#but because its chibnall and how he wrote kate stewart

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The Power Of Three - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Two Chris Chibnall stories? Two Chris Chibnall stories?! What the fuck did I do to deserve TWO Chris Chibnall stories?!?! Is this a punishment for something I did in a previous life?

So come on then. What poorly thought out, underdeveloped bullshit have you pulled out of your arse this time?

It’s present day Earth and a bunch of cubes have mysteriously appeared. Nobody knows what they are or where they came from, so naturally they decide to keep them instead of doing something sensible like dumping them all in a ditch somewhere.

The Power Of Three looks very much like it’s jumped straight out of the RTD era. Obviously there’s the alien invasion on present day Earth, but there’s also the news reports, the pointless celebrity cameos (why would Sir Alan Sugar be trying to sell the cubes when people can literally just pick them up off the fucking ground?), and of course the often forced and borderline nonsensical social satire. The cubes are clearly supposed to be a commentary on humanity’s curiosity and obsession with social trends, but there’s one problem with it and it’s... Oh come on. It’s a Chris Chibnall episode! What do you think the problem is? This is the same guy who wrote an episode of Torchwood that featured purple sex gas that feeds off of ‘orgasmic energy.’

At this point I can say quite confidently that Chris Chibnall is a fucking awful writer. Everything he’s ever written for Doctor Who suck to varying degrees. So the question isn’t so much ‘was The Power Of Three any good?’ Rather it’s ‘how badly did Chris Chibnall fuck up this time?’ Well.... quite badly actually.

Let’s start with the cubes. I admit it’s a striking image seeing all those black cubes dotted around all over the place, but in order for Chibnall to make his ‘slow invasion’ work, he has to reduce every single character to gibbering morons. Obviously if a bunch of cubes mysteriously and suspiciously appeared out of nowhere, the government and the military would want to gather them all up. They could be fucking bombs for all we know, right? Well not here. Here everyone thinks it’s a good idea to just leave the cubes lying around or take them home with them and make videos about them. Nobody seems to bat an eyelid. Bearing in mind at this point in New Who the Earth has been invaded by Autons, Slitheen, ghosts, Cybermen, Daleks, Cybermen and Daleks, Racnoss, Sycorax, the Master, Atraxi and...

...whatever the fuck that was all about. So do you really expect me to believe that people would be that cool with a bunch of mysterious cubes appearing out of nowhere?!

Now Kate Stewart does raise a very good point. It would take months for the entire world to coordinate a cleanup operation of this scale. That is absolutely right. Except:

THE EPISODE TAKES PLACE OVER THE COURSE OF A YEAR!

Are you seriously telling me that these potentially dangerous cubes have been sitting there FOR A YEAR, and the world’s governments did... nothing?

Oh and when I said ‘slow invasion’, I wasn’t kidding. This episode is painfully slow. After the first 10 minutes, the episode pretty much just stops dead in its tracks as the Doctor decides the best course of action is to wait and see what happens. So while we sit around waiting for the plot to kick in, let’s talk about the characters. 

They’re awful.

Okay, to be fair, I thought Kate Stewart was okay. Jenna Redgrave does a good job with the material she’s been given, but outside of being the Brigadier’s daughter, there’s not a lot to her character and she doesn’t actually do anything. She’s basically like Commissioner Gordon from the original Batman movies, who never did any actual police work, instead just pressing the button for the Bat Signal and getting the Caped Crusader to do all the work. While Kate is marginally better than the other female characters of the Moffat era, she’s still entirely dependant on the Doctor and doesn’t actually exhibit any kind of life or personality of her own outside of the Doctor.

Speaking of the Doctor, good God did I hate him in this. It’s like The Lodger and Closing Time where they decide to ramp up the Doctor’s goofiness until his obnoxiousness levels go through the roof. I recognise this is more of personal taste issue, but I’m sorry, i really can’t stand Matt Smith’s Doctor when he’s like this. It just feels so childish and is incredibly grating. Rory’s dad also irritated me a bit too. He seems more cartoony than he did in Dinosaurs On A Spaceship, and a lot of the humour just feels really forced.

And as for Amy and Rory... um... Why are they here again?

Yeah, I’m really struggling to see why Moffat decided to bring them back for Series 7 because outside of that stupid and insulting divorce subplot in Asylum Of The Daleks, they both just feel like spare wheels. They’re not contributing anything and the characterisation has become somewhat bland and superfluous. I honestly don’t understand why they’re still hanging around. And that’s quite a problem considering a lot of this episode hinges on Amy and Rory deciding whether or not to keep travelling with the Doctor. It’s hard to be emotionally invested when you don’t really give a shit about the characters. And you can tell the writers have gotten desperate when the Doctor starts talking about how special Amy is because she was the first face he saw after his regeneration. So their bond has nothing to do with Amy as a person or anything. No, it’s just because she’s the first person the Doctor saw after he regenerated. Presumably he’d feel the same way about a cat or a garden gnome if that was the first thing he clapped eyes on.

And then typical Chibnall cocks up again near the end. Throughout the episode it soon becomes abundantly clear that Amy and Rory have outgrown the Doctor and are ready to start real life, and while this is all done in a really cack handed way, this could have built up to a really good, emotional farewell, but then for literally no reason whatsoever the characters suddenly do a complete 180 and decide they do want to travel with the Doctor after all. It feels like the ending to a completely different arc. It just doesn’t marry up.

But wait. The cubes are finally doing something now. They’re counting down from 7, which the Doctor opines as meaning that a cube has 7 sides, including the inside.

If you include the inside, then a cube technically has 12 sides, you fucking moron!

So UNIT have a cube sealed inside a containment room thingy and the Doctor decides to sit in the containment room thingy until the countdown reaches zero. Why he couldn’t just watch the cube from the outside I don’t know. Then it turns out the cubes give people heart attacks, including the Doctor, which should be really tense except the episode for some reason decides to play it up for laughs, thus stripping away the tension. And Amy is soon on hand to defibrillate the Doctor with a defibrillator that just happens to be lying around.

...

A defibrillator... in a hospital... full of heart attack victims... that just happens to be lying around... with nobody using it.

So anyway they find a wormhole in a lift that leads to a ship where an Emperor Palpatine lookalike plans to eradicate the human race because he seems them as a pestilence. Why does he view them as a pestilence?

Fucked if I know. It’s a Chris Chibnall script. What did you expect? A coherent and satisfying narrative?

And don’t get me started on all the plot holes and inconsistencies. What was the point of those robots with the snouts abducting people? What was the point of the little girl in the hospital? How come nobody noticed her sitting there for a year? Where did the robots with the snouts disappear to when the Doctor and Amy showed up at the end? How come the Doctor left all those people to die when he blew the ship up? Why would Emperor Palpatine leave the ship undefended with a great big wormhole open to the public where any prat could wander in and ruin his plans? What was the point of the scene where the cubes were producing spikes and hovering and firing lasers at the protagonists? And why the fuck did the world’s governments just leave the cubes laying around for a year? (sorry I’m still on that).

Oh yeah, and then the Doctor uses the cubes to bring everyone back to life. Not just save them, but literally bring them back to life. Because that’s who the Doctor is now. He’s a smart person written by stupid people who think smart people are indistinguishable from fucking wizards.

The Power Of Three is terrible, just like everything Chris Chibnall has ever written for this bloody show is terrible. Remind me, why was he picked to be the next showrunner again?