"The Rebel Flesh"

"It was like a boring episode of the Classic series," argues one of my esteemed colleagues in Doctor Who fandom, and that's a pretty concise summation of this first part. The good points are that it actually has a bit of a science fiction concept for once, which we haven't really seen this series, that the Doctor has been toned down a bit again, that Rory gets plenty of time to shine and that it takes itself seriously enough to not seem self-parodying, unlike other recent episodes. The bad points are that the science fiction concept is far from fresh or innovative, that the plot is rather predictable, safe and quite slow at points, that the secondary characters and the setting are not amazingly well developed, that Amy is clumsily sidelined and that the general scenario is one we've seen in New Who two-parters many times before.

I'll start with the bad points, I suppose, in an effort to end the review on a positive note. I suppose to people who go into the show just expecting silly run-arounds and broadly-drawn emotionality the idea of replicants receiving identities must seem a pretty novel one but to any sci-fi audience worth its salt it all seems terribly old hat. Didn't Blade Runner do this? Didn't Star Trek do this? Indeed, didn't Doctor Who do this during the Classic series? "Spearhead from Space", anyone? Maybe it's been too long since these ideas were refreshed, and that makes their presence here seem more reasonable, but at the same time there's not much in the way of discussion here. The Doctor and Rory think the Gangers deserve to live, Amy and the orange jumpsuit cyphers are pretty iffy about them, and that's about it. It's not really presented in a very challenging way. Compare this to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where killing androids, living things with their own identities, can be a way of life, and a profitable one at that, where they aren't seen as living things in need of protection or monsters but rather are completely denied their subjectivity by society who sees them as objects. We get the idea that the Gangers are tools or vehicles but it's never really played up in a challenging way. Maybe if one of the Gangers had casually been killed by Cleaves after the Solar Storm and the rest of the human crew didn't bat an eyelid it would have been more effective. Perhaps then the Doctor could have sided with the Gangers and they had to fight or negotiate their way out or something, I don't know. But no, instead, after a lot of faffing around in the middle where nothing really happens, Cleaves kills Ganger Buzzer and everyone's very shocked and the Gangers and the humans decide to 'go to war' or something which all sounds implausibly melodramatic from these stoic Northern and Scottish people. This sets up the showdown for next episode where presumably the humans and the Gangers will slowly be killed off through a number of encounters and so on. This effectively encapsulates my second bad point too, that the plot is safe and familiar. They had a chance to do something new here and they didn't. It'd be nice to see these clones try to integrate into society or something for once. The middle drags a lot as well, and while the opening is rather brisk and nice and the ending is reasonably pacey there seem to be large chunks in the middle of the episode where it mostly just has various characters wandering around not doing very much. Is it worth noting that the writer of this episode was Matthew Graham, who also wrote "Fear Her"? This isn't nearly as padded out but you can still feel those heavy areas where the characters seem to be twiddling their thumbs a bit.

This neatly segues into my discussion of the characters introduced for this episode. Jennifer's the token wet fish, Buzzer and Jimmy are the belligerent dudes, Cleaves is the textbook ruthless leader and Dicken's only character trait is quite literally that he occasionally sneezes. Now we do get some insight into Jennifer through the ganger but she's so mopey and desperate and pleading that she's more annoying than anything and she just feels like the arbitrary sympathy character until she turns nasty at the end. Hopefully that's developed properly in the next episode. Cleaves reminded me of Thawn from "The Power of Kroll" for some reason because she seems to hate the Gangers for basically no reason and is a motiveless authority-based antagonist. It's also amusing to watch the scenes where every time it cuts back to her she seems to have her mouth twisted into a different position of distaste. On the other hand the commentary by Ganger Cleaves on her human version are rather intriguing and we could have used some more of that, just as it would have been effective to have actually shown the search being conducted by Jimmy and Ganger Jimmy together. As I've said Dicken seems to be there solely for the sake of an extra body although I imagine the sneezing will play a role in the next episode and Marshall Lancaster, one of the best performers from Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, is rather wasted in the inconsequential role of Buzzer. He just comes across as a stereotypical money-grubbing slightly grumpy Northern bloke. The characters just aren't very lively and it reinforces the bland, grey atmosphere of the setting, although I'm not sure if it was intentional. I suppose ordinary people just aren't very interesting. Speaking of the setting, though, as I've said it's not very well developed either. We know we're on an island somewhere and seemingly in the nearish future but apart from that it's all pretty vague and it gives a rather unpleasant sense of absence. What's the acid for? Why are 'solar tsunamis' happening? How was the Flesh technology developed? I would argue that all this dreariness and vagueness in character and setting is meant to reinforce the themes of identity becoming a grey area and so on but I think that would be drawing far too long a bow; what's more likely is that we just don't have an amazingly strong script.

This brings me to our main trio. The obvious star of this episode is meant to be Rory, and it shows. Arthur Darvill does compassion well - he knows what it's like to be an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. He also knows what it's like to be a facsimile of himself, having been an auton. His performance is incredibly naturalistic, and he gets some very funny and endearing moments which have been denied to him in previous episodes. It's really the solution to what I've been talking about in earlier reviews this series. Here a companion is being given a proper role, not just being a plot device or a source of cheap gags. You'd think I'd be overjoyed with this, but they fumbled it a good deal in dealing with Amy. She's barely present in the episode, with what seems like a handful of lines and virtually no involvement in the plot, spending most of her time just looking for Rory. It also becomes implausible to think that Rory would go running off to help a Ganger and ditch his wife when he's been so uxorious in the past, and unless this is some fresh character development, and while it's nice to see him not being clingy, it seems like a very inelegant way of playing up his role. They seem to be struggling with making the husband/wife companion dynamic work. It's a step in the right direction but they really need to be doing this with both Amy and Rory.

