Laz - a low

Oh Noooo.

The Lazarus experiment.

What a thorough disappointment that was. I was quite looking forward to this episode of Dr Ru what with it having Mark Gatiss in it. But he wasn't exactly given much to do. Starting off wearing a prosthetic rubber face – then being blond and sinister and then naked and cold pretending to be dead lying on some church paving slabs. The rest was taken up by a totally unconvincing CGI monster. That was an embarrassment too – apparently it was supposed to have Mark Gatiss' face. Looked nothing like it to me. Rather, it looked like something that might have been impressive back when CGI animation was first being worked out in the 80s – but now... umphf. If the story line was that a monster had escaped from a computer game then then it would have been fine. But as it was... it was far from their best. Certainly the least convincing.

My own personal prejudice is that the use of any CGI is better served when it's mostly used for architectural things – it often looks too obvious whenever it's used for monsters. Actually no, I take that back a lot of the previous CGI monsters in the last two seasons of Doctor Who have been brilliant – the werewolf (all that fur) – Cassandra, and um – a few others. Maybe they've raised the bar too high for themselves? Maybe they've got too lazy and complacent – or had to do it in a rush?

Oh well, I'm hoping this is the duff one of this season (like 'Fear Her' was of the last one. (Oh that one was so rubbish, rubbish and rubbish.) Now it's out the way hopefully things will pick up from now on... (although I'm not happy about having to wait a whole fortnight because of the Eurovision song contest thing. Gah. I never watch that stupid thing.)

The only other thing is – there hasn't been anything in this episode to quash my theory that a lot of the background story this season is about trying to re-create a timelord.