Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor

This has been the first episode of this series that I’ve had to wait until after the broadcast on either BBC1 or BBC1 in HD to catch up with it. As a result, I couldn’t help but see Facebook and Twitter updates from friends. Fortunately, no spoilers beyond what I already knew. When most of my friends, if not all, had admitted to shedding a tear, I had imagined a mawkish scene to do with Vincent van Gogh’s suicide. Easy to resist, thought I, because it takes a very well written, directed and acted scene to get me choked up…

This episode of Doctor Who did something that has never been done before. Oh, we’ve had the jokes about the Doctor meeting luminaries like Leonardo da Vinci, and we had the delightfully daft romps with Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, H.G.Wells and Agatha Christie earlier, but this one did something different. It wasn’t just a wheeze about meeting famous historical figures from Earth, although it did have that element to it, but it humanised said historical figure. I think the London Metro review (7 June 2010) got it bang on when they said this episode managed to pull off something that could have gone so horribly wrong. They were talking about the scene towards the end when the Doctor and Amy bring Vincent to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, which is holding an exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s art.

It choked me up and had me grasping for my hankie.

Other lovely touches included the quick scene early on about accents and languages. Speaking of which, I adored the way Bill Nighy’s museum guide pronounced “van Gogh” as close to the proper Dutch way as an Englishman can get. Such a relief to not hear “van Go” or “van Goff”. Okay, the Doctor does, but that’s explained away. The ginger bit was fun, too, but I wonder if that will be misrepresented again.

I liked the monster. I was fascinated by some responses to the online version of the review in the UK's Telegraph newspaper who suggested that the monster could be read as an allegory to mental illness, specifically Vincent’s mental illness. Yet, equally, I think it can be taken at face value where the simple allusion is to the monster being an outcast through a physical handicap and thus lashing out – sort of a bit like Vincent in the village where he was living and working. And the reason why Vincent could see it and no one else could was from how Vincent interprets colours

But what also got me was how they handled the Rory situation. Subtle. Very subtle, and moving as a result.

In summary, I think this was one of those experimental Doctor Who episodes. So much could have gone wrong if, as I wrote above, it had the wrong director and/or the actors didn’t interpret the script the right way. In this case, I think they did. Not only did it pull off an incredibly difficult trick of making someone who could so easily have been pure caricature truly, achingly human, it showed the Doctor as someone with empathy. As someone who cares, truly, and might get hurt in the process. As someone who might have cracked through that barrier of being righteous to the point of not caring for the people in his life…

But for that, time will tell. Only a few more episodes left.