What about the Doctor? Well as I mentioned he's been reined back a bit in this one, and you can tell that it's when the silliness has been toned down a tad and the eccentricity's less arbitrary that Matt Smith really gets his time to shine again. His character in this one is much more consistent with last series and his commanding presence and great endowment of the Doctor with inner strength and conviction are once again evident. He does get to be funny, true, but the humour's been toned down to an appropriate notch and there's a bit more gravitas. The pointless rambling and rapid-fire hand-wavey explanations are gone and it all feels much more true to the Eleventh Doctor we came to know last series. I hope he sticks around. I also hope they use this Ganger Doctor well, although honestly, who didn't see that one coming?

Overall the lack of flippancy and silliness benefits this episode a great deal compared to recent offerings but at times it seems to overstep the mark a bit too far and it can feel a little dry and stale. It captures some of last series' sincerity but could have been a bit more interesting. These stumbles don't stop it from being a step in the right direction, but the rather noticeable change in tone does tend to reinforce the wobbliness of this series. Moffat had better have something amazing waiting in the Doctor's apparently-fatal future...

"The Doctor's Wife"

Moffat's big gun this series besides his own script-writing weight was the fact that this episode was penned by none other than Neil Gaiman, who in a big first for the New Series is actually a science fiction and fantasy author rather than just a sitcom or soap writer with delusions of grandeur or a BBC hack. That being said, it doesn't mean this episode is a masterpiece or anything, and a lot of its kookiness is fairly predictable. I think some part of me really wants a good talkie episode and you'd think they'd use Gaiman for that but a lot of this involves manic rushing about and breathless scares so that's so much for that, then. Am I being unnecessarily harsh? I don't know. I just feel like Moffat's team has let me down somehow this series. Of course The Smith hasn't, and Karen Gillan hasn't, and I can't imagine a world in which Arthur Darvill could ever disappoint anyone, but I almost feel like Moffat pulled out all the stops to carry people over from the previous era last series and now he's kind of content to let the show wallow in self-indulgence and banality. None of this is to say that "The Doctor's Wife" is bad; it's certainly better than last week's offering. It just feels a little dull and kind of like it's insisting on itself a bit, as if personifying the TARDIS, having a couple of weird, creepy people speaking in funny accents, getting the Doctor to make some cheeky jokes and having a red herring 'recovery of the Time Lords' plot hook somehow will just instantly make everyone fall in love with the episode. The design comes from the Tim Burton school of grit, Idris aka The TARDIS looks like a friendly version of Bellatrix Lestrange, and Rory has yet another fake/imaginary death for the bajillionth time. Can't it happen to Amy for once? I guess they really want to hit us over the head with the whole 'Amy cares about Rory' thing so they keep having to pile on the hastily-aborted grief. If something happened to Amy, like it did in "Day of the Moon", we'd expect Rory to be pretty cheesed, but apparently Moffat and co believe that we're not certain of Amy's fidelity yet or something.

It's nice to see the corridors of the TARDIS even if they are extremely bland and kind of claustrophobic; it would have been even better if they'd shown us some of the other rooms but I guess the budget only extends so far. It's also nice to witness the deletion of the uninspired Eccly/Tennant console room for the sake of a relatively minor plot point. It seems odd that House wouldn't be aware of the hard-wired emergency programme of the TARDIS, though, or that he didn't shut it off when he turned off the other safety precautions, but there's a fair whack of hand-wavey in this story. In fact in many ways it feels like a Classic Series story of a good four episodes or so crammed uncomfortably into a straining forty-five minutes. There are a lot of ideas here about how House fixes people, about Aunt and Uncle and Nephew, who Idris is, why House eats TARDISes, who House is and what his motivations are and so on, but they're all kind of swept under the carpet as the story rushes to its climax and it feels like this episode had more potential than just the Doctor getting to have a flirt with his time machine. I'd even go so far as to argue that giving the TARDIS a face and a human identity was the least important or even the least meaningful of the avenues of thought in this story but obviously as I've already attested they want to play the character drama angle up pretty hard in this series. Indeed I almost thought of this story at one point as sort of the Eleventh Doctor's "The Girl in the Fireplace" only, y'know, with an infinitely superior Doctor and companions and believable character dynamics.

What about this Time Lord thing, though? The term 'Time Lord' gets thrown around in this episode like it's going out of fashion and the Doctor's convinced he's found 'the Corsair' and a bunch of other chappies whose names presumably start with 'the' and end with increasingly esoteric titles. Surely 'the Corsair' would be some kind of Time Lord pirate? Perhaps one who used his TARDIS to board other people's ships and so on? That could have been cool. But no, rather it's all just a trick and we're supposed to be excited that we've seen the return of the message box technique the Second Doctor used in "The War Games". I guess that's kind of cool, but really why bother? They could have saved time exploring something interesting without having this whole 'maybe some Time Lords are still alive' malarkey, and it just seems like a cop-out to play it up so much only to then simply ditch the entire thing and rapidly forget about it. The bit where the Doctor builds a TARDIS console room was kind of cool and seemed reminiscent of what the Third Doctor was up to in "Inferno" but a lot of these little continuity nods don't really seem to serve much purpose. All the episode really cares about in the end is how much the Doctor loves the TARDIS and how at last the TARDIS gets to say the same thing and while it's all deeply touching and so on it doesn't half leave me feeling a little bit unsatisfied. As I keep saying, there was more to be done here but it was just abandoned for two of Moffat's loves - one we've seen since the beginning of the New Series, which is to say cheap horror gimmicks, and one which seems to have developed recently, which is to say this kind of awkward sentimentality he's started playing up. Matt Smith plays it well so it doesn't come across with the same kind of wet melodrama in which a Tennant sob story would wallow but it still seems kind of limited and safe compared to the challenging issues we could be exploring in these stories.

