Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Warning: spoilers.

Much to my pleasant surprise, Dinosaurs actually turned out to be a pretty solid episode, not only by dint of comparison to the monumental arsetripe of Asylum, but in its own right, too. I did have a few points of irritation – Nefertiti hitting on the Doctor, the screamingly camp robots, the frenetic pacing early on and some jumbled bits of dialogue – but otherwise, it managed to take a fairly flashy idea and actually make it work. It makes perfect sense that the Silurians, convinced their world was ending, would send up a space-ark complete with local fauna, while the slow reveal of Solomon’s capitalistic villainy, coupled with his eventual demise gave a nice, dark catharsis to the piece.

The writer, Chris Chibnal, has some pretty great credentials: apart from having penned the brilliant S3 episode 42, he’s been a major force in Torchwood and was also a writer for Life on Mars. Which possibly goes some way towards explaining why, for the first time in memory, we’ve got a DW episode that knows how to handle a bigger cast: apart from the Doctor, Amy and Rory, we’ve also got Queen Nefertiti, Rory’s dad Brian, Riddell the game hunter and villain Solomon in play, all of whom actually get meaningful screentime, and all of whom feel like genuine, fleshed-out characters.  Not only that, but Amy and Rory actually get to do something other than be in a tempestuous relationship: Amy banters with Nefertiti (at last! an episode that passes the Bechdel test!), fights dinosaurs with Riddell, solves the mystery of the ship’s origins before the Doctor does, and still gets to have a touching conversation about being left behind that neatly foreshadows the season end; while Rory gets to talk with his dad (whose presence and character both go a long way towards explaining Rory), demonstrate his nursing skills, pilot a spaceship away from the Earth, ride a triceratops and threaten a couple of robots. And honestly? That’s more than they’ve had to do for quite a while.

And then there’s the secondary characters: Chibnal treats Nefertiti with respect, establishing her firmly as intelligent, powerful and and courageous without simultaneously making sexist or racist asides at her expense (as Moffat has a tendency to do with River Song). Nor does he flinch from giving Riddell the gender attitudes appropriate to his era without making him either hostile to or dismissive of the women around him – instead, he seems genuinely to enjoy being confounded by them. Brian, by contrast, is an utterly adorkable dad, and it’s a testament to Chibnal’s deftness that he manages to both introduce and evolve him within in the space of a single episode: the contrast between his initial travel-related distemper and the final, iconic image of eating him lunch from the TARDIS step is an utterly lovely gracenote, and one that balances neatly against his role in piloting the ship. And then there’s Solomon: a genuine grasping merchant, frightening and cold – who is, I think, the first actual sentient villain we’ve had in ages.

Though Dinosaurs has something of a manic start, it soon finds its feet and manages some truly fun moments: Brian’s trowel, a triceratops who wants to play fetch with golf balls, Amy’s cheerful assertion that yes, she is a queen, and the closing image of Rory having switched domestic roles with his dad. But what really sold me on Dinosaurs was the treatment of the ladies. Not only do Amy and Nerfertiti talk, they actually get along: they trust and respect each other, make jokes with each other, and back each other up. Both of them call out Riddell for sexism – Amy says he needs a lesson on gender politics – but most importantly of all, when Nefertiti decides to go with Solomon to protect the rest of the group; when she holds up her hand, defies the Doctor’s objections and says that, no, it’s her choice? The Doctor lets her go – he respects her agency in the moment, and though he later shows up to get her back, it’s Nefertiti who gets the drop on Solomon, cathartically pinning him with his crutch-arm just as he did to her.

Still, as I said, it’s not a perfect episode: while the image of Nefertiti going off with Riddell was fun in the moment, it was loaded with unfortunate colonial overtones that felt a bit squicky; there was no reason for Solomon to kill the triceratops except as a kick the dog moment; and while I liked the Mitchell and Webb cameo as the robots’ voices, I didn’t like the robots themselves – they were bit too cartoonishly on the nose for my taste. But overall, it was a strong offering from a good writer, complete with memorable characters, solid emotional development, a mystery that made sense while still being compelling, and a proper, well-paced structure. It was, in other words, the polar opposite of Asylum in every important respect, and has gone some way towards soothing my earlier rage. I might not like Steven Moffat, but Chibnall has succeeded in reminding me that I do like Doctor Who – and that sometimes, I get to have the latter without the former.

(Plus and also: Arthur Weasley and Argus Filch in a single episode – squee!)

Imaginary Interview With Imaginary Steven Moffat

So because I am a crazy lady who cares about her stories and her feminism, I have basically spent the whole week having imaginary internal arguments with Steven Moffat about the sexism in Sherlock and Doctor Who. And because I am also a crazy lady with a blog, I have decided to get all of this angsting off my chest in a cathartic, therapeutic way by having an imaginary interview with Imaginary Steven Moffat right here on the internet, in honour of the forthcoming Sherlock episode.

Thus, I give you: My Imaginary Interview With Imaginary Steven Moffat!

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Me: Imaginary Steven Moffat, it’s a pleasure to have you on the blog.

ISM: Thank you. Though I feel I should start by apologising.

Me: Oh? Why?

ISM: I’ll be honest. I have no idea who you are. My Imaginary Agent booked this gig at the last minute, so… you have the advantage of me. (Laughs)

Me: (Laughs) Fair enough! Well, in brief: my name is Foz Meadows, I’m a fantasy author, a geek, a blogger and a feminist – and as you’ve been honest enough to start with an apology, I probably should, too.

ISM: And why’s that?

Me: Because – straight to the point – I’ve basically got you here to talk about the concerns of many that there’s a theme of sexism in your work, specifically Sherlock and, to a lesser extent, Doctor Who.

ISM: Look. I’m very tired of these accusations. Neither I nor anyone on the team is either sexist, or a misogynist, and frankly I find the suggestion offensive. As I’ve said before in response to Jane Clare Jones’s piece in the Guardian:

I think it’s one thing to criticise a programme and another thing to invent motives out of amateur psychology for the writer and then accuse him of having those feelings. I think that was beyond the pale and strayed from criticism to a defamation act. I’m certainly not a sexist, a misogynist and it was wrong. 

Me: Right, OK. I understand that. And like I said, I apologise, because you’ve come in here not knowing that this is the topic under discussion, when clearly it’s something you feel very strongly about.

ISM: There’s nothing to discuss. I’m not a sexist. I respect women.

Me: All right. I hear what you’re saying. But as you say, there’s a relevant distinction to be drawn between what a writer believes in real life and the things they write about, and on those grounds, I and a lot of other fans would contend there’s a case to answer.

ISM: This interview is over. I’m leaving.

Me: I’m sorry, Imaginary Steven Moffat, but it’s not, and you’re not, because this is all happening in my head. You’re Imaginary Steven Moffat, not Real Steven Moffat, and while I’m sure he might like to leave at this point, this whole thing is, as they say, my party. One way or another, we’re going to thrash this out.

ISM: Rats.

Me: Right. So, before we get to the meat of things, I’d like to make one thing clear from the outset.

ISM: Go on, then. Clearly I can’t stop you.

Me: Thank you. What I want to begin by saying is – and I’ll understand if you don’t believe me – that contrary to how it might seem, I am actually a fan of Doctor Who and Sherlock.

ISM: (Snorts) You’ve got a funny way of showing it.

