Not The Pre-Historic Goop!

There once was a woman who worked in a 7-Eleven, providing womanly services to gentlemen (and the occasional lady who paid well enough). One day, she underperformed, got very embarrassed and turned bright red. And thus was the tale of the Crimson ...

Wait, what? Oh crap, I watched the wrong episode! Back to the viewing board...

The Story

The Doctor has made a habit of appearing in retinas.

He's an eye Doctor.

So everyone's favorite gang of three goes north to rescue him. They find out that he and Clara have been captured by a nice old lady and her gang of very attractive people.

She's so nice, you could almost think of her as Mrs. Sweet

Jenny rescues the Doctor, then both of them rescue Clara, and then they confront Mr. and Mrs. Sweet. Speaking of which, while we've known for the whole episode what Mrs. Gillyflower looked like, it's not until the end that we find out that Mr. Sweet looks like this:

Apparently, the evil plan in this episode is that Mrs. Gillyflower and her army of models would load Mr. Sweet's fluids into a long, rigid rocket, which would then rise up into the air and explode, spraying everyone with Mr. Sweet's sweet nectar.

This doesn't sound too bad, except that Mr. Sweet's nectar, instead of helping to create new life like most people's ... nectar, will kill everyone, which is a bad thing.

But never fear! Because Madame Vastra and Jenny are holding a large red container!

This is apparently the whole resolution to The Crimson Horror.

Strax uses a laser to knock Mrs. Gillyflower off of the staircase, Ada (Mrs. Gillyflower's horribly abused daughter) squishes Mr. Sweet, and then everyone lives happily ever after.

The Bad

No, I'm not skipping "The Good". I thought about it for a while and decided that there was nothing to put in that section.

Resolution

I hardly need to mention the resolution: So rushed that I didn't understand it the first time I watched. I only knew that the threat was over because the music switched from tense and actiony to triumphant.

Explosions are good? Are they bad? I dunno.. there's no music, so it must be okay.

It still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. That ending only works if the rocket was only supposed to have one container of venom loaded, AND the people in charge were willing to let any random pair of people wander around with that one and only container of venom rather than giving only to someone they trusted, AND the Doctor knew about that huge security hole. (TL;DR: Mrs. G is an idiot and the Doctor magically knew that)

Mr. Sweet

After all the build-up over Mr. Sweet, it was a huge letdown to find out that Mr. Sweet was a tiny puppet thing glued onto Diana Rigg's chest.

It's the newest bra for the elderly. Do you like it?

Seriously, Mr. Sweet is so feeble that during the entire scene, about 5 minutes, between when Mrs. Gillyflower falls and when she dies, he only makes it about 10 feet. It's like the Jagrafess all over again, but without even the threat of being huge and growly.

This is the most lively that we ever see him

Although I did kind of enjoy the lead-up with the scene where Mrs. G pours salt down her shirt.

Mr. Sweet AND Salty.

The Gang of Three

Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax have been used up. They were somewhat funny and effective in The Snowmen, but it seems like the writers tried to shoehorn the exact same jokes into a different, shorter episode, and it didn't work. While Jenny was an essential plot point for the first 20 minutes, she could easily have been replaced by a lost and confused Clara, or even a more proactive Ada. The episode could easily have done entirely without Vastra or Strax.

The problem is that when you try to shoehorn characters who aren't really that interesting, you end up with horrible scenes where those characters have trite dialogue that contributes nothing to the story. Case in point:

"If our stratagem succeeds, we'll save the Doctor, Jenny will survive, and we'll get to be in more episodes."
"Is that really such a good idea?"

Also, while I don't have a ton of attachment to the Sontarans as villains, even I found the idea of a Sontaran being put in timeout offensive.

*Pouts* "I'm gonna go devise a stratagem to wipe out the human race and turn the planet Earth into a Sontaran breeding ground. That'll show her!"

Ada and Her Mom

You'd think that we could have an interesting dynamic. Either a cold-hearted villain who has a soft spot for her daughter, or a mother driven to insanity by the cruelty visited upon her daughter.

In her sermon near the beginning, Mrs. Gillyflower even gives her character a chance to be interesting. What if she had been driven to madness by her violent husband, who frequently injured her and once, in a terrifying fit of rage, blinded their daughter.

