An Autist Reviews: The Ghost Monument (NuWho Episode 11.2)

*All Reviews Are Spoiler-Free Aside From Any Spoiler Sections*

Welcome to planet Desolation. It’s off orbit, the water will eat you, the atmosphere will poison you, and traveling at night is suicide. This is the final planet of the biggest and most dangerous intergalactic race of all time. Only two competitors remain and each will do anything to win. They’ve picked up a group of four mysterious strangers, and they, like the competitors, are searching for the Ghost Monument. But the Doctor is also looking for answers. Something made this planet cruel, and something makes traveling at night dangerous, and as much as she wants to correct her mistake and get her friends back home, she also wants to find out the secrets of this planet, but will she survive long enough to?

“This entire planet has been made cruel.”

There’s nothing like a good action-adventure episode of Doctor Who to cool off with after a scary and emotional series-opening! It’s a step down in quality to be sure, with Angstrom often talking about her life with no good reason and some exposition that just doesn’t really make sense, especially given that I swear to god I saw lush greenery on this supposedly dead planet at one point, but none of this makes it particularly bad. It’s a great and fun romp across a dangerous planet with lots of bonding, self-doubting Doctor moments, and action, and that’s more than good enough for me. There are some flaws in the core story of this episode, such as the fact that there’s no real reason for the group to go through the ruins they were told to go through unless there’s some reason that got left out of the final script or cut, the way that everybody seems to be able to go to sleep on command, Epzo and Angstrom just following the Doctor as she explores and does stuff, only saying that they need to go when the plot calls for it, holographic security feeds just popping up conveniently when they need to, and Epzo not complaining at a specific point that I can’t share the details of, but where, without a doubt, he should have had a lot of complaints to lodge. But past all of this and a rather quick conclusion to the story, once the group is out of danger, this really is just a fun story. Granted it’s a fun story with talk of ethnic cleansing and torture, but welcome to Doctor Who, there’s no such thing as an episode that’s just happy-go-lucky fun all the time without some dark theme or conversation reminding you that the world is a hot mess. This story has some great side characters, begins the Timeless Child arc more or less, and shows how the TARDIS team is going to work while showing more Ryan and Graham conflict and bonding. There’s some good foreshadowing, some truly emotional moments, and some really clever bits too, especially with the gas swamp, and seeing 13 be clever is just great! I also love that the Stenza make an appearance, if in name only, in this episode, although it is a little convenient that this planet is connected to the Stenza.

“She’s our best hope. Or only option, depending on your politics.”

Yeah, this episode is kind of surprising with its acting. The main characters have quite a lot of iffy lines, the side characters barely any, and the bad guys, as little time as they take up, absolutely none. It’s not what one is used to seeing. Usually, it’s the side characters that drag the rating down, not the main characters, but Ryan and 13 make a lot of acting errors, and while they’re not big, they do make it harder to enjoy the episode and they certainly add up. The Remnants are fantastic bad guys, their voice is perfect; their malice palpable. The side characters honestly steal the show, with Epzo and Angstrom’s being on top form for most of the episode. Also, I should probably mention Ilin, who is basically the hologram that tells the group what to do at the beginning of the episode, and he too is absolutely fantastic. The actor is clearly having a lot of fun, and god does it come through.

Effects time. Bad to good, here we go. So, the Remnants kinda suck. They look like poorly rendered ps3 (at best) cloth, which isn’t the worst until you see the cloth that isn’t CG that is meant to be Remnants, which immediately makes you realize just how bad the CG is. Aside from the remnant though, the CGI is incredible, aside from the hologram of the Ghost Monument being completely blue with no other colors, even for the landscape, and Yaz talking about the color of the TARDIS… which doesn’t make sense because everything is one color, so she couldn’t know it’s actually blue, hence the rating not being all that low. The music, while mostly fantastic, does have some strange moments, with a particularly weird choice in music right at the end of the episode inside of the TARDIS. The cinematography is generally great in this episode, but when it gets bad it gets really bad. To start with, the camera constantly does creepy zoom-ins on random pieces of cloth, which obviously has a reason, but it’s just stupid, even when you know the reason. Another example of bad camerawork comes when Ryan goes gungho and tries to shoot dead a bunch of Sniperbots and we get a really badly shot first-person view of the action from the gun’s POV, which results in a really shaky and shitty moment. It’s annoying. Speaking of shaking and annoying cinematography, guess what happens a lot at the beginning to show you that a ship is breaking up and crashing and that things are really bad? The camera shakes a whole bunch, despite it being clear that the actual ship isn’t, or at least isn’t much. Oh, and more camera blurriness happens, because apparently that’s cool and nobody has realized it’s not fun yet. Still, the majority of the camera work is beautiful and looks fitting for a blockbuster movie, hence the cinematography rating being only a 7. It shouldn’t be hard to interpolate, based on this section of the review, why the action rating is an 8. The set design is phenomenal, with the TARDIS being the standout, but really, the only set that has any real flaws is Epzo’s ship, which just kind of looks flimsy, which makes the scenes it features in a lot less dramatic, with the shakycam certainly not helping. It deserves to be said that the TARDIS is hella dark and gloomy when 13 first enters, but this is something of a theme with NuWho. No TARDIS in the modern series has looked as bright inside as it actually is when it first appears. It always looks far darker than it actually is, and I don’t for the life of me know why at this point. Maybe it’s tradition, who knows. The sound design is flawless, nothing more to be said there. The voice effects in this episode are also flawless, so nothing more to be said there yet again. Same goes for the costume and makeup, but the makeup does get brownie points because damn does Epzo’s laser wound look good! All in all, the effects are stunning, as expected!

Here is what you get on a second watch: Oh, that’s why the zoom-ins randomly. Oh, the Timeless Child, cool! Oh, hey, they did foreshadow the fog swamp escape! And that’s it. Don’t get me wrong, this story is certainly fun and I’m sure you’ll want to watch it again just because it was a good time, but you don’t really get much out of it. That being said, it’s no worse a second time either.

“We gave them our minds, and they made us the creators of Death.”

And now I conclude this review which definitely isn’t being written an entire week after I watched this episode! How dare you imply that I would procrastinate writing this for an entire week! Your rudeness aside, this episode is a fun action-adventure romp with a good, small cast, and low stakes. It has a good mystery aspect, it has some good scary scenes, and it really is just beautiful to look at. The effects are mostly fantastic, the cinematography has its faults, certainly, but is still more than a little good, the acting definitely isn’t as good as it was in the previous episode, but ups and downs are to be expected, and the acting here isn’t really bad at any point. The writing could be better, there could be more to get out of this on a second watch, but overall, I don’t feel a need to complain. There’s nothing wrong with a good, fun, story, and it certainly shouldn’t be crucified like it is. There’s nothing wrong with a simple, low-stakes story. Nothing.

“Come to Daddy. I mean Mummy. I mean… I really need you right now!”

Total - 9

Plot - 9

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Story - 8

Pacing - 8

Dialogue - 9

Narration - NR

Exposition - 8

Enjoyment - 10

Twist/s - NR

Resolution/s - 8

Ending/s - 9

Acting - 9

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MC/s - 8

SC/s - 9

BG/s - 10

Narrator/s - NR

Effects - 9

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Music - 8

Voice Effects - 10

Computer Effects - 8

Practical Effects - 9

Costumes/Makeup - 10

Sets - 9

Action - 8

Cinematography - 7

Sounds - 10

Replay - 8

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Re-Enjoyment - 10

New Details - 6

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