Me: I can see how it might appear that way, and I’ve definitely used some strong language to get my point across. But I’m sick of this idea that offering up real criticism of the things I love somehow makes me a bad fan. If I didn’t like your shows, I wouldn’t bother critiquing them, because I wouldn’t bother watching; but that doesn’t mean that all their good points are enough to make me excuse the sexism. A lot of what’s on TV is far worse than anything you’ve put out, but that’s why I avoid it. Certainly, I’ll complain about the damage they do, but not in personal terms, because I have no attachment to the material. But I do care about the Doctor; I do care about Sherlock Holmes. These are both characters who’ve existed long before you ever started to write them, who have dedicated fandoms and histories that precede your work by decades. You were two years old when Doctor Who first aired, and Conan Doyle was writing in the 1800s. That’s a long time for people to become attached to these stories.

ISM: So what you’re saying is that by taking over two existing narratives, I’ve come along and ruined a good thing – that all the previous interpretations are better, and that because my work doesn’t meet your standards, it’s crap.

Me: Not at all. You’re a fantastic writer. You have great ideas, you put together great production teams. A lot of your work I really love. But what I’m saying is, there’s a difference between picking up an existing story and creating something new, because existing stories come with existing audiences.

ISM: So I should just avoid doing anything original with old material?

Me: No, no! It’s not that you shouldn’t try new things – I love that Sherlock is set in the modern day. It’s just – remember what I said earlier, about not critiquing shows I don’t care about?

ISM: Yes.

Me: Well, I’d say that’s true of the majority of people. So when a new, original show rubs us the wrong way, it’s a very easy matter to disengage: we don’t have any investment in the story beyond what we’re willing to put in at the outset. And if you, as a writer – as all writers do – start to build up a portfolio based on your individual kind of storytelling, then as you move from project to project, you’ll start to collect fans whose primary investment in each of your new stories is the fact of your involvement: that you, Imaginary Steven Moffat, are the one in charge. By the same token, though, some people might not like your storytelling style; maybe they’re just ambivalent, or they’ve never heard of you, or they like it, but not enthusiastically enough to consider themselves a fan. Maybe they even hate it. But if you start writing about characters that are dear to them – like Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes – then those people will end up watching your shows, too. And unlike your usual fanbase, their primary motive isn’t your involvement, but the presence of existing characters. And this is important, because it means that a significant proportion of the people responding critically to your output will end up critiquing, not just the show itself, but the way you’re telling it. And because the characters aren’t yours, their opinions can’t just be written off by saying the show isn’t for them; because clearly, those characters are for them, or they wouldn’t have bothered watching.

ISM: I don’t think I’ve ever said these shows aren’t for fans of the originals. Quite the opposite.

Me: No, I’m not saying you did. But what I’m ultimately getting at here is that perhaps one reason why the accusation of sexism has upset you so much is that it’s no something you’ve had to deal with from your usual fanbase, and you’re confused as to why people like me, who are being heavily critical, are watching to begin with.

ISM: You do think badly of me, then.

Me: A little bit, yes.

ISM: Hah!

Me: Look, I’m trying to be honest. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not perfect, and I certainly don’t expect you to be. But part of fighting sexism is acknowledging that, precisely because we’re not perfect, our ideals and our actions don’t always match up.

ISM: You’re making it sound like I have lapses; like I suddenly forget that women are equal to men and behave like a Neanderthal. It’s ridiculous. I’m not a sexist; I repudiate sexism; therefore, there is no sexism in my writing.

Me: But that doesn’t logically follow, does it?

ISM: Excuse me?

Me: Well, look at it this way. It it possible to offend someone unintentionally, even when you’re trying to be polite?

ISM: What, you mean like a back-handed compliment?

Me: No, I mean genuinely by accident. Like, say I meet someone at a party whose outfit I think is stunning, and I compliment them on their style by comparing them to a particular celebrity who, unbeknownst to me, they completely loathe.

ISM: Obviously that’s possible, yes.

Me: OK, right, good. So, sticking with that example, what if I know beforehand that the person hates the celebrity, and I still make the comparison?

ISM: That would be deliberately offensive, yes.

Me: Yes, it would – but what if, even knowing what I know, it’s my firm belief that the person’s dislike for the celebrity is unreasonable? That because I’d consider the comparison to be complimentary, they should, too, and that by making the comparison, I’m partially trying to bring them around to my way of thinking?

ISM: Still offensive, but in a different way. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse, though.

Me: Of course. It’s a more contextual point. But can we agree that, even though I’ve paid the compliment knowing it will be badly received, to my way of thinking, I’ve not actually said anything offensive? That because I wouldn’t be offended if someone said that to me, I haven’t set out to be insulting, and that if the person is insulted, then that’s down to their beliefs more than it is my actions?

ISM: Technically, yes, I agree. Though you shouldn’t be surprised if they still react badly to it.

Me: Of course not. But compare all this to what you’ve just said about sexism. Intentions only carry us so far. Believing that you’re not sexist doesn’t prevent you from perpetuating sexism any more than intending to be complimentary prevents me from being insulting. And when you react to the knowledge that some people find your work sexist, not by considering the possibility that it is, but by continuing to assert that we’re wrong to see it that way – by saying something you know we’ll find it offensive – then, as you say, you shouldn’t be surprised that we react badly.

ISM: Yes, all right, very clever. But this is all metaphorical; you haven’t actually addressed the content of what I’ve written.

Me: OK, then. Consider Irene Adler. In the original Conan Doyle story, A Scandal in Bohemia, she beats Sherlock Holmes at his own game, marries her fiancé and leaves England victorious, while he is left – according to Watson – with a new-found respect for the intellectual capabilities of women. There’s also an inference that he’s attracted to her, because the only payment he takes for the case is her photo: at the very least, he certainly admires her.

ISM: And Sherlock admires her in my version, too. He definitely respects her.

Me: Yes, but he also beats her; she “beats” him with a riding crop – which is a nice play on words, I grant you – but he’s the one who actually wins. And then at the end, you’ve literally made her a damsel in distress, rescued from execution by terrorists in Karachi.

ISM: Look, I’m sorry, but it seems like a pretty poor definition of sexism to say that men can never beat women. Following that logic, any story where women don’t come out on top is sexist.

Me: No, that’s not what I’m saying. If you were writing an original story where your male protagonist triumphed over and subsequently rescued a female antagonist whom he nonetheless respected, that would be one thing. But when you take an existing, much-beloved story where the female antagonist not only wins, but is vaunted by the male protagonist for doing so – where this is, in fact, the primary basis for his admiring her – and change it so that things end up the other way around, then yes, I’m going to call that sexist.

ISM: (Angry) So you’re saying I wrote Adler the way I did because I’m a sexist? That wanting to write a fresh interpretation had nothing to do with it, and all I really wanted to do was put her down as a character?

Me: (Frustrated) No! What I’m saying is that you elected to make Sherlock look really badass by having him first defeat and then rescue an intelligent Irene Adler, but without appreciating the fact that making male characters stronger at the expense of their female counterparts is one of the oldest, most sexist tropes in the book. Using the trope unconsciously doesn’t make you a sexist: but it doesn’t strop the trope from being sexist, and if you refuse to acknowledge that some narrative conventions are founded on sexism, then you will invariably include sexism in your work.

ISM: So men being cooler than women is sexist?

Me: No, not just being cooler than. Being cooler at the expense of. Can you see that there’s a distinction?

ISM: (Pauses) Hypothetically, yes, but I don’t see how that applies in the case of Adler.

Me: Sherlock is made to look cool and competent because Adler’s feelings for him prove her undoing. That’s coolness for him at her expense: she loses her professionalism – the phone being “Sherlocked” – while he gains credibility for spotting the error. Then she has to beg him for protection: she loses her dignity so that he, in refusing her, can gain mastery. Finally, she loses her competence – the ability to get herself out of trouble – while he gains power for rescuing her.

