Love & Monsters

📝7/10 = ENJOYABLE!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

THIRD IMPRESSIONS: “LOVE & MONSTERS”

Hey, look! It’s the infamous bottle episode from Series 2, known for its ELO-heavy score, weird characters, an alien designed by a child, and a sex joke cruder than anything ever seen or heard on Torchwood!

The silly opening scene introduces us to Elton Pope, who finds Ten and Rose in the middle of an adventure. It’s deliberately over-the-top silly and successfully shows us how the Doctor's adventures might look to an outsider.

The entire episode is built around the idea of obsessive fans and how they could form clubs inspired by the Doctor in hopes of meeting him. While this meta-level commentary is fun, it tends to veer towards parody from time to time.

Love & Monsters breaks the usual formula for the show. It focuses on different characters and looks at the show and its tropes from a new perspective. One of its fine aspects is how it tells Elton’s story and how he witnesses some of the failed alien invasions we've seen throughout Series 1 and 2. Another is the support group-like club (L.I.N.D.A.) formed by the characters, which brings these perfectly normal characters together through shared experiences, music, and song. And then there’s the casual mix of an alien slowly killing the characters while they keep looking for the Doctor, and Elton bonding with Jackie Tyler.

The use of ELO’s music throughout the episode adds to the unique feel. It's very infectious music.

I had forgotten the gut-wrenching twist at the end, revealing that the Doctor failed to save Elton's mother when he was a boy.

Marc Warren is a sympathetic lead and a great audience surrogate, easy to identify with. Shirley Henderson (always Moaning Myrtle for me!) makes for his obsessive, slightly creepy but sweet girlfriend, with a fiery attitude whenever needed to defend the things she holds dear. Her ultimate fate is a bit heartbreaking though.

Peter Kay is the Joseph Furst of the revival. Over the top and with a scenery-chewing presence, he’s impossible to take seriously, but he has that silly villain aura over him that works as long as he looks like a human. Once his true form, the Abzorbaloff, is revealed, he turns into more of a joke. The alien design is based on the winning entry of a monster design contest for children, and what we get here is something that would suit better for The Sarah Jane Adventures of the K9 spinoff.

It’s lovely to see Jackie again, and Camille Coduri truly makes the episode with her fun and warm presence, proving that she is a well-rounded character even when not directly involved with the series regulars. The scenes with her are used effectively to show us how family members react to and cope with being left behind and not knowing what is going on with their loved ones.

All the faces on the Abzorbaloff's body are more cringeworthy than creepy. And the face in the slab thing is a step too far if you ask me (especially when you consider that Elton has “a bit of a love life” with a stone slab).

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

• Fun fact: There’s a real club named L.I.N.D.A. (short for Lindas Involved in Network Development Association), and it welcomes anyone named Linda With an I or Lynda With a Y.
• The twin planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius being named Clom is a fun gag.

I think some of you guys are legitimately forgetting that this is first and foremost a show for the whole family, so it's going to look dumb and goofy sometimes. Idk I like it for what it is. Not a favorite or a classic or anything, but I liked it as a kid and I thought about the same now.

This review was written on April Fools Day 2016, as I decided this is the one Doctor Who episode that feels the most like an April Fools joke. Yes, that's right: Love & Monsters.

Love & Monsters is quite simply an abomination in every sense of the word. The premise is about a Doctor fan group called L.I.N.D.A. (London Investigation 'n' Detective Agency) led by Elton Pope (Marc Warren) who seek to track down the Doctor and Rose because they're rabid fanboys. If that sounds incredibly meta, that's because it is. The only difference here is that the fans are bland; nothing like the exciting characters you get in real-life fandom.

It only gets worse when Peter Kay comes in as Victor Kennedy. To be fair to him, he's not too bad at first but when he becomes the Abzorbaloff he is laughably terrible in the role. As I said previously, Peter Kay would have been better playing a fan like Malcolm in Planet of the Dead as opposed to a cheesy monster invented by a kid.

