Reviews

This episode again shows how frustrating this show is.

The Aston part was fine. A standard middle of the road review.

James May's part about the astronaut's cars was brilliant. They should have done The Grand Tour solely around films like that, the Jim Clark one, the Lancia rally one etc.

The Citroen review was the usual later year Top Gear nonsense. It smacks of something they threw together in 5 minutes because they ran out of ideas. These types of segments should have been binned years ago. And the constant fake horn noises are tiresome as well. They seem to use the truck horn 1 every 5 minutes. No truck horn sounds like that except on Top Gear/The Grand Tour weirdly. The only good part of this review was the last part going up the mountain.

This show could have been great, there is greatness sprinkled across the episodes, but there is a lot of complete and utter rubbish thrown in amongst it.

I really enjoyed this film and it made me a lot more emotional than I thought I would be at the end of it. I never thought I would be 1 of these people who would watch something and decide to go vegetarian or vegan or whatever after it, but I don't think I can eat octopus again after watching this.

At one point Craig compares the octopus's intelligence to a cat or a dog and I think that shows when she rushes to greet him and hug him. It also made me wonder what kind of reaction I would get from my 2 cats if i left them in the wild and only visited once a day. I bet it wouldn't be as warm as he got from her!

However, I have to agree with other people in here that he could have done more to help her. Yes on the 1 hand I don't think that Attenborough type documentaries should interfere when a lion is chasing down an antelope for example. Thats nature taking it's course. But he had developed a bond with the octopus and clearly the feeling was mutual. I don't think anyone watching would have been on here complaining if he had chased off the sharks when they were chasing her. And watching her final moments and him not holding her was heartbreaking. The thought of me not comforting my pets, who are essentially as good a friend to me as the octopus is to him, in their dying moments doesn't bear thinking about. I'm sure she would have known he was there, he should have at the very least reached out to her.

This is a great watch and really emotional. Craig should really have just shown a bit more compassion and protection to her and this could have been a genuinely great film.

A perfectly good episode, ruined by the completely predictable "crash" at the end. Why do they bother with stunts like that? It stopped being funny 15 years ago.

Watching this documentary I couldn't help but think that if the makers had went into a bit more detail on each part of Justin's life they could have made something really great, but everything seemed so rushed.

It started off talking about him and John being abandoned by their mother and growing up in an orphanage and then with the family that took them in. It didn't really go into any great detail in that.

The story seemed to leap forward to him being in the Norwich first team. There was no mention of him breaking into the team, his England under 21 matches or really info at all on what was the best spell of his career apart from 4 or 5 shots of his goal against Liverpool.

It then jumped to his spell at Forest. It seemed to hint at the problems he had with Brian Clough without really going into any great detail there. Or go into any great detail about his poor form with Forest or even his spell with Notts County.

Then we jump to Los Angeles, with for some reason mentions of the AIDS pandemic (unless Justin had AIDS I have no idea why). It shows him recovering from an injury, but no clues as to how he got injured.

The timeline then continues to leap forward several years to seemingly random points in his life. This could have been time better spent going into greater detail about the parts I mentioned above, or about the racist abuse he continually got throughout the 80s but is only hinted at in the documentary.

Into the 90s we again get brief, sporadic mentions of parts of his life without any in depth analysis of it.

Even at the end, the allegations made against him and his death are almost mentioned as a passing comment.

It's such a shame because Justin Fashanu's career is unique in British football and this could have been a genuinely brilliant documentary but it fell way short of the mark in my opinion.

This series started off quite well but there is very little to this story. The amount of time given to the "internet sleuths" in the series is incredible. The police, hotel staff and the coroner give reasonable explanations for everything that happened, however the sleuths just counter it all with "there must be more to it" and "it's a conspiracy". Part of being a detective is following evidence, not coming up with wild, baseless theories. I felt so sorry for Morbid. They made his life hell. Someone who had been at the hotel a whole year before she died, but they just clung onto the fact that he did it. I also feel sorry for Elisa Lam's family. These people potentially gave the family false hope or kept dragging up the case on the internet. They didn't ask for this. This series should have been about the history of the hotel, going deeper into some of the stories that are touched upon, with Elisa Lam given 10 minutes of it. None of these "sleuths" should have been given the airtime whatsoever

This episode summed up the best and worst about The Grand Tour and the later years of Top Gear for me. Capable of brilliance but also capable of being terrible. The episode would have been 10/10 but the need to throw in explosions for childish "laughs" marks it down.

The Lamborghini review was a good review of a very good car. Despite the fact that Hammond is easily the weakest of the 3 presenters, the review was enjoyable and probably 1 of their better supercar reviews.

Joshua and Goldberg were probably the best 2 guests they have had on. They played off well against each other and it was a genuinely funny and interesting segment.

Conversation Street was it's usual terrible attempt at stand up comedy. Why can't they just do car news instead of "I wonder what a dogging Benteyga would look like?" (Insert canned laughter while the audience stand expressionless in front of them). As always it's the weakest part of the show.

The fuel filling idea was clearly just filler to pad out the episode (if you pardon the pun). The final idea was actually ok but the 1st 2 with the token explosions did nothing but make me roll my eyes. They can do much better than this but they seem to think making things explode is funny.

Then you get the best thing The Grand Tour has done so far and possibly the best thing the 3 of them have done since the Senna tribute. Clarkson shows what he can do when not playing the character he plays in The Grand Tour and throws himself into a storytelling role. As with the Senna tribute and his War Stories series he is genuinely brilliant and passionate when doing a documentary-style role. It's such a shame he has to play up to the daft persona they want him to have normally. I wish they had done an hour long feature on the Audi-Lancia story, or Clarkson had done it as a side project.

With the exception of Conversation Street and the fuel filling, this is what The Grand Tour could have been. This is what I was expecting from a Clarkson/May/Amazon team up (not Hammond, they should have cut him adrift years ago).