The Sandman: Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope

 "Writers are liars."

I'm again following far too many series because pesky present day telly insists on throwing up The Rings of Power, Inside Man and (coming soon to this blog) Andor. Fortunately this is a season finale, so I now have only Hawkeye, Breaking Bad and films to balance with all those. Anyway...

This is a beautiful coda to what is hopefully not the only series of Sandman. Here we have two achingly beautiful, profoundly meaningful fairytales that are so very, well... Gaimanesque.

As one who has been the property of many feline owners over the years, I was both amused by and admiring of Dream of a Thousand Cats, a cartoon with many famous voices. It transcends its superficial resemblance to Animal Farm (the Prophet is stroikingly similar to Old Major) to reach annundeniable truth. Cats, much as we adore them, have utterly enslaved us, and would certainly kill and eat them if they could... well, except Ashi, and Badger, and Loki, and Gizmo. I'm their daddy, so I'm safe. Right?

So it indisputably true that a reality shift occurred not all that long ago, and before then we were much smaller than them, and hunted by them. This is undoubtedly true,

Calliope is much darker, using myth to explore male abuse and exploitation of women, and the ensuing hypocrisy. In this case Richard is stealing the ideas of Calliope, a woman, and taking credit... not exactly unptrecedented. Arthur Darvill is superb as a dark protagonist straight out of an updated version of Hammer House of Horror, while Derek Jacobi is exquisite as an elderly writer who owes all his success to the fact that he kidnapped a Muse, Calliope, while on holiday in Greece, the Muse who inspired Homer.

Richard finally gets his just comeuppance at the hands of Morpheus, whose tender relationship with Calliope- despite their past bad blood centred on theor son Orpheus(!) is deeply touching.

This is just a profoundly beautiful bit of telly.

Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan

"He went to get coffee, and turned up in a book. How does that work?"

"I don't know. We're in New York."

Damn you, Moffat. You sadistic evil genius, you. You distract us with scares, timey-wimey cleverness and a story title that makes us think of Muppets, and then you go and make us have all these damn feelings, damn you. Even those of us who like to think we have hearts of stone. The Angels Take Manhattan is twisted, evil, and possibly the best thing in Doctor Who since, well, the last story you wrote with the Weeping Angels. Once again: DAMN YOU!!!

Let's leave Amy and Rory until we've talked about the other stuff, because I won't be able to talk about the other stuff otherwise. Bloody feelings…

This is a much, much better use of New York than the last time. We get iconic locations, including the Statue of Liberty being used as a Weeping Angel (!). Everything looks great. There's a definite Raymond Chandler / Dashiell Hammett influence, what with the private eye in the opening teaser and, ahem, "Melody Malone", whose identity, I'm sure, was never intended to surprise anyone.

Speaking of River, she and the Doctor are, of course, married, meaning that the heroes of the episode are two married couples. And it's fun to see River and the Doctor acting just like a married couple. There are the witty lines alluding to this, of course ("Sorry I'm late, honey. Traffic was Hell"), but there are also fault lines in this very strange marriage. River loves the Doctor, which is why she slaps him for using his regenerative energy to heal her broken wrist. But she's terrified of his seeing her aging and becoming aware of her mortality. The Doctor hates endings, and is therefore unlikely to be keen on commitment, hardly a deep observation given his lifestyle.

Oh, and River alludes to the long-running season thread, namely that the Doctor has been deleting all records of himself. It means that the man she's supposed to have murdered no longer exists, so she's been freed and made a professor. There's one ripple from the Doctor's "absence": what about the others, I wonder?

The Angels are horribly scary, too. The baby Angels, with their terrible giggling, are well scary, especially when Rory is trapped alone with them in a darkened cellar with a match. And all throughout the story the set pieces, and the excellent direction, keep making you jump. Scares along with heartbreak- damn you once again, Moffat!

The typically Moffat-esque timey-wimeyness is gobsmackingly clever here, probably the cleverest we've seen since Blink. The concept of the Doctor and Amy possessing a book, from their personal future, recounting the adventure they're having now, is devilishly clever. And the fact that they can't read ahead without fixing their futures is even more so. It's hard to talk about the way this is used without getting all emotional about Amy and Rory, but the bit where the Doctor accidentally sees the last two chapter titles ("Death at Winter's Quay" and "Amy's Last Farewell") is a hugely clever moment, as well as being pure evil.

But let's get back to the elephant in the room, shall we? There are all sorts of ominous signs. It's constantly reiterated that the Doctor doesn't like endings, hence the fact that Amy and Rory are still around even after being officially dumped in The God Complex. This is where he has to face up to what he doesn't like.

Of course, Moffat being evil, he tortures us with three endings, all of them heart-breaking. First, we're told that Rory is fated to be sent back in time, to spend the rest of his miserable life in a little room, without Amy. Worse, the only way out for him is to destroy the Angel by creating a paradox, and he can only do this by jumping off a building to his death. This sequence just breaks your heart, and then Amy goes and jumps too because she can't bear to be without him. DAMN YOU, MOFFAT.

Except there's one more, equally evil, timey-wimey twist. All of that has been un-happened, everyone's ok, and they will all live happily ever after. Except they won't, because the one remaining Angel sends them back in time, one by one, with lots of tears. The Doctor has to face it: this is an ending. It's also unbelievably good telly. But still evil.

We end with a final message from an unreachable Amy to the Doctor: don't be alone. As Donna once said, he still needs someone to stop him. As for who that someone is, and how we resolve the puzzle that was set by Asylum of the Daleks… we have to wait until Christmas. Damn you, Moffat.

Doctor Who: The Power of Three

"There are soldiers all over the house. And I'm in my pants."

It's close. Very close. This is the penultimate outing for the Ponds, an episode which takes the time to fully examine both characters, and how the Doctor has affected their lives, until they leave the show next week. I have no idea what's going to happen, being joyfully unspoiled, but I couldn't help but notice the ominous hints: the Doctor admits to Brian that some of his companions have dies, and it's eventually Brian who changes the Ponds' minds and gets them to choose travelling over real life, adding, ominously "Just bring them back safe." Oh dear. That lovely night-time conversation between the Doctor and Amy gives off similar ominous vibes. They're doomed, right?

We get a proper examination of their dual lives, pulling at the Ponds in two directions. That, rather than the gimmickry of the plot, is what the episode is about. The central device, of a very slow invasion, is hardly original, and nor is the concept of loads of mysterious McGuffins suddenly appearing, but then it isn't supposed to be. Indeed, the script even goes so far as to point this out, as Brian rattles off a list of all the usual tropes. It doesn't matter. Let the plot just go ahead and be Quatermass- this is about the Ponds. Although, admittedly, the tension-filled moment where the Doctor opens the box, only to find nothing, is rather too obviously straight out of Kinda. And it's a bloody huge coincidence that, of only seven wormholes on the whole planet, one of them should just so happen to be in the hospital where Rory works.

It's nice to see UNIT, too, of course, and it's especially nice that they've been reformed to be much cuddlier, losing the Orwellian overtones of recent years and becoming infused with scientific values of which the Doctor approves. Kate Stewart, Head of Scientific Research, is a great character, very Doctorish, and making her the Brig's daughter is not only good shorthand but also a sign that we, the viewers, are allowed to be invested in her as a character. She'll probably be back; they cast a Redgrave, after all. Also, the Tower of London being their not-very-secret base is well cool.

It's a good Doctor episode, too. Matt Smith gets, and delivers, such magnificent speeches, and the sequence of him doing household chores (and keepy-uppy) is fab. I'm also enjoying these fun little mini-adventures, this time involving Zygons, Henry VIII, and God knows what else.

The villains are a bit blah, very casually sketched, although admitted the Doctor gets a great speech out of the situation. And the Doctor saves the day with little more than the most casual application of handwavium. But that's sort of appropriate. It's not really about the plot.

I'm nervous about next week. Very nervous…

Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy

"Everyone who isn't an American, drop your gun!"

Well, that was… adequate, I suppose. Nothing seriously wrong with it but it didn't really sing. Mostly it was the formulaic plot and the tiresomely excessive focus on the ethics of Kahler-Jex at the expense of the fun, but there was a certain lack of sparkle.

On the other hand, a Doctor Who western is a cool idea, even if it was done better forty-six years ago. The location filming in Spain ensured that the whole thing looked great, and there were a pleasing number of tropes to go around, from the lynch mob at the town jail to the gunfight at noon. I especially liked the undertaker, who reminded me of Back to the Future III. Then again, this is a timey-wimey Western. It couldn't not remind me of Back to the Future III.

