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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 6, p. 3

Night Terrors: This is an unusual episode, particularly for this season, in that it’s really quite unambitious. It’s pretty unambiguously an episode of a children’s show, more so than most other episodes of the reboot or even much of the classic series. It’s a straightforward, simple little story about a frightened little boy and the monsters in his closet, and overall it’s pretty charming. The concept of how we deal with fear has definitely been done in much more sophisticated ways elsewhere on the show; “Midnight” was a terrifying look at how fear can make us turn on one another, while the later episode “Listen” is a powerful exploration of the ways in which fear moves and inspires us. This story is a much narrower tale of one child’s experience of feeling worried and vulnerable, but it’s a perfectly fine version of that story.

           While this episode is relatively unimpressive when compared with stories like “Midnight” and “Listen,” its focus on childhood fears could also invoke comparisons to Season Two’s disastrous “Fear Her,” possibly the only episode of the reboot to be more clearly directed at a child audience than this one is. The show seems to have benefited from the criticism of the former episode, as it avoids most of its mistakes (and retains its one strong point by including a cute animal—the landlord’s droopy bulldog is not tied to quantum humor like Possibly Schrodinger’s Cat, but compensates by looking very huggable.) While the ending remains extremely sentimental, the sentiment is grounded in the primary plot about George and his father rather than centering on nonsense about the Olympic torch. Unlike the offensively demonic portrayal of Chloe, George comes across as frightened but actively trying to keep the monsters at bay through various rituals, like having his mother flick the lights on and off and putting frightening things in the closet. This episode also portrays George’s dad much more sensitively than its predecessor managed with Chloe’s mom, and Daniel Mays’s endearing performance in the role goes a long way toward making this story palatable. It would have been nice to see a little bit more of George’s mother, though, not least because female characters other than Amy don’t get much to do in this episode.

           The episode’s visuals vary in quality, with the setting generally faring better than the monsters. The apartment complex has an oddly comforting presence, particularly after the more outlandish settings in recent episodes; to me, it’s the most familiar-looking depiction of contemporary Earth since Davies left the show. The enlarged dollhouse is also enjoyable, and I like the Ponds’ exploration of the odd space, complete with wooden pans painted to look like copper, seemingly anachronistic lighting, and eyeballs in drawers. The dolls themselves are pretty disappointing, though—their appearance is creepy enough, but this portion of the story is just too sleepy and slow-moving to capture my attention. (That said, it does give the Ponds some entertaining dialogue, and I’m amused that Rory is starting to get annoyed at how many times he has “died.”) George’s toys, and the shadows that they cast on his bedroom walls, are more successfully scary; they’re not among the show’s most memorable frights, but I can remember feeling precisely the same kinds of terrors when I was little, so I can empathize with George here.

           As Amy and Rory are mostly tied to the dollhouse plot, it’s not a great episode for them. On the one hand, this episode fits really nicely into their overall arc this season. It’s yet another iteration of the “parents save the world by loving their children and refusing to be separated from them” narrative that happens a lot in Season Six, and my heart goes out to Amy and Rory every time this works for everybody except them. On the other hand, the episode was controversial for not having them directly comment on how close to home this situation is for them. This has been explained in part by the fact that the episode was initially slated for the first half of the season, when it would have preceded their loss of Melody, and then later moved to the second half. This actually winds up working out well for Amy, I think; the second half of this season is very focused on how much she is bottling up her feelings, and the next two episodes are going to go into the psychological impact of that to such a degree that I think it would be a mistake to have her abandon that mentality and actually talk about or even visibly react to her own loss here. While the season as a whole provides lots of reasons for Amy’s occasional underreactions, it never quite manages to do the same for Rory, and so while it’s totally believable to me that Amy would be pushing herself to keep a stiff upper lip, it would have made sense to get more of a reaction from him.

A lot people hate this episode, but while I think you could skip it without missing anything integral to the season, I honestly find most of it extremely pleasant. There are so many large-scale episodes this season that it’s sort of nice to have a more low-key one here, and there’s enough angst both before and, especially, after this episode that a sweet story about the monsters in a child’s closet is a welcome change of pace. B-

The Girl Who Waited: I almost never cry in reaction to TV. There are a few rare occasions in which I’ve gotten slightly teary, but for the most part, my default emotional reaction is to get very tense and forget to breathe. (Temporarily, of course.) The first time I watched the end of this episode, I started sobbing. When I rewatched it a couple of months later, I had exactly the same reaction. I have never had a reaction quite this dramatic to any other television episode, and it took me some time to figure out quite what was producing this response, in large part because this episode is more complicated than it looks. On the surface, this looks like an episode about Amy’s love for Rory, which is sweet but is already very well established and so isn’t great subject matter for a story. In truth, though, Amy’s relationship with Rory is the least important one in this storyline, serving as the constant in an exploration of Amy’s much more volatile relationships with the Doctor and with her own mental state. (The title, which references Amy’s history with the Doctor, is a pretty good clue that this episode isn’t really going to be about Rory.) This episode is dark in a way that this show can only manage every once in a long while, but as bleak as it can be, there is something beautiful about how much it tells us about Amy.

           This is the first intentional trip that the three have taken since the events of “Let’s Kill Hitler,” as “Night Terrors” involved a detour in response to George’s message, and they are pretty clearly on a mission to comfort Amy. Appalappachia (what a great name!) is supposedly one of the nicest planets out there, which would have been a nice respite after the draining events they’ve been through if it hadn’t turned out to be under quarantine for the one-day plague. Instead of a nice vacation, Amy gets a fairly sterilized medical facility, where she is constantly being offered “kindness” that would kill her and where she is mostly cut off from communication with Rory and the Doctor. Her aloneness, her inability to talk to even those closest to her, and the total uselessness of attempts at kindness, are not the subtlest pieces of subtext the show has ever done, but the episode generally does a good job of using the sci-fi plot to showcase Amy’s pain and sense of isolation without sledgehammering “This is a symbol of Amy’s grief over losing her child!!!”

           The plot, in which Amy hits the wrong button when entering Appalappachia and winds up in a different time stream from the one that Rory and the Doctor are in, is simple enough, allowing the episode to focus on the emotions of the characters. Even the Appalappachian facility is pretty straightforward, although the grounds look beautiful and the harsh white light is distinctive; there aren’t a lot of nuances to this planet, and the robots play a minimal role, so the world informs the experiences of the characters without really distracting attention from them. It’s a dark episode for the Doctor, who has to lie to Older Amy in order to bring about Young Amy’s rescue. It’s chilling when he slams the door on Older Amy’s face at the end, but the episode manages to work with this dark side of the Doctor without engaging in outright character assassination. He’s in a terrible position, knowing that his best friend will have to endure 38 years—most of her adult life—of complete solitude if he brings Older Amy on the TARDIS with him. I don’t really know what I think the right choice is here, and that lets us look at the Doctor’s tendencies toward manipulation without making him look like a monster. Rory is also in a harrowing position, especially since he sort of has to grieve for the loss of the wife he knew while interacting with the person she has become. I’m glad that Older Amy makes the decision for him at the end, because it really should be her call, but watching him wrestle with which version of Amy to take with him is horribly sad, and completely justifies his furious claim to the Doctor that “You’re turning me into you.”

           As interesting as the Doctor and Rory are here, though, it’s the Amy Pond show, and Gillan is absolutely magnificent as the version of herself who has been alone for nearly four decades. We can see remnants of Amy’s personality in her sense of humor, but she’s thoroughly changed by her time on her own. For one thing, she’s gotten extremely good at surviving—without any help from the Doctor or Rory, she has managed to fend off the robots and make a life for herself. The nature of that life is difficult to imagine; not only does she have to deal with complete solitude, she has to contend with not knowing whether she’ll ever be rescued. Every day could be the day that the Doctor and Rory finally reach her, and having that hope frustrated over and over again for 38 years is probably the most difficult part of this scenario. It also means that this Amy has had time to process what the Doctor has meant to her life and how his behavior has affected her, and after 38 years, all that’s left is anger. It’s not the first time that he’s accidentally shown up at the wrong moment—their very first encounter featured him turning up twelve years later than promised. Amy’s abandonment takes the concept of “Aw, tiny Amelia waited for her Doctor all night with a little suitcase” and transforms it into something deeply horrifying—all the more so because we know that the Doctor’s sometimes irresponsible behavior has caused Amy irreparable harm already this season. She insists that the device she’s made is a sonic probe, not a screwdriver, because she’s “not on a romp.” The implication that the Doctor is just out playing and being whimsical while other people suffer the consequences makes sense from someone who has endured nearly four decades of solitude because of him, and she’s not kidding when she declares that she hates the Doctor.

           She still loves Rory, though, and the scene in which young Amy uses that love to convince her older self to help her escape is extremely moving. Her words about Rory becoming beautiful as she got to know him are appropriate to the relationship that she has with Rory, which was pretty clearly not love at first sight, but rather a gradual growth toward an understanding of Rory’s importance to her. The scene allows her a beautiful articulation of exactly what Rory means to her, and it’s the kind of connection that seems plausible as something that would still be resonant 38 years later. The following scene, in which she sort of awkwardly does the Macarena to remind herself of her first kiss with Rory, is the one part of this episode that falls a bit flat for me, but its setup, in which she declares “I’m going to pull time apart for you,” is a perfectly-rendered moment: Gillan’s performance and the soundtrack combine to create an absolutely stunning sense of her determination and resolve.

It’s leading up to something impossible, though; there can’t be two Amys, and in convincing Older Amy to save her younger self, Young Amy is unwittingly causing the older version to unwrite herself. “Time can be rewritten” is Amy’s favorite phrase, only here she’s what’s being rewritten, which is even sadder when considered in light of recent events in Amy’s life. There are two Amys now, one who is still clinging to faith and hope, the other who has acknowledged the destructive impact that the Doctor had on her and who is fully willing to express her anger and sense of betrayal. She’s the embodiment of all of the feelings that Young Amy isn’t expressing, but in the end, she erases herself from existence because Rory and Amy will be happier together without her. Until the final seconds, this is portrayed as noble, generous and heroic. “Tell Amy, I’m giving her my days,” she says to Rory, as she speaks to him from outside the TARDIS, only her outstretched hand visible from his point of view. She goes out bravely, willingly turning away from the TARDIS and facing the robots armed with kindness. Her last seconds, as she asks the Interface to show her Earth, are astonishingly effective, and the script invests so fully in Older Amy’s perspective that it takes a while to grasp the fundamental wrongness of the situation. It’s not until the very end of the episode, when Young Amy awakes and asks where her older self is, followed by an ominous chord and a shot of the Doctor looking conflicted, that we get an overpowering sense of “Something very not good is going to come of this.”

One of the hardest things about psychological crisis is that acts of self-erasure feel so temptingly right. At my lowest point, I had a brief breakdown just once, when I came home from a party after having a little bit too much to drink and stood in front of my bathroom mirror and screamed at my reflection while gasping for breath. Other than that, in the eight months or so when I was experiencing my usual mental health issues to a much more serious extent than is usually the case, I didn’t cry, I didn’t raise my voice, and I didn’t let anyone know how much pain I was in. This wasn’t so much fear of anyone’s reaction as it was a persistent sense that there was something else to do; I constantly felt like I ought to do something about my mental state, but I really needed to finish a conference paper, and a couple of my students needed a lot of help or they were going to fail the next assignment, and even though I believed very strongly in the need to acknowledge and work carefully through mental health problems, this belief always came with an attached “…but not yet.” We tend to think about a crisis as a time of emotional intensity, but mine mostly involved waiting—I knew that a lot of difficult feelings were there, and I had every intention of dealing with them…later, when there was more time. It felt powerful, sometimes, when I managed to accomplish things in spite of the fact that I was spending significant portions of most days practically unable to move. Look at me, I thought to myself, heroically finishing a dissertation chapter and grading lots of student work and going to multiple social events in one week in spite of feeling like this. These are fairly small victories, but they felt enormous to me because of the state that I was in, and the pride that I felt from getting my work done and keeping my composure every day was enough of a rush that I couldn’t shake that sense that I needed to keep holding off on acknowledging how much of a crisis I was in. I need to deal with how I’m feeling, I’d think, but I really needed to get a lot done today, and I did it without falling apart, and I stuck with that mentality, week after week, month after month, until finally I had a flash of recognition that if I had let myself step a little bit closer to falling apart that might have been better for me. Over time, though, things get buried, and if you repress your feelings for long enough, it can be difficult to get them back when you figure out that you need to express them. By the time I got to the point of wanting to acknowledge what I’d gone through, I felt detached from some of those feelings, as if there had been another woman who had felt anger and grief and betrayal and fear, but I’d stopped her from surfacing by replacing her with the smiling, professional, emotionally stable person that I’d performed for so long. Trying to get back some of those feelings was difficult, because they had grown confused from lack of use, and while I knew that that other me had existed and had been real, I was mostly left wondering, like Amy, “Where is she?”

I hadn’t quite put some of this into words, until I watched this episode and was so emotionally overpowered by it that I started thinking about why it made me feel so strongly. It took me a couple of times to quite get what was going on in this episode, and even longer to connect it fully to myself, but I can’t think of another episode of television that has looked so much like how that psychological low point felt. As much as this episode made me think about myself a lot, it leaves us with a frightening sense of what is yet to come for Amy. She has been through a lot this season, and she’s struggled to put her feelings into words. She’s finally met the embodiment of her anger, grief, and loneliness, but that body has literally vanished, made to have never existed, and for someone in a crisis, it’s hard to think of a more concerning image. This is an intriguing story, and the use of off-kilter time streams is fascinating in itself, but what’s truly memorable about this one is how much it lets us into how lonely it is to be the girl who waited. A+

The God Complex: This episode isn’t quite as brilliant or as emotionally captivating as the previous one, but while the previous episode remained quite serious and fairly heavy throughout, this one is frequently silly and whimsical, and so the fact that it gets pretty close to the emotional heights of its predecessor is even more impressive. “The Girl Who Waited” is one of several episodes that is memorable as a departure from the show’s usual tone—“Midnight” and “Heaven Sent” are similar in this respect. This episode is exactly what regular Doctor Who should be like: fun, enjoyable, and creative, with a great deal to laugh at but a surprising amount of insight at the same time.

           The fake eighties hotel is an absolutely brilliant setting: it looks so convincingly mundane and ordinary that it throws all of the insanity unfolding within it into sharper relief. Having a separate room for each fear is a solid device, and the shifting corridors mean that this Minotaur-centric episode has managed to turn the hotel into a sort of labyrinth, which is a lovely touch that completely escaped me the first time I watched the episode. The Minotaur itself is fabulous; I generally enjoy the big, clompy monsters, but even apart from that the makeup department did a great job with it. (In spite of the repeated exclamations of “Praise him!” the Doctor generally refers to the Minotaur as “it,” so I’m going to take that as the correct pronoun.) It’s definitely an intimidating presence, and is made even more so by how long it takes us to get a proper look at it, but its appearance also manages to evoke sympathy, in part because when we get closeups of its face it looks surprisingly like ET. Its final scene, in which it gratefully dies after the Doctor cuts off his food source, is a lot more moving than you would expect the death of a character who has just wandered around growling to be, and the Doctor’s translation of his last words show him to have a hugely effective sense of empathy. (He also gets the Doctor to make a brief reference to Classic Who’s utterly ridiculous but generally entertaining “The Horns of Nimon,” which is a nice callback.) What the Minotaur does to its victims—invoking their worst fears in order to prey upon their most deeply-held beliefs—is among the most horrifying things we’ve seen this season, but it emerges from the episode looking more like a victim of the system that links Gods and worshippers than an intentionally evil figure.

           The “minotaur in a labyrinth” narrative isn’t the only traditional story at work here, as this is also an iteration of the time-honored “fears coming to life” episode. This has appeared in plenty of sci-fi and fantasy shows (“Nightmares” and “Fear Itself” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are both good examples.) There are some terrific individual fears here: “that brutal gorilla” is awesome, and the wall of fears is both terrifying and darkly funny; I wouldn’t want my last memorial to be my photo on a wall with “Other people’s socks” captioned beneath it. The story is so interesting, and the Minotaur is such a great monster, that the episode could have gotten away with uninteresting minor characters, but in this regard it remains mostly sublime. Even the initial exchange between the Doctor/Ponds and our new characters for this episode is an absolute delight: Amy mocks Rory for responding to their new acquaintances by yelling “It’s okay, we’re nice!” while the Doctor realizes that this is, in fact, not the first time that someone has threatened him with a chair leg. Howie looks for a while like a sort of mean-spirited depiction of a nerd, but there’s a nice moment after his death in which Rory notes with admiration that he had just gotten over a stammer through speech therapy, and I really appreciate the inclusion of this positive information about a character who might have otherwise come across as a one-note joke. Gibbis is our first glimpse of the Tivolian species, and the bits of information that we get about this constantly-surrendering planet are hilarious. Between their anthem (“Glory to Insert Name Here”), Gibbis’s school motto (“Resistance is Exhausting”), and his job (planting trees so that invading armies can march in the shade), Tivoli sounds amazing; it might be too nonsensical to support an actual storyline, but hearing occasional facts about it works extremely well. As funny as the character is, David Walliams also does a great job of conveying the aggressive, controlling aspects of the character’s cowardice.

If I could pick one single-story character in the entirety of the reboot to serve as a major companion, I would probably pick Rita, the Muslim doctor (or medical student? I don’t think this is clarified) who believes the hotel is Jahannam. Amara Karan’s performance is splendid, allowing Rita to join characters like Rose and Bill in feeling like a believable, well-rounded character even before anything much happens with her. She’s extraordinarily likeable: clearly concerned about what is happening, but composed enough to formulate and find comfort in a theory and even, awesomely, to find out where the hotel keeps its tea. While a parent’s disappointment about a low grade is awfully clichéd as an Asian woman’s worst nightmare, she otherwise gets some really interesting material, and I would include her death scene in that category. It can get irritating when the show brings on a great new female character, only to kill her off immediately, and I do wish that we could have gotten at least a few episodes for this character, especially since the episode ends with the Ponds getting a vacation from the Doctor. Unlike Lorna Bucket a few episodes ago, though, Rita’s death scene really feels like an occurrence that has significance beyond the Doctor’s resulting sense of guilt. The Minotaur’s actions take away most of her ability to think for herself, but she insists on preserving what little autonomy she can retain, asking the Doctor to turn the screen off and let her be robbed of her faith in private. It’s such a beautifully-written moment that I react to it in the way that I reacted to the Hostess’s death in “Midnight” and Bishop Octavian’s death in “Flesh and Stone,” in that I’m just so fascinated by the depiction of the dying character’s final moments that it doesn’t occur to me to think about the death in terms of how it might move forward the narrative or other character arcs. Not having Rita as a long-term companion is the biggest missed opportunity of this season, but even in death she’s compelling and memorable.  

This is also the one episode this season in which I’m completely satisfied with the depiction of Rory. There’s been a lot of vagueness regarding his reaction to the events surrounding Melody Pond, but in this story, we can see just how troubled he is. The Minotaur has so little interest in him that he’s constantly seeing ways out of the hotel, and once we find out what the Minotaur is actually interested in, this means that Rory just doesn’t have any faith. Not in the Doctor, not in his relationship with Amy—just no faith at all. As the hotel seems to take the concept of faith extremely broadly, well beyond religion, it’s a sad indication of his current mindset that the Minotaur can’t find any belief to latch onto. He also, in his conversation with the Doctor, speaks of his travels with the Doctor in the past tense, suggesting that he is basically done with the kind of life he and Amy have had on the TARDIS. I still think that this season could do more to explain Rory’s feelings, but this episode gives us far more depth for him than any other.

For a while, Amy seems like a minor presence in this episode. The version of herself who feels actual rage and disillusionment toward the Doctor having been erased from existence in Appalappachia, she is now the embodiment of firmly-committed belief in the Doctor. The previous episode’s events were a severe test, but she has gotten through it, clinging to her belief in the Doctor by the skin of her teeth. She’s fully prepared to trust him here, which is why she’s in so much danger. She’s fought for the faith that so endangers her here, maintaining her hope in him even when he abandoned her as a child, believing “for twenty minutes” when he asked her to in “The Eleventh Hour,” trusting in him enough to walk past the Angels with eyes closed in “Flesh and Stone,” keeping hold of that faith even when he was gone from the universe in “The Big Bang,” insisting, in the midst of grief and loss besetting her throughout Season Six, that “time can be rewritten.” She’s gotten through all of that without losing her grip on her faith, but in order to survive the Minotaur, she’s got to destroy it. She even has to destroy this belief voluntarily—it’s not taken forcibly from her, so she has to deliberately choose to set aside her trust in him. After so many years of insisting on that belief, she essentially has to relearn how to see the world, and she has to do so in a moment characterized by precisely the kind of fear that would generally call forth her reliance on the Doctor. Gillan’s face here is just perfection, showing not so much grief as confusion, as if she is wondering, “how do I learn to think like this?” The knowledge that her worst fear is her disappointed but still hopeful younger self makes this even sadder. (I wasn’t sure, when I first watched this scene, whether the room was Amy’s or the Doctor’s, but on rewatch, it’s clear that it’s hers, because the door that falls on Rory has a 7 on it, which is established earlier in the episode as Amy’s room.) My heart just breaks for Amy, but I’m impressed that she has the strength to go through with what she does here, even if she does have the Doctor walking her through it. It’s not easy to let go of the beliefs that sustain you, especially when you’ve been having a rough time, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be for her to have to shift a fundamental sense of how she perceives the world within seconds.

This makes the ending something of a relief. I have varying opinions on the moments in which the Doctor sends companions away for their own good; I’m perfectly fine with it in “The Parting of the Ways,” for instance, but much less so in “Journey’s End.” This is one of the times in which it seems justified—after what the Ponds have been through this season, and especially after what we’ve seen of Amy’s mental state, they really do need some time away from the Doctor. I love that he gives them a house with a little blue door, and that he remembered exactly what Rory’s ideal car looked like. (In general, I’m just really happy that the Doctor got something specifically for Rory here, because sometimes he treats Amy like she’s his companion and Rory is just along for the ride, so I’m glad that he put some thought into his temporary departure from both of the Ponds.) He makes it clear that he’s not saying goodbye for good, but this is a huge transitional point for them; after this, they start to gravitate back toward their normal lives, and act as much more temporary companions. Everything is different after this episode, and it’s not because anyone died, or had their memory wiped, or jumped into a timeline, or got trapped somewhere, it’s just because the Doctor and Amy thought about what they meant to each other, and realized what needed to change. A+/A

Closing Time: This sequel of sorts to “The Lodger” captures some of the fun of that earlier episode, but overall doesn’t live up to it. James Corden continues to be delightful as Craig, and young Stormageddon is enjoyable, but the episode doesn’t quite manage the exuberance that made “The Lodger” such a success. I do like seeing the Doctor hanging out in Craig’s house again, and the shop generally works well as a setting, particularly because it gives us an opportunity to watch the Doctor play with toys. (I agree with him that Yappy the Robot Dog is nowhere near as good as K-9.) While there are plenty of fun moments here, much of the humor seems much cheaper than it was in Craig’s first episode. While “The Lodger” grounded most of its comedy in the absurdity of the Doctor functioning in an ordinary human space, this episode takes as the premise for many of its jokes the notion that the Doctor and Craig are acting sort of like a couple. There are multiple scenes that play the possibility of a Doctor/Craig relationship for comedic effect, most notably Val assuming that the Doctor and Craig are involved and the Doctor declaring his love for Craig in an effort to distract him from the spaceship. Gareth Roberts, who wrote the episode, is gay himself, but even coming from a gay writer this kind of humor seems mean-spirited to me. There’s also a brief bit of “comedy” about the Doctor walking into a changing room while a woman is changing, as well as a scene about Craig freaking out a female employee working in the lingerie section. There are plenty of moments of humor that do work, but it’s aggravating that we have to wade through these ill-advised jokes in between.

           As a Cyberman story, this is a pretty mixed bag. I really like Cybermats, so having them running about is nice, and there are moments in which the Cybermen are used to very good effect: the solitary one that greets Shona from a changing room in the beginning is especially creepy. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough of an effort here to figure out how to resolve the Cyber threat, so we get a silly resolution that fits nicely into the seasonal arc but doesn’t work very well on its own. Throughout the Moffat era, the Cybermen are used to challenge ideas about what constitutes humanity and how emotion fits into that picture. It’s an endeavor that functions much more interestingly in later seasons, when Moffat begins to shift into an understanding of the fundamentally human qualities that are not immediately reliant on emotion. For now, though, we’re stuck with Craig’s love for his child overcoming the cyberprogramming, and it comes across as an arbitrary and underwhelming way of fending off the threat. (Also, the Doctor specifically calls attention to the idea that love was the solution—if you’ve got a somewhat lazy ending to your story, it’s probably best to avoid having the Doctor directly mention it.) We conclude with a couple of scenes that lead into the finale: first, there are some voiceovers from people who saw the Doctor in his final moments before going to Lake Silencio, and then we move to River being sent on her mission to kill the Doctor. The latter is at least a decent way of building anticipation, but the first is deeply annoying and utterly unnecessary.

           I do find this episode more interesting in terms of its contribution to the more personal dimensions of the seasonal arc. Amy and Rory are very close to not being in this episode, but it’s still highly concerned with their feelings. The most obvious approach that this episode takes to the Ponds is the final installment of the “everyone saves the world through a refusal to be separated from their children, except for Amy and Rory” subplot. Craig’s love for his son is so powerful that it can offset Cyber technology; meanwhile, Amy and Rory have a brief, basically meaningless exchange with a little girl looking for an autograph. Every time this season juxtaposes triumphs of parental love with their own loss of Melody, it’s very effective, and this is the moment at which the contrast is at its strongest. The subtler approach to the Ponds’ emotional state comes in the form of a tiny echo of language from earlier in the season. Amy is now a model, appearing in posters for “Petrichor,” a perfume. We were first introduced to this term in “The Doctor’s Wife,” when the TARDIS defined it as “the smell of dust after rain.” I guess this isn’t completely implausible as a perfume scent, as there is a quite nice aroma to dust in this state, but it’s just unusual enough that it draws attention to the words. If you google “Dust after rain,” one of the first things that comes up is “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” a book that appears to be focused on our difficulties with properly expressing and experiencing grief. I don’t think that the show is referencing this particular book, but I mention it because it confirms for me that there’s a basis for my association between these images and the notion of grief that has been somehow blocked. Rain is naturally suggestive of tears, but the idea of dust in the wake of rain conjures up the image of the dull, messy feelings that ensue when the first shock of grief is over. We see basically nothing of the Ponds’ feelings here, but we persist in the sense, set up in the previous two episodes, that something is very badly wrong.

           These implications about the Ponds’ emotional state give the episode a little bit of the emotional weight it would otherwise lack, and Corden and Smith work together so well that the episode is more successful than the script really merits. The cheap humor and the weak ending to the Cyberman plot are enough, though, to make this a fairly weak episode. C+

The Wedding of River Song: “Sometimes you don’t look hard enough,” the Doctor tells Amy, in a season finale that necessitates extremely careful observation. This episode definitely has its flaws, but in between them, it’s absolutely magical. Like much of this season, it is not really an episode for casual enjoyment, as appreciating its nuances requires a lot of commitment and effort, and I can understand the mentality that this episode is just too much work. In spite of the ambition, though, it’s absolutely delightful, full of tiny pieces of brilliance that mostly counterbalance the moments in which it goes slightly off the rails.  

           The story is aided by a terrific setting, replete with “don’t feed the pterodactyls” signs, Charles Dickens on the news, and Emperor Winston Churchill returning home on his own personal mammoth. (I really, really want there to be a mammoth on this show. I’m sad that we didn’t get to see Churchill’s mammoth here, but even just the mention really made me laugh—there’s something about the solemnity with which the newscaster delivers the line that makes it hysterically funny.) It’s chaos, but it’s wonderfully satisfying chaos, the kind that works because it’s silly but also very carefully planned. I wish we had five episodes in which to play around in this universe, but I guess that giving us a glimpse of it without dwelling too long lets us enjoy how thrilling it is without getting tired of it. Even the bits that we see of the regular universe are wonderfully done: there are CHESS GLADIATORS and Dorium’s severed head enjoying the free wi-fi in a crypt, and a bad guy being devoured by skulls, and everything is just so thrilling and imaginative and I love it.

           There are also some pretty glaring issues here, the first of which is that the timeline of events in the main, ordinary universe just completely confuses me. I can just about buy that Amy would be able to access some of her memories from the real world in the time-collapsed universe, although even that requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. What I can’t really follow is what her experience is of the real timeline. At what point does she remember what happened in the alternate timeline? When does she become aware that the Doctor has died? I can understand the sequence of events within each universe, but the interaction between them just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

The other main problem is the depiction of River’s avoidance of the main timeline. In spite of being in the title, it’s not really a great episode for River, in part because her declaration of how much she will suffer if she has to kill the Doctor is just so overwrought. Kingston is usually fantastic, but she can’t quite make the heavy-handed scene work, and so her wedding doesn’t have quite the lead-in that I want it to. I do rather like the actual wedding ceremony, which is pleasingly simple and sweet, but I would have liked this entire development better if River’s emotions had been worded more clearly, or in ways that didn’t make her look massively selfish. (I mean, she thinks having to kill the Doctor is worse than the deaths of billions of people? Really?)

