#my love/aggravation relationship with moffat continues

[demigodofhoolemere]

Me through most of Boom: Wow, this is a really solid dramatic episode.

Me when Moffat needlessly sprinkles in anti-faith sentiments without specifying that it’s blind faith in bad things that the Doctor doesn’t like, which makes it come off like the Doctor is just against religion generally:

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 5, part I

Please note: these reviews contain spoilers for this season as well as other seasons of the reboot, and contain occasional references to the classic series.

Previously on Doctor Who: Russell T. Davies presided over the rebirth of the show, starting with Rose Tyler’s escape from mannequins in a shop and ending with the Tenth Doctor’s sad exit. Lots of glorious things happened, we met some fabulous new monsters, we were introduced to an unprecedented amount of information about companions’ homes and families, and if there were occasional detours into deeply annoying pieces of plot and characterization, there were also many triumphant forays into charming and highly emotional stories. Once Steven Moffat takes over as showrunner, the show gets more complicated; people usually mean by this that the plot becomes convoluted, which I think is only intermittently true, but the approach that the show takes to its characters is, to me, the much bigger leap in terms of complexity. In the Davies era, we had a lot of very emotionally demonstrative characters, who often verbalized their thoughts directly, and who had such expressive faces and body language that they were usually legible to us immediately even if they were refusing to speak about certain feelings. With Moffat in charge, I don’t think that the characters’ emotions are less deeply felt, but I do think that they are less directly expressed, to the point that elements of plot, music, and imagery are far more thoroughly burdened with conveying—sometimes with extreme subtlety, sometimes with banging-you-over-the-head obviousness—the feelings that the characters conceal from each other and occasionally from themselves. This season is not quite as subtext-heavy as the next one, but I do think that, while you can turn your brain off and enjoy much of this season as a compilation of lots of good jokes and some entertaining running around, it does seem like a very different kind of storytelling that fundamentally involves more work for the audience, at least if you want to grasp what’s going on with these characters. I don’t think that this is necessarily a qualitative difference—more directly visible characterization can be brilliant and can be terrible, and the same is true of more subtext-driven work. Sometimes, the Moffat era is smarter, in its indirect character-building, than the Davies era was, and sometimes it is clumsier, but regardless of the result, I do think that the approach is extremely different. With that said, plenty remains the same: the show is fun, the monsters are scary, and, as we start this new season, the Doctor is about to make an endearing new human friend.

The Eleventh Hour: There are two high-stakes situations unfolding very quickly in this episode: the Doctor has twenty minutes to save the Earth from incineration, and the show has about an hour to prove that it can survive without David Tennant. The combined pressures exerted on both the show and its characters result in a frenzied, often breathtaking episode that feels a bit like inhaling five shots of espresso, but it finds just enough moments to slow down and let us appreciate this new array of characters.

           Smith is immediately good, but Doctor himself takes a few minutes to win me over. While the initial meeting between the Doctor and tiny Amelia is cute, the long sequence in which the Doctor tries and spits out various foods quickly gets annoying; making a little girl cook what seems like most of the contents of her fridge for him seems like an awfully pushy thing for the Doctor to do in his opening minutes, and the scene puts the Doctor right on the line between quirky and exasperating. At the end of the scene, though, we get the first piece of magic in this fairytaleish season, appearing in the unlikely form of fish fingers and custard. There are quite a few things on Doctor Who that work for reasons that are difficult to articulate—murdery trashcans really shouldn’t be some of the most engaging villains in television history, but somehow they are. Smith, until the end of this scene, has been a mostly likeable presence without quite being able to shake the little voice saying “He seems pretty good, but why did they cast someone so young?” This was my initial reaction to his casting, and continued to be my reaction to his first few minutes, but then he dips bits of fish into a bowl of yellow gloop and why this works is entirely beyond me but suddenly he’s the Doctor. Hi, Eleven.