Interestingly, Amy and Rory disagree on whether the Doctor is right to crudely expel Jex  from the town and send him to his death. Also interesting is that Amy notices a harder edge to the Doctor when he travels alone for too long. He may have regenerated since this was last an issue, but the Doctor still needs someone to stop him. And, right now, this is a problem, because he's gradually drifting away from Amy and Rory…

Ultimately the episode suffers because of the excessive hand-wringing over Jex. Yes, I know, we're meant to see a parallel between the two alien doctors, and the Doctor's crimes are arguably worse than Jex's. But vague parallels don't get us very far.

The cyborg is cool, I suppose, as is the ending, although the narration device seems a little forced and pointless, and there are enough set pieces to stop the episode from being overly bogged down. Still, meh. Hopefully there'll be more to talk about next week.

Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

"Egyptian queen or not, I shall put you across my knee and spank you."

I'll admit I wasn't concentrating 100% on first viewing, but I was, er, distracted. Yes, distracted. Deliriously, wonderfully so. I'll say no more!!! Suffice to say that I've watched it again and was blown away. I haven't been as harsh on Chris Chibnall's scripts in the past as others have been, but his episodes have never been my favourites. Until now.

There's a tendency, under the present reign of the Moff, for Doctor Who to concoct episodes out off the maddest possible combinations of characters and high concepts just because it's cool. It's a high risk strategy, placing huge demands on the nuts and bolts of the script to hold it all together, but when it works, it's just brilliant. And that's what this is. The script just sings.

Yes, we have the eponymous dinosaurs on a spaceship, and the CGI is mostly convincing. But we also have Queen Nefertiti(!), an Edwardian big game hunter played by Lestrade from Sherlock, Rory's dad, played by Mark Williams of The Fast Show, and two delightfully camp robots voiced by David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Oh, and a massive beach with big skies that's actually the engine room for a spaceship. All this has got to be crammed into forty-two minutes, which is seemingly impossible. Thing is, though, it works brilliantly, and that's because of a brilliantly structured plot. Case in point: surely the opening sequence must be more crammed with stuff than any previous episode? That's some tight plotting, yet the whole thing is done with such lightness of touch, and the dialogue sparkles.

The dinosaurs are great, and cool set-pieces abound, from the Doctor, Rory and Brian riding a triceratops to Amy and Riddell shooting at raptors. The villain- essentially a pirate / banker type moral blank space- is suitably nasty, murdering a whole ship full of Silurians for a profit. Interestingly, the Doctor leaves him to die at the end, which is rather reminiscent of his treatment of Cassandra, two incarnations ago, in The End of the World. Also interesting is that, for the second episode in a row, we're reminded that the villain has no idea who the Doctor is. All traces of his existence have been erased. This is definitely leading to something…

Also interesting is the developing arc between the Doctor and the Ponds, whom he now sees only every few months. In fact, before he goes to pick them up he revealingly says that he "(hasn't) seen them for ages". Also interesting is that Amy is pointedly made to look very Doctorish when she discovers the Silurian backstory by pushing some buttons, in front of Nefertiti and Riddell, especially when she insists that "I will not have flirting companions!" Steven Moffat has been quoted as saying that companions are there as the audience's representatives, through whose eyes we see the Doctor's adventures. When he starts allowing his companions to be so clearly portrayed as Doctorish, this is definitely a harbinger of the Ponds leaving. Amy even voices to the Doctor her fear that the Doctor is visiting them less and less often, and that one day she will once again be left waiting for a raggedy Doctor who never comes.

Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks

"You're going to fire me at the planet? That's the plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it?"

"To be fair, that is slightly your MO…"

"Don't be fair to the the Daleks when they're firing me at a planet!"

Oooh boy. That Steven Moffat is a very clever and naughty man, casting Jenna-Louise Coleman in this, as a character who can't possibly be a companion because she's not from contemporary Earth and, oh yes, she's actually a Dalek. And yet her last word is "Remember". What's going on? How can I possibly wait to find out? Grr. Typical Moffat to smuggle this into precisely the episode no one would expect it. We've come to expect misdirection from Moffat, but this time he's outsmarted us all.

Oswin (a boy's name, surely????) is the emotional heart of this episode. (Actually, this episode rather appropriately has two emotional hearts, the other being Amy and Rory, but we'll come to that.) We spend the whole episode seeing how cool, nice, quirky, pretty and downright amazing she is, only to find out that her life is an elaborate fantasy (an old Moffat trope; I remember Silence in the Library…) and she's been turned into a Dalek. And then, of course, she sacrifices herself to save the Doctor and his friends, proving that she's human after all.

It's unique seeing the Doctor's relationship with Amy and Rory these days. He travels alone these days but, as Steven Moffat has often said in interviews, it's not as though they'll never see the Doctor again, and the stories as transmitted are those particular moments where they do- implying, of course, loads of untransmitted adventures for the Doctor. He could age years between episodes. And so we have a paradox: we only see the Doctor from the Ponds' point of view, but we also see the Ponds from the Doctor's point of view. Years have passed since we last saw them. Amy is a successful model. And, upsettingly, they're divorced. And, of course, Amy explicitly insists that this is the sort of problem that the Doctor can fix. And yet, annoyingly and wonderfully, he can. (It seems the split up was about children- I predict that the episodes to come might see the patter of tiny Ponds…?)

Misdirection aside, of course, there was genuinely stuff here to please those of us who like a bit of fanwank. We had some real Sixties Daleks, one courtesy of RTD, and crowd-pleasing mentions of "Spiridon, Kembel, Aridius, Vulcan, Exxilon". But there was cool new stuff- the epic CGI awesomeness that was the Parliament of Daleks, the Dalekised humans (foreshadowing!) and the Dalek zombies. Especially the Dalek zombies.

The conclusion of the episode, though, courtesy of Oswin's cleverness, has the Daleks forgetting the Doctor, continuing the recent theme whereby traces of the Doctor's existence are currently erased. This is definitely leaving somewhere. Just like the end of The Wedding of River Song, we end with a constantly repeated "Doctor Who?"

Doctor Who: The Wedding of River Song

“You and me- we should get a drink sometime.”

“OK.”

“And married.”

“Fine.”

Oh blimey, here it comes at last. It ratchets up the tension to get such an arc-heavy “Previously on Doctor Who” sequence; it’s always interesting to see which particular clips they choose to go with. Why so much emphasis on the Teselecta, hmm?

The opening is weird, and great. Steam trains choo choo their way into the Gherkin, Roman charioteers wait at traffic lights, a picnic is ruined by pterodactyls and Charles Dickens is giving an interview to BBC Breakfast News. There’s so much stuff crammed in here that will take more viewings to get.

This world is presided over by “Holy Roman Emperor” Winston Churchill, whose war mammoth, thankfully for the budget, is kept off-screen. It’s a bit weird to see the return of that Silurian eugenicist, though; can’t we have some Victorian Sapphic sleuthing, instead?

The Doctor’s entrance into the narrative is both dramatic and bearded, as expected, and it turns out that time has gone all wrong, the universe is in a spot of bother, and this is all a framing narrative anyway. This is all out of left field, and really rather fun.

So, off we go into the main narrative it self. There’s almost as much spectacle here as the Doctor searches for information on why the Silence want him dead. There’s a nice cameo from Mark Gatiss as Gantok, a bizarre Viking dwarf, and some terrific stuff with some scary-looking skulls that eat rats. Brr. But basically, Dorium’s back, decapitated but still alive. Yay!

Dorium’s a great, witty, charismatic character and thus perfect for giving out loads of exposition. That he certainly does here, and there’s one line worth quoting as I’m sure it’s going to mean an awful lot next year- and perhaps up to the 50^th anniversary, given what we learn at the end of this episode: On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature could speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked. A question that must never be answered.”

What’s this about, then? Is “the fall of the eleventh” a reference to the next regeneration or just a red herring? Just how far ahead is Moffat planning?

Anyway, the whole point of “Silence will fall” is that the Doctor must be killed before he can answer the question, or Bad Things Will Happen. The Doctor is in denial at first but, in a nice little touch, he changes his mind as he learns that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has dies. This is a nice little tribute to Nicholas Courtney. That and, as my mate Nick remarked in the pub last night, the fact that they’re all wearing eyepatches. I didn’t see an on-screen caption, though?

It’s interesting to see the events at Lake Silencio again, this time from the Doctor’s perspective, and we’re made privy to the conversation between River and himself. There are two very odd things here, though. Firstly, River is being controlled by the spacesuit and isn’t responsible for what happens. She’s the weapon, not the murderer, so why the Hell does this innocent woman happily end up in prison, “serving time for a murder you probably can’t remember”? And that goes double after what we learn at the end. Secondly, why does River need to be in the spacesuit at all if she doesn’t do anything?