The gaping plot holes with regard to the relationship between universes and the poor writing for River definitely weaken the episode, but there are a lot of compensations. The Doctor is very charming in both universes, in spite of being stuck with possibly the worst haircut ever seen on this show while he’s in the alternate world. I like his early-episode exuberance, followed by the sobering news about the Brigadier’s death—if this had been the last we’d heard of the Brigadier, I’d be a little sad that he didn’t get more of a moment, but the end of Season Eight takes care of that, and the Doctor’s grief is nicely played here. He is also sort of adorably invested in the Ponds’ relationship, even if he thinks that dating basically just involves “texting and scones.” I really appreciate that the season ends with his decision to play dead for a while, on the grounds that he has gotten “too big.” We haven’t spent a lot of time exploring his actual reaction to the accusations that River made at the end of “A Good Man Goes to War,” but his actions here suggest that he’s actually thought about some of his flaws and is trying to correct them, so that’s nice. Moffat’s insistence on incorporating the show’s title into the plot might be wading a little bit too far in a meta direction, but I honestly really do enjoy it, and so I like the decision to end the episode with Dorium repeating “Doctor Who?”

While there’s a lot of spectacle at work here, the heart of the episode is still Amy’s attempt to recover from the events that have happened to her this season. “The God Complex” was a pivotal moment in her arc, but giving up on the intensity that had characterized her faith in the Doctor to that point isn’t an endpoint but rather the creation of a new set of problems. As I said before, the nature of her memories of the real world is a bit confusing, but she does seem to have at least some access to the memories that occurred this season, which means that she’s reacting to the loss of Melody and to the choice that she made to cut off her faith in the Doctor. This has had a number of effects—for one, now that she isn’t relying so heavily on the Doctor to fix things, she’s doing more herself. Her efforts to join River in summoning all of the Doctor’s friends to come to his aid don’t have much of a narrative payoff—there isn’t much they can do about this scenario, so they’re mostly irrelevant. It’s a nice reversal, though, of the previous season’s finale, in which all of his enemies joined forces to defeat him, and I like that Amy and River have been working together on such a large-scale project. This universe also exists in such an extreme state—everything is happening at once! Time is falling apart!—that it creates a sort of perpetually high-stakes environment, and that seems to draw more reaction from her than anything else has this season. Not long ago, she was engaged in pretty destructive self-erasure, and some of her behavior here seems like an endeavor to un-erase her life. She literally has to draw things, to commit them to paper in order to prevent them from escaping her, and the attempt to create physical memories of things that threaten to vanish from her mind is an interesting psychological step for her.

She also directly articulates her feelings about the loss of her baby, in an incredibly dark scene that ends with her leaving Madame Kovarian to die. This is preceded by a moment in which she shoots down a lot of the Silence with a machine gun in order to protect Rory, immediately before finally articulating her anger about the loss of her baby. Having Amy destroy the Silence immediately before breaking her own silence about her feelings is not going to win Moffat any Subtlety of the Year awards, but I like it. If this were the end of a conventional action movie, killing Madame Kovarian would be the natural endpoint—she’s a force of considerable destruction, whose actions have not only hurt Amy and those close to her but have also sometimes threatened all of existence. Amy hasn’t exactly gone evil here, but she has rejected the kind of ethics that the Doctor usually employs. Her words to Madame Kovarian are partly a statement of vengeance toward the woman who stole her baby, but they seem just as motivated by her thoughts about the Doctor. The Doctor told young Amelia that he would be five minutes and then didn’t return for twelve years, he told her that he’d pick her up in Appalappachia and then he showed up 38 years late, he has at multiple points wandered off without telling her when he would return, and her whole relationship with the Doctor has featured the persistent uncertainty about whether or not he would be there when he said he would. When she tells Madame Kovarian, “You know what else the Doctor is? Not here,” it’s partly an expression of her willingness to break the Doctor’s rules in his absence, but in part an expression of anger at the abandonment she has suffered over and over again on this show. I do think that this scene lurks fairly close to linking trauma with violence, but it generally avoids suggesting anything too damaging. Earlier in the season, I mentioned that the Doctor had sort of gone off of the usual Doctor Who ethos and into more of a Star Wars approach, and Amy is essentially embracing here the notion of “striking down the villain is the natural goal of an adventure.” It’s a mentality that the Doctor usually rejects (although not without exception), but she’s turned into Luke Skywalker, not Darth Vader, and that removes most of the harm that this might otherwise do.

Her position of rejection toward the Doctor’s approach to violence is not the end of the story, though, because we eventually return to the usual world, unburdened by the collapse of time. Amy is sad, but when River turns up she’s more willing to communicate than she has been for much of the season. She starts to tell River everything, from her grief about the Doctor to her guilt about Madame Kovarian. (I really appreciate that the script makes time for her to directly acknowledge that this is still real to her; River tries to give her a pass by saying that this happened in another universe that has now gone out of existence, but Amy rightfully dismisses this with the brief statement that “I remember it, so it happened, so I did it.”) I’m happy whenever there’s interaction between Amy and River, but it’s especially nice to watch Amy so determined to face reality and express her feelings. This kind of emotional awareness and directness has been eluding her the whole season, and so this conversation feels like a huge triumph for her, even though it is an expression of some very troubled feelings.

It’s not a gloomy ending, though, because Moffat gives Amy a moment of tremendous joy to cap off a season that has been mostly sadness for her. We don’t hear exactly what River tells Amy about how the Doctor escaped death—it’s fitting, given the themes of the season, that the most important words are silent to us. We know the substance of what has happened, though, and can piece together something of what those words must have expressed. At Lake Silencio, when she watched the Doctor die, she immediately said that maybe it was a clone or a doppelganger, because she’s Amy Pond, the woman who believes, the one who acts with constant faith in the idea that time can be rewritten. You can’t rely on that, not all of the time, not even with a time machine and a brilliant alien best friend, and Amy let herself get so wrapped up in the idea that things will right themselves, that a miracle will happen and all will turn out for the best, that her faith has sometimes led her astray. This kind of faith isn’t an entirely bad thing, though, at least not when it’s directed toward something good, and what River’s off-screen words reveal to her is that her sometimes excessive hopefulness might be damaging at times, but it’s not always going to be wrong. We don’t hear the words, whatever they are, just the scream of pure happiness that gives way to adorable awkward dancing. It’s not the same kind of joy that we got at the end of last season, when the Doctor rebooted the universe and everyone ran off jubilantly after a beautiful wedding. After all of the holes that this season has poked in Amy’s approach to belief, though, having that quality actually validated for once is such a lovely way to resolve this season that I wind up happier about this than I did about the more obviously joyful conclusion to Season Five.

           Plenty of this episode doesn’t work, but the pieces that do add up to a beautiful resolution of this season’s narrative. The previous Christmas special defined Christmas as being “halfway out of the dark,” and it would have been a reasonable guess to assume that the expression would wind up characterizing the Doctor, who in previous seasons was the only character really to have an extended brush with darkness. At the close of the season, though, it’s Amy who is best described by this phrase. She hasn’t gotten past every dark thing she’s gone through this season—as the start of this scene shows, she’s still dealing with her actions in the other world. If she hasn’t completely emerged from the darkness, though, she looks like she’s about halfway out: after a season of silence, she’s finally speaking, and for a moment at least, she’s so full of joy that it looks like Christmas morning. A-/B+

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 6, p. 2

The Doctor’s Wife: “Bigger on the inside” has been a feature of the TARDIS since the show began, but in this gorgeous episode Neil Gaiman manages to make it look like the show’s creators invented the concept with this story in mind. A love story between a man and a time-space machine has plenty of potential to go awry, but it’s achingly beautiful here, and it brings out the very best in Smith’s Doctor.

           I’m not especially enamored of the planet that the Doctor, Amy, and Rory land on, or of House as a villain, because disembodied voices don’t make for great antagonists even when they make cool special effects happen on the TARDIS. (I do like the name, though—it’s appropriate to have a villain named House in an episode that features an attack on the Doctor’s home.) While the eerie atmosphere is very nicely done, both on the planet itself and on the Ponds’ frightening dash through the TARDIS, when thinking back on this episode I mostly forget everything that isn’t centered on the Doctor and the TARDIS in human form.

I thought at first that the human embodiment of the TARDIS was doing a little bit too much of a Helena Bonham Carter impression, but I eventually find Suranne Jones’s performance to be quite distinctive and entirely appropriate for the character she is playing. Her speech patterns look like nonsense at first, but they’re very carefully ordered nonsense, and they proceed according to the kind of logic that a time machine might plausibly have. I can completely believe that tenses would be enormously difficult for someone who spends most of her existence shuttling back and forth across time, and watching her trying to figure out the right expression (“You’re going to steal me. No, you have stolen me. You are stealing me”) is possibly the most enjoyable sequence of verb conjugation ever on television. It’s tremendous fun watching the Doctor and the TARDIS go back and forth in their not-quite-lining-up dialogue for a while, but their interaction gets much more emotional as soon as they start to discuss the origins of their relationship: “Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?” says the TARDIS. They continue to have an adorably quirky exchange of perspectives on their long friendship, including the information that the Doctor has been pushing the TARDIS doors open for hundreds of years in spite of the “Pull to Open” sign. As entertaining as this is, her assertion that she “always took [him] where [he] needed to go” is the heart of their dialogue, and it’s true—as crazy as their adventures have been, she’s always brought him to the right places.

           As good as much of the episode is, it’s the absolutely transcendent ending that stays with me. While I don’t love House as a villain, he brings out the Doctor’s anger to a fascinating degree, and the Doctor’s response to House’s boast of killing hundreds of Time Lords (“Fear me, I’ve killed all of them”) is quietly chilling. The TARDIS’s destruction of House is beautifully done, and Gaiman’s script deftly makes the notion of “bigger on the inside,” function not as a description of physical space but as a description of a soul. Her definition of “alive” as something that is “sad when it’s over” already turns the scene into one of the Doctor’s most emotional exchanges ever, and then the scene manages to exceed even those heights as she gives the Doctor a tearful final hello. I think one could make a pretty strong argument that “I just wanted to say…hello” is the best individual line in the 50+ year history of the show; it encapsulates so perfectly both the quirkiness of the Doctor’s relationship with his time machine and the emotional ramifications of personal connections that don’t quite occur in the expected order. The conversations between the Doctor and the TARDIS have proceeded outside of any discernible order for the entire episode, so of course, once they have to part, their conversation concludes with its beginning. It’s not quite the last line, though, because if you listen very carefully, you can hear an “I love you” from the TARDIS, just as she fades away.

           The Doctor’s slight shift of his jaw right after she disappears is possibly the saddest he has ever looked, but the episode ends on a much more joyful note, as the Doctor tends to the TARDIS’s newly-restored machine form. (He also creates a new bedroom for Amy and Rory, this time without bunk beds, in spite of his insistence on the coolness of “a bed with a ladder!”) I completely believe his assertion that his attachment to the TARDIS, long after everyone else is gone, is “the best thing there is,” and the TARDIS gives an awfully cute little wobble when he does something with a wire. He looks sad for a moment as he wonders whether or not the TARDIS can hear him, but then she moves a lever on her own and his rush of joy as he whirls around the controls is the perfect ending to an absolutely glorious episode. A+

The Rebel Flesh: The title of the second part of this story is appropriate for the tale as a whole, as its characters almost seem like believable people. I sort of like Cleaves, Jimmy, and the rest of the group, but they never quite gel into completely convincing human beings. It is a huge improvement from the author’s first episode, “Fear Her,” but his writing has basically risen from bad to okay-ish.

The beginning of the episode is promising. I quite like the setting—the combination of the old monastery building, the Dusty Springfield record, and the futuristic technology is oddly appealing. The Flesh is introduced well, in an intriguing scene that sees a character casually grousing while being melted with acid before revealing that the dead body was a Flesh avatar. The use of the Flesh to carry out dangerous missions establishes an interesting set of ethical questions about what constitutes life, and the electrical storm allows these questions to come to the forefront in a meaningful way. The feelings of the Flesh creatures are also interestingly conveyed, particularly in a monologue that sees Jennifer describing her memories of an imagined second self during a childhood catastrophe; it’s a particularly intriguing choice because it sets up the character’s belief in multiple selves as existing even before the electrical storm made this a physical possibility. I don’t really like the Flesh, though, in part because the visual is just so grotesque that it distracts from my enjoyment. The image of Jennifer’s head at the end of a serpent-like neck is particularly disturbing, but there are a lot of moments in which I start to think “ooh, this is interesting!” and then my brain switches over to “nope, they look like yogurt on legs.” I get that this is a show about monsters, and they’re often slimy and unpleasant, but the sight of Flesh extending as the bodies destabilize just comes across as such a poorly-done special effect that I have trouble separating my interest in the concept from my irritation at how silly it looks. It’s an entertaining episode, but one that never feels very high stakes, with the exception of the cliffhanger about having a Flesh Doctor. Other than the weird visuals, there isn’t much to dislike here, but I don’t find it especially memorable. B-/C+

The Almost People: This is maybe a slight step up from part one, but it still never reaches the concept’s potential. I like having two Doctors around, and the Flesh people really do bring about some interesting ethical questions, but there isn’t a particularly imaginative response to those questions. The attention to doppelgangers is interesting as a component of the seasonal arc; you can see the wheels turning in Amy’s head as she remembers the events of “The Impossible Astronaut” and realizes the possibilities inherent in having someone who looks like the Doctor but isn’t the Doctor. The issue of a doppelganger’s humanity is resolved simplistically, though, because the end of the episode leaves us with just one surviving member of each human/doppelganger pairing. I was confused, at first, about why the Doctor was all right with destroying Amy’s flesh avatar after insisting on the humanity of the others throughout the episode, but if I’m understanding it correctly, the electric shock that galvanized the flesh avatars during the storm created a more permanent identity for those creatures, and since Amy was in a different point in the monastery, I don’t think that she got quite the same result. (This would definitely have benefited from greater clarity.) In the end, the response to the question of whether or not the Flesh counted as human boils down to, “I guess so,” which doesn’t give us a memorable resolution.

The minor characters continue to be interesting-ish without being quite as good as I want them to be, and the weird visuals put me off as much as they did in the last episode. (I do still like the monastery, though.) The interaction between the real Doctor and the Flesh Doctor is stronger than their interactions with the rest of the ensemble, but even this is not the best version of the multiple Doctors concept. The most noteworthy thing about this episode is the end, in which we discover that Amy has been a Flesh avatar for the whole season, and her real body has been held captive by Madame Kovarian and is about to give birth. The specifics of the process by which a human consciousness makes the flesh move are a bit unclear to me—the characters throughout the episode have seemed to be conscious of the fact that they are flesh avatars, but she doesn’t seem to be. That aside, it is a genuinely shocking development that I didn’t expect at all, and it works better for me than the sudden death of Rory did as last year’s mid-season twist. After an episode about the same memories being attached to two bodies, it is especially interesting to realize that Amy has spent this entire half-season being detached from her own body, existing as a sort-of embodied, sort-of disembodied avatar. The episode leaves us an in intriguing spot, but it doesn’t do anything remarkable on the way there. B-/C+

A Good Man Goes to War: Much of this episode feels like we might be in the wrong story. The Doctor’s dialogue, the violence, even the physical appearance seems more like a Star Wars-esque saga than the kind of story that we’ve come to expect from this show. This has a lot of potential to be off-putting, and I would say that there are moments when it is, but the episode is careful to set up exactly why this is happening, and to create consequences that are precisely tied to the behavior of the characters. The episode also manages to wring as much fun as possible out of this rather unusual tone; there is an exuberance at work here that holds the episode together even when some rather questionable things occur.  

           This episode is notable in part because of its inclusion of a variety of important minor characters. It’s our first introduction to Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, and while they’re not quite as fantastic here as they are in later episodes, they are an immediate joy. Vastra gets a particularly good entrance, having just eaten Jack the Ripper. Strax’s comedic nature is also immediately on display here; his opening scene features him telling a military man “I hope some day to meet you in the glory of battle, where I shall crush the life from your worthless human form. Try and get some rest.” Dorium is a fun presence, and I enjoy his self-centered reaction to the Doctor’s plea for help. Lorna Bucket…is a terrific name, but not a terrific character. I do enjoy her very sweet conversation with Amy, but otherwise she’s mostly in the episode to provoke the Doctor’s guilt by tragically dying, which is tiresome. (At least she’s not in a literal refrigerator, like Abigail.) Madame Kovarian, who has appeared for brief moments in previous episodes but steps into a larger role here, is a striking presence. Frances Barber does a great job with the role, and her enjoyment of her own victory is entertaining enough, but she never really acquires the depth that some other villains have. The Silence are such a compelling and interesting presence this season that they seem like the main antagonists much more than she does, and so she can come across as something of a plot device. If we’d seen a little bit more of the factors motivating her need to destroy the Doctor, that would have made her a much more interesting figure, but she gets too caught up in being the conventional evil figure and we never really learn very much about the actual beliefs underlying the Kovarian sect.

           This is especially sad because the power structure set up here truly looks fascinating, but we continuously get tiny bits of information, like the Gamma Forests being “heaven neutral,” without getting any kind of elaboration. I keep wanting to get more information about how this theological system works and where the Doctor fits into it, but the glimpses that we get of it are definitely intriguing. While Madame Kovarian lacks depth, she does set up a tremendously energetic plot, in which both of the warring armies put together a dazzling array of attempts to outwit their opponents. The Headless Monks are particularly creepy, and I like that there are patches of genuine intelligence throughout the cast of characters. The Colonel may wind up withdrawing at the Doctor’s command, but I like that he leads his army to disarm themselves immediately after the Doctor’s presence is revealed. It shows that he really has put thought into the kind of enemy he is facing, and he seems, for the time, like a relatively formidable opponent. The constant rush of information about what’s really going on—given to us through a variety of characters’ perspectives—is sometimes bewildering but definitely exhilarating.  

           The Doctor helps to build this sense of exhilaration, and until the end of the episode, he is pretty clearly enjoying his own efforts to track down and rescue Amy and her baby. With Rory’s assistance, he stages an explosive takedown of some Cybermen, and he clearly plans his appearance to the Headless Monks with its theatrical impact in mind. He’s certainly concerned about Amy, but he’s also doing a lot of swaggering and posing and making grandiose statements about his own need for rules. He has engaged in similar behavior before, such as his intimidation of the Atraxi at the end of “The Eleventh Hour” and his speech to the monsters in “The Pandorica Opens,” but this is probably the most gratuitous display of his ability to engage in spectacle. On both of those previous occasions, frightening the enemy was part of the objective, and so a certain amount of shouting and posturing was understandable. Here, though, he’s basically on a mission to rescue a kidnapping victim, which seems like something ideally accomplished by stealth. If he had snuck inside, he probably could have picked up Amy and maybe even Melody without causing too much of a stir, but he is so intent upon having revenge upon the people who hurt his friends that he practically puts on a Broadway show about how much they should be afraid of him. I sort of alternate between really enjoying Smith’s performance and just wanting to shout at the character for behaving stupidly, but it does seem consistent with the way the character has developed.

This continues until the episode’s memorable ending, which is remarkable in part because of the information that River reveals about herself, but, I would argue, even more so because of her explanation to the Doctor of the problems he has caused. The Doctor isn’t aware, yet, of some of the trouble he will cause for her, but this is the right point in her timeline for River to voice what he’s done to her. The Doctor is the reason why she is spending most of her time in Stormcage, even if she does break out on a regular basis, and his tendency to create a spectacle out of his own world-saving endeavors is the reason why the Kovarian sect felt the need to kidnap and brainwash her in the first place. This is River’s chance to tell the Doctor about what he has done to her, only she can’t really say very much at this point, because…well, spoilers. I was put off, initially, by the fact that “The Wedding of River Song” doesn’t give her the opportunity to express any sort of anger about how the Doctor’s fake death lands her in a very real prison cell, but the truth is that she does get that opportunity here, she just can’t give him the details of what is provoking some of her anger because for him, it hasn’t happened yet. She can’t tell him how much of her life he has uprooted, but she can tell him exactly where he’s gone wrong and just how much he’s departed from his ideals. This has to be an awfully frustrating moment for River, who can’t reveal most of what’s motivating her remarks, but I’m glad she at least gets an opportunity to articulate how many problems the Doctor has caused for her, even if she has to do it in a rather impersonal way. The relationship between these two has never been so thoroughly complicated by its lack of chronological rhyme and reason, and the need to avoid spoilers has never been quite so difficult.  

While she still has to withhold some details about future events, River does finally get to tell the Doctor and the Ponds who she is. The reveal of River’s identity works far, far better than it should; I think that many viewers had probably guessed who she was by this point, and I had seen spoilers so I knew for sure, but the lack of surprise has weirdly no impact on the quality of the scene. The Doctor’s delight at what he learns is so vivid and so infectious that it feels like a burst of knowledge even if you already knew everything, and there is something immensely satisfying about watching the secret come to light. River’s name appearing on the scrap of cloth from Lorna is a nice moment, and the soundtrack really is lovely here; the “ooh-ooh-ooh” vocalizations sound similar enough to material that supports Amy’s narrative in other episodes that it feels especially appropriate for her daughter here. It’s sort of a bizarre plot twist, and it could just come across as a shocking moment, but the interaction between the Doctor, River, Amy, and Rory is just so endearing that the scene comes across as charming rather than merely surprising.  

           The ending is good enough that it generally overcomes the frustrating bits of the episode. While I think that Lorna and Madame Kovarian needed some more development, the assembled cast of characters is generally entertaining enough here that they carry the storyline toward its major revelations in an enjoyable way. The Doctor’s behavior is fun at times, but also can get annoying; that being said, his arrogance is brought to an interesting point in his argument with River, and he is at least limiting himself to shouting at his enemies, rather than his occasional much more irritating tendency to direct his self-centered boasting at his allies. His sense of swagger has helped him to protect and comfort people before—in his very first episode, he pretty much convinced the Atraxi to leave permanently by inflating himself like a giant, bowtie-wearing pufferfish until they got scared. It’s understandable, to some degree, that he would come to rely too much on his own ability to function like a neon warning sign, but I appreciate the attention, here, to the ways in which it affects the well-being of the people around him. I appreciate even more that this ending sets up an exploration of this impact in a way that focuses on their feelings as much as his own. River having to censor her own anger for spoilers is one of the most interesting insights that we get into her experiences, this season, and, as the episode reaches its conclusion, Amy and Rory are finally aware of just how complicated their family is. Amy is clearly emotionally fraught, enough so that she’s willing to demand answers at gunpoint, and the episode ends just as she finally gets those answers. Amy’s general tendency is to assume that time is rewritable, but that confidence has never been so thoroughly challenged; once a timeline involves the kinds of complexities that River Song brings with her, it’s nearly impossible to rewrite. A-

Let’s Kill Hitler: The whole episode is basically a very high stakes screwball comedy, which is already sort of an odd concept and which becomes even odder when it is dropped into Nazi Germany. Major things are happening here, ranging from an attack on Adolf Hitler to the regeneration of River Song to the almost-death of the Doctor. There are pieces of this episode that are borderline disastrous, and others that are phenomenally good, and it’s not easy to figure out how to balance them against each other. I…like the episode a little bit, I guess?

           We continue the River-related revelations that began in the previous episode, this time with a focus on what her childhood was like after Madame Kovarian took her away from Amy. I don’t really buy the idea that “Mels is actually Melody, who is also River” is impossibly complicated; if you can describe a situation in a fairly short sentence, it’s not that reliant on convolutions. It does, however, introduce some complexities into the Ponds’ reaction to the loss of their child. Her role in their lives is a bit bizarre, particularly in the sense that she was present for the beginning of her parents’ romantic relationship, but it does at least give us a chance to return to young Amy, this time with the added presence of tiny Rory. Mels is right that, in one sense, they did get to raise her; the childhood sequences in this episode make her seem like a constant presence in their lives, so it’s really not the case that they didn’t get to see their child grow up, they just did so without realizing who she was. They also did so without realizing that she was being brainwashed by Madame Kovarian, and so they’re in the unusual position of finding out that their daughter is someone whom they know well while simultaneously finding out that they didn’t know her that well at all, really.

           Amy doesn’t seem like she quite knows how to react to things, which makes sense but also causes some difficulties for viewers trying to connect to Amy’s emotions. Several of the later episodes this season—“The Girl Who Waited,” “The God Complex,” and “The Wedding of River Song”—give us a really specific read on exactly what is happening in Amy’s mind and why it might not be translating into demonstrative emotions in a particularly conventional way. Because they are focused on why she is suppressing or ignoring certain feelings, it makes sense to show her being, essentially, silent about her emotions at this point. I would say that this episode and “Night Terrors” make sense in retrospect, once those later episodes point us toward the nuances of Amy’s psychological state, but both episodes can look sort of unsatisfying for the moment, because she currently seems to be underreacting and we don’t find out why until a couple of episodes later. This sort of delayed gratification isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, but I do think it would have been better if Moffat had found some way to signal the tensions within Amy’s mind at this point, so that viewers wouldn’t have already felt like they were being underplayed by the time the episodes that did flesh out her perspective came around.

           The rest of the episode is also a combination of some things that work extremely well and some things that don’t quite manage it. The Tesselecta are much more satisfying doppelgangers than the Flesh were earlier this season, and their cold, meticulous system of copying people in order to deliver punishment is terrifying. Their extremely clinical methods of transforming into other people, then miniaturizing them and leaving them to be killed by antibodies, are also brutal in a weirdly calm, organized way, which makes them even scarier. I don’t find doppelgangers to be the most interesting kinds of Doctor Who creatures in general, but these are, at least, a solid version of the concept.

           While it is, in some respects, a very scary episode, it’s also a story with some great pieces of comedy. I particularly like Rory punching Hitler and shoving him into a cupboard, and little Amelia as the matter-of-fact, pessimistic Voice Interface is really cute, as is Amy and Rory using their car to make a crop circle that spells out Doctor in order to get his attention. I would have liked to see a bit more interaction between the Doctor and River, but what we do get is fun, and the business with the gun and the banana is especially delightful. Her regeneration itself is an incredibly odd moment that generally fits quite well into the episode’s zany tone, although River’s immediate reaction to her new appearance is pretty ridiculously oversexualized. It’s sort of nice to see a character regenerate from a twenty-something into a body played by an actress who is nearly fifty and look pleased about it—I would definitely have been much more bothered if River had been lamenting her lost youth—but her raptures about her new body go on for way too long. (And we didn’t really need to know her plans about how much she’s going to wear jodhpurs now.) She has a good time running around Germany and causing chaos, though, and River’s effusive reaction to her own appearance aside, the episode generally does well when it’s giving us a fun glimpse into just how inherently silly time-travel adventures can be.

           When we get into more Serious Things, I’m somewhat less happy. The Doctor’s impending doom never feels like something that has any chance of happening, but I still like watching his efforts to cling to life. This goes on a bit too long, though, and so when River makes the decision to use her regenerations to save him, the whole thing feels rushed, and the emotional force doesn’t quite land. I can imagine this episode’s emotional structure actually working quite well if a few of the smaller pieces were more successful; it seems like the intention may have been to give us an unusually topsy-turvy world for much of the episode, and then pull the rug out from under that by turning toward a deeply emotional moment at the end. This is an interesting move, and one that has a huge amount of potential, as emotional revelations can hit even harder when they come out of nowhere and represent a sudden, massive shift in tone. This is a structure that requires a huge amount of finesse in order to pull it off, though, and River’s realization that the Doctor is important to her doesn’t quite create enough of a bridge between the episode’s general absurdity and its more sincere conclusion.

           This is an intensely difficult episode, far more so than the fun adventure that preceded it, and Moffat doesn’t quite pull it off. I really do like being swept up into such a madcap story on the heels of the last episode’s revelations, but it needed a lighter touch at the end. I can also imagine this being frustrating for viewers who watched in real time, as the long gap between the air date of this and “A Good Man Goes to War” would have built up a great deal of anticipation about how the characters would react to the revelation of River’s identity. I did not watch these when they first aired, and so was able to watch without the gap in time, but there is still a little bit of a sense of letdown, in spite of my general enjoyment of this story. B/B-

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 6, p. 1

Warning: These reviews contain spoilers for this and other seasons of the reboot, as well as occasional references to the classic series. 

Previously on Doctor Who: The universe ended, but then it didn’t. (Hurray!) Last season ended on the most unequivocally positive note of any season of the reboot, in which nobody died (at least not permanently), nobody suffered a catastrophic fate, and everything concluded with a lovely wedding. This season is a very different kind of story; in spite of the numerous deaths that don’t stick, this season is full of consequences, and of the dark side of the much brighter narrative that we got in Season Five. “Dark side” is the easiest term to use in describing this shift, but it doesn’t get at the entirety of what is going on here. I would argue that this is, in some senses, among the most hopeful seasons of the show, and certainly one of the most redemptive character arcs. Problems are awfully hard to fix this season—much, much harder than in most previous ones and certainly than in the immediate predecessor—but our heroes try so strenuously to emerge from these problems that I wind up with feelings that are a lot warmer and fuzzier than one might expect from the relative bleakness of this narrative.

This season has a reputation for devoting too little attention to Amy’s feelings, particularly in light of her pregnancy and subsequent separation from her baby. It’s a widespread view, but not really one that I get. To me, about 90% of the season is about Amy, to the point that I can understand criticisms that it’s too closely focused on her feelings more than I can understand the opposite. I do think that the season is better at representing her feelings of loss and grief than it is at exploring her bodily experience, but overall we get enough detail about her mental state that I only very rarely feel like she’s being underwritten. A more complex issue is the methods by which Moffat portrays Amy’s crisis. This season is pretty thoroughly wrapped up in concepts of silence and, to a lesser extent, vision. This raises the possibility of ableist metaphors, the kind that develop when writers use blindness, deafness, muteness, etc. as ways of making a point about moral failings. For the most part, I think the season avoids falling into this trap. As I’ll explain in more detail later in the season, I think that the inobservability of certain forms of trauma, as well as the difficulties in communication that stem from them, are very real parts of Amy’s circumstances, so that while there are metaphorical treatments of these issues, they are tied to very real mental health issues in which sight and speech play integral roles, and so it doesn’t come across to me as using disability as an analogy for unrelated experiences. It’s a difficult issue, though, and one that I’m trying to be attentive to as I write about these aspects of the season.  

