Doctor Who: Year 48 part 1

Rather than reviewing each episode as aired like I normally do, this time I’m doing it altogether in blocks. If you’ve not seen the episodes, and want to, then don’t read this. It will spoil the surprises, and probably spoil the enjoyment you might well have otherwise got from this series.

There’s also speculation. And, actually, that tells you something about how I’ve reacted to this half of the season. I want to speculate. I can’t help but to play around in what Steven Moffat and the team have created.

The Impossible Astronaut starts with the Doctor being killed by an astronaut in a lake in an American desert. Only there are two Doctors. Two different time streams. And River Song. Possibly two of her (but you won’t know that until the end of this block, and are we really sure that’s the case anyway?). Amy and Rory have been home in married bliss. They, along with River, get a note. Unsigned, but they all think it’s from the Doctor. The note tells them to be at a precise set of co-ordinates at a precise time - Utah, 2011. The Doctor’s also got a note. And so has an old man named Canton Everett Delaware III. Everything is set up to ensure the viewer thinks the Doctor is dead. He can’t regenerate. His body burned, Viking warrior style. (Oh, I think I might understand something - Rory suggested that. They’re killing the warrior Doctor…). But there is still the younger Doctor, blissfully ignorant of his older self’s fate (or so we understand), and thus the TARDIS (well, River’s better at guiding her) is able to take the younger Doctor, River, Amy and Rory to 1969 Washington DC. The Oval Office, in fact, in the White House of President Nixon, briefing the young Canton Everett Delaware III to investigate mysterious phone calls he’s been getting from a “little boy” (so Nixon thinks). And just who or what are those creatures Amy keeps spotting, but vanish from her memory? Oh, and she might be pregnant.

The series opener has a lot going on. Frenetic activity, some great jokes (the whole scene with the Doctor first meeting Nixon is brilliant), and the Silence are an astonishingly good idea for a monster.

Day of the Moon is the concluding part of The Impossible Astronaut. There are answers, of a sort, and more questions. I think they are questions deliberately left to be picked up later. Unusually for a Doctor Who story, it starts three months later. Defeating the Silence is going to take a lot of ingenuity - even the Doctor forgets about them when he looks away. Just not quite as much as the humans do. So the set up is complicated, even though the solution is perhaps fairly easy. Kill the Silence. Genocide at the launch of Apollo 11. Hmm.

There’s other stuff going on, too. Amy is both pregnant and not, not that she knows that. She is plagued by images of a woman with an eyepatch looking through what looks like a prison door hatch. The child calling Nixon is the little girl inside the spacesuit. She escapes and at the end of the episode seems to regenerate.

I watched The Curse of the Black Spot pretty much straight after watching Robot and Pyramids of Mars. I think that’s the reason I rather enjoyed it. After the twists and turns of the first two weeks, this one was pretty straightforward adventure with a few scares and laughs along the way. I thought the explanation for the Siren was pretty cool (certainly less daft than the reveal that Kettlewell is a fascist scientist after all) and missed the mystery disappearance of the Boatswain.

I’ve read a few Neil Gaiman books, and enjoyed them, but I can’t call myself a fan. I was curious about his script for Doctor Who, given his reputation, and was one who loved The Doctor’s Wife. Having had a chat with the only person I know who didn’t enjoy it, I realise that a large part of my enjoyment was because I’ve always thought of the TARDIS as a sentient being. Well, okay. Not always. But since the early 1990s when I was writing Doctor Who short stories for fanzines and novels for the Virgin New Adventures range. When writing a bit of “adult material” (Nyssa and Tegan getting it on) I included the suggestion of the TARDIS being a bit pervy… I had no idea where that came from, but this story showed that wasn’t just me. Loved it, and not least because of where my brain took me - if the TARDIS responds better to River Song as she caresses her… Do I need to continue? Nah, didn’t think so.

The Rebel Flesh begins with what looks like an industrial accident. Fascinating mix of concern and what looks like callousness. Then the explanation. Then lots of running around a spooky old castle in the rain with doppelgangers a-plenty. The Almost People is the direct sequel and, nicely, didn’t suddenly change mid-step. It had some good ideas in it, and generally was well-done. Except for the weird CGI monster. Er, why? I thought the humanness of the Gangers, including the Ganger-gone-mad (and went physically monster-y), was actually scarier. But, one (or two) dodgy effects does not ruin Doctor Who stories for me. Oh, and I suspect the slightly odd left-hanging feel of the Ganger plot might turn up again. I don’t know this, it’s speculation.

Then there was the final scenes to do with Amy. The obvious explanation, really, and I thought beautifully played by all concerned.

Having thought about how a Good Man Goes to War begins, I understand the Cyberman thing, but it still leaves me cold. As in, I don’t really care. Perhaps a reference to the genocide that occurs in the first story of the season - oh, but I quip back to myself, the Silence are so forgettable. Cybermen aren’t, but they are “invincible”. But, that scene is but a single quick moment of a lot of moments of what I felt and thought were pure, brilliant, roller coaster. And I loved them, and the way they were all put together. The Sontaran was best in terms of what I mean - it’s like the amazing sequence in the film Up! in that you get the sense of a whole life in a relatively short time. There are glimpses of important things, both humorous and sad, and actually important for later (ah, story-telling). A Sontaran warrior-nurse telling Rory, the nurse-warrior, a few key things about healers and warriors. Well, I think they’ll turn out to be key.

I also loved Lorna, and my take on that was that she’s the “real Christian” among an army of zealots for daring to question the orthodoxy, the received wisdom.

Madame Vastra and Jenny are screaming out for their own BBC2 series. Seriously. It’d be better than Sherlock, which I love, by the way, and Tipping the Velvet combined. With a cheeky bit of V (the original, natch) thrown in.

It’s a good thing DVDs don’t wear out :-)

One thing has lodged in my mind and won’t let go. Too many of my friends hate Amy. Less so this series, but the hatred is still there. It’s a strangely intense hatred, that when questioned about it the response I tend to get is a, “Well, it should be self-evident why we hate her. She’s hate-worthy. In the same way as everyone hates Fear Her.” Only one mate has made any attempt to explain what in the character he doesn’t like (with some interesting points). What niggles me is that all these mates of mine are gay guys. Lesbian friends and acquaintances have a whole other reaction to Amy, and it’s not just Karen Gillen’s looks. There’s a similar thing with River Song (who I adore, and loved from her first appearance).

River Song says she’s in prison because she killed “a good man”. I am presuming that means the Doctor as a good man who goes to war. Healer/warrior - killing the warrior to save the healer? The Doctor? To get back to uncomplicated adventures?

We’ll find out in the northern autumn.
.