Review of The Bells of Saint John
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
I really want to give Clara’s “no, this time we mean it!” introduction story an enthusiastic thumbs-up, but I can’t quite.
Like most Moffat-penned scripts, it zips along at such a fast pace that it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and come out saying, “Wow! That was great!” But Bells (and what the hell sort of irrelevant title was that, anyway, based on an utterly toss-off portion of the story from 1207?) also suffers from the common problems that plague Moffat’s stories.
To begin, we’ve got the usual casual misogyny, like when the young monk asks if the Doctor is speaking with an evil spirit and when he’s told “it’s a woman,” he crosses himself. This one I’m willing to let slide because, OK, it’s 1207 and the dude’s a monk who’s probably not supposed to have any contact with women. But it’s still in rather poor taste.
More irritating to my mind is the way the Doctor insists that Clara repeat The Question to him three times. I never used to think of the Doctor as a pure narcissist – a bit overly proud of his intellect, perhaps, but not full of himself – but that’s how that scene presented him. The Doctor seems to be exhibiting an ever-increasing number of troubling character traits these days (and I’m not just talking about some “fall into darkness” he might be experiencing), and I find myself watching with more trepidation all the time.