ISM: But now we’re just back again to this tired idea of sexism meaning any story where women lose to men.

Me: No, we’re not. Because as an existing character being reinterpreted, Adler is quite literally loosing her essence. In Conan Doyle’s original, she has professionalism, dignity and power, and the story ends with her in possession of all three. But in your version, Sherlock strips these qualities from her to enhance himself, and for no other reason than that you wrote him that way.

ISM: (Uncomfortable) All right. I can see how people might be… I can see why some people might not like that ending, though I know a lot of them have. But the story is about Sherlock, after all – it’s his show, it’s his party. Why shouldn’t he be the best character?

Me: Imaginary Mr Moffat, if you think that losing once to an exceptional woman is enough to stop Sherlock Holmes from being the best character in his own show, then we really do have a problem.

ISM: (Silence)

Me: The fact is, you have a habit of depowering your female characters to make your male protagonists look stronger. That doesn’t mean your women are badly written, or that your male characters are sexist, or that you are. It means that, somewhere along the line, you’ve unconsciously absorbed two very old and very powerful narrative ideas: that a protagonist who routinely proves himself better than the other characters is a strong protagonist; and that an exceptional man can be made even cooler by his rescue of an exceptional woman. And because we live in a society that’s still overrun with sexism, you’ve also taken on board the idea that it’s acceptable to make jokes about women’s bodies.

ISM: I think you’re going too far, now. I’ve conceded the point about Irene Adler, but now you’re grasping at straws. Where did all this appearance stuff come into it?

Me: Molly Hooper. Sherlock is constantly criticising her make-up, her clothes, her appearance, her sexuality. Twice, he makes her cry. He even criticizes her weight, making it a negative thing that being with her new boyfriend has caused her to get heavier, when in Conan Doyle’s books, that same exchange was a friendly one between Holmes and Watson, with the weight-gain being part of a cheerful, positive assessment of how marriage agreed with John. In Doctor Who, too, when Mels regenerates into River, the first thing she does is start talking about her body, what clothes will fit and how she needs to weigh herself. For an entire season, Amy is reduced to being a womb in a box – the Doctor even destroys the ‘ganger that took her place, because she’s not “real”, even though he’d just spent the whole episode telling people that ‘gangers deserved human rights – and then later, you let Old Amy die in favour of saving her younger counterpart, even though Old Amy has been suffering for forty years. In both cases, a copy of Amy dies because her body is wrong – she’s not the real, young Amy, and so she can cease to exist with impunity.

ISM: This is a separate point, though, to the one you were making before.

Me: Separate, but related to why critics think there are sexist themes running through both interpretations.

ISM: I don’t see it. You’re taking all these scenes out of context. This isn’t about plot, and it’s not about changing an existing character. Molly, Amy and River are my creations. You’ve gone completely off-message.

Me: OK, I’ll admit to having jumped around a bit. My apologies for that. But I’d like to run with another hypothetical.

ISM: Do I have a choice?

Me: Not really.

ISM: (Muttering) My Imaginary Agent is so fired, I can’t even.

Me: Right. So imagine I’m the writer and creator of a TV show called The Last Amazon – it’s about Hippolyte, the Amazon Queen from Greek legend, being an immortal, kickass warrior who’s lived through to the present day and has now teamed up with a team of geeky sidekicks to fight the forces of mythological darkness.

ISM: If you say so.

Me: Now, this is mostly an SFF show, but with mystery elements. Sure, there’ll be flashes of romance and sexual tension from time to time, but mainly it’s about magic mixing with technology, solving crimes and having crazy adventures.

ISM: Right.

Me: Apart from Hippolyte, most of the geeky sidekicks are women. There’s one or two men involved, but in almost every encounter with the female characters, they either suffer hilarious put downs or are told to shut up. One of them has a massive crush on Hippolyte, but she’s a kickass Amazon warrior – she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, and makes hurtful jokes at his expense, which is played for laughs. The female camaraderie is the real emotional heart of the show: ladies looking out for each other, being awesome, and only really dealing with men on the sidelines. In fact, men are mostly encountered as victims: handsome surfer youths who’ve been drowned by Sirens, loving fathers who’ve been ripped apart by Harpies, little boys who’ve been kidnapped by Neriads, wise old men who are callously killed by the descendants of Circe. Sometimes women die, too, but those deaths are always more perfunctory, less brutal and less emotionally intense than those of men. Most killers are, by contrast, women: goddesses and girl-monsters all, and there’s a general sense that, by taking them on, the female protagonists are fighting the worst aspects of their own gender: protecting the less powerful men from the predations of cruel, murderous women.

ISM: Very subtle.

Me: And yet, the reverse dynamic is the sacred foundation of almost every crime procedural, ever. Except for the put-downs part. That’s just for your benefit.

ISM: Touché.

Me: Anyway. You’re watching this show because hey, Greek mythology is awesome! And you really start to get into it. But then you notice the fact that the women are always putting down the men. You notice that, while the female costumes are cut concealingly, to make them look well-dressed and competent, the pretty young men are always shown shirtless or wearing revealing clothes – and that’s offputting, because it’s ultimately unnecessary. You notice that the men, though clearly doing important work in the background, are never given due appreciation by the other characters. You notice that time and again, they’re the ones imperilled and threatened; they’re the weak link the villains always seek to exploit. You notice that the men are always ruled by their emotions, falling in love with the women at first sight, their romantic epiphanies made grandiose while the women are allowed to remain aloof. You notice that the women often make jokes about how the men look – about their weight, and their hair, and their attractiveness, their probable penis size and how good they are in bed; sometimes they’re even shown to call their male partners the wrong name, which is played for laughs. You notice that, given a bunch of new characters to protect in a perilous situation, it’s always the men who end up dying for dramatic effect. You notice that, while the female characters are given room to develop in lots of different ways, the men are primarily defined by their sexuality: as lovers, adulterers, boyfriends, husbands and fathers, but rarely anything else. And when Hercules, Hippolyte’s historical love interest, shows up on the scene, you’re dismayed to find that, far from being the competent warrior who won her love and then left her, as per the old story, he instead shows up as a high-class escort – one who claims to be gay, but then falls for Hippolyte anyway – while she then humiliates and rescues him in short order.

ISM: Like I said. Subtle. And long-winded.

Me: I’ll get to the point, then. Having watched The Last Amazon, you, as a male viewer, start to feel that I, the female creator, might be a bit of a misandrist. Certainly, there are elements of misandry in my characterisation, or of sexism at the very least. You cannot find any male characters who come out on top, and while you still appreciate that this is meant to be Hippolyte’s show, you don’t see why there can’t be more of a balance where the portrayal of men is concerned. You’re not the only one to have noticed the problems, either. You write about them, detailing your complaints in blogs and newspaper articles. And then I respond, because I’m angry at your criticism. I say that I’m not a sexist; that I find it offensive that anyone would use the word misandry to describe what I do, because obviously I believe women and men are equal – and after all, I’m married! I say your claim is ridiculous, and don’t address your specific concerns beyond saying that you’re out of line. I am not a sexist, I protest; therefore, my show isn’t sexist. End of discussion. So how would that leave you feeling?

ISM: I’d be angry. Frustrated. At the very least, I’d start to think that, if you really disliked sexism, then you’d want to make very sure that you weren’t perpetuating it by accident, rather than just assuming it was impossible. That you were reacting defensively, automatically, without any sort of self-assessment at all. The unfairness of it would nag at me until one day, having had various arguments with you in my head about what you were doing wrong, I realised that we’d never be able to have a proper conversation, and so decided to write down an interview with Imaginary Foz Meadows about all the misandry and sexism in The Last Amazon. Because even an imaginary dialogue would be better than your angry, non-response to the legitimate complaints of fans who are sick of seeing their gender slighted and demonised in the media.