There are so many ways to interpret this season, and this can lead to questions about what Moffat actually meant this narrative to be about. It’s certainly a question worth considering, but I’m not terribly invested in the answer. Amy’s story this season means very specific things to me, grounded in my own experiences, and I’m not particularly concerned with whether or not Moffat completely intended the story to function in the way that I see it. I do think that at least pieces of the story seem to have been intentionally composed in the ways that I understand them, but there are so many pieces to this narrative that my interpretation of some of them might be completely different from what Moffat meant. Explaining how this season comes across to me is especially difficult because it’s so dependent on how the episodes fit together with each other; it’s hard to articulate the importance of individual episodes, sometimes, and so this season’s review may be more than usually centered on the review of the season as a whole at the end.

This is also the season in which we get a pre-credits voiceover sequence, a.k.a. Amy Pond telling us “When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend…” and then going into a tiny synopsis of her friendship with the Doctor. I’m not really sure why this is here or who it was intended to be useful for, because anyone who’s seen the show before knows this information and anyone who jumps into the show in the middle of this season is going to have a lot of questions that aren’t answered by this segment. It’s pretty annoying, but if you watch on Amazon the fast-forward button is a very helpful friend whenever this voiceover comes up. Given the unusual amount of connection between this season and its predecessor, though, something of a recap of what has gone before is appropriate, particularly as a way into Amy’s mentality. A more accurate and useful version might go something like this: “When Amy Pond was a little girl, she had an imaginary friend, and she spent much of her childhood struggling to keep believing in him. He came back, and so did Amy’s belief in his capacity to rewrite time. He’s done so many wonderful things that even death seems rewritable. Amy’s particular brand of faith ran away with her, and they’ve been running ever since.” And…here we go.

A Christmas Carol: There are about sixty billion versions of A Christmas Carol, but to my knowledge this is the only one with flying sharks. This episode features a lot of whimsy, both shark-related and otherwise, but it’s deceptively serious as well. Some Doctor Who Christmas episodes are integral to seasonal arcs on the show, while others function more as standalones. This one is unusual in that it looks like the latter, but turns out to be much more connected to the season than it initially appears. In fact, it’s connected to two seasons, and one could see it as Season Five’s endpoint almost as much as the start of Season Six. In some ways, it functions as a sort of bridge between the two seasons, but I see this primarily as our first foray into the odd combination of light and solemnity that characterizes much of Season Six. “Halfway out of the darkness” could be seen as the theme of this season, and so the Doctor’s use of this phrase to define Christmas is our introduction to an important concept.

           It’s also our first step into the troubling side of the “time can be rewritten” idea, which is hugely important for Season Six. At the end of the last season, the Doctor basically rewrote the universe, fixing at least some of the pieces of existence that disappeared through the time crack and rewriting time on a very large scale. Here, this happens on a much smaller, more personal level, and while it brings about Kazran Sardick’s redemption, it also comes across as invasive and potentially destructive. Season Six devotes a great deal of time to the human cost of miracles, and it’s pretty concerning that, while Kazran might have wound up a better man because of the Doctor’s interference, he’s also a different one, to the extent that his technology no longer recognizes his brain. The ethical implications of essentially rewriting a person, even if the rewrite is morally superior to the original, are not really discussed here but this moment of his brain literally becoming unrecognizable highlights just how much of an impact the Doctor’s actions can have. It’s such a dramatic change that it’s difficult to avoid thinking “Would the Doctor really be all right with just giving someone an entirely new backstory, complete with memories of experiences and connections that had never existed before?” and this question persists until we go back to the honeymooning couple and remember that last season’s happy ending pretty much depended on exactly that happening to Amy.

We also get the season’s first mention of silence—not, in this case, a scary monster, but an aspect of loneliness. I didn’t really listen to the lyrics in Abigail’s song the first time I watched the episode, but they’re eerily appropriate for the upcoming season. Lines like “When you’re alone, silence is all you know” and “Let in the shadow; let in the light of your bright shadow” are awfully cheesy, but Christmas episodes can get away with a little bit more cheese than usual, and the song is just so pretty that it gets away with the lack of subtlety. Given the rest of the season’s attention to Amy remaining steadfastly silent about a lot of her problems and refusing to acknowledge the shadow in her life, in retrospect it seems like a song about the growth that she needs to do this season. Because the episode feels like a commentary on Amy’s arc this season, I’m ok with her relatively small role in this episode, and even the return of the kiss-o-gram outfit only annoys me a little bit.

I am more bothered by the treatment of Abigail herself, even though I love her and I’m happy whenever she’s on screen. It’s sort of weird to apply the concept of fridging to a character who is so vibrant and lively throughout the episode, and who doesn’t actually die in it, but if you’re going to have a female character’s impending demise operating as an important plot point, it’s probably a good idea to avoid literally putting her in a giant freezer. There are quite a few rankings of Christmas specials on the internet, and while there are of course fluctuations between the lists, this one is the clear favorite. I do think that it’s the most creative and possibly the most fun, but I would rank it behind at least one and maybe several of the other specials on the grounds that Moffat doesn’t manage to give Abigail a storyline that’s meaningful to her (as opposed to being a motivation for Kazran’s narrative) to go along with the dynamic personality and gorgeous voice.

           When it’s not putting Abigail on ice, this episode is thoroughly delightful in spite of its serious attention to the season’s darker themes. The production design brings together exactly the right combination of quirk and genuine beauty in creating a stunningly gorgeous planet. The fish/sharks are brilliant—the whole scenario is weirdly believable as the basis for this planet’s economy and power structures, and young Kazran’s account of the bonding that he missed out on when he was away from school during a fish attack gives us an intriguing glimpse into the role that the fish play in this culture. The Doctor reacts charmingly to them, particularly in his optimistic assertion that “I bet I get some very interesting readings off my sonic screwdriver when I get it back from the shark in your bedroom.” Even beyond the goofy charm of the fish, the episode is a strong adaptation of Dickens’s novella. This is partly because of Michael Gambon’s strong performance as Kazran Sardick—a name that nicely exaggerates Dickens’s proclivity for character-appropriate naming. What’s most impressive, though, is the way the episode works with the past/present/future structure. Much of the episode weaves smoothly between the first two, allowing us to watch the older Kazran remember the memories that didn’t exist until the Doctor showed up. I fully expected the future part of the story to involve a trip into Kazran’s near future, as the TARDIS would make it easy enough to get him there. Just when the episode looks like it’s going to do a pretty conventional take on Christmas Yet to Come, it does something thoroughly unexpected; this season is pretty plot-twist heavy, but few of the later revelations startle me quite as much as the sudden appearance of young Kazran, staring fearfully into the old man who has become his future. I can’t quite articulate why this works so well, but I was so surprised by this approach when I first saw the episode that it completely took my breath away.

While Abigail’s literal fridging diminishes my enjoyment a bit, I’m incredibly impressed with how well this special brings together serious psychological issues with a truly fun, entertaining story. We get a lot of attention, in this season, to the rewriting of time, and to the presence of Silence—in most cases, these are part of big, complicated, large-scale stories. Seeing them operate as pieces of a much more intimate, personal tale of loss is an important introduction to how one should think about the events that lie ahead. The episode isn’t without missteps, but a beautiful set, stunning character work, and flying sharks all in one episode are a pretty fabulous Christmas present. A-

The Impossible Astronaut: This is technically the start of the major arc of Season Six, but it picks up so many ideas from “A Christmas Carol” and from the end of Season Five that it feels like the opening number of Act Two rather than the beginning of a completely new story. Watching the Doctor die a few minutes into the episode is a shocking moment, both because it’s the protagonist’s demise and because of the unusualness of the murder method—namely, being shot by an astronaut who has emerged from the depths of an American lake. It’s pretty clear that the Doctor isn’t really dead, as the show can’t exactly move forward without him, but trying to figure out exactly what happened and how he wriggled out of what looks like certain death is fun even in the certainty that it won’t stick.

           There is an immensely enjoyable sense of silliness at work here that erases any sense of self-importance that might otherwise come from appearing to kill of your lead character in a season premiere. The Doctor’s attention-getting historical forays at the beginning of the episode are a bit hit-or-miss for me, but the scenes at the White House are sublimely funny (with the very brief exception that we definitely didn’t need the Doctor referring to his companions as “the legs, the nose, and Mrs. Robinson.”) The shocked reaction to a big blue box turning up in the oval office is particularly well done, as is the dialogue in the ensuing scene: the Secret Service officer yelling “Do not compliment the intruder!” is probably my favorite line, but the Doctor trying to requisition a fez and some jammy dodgers is a close second. Canton is an immediate delight, coming across as smart and snarky and just a little bit bewildered about all of the sci-fi material that is suddenly unfolding around him.

           The episode’s considerable humor competes with quite a lot of serious material. This is due in part to River’s increasing consciousness of the difficulties of her relationship with the Doctor, who knows less about her each time they meet. Even more importantly, Silence has been threatened, foreshadowed, and even sung about, but this is the episode in which it finally becomes monstrous. I don’t think I’d get a lot of agreement on this, but to me, the Silence are Moffat’s greatest monsters. Yes, I like them better than the Weeping Angels. The idea of a monster that you forget when you’re not looking at it is inherently frightening, offers a lot of potential for really interesting subtext, and works incredibly well in a visual medium. Watching the characters go back and forth between terror and total ease is fascinating, and the music underscoring some of these scenes helps to make these moments even more effective.

           The monsters aren’t the only things creating emotional imbalance in this episode. Amy, who is finally in an outfit that no one could reasonably interpret as an attempt to over-sexualize her, goes through quite a lot of turmoil here. After the events of the previous season, it’s unsurprising that her ability to process grief in a healthy way is slipping. She does react tearfully to the Doctor’s “death,” but her immediate reaction to it also essentially involves rewriting it in more palatable terms in her mind—“maybe it’s a doppelganger, or a clone,” she insists, as she frantically tries to piece together the version of this story in which things will turn out okay. Even after she sees the Doctor alive again, she starts thinking about how his eventual death can be unwritten. This reaches its climax when she grabs a gun and shoots at the astronaut, which is shot in crazy slow motion that should be awfully cheesy but somehow is marvelous. There is a lot of focus this season on Amy’s disillusionment with certain aspects of her relationship with the Doctor, and this is the first moment that she turns away from his principles, even if it is brief and she misses. (I would see this as a cop-out if the events of the season finale didn’t happen, but they do and so I don’t.) “Time can be rewritten” is a hopeful expression, sort of, but it’s also one that takes away the possibility of closure, that stops one from recognizing the need to move on. Amy’s willing to do anything to rewrite time here, even to the extent of pointing a gun at a stranger and pulling the trigger, and for all the excitement in this episode, it’s her psychological state that I find most chilling. A-

Day of the Moon: Sometimes, Moffat has a tendency to write something stunningly brilliant and then distract from its brilliance by including one or two really annoying things, and this episode is one of the most prominent examples. This story, and particularly this second part of it, is terrific, and if it were not for a couple of glaring missteps, I would put this episode well within the top 30 of the reboot. Its ranking plummets, however, (to, I think slightly outside my top 70 in the eleven seasons so far) because of a couple of brief moments that draw attention to their own stupidity and distract me from how fabulous the rest of the episode is.

           I’ll get into the things that bother me in a little bit, but let me first say that what definitely doesn’t bother me is the plot-driven nature of this two-parter. It is inarguably the case that a LOT is happening here, and the sheer magnitude of the plot is one of the things that puts a lot of people off about this season. There are definitely some aspects of the seasonal arc that suffer from the narrative twistiness, and while I do think that there is far more character-driven work this season than it tends to get credit for, this episode is one of the plottier ones. The thing is, plot twists are usually intellectual devices grounded in being flashy and impressive, but sometimes events come together in such a perfect way that I do wind up reacting emotionally. Watching what looks like chaos be revealed as order carries with it a sort of surprised sense that things look nicer than what I expected, sort of like suddenly seeing a kitten. My heart just goes, “My goodness, I wasn’t expecting you!” and pieces of this episode bring out that kind of reaction in me, to the point where, if I were a person who tended to cry at television shows, I’d be sniffling about how lovely the narrative structure is.

           We begin the episode with precisely the kind of giddily brilliant scenes that I’m talking about, as Canton appears to hunt down and kill the entire Pond family, while keeping the Doctor locked up in a familiar-looking prison. (And yes, you could see this as a bit repetitive, but I kind of love that there was pretty clearly an offscreen exchange in which Canton asked the Doctor how to construct the facade of a perfect prison for containing him, and the Doctor just described the Pandorica. It’s nice when he’s willing to get ideas from all his worst enemies. I hope the Doctor did impressions of all the monsters while he was explaining the plan to Canton.) The invisible TARDIS suddenly coming to light, the Ponds complaining about a lack of airholes in their body bags, River falling backwards off a building and into the TARDIS swimming pool…it’s such a stunning bit of goofiness and I love it. The show can’t spend too much time on hijinks like the swimming pool business or it would start to look awfully self-indulgent, but in small doses it’s just incredibly charming.

After the delights of the opening sequence, we learn more about the Silence and the efforts being made to remember them. The lines drawn on the skin as a memory technique never fail to scare the hell out of me this season, but I also like the implanted voicemails, which are nicely creepy ways of getting across just how much is being forgotten. The children’s home is a solidly atmospheric setting, and while I get a bit annoyed about the amount of time spent on a kidnapped Amy pleading for help, her initial wander around the house is a strong introduction to her role in the little girl’s life. The notion that the Silence have manipulated humanity into traveling to the moon so that they can get access to fancy spacesuits is also pretty frightening—this whole episode really emphasizes just how much influence the Silence have had on Earth, and their input on space exploration is a good example of how far their impact has extended. I do have a few qualms about the role that they have played in influencing human affairs; there are moments in this episode that seem to lurk pretty close to just removing human agency altogether through the suggestion that the Silence have been manipulating us into almost everything we’ve ever done. The depiction of 1960s America is so vibrant in this episode, though, and the characters are so full of purpose and energy, that it doesn’t come across as a brainwashed world.

The entire plot is captivating, but the Doctor’s defeat of the Silence is the clear high point, and is one of my favorite resolutions ever on this show. A couple of factors make this work, the first being how suggestible people are when they are looking at a Silent. The Doctor makes clear—by having Canton look at a Silent and telling him to adjust his bowtie—that people can be influenced by what they have heard while looking at a Silent, even when they have forgotten the entire experience. The quasi-hypnotic possibilities certainly play a role here, but I would say that the pattern of remembering and forgetting associated with the Silence also makes the Doctor’s plan work. It has been established that everyone forgets the Silence only when they are not looking at them; Amy, for instance, remembers seeing the Silent at the lake when she sees another in the White House bathroom. Everyone who ever watches the footage of the moon landing will therefore see the “You should kill us all on sight” message, immediately forget it once the image has passed, and then remember it only if they happen to come across another Silent. The proper version of the moon landing thus stays intact in everybody’s memory, but if they find themselves in the company of a Silent, they will suddenly regain the knowledge that they need to see the Silent as an enemy. In spite of the hypnotic influence of the Silent’s words, this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will actually try to kill them—I can imagine that some would be too frightened to take them on, and others would just be incapable. The increased presence of human knowledge and aggression, though, means that the Silence face a world that is more hostile and dangerous, and have a legitimate reason for seeking a new planet to rule. What’s especially brilliant about the Doctor’s plan is that because of the general state of forgetfulness, it doesn’t push humanity to hunt down the Silence and try to drive them away; whether the “kill us on sight” line is functioning as hypnotic influence or people are remembering instructions when they see a Silent, the impulse depends on being in close enough proximity to the Silence that they are actually visible. This gives the Silence the information that their safety has been compromised, thereby giving them the incentive to go somewhere else, and so if they’re careful about not being seen, they should be able to get away. (They’re good at appropriating human technology, so I can imagine that they would be able to get themselves to another planet.) It’s a revolution by warning, in which nobody really needs to get killed, and the whole notion of uploading cell phone footage into a 1960s video in order to let scary monsters know that they need to abandon Earth is just such a creative way of resolving things that I absolutely love it. You could make the argument, and many have, that Moffat can get too clever-clogs for his own good, but watching the narrative click into place like this—I don’t know, the world just looks a bit sunnier for a while. It’s not often that you want to hug a cell phone, but I really do by the end of this story.

The surprises don’t stop there, as we conclude the episode with the revelation that the little girl that they have been looking for is regenerating. We know so little about her at this point that I don’t have that much of a reaction to the character’s experience, but it’s such an unexpected moment (at least it was to me) that it makes for an extremely strong ending to the story. There is as much genuine surprise in this episode as almost any other in the episode, and these twists are incorporated so beautifully into the story that it’s a joy to experience the rush that comes from realizing just what has happened.

In spite of the fabulousness of much of this episode, it doesn’t make my all-time favorites list because of a couple of smaller pieces that lower the quality of the entire episode. One problem with this episode is the brief and thoroughly unwelcome return of the Amy/Rory/Doctor love triangle. It’s present only as a miscommunication—Rory hears Amy say something to him that sounds like it could be addressed to the Doctor, and worries that she is regretting her choice to marry him. She also tells the Doctor that she’s pregnant without telling Rory, suggesting that she places more trust in the Doctor. Of course, everything is resolved by the end, but while her explanation that she didn’t want to tell Rory about her pregnancy because she’s worried that her baby will be born with “three heads, or like a time head” is believable enough, this whole element just comes across as extremely contrived. Amy’s use of the “fell out of the sky” language to describe Rory doesn’t really accord with the notion that they’ve been friends since childhood, and so it just looks like Moffat made her say intentionally confusing things in order to create a space for marital drama. The interaction between the Ponds at the end of the episode is awfully cute, though—I particularly liked Rory’s jubilant exclamation that he’s “never going to stop being stupid!”—so while I did not enjoy this throwback to last season’s most irritating subplot, I was still happy with the Ponds as a couple by the end of the story. The larger problem is the exchange between Canton and Nixon in which we learn of Canton’s sexuality. I really, really like Canton; the actor is great, the character’s combination of obvious intelligence and befuddlement about what on earth is happening is endearing, and he’s a solid source of support for the Doctor and Ponds in this story. I’m glad that the show is making more of an effort to include LGBT characters this season, after not doing at all well in this regard in Season Five, and Canton was, I think, at this point the second-most screentime for an LGBT character, after Captain Jack. Given that for both Captain Jack and the soon-to-debut Vastra and Jenny, their sexuality is a defining element of their characterization, it’s sort of a nice bit of variation to have a character who is primarily known for his work in the monster-fighting plot, and whose sexuality emerges as a minor part of his background. However, while getting across Canton’s sexuality in just a line or two is a reasonable move on those grounds, the actual lines are completely misguided and deeply problematic. Nixon’s reaction that the moon is “far enough for now” just comes across as laughing at the sixties for being a homophobic time period, which is blatantly unfunny both because of the tremendous discrimination facing gay couples in the 1960s and because in many ways that discrimination hasn’t stopped. Nixon’s inability to accept such a relationship is the punchline here more than Canton himself is, but it’s a completely inappropriate piece of humor. Even the soundtrack emphasizes the jokey nature of the exchange, making this even more grating.

If you took out the five seconds devoted to Nixon’s reaction to Canton’s sexuality, you would have a very, very strong episode; I would put up with the brief return to the Pond Relationship Drama in exchange for all of the fascinating stuff that happens to them here. There’s just enough that annoys me, though, that I don’t love the episode as much as its stellar plot warrants. In a way, this makes this two-parter a fitting opener to the regular season, as Season Six is, in general, a giant mass of brilliance that wanders off into total stupidity at intervals. Overall, this two-parter is a mostly glorious, intermittently frustrating opening to a season that is full of both wonderful and terrible things. B+

The Curse of the Black Spot: It’s a shame that this utterly boring episode happens here, in what is otherwise a terrific string of episodes. A few questionable things in “Day of the Moon” aside, the string of eight episodes that starts with “Vincent and the Doctor” and ends with “The Doctor’s Wife” is full of glory—except for this episode, which manages to make pirates dull. I do like the setting for the episode, which is what keeps it out of my bottom five episodes of the reboot—watching the characters run around on a pirate ship is entertaining enough to lift the episode above the slog of unimaginative plotting that otherwise characterizes this story. Still, for an episode that has the automatic fun of featuring pirates on a pirate ship, this is a huge disappointment.

           There are some decent moments here; the beginning of the episode, in which pirates react with terror to extremely minor injuries, is relatively intriguing, and Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey does a good job as the lead pirate suddenly forced to take responsibility for the son he abandoned. The whole Siren story is just so inane, though, that the poignancy of the father/son narrative gets completely overshadowed. The Doctor interprets events incorrectly over and over again, which is an approach that appears to good effect in a number of other stories but is mostly just annoying here. The usually delightful Ponds are reduced to yet another silly love triangle, this time with the mysterious Siren: Rory spends a significant amount of time being spellbound by her beauty, leading to extremely tiresome jealousy on Amy’s part. The Siren herself is sort of a fragmented version of the sexy nurse cliché; she spends part of the episode nurturing sick and injured pirates, and the rest of it trying to sensually lure men to their deaths, or at least so it seems. Nothing makes me quite as angry as Ursula the paving slab in “Love and Monsters,” but this episode probably spends a larger amount of time on sexist nonsense than any other in the reboot.

           There are some nice pieces of continuity here with the rest of the season; I like that a season in which magic eye patches are a major plot point has a pirate episode in it, and the episode provides one of several installments in the season’s thematic focus on the inseparability of parents and their children. Otherwise, though, this is an awfully pointless episode. C-

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 5, p. 4

Warning: These reviews contain spoilers about this and other seasons of the reboot, as well as occasional references to the classic series. 

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 5, p. 3

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season Five, part II

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.

Vampires of Venice: I usually like Toby Whithouse’s writing, and this isn’t really a bad episode on its own terms, but its continuation of the silliness that started at the end of the last episode kind of destroys it for me. There are plenty of good things: the “vampires” are effectively creepy, there are some good supporting performances here from Helen McCrory and Lucian Msamati, Smith gets some good comedy to work with, the episode is well-paced and fairly clever, the scenario of another dying species is a good way of introducing this Doctor’s approach to his actions in the Time War, and we get some intriguing references to the Silence. When the Doctor interacts with Rosanna, the story is vibrant and compelling—the two work together brilliantly, and Venice provides a nice backdrop for their struggle.

However, the Amy/Rory/Doctor romance situation continues to be really unpleasant, to the point where it makes it difficult to enjoy the episode. Part of the issue is that the love triangle is still being played as comedy; poor Rory may not be a fully formed character at this point, but he deserves better than to have the Doctor pop out of a cake at his stag party to announce to everyone that Amy kissed him. Rory does get some good moments in this episode, including the revelation that after the events of “The Eleventh Hour,” he started doing research into sci-fi theories—something which way more characters on shows like this should be doing—and his accusation that the Doctor endangers people by making them want to impress him. The rest of the time, though, he’s just stuck being jealous of the relationship between Amy and the Doctor, and one of his conversations with the Doctor features easily the worst joke of the season: “And you kissed her back.” “No, I kissed her mouth.” Good grief. The general ickiness of the vampire-fish plot makes the stupid love triangle look even worse—the Doctor does at least acknowledge that the effort to kidnap and transform young women so that they can re-people the fish monster race is unusually gross, but having a storyline like this while Amy’s sex life is being mishandled just seems particularly problematic. The actual portrayal of Amy is less troubling than the last scene of the previous episode was, largely because she seems more confused and uncertain and less traumatized, but she’s still a weaker character here than she was in most of the previous episodes. I don’t really have much to say about this episode—it’s an entertaining enough plot, but my general response to the love triangle story is just to shut my eyes, put my fingers in my ears, and wait for it to get better. Fortunately, this is only one episode away, but for now, I would have preferred Venice and its “vampires” if they hadn’t been burdened with the nonsense that the show is currently making Amy go through. C+

Amy’s Choice: “There’s something that doesn’t make sense…let’s go and poke it with a stick” says the Doctor, in a story that pokes at absurdity in a surprisingly delightful way. As the concluding episode in the ill-advised love triangle subplot, this episode should be a disaster, and yet it somehow manages to pull off a difficult story with a huge amount of charm and very little material that is reductive or insulting to the characters. I don’t love the idea of Amy being forced to choose what she wants in a life or death scenario, but this episode is pretty much the best possible version of this plot. It’s helped by a marvelously comedic script—the dialogue sparkles here to a greater extent than almost any other episode this season, giving us a fantastically funny version of the Doctor but also (and perhaps more impressively) of the other major characters as well. “I was promised amazing worlds. Instead I get duff central heating and a weird kitcheny wind-up device” doesn’t seem out of character for Rory, but it portrays his slightly aggravated regular guy persona in a memorable way, something that previous episodes hadn’t really managed. I love Amy going on about Leadworth’s terrible amateur dramatic society, which is about to attempt Oklahoma!, and I love even more her determined assertion that “If we’re going to die, let’s die looking like a Peruvian folk band” as she hands out warm clothing. The Dream Lord gets in some solid insults toward the Doctor--“If you had any more tawdry quirks you could open a tawdry quirk shop” is a pretty true statement, and really makes me want to see what a Tawdry Quirk Shop would look like. Some of the best moments for the Doctor himself come in the form of tiny details; I found his turning the “Open” sign around as he escapes into the shop to be an especially hilarious piece of the Doctor’s bizarre logic. The writers have started to get what kind of lines work best with Smith’s particular brand of quirkiness, and lines like “What a nice bench, what will they think of next?” and “Did I say a nightmare? More of a really good…mare” don’t seem especially funny on their own but they play nicely into the strengths of Smith’s acting.

Beyond the humor, this episode benefits from being immaculately structured. The zooming back and forth between dream worlds, with transitions marked by birdsong, makes for an exhilarating plot, and the continuation of time in both worlds simultaneously adds to the sense of stakes. The frozen TARDIS is a pretty simple idea, but it looks brilliant, and the story of the fantastically-named Mrs. Poggit and the Evil Elderly People is sort of wonderfully ridiculous. The actual choice that Amy has to make is set up as sensitively as the love triangle stupidity permits, and I particularly like that the story separates choosing Rory from choosing the fantasy of domesticity in the first dream world. It initially looks like staying with Rory means committing to the dream of being pregnant and a bit bored in Upper Leadworth, but her eventual realization of her feelings for Rory prompts her to destroy that world. She’s ultimately given a choice between two different versions of her life with Rory, rather than a choice between Rory and the Doctor, and there’s only a little bit of outright competitiveness, so it mostly feels like Amy thinking through what kind of life she wants to pursue with Rory rather than having to pick which man she wants. This is really important to the episode, which would pretty much be a lot of good jokes in the service of a bad, offensive story if it had mishandled the substance of the choices that she’s given here. No one seems to have put any thought whatsoever into how to begin the love triangle in a way that avoided outright character assassination, but there at least appears to have been some thought about how to resolve it without making a mockery of the characters. Amy also has real chemistry with Rory here, especially in the very cute scene in which he cuts off his ponytail. I had no real interest in their relationship after the previous episode, but I’m quite happy with them as a couple here.

A lot of this episode is bright and sunshiny and fun, but it’s also organized around the idea that the darkness in the characters is informing everything that happens. The Doctor claims that it is his darkness alone, but that’s pretty clearly not true, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in trying to figure out which bits of the story came from which character. The secretly sinister version of quiet, peaceful Upper Leadworth is a pretty clear reflection of Amy’s hesitation toward the world that she ran away from, while the frozen, drifting TARDIS is both the Doctor’s worst nightmare and, possibly, an expression of Rory’s uncertainty about whether the life of traveling and adventures is what he wants. The Dream Lord does a good job of taunting the Doctor, noting that his friends never see him again once they’ve grown up, but he’s even better at pointing out Amy’s flawed understanding of the Doctor, including her assertions that he never has to apologize for anything and that he tells her everything. The darkest moment is the first of many “deaths” for Rory, which is memorable mostly for Amy’s certainty that the Doctor will be able to fix it: “What is the point of you?” she demands when he can’t. I was put off, at first, by her total willingness to possibly commit suicide in order to reject this dream world, both because it makes her seem incapable of living without her fiancé and because she is pregnant with what seems like a baby she wants. Still, her language in this scene suggests that at least part of her thinking centers on an inability to believe that this can be the real world, as if the Dream Lord’s introduction of false realities prompted her to start putting tragedy in the “unreal” category. It’s not a healthy state of mind, but I can imagine it being a very tempting one, and the episode as a whole works very well as a large-scale version of Amy’s tendency to write bad things out of her understanding of reality.