Except, River doesn’t shoot. The Doctor lives, time goes tits up, and we’re back where we started. The framing narrative is now the main narrative, time is dying, the Doctor and Churchill have weapons on them for reasons they can’t remember, and there are tally marks on the Doctor’s arm. Oh dear.

I love the moment where we see loads of Silence on the ceiling- it certainly scared the pants off me. And as for special agent “Pond, Amelia Pond”- what an entrance! Is it me or does Karen Gillan look particularly ravishing in an eyepatch? I love the way the character gets treated here- she’s so cool and so heroic, with an office on a train and everything. And her relationship with alt-Rory is cool, too.

Things now proceed to get cooler as the steam train choo choos into the Great Pyramid, which has “Area 52” written on the side. This is Amy’s headquarters, which she runs alongside River. They’re all wearing eyepatches because this allows them to remember seeing the Silence for as long as they wear them. This is rather important, as they are holding prisoner a number of Silents, plus Madame Kovarian.

I love the Doctor’s attempts at matchmaking between alt-Amy and alt-Rory. “Texting and scones”… I’ve certainly never heard it called that before.

The main romance of this episode is, of course, between River and the Doctor. Everything that happens is about love: River is prepared to allow the universe to die because of her love for the Doctor. As for the Doctor, he’s not pleased about this, but he does drop a subtle hint about his feelings for River. Reader, he marries her. As River says, at least he gets to die knowing that he’s loved. They kiss, and the Earth moves.

We cut to Amy, in her garden, sharing a glass of wine with her daughter. For River, the wreck of the Byzantium has just happened. This is, of course, in her personal future. But things are still raw for Amy. She deliberately allowed Kovarian to die (although this was, as River says, in another reality, so this reality’s Kovarian is presumably still out there) and feels guilty about it. River doesn’t think it’s that bad a crime but, given the circumstances, that’s not too surprising.

River drops a few important revelations. She was only pretending not to recognise that spacesuit in Florida; the Doctor didn’t actually whisper his name to River but something else, and… the Doctor isn’t dead! It was a Teselecta after all, with the real Doctor inside. Predictable enough, I suppose, but it’s been so enjoyable getting up to this moment that I don’t really mind.

The Doctor isn’t going back for Amy and Rory; he still believes what he believed at the end of The God Complex and he prefers to “step into the shadows”. It seems a bit unfair for River to be in prison, but it seems she’s spending all of her nights with her husband, er, texting and scones.

Dorium has the last word, though, revealing the “first question”, the one which must not be answered under any circumstances, for fear of dire consequences.

“Doctor who?”

Doctor Who: Closing Time

“I’m the Doctor. I work in a shop now.”

Oh dear. I seem to have fallen into a bit of a rut in lavishing praise on how nicely shot the pre-titles sequences are. Shall we just take it as read that I’ve done that and move swiftly on?

This is the umpteenth bloody good episode in a row, and maintains Gareth Roberts’ impressive record. His four episodes might not be quite up there with the very best, but all of them are consistently brilliant, and this one is probably his best yet. Even the sickly-sweet resolution is appropriate given the context of Cybermen vis-à-vis emotions.

It’s good to see Craig again; James Corden is bloody fantastic with his subtle physical comedy and nice balance between humour and pathos. It helps that he and Matt Smith are a great double act. The “fact” that Matt Smith speaks baby is a fab gimmick, too.

Two centuries have passed since the last episode tomorrow. Tomorrow (by the Doctor’s subjective timeline- how does this work? He’s a time traveller. I suppose he has to die at his present age because it was stated in The Impossible Astronaut, but why this particular day? Is it the day before his next birthday or summat?) he gets shot dead. He’s spending his last day visiting Craig (and others, I assume).

There’s a lot of great humorous dialogue. We get a “You’ve redecorated. I don’t like it.” to please the fans and a hilarious “Social call. Thought I’d try one out.” There’s a lot of nicely metatextual humour here; we all know perfectly know that noticing g things and sorting out the baddies is all the Doctor ever does; of course there’s going to be a massively coincidental alien invasion.

Once again it’s nice to see the Doctor in a contemporary setting; combined with this episode’s comic focus it gives Matt Smith’s Doctor a chance to breathe and be really Doctorish. His interaction with George, Kelly and the Fabulous Val (the great Lynda Barron, again!) is great; this is a sweet, likeable Doctor who is liked and trusted by all. Midnight feels a long time ago. Plus, we have a nice little mystery with Cybermen. Yay! This is a particularly good story for them, not least because they lurk in the background being menacing and hardly say a word, as they do in all their best stories. The new Cybermats are great, too, with real and very pointy teeth. We even get a small snatch of Murray Gold’s old Cyber-theme. If only we could have that “Space Adventure” theme from the ‘60s again…

Of course, it’s in no way surprising to see Amy and Rory here. You were expecting them too, right? And I don’t need to have seen any spoilers to know that they’ll be back full-time next week. But it’s great that Amy has stopped being a kissogram and become a model, although there still a certain objectification-of-women thing going on, and I understand the fashion industry is largely run by bastards. Still, it’s great that she’s advertising something called “Petrichor”.

The Doctor gets a nice little monologue to the baby, but his mournful admission to Craig that he’s going to die because he’s “a stupid, selfish man” gets the perfect response. Craig knows the Doctor- he’s been inside his head- and instinctively knows that this is all a load of pants; the Doctor has saved loads of people and can be forgiven a little vanity and self-indulgence.

Oh, and we get that line again: “Silence will fall when the question is asked”. On which story arc-y note I really ought to do what I ought have done a few paragraphs ago, and point out that this is the first time since 1989 that a series has ended without a two-part season finale. The next episode, if it really is going to wrap everything up, has a lot of work to do in forty-five minutes, or an hour, or whatever.

The actual alien plot is rather prosaic, and very much takes second fiddle to the stuff about the Doctor and Craig. Six Cybermen and their ship have recently been woken up after centuries of slumber (Cyber continuity? Let’s not go there…), are a bit rubbish, they try to Cybernise Craig (always nice to see the Cybermen trying to do this; it brings out the full body horror), but it doesn’t work because he’s a great dad, and he kills them with love for his son. That’s it. It should be tacky and sentimental, but somehow manages to be brilliant instead.

Interesting, too, that the Cybermen are more impressed by Craig than they are by the Doctor, and even see him as potential Cyber Controller material.

We end with some throwbacks to the start of the series; the Doctor has bought some nice blue envelopes, and Craig gives him a Stetson. The scene then suddenly shifts to River Song, who’s just got her Doctorate. Suddenly, along comes Madame Kovarian, she who has pulled River’s strings for her entire life. She’s accompanied by a couple of Silents (“Your owners”). River is put into an astronaut suit and shoved at the bottom of Lake Silencio…

I shouldn’t really mention the “Next Time” trailer, but it’s all about to kick off. I can’t wait…

Doctor Who: The God Complex

“Every time the Doctor gets pally with someone, I have this overwhelming urge to notify their next of kin.”

On the surface, this episode is a good, if not great, one-off tale with a twist at the end. But I get a strong impression that, far more importantly, it rehearses the main themes and foreshadows the events which will end this season- and I say this as someone who’s spoiler-free. The above quote from Rory is one of many examples in which we explore Amy’s and Rory’s contrasting attitudes to, and confidence in, the Doctor. Their departure is foreshadowed throughout the episode, and yet I think we all suspect that their “departure” is a massive red herring. Anyway…

This series, and the Moffat era in general, is getting quite a reputation for more creative directing, and the pre-titles sequences have shown some fantastic shots of late, with Night Terrors being a particular highlight. This episode does it again; I particularly loved the shot of the stairwell, suggesting a Castrovalva-like shifting geography with great economy and style. There are some nice-looking shots from the POV of the CCTV, too, which give a real feeling of being watched.

There are lots of strange and scary things in the early minutes of this episode: the clown, the photographer, the man in the (deliberately?) unconvincing gorilla suit, but the most eerie of the lot has to be the hall full of ventriloquist’s dummies, all moving their heads in unison.

We have a nicely fleshed-out guest cast. Rita- intelligent, resourceful, brave, nice, and liked a lot by the audience and therefore the viewer- is a bit of a Mary Sue character, and therefore doomed, but of course we’re supposed to know that. The Doctor even seems to offer her a trip in the TARDIS at one point, which of course makes her death inevitable, in a Lynda with a “y” sort of way. Howie is a tiresome conspiracy theorist (I really don’t like conspiracy theories, they are not harmless, and anyone reading this who believes in any of that nonsense should read this book), and therefore also doomed. Joe is doomed already before we meet him. This leaves Gibbis, a cowardly alien from Tivoli, most invaded planet in the universe. This is a funny yet sinister performance from David Walliams, and of course he doesn’t die. The cowardly ones never do in Doctor Who.