           The Doctor, whose tendency to show off becomes especially troublesome in this regeneration, gets plenty of opportunity to do so here. He gets the attention of world leaders by sending them a proof of Fermat’s theorem and several elaborate pieces of knowledge, he practically revels in the chance to save the world with no TARDIS and a twenty-minute countdown, and his warning to the Atraxi, in which all of the previous Doctors appear, is both a terrific moment and a huge display of vanity. The Doctor refers to his confrontation with the Atraxi as “showtime,” but he’s putting on a show the whole time, and enjoying the performance quite a bit. Even his pep talk to Jeff—“First, you have to be magnificent. You have to make them trust you and get them working…This is when you fly”—seems like something he is saying to himself as much as to the bewildered young man he is addressing. The Tenth Doctor was often a huge spectacle, but he was rarely as self-aware of it or as intentional in building it as this Doctor so immediately is. This means that there is even more potential for aggravation here than in his previous incarnation, but the Eleventh Doctor’s tendency to indulge in performance is so clearly-defined and so easily-perceived by other characters that it plays a slightly different role here than it did before—most notably, it produces problems more often than it solves them. This is one of the rare moments in which his self-glorification really does straightforwardly solve the problem, but it’s just so nice to see glimpses of the previous Doctors just as we’re starting with a new one that I still really like the sequence.

           There were a lot of complaints about Amy Pond being introduced to us as a short-skirt-wearing kissogram, which is a reasonable objection. On the one hand, her outfit allows her reunion with the Doctor to take the form of hitting him with a cricket bat, handcuffing him to a radiator, dressing up as a police officer, and communicating with fake police on a fake radio, which is sort of fabulous in itself; I appreciate people who have a proper respect for costumes and props. On the other hand, it really is just an unnecessarily objectifying first look at grown-up Amy, and it invites the audience to sexualize her in a way that hadn’t really happened with the reboot’s previous companions. The decision to have her let her hair down just as she reveals that she’s a kiss-o-gram makes the scene look even more sexualized, and the return to the subject later on at Jeff’s house is just cringeworthy. We really, really didn’t need the Doctor making a judgmental face about Amy’s choice of profession, nor did we need a list of the different people she dresses up as—apparently, she’s been a police officer, a nurse, and a nun. It’s a brief scene, but it really does feel sexist, and it’s an unfortunate distraction from the much more interesting elements of Amy’s personality that we encounter in this episode. (On the subject of gender, it’s also worth pointing out that if you’re on a laptop talking to a group of world leaders, at least one of whom appears to be female, you might want to refer to them by a less gender-specific term than “fellas.”)

           Other than the questionable choice of occupation, though, we get a marvelous introduction to Amy here. I particularly like that the companion who’s going to go through pretty much every imaginable faith-related psychological issue over the next couple of seasons is introduced praying to Santa Claus (in April!) It’s a silly moment, but one that shows that her tendency to resort to belief that some sort of miraculous intervention will solve problems is exacerbated by the Doctor but doesn’t originate with him. She’s had many years to obsess about the Doctor, and her long period of disillusionment with him before she even sets foot in the TARDIS means that she reacts very differently from what we’ve seen in other companions. I really like the scene in which she traps him by locking his tie in a car door in spite of the fact that the apocalypse is looming, and I love that there’s no “bigger on the inside” moment when she first enters the TARDIS, just wide-eyed silence. The presence of the Doctor and his time machine is as much a validation of her stubbornness as anything else, and the “Scottish girl in the English village” who clung to her accent in spite of the geographic change already has a complicated relationship to the man whose existence she spent so much time defending. There’s some interesting thematic work connected with her as well: the act of carefully looking is an important element throughout Amy’s time on the show, and the Doctor’s promptings to look for what’s in the corner of her eye create a nice beginning to this, as does the fact that the Atraxi is basically just a giant eyeball.

           Amy’s world—a small town with a post office, a hospital, and a duck pond with no ducks—doesn’t look as endearing as Davies-era London often did, but it’s very pleasant and I sort of wish that future episodes had let us spend a bit more time there. I particularly like the Doctor’s frustrated remark that in their current possibly apocalyptic scenario, “We’ve got a post office. And it’s shut!” Rory isn’t especially memorable here, but we get a solid introduction to him. While everyone else is busy filming whatever is happening with the sun, Rory is calmly trying to do the useful thing by recording the inexplicable phenomenon of a walking coma patient, and the impression of Rory as quietly and unostentatiously helpful is a pretty accurate first glimpse of him.

