Television Review – Doctor Who – The Return Of Doctor Mysterio

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Spoiler alerts With a totally unexpected anonymously bequeathed TV license arriving today I got to catch up quickly on Doctor Who’s Christmas Day special, aired yesterday, and what a lovely episode it is. The Doctor stumbling into the world of comic book superheroes seems long overdue and this was very much a tribute to Superman and Lois Lane, with digs that Spiderman would just die of radiation poisoning. The Doctor unwittingly creates The Ghost when a child swallows an amulet intended for a machine mistaking it for cough medicine. Years later, the grown up Ghost, and the Doctor end up trying to deal with alien brains who want to replace the brains in the heads of Earth’s leaders. The plot is rather slight beside the story of The Ghost trying to hide his identity from his girlfriend, who he serves as a baby-sitter, taking the baby listening intercom with him on his rescue missions. There is a lot to commend, though it is unclear why the Doctor gives up on his machine at the start of the episode. Matt Lucas’s character is also largely wasted apart from his moving reveal about the death of river Song at the end. It’s really a Ghost story though, as it feels as if the Ghost could crack the case even if the Doctor wasn’t around. Why the Ghost doesn’t demolish or expose the New York brain base on the first visit is unclear. He saves the Doctor and the girl and then dos nothing more until much later. This seems to be the first Doctor Who episode to use split screen effects to both convey multiple simultaneous events and give a sense of comic strip action panels. Some gags were quite daring such as the junior Ghost levitating when the girl he fancies walks past and he’s trying not to use his x-Ray vision. The trailer for the new season indicates that Matt Lucas’s character may be travelling with the Doctor for a while. Hopefully he will get more to do than provide occasional light relief. Arthur Chappell