I suppose some mention must be given to the House, who is a reasonable villain and whose voice acting is pretty good but as I've said we are given virtually no indication as to his motivation as an antagonist or why he does anything and he starts to feel pretty arbitrary by the end. They do a good job of characterising this faceless villain in a way which seems interesting but we really needed more; again, this was probably something which could have been explored if the whole Time Lord diversion had been removed. Again the phrase 'murder your darlings' comes into my head and it seems like a lot of the ideas which Moffat and Gaiman probably thought were dashedly clever and special were really prioritising hype and suspense over telling a complete story. Oh, and whose idea was it to have yet another Ood villain? I notice they didn't even bother explaining how Ood are easily mind-controlled in this one; can't anyone see what a wasted opportunity it is by consistently having the Ood as enemies of the Doctor rather than his allies? His appearance also feels, in many ways, like a pointless nod to stories gone by and the Doctor's completely nonchalant remark about "Another Ood I've failed to save" only serves to reinforce how little we care by this point. You may as well have had a mildly placid Dalek as the servant for all we're meant to care about Nephew's destruction. How does House mind-control people anyway? It just keeps coming back to the limited explanation present in this episode; in many ways the story and the mystery becomes completely derailed for the sake of the Doctor-TARDIS interaction scenes.

As I keep saying this series Amy and Rory don't have nearly enough to do, spending most of their time running around or having mental games played on them and their relegation to the level of plot contrivance to get the Doctor into action is fairly disappointing. At least they're kept together in this one. Also, why does the Doctor not even care about who Idris was before she was shunted out of her body and replaced with the TARDIS' 'Matrix' or whatever? House says "Goodbye, Idris," in a particularly scathing tone of voice at the end and it feels like there was meant to be something there which we didn't find out about. I'm led to believe that this episode was heavily rewritten due to budgetary constraints and it kind of shows. Idris/The TARDIS also said something about "The only water in the forest is the river," at the end, presumably some kind of reference to River Song and perhaps the last name 'Pond' as another water source. So, resorting to dropping RTD-style cryptic phrases are we Moffat? The deliberate speculation fuel is tiresome in the extreme, much like the heavy-handed pieces of dialogue between Amy and Rory which keep being inserted about the future Doctor's death in "The Impossible Astronaut". Speaking of which, I wish the Doctor would stop using the term 'impossible'. With everything he's seen you'd think he would have abandoned the concept by now. What's more, Tennant didn't require much more than the sight of someone patting their head and rubbing their stomach or doing a reverse park to start shouting "Impossible" like he had some kind of Bewilderment Tourette's, and I'd prefer not to be reminded of his mannerisms. Back in the day the Doctor used to rock up and suggest improvements to some machinery and all the gormless humans/humanoid aliens would say it was impossible or call him a genius. Are we really supposed to believe any of the hand-wavey fairy-story silliness which goes on in the New Series is impossible, or feel any kind of suspense in these situations, when it seems like wishful thinking is everything the technology of the future needs to function? What this distracted me from, though, is this dropping-little-clues thing Moffat has fallen for, and you can tell he's just waiting for people to start arguing on the forums and stuff. It's populist and moron-pandering and honestly I expect better of him. The revelations at the end of this series will have to be mind-expandingly amazing to reconcile me to any of this.

I've probably been more negative than I honestly feel. I enjoyed this episode, and while a lot of it left me feeling disappointed and unsatisfied there were times when it made me laugh, and Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are as watchable as ever. I just feel like the spark which invigorated the previous series got lost somewhere and Moffat's fumbling around in the dark trying to relight the candle. He got Neil Gaiman in to help him look but their combined efforts really didn't achieve much more than a kind of low flicker. It's worth watching, and fans will probably appreciate some of the references, but there's just so much more which could be done here and it's the wasted potential more than anything which grates on this episode and the series as a whole thus far.

"The Curse of the Black Spot"

Sometimes reviewing Doctor Who is a challenge. It's not always astoundingly easy to heap praise upon art, or offer constructive criticism to a solid piece of work, and it's especially hard to be funny about what you admire. It's for that reason, I suppose, that my reviews of the previous series of New Who were not as verbose as those which came before, because being what I, with blatant passion, basically consider a thirteen episode borderline masterwork, I was often pressed for things to say. Occasionally, as I pondered what to write about a game-changing televisual experience like "The Eleventh Hour" or "Amy's Choice", and in times since, I would think to myself that if there was anything I would miss about Tennant and RTD it would be how unbelievably easy it was to review the episodes because practically every week we were being served up unsalvageable piles of plotless, unscientific, melodramatic populist drivel which it was both simple and fun to absolutely destroy. Moffat and co must have been listening to these mutinous thoughts with some kind of mind-eavesdropping device from one of those 'dark fairy stories' because they kindly offered up "The Curse of the Black Spot" for my examination.

I'll get straight to the point now. This episode is a mess. It's astoundingly derivative and unoriginal, the dialogue and characterisation are sloppy and the plot has more holes than a pirate ship after being on the receiving end of a full broadside. The writer of this episode, Steve Thompson, is to my surprise the same person who wrote "The Blind Banker", the serviceable second episode of Moffat and Mark Gatiss' currently-running Sherlock TV series, and if anything is obvious it's that he should probably stick to longer-format works, and more realistic genres like detective fiction, rather than trying to tackle forty five minutes of sci-fi.