           In addition to Amy, Rory, and the Doctor, we’re also introduced to the new TARDIS, who gets possibly the best debut of the four. Debates about who has the best TARDIS entrance generally center on companions, but my answer would be the Eleventh Doctor. I’m really glad that he’s the Doctor who eventually gets to talk to the human TARDIS (in next season’s “The Doctor’s Wife”) because he and the TARDIS somehow manage to have off-the-charts chemistry even while she’s still a machine. His awed “What have you got for me this time?” as he first enters his newly-redecorated TARDIS is my favorite moment of the entire episode, because he delivers the line with such a palpable sense of love that I suddenly get their relationship more than I ever have before. The TARDIS has always been fabulous—I mean, she’s what makes the show possible—and there have been plenty of moments that showcase the Doctor’s emotional connection to his time-space machine, but the end of this episode is the first time that she genuinely seems to me like a real character with a personality. This is partly due to Smith’s reaction, but the camera also shows an unprecedented level of excitement about the buttons and switches, and there’s a spinny thing that made me really want to poke it when I first saw it. (It should be pointed out that Amy does so almost as soon as she enters. Well done, Pond.) It’s like the camera, after years of taking it for granted, suddenly noticed how amazing the control room was, and while I have often wanted to travel on the TARDIS, this episode made me feel much more connected to the TARDIS herself than ever before.

           There is so much attention to new characters and spaces here that it’s easy to lose sight of the plot, but it’s a solid one—the Atraxi’s broadcasts to the entire Earth are quite frightening, and Prisoner Zero’s ability to change form is used to good effect. I wish that Olivia Colman had gotten a bit more to do, but she makes the most of a tiny role, looking and sounding tremendously intimidating as one of Prisoner Zero’s bodies. We also get a number of references to upcoming plot points, including the first appearance of the eerie cracks in time and the first mentions of the Silence. As a shift in tone and an introduction to new characters, storylines, and themes, this is a phenomenal piece of writing, and if Moffat had managed to come up with a different job for Amy, this would probably be in my top ten episodes of the reboot. The kissogram nonsense brings the quality down a bit, but it’s still easily the best debut episode for a Doctor in the reboot, and “Spearhead from Space” is really the only episode in the history of the show to compete with it as an introduction to a new Doctor. “Spearhead from Space” is an important predecessor here, in that it, too, marked a huge departure in tone from what had come before. The change here is not as drastic as the shift between “War Games” and “Spearhead,” but it does feel like we’re in a quite different world from the one of the Davies era. It definitely requires some adjustment, but for the most part, the new world looks absolutely stunning. A/A-

The Beast Below: I really disliked this episode the first time I watched it, but there are only a couple of episodes that have grown on me more over time. The Starship UK isn’t among the best worlds this show has portrayed—it’s a bit too wrapped up in generic Police State Surveillance things to be completely enjoyable. (The logic doesn’t really hold up either. Having children fed to the whale because they perform badly in school is horrifying to an extent that doesn’t really gel with the idea that the leaders here are trying to do the least terrible thing possible in an awful ethical dilemma. It’s also pretty stupid that the Starwhale clearly doesn’t eat children, and yet they keep getting sent to it.) The episode manages not to fall too badly into the trap of dystopian dullness, however, in large part because it features a queen wearing a giant, awesome cape who has strewn water glasses all over the floor and is secretly investigating her kingdom. It’s too bad that we only got one episode (and then a tiny cameo at the end of the season) of the marvelous Sophie Okonedo, but she really sells both the Queen’s enjoyment of trying to take down her own government and her eventual guilt when she realizes what she has allowed to happen. She looks, at first, like she’s going to be fabulous and fun but sort of lacking in depth, but by the end I’m really intrigued by her role in the Starship’s moral dilemma. She makes the Starship a much more interesting space, and some very nice direction allows the camera to find some really beautiful moments in the generally pretty drab world.  I tend to get annoyed with episodes that take a general approach of “It’s the future, and everything’s terrible! And technology, in particular, is terrible! Look at all the terribleness!!” because it’s just a boring way of creating a new place. Unlike some other episodes, though, the episode mixes a simplistically grim-looking future with some whimsical features and some much more compelling and creative darkness, and so the world of the Starship winds up with a varied enough atmosphere that it mostly works.