Motherly concern at its finest

But instead, we learn that the source of all bad in the world is Mrs. G - that she blinded her own daughter in an effort to protect herself, and that she is perfectly happy to see Ada die in order to advance her evil plans.

Which means we're stuck with yet another story of Good Versus Evil: A bad guy with no redeeming qualities who must be stopped at all costs, and a group of heroes who must stop her.

And don't forget Ada, who also had the potential to be such an interesting character. She'd been blinded, although she didn't know why or how, and she was working with her obviously insane mother to advance the destruction of all of humanity. She could have slowly become aware that she was fighting for the wrong team, happened across the Doctor, and offered to help.

But instead, she pines for her mother's affection in the most pathetic and sniveling way.

"You are not worthy even to lick my boots!"
"Please? Just one lick?"

And what's worse? When she finally does defy her mother, it's not for principle or anything for entirely personal and selfish reasons.

"How dare you be mean to me and reject me from your club of perfect people!"
"And the genocide thing...?"
"Oh, that too"

I guess neither of these points makes them horribly unrealistic, especially compared to some previous villains who were self-defeatingly evil, but it does take a pair of villain/victims that could have had an interesting story, and makes them pretty boring instead.

Author on Board

Mrs. Gillyflower takes Ada hostage, and the Doctor says "No, Clara. If we follow straight after her, she'll shoot Ada on the spot." But then...

"Now that we took a roundabout way to follow her, even though she's still holding a gun to her daughter's head, Mrs. G won't shoot this time!"

This is a great example of a trope called "Author on Board", which basically means that the writer is making his or her presence known by arranging events to work out well for the main characters. In this case, the writers were arranging things so that we could transition fairly quickly from the scene in Mrs. G's dining room to the rocket scene, giving the Doctor a horribly contrived excuse for that transition that they could throw away in the next scene.

If you want an even better example, look below.

"Look at how sneaky I'm being! Madame V will be so proud!"

If she really doesn't want to be noticed, why did she leave a previously closed door open after she went through? And why didn't anyone notice and then catch her? Author on Board.

Fainting Man

Hey guys! Guess what's funnier than Strax always making the same jokes about contextually inappropriate weaponry and attacks!

HAHAHA THAT MAN FAINTED BECAUSE MADAME VASTRA IS A LIZARD WOMAN!!!

ROFLCOPTER HE FAINTED AGAIN BECAUSE STRAX IS A GRUMPY POTATO!!!!!!!!

LMAOZEDONG WOW HE MUST BE FAINT OF THE HEART BECAUSE HE FAINTED YET A THIRD TIME BECAUSE THE TARDIS DISAPPEARED HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA THIS SHOW IS SO FUNNY IT'S WRITTEN BY FUNNY PEOPLE LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thomas

I had originally written something about The Crimson Horror being free from the plague of bad acting that had infected Journey, until I rewatched, and saw the scene with Thomas, the kid who saved Strax's horse from Sontaran execution.

"Directions to Sweetville. Loading. Loading."

The GPS on my phone sounds less robotic than this kid.

Who Figures Stuff Out?

Remember that scene? The one where Clara is like "Hey! Doctor! A chimney that doesn't blow smoke!".

"Doctor! We have a crisis to solve!"
"Ooh, clouds. Oh, right, what's going on?"

I'm fine with clever companions, but there is a very specific type of cleverness that used to be the Doctor's trademark. (And no, I'm not getting nostalgic for the pre-2005 series. I've never seen it and I likely never will. I'm talking about Eccleston's and Tennant's Doctors.) That specific type of cleverness basically boils down to being able to figure out what was going on. But now Madame Vastra is the one who recognizes the pre-historic goop, and Clara is the one who figures out the thing about the chimney.

What's even worse about Clara in particular is that being clever is not actually an attribute of her character. Remember when we first met this Clara? She was so stupid that she couldn't spell "Are Why See Bee Ay Are One Two Three" without calling "the best help line in the universe".

"rycbar124 is not the right password! What should I do??"

All of her intelligence came from being scooped up into the internet, so any time we see her being clever or resourceful, it's not really her, but an artificial trait that was added on to her by the bad guys.

