Doctor Who – The Angels Take Manhattan

Series 7, Episode 5, Mid-Series Finale

CONTAINS SPOILERS

The last episode of Doctor Who until the Christmas Special, and the last episode ever with Amy and Rory, at least as full time companions. You never really know if something is a final appearance ever in a TV show, especially with a show like Doctor Who. But it was said in the promotional material for this episode that the departure of the Ponds is very final, and it does indeed feel that way.

Watching this episode knowing it is their last you start feeling a bit sad early on, even if the characters themselves are happy. The scene with the Doctor, Amy and Rory enjoying themselves having a picnic in Central Park in New York is an example of this. Amy teases the Doctor about reading a book out loud, Rory gets some comedy moments, and the three characters and actors work really well together. The strong bond and affection that they all hold for each other is obvious. Watching this knowing that this will no longer be part of the show you begin to have a melancholy feeling right away, and it becomes even sadder in hindsight knowing that this scene is the last time the Doctor, Amy and Rory just had fun together enjoying each other’s company.

With this episode being the last appearance of her parents, it obviously has to feature River Song, and here she is the best she’s been in ages. As we’ve seen her story unfold more or less in backwards order, it also shows her development as a character in reverse, and here River is the wiser and more mature version that was seen in series 4 and 5 as opposed to how damaged as a person she was in much of series 6 which told her traumatic origins. She’s fun and fiery, and the references to her marriage (such as it is) to the Doctor allow for some funny lines. She also calls Rory and Amy as “dad” and “mother” respectively on separate occasions. I’m not sure off the top of my head if this is the first time, but it is significant that she refers to them as her parents.

Moffat’s other well known creation to the Doctor Who mythos also feature strongly. The Weeping Angels are the main villains here, and like River they are also back to their best, having gone back to the methods of attack we saw in Blink by sending people back in time to feed off their energy rather than breaking necks in The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone. They are also the most creepy they have been since Blink. The episode is filled with scenes of them slowly surrounding characters getting closer with each flash of darkness. This is most effective when an Angel grabs River’s wrist, meaning she has to break her own wrist in order to free it.

Not only that, but the Weeping Angels have developed as well. This episode showed a very disturbing addition to them and just how sadistic and ruthless they can be. Rather than simply sending humans back through time to live out the rest of their lives in the past, here they create a battery farm for them to go to, imprisoning them in a room until they die of old age and feeding off their energy all that time. This horrific nature to their personality is not the only new aspect to the Weeping Angels revealed in this episode, as we have statues of cherubs as “baby angels”, and they have a very unsettling giggle. They provide one of the creepiest moments in the whole episode with Rory lighting matches in the darkness, and the cherubs slowly advancing on him until one blows the light of his match out. It also turns out the Angels have a celebrity member in their family, as the Statue Of Liberty appears as a giant Weeping Angel. This last thing is probably the weakest overall, as it makes the least sense other than “because it’d be cool”. Which it is, but still. It also gave my favourite funny line of the episode, once again by Rory; “I always wanted to visit the Statue of Liberty. I guess she got impatient”.

One of the most enjoyable things about this episode was the inclusion of a book, a pulp novel about a private detective called Melody Malone. It turned out that the book was actually written by River as a series of clues for the Doctor, so the characters ended up being in a book they were reading. They have a lot of fun with that idea. Simply reading ahead to see what happened to them would be too dangerous, as once time is ‘written’ and read, it is set, but they were able to get around it by being able to read “a page of handy hints, Preview, spoiler free”, that is chapter titles. There are of course obvious parallels here with people reading spoilers for the series itself and that it’s more interesting to figure out clues in the story than to just skip to the end so you know exactly what will happen. The most significant chapter titles were ‘The Roman In The Cellar’ telling them where Rory was. and ‘Amelia’s Last Farewell’ which upset the Doctor enough to be desperate to rewrite time.

Which brings us to the main thing about the episode. Amy and Rory’s exit. They have become trapped by the Weeping Angels, and figure out that a way out of the situation is to create a time paradox. Rory decides to sacrifice himself, as if he dies there at that age and at that time he cannot live to be part of the battery farm, and Amy chooses to go with him. This creates the paradox and it looks like all is well… but watching it, I just knew it wouldn’t be that easy. The happy ending is snatched away from us as Rory notices a gravestone with his name on (as a side note, nice touch that Rory’s middle name was Arthur, just like his actor Thomas Arthur Darvill).

