Doctor Who
Season 9, Episode 12 “Hell Bent”
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Written by Steven Moffat
Starring Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Maisie Williams, Ken Bones, T’nia Miller, Clare Higgins
BBC America
Air date: December 5, 2015

This week, we find the Doctor back on Gallifrey, the home of Time Lords. It’s a place of many traps, both for the Doctor and for Doctor Who. There is the Doctor’s own, occasionally troubled relationship with his own people. There is the temptation to reveal too much about who the Doctor really is. There is frequently the desire to indulge in the worst kind of fan nostalgia by summoning up key words, faces, and objects from the past.

In this week’s episode, “Hell Bent,” I think the Doctor emerges relatively unscathed, but only after the showrunner Steven Moffat leads us through some abrupt and unconvincing turns that aim high but cater to the show’s worst storytelling tendencies.

In recent years Simon Pegg, the multi-talented British actor/writer who has become a hero to geeks everywhere thanks to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has been balancing out roles in big-budget Hollywood blockbusters like Star Trek and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol with smaller and odder films like Paul and Burke and Hare. Most of Pegg’s fans tend to forget that he started his career in wonderfully out there British television series like Asylum, Big Train, and of course Spaced – the cult classic comedy he created with Edgar Wright and Jessica Hynes. Now that Pegg is a bonafide star and confirmed good luck charm for any franchise that wants to employ his talents (even the Ice Age movies), he has the clout to make darker, riskier films where he can do more than deliver funny lines with that priceless British comic timing of his.

Such a movie is Pegg’s latest, A Fantastic Fear of Everything, and the movie now has a trailer. You can watch it here below.