Once again, for the millionth time, we have some kind of alien creature which looks like a nasty thing from folklore showing up and terrorising people in the past. It's mind-numbing that they just can't escape this trope. The explanation for the Siren is fair enough, if a little rushed and predictable, but there are some weird things. Why can't it cure people? For the sake of dramatic tension, apparently. Why does it go all red and demonic when people try to interfere with what it's doing? Lack of imagination, I suppose. If it takes people to its sickbay by touching them, how come the Doctor, Amy and Captain Avery don't end up there straightaway when they get touched? Who knows. How does it travel through reflections? Possibly on wishful thinking, because no science holds any of this episode together. The Doctor rattles off a lot of guff about colliding realities and mirrors which is basically meaningless and it sounds a lot of the time like his dialogue was being written with Tennant in mind, especially when he says "Sister, you are good!" to the Siren.

Amy and Rory are again, and astoundingly for the two other stars, woefully underused, and apart from some pointless swordfighting with Amy and some cheap anaesthetised laughs from Rory that's about it. Why do Amy and the Doctor feel the need to drag Rory all the way from the hospital bed to the TARDIS before performing CPR? The whole 'CPR' thing is so unimaginative that I can't believe it was used, especially for the protracted bit before Rory coughs the water up. Is he just going to keep getting sort-of killed? They really need something fresh to amp up the drama here, and while I suppose they have it in this story Moffat's running with the little girl and so on it seems like in the filler episodes they don't really give a damn.

That's what this episode feels like - filler. Why did Henry Avery become a pirate? It's not really clear. He likes gold, apparently, but he seems like such a nice guy his lust for treasure doesn't fit at all. Is he really a murderous cutthroat? He doesn't seem to give the Doctor too much trouble. His son also serves as one of Moffat's Arbitrary Annoying Children and I wish to say no more of him. Incidentally, is it really plausible that a seventeenth century ship captain could ever really figure out how to pilot a futuristic alien spaceship, and incidentally, how did they get it moving if it was stuck, thus becalming the pirate ship and the TARDIS?

There are a couple of other weird plot holes too. The greasy-haired pirate who wants to scarper gets slashed by Toby, the little kid, in a needless act of unpleasantness, and tries to barricade the door. However, when Avery and the Doctor show up a few minutes later, he's completely vanished. Where did he go? Is there a scene missing? It's never mentioned. And if the magazine on the ship is "as dry as a bone", how come there's a huge, full barrel of water in there, and why does Toby take the lid off? Speaking of which, wasn't there meant to be only one barrel of water left on the ship? Because they open another one on the deck to let the Siren out towards the end. It's blatantly lazy and inconsistent and devoid of any kind of explanation.

A lot of the lines Hugh Bonneville gets saddled with as Captain Avery are absolute ham and cheese of the most elevated denomination, going on about "ships laden with treasure" and calling people "scurvy dogs" or "bilge rats" or whatever, although he does his best with what he's given, and the 'walking the plank' scene is so needless as to be borderline parody without being aware of the fact. It's like they wanted a pirate story but they blew the budget going to America so they couldn't afford a big pirate battle or anything so just stuck in some guff with Amy waving a sword around and a bunch of guys with beards and tricorns guffawing. They also totally missed several opportunities to make some kind of 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' reference too. It's also astounding how for almost the whole episode they do such a good job of holding Rory back from approaching the Siren yet repeatedly when the injured sailors are confronted by her the most that happens is the Doctor or Avery paws ineffectually at one of their coat tails for a brief second while staring gobsmacked at the apparition. It's never explained how or why the Siren takes the TARDIS, either. The whole episode is absolutely full of random incidents to cause strife or drive the plot forward with absolutely no explanation or rationale behind them.

The problem is that there are some good ideas lurking back here somewhere - the Captain torn between his reputation and his greed, the medical program carrying out its function without thinking (albeit very similar in many ways to the plot of "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances") and the implications of that kind of utilitarian attitude, Amy and Rory's relationship and so on, but they're all so hotch-potch and insubstantial that they ultimately can't be reconciled into any kind of meaningful or even interesting structure. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are of course all doing their very best with what they're given, and as I've said Hugh Bonneville's performance is as strong as you can expect with such a lamentable script. The whole thing was in dire need of editing and its overall cheapness and lack of polish make me wonder if the division of this series into two parts caused Moffat to focus on two things, which is to say his own story arc following the little girl and the Silence, and the presence of Big Name Neil Gaiman as a writer for an episode, and permit the remainder to just be quickly-churned-out irrelevant pap. It's just so average and flimsy that it's really quite valueless, and the galloping plot holes in particular make it a very dubious offering. It's really a shame, because this is probably quite obviously the bottom of the heap for Matt Smith and Moffat's run so far, and it's disappointing to see this get through in such an incomplete and unsatisfying state in what has otherwise, up to now, been a pretty impressive tenure.

"Day of the Moon"

Another installment of "Moffat Mystery TARDIS Theatre 11000", this episode is where things really get confusing. Before I forget, as if I'd seen a Silent, I'm going to list all the unanswered questions of this episode: Who are the Silence? What do they want? Why do they have some kind of fake TARDIS? Why do they need Amy, and why is she in a photograph from 1969? Why do they need a regenerating girl? Why do they need a space suit powered exoskeleton life support? Why do they need to keep the regenerating girl in the space suit powered exoskeleton life support? How is it that the regenerating little girl can regenerate? Who is the woman with the metal eyepatch Amy saw through the door? Is Amy pregnant, or isn't she? Who knows, and with a story which furnishes us with far more questions than it does answers I think it's pretty conclusive to say that Moffat is going for the hype angle in this series, trying to rope people in with mysteries and little clues. At least they seem to be maintaining some kind of narrative arc, which is much more effective than dropping buzz words, but it's pretty irritating when all these seeds of doubt have been sown and then the Doctor decides he wants to go have adventures instead. Adventures are one of the fundamental principles upon which Doctor Who operates, so don't turn them into frustrating road-bumps obstructing the fulfilment of a story arc purely for the sake of hype. It's manipulative of Moffat, and while it's a much less vacuous and condescending form of manipulation that the emotional tripe the previous era loved it's still the altar upon which artistic credibility and meaningful representation is sacrificed.