The first few minutes set up the situation as we understand it- people are drawn to the hotel, given a room with their biggest individual fear, and eventually come to welcome their own inevitable death with religious fervour. No one leaves alive. It all pays off later, except for one bit: what’s the significance of the disappearing fire exit found by Rory? As far as I can see, this is never followed up.

The main flaw in this episode, and by no means a fundamental one, is that the handling of religious themes is a bit clumsy. I don’t think there’s any great message intended here about religion- it’s basically there as a metaphor for Amy’s faith in the Doctor, about which more later- and I say this as an atheist, but it comes across that way without, I think, meaning to. This is awkward, especially given the emphasis on faith, and the foregrounding of Rita’s Islamic beliefs. The implicit assumption that faith is a weakness, and the Doctor’s casual statement at the end that the minotaur “god” was overthrown when its worshippers became more civilised and went “all secular” (that isn’t what the word “secular” means!) is arguably a bit arrogant. I’ve no problem with arguments that there isn’t a God (I myself think this is the most likely probability by far), but there’s no need to be arrogant, or rude, or Richard Dawkinsy about it.

There’s a lot of foreshadowing of the end of the episode; after Howie’s death, the Doctor notices Rory speaking of his time in the TARDIS in the past tense, and he speaks admiringly of Howie’s speech therapy, to get rid of his stutter, as a phenomenal achievement, implying that he sees just as much potential for adventure in his everyday life as a nurse as in his travels with the Doctor. His chat with Rita on the stairs is also full of foreboding; her suggestion that he has a “God complex” (the title of the episode is clever, multi-layered and rather interesting in terms of the Doctor’s development as a character) is more perceptive than is probably intended, and the Doctor seems to accept that his whimsical adventuring is rather frivolous, “which is why grown-ups were invented. Rita, by contrast, has a serious and proper job with responsibilities, as indeed does Rory. I’m also reminded of the home truths spoken by the older Amy in the previous episode.

What does the Doctor see in his room? We hear the cloister bell, but we don’t see anything. Perhaps there is a clue, though? Can we perhaps read something into the “Do Not Disturb” sign?  Perhaps the Doctor is sleeping with someone in that room, perhaps married, perhaps to River Song? Perhaps his fear is of something symbolised by marriage, such as commitment, which would be anathema to his wandering lifestyle? Perhaps it terrified him, because it would make him into a “grown-up”?

His words to Amy at the end show an obvious parallel with his words to Amy in The Curse of Fenric, although this time he doesn’t want Amy to hate him, just to lose her faith in him! I think what he’s telling her is simply the unvarnished truth, although these things are of course subjective: “I took you with me because I was vain. I want to be adored. I’m not a hero; I really am just a madman in a box.”

I was overjoyed at the links to the Nimon (yay!) and intrigued that Amy’s question of what Time Lords pray to is left unanswered. But the most interesting words spoken at the end of the main story, with the hotel dissolved into an empty cyberspace grid, are by the dying minotaur: “An ancient creature, drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting in space through an endless, shifting maze…to such a creature, death would be a gift.”

The departure of Amy (especially) and Rory, although effective and touching, is bound to be a red herring; they’ll be back for the series finale, I’m sure, although I have no idea whether they’ll stay after that. The Doctor ends the story alone, so alone, slumped in the TARDIS…

By the way, as someone who’s a little deaf, I have to give a virtual high five to the person (definitely a fan!) who did the subtitles. The TARDIS leaves with a Vworp! Vworp!...

(Probably no blogging until Saturday now, and there might not be anything other than current Doctor Who until the end of September. Real ife intrudes, I;m afraid! Fear not, though- normal service witll be resumed from the start of October!)

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited

“You didn’t save me.”

Five years on and we finally get another script from Tom MacRae. Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel was a fine story of a traditional bent, but this time he’s given us an extraordinary piece of conceptual brilliance. This season just won’t stop being great.

Essentially, we have a world in quarantine. A plague fatal to all two-hearted races infests the planet, and death is inevitable within one day. This means the Doctor has to spend most of the time in the TARDIS in what is a rather effective way of telling a Doctor-lite story; there certainly isn’t any obvious lack of screen time. Still, if the Doctor is vulnerable to this plague, does this mean he was born with two hearts rather than gaining one on his first or second regeneration? Perhaps that’s a can of worms which should be left well alone.

There are 40,000 people on this world, all occupying a different time stream, a device which leaves the cast nice and small. Each individual timeline exists so that the last day of an infected person can be dragged out for a whole lifetime, spent alone but with a magnificent array of entertainments, some of which would presumably not be suitable for broadcast on a family show. It is, indeed, “a kindness”, although it’s perhaps not entirely realistic that a civilisation would expend such a massive amount of resources on doing this.

All this is no good to Amy, though; she’s trapped, in a different and faster timestream to that of Roy and the Doctor, and even an exact replica of Disneyland Clom(!) is not much consolation. Rory’s massive magnifying glass is a nice way of showing this. There’s one problem, aside from the prospect of years passing before she’s rescued; there are loads of white robots which want to give her injections from some nasty-looking syringes. As she’s not a native of this world, these injections would kill her, and the robots are pretty persistent, to the point of shooting needles at her. I don’t think much of their bedside manner.

The big emotional kick of the episode occurs once Rory meets a much older and very bitter Amy, who has spent thirty-six years alone, surviving. (Incidentally, the prosthetics work here is the best I’ve ever seen.) It’s pleasing to see that Amy is resourceful, handling the robots with ease and uber-cool sword-wielding slow-motion martial arts and showing an unexpected technical wizardry. But her bitterness at being so carelessly abandoned (and the Doctor was careless to lose her at the beginning) is shocking. Karen Gillan’s performance is magnificent: completely different from the normal, kooky Amy while still being recognisably the same character. It’s an emotionally devastating performance by an actress too often taken for granted.

The older Amy is at her harshest in the first few moments, with some very harsh words aimed at the Doctor. She even rejects Rory’s attempts to comfort her, and insists that her sonic device is a probe, not a screwdriver. The edges soon soften, though; she’s still Amy. I liked the ‘armless robot with the smiley face, which she has inevitably named after Rory.

Still, Amy refuses point blank to be “saved”.  She has good existential reasons for this; if the Doctor and Rory rescue her earlier self, that means the last thirty-six years of her life will never have happened and she will effectively die. It’s nice to see this acknowledged. This sort of thing is too often brushed under the carpet; here it’s foregrounded.

Instead, the older Amy wants to go with them, in the TARDIS, now. And this means condemning her earlier self to an otherwise avoidable thirty-six years alone. After all, why should she sacrifice her life? This means, as the Doctor says, that Rory has to choose between them. And it’s a horrible choice to have to make. Unsurprisingly, he’s angry at the Doctor, and we’re reminded very much of the less travelled Rory of last season as he firmly tells the Doctor that “…I do not want to travel with you!”

Rory is able to use the magnifying glass and allow the two Amy’s to talk to each other, which sets up a kind of time loop. The older Amy remembers being the younger Amy, hearing her older self refuse to save her. It’s a closed circle and, seemingly, there can be no way out of the paradox.

I love the way MacRae just takes a sword to the Gordian Knot, though! It may be outrageously cheeky to solve the paradox simply by saying that Amy is “bloody minded, contradictory and bloody unpredictable!”, but it works. What I particularly love is that the fact this doesn’t really make sense isn’t just glossed over, but positively revelled in! That’s proper Doctor Who, all right. And it’s perfect that the older Amy would do it out of love for Rory.

Mind you, there’s trouble ahead. The prospect of two Amy Ponds in the TARDIS makes Rory a kind of bigamist. And, let’s face it, if he has two Amy Ponds as sexual partners, one in her early twenties and one in her late fifties, he’s not exactly going to treat them both equally, even with the best will in the world. It’s pretty obvious that the older Amy has to die.

Still, the older Amy gets an uber-cool death scene, with lots of swordy, kicky action, and gets to heroically sacrifice herself in the final moments. And there’s an interesting parallel. “I’m giving you my days” she says to her younger self, paralleling what River did for the Doctor a couple of episodes ago.

I had to raise an eyebrow at the Doctor saying “Calm down, dear” to the TARDIS, incidentally. I hope we don’t get any more of this; Michael Winner and David Cameron are not exactly the two greatest role models out there.

Doctor Who: Night Terrors

“Today, we’re answering a cry for help from the scariest place in the universe: a child’s bedroom.”

