Doctor Who episodes set in historical periods fall into two approaches: meet a famous person or meet fictional people of the time period. Of the two, I prefer the second, for example, I preferred last seasons Demons of the Punjab to Rosa. The danger in the first kind if the episode ends up being very reverential and indulges in the great-man-of-history model of progress. That can be subverted, for example Alan Cumming’s OTT King James was very far from reverential and a plot point with Ada Lovelace in this season’s opening two-parter was to show her as part of a chain and network of influential people.
This episode goes both feet first into ‘wow ,wasn’t Nikola Tesla amazing’ but has the advantage of a convincing performance by Goran Višnjić as Tesla. The story itself is what would best be described as a ‘romp’. Ghastly goings on and an invasion of alien scorpion creatures leave little time for plot subtly but do add up for an enjoyably diverting 40 minutes.
This is not going to become a beloved classic episode but it is the kind of episode that keeps Doctor Who going and enjoyable. Yaz gets something to do and a bit more focus (but still not much character development) and Graham & Ryan get to do their comedy double act in the background.
Fewer of those rough-edges/script-laziness that I’ve been complaining about. The biggest one being the supposedly now pacifist Doctor building a super weapon that uses the power of a whole planet to blast an alien spaceship. Again, given the freedom of being able to make literally anything up, thinking up away that the same actual events could have fit more closely with the new parameters of the Doctor wouldn’t have been hard (e.g. the spaceship could have been in hyperspace pocket and the electric pulse would have closed the pocket, removing the aliens from Earth or whatever). There was a visual effect to imply the spaceship flew away but blink and you would have missed it. Perhaps, this was intended to be a character shift after the reveal of the destruction of Gallifrey in episode 2 of this season? If so that aspect was under-developed.
The reference to a Silurian gun as an alien weapon unreasonably annoyed me. I feel like the Doctor should have corrected somebody but that’s just me being pedantic. I’m also glad that the episode dumped the mind-wipe thing of historical characters and both Tesla and Edison go without a brain reset. Of course, that does make the brain resets of Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan even more out of place and has the unfortunate result that this season, the Doctor only mind wipes famous women from history and not famous men.
Silly in exactly the way I want Doctor Who to be silly and an episode with more internal confidence than last season.
Camestros Felapton 
10 responses to “Review: Doctor Who – Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror”
“The reference to a Silurian gun as an alien weapon unreasonably annoyed me. I feel like the Doctor should have corrected somebody but that’s just me being pedantic.”
It may be pedantic, but it annoyed me too.
Overall I think this is my favourite complete story of this season so far. I thought Spyfall part one was probably better, but part ones usually are because they don’t have to do the heavy lifting of resolving the plot in a satisfactory way.
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I thought this one was so fast-paced it hardly had room to breathe. I kept wanting it to slow down a bit (see: Rosa’s pausing long enough for Ryan and Yaz to have a conversation about modern-day racism and how it affected them). Also, the CGI scorpions were kind of…dodgy, to say the least.
I mean, it was okay, and the Doctor and Tesla exchanging inventor-nerd anecdotes was fun, but I didn’t think it was outstanding.
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I have that issue regarding pacing with nearly all modern movies and television. /grumpyoldman
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Completely agree. This was perfectly acceptable Doctor Who, and along with the various DC superhero shows provides a nice backdrop for ploughing through Fire Emblem missions. Maybe I just missed something (because Fire Emblem) but it seemed odd to me that none of the companions had a damn clue who Tesla was or made any connection between him and the company named after him, or made some reference to, say, Tesla coils, or something?
Also very much not wild about the Doctor jumping almost directly to “blow them up!” but as you say that might be a sort of PTSD reaction to the Master and seeing Gallifrey.
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Ryan I think asked about the type of car. Tesla is nerd-famous I guess rather than generally famous
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Yeah fair enough, although an appearance in Who means he’s penetrated further into pop culture. The first time I heard of Tesla it was via Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 wayyyyyyy back in 2000/2001 so I would only have been 12 or 13 at the time, so he’s been on the fringes of where nerd-famous meets regular-famous for a little while.
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When I took radio-TV electronics in the 70s, my teacher had a near-superstitious awe of Tesla. He believed that Tesla had invented a force field the size of a pack of smokes that would keep others from being able to get to you, and either had or had been about to perfect electricity transmitted without wires. (This teacher was an interesting guy. He also believed that a lake up in Canada emits flat disks of pure force at intervals that can push aircraft aside. I shall not digress into a larger accounting of my teacher’s quirks at this time.)
I also see Tesla’s name whenever I drive up into Canada from here, on a road, right about where I turn left toward London rather than continuing North to Toronto.
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Nikola Tesla is menaced by a cold-hearted villain who appropriates others’ technological advances! – oh, and there were also some CGI scorpion monsters. (Honestly, with Edison right there, did they need another villain?)
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The very first episode of the “Murdoch Murder Mysteries” (set in late 1895 Toronto) featured the Tesla/Edison rivalry as a major plot point. It’s been used a lot. I actually appreciated that Edison was suspected but *not* the real villain of the piece, in spite of his very-well-documented faults.
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Tesla has been fairly well known since the 1990’s, though I did think the Ryan i.d. with the car made sense. There is an up-coming movie about the Edison-Tesla conflict, so this episode seemed a bit redundant, but at least this time the plot made sense. That is, made sense until the end when the Doctor doesn’t mind-wipe Tesla and Edison, two men who had the ability to seriously disrupt history with the knowledge, after having mind-wiped two key women two episodes before whose knowledge of the future might not have changed anything at all. It would have been fine if the show bothered to give a reason for why the Doctor decided not to mind-wipe them, but that seems to be the problem this season — no one is concerned about even basic continuity.
The scorpion aliens did escape. They all popped back on the ship because their queen was getting blasted and took off to save her. So it’s possible that she died and the Doctor was back to telling her that she was going to die, but technically the Doctor still did more deterrence than war. But that was plausible in terms of the queen talking about dead planets after the Doctor saw Galifrey. It’s all a bit muddled, which seems to be a trend.
I’m less concerned about character development for the companions because they did so much of that last season, so they are fairly established and smaller changes are okay. They also still do nice little touches with them, like when they have to jump between railway cars and Ryan is hesitant because of his condition and Yaz urges and helps him over. So overall this was an improvement but I agree not super memorable.
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