Hated It, Can't Wait for the New Series

[faustus]

Uncle Digby? I'm surprised the kids weren't called Clive, Staples and Lewis.


If you cast Claire Skinner as a mother, you do kind of risk making the audience wonder where Pete and Ben and the other kids are. That gun seemed to come from nowhere. Is alien technology just like flying a plane?


If you cast Alexander Armstrong as a fighter pilot, you do kind of risk making the audience wonder where Ben Miller is. And to spend half the episode trying to remember what the airmen sketches were. If you kill him off in the first reel, you distract the audience by making them wonder how the narrative will cheat and bring him back from the dead. Because you won't leave people dead, will you?

Why waste Bill Bailey and Arabella Weir? Even if the audience doesn't know quite who she is, and whether she was the one with the big bum. Don't have them upstaged by comic relief.

Don't refer to Androzani as you'll make the audience wonder how it refers to the caves thereof, and think nostalgically of Peter Davison and Robert Holmes.

Don't trump the emotional cheat of resurrecting the dead character by a pointless reunion which explains why there's ten minutes of screen time left once the plot has finished, rather like every final episode or Christmas special. It's a wonder he didn't look up Adric.

Oh, and above all, shut the fuck up with the incidental music for, I don't know, maybe five seconds of the episode. This must be the first sixty minute drama with a two hour score. I may have to start watching on mute with the subtitles.