You might have noticed that my weekly Torchwood and Doctor Who reviews are somewhat late this weekend. This is because I spent yesterday at the rather splendid Whooverville convention in Derby. And after the excellent day’s entertainment had finished and some beer had been drunk, it was time to sit down at 7pm and watch Doctor Who, on a big screen, with my mates and loads of other fans- the best way to watch it! But fear not, my readers- I’ve just rewatched it with subtitles and written up my notes…

Richard Clark is a bloody brilliant director. The opening shots are amazing, and really looked magnificent on a big screen. The whole aesthetic is fascinating, too; taking a rather run-down 1960s housing block, complete with bin bags across a wall, and make it look both scary and beautiful. It succeeds at both brilliantly, and the direction really brings out the scariness right through the episode.

Living on the estate is a little boy called George, who seems to be afraid of everything, including, we’re told, pants. So scared, in fact, that his pleas for help against the “monsters” reach the TARDIS and the Doctor’s psychic paper.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory split up and, in some very funny intercut scenes in which Arthur Darvill shines in particular, get to meet the neighbours. We’re introduced to Mrs Rossiter, whom George thinks is a witch, and to the extremely nasty landlord, Jim Purcell, with his threatening pit-bull, Bernard. More about him later.

George, unfortunately, overhears Rory joking that “Maybe we should just let the monsters gobble him up?”. Seconds later, Rory and Amy find themselves taking a much faster and scarier trip in a lift than they had intended. Mrs Rossiter, meanwhile, is swallowed by some bin bags. I can think of no other TV series in which that could happen!

Amy and Rory discover themselves to be somewhere else, somewhere very dark and more than a little odd. They’re uncertain about where they are (I love Rory’s “We’re dead. Again.”). It seems to be a big but featureless house, with a massive glass eye in a drawer (urgh!), wooden pots and pans and electric candles. It’s all very mysterious, but the clues are there…

The Doctor tries to bond with George (I loved the fan-pleasing reference to “Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday”), and establishes that everything that scares George is put into the cupboard? The suspense is ramped up to unbearable levels, but just as the Doctor is about to open the door, he’s interrupted by some loud knocking.

Alex opens the door to the bullying Purcell, and we get a glimpse of a parallel and perhaps worse terror. Alex, we learn, is unemployed, and Claire’s wages are not enough to pay the rent. None of this is resolved by the end; Purcell is still their landlord. It seems to be implied that the family may be in the early stages of a Cathy Come Home-style spiral of descent into poverty and eventual homelessness. If this is even partly correct, then the apparent happy ending we eventually see may well be illusory, and George may end up being taken away after all.

Back to fears of a more fantastic kind, though, the Doctor scans the cupboard, and discovers that George’s monsters are real. Things are getting creepy for Amy and Rory, too; children’s laughter has never seemed so scary. There’s something very Sapphire and Steel about this thread of the story.

Alex eventually asks the Doctor to leave, but is unable to. For all that these scenes are played for laughs, it’s clear that Alex is rather a weak personality- and so, from what we see of her, is Claire. None of this bodes well for the family’s future.

Amy and Rory are perhaps too eager to open their cupboard downstairs, but all they find is a horrible old doll. At first, it seems to be eerie but harmless. The cupboard, upstairs, though, after some further scenes of tension, turns out to be empty. But then the Doctor discovers something odd about the family photos; Claire photographed a fortnight before giving birth to George, is clearly not pregnant. This confuses Alex, and he blurts out that “Claire can’t have kids.” we realise two things: firstly, George is not what we thought, and secondly, he has been there all the time, listening. The room starts to shake, and the Doctor and Alex are pulled into the cupboard.

Purcell gets a hard time, too; George has heard him being nasty to his Dad, and he is pulled under the ground to the doll’s house. Amy and Rory see him there, being chased by dolls and, in a horribly memorable scene, see him being turned into one of them. These dolls are one of the best Doctor Who monsters ever, in both concept and execution. They’re simply terrifying. It’s not just the faceless, decayed appearance of the faces, but the slow advance, the childish voices and the nursery rhymes.

Amy and Rory are trapped in a room by advancing dolls, but Amy works out that the only solution is to open the door and push past. This sort of works, but Amy is caught, and turned into one of them: a terrifying moment.

The Doctor works out that the cupboard is a repository for all of George’s fears; everything that terrifies George is in there with them. It’s odd that there should be a doll’s house in the house, mind- George is a boy- but there we are. It seems that George is a Tenza (why not re-use the concept of an Isolus from Fear Her? Perhaps that’s an episode the production team would like to forget…), an alien “cuckoo” who has instinctively created a perception filter around the circumstances of his birth. The Doctor shouts to George to try and stop it, and the advancing dolls stop. And then start again, because George fears rejection. Alex soon sorts this out by running to his son, and the episode seems to end happily. But does it? What happens if the family get evicted and bad things keep following on…?

At last, a truly first class script from Mark Gatiss and probably the scariest story since The Time of Angels.

Doctor Who: Let's Kill Hitler

“Well, I was off to this gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled when I thought ‘Gosh, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish. I think I’ll kill the Fuhrer.’”

Wow. Still reeling a bit from that. Also, I took a lot more notes than I usually do. Lots of writing ahead, and I want to get this review out tonight. Damn you, Moffat, with your intricate and cool story arcs.

Amy and Rory are driving about a cornfield in a rubbish old mini, making crop circles just to summon the Doctor. He arrives, and asks permission from Mr Pond to hug Mrs Pond- nice touch! We establish that the Doctor hasn’t made any progress in tracking down their baby.

Then, suddenly, in a very flash car, comes someone we haven’t met before. She’s called Mels, she’s known Amy and Rory for a long time, she doesn’t do weddings, she’s heard all about the Doctor, and she’s on the run from the fuzz. Oh, and she has a gun. And a plan. Cue opening titles.

We now get a flashback, inserting Mels into the childhoods of Amelia and Rory, whom we now discover to have been childhood sweethearts. Mels, of course, is always getting in trouble. There’s a particularly nice bit in which Mels alerts Amy to the fact Rory fancies her, which not only firmly draws her tightly into both of their lives and leads the audience to accept this new character as an old friend, but introduces a little verbal meme (“The penny drops…”) which will become important later.

In a particularly nice shot from Richard Senior, we cut from a spinning model TARDIS in Amy’s bedroom to a spinning real TARDIS in the sky. Mels has just shot the console, to test whether the Doctor’s talk about “temporal grace” really is just a “clever lie”…

Berlin, 1938, and there are already time travellers here, in the form of lots of little people controlling a chap’s body. This reminds me so much of a certain strip from the Beezer that I’m going to refer to them as the Numbskulls. The Numbskulls set about copying the body of a Nazi officer, and send the now miniaturised Nazi into the body’s head, where he is promptly knocked off by an “antibody”. I love the antibody’s officious language and instructions to remain calm!

Incidentally, is it just me or does one of the numbskulls look exactly like Peter Andre?

The numbskull body seems to be about to assassinate Hitler when the TARDIS crashes through the window. Our TARDISeers are pleasingly rude to Adolf, but are taken unawares when he suddenly shoots his putative assassin. They are rather annoyed at this, and Adolf duly spends the rest of the episode in the cupboard.

All is not well, though; the bullet also hit Mels, and she seems to be dying. And, interestingly, the numbskulls suddenly detect the presence of an even greater war criminal than Hitler. I thought for a moment that they were referring to the Doctor but no; it’s Mels. And she’s regenerating. “Last time I did this,” she says, “I ended up a toddler. In the middle of New York.” Suddenly, a lot of things make sense. As the Doctor says, Amy and Rory named their daughter after… herself.

Melody regenerates into Alex Kingston (incidentally, this would seem to put to bed the tiresome debate about whether or not an “ethnic” actor could ever play the Doctor with a resounding affirmative!). “Who’s River Song?” she asks. “Spoilers!”

There’s a problem, though. The Numbskulls recognise her as “the woman who kills the Doctor”, and she’s been trained and conditioned to do so ever since her kidnap as a baby. This is the fulfilment of Madame Kovorkian’s plan.

She tries to kill the Doctor in a fun little timey-wimey scene which borrows quite liberally from Moffat’s own The Curse of the Fatal Death. I love the bit with the banana, with its nod to The Doctor Dances. During all this, though, she poisons him with a kiss. He’s dying.

Melody, pausing only to get briefly shot point blank by a whole bunch of Nazis, steals a motorbike and rides off. Amy and Rory follow on another bike, only for the Numbskulls to follow.

The Numbskulls are confused. They know River / Melody kills the Doctor, but she does so in Utah, in 2011. (This seems to tell us pretty conclusively who was in that spacesuit.) And we discover that the Doctor’s death is a fixed point in time, immutable. Get out of that one, Moffat.