           The episode definitely has some iffy romantic things happening, which was inevitable given the love triangle arc it was a part of, but unlike the last episode and the end of “Flesh and Stone,” they’re at least happening to complex, layered people who are fun to watch. I don’t think it was really possible for this episode to emerge from the love triangle business completely unscathed, but it really brings much more sensitivity and humor to a bad setup than I would have expected, and it brings a very welcome stop to the Rory vs. the Doctor romance nonsense instead of letting it unfold across the season. Given where this plotline started, resolving it in a way that I actually like is…well, not quite as miraculous as rebooting the universe, but it’s pretty close. A-

The Hungry Earth: Things coming up from underground to grab you and pull you under is a properly scary concept, and the Silurians are good monsters, but this episode doesn’t reach the potential of either of those things. It’s odd, because when he returns in Season Seven, Chibnall’s strong point is that he is especially good at writing the Ponds: “The Power of Three,” for instance, has one of the most pointless plots in the show’s history, but still mostly works for me because the tension that Amy and Rory feel between their time-travel adventures and ordinary lives is so beautifully realized. There are some questionable moments with the Doctor in Chibnall’s Season Seven episodes, but some really great moments as well, particularly in his reaction to having to deal with the slow pace of life in the Ponds’ home. Here, though, it’s like Chibnall is going out of his way to make Amy, Rory, and the Doctor into unlikeable characters. There are constant jokes about how Amy’s wearing tiny shorts because she was expecting to go to Rio. There’s an awkward conversation in which Amy seems really uncommitted to her relationship with Rory, even though the previous episode ended on exactly the opposite note. Then she falls down a hole, after which she gets nothing to do in the episode beyond being terrified. We get a brief shot of her covered by dirt, she lies in a glass case and yells until she gets knocked out with gas, and then she wakes up in chains and wriggles about a bit before Mo tells her not to struggle because she’s just going to be dissected anyways. It’s a complete waste of Karen Gillan’s abilities, particularly after all the interesting work that was done with her in “Amy’s Choice.” Meanwhile, Rory wanders around, gets mistaken for a police officer, and just goes with it for no reason. I get that you might go along with whatever job you were mistaken for having if you were in space or the distant future or past because of the need to create a role for yourself in a world that you don’t actually belong in, but pretending to be a police officer when close to one’s own time and place just seems irresponsible. He does help the Doctor to trap a Silurian in some sort of meals on wheels van, which is fun, but otherwise there isn’t anything interesting for Rory to do here. The Doctor does a lot of shouting when Amy falls down the hole, and then he gets in a lengthy argument with Nasreen and Tony about whether various science-fictiony things are possible, and then doesn’t do much of note until making a speech about needing everyone to be the best of humanity, which falls awfully flat. Last week’s episode showed that the Doctor, Amy, and Rory can be absolutely delightful together, but they’re very dull characters here.  

           Minor characters vary in quality. Nasreen is fantastic—easily one of the best single-story characters of the season. She feels like a believable, interesting person almost immediately, and her TARDIS entrance is probably the best moment of the episode. Tony and Mo are all right, but Ambrose is already questionable, in preparation for being an outright disaster in the next episode, and Elliot is mostly annoying, although he has a nice conversation with the Doctor about wanting to leave home. Alaya is pretty one-note, but Neve McIntosh (who will eventually be cast as Madame Vastra) makes her as compelling as possible. The actual science-fiction plot here is really pretty good. There is some cool stuff with computer models, and some very nicely-directed horror sequences, especially the scene in which they frantically try to open the door to let Elliot in, only to find he has disappeared. The Silurians’ status as monsters who are not actually aliens makes them unique among the creatures on this show, so the story definitely carries a level of excitement, and the attention to the dangers of drilling grounds the story in the real world in an interesting way. By the end of the episode, though, Nasreen is the only character that I’m invested in, and so the good pieces of the plot just don’t mean very much to me. C+

Cold Blood: The title is appropriate for an awfully chilly episode. Nasreen continues to be a great character, and the Silurian civilization is visually very well done, but I find this episode difficult to get through. The most generous reading of it is that it was trying to do an interesting gender reversal, in that the male characters are mostly very peaceful, while Alaya, Restac, and Ambrose are militant or impulsively violent. It’s a workable concept, but it doesn’t come across well here because there is no effort to give this violence any depth or coherent motivation. All three of these characters are extremely one-dimensional, and very obviously wrong, and they are constantly being talked down to by men in a way that suggests the show sides unequivocally with the male characters. This is especially true of the insistence on hammering home exactly how terrible Ambrose is as a person. I don’t like Ambrose, but watching everyone tell her how much of a failure she is over and over and over gets cringeworthy, and it brings out the Doctor’s self-righteous side to an unbearable degree. He is perfectly fine with the Silurian scientist, who dissects and experiments on kidnapped people, but all he can think of for Ambrose is repeated scolding laced with contempt. (This season had been doing all right, until this point, with working with the Doctor’s arrogance in a way that was intriguing and not annoying; even his biggest burst of self-righteousness, in “The Beast Below,” gets shut down pretty much immediately by Amy figuring out a better plan than his. This episode, though? Definitely up there with Tennant lecturing Torchwood/UNIT/whatever other authority figures got thrown at him in terms of making the Doctor look like a big, dismissive jerk.) You could do really interesting work with, for instance, the idea that Ambrose’s maternal instincts actually prompt immoral behavior, but this is only interesting if you treat her like a person and not as a punching bag. The tone of the episode is honestly pretty close to sadistic pleasure in pointing out just how much of a failure she is, and that removes all of the potential from what might be a worthwhile look at gender stereotypes.

Amy at least gets to do something other than be a victim in this episode, but she still doesn’t seem like a fully realized character here. Her attempt to rescue the Doctor is completely treated as a joke, and even after this she mostly just sits around and provides humorous lines. You wouldn’t really know, from watching most of this episode, that she’s a main character in this show, because she just comes across as sort of background comic relief. I like the idea of having Amy and Nasreen negotiate with the Silurians for the fate of the planet, but Amy appears to be trying to take a nap during most of it, although she wakes up for long enough to suggest putting the Silurians in deserts. I like that the Doctor tries to stay out of the negotiation and allow humans and Silurians to take care of the situation themselves, but if he wants to provide encouragement he could find something more productive to do than stand around telling everyone to be extraordinary. In the end, the Silurians just decide to go back to hibernation for a long time, so nothing really comes of this entire storyline anyways. The issue of whether Silurians and humans could share the planet makes this episode similar to the Silurians’ debut episode back in Season Seven of the classic series, but this episode never finds the depth that that earlier episode managed to bring to this scenario.

           Because the main plot does very little of interest, this episode is mostly memorable because of its shocking final scene, in which Rory is swallowed up by the crack in time. It’s a surprising development, and a far more emotional scene than the rest of the episode. While Rory has some good moments in the first two thirds of the season, he hasn’t really stood out to me as a character by this point; still, it’s horrifying to watch someone be erased from time, and Gillan does a nice job with Amy’s dramatic shift from agonized grief to complete forgetfulness. The explanation of why she could remember the clerics who were erased by the crack in time but not Rory is a bit half-baked, but otherwise it’s a solid scene that ends a highly questionable episode on a much more positive note. C+

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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-

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Russell T Davies Era Overview

The Davies era is also known as the high point of strong female characters on the show, a reputation which I think it deserves in some ways and not in others. The classic series varied a lot in terms of its treatment of female characters; sometimes we got fabulous female companions like Barbara, Ace, and Sarah Jane, and sometimes we got companions who were reduced to eye candy/damsels in distress—Peri is probably the worst example. We got some terrific minor female characters, but many stories showed very little interest in women, with the worst instance being “The Deadly Assassin,” a good but rather overrated story in which we get four episodes in a row in which every single character is male. Davies puts much more of an emphasis on ensuring that there is a regular presence of female characters—the show passes the Bechdel test most of the time, and we get a terrific range of character types for women. While I’m happy about the increase in female presence and dialogue, I do think there are a lot of minor female characters in the Davies era who come across as awfully generic: Lynda with a Y, Reinette, Astrid, Jenny, and Lady Christina are among the most prominent examples. We also get occasional total disasters, like Ursula of “Love and Monsters” and Yvonne of “Army of Ghosts,” although I would say there are fewer of them. There’s a sort of frustrating trade-off between the Davies and Moffat eras, in that Davies made a much more consistent effort to include minor female characters but there are only a handful that I find truly memorable, whereas Moffat (in the Smith era, at least—he gets more consistent in the Capaldi era) sometimes seems to be alternating between having brilliant minor female characters and just not really bothering with minor female character at all. Davies’s major female characters are generally fascinating figures; Rose and Donna are sparkling, charismatic presences, as is Martha when the narrative isn’t making her deal with nonsense. All three are given moments to shine, and each gets individual episodes that show them in their best light: “Dalek,” “Father’s Day,” “Smith and Jones,” “Partners in Crime,” and “The Fires of Pompeii” are among the best.

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, The David Tennant Specials, p. 2

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

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, David Tennant Specials p. 1

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 4, p. 4

Season Four Overview: The Most Important Woman in the Universe

Donna Noble’s return to the show is one of the biggest godsends that has ever occurred on this program. After a very strong first season, the show had declined a bit in quality—it still offered us the chance to watch a lot of marvelous actors and some very well-written episodes, but it had definitely gotten markedly less consistent. Even with Donna, there are more weak episodes here than were present in the first season, but the number of high-quality episodes definitely skyrockets. Part of Donna’s success is the shift in character type. The classic series sometimes had female companions, like Barbara and Romana, who were a bit older than the average companion, but Martha and especially Rose were much more in the tradition of relatively young companions like Ace, Sarah Jane, Tegan, etc. The casting of Catherine Tate was already an interesting move away from what was becoming the established type for companions, but just as importantly, Davies allows the character to play to Tate’s comedic strengths. Donna is funny and loud, to the point that some fans have labeled her as “screechy” or as a “joke companion.”  Most companions haven’t strayed very far from the traditional ingénue type, and having a loud, comedic woman—the type of character who is often reduced to being the female lead’s best friend—play the main companion is absolutely marvelous. We get so many delightful moments of Donna’s exuberance, like her mimed reaction to the Doctor in “Partners in Crime” and her mystery-solving efforts in “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” and Tate sells the character’s energy and humor amazingly well.  

While she’s easily the most overtly comedic companion of the reboot, the show also takes her very seriously as a character, and some of the season’s best scenes center on her growing awareness of the world around her. Traveling with the Doctor produces something of an awakening for all of the companions, but there’s a more dramatic shift for her. Rose was also stuck in a pattern of being unable to find meaningful work or a sense of purpose, but that’s a different experience for a 19-year-old than it is for someone over 30, and Donna carries with her the extra burden of having gone through repeated failures to find the life she wants over a long period of time. “The Runaway Bride” also established a slightly shallow, gossipy persona, and so the moments in which her kindness and empathy come to the forefront are especially resonant. The end of “The Fires of Pompeii” and her reaction to the Ood’s song of captivity are stunning moments, in large part because they show how much more depth there is to Donna than was initially apparent. In spite of her exuberant sense of fun, Donna also possesses a lot of resentment, presumably the product of a lifetime of dull jobs, failed relationships, and people telling her not to be so loud. This resentment winds up being a huge asset to her, as she is very vocal about the things that frustrate her, from occasional lapses in the Doctor’s behavior to the rules about interfering with history. Davies blends her narrative of personal growth with the monster-of-the-week plots beautifully, to the point where even many of the most important pieces of plotting speak to Donna’s development as a character.

While I do think the season conveys a very clear sense of how Donna’s previous life experiences affect her actions as a time-traveler, I would have liked to get a bit more of a sense of what that life was like. To be fair, we did see some of this in “The Runaway Bride,” but this season is focused to an unusual extent on Donna’s escape from ordinary life. Even “Partners in Crime,” which is set in contemporary London, mostly depicts Donna’s efforts to rejoin the Doctor by investigating unusual events, and so it doesn’t give us much of a sense of what Donna’s life is like when it’s not centered on the Doctor. The first season of the reboot was revolutionary in the extent to which it worked Rose’s home and family into the narrative, but in some senses I think subsequent seasons have built on that season’s success in the wrong ways. I loved Jackie Tyler, I really liked Pete Tyler, I was bored for a while with Mickey Smith but eventually I got round to liking him, but part of the charm of our introduction to Rose was that she was placed into a quite specific and detailed world. Yes, her family was important, but we also got a lot of attention to her life on the Powell Estate. The early scenes of “Rose” give us a lot of information about her job and how she spends her time, “Aliens of London” showed us her neighbors, “The Parting of the Ways” showed us where she eats chips—they aren’t especially significant details, but she really is placed into a particular world, and Jackie benefits from that specificity as well. After Rose, Davies stuck with the idea of showing us some of the life on Earth of the companions, but he basically shifted to just family members. I was frustrated that we got basically nothing about Martha’s status as a medical student after her first episode, because it meant that her parents and siblings were the only connections that she had to Earth. Donna is written the same way here—Wilf is a very nice character, and he’s beautifully acted by Bernard Cribbins, but he is written as the only thing that Donna cares about on Earth, and I’m a little bored with that. Most of their scenes together involve talking about the Doctor, so Donna’s one connection to Earth is still almost entirely about her Doctor life. I like having companions’ family members on the show, but more than that I want to see companions that have interests, or at least things that they do with their time that are not traveling in the TARDIS. Rose was mostly just working at the shop, eating chips, and hanging out with Mickey, but even if her life was dull it was well-rounded. Later companions start coming back to this; Amy never really gets enough attention to her life on Earth (and “The Power of Three” is the only episode that really tries) but Clara is grading papers and holding parent-teacher conferences and going on dates with Danny, and Bill is serving chips and looking for cheap housing and getting interrupted on dates with Penny and writing lots of essays. Not all of the details work well in these examples, but my overall impression is that Rose, Clara, and Bill get worlds, while Martha, Donna, and Amy get relatives. Other than “Turn Left,” which gives us a very different version of Donna, when she’s not traveling with the Doctor she’s trying to find the Doctor or talking to Wilf about how much she wants to find the Doctor/how happy she is to have found the Doctor. Tate’s performance makes the character feel so grounded and real that it doesn’t matter too much, but I would really have liked to see something that Donna wants that doesn’t involve the Doctor.

     This lack of attention to Donna’s life on Earth sort of dovetails with the other problem that I have with her arc this season, which is that it feels weirdly frontloaded, to the point where there isn’t sufficient material to work with in the second half of the season. While I would say that the strongest sequence of episodes overall this season is “Silence in the Library”/“Forest of the Dead”/“Midnight,” my favorite part of the season for Donna is actually the beginning. “Partners in Crime,” “The Fires of Pompeii,” and “Planet of the Ood” do an absolutely splendid job of setting up the relationship between the Doctor and Donna and of showing how much she has grown since “The Runaway Bride.” If we can sort of see the start of this season as the introduction of Donna as a major companion, since she’s presented as just a one-episode character in “The Runaway Bride,” I would consider these three episodes to be the best companion introduction certainly in the reboot and probably in the entire history of the show. We learn so much about the character in this sequence, and she’s just so likeable and such a good counterpart to the Doctor that the season starts off magnificently. The problem is that she grows into the ideal version of herself quite quickly, which means that the second half of the season struggles to figure out what to do with her. I absolutely adore the work that episodes like “The Fires of Pompeii” and “Planet of the Ood” do with the character, but I do think that they represent fairly climactic moments in Donna’s growth as a person, and they come awfully early in her time on the show. After that, the season is sort of stuck portraying Donna as someone who has had flaws, because she’s already successfully worked through the major ones. If the season had allowed her to retain a little bit more of that shallowness that she used to possess for just a few episodes longer, the season would have felt like a more consistent progression for her, rather than a sensational leap at the start of the season followed by a long plateau. (I mean, she’s still awesome and loveable on said plateau, but in the first few episodes she’s awesome and loveable and developing as a character.) I think that seeing more of her life at home—as herself, not as Alternate Dystopian Universe Donna—would maybe have allowed us to get a more extended progression toward her best self. If we had more encounters with things that frustrate Donna or that distract her from the drive that she shows this season, her arc might be able to unfold more gradually rather than springing into existence like a jack-in-the-box. Again, Tate infuses the character with so much depth that she’s still enjoyable even in these later episodes of the season, but I just never find the character as interesting as she is in those first few stories.

The Doctor’s development is also inconsistent here, although it does extend longer than Donna’s does. He starts the season seeming like he has put aside some of the problems that characterized his behavior in the previous season, as can be seen in his admission that he ruined Martha’s life and his determination to avoid repeating that. He’s doing really well for a while—until the Sontaran episodes, he’s treating everybody nicely and enjoying the universe and being helpful. Then we move into a segment of this season that focuses more on his arrogance, which has very mixed results. It culminates in the wonderful “Midnight,” but that episode is led up to by a number of stories that demonstrate his ego, most of which just come across as annoying. His behavior in “The Sontaran Strategem” and “The Doctor’s Daughter” is particularly irritating, especially because it just sort of feels gratuitous. There isn’t any need for him to behave in so extreme a fashion in either case, and it’s not done in a manner that is funny or interesting or compelling. When we get to “Midnight,” it at least looks like we’ve had these moments of irritation for a purpose, as the Doctor’s tendencies to embrace the status of hero work against him more than they ever have before.

        This season is sometimes seen as the high point of the reboot, and as of the end of “Midnight,” I think it was on track to make a legitimate claim to that distinction. While there are some weak episodes early in the season, “Partners in Crime,” “The Fires of Pompeii,” “Planet of the Ood,” “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” “Silence in the Library,” “Forest of the Dead,” and “Midnight” are such a wonderful collection of episodes that I don’t really mind having to sit through “The Doctor’s Daughter.” “Midnight” is such an explosive, revelatory episode that it puts the season at something of a crossroads, and in an unfortunate piece of irony I would say “Turn Left” is where the season starts to take a wrong turn. Part of the problem is that this is the point at which the weak points in the structure of Donna’s arc start to become more apparent. She has a terrific moment of world-saving at the end of “Turn Left,” but it’s not really dependent on the qualities that we’ve seen in development across the season. In “The Fires of Pompeii,” Donna’s compassion and loudness and resistance to being told what to do come together and help her to convince the Doctor to save the Roman family. In “Turn Left,” she sacrifices herself, allowing her body to get in the way of traffic so that the other version of herself will take the right job; essentially, she goes from a character whose traits and abilities are valuable to a character whose tragic death allows the world to function properly. Then, in the season finale, she gets a sort of honorary doctorate; she gets to play the Doctor’s role, but she hasn’t actually learned how to do any of the things that she does here, she just got a lot of abilities projected onto her. By the end of the season, she’s bordering on being a sort of receptacle; her body is used to push events in the right direction in “Turn Left,” and then the necessary knowledge gets poured into her in “Journey’s End.” The qualities that we see early in the season have very little to do with these resolutions, and that’s the downside of giving a character problems to overcome and then letting her overcome them by about episode three.  

      If Donna’s arc goes in something of an odd direction, the Doctor’s is arguably even worse. I love “Midnight,” but the one respect in which the otherwise stellar episode is a bit of a letdown is that it doesn’t serve as the turning-point that the Doctor really needs. He could have seen the events of “Midnight” as a reason to re-evaluate some of his behavior and try for a little bit of humility, but his reaction to the events of that episode mostly takes the form of looking sad about the dark side of humanity. By the end of the season, his arrogance appears to have increased, as is especially visible in his willingness to arrange Rose’s future without getting her input. In general, the Doctor seems to have engaged in a lot of self-reflection before the start of the season, as can be seen in his admission of having hurt Martha in “Partners in Crime,” but much of the rest of the season comes across as more of a regression. This is also apparent in the season’s attention to the Doctor’s complex relationship with violence. The season leans pretty heavily on irony, as the Doctor shouts about pacifism more frequently than ever before and yet continuously gets caught up in violence. The idea of the Doctor as a fighter obsessed with non-violence is an interesting aspect of pretty much every incarnation of the Doctor, and the Tenth Doctor’s particular mixture of heroism and introspection make him an especially good version of the Doctor to really engage with this contradiction. I’m not sure that the season ever really goes beyond pointing out the inconsistency, though—often loudly, and with a total absence of subtlety. It’s interesting to see the gap between the ideals to which the Doctor aspires and the reality that he lives, but I think of this kind of contradiction as an effective starting-point for a story rather than an end in itself. Pointing out that the Doctor is arrogant and prone to violence in spite of his distaste for it is a reasonable move to make, but it would be a much more compelling narrative if he actually tried to work on these things, and what we get instead is basically a never-ending reminder that the Doctor has a lot of problems. In some ways, this lack of self-improvement makes sense, as the exploration of the Doctor’s narcissism continues into the specials, reaching its most interesting point in “The Waters of Mars.” (Even there, though, as in “Midnight,” the Doctor has a pretty stellar confrontation with his own problems, but still hasn’t quite figured out how to respond to them in subsequent episodes.) There’s certainly no requirement for a character’s sense of morality to be on a constant upward trajectory, but at the same time “Journey’s End” is the second season finale in a row that leaves me massively exasperated with the Doctor, and it’s especially annoying when other characters get sort of engulfed by the narrative of the Doctor’s everlasting struggle with his main flaws.  

         Because I see the seasonal arc as doing something of a disservice to the two main characters, I don’t see it as a particularly strong one; that being said, the details that Davies uses to build toward the plot are often very well done. The missing planets, the disappearing bees, and the hints that Rose is coming back are all expertly set up, and it’s nice to see the severed hand play a role after several seasons of occasional appearances. This season is sort of an odd mix of originality and repetition, in that there are a lot of extremely inventive premises, but there is little variety in terms of how they are resolved. “Midnight,” the library two-parter, and “Turn Left” are particularly great ideas, but their conclusions are so similar that they start to produce diminishing returns. Even if the “characters sacrifice themselves for the Doctor” angle gets overplayed, though, most episodes contain a tremendous amount of fun and creativity en route to that resolution. For me, properly enjoying this season involves skipping the Christmas special and “The Doctor’s Daughter” and stopping after “Midnight,” before the storyline takes a wrong turn, but in between the problems, there are about as many absolute triumphs as any other season. Donna is such a refreshing burst of warmth and joy that she makes the whole season far better than it would otherwise be, and she and Tennant really sparkle together. We get to watch some of the best comedic scenes of the entire reboot, as well as some of the creepiest scenes of monster-induced terror. The wrong turns that this season takes are frustrating in large part because when the season does work well, it’s absolutely sensational.  

Monsters, Aliens, etc.: Generally pretty great. The Vashta Nerada are solidly spooky, the Ood are terrific, and whatever is happening in “Midnight” is dramatically-captivating terror. I don’t love the giant wasp or the little fat-molecule creatures, but they make it possible for entertaining stories to unfold around them. The Sontarans don’t really register very much, and Davros and the Daleks get slightly buried under the avalanche of plot at the end of the season, but there are enough good monsters this season to make up for a few lapses.

Planets: “Midnight” unfolds brilliantly and terrifyingly in spite of taking place almost entirely in some kind of futuristic tour vehicle, but even here the mysterious nature of the planet provides strong support for the story—there’s something about the phrase “exothermic sun” that makes the setting’s danger seem properly scientific and plausible. Beyond this, there are some great physical settings, including the gorgeous library, a fabulous-looking Pompeii, and the awesome country mansion in the Agatha Christie episode. “Partners in Crime” is the best contemporary London has looked since Season One, and while I have a lot of issues with the finale, London looks pretty great there as well. Not everything is perfect, but I’m overall very happy with the settings for this season.

Female Characters: Well, “Journey’s End” is about as disastrous as this show has gotten in terms of gender, but other than that the show does a mostly wonderful job with women this season. Donna is, of course, the highlight, both because she is marvelously likeable and full of charisma and because of the ways in which she works against the expectation that the companion will be a traditional ingénue. Martha also makes a fantastic comeback this season—while I wish she could have been written this way more frequently when she was the female lead, she is much, much better this season and it’s really wonderful to see her embrace her potential without being encumbered with any silly unrequited love plots. We also have some great supporting characters, including the Hostess and Sky in “Midnight,” a magnificent, thoroughly redemptive return for Harriet Jones in “The Stolen Earth,” and a stunning debut for River Song in “Silence in the Library.” I have a lot of problems with the writing for Rose this season, Sylvia only works some of the time, and Astrid and Jenny are pretty serious missteps, but some of the reboot’s very best moments for women occur in this season.

           Overall, I find this season slightly overrated, not because I don’t like it but because it’s often seen as the best and I don’t think it quite deserves that. While Donna is probably my favorite out of all of Davies’s characters, I find the first season’s nuanced exploration of the Ninth Doctor’s post-Time-War trauma and exuberant portrayal of Rose’s introduction to TARDIS travel to be a stronger story than this season’s somewhat scattered treatment of its characters’ problems, and so I would consider Season One to be Davies’s best work. Nevertheless, there are so many absolutely glorious moments this season: Donna’s reunion with the Doctor in “Partners in Crime,” her insistence that the Doctor save someone in “Pompeii,” her reaction to the Ood’s song, River’s marvelous introduction and heartrending demise, the mysterious terror unfolding throughout “Midnight,” and lots of wonderful moments of friendship between the Tenth Doctor and his best companion. A/A-

 Episodes Ranked So Far:

1. The Satan Pit

2. Midnight

3. The Doctor Dances

4. Blink

5. The Family of Blood

6. The Empty Child

7. Dalek

8. The Parting of Ways

9. School Reunion

10. Forest of the Dead

11. The Fires of Pompeii

12. Partners in Crime

13. Utopia

14. Human Nature

15. The Impossible Planet

16. Silence in the Library

17. The Sound of Drums

18. Doomsday

19. The End of the World

20. Planet of the Ood

21. Father’s Day

22. Smith and Jones

23. Rose

24. The Unicorn and the Wasp

25. The Unquiet Dead

26. The Stolen Earth

27. Turn Left

28. Christmas Invasion

29. The Runaway Bride

30. The Girl in the Fireplace

31. Aliens of London

32. The Shakespeare Code

33. The Lazarus Experiment

34. Tooth and Claw

35. New Earth

36. The Sontaran Experiment

37. The Age of Steel

38. Bad Wolf

39. Rise of the Cybermen

40. The Poison Sky

41. Boom Town

42. World War III

43. Army of Ghosts

44. 42

45. Gridlock

46. The Last of the Time Lords

47. Idiot’s Lantern

48. Journey’s End

49. The Doctor’s Daughter

50. The Long Game

51. Voyage of the Damned

52. Love and Monsters

53. Evolution of the Daleks

54. Daleks in Manhattan

55. Fear Her

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 4, p. 3

Midnight: Davies has written a lot of epic, sometimes overblown stories, but this relatively quiet piece of terror is easily his most impressive, and it gives us more insight into the Doctor than perhaps any other episode in his time as showrunner. The supernatural presence in this episode is never defined or explained, but it never stops being terrifying. In general, the episode’s minimalism works sublimely well—the lack of spectacle and setting allows us to focus on the characters and the fear that they feel. Fear has rarely been more palpable on this show, especially in the long, chilling sequence of repeated language, and Alice Troughton’s magnificent direction and Tennant’s sublime performance keep the tension building for the entire episode. It’s one of the scariest episodes the show has ever done, but in spite of how frightening both the unknown presence and the panicking humans are, the episode isn’t completely without hope, and the pieces of light make this very dark episode much more meaningful than the straightforward piece of horror that it would otherwise have been.

The Doctor behaves here as he generally does—he’s interested in the people around him, he enjoys their company, and he’s determined to protect everyone once the danger becomes evident. If Donna had been with him, she might have balanced out his know-it-all tendencies enough to make his efforts to take charge more palatable, but on his own, the Doctor is a giant spectacle of brilliance and heroism, and some of the episode’s effectiveness lies in its understanding that in a moment of crisis, these qualities are less comforting than one might think. The Doctor doesn’t just fix problems, he does it with a flourish, and this draws attention to his personality in a way that can make him feel like part of the terror rather than a way of fighting it. I’m still not a huge fan of the depiction of Luke in the Sontaran episodes, but his bratty insistence on his own cleverness provides an interesting piece of context for the Doctor’s assertion that he should be in charge because he’s clever. The Doctor is by far the smartest and most capable person on board, but his assertiveness does come across as off-putting and perhaps inappropriate here; in the middle of a genuine panic, there are few things more terrifying than seeing someone who seems far less frightened and confused than he should be. He doesn’t really do anything wrong here; he’s had far worse moments of arrogance and narcissism at various points in the show, and he responds rationally and intelligently to the threat. He’s so busy being the hero, though, that he’s rarely seemed less human, and the lack of a human companion by his side makes this all the more dangerous.

I definitely miss Donna in this episode, but I get why this story required her absence, and I think it’s kind of awesome that she decided to sit out an adventure in favor of relaxing and enjoying herself. The need for drama means that we only really see the more thrilling pieces of the Doctor’s travels, but I’d definitely like to think that he and his companions at least occasionally put their feet up and have a margarita. Because this is mostly a companionless story, the minor characters have especial importance, and they’re an absolute triumph. I was surprisingly attached to Sky Silvestry, in spite of the fact that she becomes possessed so early in the episode that we get very little time with her actual personality. Everyone else is unusually well-rounded for one-episode characters, with the one exception of the Hostess. She is far less defined and generally easy to ignore, which makes her act of self-sacrifice all the more dramatically satisfying. She’s a startling savior, given that she’s spoken very little in the episode and has reacted far less vehemently than anyone else around her. We might have expected the more knowledgeable Dee Dee to be the one to figure things out, or even Jethro, who seems frustrated by his parents’ unwillingness to listen to his ideas. The Hostess has been a pretty unremarkable presence for the rest of the episode, and, as the Doctor remarks after she is dead, we never even learn her name. She listened, though, to the Doctor as he engaged in small talk at the start of the journey, and that’s enough to let her know how the alien presence is working even when all of the theorizing of the other characters completely fails. There have been many highly distinctive, memorable personalities on this show, but I love that we get an act of heroism here from someone who has otherwise faded into the background—this creates a surprising ending, but more importantly, it creates a brilliant disruption of the horrifying portrait of human nature that appears throughout the episode.  

