"Albert Einstein! Nice to see you!"
IN THIS ONE... Einstein shows up with a time travel fluid that only manages to turn him into an Ood.
REVIEW: I hate to bag on a contest entry written by kids in 6th grade, but Moffat, his producers and the BBC controller decided to make it, and I don't think much of the production itself either. So with all due respect to the students of Oakley C.E. Junior School in Basingstoke, here's the aforementioned bag.
Set in the wake of The Big Bang, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS with a new fez, replacing the one River blew up in that episode, a new fez that belongs to old friend Albert Einstein (Time and the Rani, A Christmas Carol). The TARDIS seems to reject its presence, vanishing it as Einstein suddenly appears, gets splashed (or so I've read, it's not clear) with the fluid he made for his own time machine, turns into an Ood for a while, and then things get fixed... It's utter nonsense, and hard to follow to boot. I don't really blame the writers - I think they were going for some timey-wimey storytelling, a historical celebrity (the educational remit - there's an origin for the crazy hair), and one of their favorite monsters. They even managed to slip it into continuity and left some of the liquid squirming around as a cliffhanger. It was just made too quickly, I think, for the joins between the idea to be properly massaged.
A big problem for me with these shorts is that, since they can't pay for new music, they just throw a prefab track on there - usually the circussy comedy tune - and don't do a proper mix. It often covers dialog, like in this case, the Ood's.
REWATCHABILITY: Low - Must be fun for the kids to see their script realized, but it's a mess to these adult eyes (and especially, ears).
Comments