           The plot itself is solid without being especially original—basically “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” with a whale in it—but it’s a surprisingly hopeful version of this story in several respects. The choice between the agony of the whale and the destruction of the Starship is taken entirely seriously, and the reveal that Liz 10 was behind this all along manages to avoid making her look straightforwardly evil. (Non-misanthropic dystopias are my favorite kind of dystopia.) There are also more options here than there are in “Omelas,” as we see in both the Doctor’s attempted plan and Amy’s actual solution. The absence of the binary decision between tormenting an innocent victim and harming the rest of society means that this isn’t as good as “Omelas” in terms of serving as a thought experiment, but this does allow for a more character-driven story. Smith is not quite as memorable in this episode as he was in the previous one, but he gets both some fun moments of physical comedy and some interesting moments of darkness, particularly in his grief over thinking that he has to murder an innocent creature. He starts to get unnecessarily condescending—he clearly sees that the choice between protecting the whale and protecting the Starship is an impossibly difficult one, so his insistence that he’s taking Amy home after this trip and his infuriated “Nobody human has anything to say to me today!” seem a little bit unjustified. Interestingly, though, he is shown to be wrong almost immediately. He and Liz 10 have sort of the same problem here, in that they both see themselves as the hero, and so the whale is placed into the role of victim, either to be saved or to be abandoned to his continuing misery.

               Enter Amy Pond, whose continuing state of awe renders her far more capable of understanding that in this narrative, the Starwhale is, well, the star. Amy gets a huge amount to do in this episode, from cheerfully picking a lock to leaving herself messages about how to rescue the Doctor from having to make a difficult choice. Her delighted reaction to being listed as 1306 years old is adorable, and the scene in which she floats just outside the TARDIS is a beautiful image—so lovely that I’m not even particularly bothered by the unnecessary voiceover. Her resolution to the whale dilemma partly relies on her observational skills, the importance of which is highlighted by the Doctor as soon as they land. “Use your eyes. Notice everything,” he tells her, and her effort to do this definitely helps her to figure out the whale’s actual motives. Mixed in with her observational abilities is her somewhat idolizing view of the Doctor, which shapes her actions in a number of ways. You don’t want your childhood imaginary friend to become morally compromised, and her immediate response to the information about the Starwhale is to leave herself a message to get the Doctor away from the ship, where he would be forced into doing something that might tarnish his image as the perfect hero. Amy eventually does create a compassionate ending, but she was entirely willing to run away and leave the whale there in order to remove the Doctor from a morally ambiguous context. Amy is a character who is defined by her ability to believe—she puts her faith in the Doctor to an extent that allows them to develop a wonderful sense of trust, but that also can become dangerous because of how fervent that faith is. Her belief in the Doctor shapes her reading of the Starwhale here; she is so committed to her vision of a perfect Doctor that she sees the whale through that lens, and is willing to take a huge, possibly catastrophic leap as a result. As it turns out, she’s right—the whale really is too kind to let down the Starship passengers. If she’d been wrong, though, she would not only have killed herself and the Doctor but also the entire population of the Starship. It’s a great introduction to the mind of Amy Pond—fundamentally good and kind and trusting, but in a way that carries quite a lot of risk with it. What I really like about this is that the Doctor doesn’t just need a human perspective, he needs Amy’s in particular; what she does here is so specific to her personality and mentality that it really does seem unique to her, and I don’t think we’ve ever had quite this much information about a companion’s mindset by her second episode before.

           The problem with this episode is that Moffat doesn’t quite seem to be able to trust the intelligence of his audience. In fairness, there are some pretty subtle things here, including the first reference to silence in relation to emotional pain, but there’s also a tendency to over-repeat important points to a ridiculous extent. We spend too much time watching Amy flash back to the clues that help her put together the real nature of the whale, and then once she’s figured it out, she goes on about kind, lonely creatures who are the last of their species for about five years. The notion of Starwhale=Doctor isn’t a very complicated one, even for a show with lots of children watching, so the decision to keep the dialogue one tiny hop away from “The cast of Schoolhouse Rock shows up and sings a song called Metaphors Are Your Friend Also Do You Get How the Whale Represents the Doctor” is just completely unnecessary, as is the poem that Amy recites at the end.

           Other than the poem and the belaboring of the point, the ending has some lovely moments. The hug really solidifies the connection between Amy and the Doctor, and the final scene on the TARDIS, in which Amy answers a phone call from Winston Churchill, is an absolute joy. On the whole, the episode does a stellar job of conveying the nuances of Amy’s emotional state, and it gives us one of the season’s best guest characters in Liz 10. If the details and logic of this world had been ironed out a bit more, and Moffat had written the ending with anything approaching subtlety, restraint, or basic faith in his audience’s intellect, this could have been a great episode, but even with these errors, it’s still a very enjoyable one. B