Doctor Who is science fiction, and science fiction is meant to have a point. Moffat sees it as a 'dark fairy tale', but if you read The Brothers Grimm or something they're meant to have a point too. Any kind of speculative fiction is best employed if it gives its audience something upon which they can reflect, and it's wasted if it only serves as a backdrop for soapy character drama, child-terrifying and cheap laughs. We know Moffat loves scary aliens which prey on fundamental human fears, we know he loves romance and we know he loves flirty humour. It's for this reason that he needs to restrain himself. The phrase 'murder your darlings' is meant to be the piece of advice that often the parts of an artwork of which you're the most smugly proud are probably the worst ones and that you should probably eliminate them, but with no one but himself to edit Moffat doesn't have to worry about that too much and it's starting to show. The superficial details are reasonably fresh and interesting but behind it all are concepts and tropes which are starting to become unoriginal.

Canton gets the feds to build the 'perfect prison' for the Doctor out of Dwarf Star Alloy blocks. It's a nice reference to "Warrior's Gate", but didn't the Doctor have the perfect prison built for him not four episodes or so ago (all things considered) and he used that to help him too? If they'd done a little lampshade hanging and had the Doctor remark upon this fact it might have seemed a little less noticeable but as it is it just seems repetitive. Speaking of which, three months have passed. What have Amy, Rory and River been doing? They're running around the place, yes, but for what purpose? Why did they leave the warehouse instead of confronting the astronaut? All we see is some grainy flashback quick-cuts of the team scarpering. Wasn't Rory being attacked by the Silence at the end of the episode and River had to go to his rescue? Guess they just offed them and bailed. Did the Doctor never think to ask why Amy shot the astronaut? When did they decide to all go running around America (on foot yet only caught by the entire FBI three months later, no less - maybe Canton was hamstringing his own investigation?), and if they're 'killing' Amy and Rory, why do they have the Doctor locked up in Area 51? Again, I guess it's Canton's doing, but the big leap between the previous episode's cliffhanger and this one's opening is rather jarring. It feels like Moffat couldn't be bothered resolving the plot of the last one so he decided to start a new plot with similar elements but a lot of the actual storyline junked for the sake of the Doctor simply overthrowing the Silence. They get completely distracted from the little girl and the astronaut. I guess these are threads Moffat intends to pick up later but it really is quite incongruous when you think about it. What evidence does the Doctor have for wiping out the Silence, anyway? He says people have suffered, but how does he know? They're forgetting everything. And while the post-hypnotic suggestion explanation is a reasonably elegant one, is it really morally acceptable for the Doctor to turn humanity into genocidal killers? Besides, what happens after, say, the guys in the bar have killed their Silent? Do they bury him somewhere and then forget all about it and find mysterious alien blood and grave dirt all over their clothes and just shrug it off or something? If Silents can fry people with electricity, how do unarmed humans pose any threat to them? Why did they kill Joy in the previous episode, incidentally? Again, we know so little about the Silence, their motivations and their biology or nature that it's really impossible to say, and the fact that Moffat is seemingly leaving these questions to be answered later makes the plot of this episode seem pretty shaky on its own. It's bold of him to craft this story arc, there's no doubt about that, but you have to wonder how much he's really going to salvage at the end of the day and how much will be swept under the rug for the sake of narrative convenience and the 'rule of cool'. We're sort of encouraged to accept the problem posed by the Silence without really knowing why.

That being said, the memory loss stuff is done pretty well in the story, with it seeming like things happen in the blink of an eye. It effectively renders the viewer's confusion as equivalent to that of the characters until the explanation begins. The whole thing with the recordings are a little underused and slightly redundant though. All it really serves is to create some dramatic tension when Amy is captured and they recover her recorder and Rory thinks she's 'fessing up her love for the Doctor. Also, the Doctor's line that "it defaults to live" sounds incredibly hand-wavey and convenient and really should have been noted in passing substantially earlier, before it became relevant, to make it sound like less of an arbitrary plot device. The Doctor says they need to find the girl to figure out what's going on, but that's just abandoned so they can go storming in just as the Doctor said he wouldn't do moments ago.

All this being said, it's by no means a bad episode. It's just kind of flimsy and exploitative, cloaked in darkness to give it a facade of meaning. Grit and horror get used more and more as a kind of insulation to give mere entertainment a pretense at artistic credibility when really something like Doctor Who could be going so much further towards exploring ideas. Nonetheless, the performances are all very good, although I still think Moffat is continuing to write the Eleventh Doctor as a little too facetious without the refreshing weariness of last series and unfortunately River is rather smug. The flirting between her and the Doctor is cause for a bit of awkward shuffling too, although the Smith's motions of discomfort during the kiss are fairly spot on. It's just a shame that it looks like Moffat's really aiming for the romantic line, which seems kind of pointless, unless this is another piece of misdirection. Amy's turn to be extremely frightened is done well and her joking around about 'Time heads' at the end is pretty funny. Similarly, Rory gets to be both funny and serious and does both with aplomb, especially when pretending to be a Presidential aide and when he's talking to the Doctor about Amy. The only problem is that, as with the previous episode, there are so many characters that there just isn't enough time for all of them and Amy and Rory in particular are pretty seriously underused considering how interesting their characters are and the great quality of their performance. Canton's pretty good; he gets some funny roles, although after the orphanage part he seems to kind of mysteriously disappear until the scene in Nixon's office at the end. Nixon himself is kind of pointless, a historical celebrity of the most needless kind, and the moments where he walks in with 'Hail to the Chief' blaring inexplicably almost serve as a self-parody of the show's predilection for these historical caricatures. He doesn't really feel angry or greasy enough to be Nixon; he just seems like a nice, albeit conservative, kind of Apple Pie American. I guess the episode suggests that the Doctor's somewhat responsible for his later paranoia and trust issues but it's not really played up in any meaningful way and it seems like he only serves to get the Doctor out of awkward situations with the authorities, which could have been circumvented if Moffat hadn't wanted the Doctor to get captured for the sake of laughs anyway. The NASA lecture theatre scene could have gone and they really didn't need to leave the Area 51 prison - surely the Doctor could have patched that Silent up. Really there was no need for Nixon, but again a tight, concise narrative doesn't seem to be one of Moffat's highest priorities right now. The inevitable gay joke about Canton wanting to marry a 'he' is stupid too. As if anyone in 1969 would even suggest such a thing, even if they were gay. It's just so obvious and predictable and pointlessly cheeky that it serves no purpose rather than arguing for something, and it would have been so much more effective if it had just been him wanting to marry a black woman and had been treated with seriousness. What if Nixon had denied that suggestion? Might have been a bit edgier than a cheap gay joke. At least Nixon's reaction is reasonably plausible.