A story like this definitely runs the risk of becoming so angsty and dark that it’s just unpleasant to watch, but I think it mostly avoids this. It’s definitely bleak, and I will say that this is not an episode that I’ve rewatched a lot—certainly less so than any of the other episodes near the top of my list. This is why, although I can definitely understand seeing this as the best episode of the reboot, for me it’s maybe sixth or seventh best, because there are other episodes that are about as brilliant and that I just like watching more than this one. Still, in spite of the bleakness, the episode ends on an intriguingly specific moment of redemption. This is partly because of the Hostess’s stunning moment of self-sacrifice, but what also really interests me about this moment is the fact that the Doctor is essentially saved by the quirks of his own self-expression. The scene makes it very clear that the Hostess realizes what has happened only when Sky begins to say the Doctor’s catchphrases: “Allons-y!” and “Molto bene!” These are generally presented as fun little pieces of dialogue, not as items of especial importance, but here they take on much more significance. The Doctor’s ego is definitely on display in this episode, and he makes clear that his status as the smartest person in the room is constantly on his mind, but it’s the tiny sparks of personality that wind up mattering here. There’s something really beautiful about having a voice so distinctive that it’s recognizably yours even if it’s been taken by force, and it’s a fitting tribute to the Doctor that it’s not his cleverness or courage that makes the difference in the end, but rather his unmistakable uniqueness. A+

Turn Left: Well, one episode after the Doctor gets a pretty clear message that his assumption that he is the world savior at all times can be obnoxious and frightening, we learn that if the Doctor wasn’t here to save us, we’d be in a terrifying dystopia within about a year and all of reality would start to disappear shortly thereafter. I still love the incisive look at the Doctor’s ego in “Midnight,” but we maybe could have followed it up with a little bit less of a validation of that ego. Anyways, the Doctor-less world is a fascinating concept, and it lets us have an entire episode focused on Donna. Some fans consider this to be among the best episodes of the reboot, and I definitely think it is one of the best ideas, but it switches with frustrating rapidity between brilliance and mediocrity, making it difficult to enjoy even the unequivocally good parts.  

           The structure of the episode is one of the items that alternates between stupidity and near-perfection. I do find the ways in which we learn of the deaths of the show’s major characters to be genuinely chilling. The fairly quiet portrayal of these events, generally conveyed through brief announcements on the news, makes for a much more heartrending sequence than what would result from a flashier depiction of the deaths. Hearing characters like Martha and Sarah Jane being killed off in a couple of sentences, as if they barely matter, is just so shocking that the deaths are very alarming, even though we know that this is an alternate universe and everything will probably go back to normal soon. The actual shape of the story doesn’t work quite as well for me, although I do love that it resolves the “something on your back” line from “The Fires of Pompeii.” The beginning has a weirdly Orientalist vibe—“Donna is attacked after naively trusting a mysterious, sinister Asian fortune-teller” sounds like the kind of story you’d expect to find in about 1897. The idea of the Trickster is interesting, but a lot of his abilities get explained on The Sarah Jane Adventures, which makes this episode a bit difficult to follow if you haven’t seen that show. In general, I really like the way that Davies creates links between Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane, but usually it’s possible to understand this show even if you don’t watch the spinoffs, and I’m not sure that that’s the case here. Still, the plot is more than anything else an occasion for us to watch a different version of Donna interacting with Rose, so a few moments of confusion are all right.

           This is the episode in which Rose finally returns properly, after several miniature cameos throughout the season. I loved those brief appearances, which I thought were a stellar way of hinting at what was to come, but her actual return is underwhelming to the point that I sort of regret the entire decision to bring back the character. It makes sense that she is different from the Rose that we knew in seasons One and Two, as this shows the impact of working for Torchwood and of living with her loss of the Doctor. I fully understand making her more serious—and, really, I wanted them to show her changing more than she did in Season Two—but there isn’t much of an effort to make that work for the character here. If we had seen a more gradual change across Season Two, this would be more believable, but she just seems like a completely different character; aside from the brief moments when she remembers how great the Doctor’s hair was and when she first watches Donna enter the TARDIS, there’s so little of Rose’s personality here that it just feels like they cast Billie Piper in a different role. Even The Moment in “The Day of the Doctor” has a little bit more of Rose’s personality, and that is literally not Rose at all and is just an interface using Rose’s image. She doesn’t get anything interesting to do here; I love that she has clearly gotten really good at her job, but in this episode, she basically turns up, tells Donna the information that she needs to know, and then vanishes, while being annoyingly and sort of needlessly cryptic. She uses some of the Doctor’s language (“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”) but she doesn’t have anything that reminds us of her own character, and even the Serious Rose angle goes back and forth between seeming like an awesome professional woman and putting on a weird affect that makes her look like she’s been drugged. I really find Piper’s performance odd here, but I’m assuming that Davies or the director told her to play the character like this because Billie Piper is a stunningly fabulous actress and she could have done so much better than this. On the one hand, regardless of the portrayal of Rose herself, we do get two women saving the world together, which is great. (In general, this is one of the most female-centric episodes of the reboot; Wilf and the Italian neighbor get a fair amount of screen time, but the other major characters are basically all women.) On the other hand, this is the first sustained return of Rose after her departure, and it’s a lot less great that for much of the episode, she’s just a plot device, and kind of an irritating one.

           In spite of the attention given to Rose and to the numerous character deaths, Donna is the star here, and even when I’m not thrilled about what the episode is doing with the character, it’s wonderful to see her get so much screen time. I’ve heard this referred to as the episode in which Donna stops being a joke, but I don’t think this is true at all, as she’s been a non-joke since the end of “Pompeii” at the latest. It is an interesting shift for the character, though, in that we finally get to see her in ordinary circumstances for an extended period of time; between her departure with the Doctor at the end of “Partners in Crime” and her return at the conclusion of “Journey’s End,” the Sontaran two-parter is the only time that Donna visits home, so even with an alternate universe and alternate Donna, this episode provides an important piece of context for a character who uses the TARDIS to escape from ordinary life more than any other companion. Granted, “ordinary” has taken on a new meaning here, as the world has collapsed into a dystopian mess, but we see her in a lot of situations that don’t involve dealing with the supernatural. Brief as they are, it’s nice to get scenes of Donna going out for drinks with her friends, singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” with her housemates, or railing against her employer as he fires her. It’s a little frustrating that we get this kind of material only in an alternate universe episode, as it still just leaves us with the idea that this is what Donna’s everyday life would have looked like if her life had been quite different from what it was; still, the episode conveys her sadness and hopelessness beautifully, and it is definitely the best portrayal of her relationship with her mother. The situation they are in is so terrible that Sylvia’s tendency toward complaint has more depth than it usually does, and this makes her into much less of a caricature than she is in other episodes. The episode doesn’t sugarcoat the problems between these two—Sylvia makes clear that she’s basically given up on her daughter—but their difficult relationship is nuanced and believable, and ultimately very moving.

           This episode lets us see more of the flaws that Donna had mostly overcome even by the earliest episodes of this season. In the absence of the Doctor, her tendencies toward self-centered shallowness haven’t been challenged, and it’s interesting to see more of those qualities here, although I think that one scene might go too far. I like the scene in which she just keeps yelling about her own problems while the hospital gets transported to the moon, but I’m less pleased with the scene that depicts her as somehow not realizing that immigrant labor camps are a problem until Wilf points out the obvious to her. The former scene works because lots of people tune out the suffering of others that they see on the news. Donna is definitely being portrayed as self-centered and callous here, but she’s taking on those qualities to a degree that seems believable and doesn’t make her look like a psychopath. There’s a difference, though, between ignoring the misfortunes of strangers on the news and being completely oblivious to the pain of your friends when they’re standing in front of you, and I just don’t buy that she would be quite this disengaged, even in a giant dystopia in which lots of different terrible things are happening. She thinks her housemate is loud, but she does seem to like him, and having people she knows being rounded up on a wagon and taken to forced labor camps on the grounds that they are immigrants is a pretty big thing to overlook. She does get upset about it once Wilf starts talking about “the last time,” but she swallows her neighbor’s cheerful lies about the labor camps being all right so easily that she comes across as having the awareness of a six-year-old. My concern here is that it makes the change that the Doctor produced in her seem bigger than I assumed it was. The general impression that I get of Donna is that she has quite a lot of natural empathy, courage, and generosity, but she felt like she had so little control in her life that she didn’t really make use of those qualities as much until the Doctor awoke those feelings in her and made her try harder. This scene makes it look like the Doctor basically gave her a new brain, or at least implanted some qualities in her that hadn’t existed prior to their meeting, and I would prefer to stick with the idea that the Doctor brought about an awakening in her and not a total personality transplant.

           I’m also conflicted about her act of self-sacrifice that returns us to the show’s normal universe. Part of my issue with this is that the season has by this point leaned too hard on the notion that good people die protecting the Doctor. I get why this is here, because it’s going to come up in the finale, but of the past six storylines, this is the fifth to resolve things through the structure of “The Doctor is dead/about to die but someone [takes his place on the exploding Sontaran ship/jumps in front of the gun/takes the fatal charge of the library computer in his stead/throws herself out the airlock/jumps in front of a van] so that he can live.” It reads more as an attempt to build a theme than as an inability to think up a wider range of endings, but this should be a really big moment for Donna, and I think the impact is diminished by the fact that we’ve seen similar actions in so many recent episodes, especially since the scenes in “Midnight” and “Forest of the Dead” were so brilliantly done. In spite of the repetition, her moment of sacrifice is very dramatically effective, but I like it less the more that I think about it. The Donna who travels with the Doctor has been shown to be smart, compassionate, resistant to being told what to do, and good at making connections with people. She’s valuable because of who she is, and what her heart and mind bring to their adventures together. The version of Donna that we meet in this episode has a tremendous moment of embracing death for the good of the world, and she does show some quick thinking in figuring out what needs to happen, but ultimately she is valuable because her corpse causes a helpful traffic jam. It’s not even the case that she’s doing something useful and gets killed while doing it—what the story needs is a body in the right place on the road, and she allows her own body to serve that function. Her death is very meaningful here, but in the rest of the series, her life has value, and while this episode ostensibly lets Donna find a sense of heroism without the Doctor’s help, it winds up emphasizing how much her personal growth depended on the Doctor’s influence. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that Donna was fundamentally altered through her travels with the Doctor, but this episode is sometimes celebrated as an empowering vision of how Donna would have been amazing even without the Doctor, and to me this ending doesn’t really manage that.

           Sacrificing your life in order to protect a different version of yourself is an interesting psychological scenario, although the time constraints of wrapping everything up in one episode means that we don’t get to go into this very much. I can imagine that if you were feeling hopeless and valueless, news of another you running around helping to save the world would be an odd thing to experience. It might be thrilling to learn of a better version of yourself, but it could also be immensely frustrating to look around at your actual circumstances and see how different they are from this vision of your ideal self. It’s a fascinating concept, but the episode doesn’t quite have time to go into the complexities of her feelings about this. The story’s conclusion makes clear that AU Donna values the version of herself who travels with the Doctor more highly than she values herself, although the degree to which this is a world-saving act of self-sacrifice versus a somewhat self-interested attempt to take on the better version of her own life is unclear. The relationship between the two Donnas is also unclear to me; Rose denies the notion that AU Donna will simply become proper Donna, but she is able to remember the phrase “Bad Wolf” at the end, which suggests that at least some of AU Donna’s consciousness transferred into the primary Donna’s mind. I’m possibly just looking for more of a metaphor than the story is actually trying to depict, but I keep feeling like I should be able to understand more about actual Donna on the basis of what we see of her alternate self, and I never really get much insight into her beyond a general sense that she’s a good person whose life would have been much worse without the Doctor in it.

           I’ve spent a lot of time talking about problems in this episode, which might make this review reflect more negativity than I feel; in spite of my dislike of this episode’s approach to Donna, she still gets some great material. I’m not sure if a companion has ever been given as much of an emotional range to work with in a single episode, and Tate conveys the characters feelings—her hopelessness about life, her panic and terror about her role in events, her occasional moments of enjoyment in spite of everything—in a tremendously detailed, utterly believable performance. I wish that we had been given a more coherent vision of what it would be like for Donna to find some of her best qualities without the Doctor’s assistance, but there are moments in which Davies gets things exactly right, like this exchange between Wilf and Donna: “You’re not going to make the world any better by shouting at it.” “I can try.” B+

The Stolen Earth: I find it difficult to evaluate this episode, because it sets up a lot of plot developments that I wind up hating, but they don’t really go awry until the next episode. I really liked this one the first time I saw it, and I do think that it’s mostly very good, but after watching “Journey’s End,” my frustration with that episode spoils some of my enjoyment of the setup that this episode provides. Taken on its own, though, this is an exciting piece of television with a lot of lovely guest appearances, so it’s not really fair to criticize it for a subsequent episode’s problems.

           In some respects, the huge cast is a limitation of this episode, because there are just SO MANY characters that it feels like we can’t spend enough time with any of them. Watching an episode starring The Doctor, Rose, Martha, Donna, Captain Jack, Gwen, Ianto, Jackie, Mickey, Wilf, Harriet, and Sarah Jane sort of feels like being a puppy when lots of humans come into the room; you want to rush over to someone and wag your tail in excitement, but there are so many humans that it’s easiest to just sort of run around in circles. Even if the episode does pull in slightly too many directions, though, they’re mostly very good directions. Martha continues to be a much better character this season than she was in the previous one, and the episode does a great job of creating tension about how long it would take for anyone to notice that Rose is back on Earth. (Rose continues to demonstrate the skills she has honed in the parallel universe, but she seems like herself again, which makes the previous episode’s weird portrayal of the character even stranger.) My favorite return, though, is that of Harriet Jones, which goes a long way toward remedying the awfulness that happened with her character in “Christmas Invasion.” I don’t know if this was the plan all along or if this was a response to criticism of that episode, but she gets back all of the dignity and integrity that “Christmas Invasion” took away from her, and she’s just marvelous. I’m sad to see her die, but I love that she is given a thoughtful, brave, heroic death that totally redeems her from the earlier nonsense.

           There are some really lovely moments of plotting here, in which we find out what has been going on with the various missing planets mentioned throughout the season and why the bees have been disappearing. Davies has woven these ideas into the fabric of the season in a really understated way, and they come together beautifully here. He’s really very good at introducing details like this without telegraphing that they’re going to play a major role in the seasonal arc—both this and the early pieces of the Harold Saxon storyline are set up with impressive subtlety. We also get to see the Shadow Proclamation and the return of the fabulous Rhinoceros Police, so there’s plenty of great material to enjoy in this episode.

In spite of my enjoyment of most of the plot here, it does feel like the storyline that’s taking shape here is a massive departure from the rest of the season. The strong character work in many episodes has given this season a sense of intimacy, and the delights of the Tenth Doctor/Donna pairing have created a consistent sense of fun, although the last couple of episodes already started the movement away from that. Season finales tend to be big and epic, so that’s unsurprising here, but the focus on so many different characters and the sudden raising of the stakes makes this feel disconnected from most of the episodes that came before it. Still, it’s a solid piece of setup, and the final moments, in which the Doctor is shot down by a Dalek just as he finally sees Rose again, create a terrific cliffhanger. A-/B+

Journey’s End: Oh, good grief. About nine million things happen here, and a lot of them are absolute nonsense, but the frustrating thing is that the episode is occasionally brilliant, so we get a tantalizing sense of what this episode might have been like if the good elements had been grounded in a more believable story. Part of the problem is the continuation of the previous episode’s tendency to seem much bigger than the season’s storyline can support. The placement of details about disappearing bees and planets has been impeccable, but while the season has been superb at conveying the necessary exposition in a subtle manner, it has done nothing to prepare for the tone that this finale takes. Both of the next two season finales also work with crazy plots and extreme emotional intensity, but in both cases something of that tone is established at the start of the season and continues to make appearances throughout the season, so that by the time we reach the finale that energy makes sense. Here, the plot just feels like it’s overflowing from its container; I quite like the idea of a reality bomb, but if you want me to believe that by making a bunch of planets into a big space diorama and then pressing a button the Daleks can wipe out not only this universe but also all other universes as well, you really need to prepare for a story of that magnitude, and the relatively small-scale feel of much of this season doesn’t do that at all.  

In addition to seeming at odds with the tone of the season, this episode also draws upon previous seasons to an unfortunate degree. The plot is essentially this: the Daleks have been trying to destroy the universe, as they do, and the Doctor is trying to stop them. There’s a possibility of defeating the Daleks through major violence, like destroying the Earth, but the Doctor is against it because he is a man of peace. Just when it looks like the Doctor has failed and the universe is in great peril, it turns out that the Doctor’s companion, who has gone off in the TARDIS without him against her will, has unknowingly absorbed a huge amount of abilities that vastly exceed anything she has ever been able to do before. She turns up at the last minute and saves the day, her “just so human” qualities combining productively with her new powers, thus explaining a phrase that was brought up earlier in the season and creating an awesome moment in which the ordinary, working-class woman saves the world. Unfortunately, her body can’t take this influx of power for long, and so it has to be removed from her, and sadness ensues. I liked this plot when it was called “The Parting of Ways,” but this episode takes the framework from that finale and exaggerates it until it ceases to be enjoyable.

This show has repeated concepts plenty of times, and it usually works, because the constant recasting means that we can take a concept from a previous episode and see how it works differently with a new Doctor or companion. This many recycled elements in one episode, though, is just too much, and once again it doesn’t quite manage to give Donna the moment she deserves. On the one hand, I do really love the reveal of the human-Time Lord metacrisis; it’s fantastic to see Donna be the hero for a while, and after saving the world she makes the Daleks spin around, which is hilarious. There’s also a nice reference to her time as a temp, as she makes use of her quick typing skills. Unlike Rose as the Bad Wolf, she retains much of her personality even when she has acquired her new powers, and her moment of triumph is an absolute delight. On the other hand, there’s been so much attention to the idea that Donna really is special, even if she doesn’t quite believe it, and I don’t think that centering her moment of triumph on a retread of something Rose did three seasons ago conveys that specialness. After “Turn Left” concluded with her act of sacrifice that mimicked the actions of many other characters in this season, this episode really needed to give her something unique to work with, and in that sense it completely fails. I also think that Donna’s triumph is a little bit too reliant on luck. In “The Parting of Ways,” it was definitely a fortunate coincidence that Rose happened to take on godlike powers just when the Daleks were about to win, but her determination to return to the Doctor, her speech about learning a better way to live, and her collaboration with Mickey and Jackie in getting the TARDIS to open really make it seem like her absorption of power is a direct result of her own choices and values. Donna takes on new abilities here because she was in the right place at the right time, and so while it remains lovely to watch her take charge, it seems a bit unearned. (There’s also a lot of nonsense from Dalek Caan about predestination and external controlling forces, and it’s unclear to me exactly how much of a role that played in this season, but I don’t like it.) Her temp abilities (100 words per minute!) may have been useful, but she wouldn’t have been able to do any of what she accomplishes here if the metacrisis hadn’t poured a lot of knowledge into her head. It’s fun to watch her succeed, but Donna doesn’t become great so much as she has greatness thrust upon her, and I would be more satisfied by this development if Donna’s actual values and abilities played more of a role.

           This storyline does allow for some very good things. Dalek Caan’s involvement is sort of interesting, even if it is explained so quickly that it doesn’t make as much of an impact as it could. In addition to sort of enjoying Donna’s moment of world-saving, in spite of my reservations about it, I also love what this episode does with Martha, whose reluctant but determined effort to use the Osterhagen Key is one of the most compelling pieces of the episode. I was constantly aggravated by the third season’s focus on her jealousy of Rose, but when she finally learns of her predecessor’s return, she simply says “Oh my God, he found you!” and looks genuinely happy for the Doctor. It’s a small moment, but a really beautiful one, and an indication of how much better the writing has been for Martha this season. I also really love the scene in which all of the characters fly the TARDIS together in order to tow the Earth back to its proper spot; yes, it’s cheesy, but it’s awfully sweet. Even if I’m frustrated with some of the ways in which the characters are used here, this really is a marvelous ensemble of people, and seeing them together is a nice reminder of how many supremely likeable figures Davies has created for us.      

           I would also say that some of the things that the episode tends to get criticized for don’t strike me as all that bad. The Doctor regenerating into himself does make the previous episode’s cliffhanger look like a pretty contrived piece of drama, but the regeneration energy and its effect on the severed hand are important later in the episode, so I can see the value of this development. It sort of messes with the rules of regeneration as we’ve come to understand them, but it’s a pretty ambiguous process anyways, so I don’t think it’s inexcusable to shift them a bit here. The severed hand itself is a particularly good piece of plotting, as Davies has been building this into the narratives of both this show and Torchwood across several seasons. I’m not even as troubled by Donna’s memory erasure as some people are. The complaints against this tend to take the form that the Doctor removing her memories even while she is directly saying, “No, no, no” has a sort of rape-like quality to it, as he is completely ignoring her wishes about how to deal with her body and mind. I can see this, but I can also understand why the Doctor would feel like he should act in this way. She could be seconds away from dying, and so there isn’t time for him to get into an argument with her about why it’s better for her to live, and I can imagine the Doctor’s desperation to avoid bringing her corpse home to Wilf. It absolutely should be her choice, but while I think this is a problematic moment, the Doctor is making a decision that I can imagine a decent person making in a moment of crisis, so it’s a dark scene that avoids making him into a monster. It also is a genuinely tragic ending to Donna’s story—probably the saddest thing this show has done that doesn’t eventually get reversed. Having her save the world but retain no memory of it is an awful fate for someone who enters the show with very little self-esteem, and her reversion to her former more callous self is just heartbreaking. The erasure of her memory is wonderfully acted by both Tate and Tennant, and even if I have some doubts about this as an ending for Donna I am really moved by the whole sequence. Her casual goodbye to the Doctor at her home is probably the saddest moment of the entire episode, and it’s one of the few things in this episode that at least partly seems like it is tragic because of what it means to her and not because of what it means to the Doctor.

           This is an unfortunately rare thing in an episode that turns basically everybody else (and sometimes Donna too) into ways of understanding the Doctor’s guilt and loneliness. What I am most bothered by is what Davies does to poor Rose. She does get some gorgeous scenes early in the episode, especially the moment in which she takes the Doctor’s hand while it looks like the TARDIS is being destroyed, but her final scene is appalling. I don’t object at all to having her wind up with the Doctor clone, but the manner of getting them together is just so awful that I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking. Rose Tyler has always been fiercely determined to make her own choices about her life. The Doctor sent her away at the end of Season One, and she used a big truck to pull the TARDIS open in order to get back to him. She winds up being taken to the parallel universe at the end of Season Two, but when the Doctor first sneaks one of the universe-travel devices around her neck and sends her there, she comes right back. Even when she has landed in the parallel universe, she keeps trying to return to him. She has fought so hard to be able to make her own choices about her life even in seemingly hopeless situations, which is why it’s so odd to watch her care so little about her own agency in her last moments on the show. I get that the gaps between universes are closing and so there isn’t time for a lot of discussion, but the Doctor could have at least asked her what she wanted to do. Instead, he just takes the TARDIS right to the parallel universe and then, once they’re there, he informs her that she’s going to help the banished Doctor clone to get over his inner violence, but it’s ok because they can date. She very briefly objects to this on the grounds that the Doctor clone isn’t the man that she knew, but it takes about four seconds for her to go along with the plan, and having the two Doctors repeat the conversation from the end of “Doomsday” so that the clone can say “I love you” doesn’t take the place of giving Rose the chance to think about what she wants. The whole sequence comes across as extremely manipulative and creates the sense that our Doctor is refusing to say he loves her just to make sure that Rose follows the plan. I also assume that the entire notion of banishing the clone to this parallel world is a similar ruse, as the Doctor has committed genocide before, and so the only reason to banish him is to create the circumstances necessary for Rose to stay in the parallel world. (Or maybe he does genuinely think that the other Doctor is truly dangerous? I honestly can’t tell what his ethical position is here.) She looks a bit cruel for kissing the other Doctor in front of him, and he looks awfully controlling, especially since he scampers while they’re kissing instead of saying goodbye. I can’t believe that Donna was on the Doctor’s side here; the Donna we’ve had all season would be shouting at the Doctor and probably throwing sand at him at this point. I get that the Doctor is being all noble and this solution is probably best for Rose in the long run, but he works so hard to force the resolution that Rose gets to play only a very small role in determining her own future. He interferes with Donna’s decision-making in a moment of crisis in which she was otherwise about to die, but he takes charge of Rose’s life when, even with the clock ticking, there was enough time to give her more of a choice—and she doesn’t even seem to mind. Rose Tyler is one of the most beloved characters in the history of this show, and one of the biggest reasons why the reboot became so successful, and she deserved a much better ending than one that essentially involves saying “I don’t have to care about my autonomy anymore, because the Doctor can be my boyfriend now!”

           This isn’t the only way in which this episode comes across as disrespectful toward its female characters. Davros is mostly wasted here, as he is really just used to tell the Doctor to feel bad about himself, but the most irritating thing about his function in this episode is that he asks the Doctor and, implicitly, the audience, to see the other characters almost entirely in terms of what they reveal about the Doctor. Martha’s principled, quietly determined consideration of destroying her own planet in order to save the rest of the universe, Sarah Jane’s acquisition of the Warp Star, and the efforts of all of the other returning companions all become ways of reminding the Doctor that he can’t shake the association with violence. The Doctor does try to defend them, saying that they’re trying to help, but the episode seems to take Davros’s critique pretty seriously. The montage of guilt, in which the Doctor remembers the deaths of numerous (mostly female) characters from the past few seasons, is even worse.  I don’t usually find this show to be particularly bad in terms of fridging, although it does happen on occasion; there are plenty of female characters who die, but the show isn’t excessive about it, and many of them die in ways that are meaningful to their own stories and not just methods of propping up the Doctor’s narrative. The montage of character deaths, though, essentially digs up the corpses of a lot of women and chucks them into a giant freezer. Even beautifully done scenes, like the deaths of River and the Hostess, suffer from being placed into a montage of reasons for the Doctor to feel guilty, removing these deaths from the narratives of those characters and presenting them as stepping-stones in the Doctor’s moral journey.            

The Doctor has plenty of flaws, and this version of him arguably has more than some of the other regenerations. He has a tendency to be narcissistic, arrogant, and oblivious to other people’s feelings. He’s still a wonderful, charming, admirable hero, but these flaws are there and it usually works well when people point them out. The fact that people sometimes die in proximity to him is not really among these flaws—there are occasional exceptions, like “Human Nature,” but it’s usually the case that if the Doctor wasn’t around, a lot more people would die. It also isn’t really a problem that he takes smart, brave people and gives them the ability to fight back against evil beings who are trying to destroy the whole of reality. I don’t get the sense that Sarah Jane, Martha, and the rest are being needlessly violent, they’re just trying to be practical in a fight against literally the worst thing that could possibly happen. Granted, Davros is not exactly someone you’d expect to have spot-on moral advice, but the show and the Doctor seem to believe pretty strongly in his words, and this means that the show has to embrace the notion that the ways in which many of its major figures have developed in recent years basically just serve as reasons to be skeptical of the Doctor. There isn’t any meaningful sense of doubt on the part of the characters themselves—Martha, for instance, gets some fascinating material throughout the episode, but there’s never any real attention to her potential concerns about the kind of person she’s become as a result of the path that the Doctor put her on. Nobody else’s feelings matter much here; the Doctor has a moment of tremendous moral doubt, and everyone else just gets pulled in as an illustration of that guilt.

And then we get the mass exodus of people, which is done in the most annoying way possible. Sarah Jane’s nice comment that the Doctor acts lonely but actually has a huge family just winds up becoming tragically ironic, and it takes forever, and the last twenty minutes feel like a never-ending epilogue. The whole episode is just weirdly structured, like going to an  ABBA concert and then having Coldplay come out to do an encore that’s half as long as the rest of the concert. What feels like the climax of the story occurs well before the end, and then we get another one, sort of, and even if pieces of it work well the whole thing is just a mess. Eventually, we get to the end, and the Doctor is being sad and lonely in the rain, and it makes a great meme but I don’t think there’s anything in the world that isn’t a symbol of the Doctor’s guilt and grief at this point; the Earth basically just exists as a large-scale reminder that he has flaws, without any sense that the Doctor is aware of what his actual bad qualities are or how he could fix them. There are a lot of amazing characters in this episode, but in the end, they’re just ways of breaking the Doctor’s hearts, and Davies has never done a bigger disservice to the genuinely lovely world he created than this. C

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 4, p. 2

The Doctor’s Daughter: This isn’t the worst episode of the reboot, but it might be the most emotionally unsatisfying. Producing a biological relative for the Doctor by putting his hand in a machine for a few seconds undercuts his grief about the loss of his people without really any payoff—his lackluster relationship with his daughter just doesn’t do enough to compensate for the notion that apparently getting Time Lords back into the world is a lot easier than we thought. There are a couple of nice moments in which the Doctor refers to his grief about his Time Lord family, but his sense of loneliness—usually taken very seriously by the show—is undermined more often than it is accentuated here.

