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New York Comic Con was this weekend! It was an amazing experience — and also completely overwhelming. There were over 150,000 people crammed into the Jacob Javits Center (a record-breaking attendance number, apparently). Look at this shot of the Javits Center entrance hallway, and this was only Thursday afternoon:

It got considerably more crowded as the weekend went on. But even though it was complete sensory overload, I had a great time. I handed out a ton of promotional postcards for my urban fantasy series to a crowd that seemed kind of meh about something that wasn’t a video game, movie, or TV show, but hey, I got the word out and you never know. I also got to see a lot of good friends in the industry while I was there. Here’s my friend Fred Van Lente with his frequent comics co-creator Ryan Dunlavy:

I got to see a few good friends who came from out of town for the event, too, like Amber Benson, F. Paul Wilson, and Laird Barron. Here’s Laird now with Ellen Datlow:

I spent a lot of time with my friends at the Orbit Books booth, including Alex Lencicki, Ellen B. Wright, and Laura Fitzgerald. It was a good place for me to go chill out when Comic Con became too overwhelming, which was basically every fifteen minutes. Here is a picture of Laura and Ellen with author Sam Sykes:

But of course one of the best parts of Comic Con is the cosplay. There were so many amazing costumes on display this year. I have such a huge amount of respect for cosplayers, they put so much creativity and effort into their costumes, and then they put themselves out there in the public eye without fear. Here is one of my favorite cosplayers from the weekend:

I have no idea who she’s supposed to be (I think the character is from a video game?) but she was so into it and so hilarious with her war cries that I had to take a picture. If anyone knows who she’s supposed to be, let me know in the comments, okay?

Here’s someone cosplaying as Omega from the 1973 Doctor Who serial “The Three Doctors”:

Needless to say, I loved it! There was a ton of Doctor Who cosplay at New York Comic Con, and I’d say 90% of them were dressed as the 11th Doctor, complete with fez and bow tie, while 5% were the TARDIS and 5% were “other,” such as Omega, which definitely wins for originality. I’d also estimate that 99% of the Doctor Who cosplayers were women. (Tellingly, I didn’t see any women dressed as Amy, Clara, or River, just the Doctor or the TARDIS. This, I believe, is because Amy, Clara, and River are such poorly written female characters, but that’s a blog entry for another time.) Here are two girls who came in adorable, homemade costumes as the 11th Doctor (I think?) and the TARDIS:

And here is a Dalek posing with a young 4th Doctor cosplayer (with Marge Simpson checking her cellphone in the background):

You can see the rest of my photos from New York Comic Con here, including lots more costumes. I swear I didn’t just take pictures of Doctor Who cosplayers! Anyway, I had a great time at the convention, managed not to spend too much money, and will definitely be back next year. I’m just glad there’s a year between Comic Cons. It’s exhausting, and I’m pretty sure I’ll need the full twelve months to recover.

After last week’s not very good episode, “The Caretaker,” we’re treated to more of an old-fashioned Doctor Who adventure in “Kill the Moon.” Old-fashioned in that it takes place someplace other than Earth, and in the future, and has our heroes fighting monsters and trying to figure out a mystery. I liked it for the most part, but it’s still a bit problematic. I’ll get to that.

NO MAJOR SPOILERS HERE, BUT THEY’RE LIKELY TO COME UP IN COMMENTS, SO CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!

One of the things I’m liking about season 8 is that there are clear emotional and psychological ramifications to events, something that was blatantly missing last season. It seemed like consequences were being set up in season 7, but then nothing ever happened. Plot lines were introduced only to be dropped, constantly. Take Angie and Artie, for example, the children Clara was nannying. They were taken into space and fought the Cybermen in “Nightmare in Silver,” and after being returned home were never seen again. What happened to them? How did they adjust after that? Is Clara a teacher now because she got fired from that nanny job for endangering the children? We’ll never know. The whole thing was dropped.

But that’s not the case any more. Characters are being allowed to develop again in season 8. Clara has become a more rounded human being. Danny is revealing new facets of his personality and past on a regular basis. And then there’s Courtney, the troubled and trouble-making student from Clara’s school. When I heard she would be a part of “Kill the Moon,” I rolled my eyes. I figured it would be like Angie and Artie all over again — except it wasn’t. The consequences of her coming along are clear and present in her fear and desire to go home in the middle of things, and also in her decision to stay and fight for what she believes is the right thing to do. Character development. Suddenly, I feel like if Courtney were to become a new companion I would be all right with that.