Rory is abruptly sent back through time by a surviving Weeping Angel. This time there is no hope of him coming back, a paradox on top of a paradox would be too much. Then Amy makes a choice she’s made many times before, but this time it’s for good. She chooses a life with Rory over travelling with the Doctor and decides to allow the Weeping Angel to send her back in time to where Rory is, to live out the rest of their lives together. This also means they can never see the Doctor again. We know from their gravestones that both Amy and Rory live until they are in their 80s, but I can’t say this was a completely satisfying ending to the Ponds for me. Rory was short changed, and we don’t even get a mention of Brian in the whole episode. I’d also kind of hoped that considering Melody regenerated in New York in 1969 that the Ponds would be able to raise her, after all there isn’t really an explanation for how Mels was able to grow up with the Ponds as children in the ’90s otherwise. Of course this would mean that Let’s Kill Hitler would be even more crazy than it already was, but this is one loose plot thread that I always wanted resolving.

But the final scenes… as tear jerky and emotional as this episode was, I don’t usually cry at TV and was OK for most of it… but the ending… River says she’s going to write the book and send it to Amy to get it published, and she’ll tell Amy to leave an afterward for the Doctor. The Doctor finds it and reads what Amy wrote for him. She tells him that she and Rory lived a long, happy life, but still worry about the Doctor and hope he isn’t alone. She asks him to do her one last favour and go back to little Amelia waiting in the garden and as “she’s going to need a lot of hope” tell her all the amazing adventures she will have with the Doctor one day. Then the episode finishes with a flashback and eventually a still from The Eleventh Hour with Amy saying “this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends”. Yeah, that got me. It’s a great way of summing up Amy Pond’s era as a companion and the end returning to the beginning with a moment in The Eleventh Hour suddenly explained.

A very good episode overall, and as a fan I have to say thank you so much to Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill for all they bought to Doctor Who and for bringing to life the great companions that were Amy Pond and Rory Williams.

Doctor Who – The Power Of Three

Series 7, Episode 4

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Described as “a love letter to the Ponds”, while this isn’t a two-part story, it could be seen as such as in many ways it’s the beginning of the send-off to Amy and Rory,  with their final episode as regular companions, and by many accounts their last episode ever, coming next week for the mid-series finale. I can’t believe it’s coming so quickly.

For this episode we see the Ponds at home, and much of it is the fact that they have a double life. As they put it, they have a contrast between “Doctor life” and “real life”. They have adventures with the Doctor, which are fun and dangerous, and they have their domestic home life of jobs, family and friends, which is… normal. They like the life they have, they like that are getting more roots and responsibilities. They are also content with the double life they have at the moment, but at the back of their mind they realise it cannot last forever. The Doctor sees it too. This is best shown in a scene where Amy and the Doctor are sitting together. I liked their moment in Dinosaurs On A Spaceship, but this is even better. It’s a great Doctor/companion scene. The Doctor telling Amy that there is so much to see in the universe and he’s trying to see it all, and while Amy wants to see it as well, she knows that sooner or later she can’t keep doing that and have a normal life. It’s a moving scene, and as the show has often done shows that the Doctor being a Time Lord has a much longer life expectancy than his human companions. You can also see why Amy is reluctant to let go, after all the Doctor has been in and out of her life for almost her whole life.

This episode reminds me a little of Father’s Day from series 1 in that it is mostly about the companion and how travelling with Doctor effects their real life, and unfortunately they both have similar weaknesses as episodes. It’s that the sci-fi threat is a little sidelined and not as well thought out. In this episode the threat is some mysterious small black cubes which slowly invade Earth. Their method of invasion is quite interesting, they just appear and do nothing for months, allowing people to get used to them and collect them. Doctor Who has often poked fun at the way people jump on the bandwagon with crazes and fads, and this episode gets plenty of that in. The cubes eventually activate and start attacking in different ways; firing lasers, flame throwing, manipulating emotions, spiking hands and… playing ‘The Birdie Song’ on a continuous loop. But when it’s revealed what is behind the cubes, this whole plot thread stops being interesting, it’s just some alien threat from another dimension, we get a Star Wars Sith-like bad guy who’s a bit rubbish to be honest, and it’s all dealt with quickly. But then, this episode was never really about the cubes.

The episode is peppered with references for fans of the classic series, such as the Doctor recalling K-9, and him sadly talking about his previous companions, including the fact that some lost their lives. We also get a character who has been part of the expanded universe in Doctor Who for some time, Kate Stewart, head of UNIT and daughter of the Brigadier. She is a good addition to this episode and I’d be surprised if we don’t see her again, as this felt like an introduction.

