TV Blog: Dr Who & The Pacific

With the relative calm of a four-day bank holiday giving us a little time to sort out baby stuff and sit down and watch some TV, we got the chance to catch up with some of the big new shows over the weekend.

First was the new series of Dr. Who with a new face for the doctor and a new head writer. I had my doubts about Matt Smith as the Doctor, especially following in the footsteps of David Tennant who has seriously got to be a contender for the best Time Lord ever, but on the whole the episode delivered. Smith's take on the character doesn't seem to be quite as compelling or believable as Tennant's but it's solid and has it's own unique angle, painting a personality that is both child-like and slightly psychotic. I was also impressed by his new companion, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, if for nothing else than her brilliant wide-eyed, hard-mouthed "shocked face" which simultaneously conveys surprise, fear, awe, and a serious intention to kick whatever caused the shock in the bollocks if it comes any closer. This being Dr Who and she being a poor ignorant earth-girl she got to use the face a lot. Surprisingly, given that the new head writer, Stephen Moffat, delivered some of the best episodes of the previous series, I was a lot less impressed with his work here. The aliens - a giant eyeball and a monster eel that could apparently hang in mid-air and travel around without the aid of arms, legs, wings or other appendages (we never got to see it's rear end) - were a bit silly. And although the episode plot hung together well, I couldn't quite believe the clumsy handling of the meta-plot for the series arc, something that was handled with incredible subtlety in previous runs. Having the first episode talking about "falling silence" and "cracks in time and space" is the dialogue equivalent of smacking the audience in the face with a plank.

I'd been waiting for The Pacific ever since it was announced many years ago. Watching the first two episodes it's clear that the team behind it took some of the criticism of Band of Brothers to heart and worked hard on ensuring the new series didn't fall into the same trap. Each episode is now introduced with a short history lesson narrated by Tom Hanks in order to set the scene, which I found a huge boon since my knowledge of the war in the Pacific is very poor compared to my understanding of the war in Europe. It also focusses down on a much smaller number of characters, three main ones and a small cast of their closest companions, which makes it a lot easier to follow. The characterisation, historical accuracy and action sequences were all very much up to the standard set by it's predecessor and yet on the whole I felt The Pacific fell slightly short of the benchmark set by the previous series. Why? On reflection I think it's very simple: whatever the flaws introduced by trying to writer a series about an entire company of soldiers, Band of Brothers simply seemed to hang together better as a story about a group of people that slowly evolved together as they travelled and fought through Europe. It simply offers a more cohesive emotional and historical narrative. In The Pacific the action takes place against the backdrop of the entire 1st Marine Division and the story of the War in the Pacific as a whole is lost because from the Marine's point of view, it was a series of isolated island landings, which makes it feel more impersonal and punctuated.

Still, the criticisms of both are relatively minor. They're well worth watching and you can bet I'll be sitting down to the remaining episodes of both whenever I get the time.