The Doctor utilises the TARDIS interface, which shows us briefly that he feels increasingly guilty about Rose, Martha and, especially, Donna, settling on the form of the young Amelia, “before it all went wring”. This is highly revealing about how he sees his relationships with his companions, especially in the light of what we learned in Amy’s Choice. Still, he gets the useful information that he has thirty-two minutes to live.

Melody steals the clothes at gunpoint from all the guests at a posh Nazi do, just so that she can have the equivalent of the Doctor’s own post-regeneration dressing room scene. Here she’s found by Amy, Rory, and the Numbskull. Unfortunately, Amy and Rory suddenly end up inside the robot replica, and are almost killed by an antibody before Peter Andre issues them with some bracelets.

Here we get some answers. Numbskull Amy reads out the charge: “You killed the Doctor on the orders of the movement known as the Silence and the Academy of the Question.” The Numbskulls, it seems, use time travel to find notorious criminals who historically remained unpunished, and torture them horribly just before their natural deaths. Sound like a right bunch of bloody Daily Mail readers…

Fortunately, the Numbskulls have hardly started torturing Melody when the Doctor arrives and stops it. He may be dying, but he’s still bothered to take the time to dress up in white tie. We get more answers; the Silence are not a species, but a movement, a religious order. How are they linked to the Clerics, I wonder? It seems they believe that “Silence will fall when the Question is asked”. The Question is, apparently the first and oldest in the universe. I take it the Silence haven’t heard / read / seen The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Numbskulls start torturing Melody again, but fortunately her parents manage to stop it. Unfortunately, this leads to their being surrounded by antibodies that want to kill them. Fortunately, they are saved by the TARDIS materialising around them. It’s piloted by their daughter, who is surprised to find that she can instinctively pilot the Ship because she’s a “child of the TARDIS”, whatever that means. Of course, she was conceived aboard the Ship…

Rule One: The Doctor dies. Except he doesn’t, because Melody somehow uses up all her remaining regenerations to save him. Appropriately, this too is done with a kiss. We leave her in hospital, where the Doctor has left her a present: a diary decorated as a TARDIS.

We end with some unanswered questions. The Doctor, we see, is well aware of the time and place of his impending death. Does River kill him? Is that why she’s in prison?

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War

“I have gene-spliced myself for all nursing duties. I can provide magnificent quantities of lactic fluid.”

If we didn’t already know this episode wasn’t going to be a big ‘un, we get a massive recap. And the scene is set: Amy is in a place called Demons Run, apparently a massive spaceship, she’s “popped”, as Eyepatch Lady put it, and her baby is called Melody. She’s not best pleased, but she’s convinced that someone’s coming, someone legendary. And in a nice twist at the end, we discover that this legendary figure is Rory. And I suspect the title is supposed to be ambiguous; is it referring to the Doctor, or Rory.

It’s an odd episode, this, completely unlike anything we’ve ever seen in Doctor Who. More so even that this series’ opening two-parter, this is an episode of pure story arc, and doesn’t really exist as an end unto itself. It reminds me of Angel seasons three and four with their very heavy arc plots. So while this episode is very well executed, in terms of both script and production, it’s rather difficult to pass judgement except as part of a larger whole, much of which we don’t yet know.

It’s cool, though. I can say that. Certainly Rory has never been so badass. I love the fact that they dusted off the Cybermen costumes and got the Mill to do a whole Cyber-fleet just so that Rory could be made to look well ‘ard.

The baddies (or at least their redshirts) are the military clerics from the Time of Angels two-parter, as well as the mysterious Headless Monks, who were briefly mentioned in the same story. It looks as though the future’s gone all mediaeval, what with Space Teutonic Knights / Space Knights Templar / whatever, and a kind of Headless Spanish Inquisition. I wasn’t expecting that.

We get introduced to a few lowly soldiers; Lorna Bucket from the Gamma Forests, who’s quietly sewing and had an “encounter” with the legendary Doctor as a child; the Thin One; and the Fat One (We’re thin, fat, gay Anglican marines. Why would we need names as well?”) Unfortunately, the Fat One learns more than he bargains for during his “conversion tutorial” with the Headless Monks. A box is put over his head, and we cut to a locker coming down vertically. Ouch.

Meanwhile, we get a succession of the Doctor’s mates. First off, we have a lesbian Silurian consulting detective(!) whose name I didn’t catch, and Jenny, her maid and lover (kinky combination, that), living in the London of 1888, where she’s just killed Jack the Ripper. I noticed she referred to an Inspector Abberline, and being a card-carrying geek I recognised the name from Alan Moore and Kevin Campbell’s From Hell. That’s even cooler than the Thunderbirds reference.

Next up we have Strax, the Sontaran nurse at the Battle of Zarathustra in 4037 AD, a future where fashions are seemingly inspired by the Crimean War. He’s a great character. I love the jocular threats he makes to kill his patients.

The odd one out is River Song. She starts out in a rather jolly mood as she smugly breaks into the Stormcage. But the appearance of the Lonely Centurion, and the realisation that it’s time for the Battle of Demons Run, suddenly turn her very sober indeed. “Because this is it,” she says portentously, “This is the day he finds out who I am.” And yes, it’s particularly interesting watching Alex Kingston’s performance the second time round.

Dorium, who already feels like an old friend after just one brief appearance, gets a magnificent speech in which he gets to be rather cool while at the same time explaining the plot to our baddies, Eyepatch Lady (or Madame Kovarian) and Colonel Manton. Because the Doctor is recruiting an army, by calling in favours. And a blue box lands right by Dorium…

Lorna has a brief encounter with Amy in which we find out her allegiances are somewhat ambiguous, and our attention is drawn again to the prayer leaf she’s been knitting, with the name of the child sewn on to both sides.

Manton’s the next one to get a speech. Although it would normally be a “level one heresy”, he is able, “by the divine grant of the Papal Mainframe herself” to remove the hoods of the headless monks, beneath which is… no head, but a stump, which is more horrible than nothing would have been. But behind the third hood, making a late and typically dramatic entrance, is the Doctor.

And suddenly the Doctor and his mates, who are popping up everywhere, are winning very quickly. The Doctor fools the clerics into fighting against the Monks, while the Silurian and Jenny take care of the control room. There’s a nice, subtle little naughty bit here: “I don’t know why you put up with me,” says Silurian Lady to Jenny, before flicking her very long, undulating tongue to knock out a baddie. The look on Jenny’s face makes it clear that we’ve just seen one very good reason for putting up with her…

Manton is quick-thinking enough to put an end to the fighting between clerics and monks, but his problems are mounting; we have more Silurians, Judoon, even Danny Boy and the Space Spitfires. Rory gets his share of the glory, confronting Kovarian, as we now learn that Captain Avery now controls the ship. And Manton gets the opposite, as the Doctor makes damn sure that he’ll be known for ever after as “Colonel Run-Away”.

There’s a knock at Amy’s door, and it’s Rory… with their baby. Rory is at such a high point that he gets to call his wife “Mrs Williams”-Although the baby is Melody Pond, of course. He even gets to shout “Oi, you! Get in here now!” at the Doctor.

There’s a bit of a clue for us as the baby doesn’t like the TARDIS noise, but the Doctor is able to stop her crying by producing a cot, apparently from the days when he himself was a Time Tot.

We get a few answers: Amy was replaced with a Ganger “just before America”, but the Doctor is typically evasive about whether or not there’s something he’s not telling the Ponds.

But, away from the Ponds we learn some more: Melody, conceived in the TARDIS on the Ponds’ wedding night, has “human plus” DNA; it seems she was born with a “time head” after all. It’s suggested that perhaps she might be able to regenerate, and immediately we know that she’s the little girl in the opening two-parter, unless we’re getting a massive dose of misdirection. And, given the clips we then see, I don’t think we are.

But things aren’t as they seem; the Headless Monks are still at large, and Kovarian appears on-screen, telling the Doctor of the “endless war”. “Against who?”, asks the Doctor, who really should know perfectly well that he should have said “Against whom?” Tut tut. “Against you!” replies Kovarian, baffling the Doctor. And then the Headless Monks strike. Dorium is the first to die. Shame. I would have liked to have seen more of him.

Suddenly, the Doctor’s bloodless victory turns into a tragic loss of lives which, we soon learn, will all be for nothing. Kovarian appears again, this time through a hatch in reality, and we discover that the baby itself is just a Ganger.

It’s all going horribly wrong. Strax finds his death is not as enjoyable as he’d hoped, although at nearly twelve he’s had a decent innings. Lorna dies, and the Doctor (who may not yet have met her) doesn’t even remember her. Things are very grim indeed.

And then River appears, too late. Solemnly, she makes it very clear that all of this is the Doctor’s fault for. In the language of the Gamma Forests the word “Doctor” means “great warrior”, and that is what his reputation is becoming. He is causing alliances to be formed against him through his vanity, and innocents are killed in the crossfire.