Victory of the Daleks: For a while, until disaster strikes and everything collapses into multi-colored nonsense, this episode seems like a return to form for the Daleks. The show’s most famous villains had a mixed run in the Davies era: they’re brilliant and terrifying in Season One, kind of fun but shoehorned into the plot in Season Two, an absolute mess in Season Three, and even in Season Four, when they improve a bit, they get slightly buried under the avalanche of plot and character things happening in the finale. In the first twenty minutes of this episode, the Daleks are sensational: terrifying, visually fascinating, and deeply unsettling in their uncharacteristic subservience. (This isn’t the first time that the Daleks have masqueraded as servants, as this was a thing in “The Power of the Daleks” as well. We only have that in animated form, though, since it was erased, and so it’s nice to have the creepy visual of tea-serving Daleks here.) I love having the Daleks fight Nazis, on whom they were initially based, and the hidden threat contained in their stated ambition of “win[ning] the war” is fantastic, although slightly diminished by having the Doctor explain the double meaning a few minutes later. The reveal that Bracewell is a robot that they constructed in order to explain their presence is terrific, and they have a solid plan for getting the Doctor to inadvertently help them. (I mean, if you’re a Dalek and your plan relies on the Doctor’s tendency to grandstand about his longstanding rivalry with your species, you can feel pretty confident about your chances of success.) Even after they have stopped pretending to be Ironsides, the Daleks do some intensely creepy stuff, like turning all the lights on during an air raid.

           The triumphant portrayal of Daleks in the early scenes of the episode makes it even more disappointing that the climax of their plan involves intimidating the world by…changing color. Moffat has said in interviews that he was too focused on the first block of filming, and didn’t shift his attention soon enough to the second block, which included this episode, and so he didn’t put enough thought into evaluating how these new Daleks looked on camera. This is a plausible enough thing, particularly for someone in his first season as showrunner, but I can’t imagine what even prompted the initial idea to do this to the Daleks in the first place. There was nothing wrong with the existing appearance of the Daleks, and this redesign just makes me think of the song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat where they list all the colors. (“It was red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn etc.” and then in the film version there are eventually multi-colored sheep.) There has been some variety in the Daleks’ appearance across the history of the show, but this is easily the silliest and least frightening that they have ever looked.  

           Other than the Daleks themselves, the episode is uneven in terms of quality. The portrayal of Churchill is pretty one-dimensional and doesn’t acknowledge the many ways in which he was a quite problematic figure, but he’s entertaining and the World War II-era atmosphere is nicely established. This is probably Smith’s weakest outing among the early episodes of this season, perhaps due to some awkward writing of his initial rage against the Daleks. He does, however, try to confuse the Daleks by pretending that a jammy dodger is a self-destruct device, which is awesome. I’m pretty tired, at this point, of “The Doctor must choose between destroying the Daleks and preserving the Earth” as a plot point, though, even as a fairly minor one. Enough with this for a while. Amy continues to be an appealing presence, but she doesn’t get anywhere near the kind of depth that she had in the previous episode. She is pretty heavily involved in the resolution of the plot, but her ability to talk Bracewell through his feelings really just reveals that she is developing a crush on the Doctor—not an aspect of this season that I enjoy. Bracewell is an intriguing character, and the notion that having human memories makes him a real person accords nicely with the focus on memories as soul throughout the Moffat era, but the ending doesn’t make sense. It’s not unreasonable to say that a robot capable of deep emotion might philosophically be considered human, but in this case it would still be a human with considerable physical differences, including a bomb inside. There’s just no reason for the character’s emotional awakening to disrupt the physical process that the Daleks have set in motion, so the last-minute escape from destruction seems unearned. The decision to let him run off and carry on being human makes for a cute scene, though, and the episode concludes with a nicely-done reappearance of the crack from Amy’s wall, as well as the intriguing realization that Amy ought to remember who the Daleks are but clearly doesn’t.

