A Town Called Mercy

Synopsis

A Borg  lookalike is trying to kill some alien Joseph Mengele with a squiggle on his face, set against a Wild West backdrop. The Doctor and the Ponds are there as well. Mengele blows himself up and the Tardis flies away.

That's about it.

Analysis

This 'story' , and I use that word in the loosest possible terms, was quite simply the worst episode of Doctor Who since Christopher Ecclestone took over the Tardis in 2005. It managed to be dull, meaningless, confused and annoying all at the same time and just...the phrase I keep coming back to is 'totally irrelevant'.

 Why the 'Wild West' setting? It seems as if someone had rang the BBC and offered them a set for a week and did they have any episodes that could be shoehorned into the OK Corral. It added nothing to the story at all.

It was so cliched that the Alien Doctor Jeck was going to turn out not to be the 'mild mannered little man' he seemed to be at first, so no surprise when he pulled the gun on Amy (would have been good if he had shot her, though).

The Doctor and the self-destruct sequence in the spaceship: there might as well have been a caption flashed up on screen saying 'Desperate Plot Device! You Know What's Going To Happen Later!!!'

You know, I'm having a hard time writing this blog as the episode it's about was so uninspiring. I feel that just by typing these few lines I've expended more effort than whoever wrote 'A Town Called Mercy' did in his whole script.

This recurring theme of the Doctor becoming 'darker' is being handled so ham-fistedly - the scriptwriting (and acting) is at the level of a spotty teenage virgin struggling to get his angsty poems to rhyme. Glee is more emotionally convincing than the current bundle of tat being peddled under the Who banner.

I'm not wrting any more of this, I can't be bothered. I wasted an hour of my life watching that crap last night and I'm not happy.

Score

3/100

(and the 3 is for the 'coming next' teaser)