But then, suddenly, the Doctor understands who River is. And promptly buggers off in the TARDIS, leaving a very angry and upset Amy and Rory with River. And her we learn the truth. “The only water in the forest is a river.” On the prayer leaf which Lorna made for Amy is the Gamma Forest version of the baby Melody Pond’s name: River Song. And on that bombshell…

Lots of people have told me this was obvious but, to my slow-on-the-uptake and spoiler-free self, this was a huge moment.

Right. More Doctor Who as it airs, and obviously Torchwood as that airs too. In the meantime, more Blake’s 7, followed by lots and lots of other things

Doctor Who: The Almost People

“Why?”

The brief tour of previous Doctors is fairly inconsequential, I suppose, but it’s fun. And it’s good to hear Tom Baker’s voice again. And it’s fine for Cybermats to get a mention. Just let’s never see them again, ok?

There are now two Doctors; the Doctor in stereo. Both of them are loving it, bouncily encouraging each others’ Doctorish ways. Still, you can tell them apart from their shoes, of course... But why are both Doctors imploring Amy to “breathe”? And you can tell that underneath it all they’re stressed. They’d never normally use words like “yowser”.

The whole ethical can of worms opened by the Gangers’ existence is dealt with much more effectively and powerfully in this episode, although this leads us to a bit of awkwardness at the very end. Flesh Jennifer is starting to remember her previous lives: the eyes are the last bit to go, as we’ll later find out with a more horrifying wall of eyes than anything we saw (or would have, if there was any footage) in Marco Polo. But we’re getting splits; Flesh Jennifer wants all-out revolution but Flesh Cleaves, in contrast to her counterpart, just wants a quiet life. It’s an interesting microcosm of the politics of resistance- Malcolm X vs. Martin Luther King, perhaps. The only trouble is that this feels pretty much exactly like every Silurian story there’s ever been- the same ethical dilemma, reheated. It’d Old Silurian vs. Young Silurian all over again.

Amy is clearly not prepared to accept the Flesh Doctor, insisting that only the original is “really” the Doctor. Everyone else, with varying degrees of subtlety, implicitly accepts this, and they are both treated differently. It’s an interesting commentary on everyday racism; “Smith” is tolerated only conditionally, treated with suspicion and, as we’ll find, not really considered “human” or deserving of the same rights. This is the most chilling thing about this episode, and Amy is absolutely complicit.

Amy sees the eyepatch woman again, and this time mentions it to the Doctor; we know that this sub-plot is going to come to a head now, as if we didn’t already know as soon as we saw the recap of last week’s incident in the “previously on Doctor Who” bit. And even if we didn’t suspect it already then the Doctor’s pooh-poohing is a dead giveaway.

There’s a real awkwardness between Amy and “Smith” , but she still thinks of him as “almost” the Doctor, and takes the opportunity to confide in him because she saw the Doctor die at his own invitation. But that’s ok, because he’s not the “real” Doctor. Right? Certainly the real Doctor would never lash out at Amy like that.

Rory, meanwhile, gets taken for a ride by Flesh Jennifer, bless him. Still, Jennifer has a sort of point, if she can indeed remember her previous “selves” being slowly and horribly killed every single day, rotting away while fully conscious. Still, there’s no denying that Rory comes across as a bit of a gullible twonk.

There’s a very revealing scene in which “Smith” and Buzzer find the dead “real” Jenny, who’s been unconscious all this time. Buzzer just knocks him out on orders from “the boss”. After all, he’s not human.

It’s quite a contrast when “Smith” wakes up among the Gangers, who instantly accept him. After all, he’s one of their own.

We’re starting to see how similar both versions of the same character are, though. Both versions of Cleves are stuck with an inoperable blood clot. And both versions of Jimmy love the same little boy, even if he isn’t exactly the greatest of child actors.

The end of the main plot, shortly after Jenny goes all Lazarus Experiment, is sudden but well-judged. The TARDIS tumbles into the correct underground chamber in the nick of time. Everyone piles into the TARDIS, but Cleaves’ Ganger stays behind for a bit of a noble sacrifice. I’m glad to see that the character (both versions)  is actually rather more well-rounded than seemed the case last episode.

Joining her in the heroic death stakes is none other than the Doctor. Or rather the Ganger Doctor; they swapped shoes, meaning we’ve had them the wrong way round all along, a nice trick. But that means Amy told… oops. At last she comes to realise that the Flesh is as real as the original Doctor. After all, he’s managed to convince her of that for most of the episode. Interestingly, though, as she gives hem a farewell hug, he tells her to “Push, Amy. But only when she tells you to.” What’s that all about, eh?

The “real” Doctor also lets slip that he understands exactly what Amy has told him. As the Flesh Doctor muses that “My death arrives, I suppose”, the “real” Doctor adds “But this one we’re not invited to.” Oh dear.

There’s a bit of handwavium in evidence as the Doctor miraculously cures Cleaves and the TARDIS miraculously “stabilises” the surviving Ganger versions of Jimmy and Dicken. But why’s the Doctor telling Amy to breathe so often now? We find out immediately, as the contractions start. It seems both Amy and the Doctor have been keeping secrets from each other. The Doctor announces that he “needed to see the Flesh in its early days. That’s why we were here in the first place.”- he just needed enough information to block the signal to the Flesh. The Flesh, that is, that Amy’s mind is currently inhabiting while her body goes into contractions, many light years and many centuries away.

But there’s a problem with the Doctor just zapping Flesh Amy. Yes, we get a “Given what we’ve learned I’ll be as humane as I can”, and yes, it’s a quick death with no slow, fully-conscious rotting with lingering eyes. But we’re left with a very nasty sense that the Doctor has just murdered a sentient being. It’s a pity, especially as a quick line of dialogue to the effect that later Flesh aren’t sentient would have been all we needed.

Amy wakes up, and the Eyepatch Lady tells her to push…

Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh

“I thought I was going to die!”

“Welcome to my world…”

I didn’t like Fear Her very much, which doesn’t exactly make me much of a contrarian, I know. Still, Life on Mars was very good, if not quite as good in hindsight as we all thought it was, so I was glad to see Matthew Graham get another chance,. We end up with this, a two parter which is really quite good, if nothing particularly special, with only a couple of little niggles.

Anyway… it’s a picturesque setting: a kind of Yorkshire St. Michael’s Mount being used as an acid factory in the 22nd century. It’s near Whitby, apparently- is this some sort of Dracula allusion? It’s as ruggedly industrial as any early Pertwee, but with much nicer architecture. And to add to the nostalgia factor we get quotes from The Invasion (“pettier than a computer, isn’t she?”).

The pre-titles sequence introduces us to our three factory workers Jennifer, Buzzer and Jimmy. The underwhelmed reaction to Jenny’s accidental “killing” of Buzzer hints at this story’s McGuffin, as does the reappearance of Buzzer, played by Life on Mars’ Marshall Lancaster.

The TARDIS is almost like a city centre pub these days, what with the dartboard and Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole. But the fact that the Doctor is having a sneaky scan of Schrodinger’s foetus at the beginning of the story, not the end, should alert us that something’s up, story-arc wise.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory disembark, and for some reason are instantly fascinated by a pip. Er, how very interesting. It’s a bit like the beginning of Fury from the Deep, except without all the tiresome suspicion for the TARDIS crew. Thank the heavens for psychic paper, which has delivered us from having to sit through loads of boring scenes with the Doctor being mistrusted by those in authority.

We meet the rest of the crew: Cleves, the boss, played by Raquel Cassidy off of Lead Balloon, and the strangely anonymous Dicken, who might as well not even be in the story. We’re also introduced to the Flesh, “fully programmable matter”, which is used to create “Gangers” to do all the dangerous work. Oh, and there’s going to be a big solar storm. Gosh, I wonder what’ll happen. After all, lightning striking artificially created human-type creatures isn’t in any way known in popular culture for bringing them to life, is it?

The inevitable happens, they’re all out for an hour, the TARDIS starts ton sink into the ground, and the Gangers have gone walkabout. Surprised? Thought not.

Rory, being a nice bloke and a burse, starts to comfort the terrified Jennifer, to Amy’s obvious annoyance. We really should realise, as the plot has been fairly predictable so far, that she’s a Ganger, and it’s not long until we get confirmation by CGI. And Cleves, it turns out, is a Ganger too. It’s all quite effective, even though it does little but run through an established list of tropes. The whole existential aspect of the Gangers being just as much a continuation of the previous self as the original is touched upon but not with any real passion or creativity. This isn’t a bad episode, but there’s certainly an element of going-through-the-motions with the plot. There just aren’t any real surprises.

