REVIEW:
Review Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror
Every now and then an episode of Doctor Who comes along that is greater than the sum of its parts. The opposite is true of The Crimson Horror whose sum parts are greater than its whole.
That said there’s lots to like in this late Victorian tale, most notably the premise of the Doctor (Matt Smith) as the episode’s monster, but the overall story of a prehistoric slug using an epidemic to level the Victorian world, is just a little too silly to take seriously. (I was expecting the Great Intelligence to be behind the plot.)
The title had me wondering whether writer Mark Gatiss has been reading Marvel Comics’ Star Wars line in 1981 when the story The Crimson Forever was published.
In that story Luke Skywalker happened upon an Imperial Star Destroyer whose crew had all died from an infection that turned them all crimson and he came down with it himself.
The opening moments of this episode had me on the edge of my seat as to when Madame Vastra and her gang would meet the Doctor.
It took ages for the show’s main character to appear, save for the pre-titles sequence where his face was inexplicably captured in the eyes of a dead man who had succumbed to The Crimson Horror.
This was very much