Who's idiotic idea was it to let a kid design a monster for the series?

There's a reason why 10 year olds don't work as costume designers!

Yet there's something far, far worse than all this. It's hinted that Elton Pope, the guy who is supposed to be our substitute for the Doctor, has sex with a paving slab.

Overall, Love & Monsters is without a doubt the worst Doctor Who episode of all time.

It's not absolute garbage, I suppose. It certainly compares favourably to something like Fear Her or some of the heavy-duty Chibnall ultraduds. It's not very good though. The idea behind it is really fun - a look at the Doctor from observers who would most certainly exist in this universe. There's a lot of good scenes where they are just cobbling together what they can of the Doctor and speculating what his story could be. Everything with the Absorbaloff and that really gross and bizarre ending (that implies oral sex, I guess?) does this story no favours. I didn't like it, but I didn't hate it or Elton, either. He was a good enough protagonist to follow.

There's a lot of ideas in this story I really like, they just aren't very well realized. It's really night and day compared to the "Doctor-light" episode they would go on to produce in Series 3 - Blink - which suggests to me this is yet another episode that can kind of be chalked up to the growing pains of the revived series.

Imagine, if you will, a 10 year old girl, watching the revival from the start for the very first time, rewatching episodes she was too young to remember watching the first time. As that little girl, thoroughly obsessed with Doctor Who, I fell in love with Love and Monsters, and it quickly became my favourite episode. I don’t remember being 10 well enough to tell you why, but I’m glad I remember my taste in episodes when I was small, and that I can now recognise that it was good, unlike when I was a teenager and suddenly too cool for it.

So, why was I right to love this episode at 10? Before the reveal of the Absorbaloff, this is a truly great story, all the members of LINDA are likeable and watching them become friends is just fun. And then there’s the stuff with Jackie which is utterly heartbreaking. Seeing how lonely Jackie is without Rose, and how much it hurts her that this new connection she made was using her, not even to get to Rose, but to get to the Doctor makes for genuinely great television. Not only that but the added layer as he realises what he’s doing is wrong, he suddenly sees what LINDA has become under Victor Kenedy, and that he is going to have to give up that part of his life, at the same time that he realises he has this genuine connection with Jackie, that he likes her and wants to be friends with her, only for that new friendship to be ripped away because he realised it too late.

Despite how good the first two acts are, it's the final act after the reveal of the Absorbaloff that the story really falls apart. I understand that it was designed as part of a Blue Peter competition, but that doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t very good. (There is one good bit when we learn he comes from Clom, twin planet of Raxicoricofallapatorius). It's weirdly not that intimidating for how awful the absorption aspect is, and then its final defeat just does not stack up to the rest of the episode.

And then of course there is the final joke, all I have to say on that is: why?

Overall a good story let down by its ending and the need for a monster, perhaps the quintessential example of this for me.

You can tell a lot about a Doctor Who fan by whether they hate, tolerate or love Love & Monsters. Hatred of this 45 minute of TV for me indicates a fan who takes the show a little too seriously and can't embrace the show switching up its format in a fun or inventive way. Loving this story too indicates a lack of interest in denouements that hold up to serious inspection. I'm someone who thinks this story has far too bad a reputation, but wish the green, blobby monster reveal had been carried off a bit more successfully.

Until Peter Kay disrobes, this story is an excellent chamber piece, introducing and dispatching with new characters at a quick rate. Every character moment matters though. And Elton, our hero of the week, is so damn lovable. The scenes with him and Jackie are pure dynamite - some of the best Doctor Who we've had all season. It has been said a 1000 times before but MAN Russell T Davies knows how to write characters.

The framing device of Elton talking to camera is a brilliant novelty and helps set this story apart from its peers. It may be a middling episode, but its one of the most memorable middling episodes. And ends with a hilarious blow job gag.