           This episode is often offered as evidence that Mark Gatiss isn’t a good Doctor Who writer, which honestly I think is a bit unjustified. As I said in my review of “Idiot’s Lantern,” I do tend to like Gatiss’s writing of more realistic stories, like Sherlock and An Adventure in Space and Time, much more than I like his work on sci-fi stories. That being said, if the Dalek redesign didn’t look so idiotic, I would think of this as a pretty good episode, slightly let down by an illogical ending. While there are other flaws, there really is quite a lot that I enjoy here, and the one thing that completely capsizes the episode is the appearance of the Daleks, which Gatiss presumably wasn’t responsible for. It’s difficult to grade this episode, because it involves balancing a lot of good moments against some incredibly stupid decisions; on the whole, I think of this as a weak episode, but I don’t think I dislike it as much as some fans do. C+/C

The Time of Angels: This episode probably features more terrifying things than any other episode of the reboot. The Angel’s slow emergence from the television screen is creepy enough, but the gravel pouring out of Amy’s eye is the stuff of absolute nightmares. The Angel’s use of Bob’s voice is also enormously chilling—I would not want to hear an actual Angel’s voice, as that would take away from the mysteriousness of the species, but having it use a human’s voice and even make use of some of his thoughts means that the Angel conveys a lot of malice while retaining its elusive nature. The conversation is nicely structured too, so that we initially think it’s really Bob talking until we hear “I didn’t escape, sir. It killed me too.” The very best moment, though, is the reveal that they have inadvertently surrounded themselves with Angels; the Doctor introduces the two-headed nature of the Applans so casually that it just didn’t register to me, and I audibly gasped when the Angels’ presence became clear. (I am usually a very, very silent TV-watcher, so it takes a lot to get a vocal reaction from me.) It’s a perfect example of how easy it is to endanger oneself by simple misinterpretation—the notion that an Angel would hide amongst statues seemed so plausible that the possibility of another way of looking at the scenario just never occurred to me.

           While this is an extremely plot-twist-heavy episode, it does some interesting work with the characters. I really like the army of clerics, especially the Bishop in charge, who is beautifully played by Iain Glen. There are plenty of reasons to be dubious about a church that has evolved into a military, but what I like about the portrayal of these figures here is that the Doctor basically treats them like he does any other slightly odd civilization by just sort of getting on with the work that he’s trying to do. The idea of an overtly militant church is allowed to be unsettling without the Doctor doing an entire production number about how terrible they are, and the episode goes along with this by making the Bishop a figure of considerable integrity. It’s also a nice touch that we get both a religious army and a mass of angel statues in a season that largely deals with the (over)development of Amy’s faith.

River makes quite an entrance, burning a message into an artifact and then, once she lands on the TARDIS, being much better at actually flying her than the Doctor is and provoking a hilarious TARDIS-landing-noise imitation from him. I do think that her exchange with the men on the spaceship at the beginning gets a bit over-sexualized, both in the dialogue and in the closeup on her stilettos, but once we get past that scene she’s terrific, especially in her interactions with Amy. There’s an easy sense of connection between the two, which makes sense given later revelations, and I like that Amy seems intrigued by River’s relationship with the Doctor without appearing jealous. Amy herself also really impresses me by figuring out how to neutralize the TV Angel by pausing the clip on an Angel-free moment, and her brief spell of believing that her arm has turned to stone is a chilling scene that ends in hilarity as she questions whether the Doctor has “space teeth.”

The end of the episode allows the Doctor to do his usual yelling at monsters about how scared of him they should be, but it also gives some attention to his relationship with Amy. The revelation that Bob’s voice is actually an Angel is a scary plot twist in itself, but what’s even more interesting about this conversation is that it plays very precisely upon Amy’s fears. It’s unsettling to hear Angel Bob use the Doctor’s words about fear against him, saying that his fear did nothing for him and that the Doctor obtained his trust and then let him down. Amy has had more occasion than most companions to think about her level of trust in the Doctor, given his long abandonment of her, and the camera occasionally cuts back to her nervous expression as the Angel continues to taunt the Doctor about his betrayal of that trust. As the episode draws to a close, the Doctor gets everyone to reaffirm their faith in him—to take, in fact, a very literal leap of faith—but while the characters make this leap willingly, there remains a persistent sense of doubt about whether or not their faith is warranted. A/A-

Flesh and Stone: The Dalek episode was difficult to grade, but this one is nearly impossible, as most of it is amazing but the last scene is absolutely dreadful. I’m not sure if any other episode of the show has ever collapsed in on itself in its final moments quite as much as this one does; I mean, I had a huge problem with the end of “Love and Monsters,” but while the last scene is the worst part of that episode, it started to decline in quality about two-thirds of the way through, while this one is generally terrific until its very last minute.