Me: And?

ISM: Oh.

Me: Imaginary Steven Moffat, thanks for joining me.

ISM: It’s been a pleasure.

Doctor Who: The Wedding Of River Song

Warning: spoilers.

I found the final episode… interesting. There were a number of awesome ideas in play – the alternate history mashup world, Amy’s train, Live Chess – and some excellent characterisation as well, which went a surprisingly long way towards redressing some (though by no means all) of the earlier problems I’ve had with the treatment of Amy in particular and River more generally. There was a cheesy-yet-delightful nod to Indiana Jones with the line about rats, the booby trap and the ravenous skulls in the temple of the headless monks, while the reappearance of some previous characters gave the whole thing a sense of catharsis, and the device of having the Silence chase the Doctor and Churchill during their conversation managed to be both ominous and creepy despite being familiar. This was definitely a showcase of Moffat’s better talents: strange and improbable settings with a dash of madcap thrown in, the action cutting between different times and places rather than being grounded to a single locale. All things considered, it was an unexpectedly positive note on which to end a season which has otherwise proved damnably frustrating, and has had the effect of calming my rage a little. Though not exactly brilliant, The Wedding of River Song is nonetheless surprisingly solid, with flaws that are more the byproducts of ambition than careless offense. Thus:

The Good

• Amy and Rory’s alternate selves. God, YES. Amy being proactive! Rory not being a doormat! An office on a train! Finally, we see these companions as they ought to have been: all last vestiges of the Love Triangle of Doom stripped clean away, so that even though Amy isn’t with Rory in this strange new world and despite her memories of the Doctor, she neither pines for him nor expects to be rescued – in fact, she rescues/captures him, which I’m pretty sure is a first. As is Rory’s quiet love for Amy: even though we’ve seen him in his guise as Stalwart Soldier before, this is the first time he’s been neither puppyish nor Woobified nor outclassed by the Doctor in a blatant ship tease tactic – and even better, Amy is his commanding officer. But the best thing is that, once the world returns to normal, they keep their memories of being awesome. Nothing is handwaved away by space magic, time fluctuations, dopplegangers or dream states: instead, the pair of them – but particularly Amy – actually get to level up. So when Amy sits down with River over a glass of wine, the two of them comparing time travel diaries, not only do we get a sense that this is an actual mother/daughter relationship, however bizarre, but Amy gets to carry the weight of what she’s actually done, and learn from it. Specifically:
• Amy killing Madame Kovarian. In cold blood. And telling her venomously as she does it that ‘River didn’t get it all from you, sweetie.’ This is the first and only time we see even a hint of the rage and grief that accompanies the loss of the infant Melody. This is an angry mother exacting revenge for the loss of a child she’ll never see again, and fuck what the Doctor would say about it – which, given her previously slavish adherence to his morality, is almost an epic development. Even more crucially, she’s never rebuked for it: nobody comes and patronises her, and instead she’s allowed to work out the consequences by herself. This is a dark, powerful, brilliant moment fleshed out by a wonderfully chilling speech, and even though it still doesn’t balance all the terrible things that have happened to Amy and her various dopplegangers over the past two seasons, it nonetheless takes enormous strides in the right direction. Mr Moffat, if you’re listening: MORE OF THIS.
• Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill in Buckingham Senate with a Silurian physician and Charles Dickens talking about a Christmas special he’s writing on a morning breakfast show, plus a train track into the pyramids. If I have to explain to you why this is awesome, you’re not doing it right.

The Meh

• The Tesselator as the Doctor’s Get Out of Jail Free card, because honestly? Not all that shocking. It doesn’t help that we already knew he couldn’t possibly die, no matter how much they kept calling his death a fixed point – he is the Doctor, it’s his show, therefore he lives, QED – but at least they ratcheted down the angst a bit and focused on the surrounding ideas, rather than just milking the melodrama.
• The title. Though it certainly grabbed some attention prior to the episode airing, it also contained a massive spoiler for what should have been the single most unexpected and moving event in the episode. And when I say unexpected, I mean that the only reason it happens is because the Doctor needs to convince River to let him die, and she apparently loves him so much that it’s the only way she’ll let him go (more of which later). Which is a flimsy reason, really, but still sort of cool, so I can’t quite decide whether heralding the wedding in the title was a cunning way to make the audience less skeptical and more accepting of the actual event, when it came, or if had a sort of hybridised Chekhov’s Lampshade effect that unintentionally served to spoil its own twist. I guess I’ll never know for sure, but nonetheless, I suspect it might be the latter.
• The Doctor’s beard of sorrow and craziness. Very scenic, certainly, but it feels like a cheap trick. Which it is, sort of. Still, I guess it works?

The Annoying

• Why doesn’t Amy know who Rory is? I mean, she remembers his name, but even though the wildly idealised version she draws of him doesn’t resemble the actual product, you’d still think the name would tip her off. A comparatively small blunder that could have been easily avoided, it nonetheless niggled at me the whole way through.
• River saying that the pain she’d feel if the Doctor died would be equal to that of everything in the universe ceasing to exist. I know it’s a time-travel romance and they’re encountering each other backwards, but River’s love has been growing more and more one-sided lately, to the point where her obvious need for him to reciprocate is actively stifling his ability to do so. More importantly, though, we seem to have a continuity problem. We’ve already seen that the Doctor plays no part in Melody/River’s childhood – he couldn’t find or save her – such that her first youthful meeting with him after the child-in-the-spacesuit incident is when Mels regenerates into River in Let’s Kill Hitler. The turning point of that episode is where all her flirtatious psychopathy falters, however conveniently and unrealistically, when she learns about her future with him, the knowledge of which is apparently enough to override all her training and make her switch sides. The next thing we see, she’s off to get her degree in archaeology – but as soon as she’s finished studying, she’s taken by Madame Kovarian to kill the Doctor at Lake Silencio, with the tacit implication being that they haven’t seen each other in the intervening years – she has, after all, been studying so she can go out and find him herself. True, it’s possible we’ll see that they’ve spoken between those points in a later episode, but as things stand, all her angst about not wanting to kill him – her choice to fracture time rather than shoot him in the final – seems to hang on the very slender thread of those previous two encounters, both chronologically and emotionally, which also makes her love for him a very suspect motive. Possibly it’s a later version who marries him, but we don’t know that for sure; and given that we’ve already seen their last ever kiss in an even earlier episode, we have to assume that this is a younger River than the one who helped him at the start of the season. The point being, as much as I liked how impromptu and brief the ceremony was, as well as the significance of the kiss – which was one of the better, more genuinely romantic moments between the two of them – I’m really wanting to see the events that make her fall in love with him in the first place, rather than just keep having their existence inferred: the fact that he’s the Doctor and therefore awesome isn’t enough, not in this context. His ignorance of their history was an amazing device to begin with, but the longer that emotional truth is hidden, the more (or so I fear) it weakens River’s character, turning her from a kickass, independent and equally awesome love of his life into another companion with unrequited affections along the lines of Martha Jones.
• As much as I loved these versions of Amy and Rory, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at how disconnected their awesomeness was from their previous portrayals. If Amy really had been just a best friend this whole time, a clever, self-possessed, no-nonsense girl blessed with extraordinary powers of observation courtesy of growing up beside a crack in time and space, and if Rory had always been stalwart and unthreatened by the Doctor’s presence, so many of the earlier problems I had with the show might never have existed, or been ameliorated along the way. Which is irritating. But at least we’ve moved on from there, finally.
• There was no TARDIS in this episode, except in flashbacks. Where did it go?
• Do we really have to wait another season before the whole thing with the Silence is resolved? I like that Moffat’s playing a long game, but his mode of play is starting to grate. It’s been dangled for two seasons already now, and there’s only so much suspense to be derived from a cryptic couplet and the unshakable inference that the Silence fear whatever circumstances eventually prompt the Doctor to tell River his name. To quote Monty Python, get on with it!