Interestingly, the Doctor comments quite early on that “This is early Flesh- the early stages of the technology”. He obviously has some sort of agenda- even Jimmy can spot that. Then again, the Doctor seems to think there’s a word called “defendable”, so what does he know?

Jenny’s big speech to Rory is quite awkward, too. Sarah Smart delivers the lines well, but the dialogue is neither naturalistic nor poetic enough to get away with not being naturalistic. Again, the existential crisis of realising your memories are not your own (or are they?) is touched upon but not with any real depth.

The Doctor is forced to abandon his shoes (and in a script this predictable we know that’ll be important later), but manages to bring everyone- human and Ganger- together. It’s an ominous sign, though, that the Gangers have all the acid suits.

Arthur Darvill shows how great he is in portraying Rory’s embarrassment when Ganger Jennifer tells him that “Amy’s a lucky girl”. And as for Amy, she’s seeing that Eyepatch Lady again. She’s rather less convinced of the Gangers’ humanity than Rory, and I don’t think this is really to do with any jealousy for Jennifer. You can tell from glances between her and Rory that she knows her jealous instincts are just instincts. She’s actually being quite rational about the whole thing. Rory waited two thousand years for her- she has nothing to be jealous about and she knows it.

There’s an interesting scene in which the two Jimmys ponder the fact that they both have the same son but, again, the whole philosophical angle is quite plodding and superficial. And the Doctor’s northern accent has declined somewhat since the days when he was Christopher Eccleston.

If this already feels a bit like last year’s Silurian two-parter in that its quite good but predictable and never-really catches fire, we get a more blatant parallel in which Cleves becomes this story’s Ambrose. Once again it’s a woman who makes it all kick off. Hormones and wandering wombs? It’s like feminism never happened. Well, perhaps that’s a bit harsh; I’m sure it wasn’t actively meant like that. But it’s a little awkward.

Oh, and here’s a Ganger Doctor. Like everything else that happens it’s hardly a surprise, but it’s quite an appetiser for the next episode.

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

“Did you wish really hard?”

No more Don’t Scare the Hare! Oh no… what are we Doctor Who fans going to talk about now? Never mind: this is utterly superlative stuff. It’s a one-off, of course. It would become quite tiresome if Doctor Who was like this all the time. But this is right up there with the very best. Neil Gaiman may be oh-so-slightly overrated in my book, but “overrated is a relative concept. He’s no Alan Moore (we long-haired blokes from the East Midlands rule!), but he’s head and shoulders above most writers.

It all looks great, too, and the visual style is very… well, Sandman. Just the opening scene, with the junkyard planet (an obvious nod to 76 Totters Lane- Gaiman, like all right-thinking people, appreciates ‘60s Who). The characters of Uncle, Auntie, Nephew and Idris come across as very endless-like, too. It’s a very atmospheric, dark, funny and, well, Gaimanesque scene. Incidentally, I’ve just looked up the name “Idris” on the ever-faithful and in all ways reliable Wikipedia. Apparently Idris was a (male) prophet and philosopher sometimes identified with the Biblical Enoch. Not sure if there’s any actual allusion there…

Anyway, on a slightly less pretentious note, we get a quick scene in the TARDIS- and another arc-related “We saw him die,” from Amy to Rory- and there’s a knock on the door. In mid-flight. It turns out to be one of those box thingies, as used by the Doctor to summon the Time Lords in part nine of The War Games. How very fannish.

So, there is at least one Time Lord still alive, it seems: the Corsair. In just a few lines, Gaiman gives us a fantastic sketch of the character, who keeps the same tattoo in all of his (or her!) regenerations. The Corsair is apparently outside the universe, though; for the first time since Castrovalva the Doctor has to burn up some TARDIS rooms to “give it some welly”. After all these years of travelling between universes being nearly impossible, it happens in two stories in a row.

The TARDIS power drains away; it’s “soul” has gone. The TARDIS crew seem to be stuck on this little asteroid in this pocket universe with no stars in the sky. And then, Idris, with her new soul (and we’ve already guessed what this “soul” is) comes running to her “thief” and kisses him, among other things (“Oh, biting’s excellent! It’s like kissing, only there’s a winner”). Idris is great, and Suranne Jones does a perfect job of making her exactly the right kind of eccentric while still being sympathetic. I love the timey-wimeyness of her speech, which gives the sense that she doesn’t quite exist in the same three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that we do.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are taken to meet the “House”, an extremely large sea anemone creature surrounded by a massive, world-size shell. Right from the start we get the impression that House isn’t very nice. He “mends people” when they “break”, and lots of TARDISes have landed on him in the past. Already this is wonderfully fantastical and, well, Gaimanesque, always a much better fit for Doctor Who than hard sci-fi.

It seems there are lots of Time Lords here, and there’s an interesting conversation between Amy and the Doctor; he’ll have to tell the Time Lords what he did in the Time War. But that’s just it; he wants to be forgiven.

Incidentally, the Doctor seems to have told Amy an awful lot of intensely personal things about himself off-screen. He isn’t usually so open with his travelling companions. But some things about Doctor / companion relationships are timeless, and one of these is the classic “Doctor sends companions back to TARDIS when things get a bit scary” trope.

The little boxes make the Doctor angry: Time Lord have been lured here, exploited, and eventually killed, many, many times over. His confrontation with Auntie and Uncle reveals a lot; they’re patchwork people, like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of bits of other people, Auntie has the Corsair’s arm.

The Doctor finds Idris, and they start the wonderful conversation that lasts for most of the rest of the episode. The dialogue sings, and the relationship between them is so heartwarming. They’re like an old married couple, but they obviously love each other. There are so many great things here. When the Doctor first touched the TARDIS console, he said that it was “the most beautiful thing I’d ever known”. Wonderfully, he didn’t just steal her; she stole him because she wanted to see the universe and he was “the only one mad enough”!

It seems that House feeds on TARDISes, deleting the matrixes first to make them edible. As just destroying the matrixes would cause lots of unpleasantness, he simply dumps them into a convenient receptacle (or body) and feeds off the residual Artron energy once they die, usually quite quickly. This is really quite nasty when you think about it.

The nastiness continues to rack up during the middle of the episode. The moment Rory says to Amy that “We’re in the TARDIS, so we’re safe”, it turns out that they so aren’t. While they’re aboard the soulless Ship, House had an absolute godlike ability to do any sadistic thing to them that he wants to. As many people have said, House can be seen as an analogy of the power of the writer.

Just as nasty, if blackly and Gaiman-esquely humorous, is the scene in which Auntie and Uncle “pop off”. Oh, and Idris has eighteen minutes to live. But one thing that Neil Gaiman is very, very good at is mixing nastiness, humour and beautifully poignant feelings, all with a real lightness of touch (“I think you call me…sexy.” / “Only when we’re alone…”- it’s funny but it says a lot).

There’s a lot of fanwank at this point, all in the best possible way. For the first time in decades we get to see the corridors of the TARDIS. And they have old-fashioned roundels. Yay! And it seems the Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for “seven hundred years”, meaning that he spent his first two hundred years on Gallifrey, unless it’s more complicated than that. I’ve recently read the latest version of Timelink and it has some very interesting, and quite complicated, theories about that sort of thing. Most of it flew right over my head, but it’s a fascinating read.

The relationship between the Doctor and Idris / the TARDIS is great here- they argue like happily married couples do, in a way which is actually quite sweet and affectionate (“No, but I always took you where you needed to go.”). It’s actually quite romantic.

The scenes between our other married couple are not nearly as nice. House plays cruel games on Amy, exploiting her guilt over Rory waiting two thousand years for her. Back in The Impossible Astronaut, Moffat dealt with the psychological impact of this on Rory- his memories of all that time are quarantined away behind a door in his brain, hence his not being completely insane- but what must it be like for Amy to have the overwhelming knowledge that her husband did all that for her?

The Doctor and Idris set to building a functional TARDIS out of all the old dead ones (with old-fashioned roundels, again!), Idris communicates with “the pretty one”, and the plot chugs along. We get to see the old control room again- well, the oldest one that can reasonably survived in an HD-friendly condition- as they’re all archived. I love the fact that the TARDIS has archived “desktop themes” from the Doctor’s personal future!

The Doctor and Idris manage to outwit House rather cleverly, and the Doctor and Idris have a completely wonderful final conversation. The Doctor cries, and the Doctor never cries. It’s the end of a wonderful love story. And we end, of course, with the Doctor asking the TARDIS to take them “wherever we need to go.”

Idris has some final words for Rory:”The only water in the forest is the river”. What could that possibly mean, he asked, pretending he hasn’t yet seen A Good Man Goes to War?