Doctor Who, series 7, episode 11 – `The Crimson Horror` review

“Yes, I’m the Doctor, you’re nuts, and I’m gonna stop you.”

“In the wrong hands, that venom could wipe out all life on this planet!”

Do you know about the not scientific proved story that the retina from a dead man’s eyes keeps the very last thing he had seen before dying? The medicine says that things can’t happen, at least in normal conditions. In the victorian times, in Yorkshire the year 1983 (the very next year after the events in the Christmas special episode, The snowmen, from London), started to appear dead man in the canals with a strange spect: scarlet-red skin, almost shining, and with the images from the moment of dead imprinted on the retina.

The Doctor and Clara arrive in Yorkshire by accident (they wanted to get in London) and become interested by the mystery. They discover that it was about some poison and the Sweetville mill, managed by Mrs. Gillyflower, is somehow related to that deaths. They try to get inside the society presided by the old lady and her silent partner, Mr. Sweet, and they disappear from the face of the Earth – at least from the point of everyone else. It’s not something unusual: about everybody accepted in the group disappeared without trace… or they were found dead in mysterious circumstances.

Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax get involved in the story when the brother of a deceased reporter shows them the pictures he has taken… the Doctor’s image was very clear in the reporter’s eyes, so they go to solve the mystery and save the Doctor. Jenna gets inside the mill and finds the prisoner – a waste of the process that transformed the normal humans into scarlet dead corps. The only reason he was still alive (beside his internal alien chemistry that made him partially immune to the virus) was the attachment Ada Gillyflower (the blind daughter of the old lady responsible for everything) felt for him – she preferred to keep a monster as companion instead throwing him into the canals, along with the rest of the waste.

The Doctor is saved, along with Jenny they save Clara, and the team reunited (Vastra and Strax join them) try to save the world one more time: the Sweetville is the Winifred Gillyflower trial to save the most beautiful and the most intelligent from an disaster she was intending to do. She and the very old leech (the reptilians had very similar problems about 65 million years ago) was bound into a symbiotic creature – its red colored venom was produced in industrial quantities to transform and kill people.

I let you to discover yourselves how they finished their adventure. I only have to mention that Strax was funny as usual, but he did his job: he saved his team twice in this episode. The most cool scene from the show was in the end of the episode, when the children Clara is taking care about show her some old images (from 1970s’ and from 1983, but also a picture from Victorian London) and they blackmail her promising they would tell their father that their nanny was a time travel unless she was going to take them along in her next adventure. So, in the next episode the Doctor will have more companions than before… in an amusement park pillaged by Cybermen…

The director is Saul Metzstein, and the writer is Mark Gatiss.

The cast: Matt Smith (The Doctor), Jenna-Louise Coleman (Clara Oswald), Jack Oliver Hudson (Urchin Boy), Neve McIntosh (Madame Vastra), Diana Rigg (Winifred Gillyflower), Dan Starkey (Strax), Catrin Stewart (Jenny Flint), Rachael Stirling (Ada Gillyflower).