On balance, though, I’m prepared to call the episode a win. Sure, it didn’t move me to ecstasy, but it was much less problematic than its immediate predecessors, and there were some genuinely cool moments that I’m keen to revisit at some later date. I’m still ready for some new companions – but I’m definitely going to keep watching.

Doctor Who: Closing Time

Warning: spoilers. 

This episode started out promisingly, and had some genuinely nice dialogue. Absent Amy and Rory, I suddenly realised just how little time we’ve spent with the Doctor since Smith took over the role – by which I mean, how rarely we’ve seen him alone – and why this has been a bad thing. As a character, the Doctor is so much a creature of his actions around, reactions to and interactions with the denizens of the universe that, paradoxically, his most important development often happens when we catch him without an audience. Tennant’s Doctor was all flashfire wit and insight when people were watching, but the performance was always tempered for viewers by our knowledge of the loneliness, rage and furious compassion that caught him in moments visible only through the fourth wall. This was a cinematic trick as much as a matter of scripting and ostensibly a simple one, but for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated to Moffat’s governance of the show, primarily (I suspect) because the little narrative spaces that used to flesh out Tennant’s Doctor have more commonly been used, with Smith, to focus on his companions. So when, in Closing Time, we were presented with the Doctor just being alone on the street, talking about what he wasn’t doing, or monologuing to baby Alfie about life, or even just physically exploring and interacting with his environment without constantly cutting back to someone else, it was genuinely refreshing. For the first time in a while, I felt like I liked the Doctor; that he was more than just a convenient backdrop for the dramas of Amy’s life. Similarly, it was nice to see Craig again; he was a good character the first time around, and his subsequent development felt consistent.

That being said, Closing Time is a far from flawless episode. The Cyberman plot is a deliberately simple background conceit whose primary function is to let the Doctor wander around talking to people, and while I’m generally in favour of that (see above), the Cybermen are such a big part of the show’s lore that bringing them in so cheaply – and at the cost of such a patently ridiculous and openly lampshaded retcon as being blown up with love – feels like serious laziness. An original villain could have achieved the exact same impact without being nearly so ridiculous, and the episode would have been stronger for it. And then there was the ending, where we see River Song confronted by the eyepatch woman (who ten bucks says is yet another future version of River) and hauled away by the Silence to kill the Doctor, which… yeah, look: is ANYONE at this point surprised by the revelation that River is the one to kill the Doctor? Didn’t we already know this? In which case, given that we’ve been repeatedly told that it’s his last day before failing to die (sorry, before dying permanently oh wait) did we really need the extra reminder? I’d feel less ambivalent towards the ending if it had fit with anything in the episode, or of it had introduced any information we didn’t already possess; but instead, it felt like textbook double-handling for the sake of filler: old setting, old characters and old motive, with only the most meager sprinkling of catharsis to justify it. Given my druthers, we’d have just cut from the Doctor being in the TARDIS to seeing River in her astronaut suit under the lake, but there you go.

But as always, and even though she only appeared for a second without actually speaking, my biggest problem with Closing Time was Amy, who has apparently gone on to become a model in a perfume ad. Now, OK. There is nothing wrong with modelling per se, although the industry itself is rife with problems. Nor is anything wrong with perfume! But consider the Doctor’s past companions: Sarah Jane, who starts out as a journalist and keeps on investigating later; Rose Tyler, who starts out a shopgirl and goes on to work with Torchwood; Martha Jones, who starts out a trainee doctor and also goes on to work with Torchwood/chase aliens; and Donna Noble, who starts out a temp and ends up brainwiped, after which she gets happily married. Donna’s arc was tragic and infuriating – she grew so much as a character, only to have all that growth and all her adventures erased. But for all the problems inherent in her removal from the show, we understand that her living a normal life is only made possible by her lack of memories. But Sarah Jane, Rose and Martha all acknowledge the impossibility of trying to adapt to everyday living after travelling with the Doctor – it’s why they all end up having similar adventures of their own. But Amy, whose whole life has been far more entwined with that the of Doctor than any of them, and whose daughter was stolen away from her because of him, can cope well enough with the change to just go off and become a model? I know she started out as a kissogram, but seriously: what the fuck? I keep asking myself: do she and Rory ever have any more children? How can they not be scarred by what’s happened to them? How does any of this even work?

And that’s another thing: as much as I liked watching Craig and Alfie together, I couldn’t help but juxtapose the father/son bond as written in Closing Time – where Craig’s love for his son is so strong that it blows up a Cyberman spaceship – with the complete and utter absence of a mother/daughter bond between Amy and Melody. Which is a recounting of the point I made last time – that Amy and Rory have stopped grieving for Melody/River – but even so, when the very next episode features a dad going through hell to return to his child, I can’t help but feel the issue is being thrown into stark relief.

But, yes. Otherwise, this was a decent enough episode. But after the final installment next week, I’ll be happy to see the back of this season. Moffat might still be in charge, but there’s a clean slate in the offing, and for all the show’s faults, I’m keen to see it improve.

Doctor Who: Let’s Kill Hitler

Warning: spoilers, rant, etc. 

Internets, I don’t know what to tell you.

It’s pretty firmly on record that I was less than impressed with A Good Man Goes To War, which is why I’ve been putting off watching Let’s Kill Hitler. And then I saw this piece in today’s Guardian about whether Doctor Who has grown too complicated, and I decided to bite the bullet.

In retrospect, I’m sort of wishing I hadn’t.

The introduction of Mels is a retcon of epic proportions. If we’d seen her before in earlier episodes or heard her mentioned Bad Wolf style, that would be one thing; but we didn’t, and we haven’t, and that makes the whole setup for the piece feel utterly contrived. We’re with Hitler for five minutes – which is a relief in some ways, because any longer would have been unbearable – but there’s absolutely no reason AT ALL that the episode has to be set when and where it is, except that someone, somewhere thought it would be cool. Which, look: I get that coolness is sort of what Doctor Who is meant to do, but dropping in on Hitler is a pretty hefty way to fuck up the established timeline, and the fact that this is played for laughs – as irrelevant – in a show whose earlier series spent episode after episode making clear the dangers and difficulties inherent in messing with established events is sloppy, unprofessional and stupid. Which means, for my money, that the episode utterly fails at coolness.

In fact, it fails at everything.

Things I am sick of seeing in Steven Moffat episodes:

• Female characters who are universally either River Song or other girls who’ve known the Doctor since childhood;
• Robots, robotic processes or other soulless, impersonal creatures as the only villains; and
• Dopplegangers of everyone. OH MY GOD, THE DOPPLEGANGERS.

With the exception of Neil Gaiman’s excellent piece, these three things define every single episode in the new season. They are also the hallmarks of Moffat’s earlier and best offerings, including The Girl in the Fireplace, The Silence of the Library and Blink. From what I’ve heard, the next two episodes are no different, and it makes me want to tear my hair out with frustration. These were all great ideas the first time around, but after the sixth or seventh repetition, they’re getting very, very worn. FIND A NEW STORY AND TELL IT INSTEAD.