A character we sadly won’t be seeing much more of is Brian Williams. He’s great in this episode, he’s a very ordinary guy that gets excited about the extraordinary things the Doctor brings to their lives, and he is clearly concerned about how the Doctor affects the lives of his loved ones. You can tell how similar he and Rory are. I think it’s a real shame that Brian was only introduced when Rory and Amy were about to leave the show, I think he was a missed opportunity.

There were some references to Christmas, which appears to be a recurring theme this series. Of course technically the Christmas special this year is going to be the sixth episode of series 7. I actually think, with a few tweaks, The Power Of Three could have been a great Christmas special. I liked it better than The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe anyway.

A few random things I enjoyed in this episode:

* Rory in his pants was used as part of the trailers for this episode, and I have to say Arthur Darvill looks very gorgeous generally in this episode. We also get Rory returning the favour of the Doctor kissing him in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship with Rory kissing the Doctor, only on his cheek though.

* In the summer barbeque scene they played ‘Don’t Falter’ by Mint Royale featuring Lauren Laverne. I LOVE THAT SONG!!!!!!

* Matt Smith proves what a great Doctor he is, and seems to be having a lot of fun, especially in the scene where he gets bored of sitting watching the cubes and rushes for an hour painting a fence and playing keepie uppie.

The final scene in this episode saw the Doctor, Amy and Rory going into the TARDIS together, and apparently it was also the last scene Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill filmed together. It will be very, very sad to see the end of Matt Smith/Karen Gillan/Arthur Darvill TARDIS team, as in all their scenes in this episode the real life friendship between the actors comes across very clearly on screen.

Doctor Who – A Town Called Mercy

Series 7, Episode 3

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Every episode of series 7 so far has reminded me of a Red Dwarf episode. Episode one: Kryten. Episode two: Pete. Episode three: Gunmen of the Apocalypse. Both Gunmen of the Apocalypse and A Town Called Mercy feature a Wild West theme and a rogue cyborg. If you’re going to take inspiration from Red Dwarf, and I know Steven Moffat loves his timey wimey plots, but please, please, please don’t do Ouroboros. If you thought River turning out to be Amy and Rory’s daughter was a convoluted sci-fi family plot, that has nothing on the bizarre and let’s face it, gross revelation that Dave Lister turns out to be his own father and his love interest Kochanski turns out to be his mother!

The Simulants in Red Dwarf were cyborgs “created for a war that never took place”, but went rogue afterwards and became a threat for whoever they came across. The cyborg in this episode, known as The Gunslinger, was also created for a war, but rather than killing for the sake of killing, he is after vengence against the scientists who made him that way.

Last week’s episode was controversial because of the Doctor leading Solomon to his death. Solomon was an evil murderer, so wouldn’t the universe be better off without him, and when it comes to something like murder, why should the murderer continue to live when the victim won’t and the families will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives? Shouldn’t they be the ones that should be given peace of mind? On the other hand, does the death penalty make you just as bad and as the saying goes, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Where will the violence end if nobody is willing to stop it?

Much of this is discussed in this episode. The situation is more complex than it was with Solomon. The Western town has ended up caught between an alien conflict. An alien, Jex, crash landed there and integrated into the community giving them electricity earlier than it had actually been invented and curing the town of cholera. It turned out though that in his own planet his species had been in a long war, and in a desperate attempt to end it he and others tricked some people into being experimented on to become cyborgs in an attempt to end the war quicker. They succeeded in that goal, but it took many deaths to get the cyborgs to the exact standard they wanted. Jex makes the point that morality in wartime and peacetime are different and it often becomes ”the ends justify the means”.  However, there are limits as to what people will consider ”worth it”, war or not. The Gunslinger was the only surviving cyborg, and had killed all those that had worked on the experiments, with Jex as the last one. He tried to be careful not to kill any innocent bystanders, but he was willing to use it as a threat, and he ended up accidentally killing the town marshal who tried to protect Jex.

Who you would side with is a question. For me, Jex didn’t come across as terribly sympathetic. He was a bit too smug when saying that it would be easy if he was just a murderer and hadn’t been someone who did good for the town. The Gunslinger definitely had more wrong done to him, and while he may have been vindictive he wanted to punish those directly involved in what was done to him, not try and punish everybody regardless of whether they had anything to do with it or not. But still there is a big difference between vigilantism and justice. In the end a remorseful Jex decides that the conflict will never be resolved while they are both alive, so ends it by killing himself. The Gunslinger goes from being a threat to the town when the episode opened to being the town’s protector when the episode ends.

Morality discussions aside, it’s an average episode. It’s not all that memorable, and it’s a bit dull. The townsfolk are little more than Western archetypes, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but they could have had more fun with it. But then as is said in the episode, the place just happens to be a backdrop for this conflict.