           I’m not really sure why Martha is in this episode, as she doesn’t want to be there and there’s very little for her to do. She forms sort of a nice bond with one of the fish creatures, but the Hath are mostly so dull that Martha’s forced to wander around in a weird, personality-less void in which fish with legs stand around breathing. She’s not really missing out on much while she’s a captive of the Hath, as the human civilization is also entirely without interest. There’s a lot of talk about war, and then there’s a brief creation myth, and then one of the humans claims that peace and genocide are the same thing so that the Doctor can yell about violence and Jenny can point out how violent he is. We’ve had an awful lot of this theme (the Doctor thinks he is above violence! but also the Doctor is violent!) in the past couple of episodes, which would be fine if it were going anywhere interesting but it’s basically not. The plot twist—in which it is revealed that the war has been going on for only a matter of days—is genuinely pretty surprising, but it’s so difficult to invest in these characters or this world that it doesn’t mean very much.  

           Jenny herself is likeable enough, but is one of the clearest foray into Mary Sue territory that the show has ever done. She’s born perky, quick-witted, and intensely athletic, and can easily understand other people’s motives and characteristics in spite of having only just sprung into existence. Other talents include asking lots of questions so that we get exposition about stuff that we already know, doing back flips through laser beams, and flirting. The actress (Peter Davison’s daughter and Tennant’s future wife) does as much as she can with the material, and she really does have a very charming screen presence, but the script confines her so thoroughly to the “attractive, physically gifted woman” box that there’s not much for her to work with. Given her origins, it’s not surprising that her connection to the Doctor comes across as forced and artificial, but I just never buy any real emotional connection between them.

           I’m even more annoyed by the “death” of the daughter, as her return to life is weirdly emotionless and doesn’t follow any of what we know about Time Lord regeneration. This non-death also lands us with one of the worst-ever Doctor speeches. Tennant generally does grief and anger very well, but his shouty speech directed at the warring figures comes across as absolutely moronic. The Doctor has a tendency to tell other people what to do, which is somewhat justified by his years of experience in dealing with conflict, but it’s a lot more palatable when it’s tempered by his awareness of his own mistakes and problems. Here, he pretty straightforwardly tells the people of this planet to model their society around their consciousness of how much better than them he is, and it’s just absolutely insufferable. I do think that his claims that he “never would” engage in their destructive behavior are deliberate irony on the part of the show, in the sense that this season does give us fairly consistent reminders that the Doctor is always trying to distance himself from violence without ever quite succeeding. That makes sense of this scene’s role in the larger arc of the season, but it doesn’t explain why the character himself has so little self-awareness or so much willingness to lie to himself that he can bring himself to say nonsense like this.

           Donna is loveable as usual here, and I particularly like her insistence that the Doctor take seriously his connection to his daughter. She also describes the feeling of stepping off the TARDIS onto a new place as being like “swallowing a hamster,” which is pretty fabulous. (I could do without the Doctor sending a mechanical mouse toy to distract a guard because Donna’s “wiles” aren’t enough, though.) She just doesn’t play a large enough role in this story to save it from the cheap emotional foundation; the entire concept of “we need the Doctor to feel feelings, preferably loudly and angrily, let’s put a blonde in” is so tired by this point that it’s difficult to watch. C/C-

The Unicorn and the Wasp: And we’re back to good episodes for a while! This is easy to forget in light of the bigger, flashier episodes to come this season, but it’s very fun. Donna’s having a great time pretending to be a 1920s socialite, and the episode gives both Tate and Tennant a lot of opportunity to demonstrate their marvelous comedic timing. Meeting Agatha Christie at a country house when someone has been murdered is a similar enough idea to “The Unquiet Dead” and “The Shakespeare Code” that they actually have Donna make a joke about it, but it’s a premise worth repeating. I do think that Agatha Christie would have written a much better mystery than this one, as none of the twists are particularly effective and the resolution is moderately entertaining but unremarkable. Still, having a giant wasp attack a bunch of rich white people (aka WASPs) is a good joke, and watching the characters try to figure out what’s going on is fun even in the absence of a compelling mystery.

           Christie herself is generally pretty well-written, but among the major historical figures the show has portrayed, she’s not one of my favorites. Part of the problem is that the actress gets sort of upstaged by some of the other guest stars. The not-yet-famous Felicity Jones is a delight as a jewel thief, but the wonderful Felicity Kendal (one of the stars of the great 1970s comedy The Good Life) steals the show. I don’t think she’s really supposed to, as she’s a fairly minor character whose function is to have a dark secret that informs the mystery, but I find myself watching her rather than Agatha Christie when they’re on screen together. Nonetheless, the idea that the events of this episode are the reason why Christie disappeared for a few days gives it a nice sense of importance, and the revelation that her books are perpetual bestsellers is not quite as moving as the similar moment in “The Unquiet Dead” but is still quite lovely.

           The heart of this story is not the character herself, really, but rather the whimsical adventures that ensue from the Vespiform’s absorption of her writing. A couple of serious moments exist, including Donna’s willingness to kill the Vespiform when the Doctor refuses, but for the most part this episode is all about the comedy. There are silly flashbacks, exaggerated plot twists, and at one point there’s a lengthy comedic bit about the Doctor cleansing poison from his system. There are also lots of accidental references to books that Christie hasn’t written yet, and Donna unsuccessfully tries to get herself into a copyright page. Nothing really remarkable happens here, but it’s just so bubbly and charming that the episode is an absolute joy to watch. A-/B+

Silence in the Library: Even if the story itself had been boring, I would have really enjoyed this episode just for the beautiful, terrifying library in which it takes place. I love libraries, and if I were in charge of the show we’d probably have a library setting about once a season. Happily, this library is home to a compelling story, with a spooky new set of monsters and a marvelous debut for River Song.

           River is definitely the highlight of this two-parter, and Alex Kingston is immediately fantastic as the doomed time-traveler. It’s a bold move to introduce a new character, heavily imply that she’s the Doctor’s wife, suggest that there are lots more adventures with her in the Doctor’s future, and then kill her by the end of the two-episode story. I can’t think of many other characters on the show who have been introduced with quite so much fanfare, and so it’s a testament to Kingston’s performance that the emotional impact of the character exceeds the impressiveness of the plot to which she is attached. She has immediate chemistry with the Doctor, and her distress at having met a version of the Doctor who doesn’t know her unfolds beautifully across the episode. In spite of this distress, though, there’s just such a tremendous sense of enjoyment and energy in everything she does, as if she can’t help relishing the challenge and the adrenaline in spite of everything that’s going wrong. The rest of her crew aren’t quite as interesting, and Miss Evangelista’s brainlessness is a bit overplayed, although I do like the brief friendship she strikes up with Donna. This two-parter is basically about the chemistry between River and the Doctor, though, and even when the supporting cast isn’t quite as good, these two absolutely sparkle.  

           The Vashta Nerada aren’t quite as memorable to me as the Gas Mask Child or the Angels, but they are solidly scary monsters, and the fact that we see the gnawed skeletons that they produce but never see the monsters themselves definitely adds to the effect. The statues with human faces don’t really do much for me, and even when we see Donna’s face at the end of the episode I’m mostly unimpressed. I’m much more interested in the ghostly remnants of consciousness that linger in those the Vashta Nerada have killed—the notion of digitally-saved consciousness is creepy in itself, but hearing Proper Dave and Miss Evangelista continuing to speak even after their deaths is absolutely harrowing. Between the dangers that lie in the shadows and the terror of listening to the dead continue to speak, there are lots of properly terrifying moments.

           The one major problem that I have with this episode is that I don’t really find the computer universe to be particularly interesting. I like the concept of having “saved” people to a computer, but I spend most of the scenes with the little girl and Dr. Moon just waiting to get back to the library. To be fair, the use of her television is pretty cool, as is the fact that she has a picture of a blond woman and a wolf on her wall, but I find the character herself to be pretty irritating. There are enough things that don’t work for me here that I don’t find this story to be quite as compelling as “Blink” or “The Empty Child,” but the gorgeous setting and the terrific introduction of River are enough to make this one of the stronger episodes of the season. A/A-

Forest of the Dead: Unreal universes clearly fascinate Moffat, who will return to this trope a number of times in later episodes. This two-parter is his first foray into a story like this, which gives it a sense of originality that diminishes as we see the concept repeat in subsequent seasons, but I would argue that this fake universe—which becomes more prevalent here than it was in the previous episode—is nowhere near as interesting as the ones that appear later on in episodes like “Last Christmas” and “Extremis” or Simon Nye’s “Amy’s Choice.” It is genuinely sad to see Donna realize that her children aren’t real, and it’s even sadder that she never finds out that her husband in the fake universe was in fact an actual person, but the whole place just says Fake Sci-Fi Universe so blatantly that I never find any interest in it as an alternate reality. It also feels oddly uncreative; I get that the other reality was initially created for Cal’s benefit, and that might explain the domestic focus, but the thoroughly unadventurous world isn’t very exciting and doesn’t seem completely suitable as a happily-ever-after for someone as energetic as Donna. Miss Evangelista, who experienced an error in translation that increased her IQ but also resulted in physical disfigurement, is a striking presence but even she doesn’t really hold my interest. (It’s also unfortunate that the script isn’t as clear as it could be about the relationship between the two changes that she experienced; I don’t think she really says anything that implies a causal relationship between the two, but a slightly vague sentence structure makes it possible to read this as a claim that her decreased attractiveness made possible her increased intelligence, which would definitely have been worth avoiding.)            

Because I don’t really enjoy the world to which Donna and others have been “saved,” this episode only really works for me when we’re in the library itself. Fortunately, there are a number of good scenes in the library and then one absolutely sublime one, as River sacrifices herself so that the Doctor can live to make all of the memories that she’s already had with him. It’s an absolutely stunning piece of writing, acting, and musical underscoring, and River’s death is so moving that it’s difficult to believe that this is only her second episode. I’m not sure what gets to me the most in this scene; it might be River telling the Doctor “you watch us run,” as she thinks of the time together that’s still to come for him, or it might be the Doctor’s acknowledgment that there’s only one reason why he would ever have told her his name, or it might be some of the best music Murray Gold’s ever composed, but in retrospect, I think what makes me saddest is the fact that one of the last things she hears is the Doctor unknowingly saying her mother’s favorite expression. She’s quick to shut down the idea that time can be rewritten in this case, but if you watch this after seeing later seasons, the words allow the spirit of Amy Pond to make a brief, heartbreaking appearance in her daughter’s final moments.

           River’s connection to the Doctor works marvelously well throughout the episode, and the notion that he’s like seeing a photograph of someone from before you knew them gives us a lovely way into her feelings. The Doctor takes an embarrassingly long time to get the connection between books and trees, but he does do some pretty stellar thinking as he figures out what it means to have “saved” all four thousand people. (He figures this out in the middle of Anita trying to have a meaningful last conversation, which isn’t his kindest moment, but it’s still impressive.) The Vashta Nerada and their creepy shadows continue to be very frightening, but the resolution—in which the Doctor intimidates them into leaving everyone alone by telling them to look him up in the library’s books—is not the most satisfying end to the main plot. The final moments, though, in which he “saves” River to the library computer, make for a much stronger conclusion. River is one of the many characters to only sort-of die, and my lack of interest in the computer universe means that I’m not that excited about the continued existence of her consciousness within it. However, the Doctor’s realization of why he gave her his screwdriver and his rush to “save” her is so compellingly done that I’m very moved by the scene in spite of the minor issues that I have with it.

           As in the first part, I don’t find this episode quite as brilliant as some of Moffat’s other early episodes, like “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” and “Blink.” The Vashta Nerada are solid villains, and the library is a gorgeous setting, but this episode is really only sensational to me when River is on screen. Still, even with some pieces that I don’t especially like, this episode contains enough brilliant moments to make it a very strong story overall. A/A-

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 4, p. 1

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

Previously on Doctor Who: The Doctor did plenty of likeable things, including saving the world, reacting joyfully to the wonders of the universe, and having David Tennant’s face. He also had some problematic tendencies toward treating other people’s thoughts and feelings with smugness or oblivion, which sometimes made the show difficult to enjoy.

This season makes a considerable effort—for a while, at least—to resolve some of the problems with the Doctor’s characterization. It’s easily Tennant’s best season, thanks in large part to the decision to move away from the unspoken or unrequited love stories that were central to the last couple of seasons in favor of an absolutely beautiful friendship. Donna Noble is the perfect companion for the Tenth Doctor, and watching the two of them enjoy time and space together makes for really delightful television. There are moments when the stories told about the character don’t quite live up to Tate’s performance, or even to the splendid writing that she gets at the start of the season, but Donna herself is basically the pinnacle of likability.

The quality of the season sort of rises and declines in waves—after the weak Christmas special, there’s a wave of several brilliant episodes, then a decline for a while, then it climbs back up again, and then it falls back by the end of the season. It’s this last contention that I imagine would be the most controversial out of my thoughts on this season—plenty of fans don’t like “Journey’s End,” but I’m also uncertain about “Turn Left” and “The Stolen Earth.” I’m not really a huge fan of this season’s arc, but it does have quite a few brilliant episodes, and the friendship between Donna and the Doctor makes the season well worth watching.

Voyage of the Damned: You wouldn’t think that an episode with Kylie Minogue, Geoffrey Palmer, Clive Swift, and Russell Tovey as guest stars could possibly be terrible, but this Christmas special pretty much manages it. We do get to watch Tennant yell “Allons-y, Alonzo!” but that is really the only moment of joy in a weirdly harsh, borderline cruel episode. (Who would want to watch this on Christmas?) I think maybe the intention here involved some sort of self-deprecating humor, but the result is a story that looks like what you would get if someone who hated Doctor Who was forced to write an episode for the show. (I know that Davies wrote this, and obviously he doesn’t hate Doctor Who. It’s still how this episode comes across to me.) We have a nice, blonde young woman in a thankless job who has never gotten to see much of the universe until she meets the Doctor, whom she immediately falls in love with—but who lacks everything that makes Rose Tyler unique and interesting. Her two main functions in the episode are to be the “pretty lady” for Bannakafalatta to gaze at in his final moments and to fall to her death while destroying the bad guy so that the Doctor can feel guilty. We have quirky humor, but instead of jokes that are actually funny we get Mr. Copper getting Christmas traditions wrong; the first couple of instances are pretty amusing, but then it happens about sixty more times and gets really tiresome. We have an attempt to give some attention to class issues, but instead of putting people like Rose, Jackie, and Mickey into the center and letting their background inform the story, we get some obnoxious rich guy yelling fat-phobic things at some nice poor people, who die very quickly. We get some non-human life forms, but instead of monsters that are either fun or scary, we get an annoying red cyborg and a far more annoying evil cyborg in a tank. It basically takes a collection of major elements of the show and twists them until they become dull and irritating, and even if the idea was for the show to poke fun at itself, I don’t think it actually landed on the fun part.

In addition to being a bad spoof of the show, it’s also just an unimpressive plot. Evil Cyborg in a Tank is so bad at being evil that once he has the Doctor in his power, he waits while the Doctor slowly and painstakingly figures out what his evil plan is and explains it to him while he kindly confirms everything. He then tells the Host to kill the Doctor, after which he and the Host wait around long enough for Astrid to quip at them from across the room, drive toward them, have trouble moving for a while, and then develop a new plan for getting him to fall down a hole while making goofy faces. Then there’s a montage of everyone else making goofy faces while the Doctor slowly struts in front of some fire, which apparently wasn’t stupid enough because then he gets the Host to hold on to him so he can fly. This, too, seems to be calling back to various pieces of the show in an unpleasant way. (Remember the Weeping Angels? What if, instead of terrifying statues, they were totally forgettable angel-shaped robots? Remember when the Doctor floated around in the air at the end of Season Three, and it was really stupid? What if we did it again in literally the very next episode?) The whole thing just reads as forced, effortful silliness, and so there’s no joy or humor in it.

After that, it gets a little bit better; the near-miss of Buckingham Palace is entertaining, the Doctor sending Astrid’s atoms out among the stars is sweet (although, like most of this episode, weirdly directed), and Mr. Copper’s discovery of his own wealth is a nice ending. There’s an odd lack of concern about Alonzo, though, who was shot quite early in the episode and hasn’t gotten proper medical attention at any point. Christmas specials are generally sillier than regular season episodes, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea of doing a little bit of self-parody. The problem is that the episode comes across as making fun of itself in an oddly mean-spirited way, as if to say, “Look! A lot of the premises of this show are fundamentally terrible!” Merry Christmas? C-

Partners in Crime: Donna!!! Her return to the show, after her slightly uneven appearance in “The Runaway Bride,” almost immediately sets the show back to the level of quality that had eluded it since Season One. This isn’t a terrific storyline; the use of miracle diets to facilitate an Evil Plan is entertaining enough, and the tiny Adipose creatures are surprisingly endearing, but the depiction of dieters wriggling about as fat escapes from their bodies comes across as slightly demeaning. As a reintroduction to Donna Noble, though, it’s a splendid episode that’s bursting with warmth and energy.

           There are elements of Donna’s characterization that could have gone badly awry here, but the show handles the challenges of the character with a great deal of nuance and creativity. I think the criticisms that Donna was played as a joke in “The Runaway Bride” tend to get a bit overstated, but there are definitely moments in which the episode seemed to be laughing at her. This episode retains the character’s humor, but is pretty clearly asking us to laugh with her—she’s funny, but she’s never a punchline. She’s also basically devoted her life to finding the Doctor; I had initially remembered her time in Adipose Industries as her actual job, but she is in fact using an old ID to sneak in and investigate because she thinks it’s the kind of thing that would interest the Doctor. She has apparently been doing this for months, going around and looking into strange happenings because she wants to change her mind and take the Doctor up on his offer to travel with him. As she tells Wilf, she’s waiting for a man, and even in a non-romantic context it could have come across as annoying to have Donna build her entire life around the Doctor, no longer really caring about her life on Earth or trying to improve it in any way as she tries desperately to find a man who might possibly have never returned. Wisely, though, the episode emphasizes the ways in which Donna has become more focused and driven through her efforts to find the Doctor—she’s pursuing the Adipose issue with a great deal of resourcefulness and courage throughout the episode, even before she finds the  Doctor. As a result, her efforts to track down the Doctor look more like a tale of Donna’s self-improvement than like a passive story of her waiting for the hero to sweep her away in his time machine, and that makes this element of the story work quite well.

           The depiction of Donna’s financial status is a bit more complicated, and I have a little trouble figuring out exactly what the show’s intentions are in this regard. I do tend to get a bit annoyed when shows use a character’s poverty as a way of creating sympathy for them but then give them the resources of a much wealthier person, and the show comes close to that with Donna. Her approaches to things like travel and personal property have a casualness that suggests the possession of a small trust fund—I’ve lost car keys before, and I don’t buy anyone who’s had to worry about money being so nonchalant about leaving them in a public place, even if they were about to run off.  She’s so convincingly frustrated with her life and disappointed with where it has led her, though, that the uneven depiction of what it’s like to be nearly broke doesn’t really do any harm. I have no idea what her actual financial state is, and I don’t get the impression that she’s in anywhere near as hopeless a state as Rose was, but Tate just does such a marvelous job of selling the character’s restlessness that the ambiguous depiction of her actual circumstances doesn’t wind up mattering.

           There’s plenty of beautifully-done comedy here, including the scene in which the Doctor and Donna keep just missing each other as they move around the office, but the highlight of the episode is definitely their actual meeting. Their mimed conversation starts off funny, gets even funnier as Donna tries to go into a level of detail that perhaps exceeds the possibilities of gesture, and ends even funnier still, as Donna and the Doctor realize that they are being watched. It’s difficult to put into words just how hilarious Tate is in this scene; every time I watch it, her gesticulations somehow manage to get even funnier. The Doctor has had plenty of moments of physical humor, but it’s rare for companions to get this kind of material, and the whole scene is just sublime.

           In spite of the comedic focus here, we get a fair amount of seriousness that works wonderfully well, including Donna’s very sweet conversation with Wilf early in the episode. After the main plot is resolved, we get several great scenes, including one which sees the Doctor actually admitting to the destructive impact that he had on Martha. After being irritatingly oblivious for most of the previous season, it’s nice to see that he’s spent the interim actually thinking about the effect that he has on other people. He’s absolutely right that what he needs is a “mate,” and Donna is just perfect for him. The brief appearance of Rose Tyler is also brilliantly done—I didn’t see it coming, and its understated tone really enhances its impact. The final moments, in which an exuberant Wilf sees Donna in the TARDIS, make for an endearing close to the episode, and a fantastic start to Donna’s adventures as a major companion. A/A-

The Fires of Pompeii: Any suggestion that Donna’s not serious enough to function as a full-time companion vanishes by the end of this episode, as her tearful plea for the Doctor to “just save someone” gives us arguably the strongest scene of Season Four. Tate is absolutely marvelous in this scene—clearly shaken by what’s happening, but still determined to get what she wants. The music is also wonderful here; the da-da da-da dahhh theme that’s often associated with the Tenth Doctor is easily one of the best musical sequences the show has ever done, and it’s rarely been used to better effect than in support of the Doctor’s outstretched hand toward the terrified Roman family. Looking at the season as a whole, I think it might be a bit early for this scene; it comes across as a climactic moment in Donna’s arc, and so it should perhaps be a bit later on. It’s such a gorgeous scene, though, that I’m just happy that it happens at all.

           In general, this is one of the show’s most emotionally effective explorations of the dangers of messing with time, in large part because of Donna’s complicated reaction to the risks of interfering. She’s obviously distressed by the thought of thousands of people, including many children, perishing in the volcano’s eruption, but there is also a consistent sense here that the passivity of being a time traveler fundamentally bothers her. When the Doctor shuts down her initial plans for an evacuation by stating that the deaths on Pompeii are a fixed point in time, her reaction suggests that she’s not just unhappy about the lack of solution to the problem, but also about the Doctor’s refusal to listen to her. Donna is pretty clearly a person who has had to deal with a lot of people telling her to stop talking/complaining, and the idea that time travel entails a certain amount of shutting up and letting things happen strikes a clearly unpleasant chord with her to a greater extent than has occurred with previous companions.

           I’m not quite sure of the position that the episode ultimately takes on the issue of interfering with time. Saving the family of four doesn’t seem to have any serious ramifications, and it’s easy enough to justify this by saying that this family was always supposed to escape from Pompeii, and that this wouldn’t have made it into historical records anyways and so doesn’t really contradict anything in the established timeline. This does raise questions about how much they could have done here; if it’s possible to save four people without wreaking havoc on history, could they have saved twenty? fifty? two hundred? So long as the volcano went off and destroyed the town, leaving a massive trail of deaths, the suggestion here seems to be that smaller departures from the “everybody dies” historical narrative are all right. The episode never really resolves these questions, but this leaves the conflict between the Doctor’s and Donna’s principles intriguingly open, so I think that the ambiguity works. This is also an interesting look at the nature of moral responsibility; we know that Pompeii has to be destroyed, but it still feels like a huge burden for the Doctor to have to be the technical cause. Donna placing her hand next to his so that he doesn’t have to be solely responsible is another stunningly beautiful moment, and solidifies just how good she and the Doctor are together.

            Other than the dimension of interfering with time, the plot is all right but unspectacular. I found Lucius a little irritating, and the Priestesses (including a pre-Pond Karen Gillan!) are entertaining for a while but get pretty tiresome by the end of the episode. The Pyroviles have a cool name, but are utterly forgettable monsters. The Roman family are likeable enough, but the only thing that really stands out about them is seeing Peter Capaldi on the show in a role other than the Doctor. There’s some fun prophecy-related stuff (and the assertion that “she is returning” is another great piece of setup for Rose’s re-appearance later in the season) but for the most part, the plot only works especially well when we’re dealing with the Doctor’s and Donna’s feelings about the catastrophe that they can’t stop. Still, there are plenty of other good moments here, because the episode does a terrific job of blending a very serious story with lots of humor. I love Donna’s attempts to play with the TARDIS’s translation matrix by speaking actual Latin, which somehow comes out as Welsh; I’m pretty sure that if Donna had a Siri or something like that, she’d try to confuse it by asking it difficult questions. The “I’m Spartacus” “And so am I” line is a not the most original joke, but it really made me laugh.

           I wouldn’t call this the best episode of the season, as it doesn’t have quite the imagination or the development of supporting characters that we see in later episodes like the Library two-parter and “Midnight.” I would probably say that this episode is my favorite, though; in spite of a few flaws, it’s got a huge heart and it shows just how perfect the Tenth Doctor and Donna are for each other. A/A-

Planet of the Ood: The planet itself isn’t very interesting—it’s cold, it’s snowy, and otherwise there’s not much to it. The Ood themselves, though, are among the most inventive monsters of the Davies era, and I really like the effort to take creatures who were mostly background players in “The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit” and make them central to this story. The human exploitation of these creatures, which was already unsettling in Season 2, is much more horrifying here, particularly in moments of dark, cruel humor like the demonstration of an Ood who has been programmed to imitate Homer Simpson.

           While it deals with slavery, it’s not as politically focused as some other episodes of the show. The Doctor reminds Donna of the likelihood that her clothes have probably been made by exploited workers, but she calls it a cheap shot and they never really come back to the issue. It’s fine to treat the political ramifications of a storyline with subtlety, but this is perhaps a bit too brief a reference; the Ood are such unusual creatures that they make slavery look distant and exotic, and so it’s easy to disregard the idea that this isn’t actually that far away from what we can see in the world around us. The Doctor does acknowledge that he let the Ood die in “The Satan Pit,” but doesn’t acknowledge that, having had time for only one trip, he chose to save one human even though he probably could have saved multiple Ood. The Doctor and Donna are allowed to be the unequivocal heroes of the story, without really any question of their status as the perfect allies. This isn’t a narrative that is directly about race, and I don’t think that the Ood should be seen as the simple equivalent of any particular group of humans, but creating a story about slavery, having the Doctor and Donna be largely responsible for the ultimate liberation, minimizing references to their own complicity, and ending with a song of gratitude toward their heroism does resemble problematic white savior narratives in certain ways. As a result, the story doesn’t quite do what some Who scripts, particularly Malcolm Hulke’s in the Pertwee era, accomplished by making a monster plot hit close to home in a productive way.

           Still, even if the complexities of exploitation get glossed over a bit, Donna’s reaction to the Ood is one of the highlights of the season. At the start of the episode, she is shocked by the frozen Ood’s appearance, but she quickly gets over her initial reaction and is furious with the way that they are treated. Her observation that the Ood would have to be trusting because they carry their brains in their hands is a nice depiction of her intelligence, but her reaction to the Ood’s song of captivity is just gorgeous. She is so palpably moved by it that we can see just how much her travels have already lifted her out of the apathy that she might once have felt, but she’s also still limited enough that she has to close herself off to the song. (The Doctor placing his hands on her hand to open her mind is a nice piece of foreshadowing for the season finale, too.) Her empathy and her refusal to accept mistreatment are very much on display here, but she’s not unrealistically perfect in her ability to deal with the suffering of others. The Doctor doesn’t register as much for me as Donna does here, but he is chased by a giant mechanical claw, which is fabulous.  

           When the episode shifts away from the Doctor and Donna reacting to the plight of the Ood, it sometimes gets a bit slow. I’m not really sure why, as I like many of the components of the plot. Solana is well-acted and I was fully expecting her to be redeemed eventually, so her refusal to join with the Doctor is a nice twist. Tim McInnerny is an actor that I’ve liked in many other things, and he does a decent job here of portraying the beleaguered executive who relies on the Ood’s exploitation for profit. It’s a solid story, but it for me it only lights up when the Doctor and Donna are on screen. Still, even if there are some problems with both the politics and the pacing of the story, it’s a tremendously moving depiction of Donna’s growing understanding of the universe. A-

The Sontaran Strategem: Well, it’s definitely better than Helen Raynor’s previous effort. There are some sizable flaws here, but there are enough great things in this episode to demonstrate that Raynor is a much more capable writer than last season’s Dalek mess would have suggested. Most importantly, after an entire season of being underwritten and underappreciated, Martha returns and finally lives up to her potential. Her first scene, in which the Doctor clearly expects there to be cattiness and jealousy between her and Donna but they immediately become friends, is especially lovely. (And it seems like specifically the kind of good scene you get when you actually bother to hire a woman once in a while; I think there’s a much greater likelihood that there would have been actual rivalry between them if this had been written by a man.) Almost immediately afterward, Martha strides off to take charge of things, and I’m just so pleased that she’s getting to make use of her scientific and medical skills in a place that seems to value her.

           Other than Martha, UNIT is an absolute mess. I didn’t really mind this the first time I watched the episode, but after having watched the Third Doctor’s adventures with UNIT, it seems like an odd decision to take such an important part of the classic series and make it into something that is basically there to be laughed at. The individual members of UNIT don’t have much in the way of personality—we get Likes to Salute Guy, Swaggery Soldier Guy, and Less Swaggery Soldier Guy. Martha sort of starts to claim that the Doctor is underestimating them, but then she says that she’s trying to make them better from the inside, so even she doesn’t seem to think that they’re much good. UNIT’s status as an organization that does a lot of secret military work definitely puts it in a position to go awry, so I don’t have any problem with the idea that the organization might have taken on some unsavory characteristics in the post-Brigadier years. Everyone other than Martha just looks so brainless for most of the episode, though, that it just seems like UNIT’s stupidity is being used to make Martha, Donna, and the Doctor look good, and to give the latter two an opportunity to be snarky. The Doctor doesn’t look troubled by what the organization that was at the center of his life for a long time has become; he just looks like he wants to roll his eyes continuously for the entire time he is in contact with the soldiers. Donna is similarly dismissive of them, and in spite of Martha’s objections the episode just lets their disdain stand.