But would the Doctor? Because one of the most problematic, indeed troubling, aspects of “Kill the Moon” is the Doctor’s dismissal of Courtney as “not special.” Why would he say that to someone? Especially a child? It felt out of character for the Doctor. After all, this is a man who once said, “In nine hundred years of time and space, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important.” That is such an incredibly important part of the character that to have the Doctor tell someone — a child! — that she’s not special didn’t feel right at all. It felt like a ham-handed justification for his taking Courtney to the moon, to make her feel special as an apology. It would have been so much better, and without compromising anyone’s character, if Courtney had stowed away on the TARDIS as the means of becoming involved in the story. It’s happened with countless companions before. It would have worked much better here.

(With the Doctor being so dismissive of Courtney and Danny, and indeed of Mickey back in the day, there’s an uncomfortable racial subtext taking shape. The writers need to keep an eye on this. At the same time, they deserve kudos for what I believe is the first episode this season where the Doctor doesn’t make fun of Clara’s appearance.)

Anyway, back to Courtney. The Doctor asks her if she would like to be the first woman on the moon. She says yes — of course she does — and we’re off to 2049. Apparently, there has not been a single woman on the moon before 2049. Which is rubbish, of course, because Martha was on the moon 2008, along with plenty of other women in the relocated Royal Hope Hospital. But we already know that Moffat-era Doctor Who doesn’t like to acknowledge the first four seasons’ existence, so apparently the Doctor just plain forgot or something?

The plot that follows is nominally a rehash of “The Waters of Mars” (Lundvik even looks reminiscent of Adelaide Brooke) with the future of mankind resting on what happens at this remote, extraterrestrial base, except this time the Doctor steps back and refuses to make the decision for them. And here’s where things start to break down. There are two very important scenes in this episode. The first is the Doctor telling Clara and Lundvik that he can’t make this decision for them. The second is Clara blowing up at him about that. Again, hooray for ramifications. However, in my opinion both scenes needed better writing to make the characters’ motivations and stances clearer. The Doctor definitely could have explained better that it wouldn’t be right for him to make that decision for them. (I also keep wondering how his speech would have been played by Tennant instead of Capaldi, and I see a lot more gravity to it. Capaldi’s delivery was smug, which felt off to me.) Similarly, in Clara’s big scene afterward, I think it really needed to be made clearer how scared she was. She thought she was going to do something terrible, then die as a result of it, not to mention dooming the student who’s under her care to death as well, while the man she trusted to get her out of it abandoned her. But very little of that comes out in her speech, so unfortunately it winds up looking like nothing more than a temper tantrum. Peter Harness, the script writer, really needed to put more into both those scenes to sell them.

But as scary monsters in space episodes go, “Kill the Moon” is pretty good. With the exception of “The Caretaker,” I continue to find season 8 a marked improvement over what we’ve been given these last few seasons.

And now some quick Doctor Who neepery! I’m glad Clara mentioned that the moon still exists past 2049, because there are at least three classic Doctor Who serials that take place on it: “The Moonbase,” in which the Second Doctor fights the Cybermen on the moon in 2070; “The Seeds of Death,” in which the Second Doctor fights the Ice Warriors on the moon sometime after 2070; and “Frontier in Space,” in which the Third Doctor is briefly imprisoned in a prison on the moon in 2540. Additionally, the Fourth Doctor’s yo-yo makes a reappearance here to test the gravity on the moon. There’s also a mention of a Bennett Oscillator, which played a role in the 1975 Fourth Doctor serial “The Ark in Space,” and a brief reference made to not killing Hitler.

Lastly, part of the episode was filmed in Lanzarote, where much of the 1984 Fifth Doctor serial “Planet of Fire” was filmed. This led to wide speculation that A) the Doctor would be returning to the planet Sarn, and B) the Master would be showing up again. Spoiler alert: Neither turns out to be the case.

For the most part, I’ve been enjoying season 8 of Doctor Who. That’s mostly due to Peter Capaldi in the role. He elevates the scripts considerably, which admittedly haven’t been as bad as they were for the last few seasons, although they still share some of the same weaknesses. But to me, “The Caretaker” felt like the first serious misstep of the season.

You won’t find any spoilers here, because there’s nothing spoil, really. There’s only the barest minimum of a plot to be had: the Doctor poses as the caretaker (or custodian, for those of us in the US) of the Coal Hill School, where Clara and Danny teach, in order to find and neutralize a killer robot from the future that’s hiding somewhere on the premises. In truth, though, the episode is really about the Doctor and Danny finally meeting after Clara has worked hard to keep each a secret from the other for reasons that are simultaneously unexplored and overstated.