All in all it's a pretty decent episode and as a follow up to "The Impossible Astronaut" it's probably on par, although the narrative shift and the huge amount of unanswered questions can make it rather unsatisfying viewing. If you look behind all the bits where the Smith is making you chuckle or Amy's being a hotty ptotty or Rory's being basically awesome, or the cleverness of the memory loss and the Doctor's trick to beating the Silence at their own game, it's all a bit full of itself and not exactly an amazingly strong tale. Good thing we're back to general adventuring huh?

Oh, and Amy seems to have Schrödinger's womb. I don't know how Moffat intends to make uncertain pregnancy, surely one of the most cliché and soapy dramatic devices possible, into something fitting for Doctor Who, but if it's in any way related to this apparent Time Lord child then I daresay it'll end up being far more for the 'wtf factor' than any kind of groundbreaking storytelling.

"The Impossible Astronaut"

So for the first time ever, this blog turns to reviewing Doctor Who episodes as they are released rather than over the course of a rewatch. I think Moffat made quite a few bold decisions in this episode and while it's not quite the strong opener we had last series with "The Eleventh Hour" it certainly goes a long way towards refreshing the format of the show. For instance, it's the first part of a two-parter, and besides that the Doctor dies about ten minutes in, only to be replaced by his past self, which is to say the Doctor with whom we're more or less concurrent. I find it a bit jarring that apparently he's been absent from Amy and Rory's lives for a couple of months and a lot of the silliness of him being painted or showing up in Laurel and Hardie films maybe overplays the kookiness a little bit. That being said, Matt Smith as usual puts in an as-expected impressive performance, particularly when he confronts his companions in the TARDIS about what they're not telling him, and these serious moments, which also include when he confronts the astronaut and the cliffhanger, are all effectively done. It's unfortunate then that Moffat has also included a lot of references to the Fez, Jammie Dodgers, using the term 'cool' and so on which are perhaps becoming slightly overplayed to the point where there's a risk of the Eleventh Doctor's character descending into self-parody. There's also a lot of weird flirting between the contemporary Doctor and River which comes across a little strangely and I wonder if Moffat is attempting to build up the sexual tension here for some reason. I really hope not because it doesn't exactly complement the Doctor's character but I'm willing to see where things go. That's a pretty big sort of issue with this episode as a whole - a lot of it hinges on the next episode and probably the series as a whole and unfortunately it means I don't have the hindsight with which to review this episode the way I did with earlier stories. On this note River is in a similar situation to the Doctor - all her cheekiness and flirtation seem a bit tired by now but the bit where she talks to Rory about her anxiety regarding her future, the Doctor's past, is done very well, so there's a bit of conflict and tension I feel here and in River's case this dialogue prevents her from falling into the rather needless Captain Jack role of Second Technician to the Doctor. It's a pretty talky episode in general which isn't a bad thing, and the large number of locations help make it feel like there's a lot going on.

Now I believe I mentioned Rory just now, and I want to do so again because the subtlety of his performance is as usual very effective, but I think a little underutilised, and I'm looking forward to the episodes where we're sans River because with three companions and a guest (Canton) the action feels a little overcrowded at times. Similarly, when they divide up we've got Rory chatting to River, Canton talking to Amy and no one talking to the Doctor and the story can feel a little abstracted from our main protagonist at times. I also find River's appearance perhaps a little too similar to the opening of "The Pandorica Opens". I think we need to start seeing River from before her imprisonment.

As I've said Rory is as solid as ever and Amy is good too, although continuing with my previous statements she doesn't get enough time either. Rory and Amy certainly have a more serious role and lose a lot of the flippancy which is focused on River and the Doctor but I'm skeptical in regards to the big revelation about her pregnancy. So what? It's all a bit soapy and I hope Moffat does something clever with it. Again, it's hard to judge these plot elements without seeing the next episode. I think Canton is reasonably good although there's mystery there too, and the presence of Nixon is reasonable, although I can't help feel that even this toes the 'celebrity historical' line a little too much. At least they don't slobber all over him like they have done with historical figures in the past. His dialogue is a little stupid though - would he really refer to himself as 'President Nixon' on the phone? What's more, he is a little characterless and seems like he's going through the motions a bit. I feel like they could have played up Nixon's familiar character traits more - his drunkenness, his paranoia and so on.