Church

I'm not religious. I don't even particularly like religion as a phenomenon (I have gay friends who would like to get married). But The Crimson Horror was underhandedly political, and offensive to boot. The parallels between Mrs. Gillyflower's outfit and a religious cult were almost too many to count.

Look! They're in church! Listening to a preacher's sermon about moral decay, a coming apocalypse, and a promised paradise to those chosen few who survive the process. And, of course, an all-important leader that nobody ever sees, and no one except for the Leader can speak to.

Jesus has actually already returned, but he looked like this, so nobody listened.

So why is this episode offensive? Two main reasons for me. The first is that it carries with it the strong implication that sermons about moral decay (aka almost every stereotypical church/synagogue/mosque sermon ever) lead as their logical conclusion to people trying to end the world and replace it with something more to their liking (and usually with fewer people in it). That is a grossly unfair characterization of most religious groups, and it paints the religious in a very unflattering, and mostly unjustified light.

But I would say that The Crimson Horror is offensive for another, deeper reason. This episode totally sweeps under the rug the real harm that a fringe cult like this can do, in favor of an end-of-the-world type drama. In the real world, the victims are the people who get sucked into becoming members and have no way out. The families torn apart when a husband leaves his wife and children to join, or when a daughter runs away from home to become a member, never to see, or even write to, their families again. Or the children abandoned and rejected by their parents when they don't conform to the cult's idea of what they should be or do.

The Screwdriver

The Doctor reaches into his coat pocket.

No, no, no.... Please don't be it!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Aaaaand of course! It has a Cure-Time-Lord-From-Red-Leech-Venom setting, as well as what I can only assume is a separate setting for Cure-Human-From-Red-Leech-Venom.

The Beginning

I get it. It's cool to begin with a flash. And what could be flashier than the Doctor appearing in the eye of a dead man? But think about the implications.

This man, seconds away from death, has managed to ascend a rickity spiral staircase, get in through a locked door, and then die. Shortly thereafter, somebody finds him and extracts his body from that room, without noticing the Doctor.

Actually, come to think of it, how did Ada manage to sneak the Doctor into that room without being noticed in the first place...?

The End

Okay, so despite all of these complaints, we've actually seen some pretty good acting. All of the actors (screw you, Thomas Thomas - I'm not even counting you) played the terrible parts they were given with great talent and poise, until...

Wow, those are some terrible child actors. Please tell me that Clara or the Doctor will say no so that we don't have to deal with them in the next episode.

Also, who took any of these photos?

The Funny

Even though I absolutely hated The Crimson Horror (as you can probably guess by this point), I still did find a few one-liners that were very funny and worth mentioning.

While I did mention that it was refreshing to see the Doctor negotiate with some success, it was also fun to see his attempts at negotiation get thrown back in his face with the closest thing to a "**** you" that can be said on family-friendly TV.

"In the wrong hands, that venom could wipe out all life on this planet."
"You know what these are? The wrong hands!"

Also, I think that the writers are stating to agree with me that the sonic screwdriver is not as effective a plot device as it used to be.

"Hang on! I've got a sonic screwdriver!"
"Yeah? Well I've got a chair!"

Overall

The Crimson Horror was awful. It had a few funny one-liners, but they weren't anywhere near enough to make up for all its shortcomings.

The story was, quite frankly, boring: a washed up tale of Good Versus Evil with no tension whatsoever and a resolution that was so rushed it didn't make any sense. Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax were not funny or endearing, none of them contributed anything to the story, and Strax was downright annoying. 

There wasn't really anything to redeem The Crimson Horror from all of these flaws, no particularly profound insight about the world, or even an interesting premise; just a boring story, poorly told.

Here was foolish little me, thinking that the show couldn't sink any lower than The Rings of Akhaten...

And to make it all the worse, just as I was getting up some hope that at least the next episode couldn't possibly come close to being as bad as The Crimson Horror, the writers just have to throw in the two most annoying children in all of space and time, and then say "Hey, guess what! You get to spend next episode with these treasures!" Oh, what a Nightmare. 

NEXT EPISODE: NIGHTMARE IN SILVER

Oh no... Angie got captured... We should rescue her...

Actually, on second thought, you can keep her.