Oh! And then we have the sexism. Did I mention the sexism, internets? Because I’m rather annoyed by it! While regenerating, River/Mels snaps that she’s concentrating on a dress size, rushes off to weigh herself once she’s done, exclaims over the hot clothes she can wear in her new body, and then has her brainwashing-induced personality explained away by the Doctor with the hilarious addendum of “plus, she’s a woman.” AGH. Oh, and we get ANOTHER scene where the Doctor dies (only he doesn’t really) while everyone sits around being sad anyway – seriously, he’s the TITULAR FUCKING CHARACTER, he’s not about to die, there is NO TENSION IN THESE SCENES, JUST MELODRAMATIC BULLSHIT OH MY GOD – and yet more robots whose repetitious dialogue goes on and on and on; and more dopplegangers of everyone to pull focus so that the writers are spared the indignity of actually having to create new characters with actual depth; and then we end with River effectively depowering herself as a TimeLord to save the Doctor despite her brainwashing, and what the HELL? Seriously? She’s been trained to kill him her whole life, but then she mysteriously deprograms herself when he calls her River, even though that makes no sense? WHY DOES SHE SUDDENLY SWITCH SIDES WHEN SHE’S JUST SUCCEEDED IN HER LIFE’S MISSION? I don’t buy that the TARDIS made her reconsider, somehow, magically. No: she’s a main character, we should see this important deeply transformative shit actually HAPPENING and not just be told about it afterwards.

GAH.

So, yeah. NOT IMPRESSED. The Guardian asked if Doctor Who is too complicated now. I say no, unless by complicated you mean narratively disjunct, with new retcons every episode, plots that don’t make sense, and characterisation so thin you could shoot peas through it. In which case, IT IS COMPLICATED.

I’m going to watch the next couple of episodes in the hope that things might fix themselves, but honestly, my optimism is low. If Amy needs rescuing one more time, or another female character gets killed/depowered/hurt for stupid reasons that are never adequately explained solely to advance the arc of Rory or the Doctor, I will get very, very cross.

And now, I’m going to go change into my The Doctor Is In t-shirt, and pretend that David Tennant and RTD are still running the show. Also, there will be wine.

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes To War

Warning: total spoilers, much rant.

I just finished watching A Good Man Goes to War. I was not impressed. In fact, my unimpressedness is such that I’m close to declaring it the Worst Episode Ever. I mean, even the one with the Ikea Darleks wasn’t this bad – or maybe it was exactly this bad, and only a sudden rosiness of hindsight is making it seem otherwise. Either way, unless the series manages to execute a pretty fabulous face heel turn, I’m going to call shark jump from this point onwards.

So, look. The idea of the episode – the significance of Amy and Rory’s baby, why she’d been stolen, how the Doctor set about getting her back – is a good one. Ditto the reveal about River Song, although seeing as how I already picked this a few episodes back, it was less of a big surprise than a confirmation of fact. Even so, the laboured business of waiting to see her name spelled out really bugged me: the only time the TARDIS has struggled to translate written language was back in Season 2’s The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, with the given reason being that the script in question predated Timelord civilisation – so seeing a sudden, convenient time-delay trotted out for the sole purpose of garnering a few seconds’ extra anxiety over River’s identity felt like retconning at its cheapest.

Which, you know. It was.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, here: let’s start at the very beginning, wherein Amy Pond spends a good few minutes telling her newborn daughter about the wonderful and magnificent man who’ll always, always look out for her. So far as I can see, this monologue was designed to do two things:

1) tug our heart-strings about her having to hand over Melody; and

2) pull a big ‘surprise!’ moment when we realise she’s been talking about Rory, not the Doctor.

Fine. Whatever. I get that, though at this point, the joke about confusing the two men in Amy’s affections is wearing very, very thin. Ship Tease a love triangle once, I thrill to it. Ship Tease a love triangle every single episode, and I start to get stabby. More practically, though, this exposition serves no narrative purpose other than the above: it doesn’t move the plot forwards, it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, and it goes on longer than is strictly comfortable. Cut to Rory in a Cyberman base, dressed as a Centurion and issuing Manly Directives while the Doctor blows shit up outside.

I’m sorry, what? The Doctor, that is to say, the man who has spent the better part of forty years trying not to blow shit up and interacting very sternly with those who do, is blowing up an entire base just to make a point?

Sorry. You’ve lost me.

Oh, wait, right – but Amy is special, so she gets a special rescue! Very, very special, although as Cat Valente and Stephen H. Segal pointed out on Twitter this week, that specialness is looking less earned and more forced the longer the series goes on. Or, to put it another way: the Doctor has a time machine that can go anywhere. Even if he really did need to call in all these amazing debts across the universe and put together a crack team of aliens to help him break into Demon’s Run, blowing up the Cyberman base was just gratuitously violent. I don’t care that River sort of, almost, indirectly calls him on it at the end; that we’re meant to worry about the sort of man he’s becoming because of this one, out-of-character incident. Bullshit: we were worried already. This is the big contradiction of the Doctor, the subtle line that Moffat and Davies before him have played from minute one of the reboot: that the Doctor is a wounded soldier, recovering from his unwilling genocide of the Timelords and Darleks, battle-forged and fighting the violence of grief, power and loneliness as the last surviving member of an all-powerful species.

All of which says to me that the Doctor does not, will not wipe out a whole Cyberman base just to make a fucking point. If such a heinous act really is his tipping point, a sign of character slippage that signals an end to everything he’s tried to be, we should see him at that pivotal, damning moment, and not just be pacified with a shot of Rory looking all badass before the credits come up.

From this point on, what fast becomes notable about A Good Man Goes to War is how little screen time the main trio actually gets. The Doctor himself is conspicuously absent from the first half hour: instead, we follow innumerable secondary characters through various disparate locations. This is meant to give us a sense of grandeur, and to some extent, it works, in that each individual setting – the Battle of Zarathustra, Victorian England, a skeezy alien bar, Demon’s Run itself, even River’s prison block – is somewhere we’d like to be; or rather, a place where we’d like to see a story told. Instead, we skim into each one for about three minutes: just enough time to introduce a new character, a vague sense of context and their debt to the Doctor before we’re whisked away to the next one. This is, to say the least, dizzying. And then there’s River herself, who declines to show up only because she has to be there at the very end, when the Doctor finally finds out who she is. She says this in such a way as to intimate, backed up by ominous music, that he will be angry at the truth, shocked or betrayed or poisoned, that she must stay away in order to savour these last few moments of anonymity, when of course – as it turns out – he’s delighted. This doesn’t surprise her at all, though: the earlier, melodramatic scene with Rory was a bluff.

Which makes no sense: because now there’s no good reason why River stayed away. Conceivably, it would’ve been awkward to have her there – except that there’s no narrative reason why this should be so, no mention of the don’t-cross-your-own-timeline directive (which, frankly, would have made more sense). The only reason River refuses to go, it seems, is because Moffat wants to tease us with the prospect of finding out who she really is, and feels her revelation will have more impact if she doesn’t show up until the very end. That’s an obvious ploy I don’t appreciate, and one that serves otherwise to ensure that an episode full of oneshot characters doesn’t accidentally stray towards meaningful development of the regulars.