What about the Silence? They're our villains and they're a sort of hybrid 'Grey' alien and Man in Black type character and while I'm not a twelve year old child and therefore don't find them particularly scary they're suitably mysterious and the idea that they've sort of taken over the world in secret is a nice conspiracy theory which I hope is played out in the next episode. As for the Astronaut, well, who knows? Its surreal nature is nice, though, and it's clever that Moffat can make something which is so notionally a symbol of hope and achievement into such a thoroughly disturbing and weird image. Any other opinion can't really be formed until the resolution of this story. There are some weird plot things though. For instance, if the future Doctor was only up to 'Jim the Fish' or whatever with River, surely she knew he couldn't die on the beach in Utah? How did River escape from Stormcage if this is (presumably) before the events of "The Pandorica Opens" for her? Does she keep stealing Vortex Manipulators?

Presumably all will be revealed in the next episode, or at least some. I think it's good to see Moffat shaking things up a bit after playing it safe with the established formula last series. Nonetheless I think he needs to avoid too much silliness and emotional manipulation to prevent his stories descending into self-parody and melodrama. I really hope Moffat isn't trying to make this series into a hype-driven cliffhanger-fest, overloaded with mystery and intrigue to get people talking on forums and tuning in next week because it's not Doctor Who's place to go pulpy on us in the era when things are improving. Nonetheless there's a lot of plot going on which prevents excessive character focus but there are also soapy whiffs in here and a lot of the final analysis hinges on what happens next episode.

"Space" and "Time"

These two short parts form the 2011 Comic Relief Special and are nothing more than about seven minutes in total of TARDIS funsies. The Moffat time loop conceit you could argue is starting to wear a little thin but the fact that he keeps changing the scenario keeps it interesting for the time being. Amy's thing about it getting complicated seems a bit catch-phrasey too and it'd be nice if Moffat maybe toned down Amy's one-liners a little because after the Pandorica thing and the "It's Christmas" thing it just feels a bit worn and silly. I get that it's just a Comic Relief episode but it's still a tiny bit annoying; I'm merely voicing a concern that I don't wish for Moffat's writing to descend into referential self-parody or anything. I'm sure he'll avoid that in the series proper. That being said Matt Smith is top notch as the Doctor, it's nice to see Rory's character being more fleshed out as his screen/companion time accumulates, performed with the usual mastery by Arthur Darvill, and Karen Gillan's Amy Pond is as watchable as ever. As some people have noted, the Doctor having his hand through the door reminds me of Portal which is a nice thing to think and I think something could have been done more with the space loop instead of the time loop because that would have been a bit different. I don't know how that could possibly matter in a trans-dimensional vehicle with moveable insides but there you go.
I was going to make some remarks about sexuality in Doctor Who in regards to this special but I don't think there's really that much to say. I suppose I just think that while there is definitely a cheekiness to some of the dialogue and character action here it's altogether more, I suppose, plausible when it's a Rory-Amy thing. They're married, for heaven's sake, and Amy's quite a looker. Sexuality in Doctor Who is always a divisive issue; I believe Moffat once claimed to have sexualised the Doctor (and the show in general) more than ever and that's probably true. I've never thought of the Doctor as asexual, just alien and distracted from those kinds of concerns, and I think having a married couple in the TARDIS is a rather elegant way for Moffat to incorporate these kinds of elements without having to compromise the Doctor. He has an almost child-like moment of 'disgust' at the notion that Rory was distracted by looking up at Amy through the glass floor and I think that's appropriate. If the previous era's needless romance taught us anything, it's that the Doctor's leanings are more towards the romantic and transcendental aspects of a sexual life rather than the physical. It's just that this era has rather solidified that position by giving the Doctor a more reluctant approach. He remarked "Let's not go there," in "The Vampires of Venice" when Rory noted that the Doctor's glowstick was larger, for instance, he refused the advances of Amy Pond after a moment's hesitation and now he's almost disbelieving that a pretty girl could cause her husband to make a mistake while trying to effect repairs on a time machine. It's moved on somewhat from the juvenile attitude of the previous era, spearheaded by Captain Jack most notably, which painted sexuality in an incredibly faux-risque manner, cloaked in euphemism and double entendre and cheap laughs. I realise this is reading way too much into a simple Comic Relief special but it seemed like an appropriate juncture.
It's not long now until the Sixth Series of New Doctor Who begins with a trailer recently released, obviously designed to drum up hype with a few tantalising images. I rather hope that it doesn't become a melodrama, but I suppose the pacing and chosen segments of a trailer are bound to give that impression. The one thing I think is that even if it does then at least it will probably have more integrity than what Series 1-4 offered.

Rant Time

No, it isn't the title of the next Doctor Who episode. It's just me filling in the void before the next series begins with a bit of a rant, where I'll briefly be eludicating my opinions about Doctor Who and how it reflects on our cultural intelligence as a society.

Now if you were to ask me to describe humanity in as few words as possible, I would probably say "Humans are stupid." People, unfortunately, just don't know what's best for them, and can't be trusted to make decisions or form opinions on their own because in a huge majority of circumstances they will be the wrong ones. The way this relates back to Doctor Who transitions in my mind via my limited capacity for sympathy. Basically, I feel a little sorry for the current makers of the programme. It must be frustrating to feel that due to the moronic nature of many fans of anything they have to compete with the almost unmitigated garbage which constituted the previous era of the show. As I've already made clear in my reviews, I am one hundred per cent behind Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and of course the great Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams. I'm also pretty confident in Moffat and his writers, directors and so on. The show's by no means perfect, but it's pretty good. It's clever, it's moving, it's funny, the dialogue is sharp, the storylines are meaningful, the character development is sensible and for the first time in a long time it's actually something approaching Science Fiction. It uses imaginary, hypothetical scientific and futurism based concepts and settings to explore real issues. It's also eminently watchable due to the good writing and the excellent actors. The plots feel reasonably fresh and original, or at least revitalised. We've had an exploration of what it means to be human in "Victory of the Daleks" and "The Big Bang". We looked at the darker side of human nature in "The Beast Below" and "Cold Blood". We dealt with grief and loss in "The Vampires of Venice" and "A Christmas Carol", time and memory in "Flesh and Stone", and if you can believe it, mental illness in "Vincent and the Doctor". And if you want character-driven episodes about the Doctor, his companions, and how he affects people's lives, with a variety of both light and dark tone, where better to look than "The Eleventh Hour", "Amy's Choice" or "The Lodger"?

