These things happen to other people - they don't happen at all, in fact

When you're following an angel, does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?  And so on.  They Might Be Giants, meet Doctor Who.  Many people over the past seven years have described New Who as "emo", and Amy and Rory defeating the Weeping Angels by jumping hand-in-hand off a tower block must surely be the extreme point (zenith? nadir?) of "emo" in DW.  And yet, just get a couple of American loons to play a jolly tune with a guitar and an accordion over it and you're back over the borderline into "whimsical".

There was a bit of a hush in the Toon household after we watched The Angels Take Manhattan (Then They Take Berlin), I don't mind admitting.  Yes, Amy Pond has left the series for the foreseeable future, and I won't give a stuff if she never comes back.  Rory's gone with her, which is more of a shame since he was more of an interesting (or even watchable) character, but still, change is at the heart of DW's success, and the show must move on.  It was quite nicely done, though.

Until you stop to think about it thirty seconds later and realise that, even if 1938 New York is out of bounds for the Doctor, he just has to turn up in 1939 to get the Ponds back.  (Best not tell him though, eh?)  It wouldn't even mean creating another paradox, just cheating a bit - plant a fake gravestone where Rory will conveniently see it in 2012, and you're away.  All the tragedy that's been built up around this departure, and which carries over into the Christmas special, depends on everybody agreeing to overlook some very obvious workarounds.  See also the business with River Song's book - reading ahead in it and feeling obliged to do what it says wouldn't be a problem if the Doctor realised he could do something else and then tell River to type up the false details later.  Timey-wimey is only binding if we all agree that it is.  So there's hope for the series yet.

The Lovely Jo felt that it was a bit unnecessary to have a Weeping Angel pop up at the end just for the purpose of writing the Ponds out, but I dunno.  Given the episode's noir detective tendencies, I think it's in keeping to have one of the villain's hitmen escape and turn up in the epilogue to kill off somebody the hero cares about.  Or in this case, send them back in time to live long and happy lives - eh, noir ain't what it used to be.

All in all, not without its problems, but a pretty good episode and a fitting farewell to the Ponds.  The concept of the Weeping Angels creating a battery farm of looped human lives in an apartment block is a great one, and turning the investigation into a '30s style thriller was a canny choice.  I think I'd rate this a 7 out of 10.

Dice Irae

The blog title would have been "Pond Life", except that - startlingly - the DW production office already used that joke for a string of promotional scenes leading into the series.  Paging Mr Moffat, message from Fred for a Mr Moffat...

* * * * *

The winning streak couldn't last.  We've opened the series with a straight run of three good episodes, which is surprising and pleasing, but here the cheer runs out and we break our shins on a plain old duffer of an episode.  It's not that The Power of Three is abhorrent, it's just bland and forgettable.  Many a Who fan will tell you that being bland and forgettable is the worst thing DW can do, and while I strongly disagree with that, clearly this episode isn't going to get high marks.

I've seen a lot of critics and commentators say that this episode is really all about the Ponds and their imminent departure, that the issue of their relationship with the Doctor and the conflict between "Doctor life" and "real life" is the main attraction here.  Well, great, that's about three minutes of dialogue accounted for.  I suspect the real reason people have focused on the Pond Question is just that there's bugger all else to work with here.  The idea of an adventure that requires the Doctor to spend a year living the quiet life on Earth is a good one, and sure, it's a natural springboard for a consideration of the place of the Doctor and the Ponds in each others' lives now that the Ponds have a settled home life.  Whereas what we get is a few minutes of that playing second fiddle to the sprawling non-story of the cubes.  The Pond Question needed either to be the story (or be reflected more clearly in the story), or to have a better story supporting it.

I mean, the episode starts off well enough, building up mystery around what the cubes are and where they've come from, then after rather too much dragging around we find out the villain is Steven Berkoff with a nasty skin condition, and he's planning to kill off humanity because he's a bit of a git, and dull dull dull-diddly-dullsville.  It's beyond perfunctory.  Ohhhh, I don't know... sinister character actor in a black cape and some make-up, will that do?  Why's he doing villainous things?  Eh, just is.