It’s because Danny used to be a soldier, you see, and the Doctor once mentioned to Clara that he doesn’t like soldiers. Unfortunately, since then, the not-liking-soldiers trait has turned into the equivalent of beating a dead horse, repeated so often and so pointlessly that it becomes grating. Besides that, it doesn’t even make sense in the history of Doctor Who. The Doctor is against the use of force, sure, but some of his best friends are soldiers. What about the Brigadier? Sergeant Benton? Captain Yates? Hell, even Wilf used to be a soldier in World War II, and he and the Doctor got along famously! Mickey and Martha became soldiers. Captain Jack Harkness is a soldier of sorts. But now, suddenly, the Doctor can’t stand soldiers and assumes Danny must be a P.E. teacher because a soldier could never be a math teacher? For goodness sake, in the 1983 serial “Mawdryn Undead,” we find out the Brigadier became a math teacher after he retired! So the whole hating-soldiers trait just comes off feeling random and forced, as if it exists solely to cause strife between the Doctor and Danny. It’s lazy writing.

Speaking of lazy writing, why in the name of God would they have the Doctor return to Coal Hill School and not mention the fact that his granddaughter Susan was a student at that same school in 1963, when she and the First Doctor were hiding on Earth after running away from Gallifrey? How could they not mention that the Doctor’s very first companions were Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, two of Susan’s teachers from Coal Hill? How could they not mention that the Seventh Doctor and Ace returned to Coal Hill School in the 1988 serial “Remembrance of the Daleks” to fight a Dalek invasion? Daleks once landed in Coal Hill’s fucking schoolyard, and it’s utterly ignored or forgotten in “The Caretaker.” In fact, the Doctor’s entire history with Coal Hill is, except for one throwaway line about there being a lot of Artron energy emissions in the area, which could be a reference to how many times his TARDIS has parked nearby. But that’s it. For God’s sake, the whole reason they had Clara teaching at Coal Hill School in the 50th anniversary special “The Day of the Doctor” is because of that long history. (In fact, Ian Chesterton is mentioned on the school sign in “Day of the Doctor” as Chairman of the Governors of Coal Hill now, but that’s ignored here, too.) To have that long history completely ignored feels like a monumentally wasted opportunity.

There’s a lot of comedy in “The Caretaker,” and those bits work well because Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat, who co-wrote the script, are comedy writers at heart. (I kind of loved the Doctor whistling “Another Brick in the Wall” in the schoolyard.) But everything else feels off. It plays like an episode of a sitcom about Clara and her romantic complications, with the Doctor as the wacky neighbor who’s always messing things up. Everybody acts wildly out of character for much of the episode, but most especially the Doctor. I don’t mind a prickly Doctor — Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, my favorite, was frequently prickly — but when he spends the majority of the episode acting like an asshole to everyone for no good reason, it becomes tedious. Danny Pink, whom I liked in every other episode in which he appears, comes off as mentally unstable in a nonsensical scene where he keeps yelling “Sir!” at the Doctor. Of course, the Doctor doesn’t sound much like himself in that scene, either. Everyone is out of character for the sole reason of trying to create strife, when really Danny and the Doctor ought to get along just fine, considering they are both decent men with tortured pasts. Both did things as soldiers they regret. The Doctor got to rectify one of them in “Day of the Doctor,” but Danny doesn’t have that ability. Imagine if we’d seen that conversation instead of the forced conflict we got instead.

There’s a brief mention of River Song that had me rolling my eyes. It’s a reminder of a period in the show’s history that I really didn’t like, as well as a reminder of how poorly the Doctor can be written under Moffat’s watch, considering how terribly he treated a woman he was supposedly in love with. Missy’s “afterlife” shows up again at the end, for only the third time, but it already feels invasive and stupid. Part of the problem is that I don’t trust Moffat to come up with good season-long arcs. (I still can’t figure out how the Doctor faking his death with a shapeshifting robot was enough to prevent all of time and space from going wonky in season 6. Or what the fuck the Great Intelligence was even trying to do in season 7.) So all this stuff with Missy and the Promised Land already feels, to me at least, like I’m just being set up to be let down again by something stupid. And don’t get me started on Clara now being able to open and close the TARDIS door by snapping her fingers, the way the Doctor can. Just last season the TARDIS didn’t like Clara and tried to get rid of her. I’m still waiting on an explanation for that, as well as how and why that behavior stopped.

