Angel of the North

After seeing them do nothing with the London setting, I'd been looking forward to this all season, I don't think Doctor Who has done anything with The Angel of the North, and seeing the K9 team in Northern England could be fun, if only for the horrific attempts at northern accents.

Sadly, my hope was misplaced.

The titular angel isn't the English statue, but a fallen spaceship that the STM comes from where something weird is happening. First of all, I also think the release order of these stories is strange, in Mind Snap they reference K9 having some link to the STM, but that link is only discovered in this episode.

But enough about the strange, lets talk about the bad. The accents in this episode seem to be dropping, they're not great at the best of times, but a few times through this episode I noticed people slipping into different ones for a couple of words before reverting. The white greenscreen with some snow effects isn't exactly the most convincing canadian snowscape, and the characters seem perfectly dry after coming back out of it both times. The Korven are again said to be this major threat for the whole of not only earth, but all of spacetime..... and the first time we see one in this episode it's dispatched of in seconds with a single shot from K9. It seems they're building to a finale with them as the main threat and yeah, no, it's just not working for me.

There's definitely some good to be had in this episode though, Thorne is, as always, suitably cunning, and we get an implication that he may be in league with the Korven, or at least wants the STM fully working for his own ends. The opening scene does a great big of horror with the classic cut to a hallway for a scream. The initial shots of Gryphen trying to leave the house do a great job showing his fear of the outdoors, dutch angles used really well to make the audience feel off balance. And lastly, it's a small thing, but I've mentioned before my love of CCPCs, just the right amount of goofy and imposing, and I love the slight tweak to the 'paintjob' they get here, with the ones coming with Thorne having red shirts under the body suit instead of the black, it seems to imply some level of rank of specialty, which is a neat tiny bit of worldbuilding.

Overall, fairly middling.

Bob Baker returns! And I like that he leans into the show’s lore a bit more. I’d forgotten in the time that it’s taken me to get to this latter stage of the series that the professor was an agoraphobe. I thought they kept him on that standing set for budgetary reasons. It is a fairly standard plot done on an epic scale. The Korven does not deliver the terror the production team are hoping to muster on its second outing. Baker gets a bit caught up with the plot at the end, forgetting to show not tell.