The Lazarus Experiment.

[duncan]

What did you think?

[Oldmankrondas]

My favourite episode of the 3rd series so far, fair enough, it was a bit like The Fly...a lot like The Fly. But I loved it, though I'm not entirely sure why, I remember grinning broadly all the way throughout, Gatiss was brilliant, especially as the older Lazarus and the monster was pretty impressive...though it would have been more impressive if the face had looked like Gatiss. It was just great Saturday night entertainment, and the fact I was in a ridiculously good mood this Saturday probably helped.

[duncan]

I think you summed it all up there OMK. I really enjoyed this too.

[John Darnacan]

I was quite disappointed in this one. While I think Gatiss did a fantastic acting job, I found the plot predictable. A third of the screen time was spend running away from the monster, (which I didn't like very much).

I also found it odd that Lazarus felt no horror at what he had become.

The Harold Saxon mystery was interesting. I assume he's part of the series arc, this year's version of Bad Wolf or Torchwood. Could Saxon be "The Last Timelord"?

[Oldmankrondas]

David Tennant has said that while the Doctor is right to think he's the last of the timelords, the Face of Boe is also right. I think that the human timelords may have survived Evolution of the Daleks and that Saxon could be a descendant. But who knows? No Who this week...I'm pining just a little bit.

[Claire Voyant]

Ditto much of what the Prof wrote.

I did like the little "reverse the polarity" comment by Tennant, referring back to Pertwee's neutron flow line.

oldmankrondas said:

David Tennant has said that while the Doctor is right to think he's the last of the timelords, the Face of Boe is also right. I think that the human timelords may have survived Evolution of the Daleks and that Saxon could be a descendant. But who knows? No Who this week...I'm pining just a little bit.

Saxon's probably with Torchwood. There must be another timelord, either the Master or some other rogue timelord. Although, I think it would be great if it were Romana, returned from E-space. Probably not. I doubt they could keep Lalla Ward under wraps. Oh well, we'll just have to wait and see.

[armadillozenith]

There were good aspects and naff ones. The acting by Mark Gatiss and the wartime rationale for the Professor's obsession with prolonging life were high points, even quite moving. And enough was shown of his persona before monsterisation that the audience was left in no doubt that this was not a nice person.
The machine looked slick and smart.

The usual 'oh-science-I-couldnt-be-bothered-thinking-about-that' gaping holes in the plot irk me.

I'll give it 3.

It is clear to me that current Who writers largely have little real love for science, except as window-dressing, and are writing tales of magic and fantasy rather than science fiction. That's a pity, because the inclusion of even bits of REAL science in popular entertainment can spur a child's early interest in finding out more. We need knowledge and learning, not dumbing-down and superstition.

The monster idea was blatantly ripped off from The Relic, a 1997 Paramount picture directed by Peter Hyams. In that, the DNA mixing was caused by a guy drinking a tribal potion in South America that scrambled his DNA and mixed in some animal attributes. He too ended up looking rather similar, with side-opening jaws and big-clawed feet.

The creature's instantaneous mass increase from human to huge monster wasn't explained, nor how bones could be reconfigured in moments - back and forth, back and forth, with the youthful human Lazarus none the worse (visibly) for his radical transformation.
Nor was there any consideration of how difficult it would be to learn how to move in a radically-reshaped body. The monster scampered about quite nimbly and even walked gratuitously up walls - as in The Relic - and as the Krillitanes had done. Why?

The need/ability to suck out people's life-force is an old cliche, (used for example in film LifeForce by space vampires, or to better effect in the heroic Space:1999 episode Dragon's Domain).
But that cliche was not given any rationale here... if the monster was a sort of composite throwback, are we to believe that life-force-sucking creatures existed in earth's primeval past? Or was that just a brand new idea the genes came up with for Lazarus?

Scriptwriters have a poor understanding even of the evolutionary ideas now widely believed and taught in school as fact. For example, the scriptwriters persistently include obviously insect-like or spider-like attributes in retrogressing human mutants (here, a scorpion-like tail and mouthparts that open sideways). (Star Trek:TNG's spiderised Reginald Barclay also comes to mind). Any scientist could tell them that those animal groups are nowhere in man's ancestry.
The old canard of a 'great chain of being' dies hard in the popular imagination; that is, the fallacy that all life-forms lie somewhere along a continuous sequence of progress, supposedly stretching from the most primitive 'onward and upward' to man, a belief which dates back to ancient Greece or earlier and was still current in Darwin's day, still shapes scripts today. A disappointing throwback indeed...

What a shame there were no references to Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of Morphic Resonance (the idea that the shapes things take are influenced -somehow- by the previous existence of similar shapes, somewhere else).
That in itself would have at least given a superficial gloss of pseudoscience to this silly schlock horror melee, and would have fitted in nicely linguistically if not literally with the idea of using ultrasound to reconfigure the genome.
The machine could have then been called a Morphic Resonator... a name with a nice ring to it.
Or some reference could have been made (by the Doctor?) to Eurypterids, the giant scorpion-like creatures of the ancient past, known from fossils ... it would have been a fallacious link as far as human DNA goes, but at least a real creature to give some basis for the monster's bizarre form.

Enough ranting already. Good acting, good 'old' makeup, nicely understated subplot of Saxon's sinister machinations to turn Martha's mum against the Doc. Could he be the Master?

Graham

[chancellorvalium]

I do object to evolution being taught as fact. It may seem very likely, but it's only a theory.

This story was very flat, and distinctly Unmemorable (don't remember much except the rather ugly abuse of CGI, some bits of reasonable (and some bits of terrible) acting, and a general feeling of 'well yes, but what of it?').

4/7.