Love & Monsters
Story 175, Episodes 720, Series 2 Episode 10
Doctor: The Tenth Doctor
Companions: Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler
Love & Monsters tries to show the Doctor from the point of view of us ordinary humans catching glimpses of his legend and then does a lot of other stuff too.
The Review
Let’s start with the good stuff. First off, this episode introduced me to the glory of ELO when I watched it for the first time in 2013, so thank you for that. The idea is pretty genius, and effective when the episode keys in on it: the Doctor appears like a legend to outsiders. It’s Clive from Rose but now in the guise of a fan club of sorts of the Doctor, seeking to learn about this legendary man. The cold open with Elton in the midst of another crazy adventure of the Doctor’s is good fun. The middle of the episode features our protagonist, Elton, getting ingratiated with Jackie Tyler, who immediately comes up with excuses to have him fix stuff at her flat before trying to have sex with him. We think it’s because Jackie is a huge flirt, and it partly is, but we learn that it also has to do with the loneliness that Jackie feels with Rose gone all the time. Despite feeling left behind, Jackie refuses to give up the location of Rose to Elton.
Then, there’s all the crazy stuff. God bless you RTD, some days you write The Parting of the Ways, some days you write Love & Monsters. Elton is kind of weird and painfully ridiculous, and so is the entire cast of ‘LINDA’, a weird group of misfits studying the Doctor. As some metaphor for fandom it kind of works, the Doctor brings these lonely weird people together in a beautiful way and then someone like Mr. Kennedy comes along, a tyrant who manipulates the fandom to fit his own self-serving needs. It would work better if everybody just wasn’t so weird. In addition, the true form of Mr. Kennedy, the Abzorbaloff is just gross and weird and not cool. Unfortunately the BBC somehow got the show to agree to doing a contest for a young kid to design a monster that had to be included on the show and I guess this is what we came up with. Elton’s girlfriend, Ursula, played by Shirley Henderson of Moaning Myrtle fame, gets unabsorbed with her head on a paving slab Elton can take home to have sex with. For all the good, there’s more gross, bizarre, and just plain weird in this one.
Going from stopping literal Satan to this episode might be the roughest transition in all of Doctor Who. It just isn’t good.
6.5/10. You get the .5 for the fandom allegory. If only it was better in basically any sense.
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