I miss the days when the TARDIS would take the Doctor and his companion to some distant time or place for an adventure, and then when things were sorted out, they’d get back in the TARDIS and be off to the next time and place for another one. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Now everyone’s on missions, or the Doctor is asking Clara where she wants to go. It’s nowhere near as interesting or engaging. Hell, there’s a montage of what appears to be actual adventures at the start of “The Caretaker,” all of which look far more interesting than the story we get. But there’s a lot of that in Moffat-era Doctor Who, I’ve noticed. Things are frequently told instead of shown (like the majority of the Doctor’s relationship with River) and a lot of episodes seem to take place after far more interesting ones are hinted at (remember the fun that was happening in all the scenes between scenes that we didn’t get to explore in “The Power of Three”, only to have to sit through a terrible, boring episode instead?).

Ah well. The next episode, “Kill the Moon,” looks like it might be a return to form, what with it being the future and not taking place on Earth and scary space monsters. Of course, it also looks like a carbon copy of the 2009 Tenth Doctor episode “The Waters of Mars.” Given Moffat’s penchant for recycling story ideas, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

After the more cerebral and atmospheric episode “Listen,” Doctor Who treats us to the kind of fun adventure episode I really wish they would make more of, “Time Heist.” It’s enjoyable, the supporting characters are interesting and well rounded, and the plot makes sense, mostly, despite getting up its own ass at the end with some timey-wimeyness. (Show runner and head writer Steven Moffat seems to love using time travel as a plot point instead of simply as a method to bring the Doctor from one adventure to the next. It can get to be a bit much.) As much as I liked it, though, I felt the direction could have been better. Some scenes and events were not clearly related to the viewers. For instance, Clara has a note she says came from the case the Architect left for them, but we don’t see her find or take the note. Additionally, many transition scenes are missing, so we don’t always know how characters get places or how much time has passed.

But it’s a fun heist story with a cool, weird monster and a mystery at its heart, so how could I not like it? Peter Capaldi continues to elevate the material beyond its pulp roots. Jenna Coleman’s Clara continues to be believably torn between her evolving personal life and the Doctor’s increasingly annoying demands on her time. Personally, I wish Clara’s issues were about something a little less conventional than a man — maybe she could have a big career choice ahead of her, or maybe there could be somebody in her life who depends on her to the point where her travels with the Doctor are interfering? I mean, it’s not that hard to come up with ideas that don’t revolve around dating — but at least she finally has a life outside of her relationship with the Doctor. (All that “I was born to save the Doctor” shit last season made me cringe.)

**SPOILERS FOLLOW**

Unfortunately, “Time Heist” features a few glaring plot holes that are detrimental the story. For example, when the Doctor and the others think the atomic shredders are weapons (“exit strategies” to kill themselves before they fall prey to the Teller), why don’t any of them think to use them on the Teller instead of on themselves? If Karabraxos has regrets about her past, particularly with regard to the Teller, why set up something as ridiculously convoluted as a fake bank heist when she could just as easily have given the Doctor the information to go back in time and rescue the Teller’s mate? Or convince a younger Karabraxos to simply release them? Or go even further back and prevent the capture of the Teller’s mate in the first place? And of course, I don’t need to tell anyone that skulls are not water balloons. When the brains inside them are turned to “soup,” the skull itself does not deflate. I’m still rolling my eyes over that one.

The mysterious “woman in the shop” who gave Clara the Doctor’s phone number is mentioned again, but I have a very hard time believing that in all this time neither of them has thought to go visit that shop and try to find out who she is. Especially when the Doctor obviously has no other pressing business, what with always asking Clara where she wants to go next as if they’re on a permanent vacation.

Lastly, we once again get, just like in “The Rings of Akhaten,” a creature that devours memories and the Doctor tries to overwhelm it by feeding it the entirety of his massive lifetime. It plays out differently here — the Doctor wants the Teller to read his mind and tell him the memories he’s missing — but the scenes are almost identical in concept and structure. Last week, I mentioned that Moffat, who co-wrote this episode, likes to return to the well of his own making and draw out the same tropes, and this scene is yet another example of it.

And now for some Doctor Who neepery! When Psi is scanning through the bank’s most-wanted files on a computer screen, mixed in with the pictures are a Sensorite, a Terileptil, an Ice Warrior, and a Slitheen. There are, intriguingly, also two pictures from Torchwood: a Weevil and James Marsters’s Captain John Hart. But perhaps most interesting of all is a picture of Abslom Daak right out of the Doctor Who comics. Apparently Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer, is now canon on the TV show, too! Also, the Doctor mentions his scarf again, and (rightfully, in my opinion) calls the bow tie he wore as the Eleventh Doctor “a bit embarrassing.”