this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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I missed the first couple of episodes of this rewatch, so joining in here.
Compared to the newer episodes a lot of the direction in this one feels more like the classic series - more like a stage play than a typical TV drama, which fits the theme of the story well.
There's lots of jokes sprinkled throughout this story, and it really works well with Christopher Eccleston. I missed that mad grin he does.
Acting - In the theatre, I did notice some of the bg extras not really running quite as fast from the ghost as they should have been, which was amusing. And the actors playing the reanimated dead bodies was really cheesy, felt less like an entity controlling them and more like they were playing stereotypical zombies. I did enjoy the portrayal of dickens as the sceptical and haunted artist.
The gelth needing the dead bodies because they've lost their own reminds me a bit of that voyager episode where the aliens take dead bodies to reuse them. It set up a nice conflict between Doctor and Rose - but after the tense conversation it doesn't go anywhere, and an exploration of what it could mean is undermined by the twist that they're evil. I didn't really like the cgi, even considering it's a couple decades old.
It's not the best episode, but certainly not the worst. I think this might actually be the first time I've rewatched this episode since I saw it live when it aired.
Random bit I noticed at the end - they look at dickens through a viewscreen monitor on the Tardis console just before they leave. The Tardis often has futuristic looking interfaces in modern series, seeing a plain cctv camera view is very retro (and dare I say it seems more useful than a semi transparent screen with a bunch of circles for no good reason ;) )
I was originally going to comment on how much I liked it...but then the humanoid Gelth showed up, and looked pretty awful.
But I did like the earlier, wispy stuff, which reminded me of old-school hand-drawn animation.