Then there’s a bit which just plain doesn’t make sense: the introduction of a married, gay marine couple who talk to Lorna, yet another oneshot,  and to each other, about the Headless Monks, the Doctor and various other sundries. Then we see one of the couple get taken away by the Monks, whose ranks he is forced to join. At the time, this is set up as an emotional thing: we’re meant to feel sorry for the chosen man, and briefly, we do – right up until it becomes apparent that neither he nor his partner have anything else to do with the rest of the episode. That is to say, we never see them again, and the five minutes we spent in their company are wasted. Lorna, at least, is important, though her scene with the couple isn’t: she sews the name of Amy’s daughter onto a prayer leaf and gives it to her, sympathetic because she, too, spent time with the Doctor as a child, and has only joined the army in order to meet him. This is, alas, an emotionally borked scene: in yet another hideous, long-winded display of telling rather than showing, they talk about how awesome the Doctor is, how worth it and wonderful, by which point both my husband and I were shouting at the episode to get on with it!, sadly to no avail.

Because then we have the army itself (no, we don’t ever find out why they’ve decided to fight the Doctor – he’s just the Big Bad as far as they’re concerned, and we have to take River’s nebulous word for it that possibly, maybe, somehow he deserves it, or is in danger of making himself deserve it) getting geed up by their commander. More Headless Monks emerge; we get another long speech about What The Doctor Is And Is Not, followed by more speachifying about how, just this once, the papal authority in charge of the Monks – who wear big, voluminous hoods – are allowed to show people what they Really Look Like, even though doing so is normally a heretical offence. This is, I mean, um. Because the Headless Monks? The big reveal about them? Is that they are headless.

Wow.

Let’s ignore the fact that if Moffat wanted anyone to be astonished by this, he could quite easily have called them, I don’t know, anything other than the Headless Monks. Their lack of heads, for all its obviousness, isn’t the biggest problem. No: it’s that he’s introduced a cowled, hooded order of Mystery Mystics, established that looking under their hoods is heresy, then lifted their hoods in a one-time special offer all in the space of fifteen fucking minutes. Which, you know, tends to kill the mystery pretty quicksmart.

Also, they fight with red lightsabers, like headless Sith Lords. LIGHT. FUCKING. SABERS.

And then, finally – FINALLY – the Doctor shows up. We don’t see his oh-so-carefully gathered compatriots at this point; instead, he talks a bit about himself (because nobody else has done that yet, oh wait), some stuff happens, he disappears, and then we get the whole army chanting WE’RE NOT FOOLS over and over again, somebody please kill me, Rory shows up and rescues Amy with their baby, the Doctor’s secret army (not his chosen few, who are doing things elsewhere at control panels, but some other random guys) show up and surround the enemy, and then we have an excruciatingly saccharine ten minutes of Everything Is Over And Yay We Won, Look At Our Cute Baby. Which, OK, I get that babies are cute, and I know the point is that everyone is happy and safe, but you’re trying to make me feel relived at the cessation of what is, in fact, a total lack of tension. Because up until the very end of the last episode, we didn’t know where Amy was, or that she was actually pregnant; we don’t see the birth, we don’t flash back to her capture, she isn’t threatened at all, Melody isn’t harmed, and the most menacing thing that happens in the whole episode is when Amy has her baby taken from her in the opening scene. The rest has just been strangers and oneshots talking, talking, talking – and so, to return to the point, when you follow half an hour of dialogue up with two minutes of something almost happening and then celebrate a bloodless victory with ten minutes of schmaltz, I am not feeling relieved that the characters are safe, because so far as I can see, they were never actually in danger. Telling the danger is not showing! Show. Me. The danger!

Which, of course, eventually comes. There’s a small trap, in that the Monks come back and attack the Doctor’s chosen guardians, one of whom dies, and Lorna, who also dies, but not until she’s had a tearful farewell in the Doctor’s arms. (Of course he remembers her. Apparently, he remembers everyone, even though he’s been known for forty years as an irascible, absent-minded professor. But I digress.) Oh, and the flesh copy of Melody that Rory thought was his daughter dissolves, thus putting the real baby well and truly beyond rescue. Except she’s not, really, because then River Song shows up, castigates the Doctor a bit, then reveals herself to be Melody Pond grown up, regenerated (because she’s sort of a Timelord, but not quite) and with her name changed via translation into an alien language.

Oh, and the name of the next episode is Let’s Kill Hitler.

I’m not making that up. Believe me, I wish I was.

There were other things, too, small gaffes and glitches that niggled. Where did the photo of Amy and Melody come from in Day of the Moon? I can’t see eyepatch lady stopping to take one. Why were the Headless Monks and their order so heavily invested in a battle against the Doctor, when we’ve never seen or heard of them before? The music, too, was desperately OTT, swooning and sugary well beyond what the situation called for, making this the first time since Eragon that I’ve actively wanted to mute a soundtrack.

So, yeah. I wasn’t impressed with A Good Man Goes to War. Not because it didn’t work, but because, despite all the problems, this should have been a good episode. There’s so much potential there, I can just about rewrite the episode in my mind. In fact, despite the probable arrogance of doing so, I can and will. So here’s my version of how things should have been.

Picture this:

In the opening scenes, Amy poses for a photo with her newborn daughter. Her smile collapses as soon as the flash dies. She tries to talk bravely to Melody, but three sentences in, she’s rudely interrupted by the army officers. The eyepatch woman declares how little patience she has for sentimentality; Melody is taken forcibly from a crying Amy, cuffed to the ground when she tries to snatch her back. They don’t need her alive any more, she’s told, but maybe she’ll be useful as bait. They leave, and we are left uncertain about Amy’s future.

Cut to Rory and the Doctor at the TARDIS controls, talking about a Cyberman base. It’s the only place they can go to get the information they need, but dealing with Cybermen is always tricky: without a show of force, they won’t tell them anything. Rory goes in, but keeps in touch with the Doctor by comm. We see the moment when the Cybermen refuse to speak; we see the Doctor’s face as he realises that violence is his only option. He tells Rory to brace, and then we see him go cold and hard, blowing up an entire base to make the remainder reveal where Amy is being kept. Later, he looks to Rory for absolution, but Rory says there’s nothing to forgive. They weren’t innocents, they were Cybermen. They needed to die.

While the Doctor picks up everyone else, the same as before (except he also grabs a regiment or two), Rory goes to River. She tells him she can’t come because she can’t cross her own timeline; that she’s already been to Demon’s Run. Rory assumes this means she’ll show up during the fighting and help, which perspective River lets him believe. We see her face as he walks away, though, and know that she’s lying – but not why. Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor asks Rory where River is, and he tells him she’s already there; and the Doctor says, of course she is. Now, we see the strike team all together in the TARDIS, listening as the Doctor explains the situation: what’s happening, what they have to do to save Amy, and why there’s an army after him. Cut this with slice shots of them actually infiltrating the base in real-time, sneaking through to their positions, fighting their way in. End with the Doctor telling them cheerfully not to die, then smash cut to Amy blank in her room as Lorna comes in, proffering the prayer leaf, which she puts down on a table when Amy won’t take it. Their conversation is different this time: it starts out with Lorna telling Amy that she used to know the Doctor as a child, but when she describes him, it’s as a great warrior, held reverential in her eyes for the violence he did. It’s why she became a soldier, to meet him in battle – an almost Sontaran glory – and Amy becomes furious, yelling at her to get out. She throws the leaf at Lorna, but the other woman won’t take it. Close the scene on Amy picking it up, trying to rip it, failing, then crying over it, all while trying to pull herself together. This she does – but just then, the lights go out.

