Doctor Who 3×05: The Dreamers, Part 1 AKA “Oh, Look. It’s a Pretty, Shiny Horse.”

There have been many odd villians and twice as many strange, strange creatures  in the long, glorious history of Doctor Who:  Macra, Ice Warriors, ooh, the Quarks, I think the Quarks win the award of ultimate weirdness…Axons,  Judoon, Sontarans, the giant evil rocks from Stones of Blood, the Mighty Kroll…Moxx of Balhoon and his gift of bodily salivas… oh, and who can forget the Yetis? I could go on for hours and would only have made a dent in the big pile of weird that surrounds Doctor Who. The best part is, no end seems to be in sight. Even though the show has thankfully left the days of rubber suits and tinfoil far in the past and has graduated to CGI horrors, there’s always something new, something bizarre, something rediculously disturbing lurking over the horizon.

What’s true for canon Doctor Who is also true for Darker Project’s version of the story. They’ve given us zombies and ghosts, vampires and Daleks, maid-of-honor bots, psychics, and so much more…and now, horses. Yes, horses. The newest Doctor Who villians…are horses. Pretty, shiny horses.

You’d think this would be something to laugh at, but strangely, this is the most disturbing thing I have ever heard in my life. I sat through the entirety of the new Doctor Who episode with a look on my face that was somewhere in between complete shock and utter creeped-outedness. (If that wasn’t a word before today, it is now.) Something about shiny, pretty, mesmerizing horses scared me more than I thought they would. When I was a little kid, I loved horses. I think that might have made it worse…

 Now that I’ve gone on for several paragraphs about the villians, I’m going to actually pay some attention to the episode itself. The Dreamers, Part 1 (written by…David Ault!) seems to be in a different key compared to the rest of the series; there’s more talking and less running from things, which actually seems to work out well. Actually, it’s more arguing; Emma and the Doctor still aren’t getting on very well, and the fact that Jason Tate’s personality keeps resurfacing doesn’t make things any easier.

The story opens as the TARDIS materializes in…London. A London that is empty of people, with the London Eye running past closing time, a phantom train in the Underground, and horses running through the streets and carrying people away. Oh, and it’s 2011. And the TARDIS’s controls are frozen. And the Doctor is not good at talking to women.

I didn’t realize how much I missed this series until I listened to the Summer Cutaway, but listening to this, the first new episode of Darker Projects’ Doctor Who since 2007, I realized that I’d completely misjudged the situation. This was the first show I listened to at Darker Projects. This was how I was introduced to the television version of Doctor Who, which I hadn’t even heard of before I found Darker Projects. This series (well, the first season, with Mark Kalita, if you wanna get specific) sent me hurtling into the amazing world of science fiction, which until then I’d only explored through Star Wars and the works of Douglas Adams. (Speaking of which, I loved the Hitchhiker’s Guide references in both this episode and the most recent Byron Chronicles episode!)

So, excuse me if I wax poetic about either Darker Projects or this series. I think you can understand why…

In conclusion: Doctor Who is back, it’s brilliant, and there’s evil horses. Give it a listen.

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Note: Am I the only one who IMMEDIATLY thought of Bad Horse from Doctor Horrible’s Singalong Blog? Please tell me that I wasn’t…