Sunday, October 19, 2014

Doctor Who: Flatline

Honest to Pete, it’d be nice if this season could deliver just one truly awful installment, so as a recapper I could have a little fun tearing into the show for a week. (Somewhere out there someone’s saying, “Dude, you had your chance with “Robot of Sherwood” and you blew it.”) “Flatline” continues this unexpectedly wonderful season of Doctor Who by delivering an alien threat unlike anything the series has ever showcased. It simultaneously harkens back to Tom Baker’s swan song, “Logopolis,” in which the TARDIS shrank with the Doctor inside.

The episode demands attention from its opening sequence. A man places an emergency call, frantically babbling about “they” being “everywhere” only to disappear mid-sentence and reappear as a smeared painting on the wall behind where he was standing. The way the camera moves and tilts to reveal his face is like one of those street paintings that only comes into focus when you see it from a certain angle. Sure enough, “Flatline” centers on an alien invasion from a two-dimensional universe, and in ours their deadly handiwork ends up looking like street art – a bizarrely weird idea worthy of Moffat himself, but dreamed up by Jamie Mathieson, who also penned last week’s outing.

Read the rest of this recap by clicking here and visiting Vulture.