What I liked most about this episode were the funny moments. You can always rely on a Toby Whithouse script to provide good humour.  The three moments I liked the most were;

* The Doctor goes into the saloon asking for tea. “But the strong stuff, leave the bag in”.

* He speaks horse, and realises a stallion called Joshua prefers to be called Susan.

* Jex’s Futurama-esque security system with a calm and slightly cheery female computer voice saying. “Thank you for choosing Abaraxas security software. Incinerating intruders for three centuries.”

Doctor Who – Dinosaurs On A Spaceship

Series 7, Episode 2

CONTAINS SPOILERS

DINOSAURS! ON A SPACESHIP!

Also Queen Nefertiti, an Edwardian explorer, Rory’s dad, Mitchell & Webb as robots… as you might have guessed, this is an ‘everything but the kitchen’ sink episode.

The episode ends with lots of postcards, and that’s not a bad analogy for episode as a whole. It’s made up of little snapshots. It has a lot of good ideas, but because everything is packed like a stuffed suitcase, there isn’t enough room or time to do them all justice, so it comes off as a bit of a random mess.

I really liked the idea of a Silurian Ark, kind of an equivalent of Noah’s Ark but with reptilian humanoids hoping to repopulate dinosaurs to save them from extinction in contrast to Noah putting two of every animal on an Ark so they’ll still exist after the great flood. But this strand is nothing more than an explanation for why we have DINOSAURS! ON A SPACESHIP! in the first place. It’s a shame, as I think that would have been an interesting idea to explore.

Queen Nefertiti as a companion of the Doctor sounds like a good idea, but she gets little to do other than flirt with the Edwardian explorer (who gets even less to do) and be taken hostage by the bad guy. She gets herself out of the situation, but it still comes off as a bit of a waste. She could have been replaced with an original character and it wouldn’t have made any difference other than having to spend time to establish that she is a well known figure.

Speaking of the bad guy, here it is a bounty hunter named Solomon. He is a vile, horrible villain. He only cares about recovering items for profit, and these items seem to be living things, such as the dinosaurs and even famous humans such as Queen Nefertiti. Not only that but he enjoys ‘breaking’ them and will murder anything that gets in his way, including the Silurians who had responded to his distress signal and an innocent triceratops. He’s also very much fits into the TV Trope ‘Evil Cannot Comprehend Good’, in that he believes the Doctor’s disgust for Solomon is because he wants the profit for himself. Solomon gets a satisfying comeuppance in the end, via a lot of missiles blowing him up in his spaceship.

Maybe this episode isn’t one that should be analysed too closely. Apparently it was conceived just to write an episode that had DINOSAURS! ON A SPACESHIP!, and, well, we get DINOSAURS! ON A SPACESHIP!  and I have to admit, my inner child is thoroughly geeky, as DINOSAURS! ON A SPACESHIP is something that excites me, in the same way that DALEKS VS CYBERMAN did in Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday.  We get to see the Doctor riding a triceratops and it ‘fetching’ a golf ball like a dog because of the grass residue. All very silly, but silly was clearly what they were aiming for.

For the second week in a row, an episode has reminded me of Red Dwarf, this one being similar to Pete which also had DINOSAURS! ON A SPACESHIP! I wonder if future episodes will see the Doctor in a backwards universe or fighting a vindaloo monster?

We get to meet Rory’s dad Brian, played by Mark Williams. He’s a great addition to this episode and I wish we’d have met him earlier, as he’s good as one of those normal people who sometimes end up on the Doctor’s adventures. It’s all an eye opener for him, as Rory says Brian normally only ever goes to the paper shop or plays golf in his spare time, and one of the best bits of the episode is when Brian is sat on the TARDIS with some sandwiches and a flask of tea looking from above at planet Earth. Brian is also the one who sends the postcards at the end, having gone to various tourist attractions because the TARDIS is able to get them there immediately. I can relate to Brian on this one, I always hate the ‘travelling’ side of travelling too. Mark Williams and Arthur Darvill work very well together playing a father and son. In fact, Rory gets a lot of good moments in this episode, the Doctor kissing him on his lips for one, and more importantly a rare occasion where we get to see his nursing skills put to good use.

My favourite part of the episode was a nice scene between the Doctor and Amy, where Amy says she is worried that the Doctor may one day stop visiting them. It’s very well played, although there is some obvious foreshadowing about the Ponds’ exit, and a very big implication that it won’t be a happy ending. If there’s one thing I got more than anything from this episode, it’s that I’m really, really going to miss Amy and Rory.

