About a week ago the BBC aired the first of the last episodes of its popular flagship sci-fi show Doctor Who to star David Tennant before his announced departure, entitled The Waters of Mars and featuring an H2O based villain possesing the crew of a Mars base 50 years from now, yes I know it's a show aimed primarily at a younger or family audience and not our genre as such but I wanted to focus on horror elements ok? Put down the pitchforks (fitting though they might be). Hey, my blog, my rules, allow me the indulgence.
Ignoring the excellent s-f elements except to say that the climax was excellently written and unbelievably well played what got me thinking about horror is specifically when people came up to discuss the show with me post airing (I am kind of a well known and renowned geek and, as such, sort of a spokesman for these things at work and among friends). When describing the episode many people said their younger child viewers, the target audience remember, commented on how scary the villains seemed. I had heard this in pre-publicity but it comes up a lot, being a show about strange monsters so I thought nothing of it. Likewise when watching the episode initially under the gaze of this hardened extreme horror viewer I found it beyond tame. It did get me thinking though, would this be a lot of kids' first experience of horror tropes and conventions? Maybe even an early memory of being switched on to the genre? Surely that can only be a good thing right?
Watching back I saw the point, if you didn't know, for example, zombie movie conventions then here they are. A bunch of protagonists in a combined space fall prey to an infection, it changes them into the same people but looking different, almost decomposed somehow. The aim is merely to infect others whilst shambling slowly and speaking as little as possible, if at all. It was quite effective as an early, tame version of this. So kudos for that in an already great episode.
The final point of interest comes back again to my idea of horror potentially also coming from good storytelling and horrific ideas, sometimes emotional (see the previous piece on horror as heart breaker). I doubt anyone, child or adult, was prepared for the moment at the climax of the story where the main female character (the stereotypical survivor of this show's set rules and arguably the equivalent of the "final girl") realises that she should have died, our hero was wrong to save her and the consequences could be vast. Shockingly she uses her blaster gun to end her own life in an exceptionally dark and shocking moment, which will no doubt echo and cement the horror nature of this in most younger memories, and the piece will doubtless be remembered and labelled as dark due to this and the ominous portents of the central characters death and frightening defiance during his change of character. I cannot recommend this enough but I am somewhat biased, if you're interested in a score from this uber geek though...
**** (4/5)
MM
No comments:
Post a Comment