Chris Chibnall's taken a very simple approach to both his episodes this series, and that paid off with Dinosaurs on a Spaceship for a variety of reasons: it suited the pulp adventure flavour of the story; the mystery of dinosaurs being on a spaceship, and its explanation, wasn't a significant part of the plot, which was in itself robust enough to carry 45 minutes of TV; the characters' motivations, though simplistic, were sufficiently clear and plausible to support the story.  It fails to pay off with The Power of Three for similar reasons: it doesn't suit a mystery-heavy, character-focused story; the mystery is the central pillar of the plot, and a crappy payoff undermines that; the Shakri's motivation is hackneyed but also sufficiently unclear by the end of the episode as to leave the whole shebang floating in the fog.

There's some other stuff drifting around in here, none of which adds up to very much.  The girl with the blue-glowing face and the two cube-mouthed hospital orderlies seem to have been thrown in just to meet the weirdness quota for the week - I don't recall there being any explanation of them, and they just seem to vanish from the story once they've had their close-up.  The scenes between the Doctor and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and their "absent friends" nod to the late Brigadier, could be considered a foreshadowing of the Ponds' departure, but her inclusion in the story also looks a bit too much like a sop to the kind of continuity-obsessed fans who would want the Brigadier's daughter to take over as UNIT's figurehead.  Nice to see Mark Williams making another appearance as Rory's dad, although most of his time seems to be taken up with commenting on the fact that nothing's happening.  And sure enough, it is.

So this might be a 4, might be a 5.  It's tempting to give it a (Power of) 3 out of 10, but it's not that bad.  It's just lacking any kind of flavour or character.  And on that note, we prepare to say goodbye to Amy Pond.

Happiness is a Warm Pun

And so, after a brief delay, to A Town Called Mercy.  Folks, it's going to be another positive review.  Here at last is a Moffat-era episode of DW that tackles a difficult ethical question head on and doesn't completely bugger it up.  It doesn't completely redeem the sins of earlier episodes, mind you, but at least when it puts the Doctor in a room with a vivisectionist, it doesn't have him bump fists with him.  It's a very far cry from the abominable Hungry Earth/Cold Blood.  On reflection, this episode doesn't seem to have been part of a developing critique of the Doctor's morality after all, more of an upward blip.  It's a welcome blip for all that.

The keystone scene for me is the bit where the Doctor avoids an armed stand-off with that young townsman.  Here the Doctor is faced with the reality of people willing to use guns, even good people willing to use guns for arguably good reasons, and he finds another way.  This scene is pretty much exactly what I wanted to see from DW, and a triumphantly Whoish moment at a time when the series seems increasingly (and for me, disappointingly) comfortable with gun use, even among the Doctor's coterie.  The big showdown at the end, pretty shamelessly borrowing from Three Amigos, also shows the Doctor thinking his way out of a fight.  It all adds up to a pleasing rejection of the simple cowboy violence that the setting invites, and that other episodes of New New Who have lapsed into.  See also the scene where Amy makes a complete fool of herself with a handgun, which is nothing new, except that here it's actually played as foolish instead of heroic.

Contrast this with The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, the previous Pond adventure in America, in which the standard response of every character to every problem is to point a gun at it.  Compare it with The Gunfighters, DW's only other excursion to the Wild West, in which the Doctor's response to guns is to refuse them or to engage in hair-raising slapstick buffoonery with them, thus undermining the heroic iconography of the gun with his own frailer but more genuine heroism.  A Town Called Mercy is clearly nearer to The Gunfighters than to Astronaut/Moon (so tempting, so tempting... can I argue for a second consecutive episode implicitly taking Steven Moffat to task?).  When it does show the Doctor threatening someone with a gun, it's an anomalous moment - it's acknowledged as wrong within the story, it isn't one of those unfortunate eye-off-the-ball moments that sometimes happens in New New Who.  We can see that the Doctor's gone past his normal moral boundaries, which in turn helps to define what those boundaries are.

We're invited to think about the Doctor's ethical history as well - is it his anger at Jex's war crimes that has pushed him over the line, or discomfort at his own actions in the Time War?  Obviously the two characters aren't quite alike - Jex is shown to have conducted macabre experiments on others of his kind, surgically converting them into weapons in order to end a war quickly in favour of his own people, while the Doctor is known to have wiped out both sides in his people's war in order to protect the rest of the universe from being destroyed collaterally.  And while the Doctor has spent much of the past seven seasons dealing with his guilt, and apparently still feels guilty, Jex denies regretting his actions, although this seems to be bravado and he eventually shows remorse.  The real similarity between the two is their desire for redemption: do they deserve it?  Is their guilt or their attempted atonement equal, or in some way comparable?  What real justice can there be for either of them, Jex being hunted down by a vigilante, nobody left to hold the Doctor accountable?  There's no easy answer to these questions, and thumbs up to Toby Whithouse for raising them, especially in the traditionally simplistic context of the cowboy film.

