I found the episode to be utterly juvenile, blatantly insulting to the intellect and most of all, boring. Not as terrible as "Love and Monsters" or the resolution of "Victory of the Daleks" where apparently you can modify a SpitFire aircraft for spaceflight in a few minutes, and a robot can stop himself from blowing up by just trying, really, really hard. But I can't believe this was done the same writer as "42", a really good, genuinely frightening episode on the level of "Event Horizon". And I also can't believe that this is the same series that gave us "Last of the Time Lords", "The Doctor's Wife" and "Silence in the Library." In this episode, there wasn't even anything to be enraged at. All the characters were dull and unlikable, including Matt Smith's 11th Doctor. The situations were contrived (either leave Rory and Amy behind for the entire episode or take them with you in the next, don't keep finding excuses to go back and forth).
I thought that the show's original purpose was to educate kids about history and maybe some science. Here we have an episode that perpetuates scientific ignorance. Dinosaurs were not mindlessly aggressive movie monsters. They were animals. They acted like animals. Just once in a movie or TV show, I'd like to see the creators address this. Dinosaur encounters a human, and then acts like a animal in that situation would do. Most likely it would sniff that human and then move on. I know that this misconception is spread across public consciousness, but this episode wins no points from me by perpetuating them.
All the scenes with dinosaurs were done much better when I saw them in Jurassic park. Even 20 years ago, the dinosaurs in that movie looked better, and the scenes involving them were far less contrived. Originally I cried during the scene in the first Jurassic Park movie with the triceratops. When I see the same scene in this episode, I feel nothing - mainly because it's trying to tell me that a triceratops is just a dog (which it is not), and so I felt nothing when it got killed because it was clearly just a fake piece of plastic.
Those "Pterodactyls" were no such thing. Those were pteranodons, and weren't dinosaurs, but flying reptiles. They missed a perfectly good opportunity for the Doctor to correct Rory's father about that fact, but they didn't. Would it have killed the writer of the episode to flip open a encyclopedia or skim a Wikipedia entry on the subject when he wrote it? It may sound like nit-picking, but there was so little to this episode that it was the only thing I could feel for it.
Nefertiti: Didn't care for. Her threats of breaking Riddell's neck falls upon deaf ears. That's one of the most common ways to die on the show, and just makes her look like overly violent *&^%#.
Rory's Father: Didn't care for. The last shot of him eating his launch in space was stupid and pointless.
Amy: Didn't care for. Her and Rory time as companion has long since overstayed her welcome, and really should have ended a season and a half ago.
Rory: Didn't care for.
Riddell: Enraged that he was a ripoff of several characters from Jurassic Park. Now, if he was replaced by Arthur Conan Doyle and acted like Professor Challenger, it would have been awesome and made more sense, as in the events of this episode inspires him to write The Lost World.
The Doctor: Three seasons in, and my opinion of him has not changed in the slightest. In this episode I felt nothing because Matt Smith is a terrible actor, even when he kills the villain I felt it was par the course. He's still the same dull, irritable, non-expressive, anti-social little twerp who is trying way too hard to imitate David Tennant's energy and likability. Matt Smith would be better cast as the Doctor's anti-social son, "The Associate" rather than the Doctor himself.
Solomon: The most interesting character. Too bad his appearance had no mystery behind it or any reason to be interested. So he wants the dinosaurs, so he killed the Silurians. Wouldn't it have been awesome if Solomon instead turned out to be say, The Master or some other great foe of the Doctor? That would have briefly livened my interest.
Good parts: (1) The "balls" jokes. It made me briefly chuckle in the abyss of boredom.
(2) The Doctor saving dinosaur species and giving them a new planet. Awesome.
Conclusion: In every season, there is usually one or two really good episodes, balanced by one or two really, really bad episodes. I hope that this was the only really, really bad episodes in this season, though with the next one involving a cyborg gunslinger I doubt it.
I thought that the show's original purpose was to educate kids about history and maybe some science. Here we have an episode that perpetuates scientific ignorance. Dinosaurs were not mindlessly aggressive movie monsters. They were animals. They acted like animals. Just once in a movie or TV show, I'd like to see the creators address this. Dinosaur encounters a human, and then acts like a animal in that situation would do. Most likely it would sniff that human and then move on. I know that this misconception is spread across public consciousness, but this episode wins no points from me by perpetuating them.
All the scenes with dinosaurs were done much better when I saw them in Jurassic park. Even 20 years ago, the dinosaurs in that movie looked better, and the scenes involving them were far less contrived. Originally I cried during the scene in the first Jurassic Park movie with the triceratops. When I see the same scene in this episode, I feel nothing - mainly because it's trying to tell me that a triceratops is just a dog (which it is not), and so I felt nothing when it got killed because it was clearly just a fake piece of plastic.
Those "Pterodactyls" were no such thing. Those were pteranodons, and weren't dinosaurs, but flying reptiles. They missed a perfectly good opportunity for the Doctor to correct Rory's father about that fact, but they didn't. Would it have killed the writer of the episode to flip open a encyclopedia or skim a Wikipedia entry on the subject when he wrote it? It may sound like nit-picking, but there was so little to this episode that it was the only thing I could feel for it.
Nefertiti: Didn't care for. Her threats of breaking Riddell's neck falls upon deaf ears. That's one of the most common ways to die on the show, and just makes her look like overly violent *&^%#.
Rory's Father: Didn't care for. The last shot of him eating his launch in space was stupid and pointless.
Amy: Didn't care for. Her and Rory time as companion has long since overstayed her welcome, and really should have ended a season and a half ago.
Rory: Didn't care for.
Riddell: Enraged that he was a ripoff of several characters from Jurassic Park. Now, if he was replaced by Arthur Conan Doyle and acted like Professor Challenger, it would have been awesome and made more sense, as in the events of this episode inspires him to write The Lost World.
The Doctor: Three seasons in, and my opinion of him has not changed in the slightest. In this episode I felt nothing because Matt Smith is a terrible actor, even when he kills the villain I felt it was par the course. He's still the same dull, irritable, non-expressive, anti-social little twerp who is trying way too hard to imitate David Tennant's energy and likability. Matt Smith would be better cast as the Doctor's anti-social son, "The Associate" rather than the Doctor himself.
Solomon: The most interesting character. Too bad his appearance had no mystery behind it or any reason to be interested. So he wants the dinosaurs, so he killed the Silurians. Wouldn't it have been awesome if Solomon instead turned out to be say, The Master or some other great foe of the Doctor? That would have briefly livened my interest.
Good parts: (1) The "balls" jokes. It made me briefly chuckle in the abyss of boredom.
(2) The Doctor saving dinosaur species and giving them a new planet. Awesome.
Conclusion: In every season, there is usually one or two really good episodes, balanced by one or two really, really bad episodes. I hope that this was the only really, really bad episodes in this season, though with the next one involving a cyborg gunslinger I doubt it.