           Luke Rattigan and his academy are similarly positioned to provoke humorous remarks from the Doctor. When the Doctor first arrives, he initially looks very excited about the science projects, and he even empathizes a bit with Luke’s status as the person cleverer than everyone else around him. If more of the episode had been like this, it could have been really interesting, but we quickly move on to Luke being a brat and the Doctor acting superior, at one point even correcting his grammar. The Doctor’s “I’m cleverer than you” side is much more tolerable in this season than it was in the previous ones because it is eventually going to have consequences in “Midnight,” but Tennant never really manages to figure out how to deliver dialogue like this in a way that isn’t massively annoying. The plot itself, featuring Luke’s collaboration with some underwhelming Sontarans, is pretty thin, and is about as interesting as the “technology is going to kill us all in the end!!” stories usually are. The opening scene, in which a sinister GPS system forces a woman to drive into a lake, is sort of creepy but also kind of reminds me of that episode of “The Office” in which Michael Scott drives into a lake because the GPS told him to and that kills it for me. I do like the idea that technology that reduces carbon emissions is potentially increasing gas usage and therefore contributing to environmental problems as much as it is combating them—I don’t know enough of the science to assess the plausibility of this claim, but it brings some nuance to the issue.

           Donna’s interaction with Martha continues to be terrific throughout the episode, especially in a brief but very effective scene in which Martha warns Donna about the dangers of abandoning her family to run off with the Doctor. Donna gets a couple of other great moments, including an opportunity to put her temp skills to good use by noticing the lack of sick days in the personnel files. She also lets the Doctor go through an entire sad goodbye before he realizes that she’s just leaving for an afternoon, because if there’s a way for Donna to enjoy herself, she’s pretty much going to find it. Her visit home—the only one for her until the very end of the season—falls really flat for me, though. Having a dramatic montage of her memories of fantastic adventures as she walks around her neighborhood is a pretty ridiculous thing to do one-third of the way into the season, but even her interactions with her family are weirdly unsatisfying. Bernard Cribbins is splendid as Wilf, and his love for his granddaughter is incredibly sweet, but until his reappearance in “The End of Time” he tends to get the same material on repeat. In spite of Donna’s massive change in circumstances, their talk here just feels like the same conversation that they had in “Partners in Crime,” and while Wilf’s belief in Donna and investment in her happiness continues to be endearing, there’s just so little range to the character that I’m already getting bored with him.

           Beyond the feeling that Wilf tends to get fairly repetitive material, this approach to Donna’s home life prevents her from having the kind of detailed, developed world that Rose got in the first two seasons. The Powell Estate seemed like a thoroughly thought-through setting in its own right, and Jackie, Pete, and, eventually, Mickey had compelling narratives of their own. Sylvia and Wilf’s house looks nice and comfortable but sort of nondescript; you could take that neighborhood and put it in any first-world country and it wouldn’t really look out of place. Other than the information that Wilf is sneaking off to the gas station to eat pork pies in defiance of the diet that Sylvia tries to impose, there’s nothing distinctive about the corner of Earth that Donna hails from, and that’s especially disappointing after the first season made it clear that Davies is capable of making ordinary settings look very distinctive indeed. I would have loved to see something of Donna’s role in her community that wasn’t her nice relationship with her grandfather and her strained relationship with her mother. I get that her life on  Earth didn’t have a lot of highlights until the Doctor turned up—her determined efforts to locate the Doctor in “Partners in Crime” definitely seem to stem from a need to escape from a relentlessly dull life. There must have been something that she did for enjoyment, though, even if that enjoyment was ultimately unfulfilling, and it would be nice to get a glimpse of that at some point this season. Her fiancé mentioned in “The Runaway Bride” that she was constantly talking about gossip and reality TV; she clearly took on a new sense of purpose after that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s abandoned all of her former interests. If the episode had let us see her yelling at a TV show, or going to the pub, or really doing anything other than having meaningful conversations with Wilf, that would give us a much fuller understanding of her life than what we see here.

           While I like the cute scene at the end, in which the Doctor turns up on Donna’s doorstep and recognizes Wilf, the scene goes to a clichéd place really quickly. Wilf seems like a reasonably intelligent human for the most part, but he responds to the information that ATMOS involves some sort of poisonous gas by getting into his car and turning it on like an absolute idiot so that we can have a big cliffhanger. (Moving your car 20 feet probably isn’t going to do much, Wilf, gas can travel.) The cliffhanger on Martha’s side of the story is better, although the Sontaran is awfully nice about telling Martha exactly what the evil plan is. Still, the idea of a Martha clone is really intriguing and builds up a good sense of excitement for the second part. It’s not a brilliant episode, because it really doesn’t serve the Doctor, UNIT, Wilf, Sylvia, or Luke well at all, but Donna gets some good material, and it’s one of Martha’s best-ever episodes, so overall I’m reasonably pleased with it. B/B-

The Poison Sky: The beginning of this episode is very promising. I still think it was stupid of Wilf to start driving his car at the end of the previous episode, but Sylvia finally gets a nice moment when she breaks a window to get him out. The Doctor gives Donna a TARDIS key and tries to make a big deal out of it, but she refuses to sentimentalize the occasion because there’s work to do. Evil Martha Clone looks like she has the potential to be amazing, and on the whole we have a great setup for this episode.

           What follows is…decent, but it doesn’t really live up to the opening. The Doctor is still speaking to UNIT like they’re especially stupid small children, and they’re not doing a lot to prove him wrong. They’re completely ineffectual against the Sontarans for much of the episode, and they don’t even seem to be trying to come up with a plan that actually takes account of their enemies’ abilities instead of just randomly charging at them. I still think that the Doctor yelling at the Colonel who just lost a bunch of soldiers under his command for referring to one of them by his code name instead of his actual name is obnoxious, though. Toward the very end, UNIT magically gets much smarter and the Doctor does seem to notice, but throwing in a good scene for UNIT ninety percent of the way through the story doesn’t really undo the irritation of what’s come before them. The Sontarans themselves are not especially formidable; the classic series managed to make them at least a little bit frightening on occasion, but the reboot has only ever really succeeded with Sontarans as comic relief.

           The approach to Luke is also pretty off-putting, although I do like the redemptive moment he gets at the end of the episode. The script at one point makes clear that he’s mostly doing this out of revenge toward people who used to pick on him, and then he draws a gun on his pupils when they refuse to go along with his plan. There’s a pretty blatant school shooter comparison being made here, and that makes the range of attitudes toward him in the episode come across as a bit distasteful. He’s a decent presentation of toxic masculinity combined with brilliance, and there are some really intriguing moments in which the episode looks carefully at his sense of loneliness. At times, though, his pouting and whininess are exaggerated to a point that makes it look like the episode is asking us to laugh at him; there’s an occasional tone of “look at this computer nerd, lols,” and playing a situation like this for comedy just strikes me as weirdly tasteless.

           I still like new and improved Martha, but this episode isn’t as good a showcase for her as the last one was. The Doctor was oblivious to her feelings for much of last season, and never really seemed to get to know her as well as he did many other companions, and I was hoping that we’d see the clone make use of this. He pretty clearly figures out that something is wrong a few minutes into the episode, though, when she hasn’t called her family, so there’s no suspense here. The Martha clone mostly just gets to walk around looking slightly menacing, press a few buttons, and then have a breakdown about how many hopes and dreams Actual Martha has.

           Because the Doctor, UNIT, Luke, and the Sontarans are all questionable here, and even Martha is not as good as the previous episode, it’s really just Donna who is holding things together. The highlight of the episode is the very convincing portrayal of the fear that she feels as she sneaks onto the Sontaran ship alone. In spite of the constant danger, there isn’t often a great deal of attention to the companions’ fears, and Tate really sells just how alarming it is to be alone and responsible for the fate of the Earth. Both of her phone calls, to Wilf and to the Doctor, are really beautifully done, and her terror provides a nice bit of setup for her more pronounced fears in “Turn Left.”

           I don’t completely get what happens at the end; I can pretty much buy that setting the air on fire might take care of poisonous gas, but it would be nice to have a little bit more of an explanation of how this works or why everything is fine after the whole atmosphere has been set on fire. The method of fixing the gas isn’t really the point, I guess, so the rather unsatisfying explanation doesn’t make a big difference. On the whole, it’s not a bad story. This two-parter is really only memorable for the good work that it does with Martha and Donna, but the storyline as a whole definitely has moments of interest, including a split-second Rose Tyler sighting on a TV screen. It works best when it’s generous toward its characters, but this is an unfortunate rarity in a storyline that seems determined to treat lots of people—Luke, UNIT, even Sylvia—as punchlines in order to build up the likeability of its central figures. In a season that had spent three episodes in a row practically overflowing with kindness, this doesn’t really feel in line with the tone of the season, but it remains a solid step up from Raynor’s efforts last season. B-

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 4

Please note: these reviews contain spoilers about various seasons of the reboot, and sometimes contain references to the classic series.

Season Three Overview: Smith, Jones, and Tyler

Going into its third season, the show had to contend with some fans’ doubts about whether it could retain its appeal without Rose Tyler. This was an important moment for the show, a chance to make clear that while the reboot was deeply indebted to Billie Piper, it wasn’t completely dependent on her. Some absolutely sensational episodes show that it certainly could get by without her, but Rose’s absence hangs almost suffocatingly over the season, suggesting a sense of total bewilderment about how to move on. It makes sense to give a lot of attention to the Doctor’s grief at her loss; Rose was such a hugely influential companion that I can understand the more long-term grief than what was typical in the classic series. The show invests so much into this perspective, though, that it comes across as defeatist, as if it’s admitting that “yes, you’re right, skeptical fans—no one will ever be as good as Rose.” The result is an interesting if frequently annoying look at the Doctor’s emotions, but it crushes a lot of the spirit out of what should have been a wonderful Doctor-Companion pairing, and this turns a potentially great season into just a good one.

Part of the problem is that the Doctor never really gets a chance to fight his own propensity for moping about the past instead of embracing the present. In next season’s “Partners in Crime,” he has clearly thought about the problems that he caused for Martha, and is putting some effort into avoiding a repetition of his mistakes. This introspection seems to have happened during the break between seasons, though, because there is very little evidence of him actually dealing with his problems here. He destroys the spider people in his first agony of post-Rose trauma, he’s not very nice to Martha, he gets a reminder of how cruel he was to Jack, and then he irritatingly gets to defeat the Master by embracing his role as the savior of mankind. A brief scene in “Gridlock” and the excellent conversation between the Doctor and Jack in “Utopia” are the only times that suggest he is confronting any of the massive flaws that we see in him this season, and after Season Two’s repeated glossing over of a lot of these same flaws, it’s getting awfully late in the game for him to remain so oblivious about his impact on other people. Granted, once he fully embraces a sense of his own problems, he becomes sort of an angsty mess, as can be seen in “Journey’s End” through the conclusion to his time on the show. Early Season Four, though, features the most likeable version of the Doctor, who is maintaining a positive, upbeat persona while thinking carefully about his behavior, and I wish that this season had built up to that a bit more instead of giving him a sudden leap in conscience once Donna turns up.  

Martha was a very good idea for a companion—perhaps, on paper, the best concept for a companion of the entire reboot. Not only is she the first person of color in this role, she’s also a doctor-in-training. There’s certainly plenty of value to showing the obstacles facing working-class people of color, but it’s important for television to have a range of characters of color, including highly-educated professionals, so I love the choice to make the first black companion an advanced medical student. She’s also very much not the “sassy black friend” stereotype that we’ve seen a lot on television, and I really appreciate that the show avoids that kind of cliché. There was so much potential here, but the show never really takes advantage of it. I don’t think that Davies has anything whatsoever against smart female characters—Rose, Martha, and Donna are all sharp, insightful, quick-witted people. He does seem a bit hesitant, though, to invest in knowledgeable female leads, and that really hurts this season. In the classic era, there were a lot of companions with vast amounts of scientific knowledge—Zoe could do anything with computers, Liz was a hugely accomplished scientist, Romana was a highly educated Time Lord, and so on. There were some companions whose advanced knowledge tended to get annoying, especially Nyssa and Adric, but I liked that the 26 seasons of the classic series had a good range of approaches to science, with some characters knowing very little and some knowing a huge amount. Martha is the most scientifically-accomplished companion of the new series, but she’s written as if Davies had taken to heart the criticisms one can find on the internet that Liz Shaw was “too smart” to be a companion. She gets to use her scientific knowledge a little bit on occasion, but the general formula seems to be that for every teaspoon of science/medical wisdom that she gets to display, we need a heaping tablespoon of “watch Martha make sad, jealous faces about the Doctor’s preference for her predecessor.”

Davies is very committed to creating relatable female characters, which is generally a good thing, but it can become a problem if it turns into minimizing the things that make a character unique for fear that they will become too distant from the average viewer. Most of the show’s audience is not going to have had the experience of going through most of medical school (or, really, of having that much education in any field), and so there are lots of things that Martha knows and can do that aren’t really part of most of our lives. It’s a lot easier to connect to a character on the basis of an unrequited infatuation, which is something that nearly everyone has experienced. It’s possible to see unrelatable moments, though, as an opportunity to let viewers empathize with experiences beyond their own, and I would have loved to see the show allow Martha’s background to inform her story a bit more. Someone in medical school would have had to study things like chemistry and biology, and the impact that encountering something like the TARDIS would have on someone who has put a lot of effort into studying how the physical world works is fascinating. The Doctor opens up new worlds for all of his companions, but this might be a more shocking experience for someone who had put a lot of time into figuring out the physical workings of life on Earth, and this creates a potentially fascinating character. It might pull her away a bit from being “just like us,” but it would make her different from the other companions and would give us insight into a mindset that many of don’t share. Instead of being centered on what it’s like for an almost-Doctor to travel in the TARDIS, though, Martha’s story is framed around her unrequited love for the Doctor, and this does a huge disservice to her character. With the lovely “Expelliarmus” moment in “The Shakespeare Code” as an exception, even her main contributions to the plot tend to take shape around the unrequited love dynamic. The kiss is a huge moment in “Smith and Jones,” she saves the day in “The Family of Blood” by declaring her love for the Doctor, and she saves the world in “The Last of the Time Lords” by traveling around and telling everyone to believe in how wonderful the Doctor is. She’s allowed small victories that make use of other facets of her character, but the big, climactic ones are all about her romantic feelings.

The lack of interest in Martha as a medical student also means that we get very little about her life on Earth. After “Smith and Jones,” she seems to have mostly forgotten that she’s enrolled in medical school, returning to the idea only in her annoyance with Joan’s racism in “The Family of Blood.” This means that the only sustained connection that we get to Martha’s regular life is her family, and none of them are written with as much depth as Rose’s family was. Francine is a charismatic presence, and her concerns about Martha traveling with the Doctor are portrayed very well, but there’s so little else to the character this season—really, the only other thing we learn is that she doesn’t like Martha’s dad’s ditzy girlfriend—that she doesn’t ground Martha’s story in a detailed reality in the way that happened with Rose. The rest of the family is just completely underwritten, including, sadly, the sister played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who could have been marvelous if the show had given her anything to do. I could picture what clearly what Rose’s life would be like without the Doctor, but it’s a lot harder to do that with Martha.

The biggest problem with Martha as a character, though, is the decision to make her mostly unwanted from the Doctor’s perspective. It makes sense that he is grieving for Rose, but even in “The Runaway Bride,” which is set seconds after his goodbye to her, he seems more willing to treat Donna as a person than he generally is with Martha for the rest of the season. There are moments in which he tries to get over this—the end of “Gridlock” sees him at least trying to talk to Martha on her own terms instead of seeing her as Not Rose—but there are far too many occasions this season in which he is very obvious about the fact that he wishes Rose was there instead of her. This leads to a lot of scenes of jealous moping from Martha, and it makes the Doctor look extremely insensitive. From his lament that “Rose would know what to do” in “The Shakespeare Code” to his almost total lack of acknowledgment of everything Martha did in “The Last of the Time Lords,” the Doctor never really appreciates Martha enough. By the time we get to “Utopia,” Martha is (understandably) pouting every time someone mentions Rose, and watching the main companion be jealous of her predecessor just doesn’t make for an enjoyable season of television. It also means that both of the two main black characters of the Davies era (Martha and Mickey) spend much of their time pining away for white people who reject them for other white people, which is not ideal.

The misguided Doctor-Companion dynamic this season is especially unfortunate because it mars a season that has some tremendously creative storylines and a plot arc that is impeccably set up, even if it does crash and burn in its final minutes. The early mentions of Harold Saxon introduce him as a vaguely threatening presence long before we realize who he really is, and the humanizing potential of the fob watch is integrated so smoothly into the season that I had no idea the concept would turn up again until we saw the watch in “Utopia.” The Master himself is very well portrayed, both by Derek Jacobi and by John Simm. Simm’s Master is going to go off the rails a bit in his return, but having to pretend to be Prime Minister for a while restrains him just enough that he generally works very well this season. He’s also having a terrific time, especially in his musical introduction of the Toclafane. He and Tennant have terrific chemistry, and watching him take over the world is an absolute delight. It’s disappointing that he comes across as intensely stupid in the last episode—the Master always gets crushed eventually, but Roger Delgado and Michelle Gomez managed to continue to look like geniuses even in defeat. Still, his interactions with the Doctor and his show-offy evil behavior are among the bright lights of this season. While there are plenty of frustrations this season, there really are some sublimely good pieces of writing, from the Doctor’s brief spell as a human to the Weeping Angels to the energetic new Master, and my frustration with the season’s problems stems mostly from the sense that if a few things had been written differently, this would have been an absolutely phenomenal season.  

Planets: There is some good work with contemporary Earth in “The Runaway Bride,” “Smith and Jones,” “The Lazarus Experiment,” “Blink,” and “The Sound of Drums,” all of which look much better than many of the modern-day scenes in Season Two. We get some really lovely historical scenes in “Human Nature/The Family of Blood,” some decent ones in “The Shakespeare Code” and the end of the universe looks smashing in “Utopia.” New Earth continues to be almost entirely without interest, New York looks like it was filmed by someone who had never directed anything before, and the moon is a bit of a disappointment in “Smith and Jones,” but on the whole it’s a successful season in terms of settings.  

Monsters, Aliens, Etc.: This is the main way in which this season is an improvement on Season Two. While it does make an absolute mess of the Daleks, probably more so than at any point in the show’s history, it also has some absolutely splendid villains. The Weeping Angels are magnificent, the Family is terrifying, the Judoon are fabulous Rhinoceros Police, the Master is giving a beautifully hammy performance, and the Toclafane are a horrifying depiction of the last remnants of the human race. Not everything works—the sun in “42” is an awfully odd villain, and the witches in “The Shakespeare Code” are awfully unsatisfying, but the monsters and aliens who do work well are more than enough to offset a few failures.

Female characters: I’m not sure whether this season is a step up or down from Two. On the one hand, it doesn’t use female authority figures as incompetent plot devices, and no one gets turned into a concrete slab. On the other hand, Martha’s potential as a character is mostly wasted, and the only real stand-out female guest characters are Donna, Sally Sparrow and Jenny/Mother of Mine. Joan does get some good material toward the end of “The Family of Blood,” but I still think of her as the weakest part of a generally excellent two-parter, and Chantho also gets a couple of good moments that don’t really offset the general lack of interest I have in the character. The actress playing Lucy Saxon has a good vacant stare, but she’s never quite as fun as I think she could have been, the women of “Gridlock” and “42” are massively forgettable, Martha’s relatives are underwritten, Tallulah and the Empress of the Racnoss are absolute messes, and generally female characters with anything resembling depth or memorability are few and far between. It’s a disappointing season for women, although that is about to get better. L

Overall: If Davies had figured out how to make the Martha/Tenth Doctor dynamic work better, this could have been one of the all-time great seasons of this show. There are some really great stories and some fabulous new monsters, but it can be so unpleasant to watch these two characters interact that the season is weaker than it should be. B+/B

Up Next: There are still plenty of problems, but there is also Donna, so everything gets better pretty much immediately. Davies has some absolutely brilliant ideas in his final full season as showrunner, and also some intensely bad ones, but the Tenth Doctor and Donna are one of the very best Doctor-Companion pairings of all time, and their wonderful friendship substantially raises the quality of the season.

 Episodes Ranked So Far:

1. The Satan Pit

2. The Doctor Dances

3. Blink

4. The Family of Blood

5. The Empty Child

6. Dalek

7. The Parting of Ways

8. School Reunion

9. Utopia

10. Human Nature

11. The Impossible Planet

12. The Sound of Drums

13. Doomsday

14. The End of the World

15. Father’s Day

16. Smith and Jones

17. Rose

18. The Unquiet Dead

19. Christmas Invasion

20. The Runaway Bride

21. The Girl in the Fireplace

22. Aliens of London

23. The Shakespeare Code

24. The Lazarus Experiment

25. Tooth and Claw

26. New Earth

27. The Age of Steel

28. Bad Wolf

29. Rise of the Cybermen

30. Boom Town

31. World War III

32. Army of Ghosts

33. 42

34. Gridlock

35. The Last of the Time Lords

36. Idiot’s Lantern

37. The Long Game

38. Love and Monsters

39. Evolution of the Daleks

40. Daleks in Manhattan

41. Fear Her

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews from a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 3

Please note: these reviews contain spoilers for multiple seasons of the reboot, and occasional references to events from the classic series.

Blink: This is an extraordinarily good story, possibly the best individual plotline of any Who episode. I wouldn’t consider it the best episode of all time, as some do, because the focus on single-episode characters prevents it from having the kind of emotional impact that we get in episodes centered on the Doctor and companion. Still, it’s a thrilling story about the sheer possibilities—both exhilarating and terrifying—that are attached to the presence of time travel. Like many of Moffat’s scripts, there is an extraordinarily large number of pieces to the story, but watching them fit together is never burdensome and is consistently delightful, thanks in part to the introduction of a captivating new monster. Most of the attention given to this episode has been devoted to the Angels themselves, who are indeed extraordinarily creepy villains. The quantum-locked statues are great in themselves, and even better in the effect that they have on other characters. Having to avoid blinking in order to ward off attack is a perfect horror-story rule, and the prospect of being suddenly sent back to a different time is convincingly terrifying. The gradual advancement of the Angels, who get closer and scarier every time someone looks away, is wonderfully directed—there’s something marvelously frightening about seeing their before and after pose but not seeing them actually move.

To me, though, the spookiest pieces of the episode don’t involve the Angels themselves but rather the fragments of writing and speech that help Sally to piece the plot together. The literal writing on the wall that opens the episode is fabulously creepy, and the DVD Easter eggs are even better. The Doctor’s efforts to bring about his own rescue through these Easter eggs, sparking lots of analysis in internet forums, is an appropriately nerdy premise for the show, and I love the bits of those forum discussions that we hear about from Larry. He’s a pretty underwritten character, but I can’t dislike anyone who puts “The Angels have the phone box” on a T-shirt. Sally’s initial “conversation” with the Doctor is already fascinating in terms of how the dialogue lines up, but when she watches it again, says different things, and the Doctor’s lines still work in response, it’s pretty mind-blowing, so lots of credit to Moffat for figuring out how to make that work. The whole concept of the Doctor reading from a transcript of a conversation that he’s still having is both a brilliant piece of plotting and an interesting opportunity to think about how free will fits into the idea of time travel. Sally is clearly making choices throughout the episode, and yet everything is unfolding according to the script that the Doctor put together based on Sally’s own notes—the time travel dimension pretty much makes sense of everything, but it’s still a tremendous shakeup of how we usually envision cause and effect.

The characters themselves generally work pretty well. Sally’s relationship with Larry is never convincingly developed—and, really, neither is Larry himself—but she’s a vibrant and engaging presence, aided by the abilities of a not-yet-famous Carey Mulligan. She has more than enough charisma to carry an episode that features very little David Tennant, and while she’s smart and capable, the script avoids making her into an implausibly good character. She’s fun and adventurous, but also a bit pretentious—particularly in her observation that sadness is “happiness for deep people”—and she has a sort of self-serving tendency to push other people into her dangerous adventures. It’s difficult to tell how much of the character’s charm stems from the writing, and how much is just Mulligan’s impeccable screen presence, but whatever the reason, Sally is one of the show’s most memorable single-episode characters. The Doctor makes the most of his small amount of screen time: “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” is rightfully one of the most famous lines of the reboot, and I also enjoy his flurried reference to the need to deal with “four things and a lizard.” I don’t like that even in an episode that has very little Doctor and even less Martha, we still have time for how uncomfortable their relationship is. He practically shoves her out of the shot when she tries to be in the video, and I don’t really understand why she is supporting him. (It’s the 1960s, she’s a black woman, he’s a white man. Even if he got the exact same job that she did, he would probably get paid twice as much. And yet, the implication is that she is working and he is not. Why?) Their relationship is pretty typical of what it is in much of the rest of the season, but it’s still annoying. Otherwise, though, the Doctor manages to be likeable and impressively memorable, in spite of the lack of screentime.

It’s hard to tell whether we should see this as a magnificent little island of an episode, or as an important harbinger of things to come. While it introduces monsters who will return in later seasons, it’s also a perfectly contained little narrative. However, it also feels like a statement of arrival, more so than either of Moffat’s previous episodes (even if I did like his Season One two-parter a bit better.) His contributions to Season One and (sort of) to Season Two showed him to be a strong writer, but this episode gives us a clearer sense of the kind of writer that he is. I don’t say this because it’s a fairly plot-driven episode, as I think the notion that Moffat made the show more plot-focused is almost completely unfounded, but the intricacy of this story is a good indication of just how much attention Moffat demands from his audience. We’ve still got plenty of the Davies era left to go, but this episode is an early indication that eventually, we’re going to get six full seasons in which a necessary component of understanding the further adventures of the Doctor and company is going to involve keeping your eyes wide open like your life depended on it. A

Utopia: The string of good episodes continues as the Doctor, Martha, and Jack find themselves at the end of the universe. It’s a terrifying place, and probably the most interesting non-Earth planet that Davies develops. The Futurekind are scary in themselves, but the dark world with barely anything left in it is even scarier. Even in this cold, bleak place, though, there is still hope for a better world, and we can see brief moments of warmth between the humans as they wait for Utopia. The emotional investment that this creates for these humans makes their eventual fate even sadder, and their doomed hopes for a new world are really beautifully portrayed here.

For the most part, Davies does an astonishing job of blending a thrilling plot with some lovely character work. The one downside to this episode is that it doesn’t always serve its female characters very well, especially since Jack’s curiosity about Rose means that this episode gives us an extra helping of Morose Martha. I’m not sure what’s more annoying: Jack’s assertion that the Doctor doesn’t abandon his blonde companions (Martha, annoyed: “Oh, she’s blonde!”) or the camera repeatedly cutting back to Martha looking bitter while The Doctor and Jack talk about what happened to Rose. It’s not that I blame Martha, who is responding reasonably to the Doctor’s behavior, but having more than one reference to the stupid Martha-vs.-Rose dynamic in a single episode is too much. Chantho is mostly used as an end-of-the-universe equivalent to Martha, as the script goes out of its way to point out that “Look! Professor Yana has a woman quietly pining away for him, just like the Doctor!” She and Martha then strike up a cute friendship, though, so the episode mostly emerges from the boring treatment of women that we get at the start.

Other than inadvertently heightening Martha’s resentment toward Rose, Jack makes a triumphant return here. (So does the Doctor’s severed hand, which Davies does a wonderful job of weaving into the plot of Tennant’s entire time on the show.) He’s just as charming and fun as he was in the first season, and we get a wonderful discussion between him and the Doctor regarding the Doctor’s abandonment of him after the defeat of the Daleks. It’s such a brief moment in “The Parting of Ways” that it would be easy to gloss over it, so I appreciate that the episode takes the time to describe Jack’s experience and to let him confront the Doctor about what he did. The Doctor’s excuse—that Jack is a fixed point in time, and therefore goes against the Doctor’s Time Lord gut instincts—is understandable, but not really sufficient to excuse the Doctor’s decision to just leave him behind. Jack isn’t particularly bitter here, though; he’s honest about what he’s gone through, but he’s still kindly disposed toward the Doctor and (of course) somewhat flirtatious toward him. Tennant and Barrowman have excellent chemistry, and the scene gracefully and effortlessly conveys their extremely complicated relationship.

The highlight of the episode, though, is Derek Jacobi’s portrayal of Professor Yana/The Master. I wish there was time for him to be in more than one episode, but he’s brilliant here, both as the kind, self-sacrificing professor and as the newly-aware Time Lord. His interactions with the Doctor and with Martha are marvelously done, and the growing awareness of his real identity is just superbly plotted. The drumming in his head is not always well-handled in future episodes, but Jacobi plays this element of his character with a great deal of sensitivity. The big reveal is an especially fabulous moment: the watch, the drumbeats, and the various other bits of the story slot together perfectly, and culminate in a terrific showdown between the Doctor and the new regeneration of the Master. Chantho’s scared but determined resistance gives us a great final moment for Jacobi’s Master, and Simm’s performance is an immediately enjoyable piece of ham. The final scene, in which the Master takes over the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor and company trapped at the end of the universe, is a stunning cliffhanger.

