Doctor Who Series 7: The Crimson Horror Review

Full spoilers for the episode follow.

Hello everybody and welcome to my review of The Crimson Horror. I realise I've fallen behind a bit in my reviews for Series 7 (tbh I've been falling behind on all my reviews). I'm sorry for the delay and I'll try and get my reviews of the previous two episodes up as soon as I can.

So far I've enjoyed this series as a whole. Jenna-Louise Coleman's Clara Oswin is easily a more interesting and compelling companion than Karen Gillen's Amy Pond and Matt Smith has really benefited well from the more serious, yet still fun tone of this new series.

So far though, none of the episodes have been able to re-capture the fun factor that I had with the series premiere, The Bells of Saint John, and after the admittedly disappointing "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", I was a little worried. Thankfully The Crimson Horror delivered on that aspect in spades. This was a very fun episode.

The first half of the episode is from the perspective of the Silurian detective Madame Vastra her human wife Jenny & their butler, the Sontaran known as Strax. I've always had a fondness for these three characters since their first appearance in "A Good Man Goes to War" and they certainly haven't worn out their welcome yet. Jenny plays a bigger role here than in previous episodes and Catrin Stewart is clearly having a lot of fun with the role. This comes at the expense of Madame Vastra who has less screentime but that's forgivable as the character of Jenny needed fleshing out and Vastra has had enough exposure in previous episodes, and of course Neve McIntosh gives a good performance as the character. Strax meanwhile is just a bundle of fun and Dan Starkly is an absolute riot in the role, providing many of the episodes laughs.

Don't take this to mean that the Doctor & Clara don't feature prominently, once they appear we have a nice, old timey flashback to how they became mixed up in this story. Matt Smith is really coming into his own now as the titular character and the same applies to Jenna-Louise Coleman, these two have such great chemistry, and their Yorkshire accents weren't that bad either.

For the villain, we have Dame Diana Rigg as Ms Gillyflower, who along with her prehistoric leech companion, Mr Sweet, plans to cover the skies with his venom. Dame Diana turns in a grade-A performance as the villain. Ms Gillyflower is certainly a villain we love to hate by the end of the episode. She is joined by her real life daughter Rachel Stirling, who plays Gillyflower's disfigured daughter, Ada. This is in fact the first time these two have acted alongside one another. There's plenty of intensity in their scenes together and I really came to like the character of Ada after a while. Her scenes with the Doctor were very emotional.

The direction by Saul Metztein was very good and the same applied to Murray Gold's music (though in honesty Murray Gold always delivers). Mark Gatiss provides a witty script with plenty of laughs sprinkled in, though they are balanced by some dark and serious moments, such as the revelation that Ms Gillyflower experimented on her daughter so she could develop an anti-toxin to Mr Sweet's venom. What a nasty old woman!

Overall, I really enjoyed this episode. It wasn't perfect, there were a few problems (the Tom-Tom joke wasn't that funny and it felt out of place with the Victorian setting), but nothing glaring enough to ruin this joyride...

Score: 4.0/5.0