Essentially what I'm trying to say here is that the series just gone, and this new era, has substantially brought the show back on track. I honestly can't believe what I'm reading when I see people arguing that the Tenth Doctor was a deeper, more nuanced character, or that the previous era was somehow intellectually superior to the one we have now. The Tenth Doctor was an unbelievable caricature - relentlessly smug without cause, cruel to many of his companions such as Martha and Jack, melodramatic to the point of childishness, such as when he complains that everyone breaks his heart, brainlessly facetious while almost never being funny, and most frustratingly of all, hyper-manic, running around like an imbecile, shouting at the top of his voice and generally being embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch. I can blame a lot of this on the writing of course, because David Tennant is a top notch actor. I just don't know where this interpretation of the character came from. He doesn't seem like a time-travelling alien scientist from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous, he just seems like some 'cool guy' playing at being eccentric and picking up chicks. Unfortunately a lot of it derives from the panting, dry-mouthed fangirl cult which developed around the character. And hey, far be it from me to criticise the Doctor for being good-looking. But you reach the point where you have to wonder how much it influenced his reception among fans, and how much the romance between the Tenth Doctor and Rose was a vicarious fantasy love story for the kind of fanatical fans who become overinvested in fiction because their own lives are too disappointing. I can't help but feel that the new, and better era, is suffering because people fail to realise that the previous one was in no way definitive.

Too many people have, for instance, not seen the Classic Series and cannot understand that the show was about adventures in time and space, and exploring science fiction issues, not a love story. In addition, too many people think that emotions slathered on with a trowel so heavy-handedly that the Doctor has to have a big cry every few episodes means that the stories have depth or intellectual value. It's easy to make people feel. It's making them think which is tricky. Too often do I see people arguing that the Tenth Doctor had a more layered and complex character than other Doctors, that the previous era was more 'emotionally powerful'. But it turned itself into a domestic drama where time and space were mere backdrops to the personal lives of these characters and it became soulless and populist. Just because you felt sad about the Doctor and Rose being separated, probably helped by the heartstring-tugging music and liberal amounts of tears, or saw the Doctor's pain when he stood very still in the TARDIS all those times with a blank look on his face doesn't mean that the show had a huge amount of integrity and depth which has now been lost. It just means RTD and co said "feel sad" and you said "yes sir" and did so. People are by and large like sheep; they will follow the path of least resistance and participate in mass conformity if something appeals to their most basic and easily-manipulated qualities and disguises itself in a cloak of false pretension to make you think you're experiencing something meaningful. If you honestly think the previous era was more nuanced than any other, that the Tenth Doctor was some kind of 'Doctor to end all Doctors', then I both pity and revile you. You're probably the kind of person who thought Avatar was a good film in spite of it being cliched spectacle or who would loudly abuse Ghostbusters II without really knowing why, giving the same arguments you're told to give by celebrities, popular consensus and big-media internet sites.

Ultimately it comes down to fan reaction versus critical involvement. I try to be both. People will attack everything to avoid confrontation or disagreement. I could get into this more heartily, and may very well do so, by talking about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a great film which people hate on just because of herd consensus. But I am both a fan of things and a critic of art, as well as a critic of human behaviour. And people are becoming absurd. If they end up crying and clutching their David Tennant doll after a hollow, shallow piece of pulp television, then they're happy, but if they're doled out a cracking piece of science fiction featuring the amazing Matt Smith and his Eleventh Doctor, they're fuming and saying that the show has failed. It's absurd. I watched the entirety of Tennant's run, and even though a lot of it was just ridiculous and that its praise was normally inversely proportional to the quality of the episode there are few good bits in there. But it's the praise which bothers me. People see in these things something valuable because they've lost sight of true art, true value. We're living in a culture where people care more about good looks and a bit of crying than being made to question their own values or seek new kinds of meaning. Sometimes I worry that we are living in the nadir of human culture, where the overwhelming majority love what is absurd and meaningless and despise the artistic and credible. At other times I think people are simply influenced by the fear of a vocal minority. All I can do is voice my concerns. So much feedback for things these days tends to go one way or the other, and those of us who disagree need to speak out. I suppose it's not really so bad for Doctor Who; for every annoying navel-gazer who thinks David Tennant should somehow come back, there are probably ten more people who, even if they loved the Tenth Doctor, are equally loving Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Nonetheless these nay-sayers crop up in the most irritating places on the internet, weaselling oodles of complaint in where it simply isn't justified. The show's better than ever; some people just refuse to see it. I suppose in the end Doctor Who is Doctor Who, and it's in the nature of the programme to change. If you can't accept that then there's no point watching, and certainly no point complaining about the changes, especially if you think we should have more of the rubbish that we had from 2006-2009. If you think the show is worse now, or think the Smith is inferior to Tennant, then I don't know what kind of opposite-day standards you hold for either artistry or watchability. Too often we see people adopting a herd mentality towards new things. A product, be it a film or a novel, a video game or a television series, is either absolutely adored or absolutely reviled, and normally people get it dead wrong. Because yes, as the title of this whole blog states, opinions can indeed be wrong. And yours probably is.