C+Q - Empress of Mars (2017)

I'm just gonna go with pictures of Missy for every review image now in protest of Gomez leaving. Also, what is it with Mark Gatiss and removing the 'The' from the start of titles like a month before broadcast?

Mark Gatiss has served Doctor Who well over the years and if this ends up being his last episode I'd say it's a good note to bow out on. [The] Empress of Mars had a lot of potential to be his strongest script yet given how perfectly suited the idea is to his style but it seems so concerned with aesthetics that the actual theme-y wheme-y stuff suffers. Victorian soldiers fighting Ice Warriors on Mars, while being a powerful aesthetic, isn't really strong enough to carry anything more than a poster or a Target novel cover. What this aesthetic needed was some meaty themeing behind it to fill the 45 minutes. For example, this episode has colonialism in it but you can't really describe it as bring *about* colonialism. The plot doesn't explore the invader/native dynamic in any meaningful way other than a few lines of dialogue that state that this dynamic between the humans and the Ice Warriors exists. The plot makes it clear that the Ice Warriors are hostile towards humans from the start, so the human invaders are made to seem more justified in their desire to kill them all. A better story would have been one that cast the British soldiers unambiguously as the villains and the Ice Warriors as the heroes; a base-under-siege where the aliens are the goodies being picked off by the evil humans. This is almost done with Friday, the sympathetic monster, but he and the rest of his species quickly default back to being regular old monsters. Don't get me wrong: the image of Victorian soldiers vs. Ice Warriors was cool, and green on red is a strong and memorable colour palette, but I feel like Gatiss could have tailored the plot a little more towards the colonialism and Empire stuff to give that image a bit more of a kick. Instead, the cool image just sort of sits there as the backdrop to a pretty average Pertwee story.

Speaking of empty aesthetics: horror clichés. The main officer guy is an absolute dickhead, acting in ways which are completely unrealistic. These sorts of characters, who blindly ignore the hero's advice, are just frustrating to watch rather than entertaining. Any story element can be made good or bad based on the context it's presented in, but here the dickhead officer trope isn't deployed in an interesting or satisfying way. It isn't even that good of a trope to be honest. Gatiss loves shovelling horror clichés into his scripts, like the scene in this episode where one of the soldier talks about their home life just before getting picked off. The thing is, unlike sci-fi clichés or Western clichés or action clichés or whatever, a lot of horror clichés revolve around stupidity. But that's okay, because in the context of horror, it's fun to watch stupid people die. Here, the horror standards are used but with no real justification or payoff. Like with the colonialism stuff, it's all just empty aesthetics. It's a strong and distinct aesthetic, but it's just not enough to carry a 45 minute story.

So did I hate this episode? Not at all. Hate is a pretty strong emotion and this episode doesn't give me enough to get me worked up over in either direction. What I will say is that it's easily the most memorable episode of Series 10 from a visual standpoint. This script is entirely style over substance but that doesn't mean style is a bad thing. And it also doesn't mean that good 'style over substance' stories can't be entertaining. Without giving me anything extra to get my teeth sunk into though, this is just a pretty average episode of Doctor Who. The bit I cared most about was the 30-second scene of Missy at the very end, which didn't even have anything to do with the main plot. I'm guessing that scene will make a lot more sense after the series is over. Otherwise it seems like a really cheap way to make me care about a filler episode. The production of Series 10 is going to be so interesting to read about once all the episodes have been released and those involved are able to talk freely. So much of this series more than any other feels improvised or hastily rewritten to accommodate new plot strands. The TARDIS kidnapping Nardole and forcing him to recruit Missy was so obviously thrown in at the last minute to give Nardole something to do after it was decided that he would be a permanent companion.

Yeah, so there isn't much to this one. It's okay.