           Until the final scene, there is a great deal to love here. A lot of absolutely terrifying things happen in this two-parter, but Amy’s slow countdown from ten is probably what scares me the most. It doesn’t lose any of its impact on rewatch, even though I know that it’s coming and what it means. The subsequent need to keep her eyes shut also makes for a lot of good drama, although her ability to avoid being sent back in time by the Angels by pretending she can see, even with her eyes closed, requires quite a bit of suspension of disbelief. As far-fetched as it is, though, I can’t watch it without holding my breath, and having to walk through danger without being able to see creates yet another test of her trust in the Doctor. (It reminded me a bit of those trust exercises they made us do in school, where you put on a blindfold and had to wander around the hallway guided by your partner’s voice. I have painful memories of almost falling down the stairs.) In fact, for a while, so many great things are happening that it takes a bit of an effort to properly appreciate them as they whiz by: the clerics use their guns to create short bursts of light so that they can see the Angels with the lights off! There’s a forest on a spaceship! With tree borgs! The Doctor gets Angel Bob to say “comfy chairs!” The clerics keep disappearing and only Amy can remember that they ever existed! The Doctor finds out part of River’s background! The Angels show up in a big scary tableau! The Doctor enters in a slightly altered costume, looking very mysterious while telling Amy to believe in him and to remember what he told her as a child! My favorite, though, is probably the scene in which the Doctor and River try to figure out how to stop Amy’s ominous countdown. The Doctor and Amy don’t know it yet, but River knows that she’s with her husband and her mother, and looking back on it with knowledge from future seasons I just think it’s a beautiful interaction between their family. River and Amy continue to have a lovely connection, and they work so well together that the episode leaves us not only with the usual questions about who River is to the Doctor but also with new questions about who she is to Amy.

           As in the last episode, there are a lot of terrifying moments with the Angels, but there are also slightly too many new developments. The worst of these is the moment in which we watch them actually turn their heads, which is the one total miscalculation that Moffat makes with the Angels in this two-parter. Part of the creepy charm of these characters is that we see where they were and then how far they’ve progressed in the blink of an eye, and I like that “Blink” left open the possibility that they essentially became something utterly different when no one was looking. Having the Angels just kill people instead of sending them back in time also isn’t as interesting, but it does lead to Bishop Octavian getting one of my very favorite death scenes of a single-story character in the whole reboot. Smith does some really beautiful work in this last exchange with Octavian, and their final words—“I wish I had known you better” and “I think, sir, you know me at my best” make for a really moving end to the character. He returns to his faith at the end, as well, saying that he thanks God for his own courage and for the Doctor’s safety, and for all that I think a militant church is all kinds of bad ideas, I really like how sincerely devoted Octavian is to his work and beliefs.

           The time crack could have benefited from just a little bit more explanation—it’s not entirely clear to me exactly what it means to never have existed, and whether this involves people’s memories being erased or the actual erasure of all of the effects that they had. (It seems to mostly be the former, but it could definitely be a lot clearer.) The clerics disappearing into it one by one is genuinely frightening, though, and it’s good continuity that the Doctor realizes that throwing a major time event (like himself) into the time energy would seal things up, as this becomes important later on. The resolution to the Angel plot also stretches plausibility a bit—it’s not the first time that the show has suggested that holding on really tight can completely offset exceedingly strong gravitational forces, and my science knowledge is limited but it always seems questionable to me. Still, I appreciate that the previous episode established the gravity turning off as a real possibility, which makes the moment more believable than it would otherwise be.

           And then there’s that last scene. Introducing a sort of love triangle between the Doctor, Amy, and Rory is a stupid enough idea to begin with, but the details of the scene make it even worse than necessary. I get that trauma can make people lose their judgment a bit, but Amy’s efforts to seduce the Doctor don’t read like someone who is shaken up and making questionable decisions, they just come across as a male fantasy of an attractive woman suddenly becoming desperate for sex. She’s so aggressive in trying to get with the Doctor—even persisting in her attempts to kiss him after he has resisted—that the whole thing is just exploitative and objectifying to a ridiculous extent. Sexual attraction between a Doctor and companion generally isn’t my favorite thing in the first place, but creating a love triangle between Amy, the Doctor, and Rory is even worse, especially with the added drama of Amy trying to seduce the Doctor on the night before her wedding. Her connection to the Doctor has so far been fascinating and unique, and this just rewrites it as something much, much less interesting. It makes this episode difficult to evaluate, because in spite of a couple of unnecessary new details about the Angels, there is so much loveliness before this scene, but this ridiculous ending is enough to bring my opinion of the episode way down. B-