And then we have the Gunslinger, who is essentially a great big gun with a personality.  Crucially, being armed wasn't his choice and isn't something he's happy about - the fact that he carries (or rather, is) a gun is a reason to pity him.  And yet, being given a gun, he's chosen to use it to enact vigilante justice against the people who gave it to him.  This clearly isn't a good thing - it's what turns the Gunslinger from victim to villain within the structure of the story - although the alternative is that the war criminal Jex escapes (or rather, conveniently commits suicide).  We're left with the awkward question of just how bad vigilantism is in this context.  The Gunslinger is still a vigilante at the end of the episode, albeit a "good" one because he wears the sheriff's badge - authority, or the semblance of it, legitimises his behaviour.  It's worth remembering too that vigilantism - generally unarmed - is basically what the Doctor does for a living.

I should probably also mention that Amy and Rory are pushed very much into the background and feel somewhat superfluous to the story.  Feh.

So this is a mature and thought-provoking slice of DW, and offers a timely reconsideration of the show's ethics.  The handling of Jex's fate is questionable - all right, the Doctor's honouring the late sheriff by protecting Jex's life, but letting him escape altogether isn't a great solution, and the fact that he resolves the plot by blowing himself up is just too neat for this story.  But still, here comes another 8.5 out of 10.  (Previous episode re-evaluated back to a 7.5.)

KKLAK! to the Future

Edit (Dec 2012): All right, perhaps 7.5 rather than 8.5.  It's not substantial enough for the higher score, but it's solid enough to deserve at least 7.5.

* * * * *

Several other people seem to have beaten me to "Jurassic Ark".  Bastards.  Now I have to resort to a blog post title that requires footnotes.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship: a cute title in search of a story.  It's surprising that Steven Moffat should have handed this wide-open brief over to the ever-risky Chris Chibnall.  It's even more surprising that he should have done so well with it.  He keeps the story simple and the brush strokes broad, and this suits the slam-bang title, the old-school adventure style, and the need after last year's series to settle back and take a bit of a breather before the forthcoming Pond departure episode.  The characters are also somewhat simplistic, but sufficiently lurid and different from one another to allow for some lively interaction.  This is the right episode at the right time, done the right way.

Not to mention: it's taken DW nearly 50 years to combine dinosaurs and spaceships?!  Well, all right, Invasion of the Dinosaurs has both, but not on screen at the same time.  It's kind of an obvious thing for Who to do, now that Who's actually done it.  Hindsight's great, isn't it?

The idea of the Silurians firing off arks to settle new worlds is a nice one, although it may not retcon as easily as one might hope with the backstory to DW and the Silurians.  And just how long has Solomon been waiting on the ship if it started to return to Earth when he boarded, and is already nearly there?  (A possible answer: were these the Hungry Earth/Cold Blood Silurians a thousand years later?  A possibility which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that they were not only forced to bugger off for a millennium to spare humanity's blushes, but were pushed off the planet altogether when they re-emerged.  Hmm.)  Some very nice use of models alongside CGI effects - I was particularly surprised and delighted to learn that the comedy robots and the front part of the stegosaurus were physical props.  Speaking of, the comedy robots were a lot of fun.

And so to the vexed question of the Doctor's morality, which is raised once again, dear oh dear.  Solomon is such an outright black-hatted bastard that it's hard not to feel that he deserves it, but there's no doubt that the Doctor is responsible for his death.  He could have pulled Solomon out of there, sent his empty ship off with the missile beacon on it, and dragged him off to trial if he'd wanted to - what we get instead is vigilante justice, a summary execution.  It's awkward.  Still, there's some distance between this and such horrors as the Doctor subliminally programming the human race to commit genocide, the vivisectionist fist-bump, and anything involving Melody Bloody Pond.  It's actually a pretty close match for the resolution to The Dominators, in which Patrick Troughton's Doctor similarly causes some simplistic villains to be blown up.  The show is merely veering a bit too close to James Bond territory, which is uncomfortable but not exactly unfamiliar for DW.

Whether this is something that will be developed and/or addressed head-on this season, or fumbled as in previous seasons, remains to be seen.  I understand the very next story plays even more with the Doctor's morality, which suggests some kind of broader plan.