Red light flickers on; we follow back to the Doctor’s posse, watching them put the finishing touches on their infiltration. Soldiers in chaos during a drill; Lorna rejoins them, excited because she knows what this means. But when the lights come up, there’s an army there instead of the Doctor, surrounding them: all weapons must be laid down. Elsewhere, we see Rory and the Doctor split up, looking for Melody. The Doctor reclaims her from eyepatch lady after a tense confrontation; he pulls a weapon,says he’ll spare her if she gives him the child, then prepares to shoot anyway when Melody is handed over. Eyepatch lady expects him to do it, which is all that stays his hand; and then Rory arrives, desperate for his daughter, in which moment of distraction eyepatch lady flees. The Doctor hands Melody over, gets word on the comm about what’s happened with the army, then leaves Rory to be the Amy-rescuing hero while he goes off to take charge of things on the ground.

Back to Amy, who’s actively trying to break out of her cell rather than waiting passively to be rescued. Just as she finds something to prise open the door, Rory opens it from the other side. Reunion! They go to the window and watch, tense, as the Doctor negotiates the final stand-down of the other army’s troops, sending them out with only a few casualties on either side. All three reunite; Rory explains to Amy what’s been happening while the Doctor goes to check the records with his Silurian sword-master. The scene about Melody’s genetics happens mostly as before, except that, when the trap is revealed and eyepatch tells him about the Monks’ involvement, they’re a new threat, one he recognises as deadly when their name is spoken. This time, we actually see the fight between them and his motley crew, including Lorna joining fight, the disintegration of the false Melody, and then the death scene of the Sontaran. A difference with Lorna’s death, though: the Doctor doesn’t remember her at all, and the last thing she sees is his face, stricken with apology, as he tries – and fails – to recall her name.

Only then, into the silence, does River emerge; she’s been watching from the shadows. The Doctor shouts at her: where has she been? She argues back, bitterly, about how rich this is coming from him, who’s forever swanning about and showing up where he pleases, never a care for those left behind, like the dead girl whose name he couldn’t remember; the Doctor retorts that he, at least, is always where he needs to be, to which River calmly replies that she is, too. Both reside a bit: he says she told Rory she’d be here; what did she mean? At which River breaks a little and says, I was, but you missed me. He understands the truth, then – heavy with the weight of what it means – but Rory and Amy don’t. The others are curious, but know this isn’t their business: he leads the survivors back to the TARDIS, giving the trio privacy. River tells Amy to pull the prayer leaf, forgotten until now, out of her pocket. Amy can’t understand how she knew it was there at all, and Rory is totally baffled, but both stop talking when they see the name on it: River Song, translated by the TARDIS. Lights, curtain, exeunt all.

Aaaand now I’m done. But seriously, is it so hard to throw in a little danger, to show us the conflict and tone down the melodrama, so that the emotional moments actually mean something? Apparently. And yet also, to my mind, not.

Doctor Who: Season 6

Warning: spoilers! 

There’s several things I’ve been wanting to blog about these past few days, but in light of just having watched the first two episodes of Season 6 of Doctor Who, I’m going to put them on hold in favour of performing a narrative vivisection. It’s been a while now since Season 5: long enough that many of the small, crucial details hinting at Steven Moffat’s arc for Matt Smith’s Doctor have doubtless slipped my mind. What I do recall, however, is that the final episodes didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time. Or, wait: let me rephrase. I don’t watch Doctor Who because it makes sense, and I’m fairly sure that’s the case for most viewers. I mean, when your basic premise is a species of open-door, case by case worldbuilding with full retconning options and an ad-hoc magic system masquerading as science, continuity and inherent logic are always going to be, to paraphrase one Shepherd Book, a mite fuzzy.

I say that with love, of course. After all, if you want to watch a witty Brit poncing about the multiverse in a police box, Doctor Who is pretty much your only option. But there’s a difference between nonsensical plots and plots which literally make no sense, and while I appreciate that Moffat is very much a creature of the long game, Day of the Moon comes perilously close to falling into the latter category.

But first: The Impossible Astronaut. Good premise, nice creepifying vibes, though I could’ve done without the prolonged image of Amy sobbing over the Doctor’s body. Also – and yes, I do realise that it represents a significant portion of the setup for Season 6 – I wasn’t keen on using his eventual death as a plot device. For one thing, it’s an annoying way to start an episode: the Doctor was always going to reappear again via some miraculous means, and in the interim, we waste time watching the characters grieve for a loss we already know isn’t final. For another, and more importantly, it’s a problematic means of garnering emotional investment in the series. If the death we’ve seen is truly an irreversible event, then Matt Smith must be the last Doctor – which, yes, is possible, but given the show’s popularity and the sheer length of its reign, I just can’t see that fact being flagged with such canonical finality so early in his tenure. Which means it’s probably going to be reversed at some point, or prolonged, or altered, or changed, or whathaveyou, and while I’m certainly interested in seeing how that happens (probable answer: Timelord magic!), I can’t feel any uncertainty about the fact that it will happen. Which makes it something of an empty threat, particularly as it’s been left to hang over the whole season.

Unless the death does stand and the show really is slated to end with Matt Smith. In which case: well played, Mr Moffat! Well played.

Monster-wise, the Silence were genuinely freaky, and a very well-seeded threat from Season 5, though as has been pointed out elsewhere, Day of the Moon was rather rough and ready when it came to how their powers worked. It’s a fridge logic problem, the sort of thing that only niggles in retrospect without really altering the fabric of the narrative: an omission of some facts and a blurring of others, rather than an outright contradiction. What I’m less forgiving about is the idea that an alien species, capable of space travel, who have demonstrably menaced multiple worlds and who, by River Song’s reckoning, have access to at least eight different types of alien technology while on Earth, had to engineer the moon landing because they needed someone to invent the space suit. Because, seriously? No. Even if they’re incapable of creating things on their own, they still have access to alien technology. I’m pretty sure there are alien space suits, you guys!

And while we’re on the subject of continuity being carried over from Season 5: haven’t we already established that there are colonies of lizard people living under the Earth? You know – another technologically advanced race that’s been sharing the planet with humankind since the dawn of history? Possibly I’m just being picky, but seeing as how the Silence also live in a network of tunnels running beneath the surface of the entire planet, it feels kind of odd to think that the two have never encountered one another. Oh, and if the Silence really are responsible for all those strange jitters people feel in empty places, the sensation of being watched – all that stuff – then can we assume that they’ve been working in tandem with the Vashta Nerada? All right, maybe that last one’s a stretch, but the point is, for a race of villains whose coming has been foreshadowed for some time now, the Silence feel underdeveloped to me. Yes, they’re frightening, but how do they fit into the wider Whoniverse as a species? (And why do they look curiously like knock-off copies of Joss Whedon’s Gentlemen?)

The other problem is Amy’s pregnancy-that-isn’t, though maybe that’s only a problem for me, given my stated position on Magical Pregnancies of any kind. Right now, it looks like Amy’s eventual daughter will kill the Doctor (somehow), steal his regenerative powers (somehow) and be reared in an abandoned orphanage in 1969 (somehow) by a creepy caretaker under alien control. With a photo of Amy on her dresser (somehow). Though when she does see Amy face to face, she doesn’t recognise her (somehow). Also, she’s not quite human (the TARDIS effect?) and super strong – strong enough to rip her way out of the space suit (somehow). Except, if she could do that, then why didn’t she do it ages ago? And how, if she is Amy’s daughter, was she stolen away? I’m struggling with all these things. I know it’s the long game, or rather, I really, really hope that it’s the long game, and the only reason it doesn’t make sense is because there’s more to come. But so far, it doesn’t feel like it.

That being said, I love River Song, I love theorising about the possible arcs and reveals of awesome TV shows (theory: River is Amy and Rory’s daughter!) and because I embrace the senselessness, I love Doctor Who even when it appears to make no sense, if only because Matt Smith is so magnificently daft. So despite my doubts and wonderings: bring it on!