Okay, I had a look at this last night…It’s great to see the Daleks become actual characters, not just nonsense spouting bits of wobbly cardboard and tinfoil. The scene where the Dalek and Diagoras look over New York and it speaks of humanity in such admiration, is really quite good.
This was an episode with big ambitions, lots of human and non-human drama told against a rich back drop, which it occasionally struggles to pull off. I know this is a TV drama, but the residents of Hooverville taking cues from a black man is a bit much, in reality they’d probably eat him… crass yes, true… possibly?
As it’s New York in the 1930’s they’d have been better to mix it up with accents, rather than everybody in the cast doing a terrible nasal Bronx whine, or Franks odd Tennessee drawl. I doubt viewers would notice Irish, English and Italian accents as much as we do the crap ones the actors are straining with.
However placing the dance hall girl and the pig-man at the centre of the action is a nice take, even if it borrows heavily from the 1980’s Beauty and the Beast TV show.
My main issue with the episode is the inconsistencies, one moment the Daleks are being all observational, the next moment they are being all shouty and spouting nonsense. For efficient war machines with abilities rivalling a Time Lord, why do they not spot The Doctor lurking ever so suspiciously behind Martha, or that she is a time-traveller? The musical number seems to have been thrown is as an after-thought, when it could have been used a bit more, a great example is Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Oddly I thought The Doctor and Martha seemed to be swamped a little by everything else going on, the best lines went to the Daleks and the grunting pigs!
As Jones said, it’s not Muppets in Manhattan, but it occasionally veers a lot closer than it should!!
No comments:
Post a Comment