The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

What was that. I'm speechless and that's not in a complimenting way.

This episode sees The Doctor answering a distress signal on the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos; over the years nine ships have called for help from the same location. The planet has a psychic field so they must wear special devices. When they meet Paltraki, the captain of a ship, who has no memory of who is or why he is there it becomes clear why they need the devices. Once he is given one he can explain more about the situation. It turns out that Tzim-Sha, the Stenza exiled after the series opener, is on this planet and he met the Ux, a race of two people with amazing telekinetic powers, who mistook him for their god. Graham it determined that he will kill Tzim-Sha for killing his wife despite The Doctor's warning that she will have nothing more to do with him if he does so.

This was a decent episode even if it didn't really feel like a season finale. The return of Tzim-Sha was an enjoyable reference back to start of the season, giving characters, most notably Graham, motives for revenge. The look of the planet, clearly filmed in a disused quarry felt like a nod to the 'classic' era of Doctor Who. The Ux are an interesting species although I would have liked it if were shown in greater detail just how they came to believe Tzim-Sha was their god given how quickly she persuaded them that they were wrong. I could have done without the sniper-robots as they were suicidally useless. On the plus side the episode had a great atmosphere and grew increasingly tense towards the end. The cast does a fine job; Jodie Whittaker impresses as The Doctor and Bradley Walsh stands out as Graham. Overall not the best episode of the series but it was still solid and felt like proper Doctor Who.

A great title, an episode with some very good elements, it was big and bold, but you'd have needed to have enjoyed the first episode to buy into this one, maybe an episode not hugely appealing to a casual fan.

There were some good scenes between The Doctor and Graham, and it was nice to see a bit of conflict between the pair, I thought Bradley Walsh was excellent in this. Jodie was very good here too, I thought one of her best performances to date.

Some very nice special effects, it wasn't an epic series finale, by any stretch of the imagination, when you consider finales from previous seasons. Overall though, I liked it, I thought the writing was rather good, with some huge ideas, fairly well realised.

So the big question, Resolution........ Of .......... Not long to wait.

7/10 Summary: Ambitious, rather good in fact.

Nothing here to make you smile, worst finale by a country mile. Contrasting this to previous ends, mind bogglingly bad, no dividends. The man in charge has no idea, he's turned gold into diarrhoea. About the villain what can you say, must suffer badly from tooth decay.

In a welcome return to pure science-fiction, the Doctor and her 'fam' respond to distress calls and end up on a planet strewn with the remnants of warships and a huge floating tower. A powerful psychic race (the Ux) has been duped by the Stenza 'Tzim-Sha' (the first enemy of this incarnation of the Doctor) into building him the ultimate weapon, which turns out to have the power to destabilize the universe. The Ux's capabilities are ill-defined but limitless, so not surprisingly, with enough pseudoscientific jabbering, the Doctor can figure out how to get them to fix everything. The whole story doesn't really make a lot of sense and once again the much feared enemy (in this case the robot warriors who are presumably responsible for much of the destruction around the tower) turn out to be pretty much incompetent (on a par with the hapless "sniper robots" in episode 11- 2). The script is full of silly non-sequiturs for the doctor to blather on about, strained pop-culture in-jokes ("Yippee ki yay, robots"), and simplistic ethics. Although some improvement over previous Jodie Whittaker outings, 'The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos' is pretty nondescript for a season finale. I will likely continue watching the series, but more out of habit more than out of interest.