Doctor Who – Asylum Of The Daleks

Series 7, Episode 1.
CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS

The Daleks are the Doctor’s greatest foe. They are very recognisable to British audiences, even by people who haven’t seen much of the show. They are a pop culture icon here in the UK. They are definitely a crowd pleaser, you could the equivalent of a band’s biggest hit that everyone expects to be played when they see them live in concert. So whenever a new series of Doctor Who starts, people expect the Daleks to turn up at some point, even if it’s only a walk on slide on cameo. But that has caused a bit of a problem. The Daleks have become somewhat overused. Some episodes featuring them have come off as an obligatory Dalek episode because people expect there to be one.

I think the decision taken last series to ‘rest’ the Daleks for a little while was a good one, as I was actually looking forward to seeing their return in the opening episode of the new series Asylum of the Daleks. I’d go further to say that’s what I think about the whole series. It has had a longer break than usual, this being the first episode broadcast since last year’s Christmas special. This episode kicked the new series off with a bang and made me realise just how much I missed seeing Doctor Who on television. I think this is probably the best Dalek episode of the entire revived series, certainly up there with past action-packed series finales such as Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday.

We get to see their home planet Skaro and a whole parliament of Daleks. The main plot though takes place in the Dalek asylum, with cracked, rusted broken down Daleks roaming around. They are essentially zombie Daleks. We also get to see charred remains of exploded Daleks after the Doctor reverses a self-destructing one back into a group of other Daleks. The Daleks are dangerous even when they are not fully functioning.

But the main surprise about this episode wasn’t that the Daleks were coming back. Indeed, it was heavily publicised. What they did manage to keep a secret was that Jenna Louise Coleman, who is to play the next full time companion of the Doctor, appeared in this episode. The character will probably appear in a different form or other to what we see of her here. But as for how she is in this episode, she is AMAZING. She’s fun, witty, smart, very likeable, and already looks set to be a great companion. She works well with Matt Smith’s Doctor, and Rory too. In a way it’s a pity that there’s little chance of her appearing alongside Rory again. Here she was known as Oswin Oswald, or “Souffle Girl”, but the name of the companion has been said to be Clara Oswin. They may not be the same person, but there is clearly some connection, but what will it be?

What really got me in this episode though was when we learn the fate of Oswin. When the Doctor found her he realised that she had been converted fully into a Dalek and didn’t even know it. The scene was heartbreaking, partly because over the episode we had got to know and really, really like Oswin. But the way it was told made it all the better. The show has done this sort of body horror thing before, where a human has been converted into a literal killing machine and upon realising that they are unable to deal with it. But it was done so much better here. In Rise of the Cybermen/The Age Of Steel for example we had converted Cybermen, including a woman who was about to get married that day, but in that instance we as an audience could only feel pity for them. Here, we were able to empathise with Oswin, as we found out about it at the same time as she did. They then showed flashbacks to her being converted, which were very scary. They bought forward what a terrifying thought it is. It’s certainly a billion times better a way of doing a ”human Dalek” story than Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks.

It’s fair to say that even if Jenna Louise Coleman had only appeared in this episode she would have made an impact on Doctor Who fans. I definitely welcome her joining the show full time.

Other highlights in this episode were that it was peppered with funny lines. My favourite was Rory’s comment that the Doctor’s escape plan was the kind where you only survived 4 seconds longer. There was a good creepy dream sequence scene where a nearly brainwashed Amy sees the Daleks as people in formal evening wear and a ballerina. There was a bit where a crew member introduces the Doctor and Amy to the rest of his crew, only for them to find the crew are all dead. This reminded me of the episode of Red Dwarf where they first meet Kryten, which is one reason I liked it, but it also provided one of those unsettling moments Doctor Who does so well, with the Dalek eyestalks coming out of the rotting corpses.

We also got a tearjerker where we find out that the reason Amy and Rory split up was because since giving birth to Melody/River for some reason Amy is infertile, so because she knew how much Rory wanted to have kids she “let him go” so he’d be able to have them with another woman. While this scene was effective… OK, this is one of those moments in a fantasy/sci-fi series where you can buy all the fantastical elements, but you have a problem with how they handle an everyday situation. If the only problem in the relationship was that Amy is now unable to have children biologically, why didn’t they consider adoption? They have other options other than ending the marriage altogether.

The other nitpick I have with this episode was the ending where the Daleks were all saying “Doctor Who?”. This is probably going to be the series-long arc like Bad Wolf, Harold Saxon, missing planets, the crack in time and the Impossible Astronaut. I have no problem at all with series long arcs, but sometimes, like in this episode, they can overdo the signposting a little.

But overall, best Dalek episode since the revival, fantastic introduction to Jenna Louise Coleman in the show and a great start to the new series.