The episode’s conclusion is so excitingly plotted that it’s easy to miss some of the quieter, more philosophical work that Davies does with the Master here. We never quite get a clear sense of what the relationship is between a Time Lord’s actual personality and the human created by the watch; the Doctor tells Joan that he is capable of all that John Smith was, but there are also pretty clear differences between the two. The watch certainly does quite a lot of rewriting, but it doesn’t seem to create a completely new personality, which means that there are at least some similarities between Yana and the Master. It’s a fascinating thought, as until his memories return, Yana is kind and self-sacrificing. It’s a bit odd to me that Tennant doesn’t refer to this in the next episode, but for purposes of this episode, I like the subtlety with which Davies sets up the possibility that the Master might have quite a lot of goodness inside him. (This wouldn’t have been the intention at the time, but it also provides a nice bit of setup for the Twelfth Doctor’s later confidence that Missy can be redeemed.)

This episode sometimes gets overlooked a bit because of the flashier ones that preceded and follow it, but I really do think this is a sensational story. It’s fast-paced and scary, we get to explore an eerie new place, Jack Harkness is back, and the Master gets a great new incarnation. There are a couple of scenes that annoy me, but of the three parts of the season finale, I would say this one is my favorite. A/A-

The Sound of Drums: This episode is already starting to show how much Davies is straining to pull the plot arc together, but it’s such an exuberant episode that it’s easy to overlook the problems for now. A lot happens in this episode, which necessitates a certain amount of rushing; this is apparent from the opening scene, in which the previous episode’s cliffhanger (The Doctor, Martha, and Jack are trapped at the end of the universe without the TARDIS!!) is easily resolved by Jack having a time travel device that will transport all three of them. The Jones family would also have benefited from a bit more screentime here—what happens to them is shocking, but we aren’t given enough of the intriguing situation of Tish working for the Master, or of their reaction to their eventual capture. We really needed to get a clearer sense of how the Archangel Network functions, or possibly just a different sense, as I’m pretty sure it just changes completely between this episode and the next. When the story does invest sufficient time and detail into its narrative elements, though, it’s tremendously fun.

           Simm is charmingly evil here, and Davies’s script allows the Master to have a wonderful time taking over the world and messing with the Doctor’s mind. There are moments of extremely dark humor, such as his nonchalant murder of the entire cabinet with poisonous gas and his casual efforts to close the door on Vivien’s death screams. He has excellent chemistry with Tennant, particularly in the beautifully acted phone call, and it’s surprisingly delightful to see him watch The Teletubbies. He gets even more fun as he begins his strategy of cheerfully irritating the American president—a strategy that includes sitting down and pulling out some jelly babies. I love that in the midst of plotting world domination, he made the time to think “I’m going to bring the Doctor’s favorite snack to my glorious victory.” By the end of the episode, he is joyfully welcoming the Toclafane to the strains of “Voodoo Child,” and it’s just such an astonishing moment of silliness that it’s a perfect return for the Master. John Simm got stuck with some odd writing on this show, some of which shows up in the next episode and quite a lot of which appears in “The End of Time,” but this episode proves that when he is given good material, he’s an absolutely stellar Master. It helps that he has to spend much of the episode reining himself in just a little bit in order to plausibly function as prime minister, so that when he breaks into a much broader persona toward the end it really feels like a rise in energy and doesn’t seem like overkill. The constant drumbeat that he hears, which was approached with considerable nuance in the last episode, has turned into a cartoonish version of insanity; still, the episode makes no effort to pass this off as a realistic portrayal of mental illness, so it doesn’t really bother me. The scenery-chewing madness goes too far when he returns in “The End of Time,” but for this season, Simm does a good job of depicting an intentionally silly persona.

           Our main characters’ fugitive status lets them stay near the main action but also separate from it, which gives us lots of time to just watch them talk to each other and react to the situation. Their conversation about the Master is one of my favorite scenes of the whole season—the Doctor’s description of the treatment of Time Lord children is beautifully written and performed, and there is a wonderful sense of sympathy between the three characters here. The Doctor ends the scene by distributing perception filters, which I always love—there’s something about the ability to make yourself unseen without actually being invisible that I find absolutely thrilling every time it’s introduced on the show. Granted, the Doctor then goes a long way toward undoing the scene’s positive energy by explaining that perception filters are like fancying someone who doesn’t notice you, making me immensely aggravated that his thoughtlessness toward Martha is now being treated as a joke. Still, there’s a nice moment between Martha and Jack as they realize that they’re both in the same position in terms of their feelings toward the Doctor. Martha gets quite a lot of good material in this episode; I especially love that she gets to be in the driver’s seat for the car chase, and while I think her family is itself underwritten, her concern for them is portrayed very well.

           The Doctor’s relationship with the Master is the heart of the episode, and Tennant really sells his conflicted feelings of wanting to protect the world from the Master while also wanting to protect the one Time Lord he didn’t destroy. I don’t really understand the choice to avoid any mention of his own experiences as a human; the Doctor tries so hard, at first, to find a scrap of empathy in the Master that you would think “I went through the same experience of becoming human and forgetting my real identity for a while” would be a good approach. Nonetheless, his relationship with the Master is intriguing throughout the episode, and his determination to save the man who was once his friend seems incredibly heartfelt in spite of the Master’s over-the-top evil. I spend so much of the episode focusing on the Master and his interactions with the Doctor that the actual plot events fade a bit in comparison, but there are some good things here, especially the reveal that the Master has turned the TARDIS into a paradox machine. The Toclafane aren’t very interesting aliens until you find out who they are in the next episode, but they’re certainly a major threat and they give the Master an opportunity to really put on a show. The whole business with aging the Doctor doesn’t work very well and is an awfully random thing to do, but it’s the only real false note marring an otherwise sensational ending. The Toclafane have landed, the Master is dancing, and Martha is off to save the world on her own—not a bad cliffhanger to take us into the finale. A/A-

The Last of the Time Lords: I can get past plot holes. An episode full of them might not be my very favorite, but they don’t necessarily prevent me from enjoying the story. The worst kind of plot holes, though, are the kind that make the characters look idiotic, and we get an avalanche of those here. First, we have the Master, who comes across as so unbelievably stupid that I cease to see him as a meaningful antagonist. I get that he’s insane, and sort of a pantomime villain, but in the previous episode he at least looked like he had a sizeable streak of brilliance as well. In this episode, he’s got spies everywhere and a huge amount of leverage over people whose families he’s kidnapped, and yet he can’t manage to find out a plan at least some of which is known to most of the Earth’s population. Martha has spread the strategy of believing really hard in the Doctor during the countdown to what seems like millions, so the notion that the Master wouldn’t have caught on to this and would still be believing in the multi-colored gun plan just isn’t plausible. (I can sort of imagine him dismissing the plan, because he doesn’t believe in the power of human goodness in the way that the Doctor does, but I can’t imagine him just not figuring it out at all.)

           Martha herself comes across as incredibly courageous here, but the nature of the plan just doesn’t allow her to shine in the way that I want her to. I would actually have preferred it if the plot twist had been close to the reverse of what occurs at the end. If Martha had let the Master believe that she was going around spreading the Gospel of the Doctor like a good little companion as a cover to hide the fact that she was using her scientific knowledge to help turn the Archangel Network against him, that would have been amazing, and not really difficult to believe. As a medical student, she’s had practice in trying to figure out what’s wrong with other people. (Just ask the patient, said the snotty, ill-fated teacher in Martha’s first episode.) She knows how to figure out the use of complex machinery by quickly consulting the manual, as we also learned in that same episode. She has very precise knowledge of the human body, as we can see in her precise account of the bones of the hand in her conversation with Joan. I can imagine an episode in which Martha traveled the Earth, pretending to spread the news of the Doctor’s magnificence but also making observations and asking questions about how the Archangel Network made people feel, consulting the network’s manual, figuring out exactly how the mind control works and how it could be redirected, and using that to surprise the Master at the end of the episode. Then we wouldn’t have needed floaty Jesus Doctor, there would at least be sort of a reason for the Master being flummoxed, and the whole season of Martha being reduced to an unrequited love plot would at least have a great resolution; I would genuinely be less mad at scenes like the “Rose would know” moment in “The Shakespeare Code” if we were moving toward a finale in which Martha completely subverted the expectations created by her feelings for the Doctor. Instead, she just goes around talking about what a magical, wonderful, sparkly unicorn the Doctor is, omitting all of the darker elements of his nature and treating him like an absolutely perfect hero. It’s a nice continuation of the idea of the power of words, as set up in “The Shakespeare Code,” but it would be a lot more meaningful if there wasn’t a lingering sense that she’s using her words to hide elements of the Doctor as often as to reveal the truth about him.

           And then there is the Doctor himself. (I was really uncomfortable with the Doctor’s behavior in this episode, but was uncertain about why until I read the AV Club’s review, which makes a lot of the same points as what follows.) It’s bad enough that he spends much of the episode as Dobby the Elf/Gollum/whatever other fantasy creature you want to compare him to here. David Tennant’s odd, joyful presence is most of what makes this character work, so when he’s absent for much of the episode, it is sad. However, his return is constructed in such a way that it winds up being more aggravating than spending much of an episode without him. The Doctor has gone through an awfully dark period. He was in so angry and grief-stricken a place in the Christmas special after the loss of Rose that he killed off an entire species and would have accidentally drowned himself (as we learn next season) if Donna hadn’t stopped him. He was so infuriated at the end of “The Family of Blood” that he basically condemned four beings to eternal torment. He’s been so morose about Rose that he has mistreated Martha basically for the entirety of the season. He’s just had a couple of experiences that might be eye-opening to him: he’s had to hear about his abandonment of Jack Harkness from Jack’s perspective, and he’s gotten a reminder of the immense darkness in the one remaining Time Lord, one who was once his friend. He’s also seen the bleakness of the end of the universe, which might serve as a humbling reminder of his inability to actually fix everything. (The reveal that the Toclafane are humans is a pretty good moment of darkness, although the erasure of everything that they actually do in this episode does diminish this a bit.) The Doctor, until the Archangel Network nonsense happens, seems like someone who becoming aware of and at least starting to hold himself a little bit accountable for the problematic aspects of his behavior. There are a lot of ways to deal with this: there is something to be said for giving the Doctor a genuine crisis of conscience, and also something to be said for having him come to a partial realization of his own flaws and continuing to develop it more subtly over time. What you shouldn’t do, basically the one thing you definitely SHOULD NOT do in this scenario, is resolve your major seasonal arc by comparing this character to Jesus. Avoiding that should pretty much be your top priority. And yet, not only does the mass of strangers treat him like a Christ figure, he completely leans in to the comparison. His arms aren’t quite high enough to constitute an imitation of Jesus on the cross, but the position is close enough that the suggestion is there. When he starts floating around with his hands outstretched, looking like someone doing an almost-crucifixion pose on an invisible motorized scooter, smiling beatifically and extending his magnanimous forgiveness to the Master, it’s not just that it looks silly. (It does look silly, but the show’s made that work plenty of times.) It’s not even just that the Archangel Network, which appeared to be coded signals that used the four successive beats as a form of mind control in the previous episode, has now somehow become sentient enough to understand the words of people all over the world and to de-age him as a result; the Doctor claiming that he’s been attuning his mind to the network does nowhere near enough to make sense of this, but I could mostly overlook this if everything else was all right here. The main problem is that the Doctor has chosen to embrace his smug, morally superior side, at the expense of every bit of character development that has been in the works this season. He even suggests that humanity’s willingness to have absolute faith in him here, basically just on Martha’s word, is evidence of the greatness of our species, and I’m not sure that he’s ever had a more arrogant moment on this show.

           It’s not that I want everyone to turn on the Doctor and hate him for the few flaws that trouble a generally wonderful personality. Forgiveness and redemption are important elements of this show, but in order for them to be have the kind of impact that they should, there needs to be a sense that they are bestowed or achieved from a position of knowledge of what has gone wrong. The people who Tinkerbell him back to looking like David Tennant know very little of the Doctor’s problems—I certainly don’t get the sense that Martha is giving them the full version of his story. The Doctor has had a lot of time in this episode to reflect on his own failings, but he concludes that reflection here through being redeemed by the faith of people who believe in him because they’ve been given the sugarcoated version of his story, and it’s just such an empty conclusion to the work of the season that it’s an incredibly disappointing moment. Having the whole world express their belief in the Doctor as the embodiment of the ideals that he’s been failing to live up to all season could be an interesting moment if the Doctor was at least aware of the dissonance, but he seems to buy into his own myth so thoroughly that the episode essentially erases everything the season has done to complicate his character. There are plenty of moments in this reboot in which the Doctor behaves in problematic ways, but usually these are individual moments, and he redeems himself fairly quickly afterward. There are, therefore, plenty of times when I don’t like what the Doctor is doing, but I generally still really like him as a character. This is the one moment in which I sort of question where I stand toward the character as a whole; he just seems so utterly oblivious of his own flaws and so self-indulgent that I’m not sure about whether he’s a character I can admire.

           He does win me back quite quickly, as Tennant does a beautiful job of portraying the Doctor’s grief over the death of the Master. Lucy Saxon’s murder of her husband would be a better moment if the episode hadn’t done so much to telegraph that something was going to go wrong with her; her behavior early in the episode shows her to be just barely holding herself back from snapping, so it’s not much of a surprise when it happens. Otherwise, though, the death and funeral pyre of the Master are sublimely done, and I’m so sad for the Doctor as he cradles his dying rival that I can almost forget how annoying he has been in this episode. I do wish that he had saved a little bit of that grief for his separation from Martha, which he accepts with irritating equanimity. It’s a fantastic moment for her, as she decides to walk out for her own emotional health, and actually gets to leave the TARDIS on her own terms instead of the usual story of being forced out by disaster. Given that the Doctor nearly lost his mind after being separated from Rose and even Joan, it’s a little sad that he doesn’t have a bit more of a reaction to the departure of a woman who has just spent a year (an erased year, but a year nonetheless) traveling the Earth to help him. It’s still a good scene for her, and, in general, the episode’s last few minutes work much better than the nonsense that preceded them. Even with some really good moments, though, an episode in which the Master looks like an absolute moron, Martha saves the world but in a dull, clichéd fashion, and the Doctor loses all sense of perspective is not a satisfying end to the season. C+/C

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews from a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 2

Note: These reviews contain spoilers for Season 3 and other seasons of Doctor Who, including occasional references to the classic series.

The Lazarus Experiment: This isn’t a brilliant story, but it’s a very pleasant episode that lets Martha shine in a way that she hasn’t since “Smith and Jones.” Her scientific knowledge comes in useful, we get to watch her interact with her family, and the Doctor is, for the most part, being nice to her. He’s totally prepared to abandon her at the beginning, and he does try to pull the “one more trip” thing again at the end, but she stands up for herself and he changes his mind. In between these scenes, he’s really very charming and they work well together.  

Although there were a couple of scenes with Martha’s family in “Smith and Jones,” this is our first extended look at them. It’s lovely to see more of them, but at the same time they do feel like a step down from the Tyler family. Jackie had a lot to say about Rose’s travels with the Doctor, but she also felt like an important character as an individual, with a life of her own and a genuine sense of loneliness that made her into a far more serious character than her earliest episodes might have suggested. I really like the actress playing Francine, but I had to go back and look up what the character’s name was when I started writing the reviews for Season Three. Throughout the season, she’s annoyed with Martha’s dad and concerned about Martha spending time with the Doctor, but there’s never much of an effort to paint outside of those lines. Her seconds-too-late voicemail at the close of the episode is a great way of incorporating information necessary for the Master plotline, but she’s so closely linked to the Harold Saxon plot, both here and later in the season, that there’s not enough attention to her as a person. Gugu Mbatha-Raw also seems underutilized in her role as Tish; it’s delightful to watch the two sisters run around London together, but she doesn’t get much to do and sort of weirdly goes from being creeped out by her elderly employer’s harassment to being somewhat attracted to him once he’s a younger-looking creep. On the whole, I like Martha’s family, but I don’t feel the kind of emotional investment in what happens to them that I did with Jackie or even Pete.

The plot itself is pretty thin, but it’s mostly engaging. Lazarus, who alternates between being Mark Gatiss and being a silly-looking monster, is an entertaining enough villain, and there’s some fun chaos as the Doctor and company try to stop him. He seems like a pretty terrible scientist, given that his machine would have just blown up entirely if the Doctor hadn’t been there and that he would have had to kill approximately half the United Kingdom in about a month at the rate he was going, but he’s a solid version of the hubristic genius figure. His conversation with the Doctor about his need to avoid death is nicely done as well, and death-by-church-organ is a great resolution. I forgot most of what had happened in this episode after the first time I watched it, but if it lacks anything memorable, it’s also really very enjoyable. B

42: This is basically what you would get if you took “The Satan Pit” and removed all of the philosophy and the joy. There are quite a few similarities, from the deep, spooky voice that infects various members of the crew to the TARDIS sealed off in an inaccessible part of the ship to the device of characters quickly running through a seemingly endless series of doors to the danger of the location itself (this time at the edge of the sun instead of the edge of a black hole.) I wouldn’t mind sitting through a retread of the black hole two-parter if we wound up with anything approaching the quality of the original—I would happily sit through an entire season of episodes with basically the same premise if they were as well-written as “The Satan Pit.” This one, though, doesn’t make rushing about in space anywhere near as fun, and it replaces the exploration of the Doctor’s beliefs with a contrived impending catastrophe. There are some strong scenes here, showing Chibnall’s potential as future showrunner, but it’s not exactly a strong debut for him.

           Knowing that Chibnall would go on to cast the first female Doctor makes me look more closely at how his episodes work with gender, and on the plus side, he’s really very good at writing Martha. Her phone call to her mother from the escape pod is particularly well done, both as a depiction of Martha’s feelings and as an introduction to the government using Martha’s mother to get to her. She and the Doctor work well together here, and she has a wider emotional range than she gets in many other episodes this season. The rest of the women are so dull that I’m not even going to bother looking up their names, so I’ll just refer to them as Killed Immediately, Killed Almost Immediately, and Plot Device. The first of them dies so quickly that you barely have time to think “Oh, it’s that actress who was on Sherlock for a while” before she’s dead. In general, the minor characters are really weak here—nobody stands out, and the group as a whole doesn’t bring out anything interesting in Martha or the Doctor.

           Much of the story unfolds either with surprising slowness for an episode that depicts a real-time fall into the sun, or with too much histrionics. The Doctor’s crazed reaction to looking into the living sun is interesting at certain moments, like when he admits that he’s scared and tries to tell Martha about regeneration, but there’s an awful lot of just writhing about or yelling awkward things like “You should have scanned!!!!” The whole notion of the sun as not just a living organism but one that is sentient enough to consciously stop pulling the ship toward itself once the fuel is returned is just such an odd notion that it comes across as an awfully silly plot contrivance; it’s not quite as overtly ridiculous as “the moon is an egg,” but it makes approximately as much sense to me. The escape pod being detached from the ship is more effectively alarming, but otherwise the situation of being minutes from destruction never actually feels dangerous.

               Like “Gridlock,” we conclude an immensely boring episode with a strong final scene. This one isn’t quite as moving, but the final minutes, in which Martha kisses one of the crew members and the Doctor gives her a key to the TARDIS, is a nice conclusion to an episode that had a sort of underlying theme of regret over having left things undone or unsaid. It’s a lovely ending, but out of about 42 minutes of story, we get maybe six or seven minutes of compelling material. C+

Human Nature: After a mediocre string of episodes, Season Three gets properly underway with what has to be one of the best concepts of the entire reboot. Having the Doctor become human in order to evade his enemies is a brilliant idea, and the setting—just prior to World War I—gives him a beautiful place in which to experience that humanity. Tennant is just marvelous, even in moments when I’m uncertain about what I think of the story. He’s close enough in personality to the Doctor that he’s still recognizable, but his mannerisms are just different enough to present a truly distinct persona. It must have been a huge challenge to work out exactly how closely to hew to the Doctor’s usual personality, and both the writing and Tennant’s performance manage this perfectly. The memories that emerge from his real life as the Doctor are also handled extremely well through the device of his journal, which contains absolutely gorgeous pictures of people and monsters he has met.

            As a “Tenth Doctor in Love” story, it’s definitely better than “The Girl in the Fireplace,” but I have some similar qualms about the focus on the Doctor as romantic hero rather than two characters as a romantic pairing. There’s nothing that I dislike about Joan, and she does get a couple of very good moments in the second part, but in this first part she doesn’t make much of an impression. I’ve tried for a while to come up with an adjective to describe her, and I’m still having a hard time…she’s competent, I guess? I really do think that the actress is good, and there’s more attention to her perspective here than there was with Reinette, but when I try to remember pieces of the episode, what I remember is the Doctor doing cute things (like falling down the stairs out of awkwardness!) in response to her rather than anything about Joan herself. It’s fascinating to watch the Doctor fall in love in a way that isn’t influenced by the constraints of his awareness of his species, but I never really get a sense of what attracts him to her.

            Martha has to put up with even more than usual, between watching the Doctor fall in love with another woman who isn’t her and dealing with snotty, racist students. I’m not a huge fan of the decision to spend so much time on having her stare sadly at the Doctor’s instructional video—the notion that she is in very unrequited love with the Doctor has been hammered in quite enough prior to this point. Even the genuinely very tense cliffhanger at the end of the episode is basically played as another opportunity for the Doctor to compare Martha to another woman, which is tiresome. However, she gets a huge amount to do on her own here, and she is holding things together remarkably well. The script makes clear just how frustrating it is for Martha to be a highly-educated, twenty-first century woman pretending to be a servant in 1913, but her lovely friendship with Jenny brings a sense of warmth to the character that nicely counterbalances all of the nonsense that she has to deal with. Aside from her lovelorn staring at the instruction video, watching Martha in the TARDIS by herself is fantastic, as is the idea that she is basically watching over the Doctor. It’s a terrific reversal of their usual roles, and she’s very much up to the task.

           This two-parter is the most attention that we get to Martha’s race this season, and it’s a much more serious take on the idea than what we saw in “The Shakespeare Code.” The Doctor’s lack of awareness of what’s happening essentially forces her to assimilate into a society that blatantly discriminates against her, and while this isn’t addressed directly, we do get the implication that she has to take on the identity of a servant in spite of her education and knowledge because it’s the only job that she could get as a black woman. The acknowledgment that her experience as a time traveler is strongly affected by her race is a welcome change from the comments in “The Shakespeare Code,” but I’m still a little frustrated by the fact that the most prominent attention to race here comes in the form of a moment that is very much about the Doctor. I can see the intention behind having him say something racist, as it raises interesting questions about whether this is part of the imposed persona of John Smith or whether this is in part the Doctor’s own lack of racial awareness bleeding through; if the latter, it’s an intriguing follow-up to his remarks earlier in the season. However, his dismissal of Martha’s stories about the TARDIS as stemming from “cultural differences” is notable mostly for the surprise of watching the Doctor, even in a somewhat different form, saying something this blatantly racist. (Even in the earlier episode this season, he comes across as clueless but not as overtly prejudiced.) To me, it’s probably the most memorable line about race this season, so I don’t like that it is about the shock factor of watching the Doctor say something horrible, and not about Martha’s feelings or experiences. If we were to look for the best depiction of racism this season, this two-parter pretty much wins by default, but I’m not unequivocally happy with the approach here.

           Even if I’m not thrilled about how the episode uses the 1913 setting to comment on race, it is otherwise a stunningly beautiful backdrop for the episode. The monsters who wreak havoc upon it are even better. The Family is a terrific set of villains, and the use of Jenny’s body is especially sad, but the highlight is definitely Baines. Whoever was in charge of casting did an absolutely stellar job, because he has one of the creepiest faces I’ve ever seen. He has an expression like a demonic cat standing with a raised paw over a quivering mouse, and he manages to keep that look on his face for pretty much the entire time in his role as Son of Mine. He’s so scary that I completely understand the Doctor’s determination to run away from the Family, and the addition of creepy scarecrows underscores the atmosphere of terror. I also love the way that the interactions with the Family introduce the fob watch and its capabilities in a way that doesn’t register as foreshadowing until “Utopia.” The watch looks like it’s just here to help this particular plotline unfold, so its importance to the Master later on is a nice surprise. I do think that the seasonal arc runs into some gigantic problems at the end, but the slow build toward the finale is really put together extremely well. This episode isn’t quite as emotional as the second part, but it’s a stunning introduction both to a human Doctor and to an immensely scary new set of villains. A/A-

The Family of Blood: This episode contains one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who scenes. I don’t mean the Doctor’s vision of the human life he will never have, which is poignant but would mean more to me if I liked Joan better than I do. That scene is good, but to me the highlight of the episode is the brief, terrifying attack that the Scarecrows make upon the school. The Doctor looks tragically, hopelessly out of place as he stands there with a gun, unable to shoot or even move, but the most heartrending piece of the scene is the closeups on the faces of the boys themselves. As they prepare for and take part in their first battle, the camera moves close enough to show us the tears on their faces, and watching them look so young and so scared is made even more heartbreaking by the knowledge that World War I is just around the corner. The scene is accompanied by a short verse of a children’s choir singing a hymn, and the soundtrack of pure innocence as the boys are forced to kill for the first time makes the scene even sadder. The eeriness of the Scarecrows adds a sense of horror to the tragedy, and overall it’s one of the best pieces of direction ever to appear on this show.

           While this scene is astonishingly effective, I don’t feel as much of a connection to any of the boys as individuals. Latimer is well-acted, but he comes across more as a well-acted plot device than as a real character, and a result I never really engage with his plight as a bullied student or even with the war memorial at the episode’s end. The general attention to unglorious, terrifying war works very well, though, especially in Baines’s taunting lines toward the schoolmaster. “Do you think they will thank the man who taught them it was glorious?” he asks, responding merely with “Et cetera, et cetera” to the man’s boasts of his own military past.

On the whole, I like this episode much better as a war story than as a love story, but the romantic angle definitely shows improvement from the previous episode. I continue to be mostly uninterested in Joan for much of the episode, but while she’s fairly dull as John Smith’s love interest, she starts to come alive once she learns of the Doctor’s real identity. She’s smart to ask him for details of his childhood, which he can give only as impersonal, encyclopedic facts. Once he has changed, she mourns for the man she has lost, but she’s strong enough to avoid the temptation of conflating him with the Time Lord he has once again become. Even better, she doesn’t let her feelings distract her from the responsibility that the Doctor bears for how events unfolded. “If the Doctor had never visited us, if he’d never chosen this place on a whim, would anybody here have died?” she asks, and her ability to see that he wreaked havoc on her community in order to save himself is a much stronger moment for the character than anything that happens during their short-lived romance.

           Martha gets a couple of wonderful scenes here, especially the initial moments of the episode in which she uses Mother of Mine as a shield and pulls a gun on Son of Mine in order to scare the Family away. Mother of Mine’s physical resemblance to Martha’s friend doesn’t give her a moment’s hesitation, and she stays focused and determined until the crisis is over. She gets another fabulous moment when she demonstrates her medical knowledge for a skeptical Joan, a scene made even better by the fact that Martha asserts herself but isn’t really used to redeem Joan from her racist assumptions; in general, this episode doesn’t give quite as much time to Martha’s struggles as a woman of color in 1913 as did the first part, but what we do see is much more focused on Martha herself. The climax of the episode sees Martha declaring her love for the Doctor, which might have been an interesting development if he hadn’t so easily accepted her backpedaling later on. Her words show just how hopelessly infatuated with him she is: “he doesn’t even look at me, but I don’t care, because I love him to bits.” The Doctor is far too willing to dismiss these words as a desperate invention in a moment of crisis, but even if he ignores the warning signs about the destructive emotional impact he is having on her, he does show her a rare, lovely moment of genuine appreciation at the end of the episode.

           There are some good moments for supporting characters here, but the Doctor is definitely the star, and Tennant gives his very best performance in his run on the show. The Doctor’s resistance to the idea that he isn’t human is really nicely developed throughout the episode, particularly in his shock that the Doctor didn’t even think to put falling in love on his list of possibilities to look out for before he changed. He’s so palpably scared about losing what he believes to be his identity that the idea of his return to being the Doctor seems cruel and unreasonable. Even with my lack of interest in his relationship with Joan, the montage of his life with her is hauntingly sad, especially in the moments when the camera pulls back from the vision and returns to his grief-stricken face. I didn’t realize, throughout most of these two episodes, quite how much he had adjusted his speech patterns, but when he tricks the Family at the end and goes directly from John Smith to Doctor, it makes really clear just how different his voice is as a human. He’s not a completely separate person, though, and he acknowledges to Joan that “Everything John Smith is and was, I’m capable of that too.” This isn’t of as much interest now, but it sets up some interesting ideas about the relationship between a Time Lord and the human persona created by the watch—a concept that gets even more interesting in “Utopia.”

           The ending is a very dark moment for the Doctor, who doesn’t just put a stop to the Family but essentially dooms them to eternal torment. I don’t think it’s necessarily out of character for the Doctor to do something like this, as “The Runaway Bride” has already given us an example of the Doctor’s tendencies toward violence in moments of loss. I’m not sure that I believe he would stick to this scenario, even after his initial rage had passed, but he does pay a yearly visit to Sister of Mine, and it accords with his “no second chances” line from “The Christmas Invasion.” His behavior here seems awfully disrespectful to the Family’s victims; their bodies belonged to regular people before they were taken over, and having, for instance, Jenny’s body placed into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy seems like a cruel ending for her physical form. Still, there’s a lot of focus on the darker elements of the Doctor this season, and this is perhaps the moment in which these elements are the most impressively and fully realized.

           The Doctor’s sad realization of his own inability to have a normal human relationship is much more memorable to me than the specific relationship that he is forced to give up, and that makes the love story angle a bit less emotional for me than it has been for some other viewers of the show. Still, as the story of the Doctor’s role in the destruction wrought by terrifying monsters upon the eve of the First World War, it’s a brilliant episode, and his distance from human nature has never been sadder. A