Doctor Who - 'Fire and Ice' Review

Before I dig too deeply into this, I want to point out that it's a fan-made production. While this means the production should be given some leeway, I still intend to be honest with my opinion.

Story in brief:

Alice is a normal enough college student in the US. Running late for class, she drives through the rain, gets distracted by something running across the road, and almost runs over a man, a man who seems to stare right through her before running off. The event haunts her and she later investigates the area. She gets lost in the woods. She gets found by the 'watch dog' that ran across the road earlier and is saved from it by the man she almost hit, a man she will find later is called the Doctor. Life gets much less normal after that.

Thoughts:

Let me get one this out of the way: I liked this. It was a good show in general. Let me nit-pick a bit for a while.

The sound is solid. I believe much of the audio was re-recorded in post and this makes it generally easy to listen to and make out the words being spoken. Unfortunately, the music (yes, it's got music) was often mixed a bit loud during dialog sequences and drown out some of that good work. The music is in the style of the new series and, to be honest, I didn't care for all of it. I didn't always think the music worked for the scenes, sometimes being too 'spooky' for its own good. It's also of the 'woman vocalizing randomly' style which is not my favorite. There is also one sequence that appears to have had an encoding problem as the audio and video don't match. It's a brief problem.

There are special effects. Some of them are quite good. The 'watch dog' is really not. A couple of sequences near the end are a little awkward as well but all credit for trying. One scene has effects missing but it is a brief moment.

There is a LOT of good in the story. Alice and her friend feel very natural in reacting to each other (apart from a sequence or two that feels awkward but, again, minor). This is important as the bulk of the first half or so of the episode is these two characters interacting. This is good and bad. It is good because there is great effort made to make their reactions credible, to show why they would start to believe that weird things are happening. It's bad because we only see the Doctor in passing during this part of the episode and the show is only named after the character. It's well constructed but it's too long.

The pacing of the episode is a bit off. The episode runs to about 70 minutes and probably should be ten minutes shorter. There are a few early sequences that don't add much and could be shortened or eliminated. Once the Doctor and Alice meet to become companions, the story shifts into exposition mode and all the weird things we've seen hints of through the episode to that point are explained. This gets a bit tedious. As some of this information gets repeated during a later sequence, it becomes more annoying. I understand that the crew was trying to get across why Alice would decide to accompany the Doctor at this point, trying to make her seem realistic, but it doesn't flow well. There is too much sitting and talking at this point.

While trying not to give away the ending, it's different and not so good at the same time. The downside to spending all this time with Alice and seeing the story from her point of view is that the ending is a bit rushed. We don't get to spend much time with the antagonists. Their point of view is laid out in a couple of lines and it's over.

I'm not so sure about the Doctor. There are attempts to make him interesting and his 'faux-hawk' is different but I'm not sure I liked him. There's not enough of him to make a decision on. His reaction to the events of the ending is either meant to be a character note or it's just poorly written. I'm not sure which.

Alice seems to be named such in order to use one line at the end of the episode. There's also an 'alternate' title mentioned during the story that's better than the actual episode title.

Grouching over, the acting is solid. The production is excellent for a fan video. They appear to have a physical TARDIS prop. The physical events in general are solid. Alice's friend is very cute (not that Alice isn't pleasant looking herself). It looks and sounds good. It looks like they shot most of it around their college and house and the woods near it so the locations look good.

Despite all my 'complaints', I enjoyed watching this and would watch another. I'm curious to see if they can generate another planet or have a space for sets. I haven't gone looking for more information on the group yet because I didn't want to color my opinions at this point.

Available to be downloaded from the Internet. Recommended.