And hey, it's the only really iffy thing I can spot in this episode.  In gender politics news, Riddell is a bit of a grotesque, but that suits his Quatermainish adventurer persona, and he seems to be put in his place by Nefertiti.  As noted in the previous post, the presence of a strong, capable female character in Nefertiti not only plays well here but also offers an amusing counterpoint to the portrayal elsewhere of Amy Pond.  Of course Amy admires her.

In the final analysis this is a very simple adventure yarn, but embellished with enough interesting characters and quirky moments that it doesn't feel stretched out at 45 minutes.  It feels more like an Old Who four-parter with Part One intact (ooh, look at the dinosaurs - but what are they doing on that spaceship?) and the rest edited down to the bare essentials.  On the whole I'd rate this episode as another 8.5 7.5 out of 10 - it's not punch-the-air stuff (with the possible exception of the Rory's dad packed lunch scene), but it's good, and if the 2012 season can maintain this standard I'll be a happy bunny.

It's a madhouse!

And so to the reviews of the two episodes that we've seen of the newest Who.  The first thing to note about this first pair of episodes is that they're a big improvement on last year.  By cracky, when I look back at the wasteland of last year... well, all right, the second half wasn't that bad once it got past the bloody wretched arc stuff.  But starting the new season off without the wretched arc stuff is a welcome move - I know River Song's back in ep5, but hey, it could even be for the last time.  There's a hint of freshness in the air.  There's a definite spring in the step of these episodes that was lacking in last year's doomy parade.  This is perhaps ironic, given the (small quantity of) doomy foreshadowing of the Ponds' departure, but then their exit is a necessary part of the show's fresh start.  It's a positive thing on, ooh, so many levels.

Asylum of the Daleks is a strong opener, from its set-piece opening effect down.  Steven Moffat does some interesting new things with the Daleks and - take note, foul Evolution of the Daleks - has the decency to make them stick.  The nanobot/drone/reanimated corpse business is a keen updating of the idea of the Robomen from The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the clone troopers from Resurrection, and could comfortably be reused in future Dalek stories.  If we're really lucky we may even see more surreal shots of people superimposed over the Daleks they've become (what would those have been, leftover human converts from Revelation?) - it's just a shame little ballerina Dalek won't be making any repeat appearances since the Doctor blew her up.  Tsk, tsk.

The basic plot makes the required amount of sense once we factor in the revelations about Oswin - presumably dumped back on the planet once the Daleks' initial efforts with her failed, and it's specifically her hacking into the Dalek Internet that presents enough of a threat for the Daleks to want to blow up the whole planet, rather than just her ship crashing through the one-way barrier.  The only big flaw I can see with the story is that the Daleks apparently have the means to infiltrate contemporary Earth with undetectable human-like agents, and they haven't attempted to invade.  Perhaps now that they've forgotten about the Doctor they'll have a go - it could even justify a Dalek season finale next spring.

There's also a secondary plot here involving Amy and Rory's relationship, a subject I had hoped had taken its final beating last year.  Here we learn that Amy can't have the children she believes Rory wants, and has decided that it's better to divorce him without explanation than to discuss it with him and, y'know, maybe settle on such alternatives as adoption, some form of surrogacy, just not having kids, or getting a cat.  The message I'm taking from this is that Amy defines her self-worth in terms of her ability to bear children, which is just tragically Victorian-values-normative.  This aspect of the episode takes on added piquancy when we get to the following episode's gender politics banter between Riddell and Nefertiti, and the clearly villainous Solomon treating women as his property, all of which looks temptingly like an in-series critique of Moffat's handling of female characters.

Early signs of what could become season themes: the Doctor saying "That's new!"; casual mentions of having performed in classical music recordings; lightbulbs.  Chances are these won't prove to be any more significant than the eyeballs and televisions of previous years.  There's also the fallout from the Doctor's faked death, which is a) beefed up into full-blown erasure from Dalekipedia, then b) strangely translated into Solomon not being able to find any information at all on the Doctor in the next episode.

All in all, 8.5 out of 10.  It has flaws, but it's a better season opener than the last couple.  Some trite stuff with Amy and Rory, but enough pleasing weird stuff to distract from it, and some very welcome good humour in the mix.  Top moment: the Dalek, thwarted in its pursuit of Rory, that whines "Exterminaaate!" in a tone that clearly says "Come baaack!"