Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

[andraste]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to file this one with Father's Day, under 'I appreciate this intellectually but I don't actually have the feelings the episode obviously wants me to feel.'

I think the problem is that they're trying to make this small family tragedy a reflection of the broader Partition process, but it just felt to me like it didn't have enough people in it. And none of the contemporary characters actually change their position on anything, so there's not much of an arc. Prem and Umbreen are in love and don't care about the politics, Umbreen's mother thinks they're cursed, Manish disapproves to the point where he'd rather his brother die than marry a Muslim girl. All of this might have worked better for me if Yasmin had a better character arc responding to all of this, but she's mostly just surprised that her family history is not what she thought it was.

It's all beautifully shot, the location is beautiful and the alien design is one of the best we've seen in years, but it all felt a bit empty to me despite some nice character moments here and there. Maybe it would have worked better as a pure historical, even though I liked the aliens very much. I do appreciate that they managed to convey that this historical mess was caused by British mismanagement of the process AND by local tensions that had been bubbling along for centuries being pushed to the surface. Ordinary people are indeed scarier than aliens.

Graham continues to be a treasure, in both his scene reassuring Yas and the part where he sends Prem off to be married and then killed. Ryan gets basically nothing to do this week, which I guess is what happens sometimes when the TARDIS is crowded.

What I did love was the Doctor doing practical science to figure out what was going on, and her reaction when she found out that the terrifying alien assassins had given up their assassinating. The last two weeks she's really settled into my mind as her own Doctor and stopped feeling generic. So that's pretty wonderful.