encyclops

It’s a little surprising that after just two stories, 1964′s Doctor Who had already turned inward for the two-parter “The Edge of Destruction”/”The Brink of Disaster”. But after going to prehistoric Earth and then the planet of the Daleks in Earth’s far future, maybe it seemed like a logical next step to explore the ship taking them there. It makes even more sense when you consider what a delicate point audiences were at with the characters: after eleven episodes, we knew them well enough to care what happened to them, but not well enough to know quite what they might be capable of if pushed to extremes. The paranoia this episode traffics in really had to happen at this point to be truly convincing.

When you know the ending, it’s hard for this episode to hold your attention by plot alone, but it’s still worth watching for the atmosphere and the acting. Ian seems more stoned than anything else, but Susan and Barbara both freak out in convincing and unexpected ways. The tension between them feels a bit like some existentialist French play, especially the scene where Susan threatens Ian with the medical scissors, holding them like a dagger and then stabbing them repeatedly and viciously into her mattress.

The story is set entirely on the TARDIS, and though we don’t see much more of it, what we do see is austere and beautiful. The console room seems huge if you’re used to the later episodes of the classic series (but not the new series, where it’s the size of a house again), and the smooth surfaces and open spaces suggest classical architecture as much as futuristic technology. There’s also some cool modernist furniture like the curvy fold-out Murphy beds. Occasionally the visuals let the episode down, such as the bits with the clock faces where it’s hard to even make out what’s happening (though it could have been the video quality), but for the most part they support the feeling of the story much better than expensive CGI showing the ship disintegrating would have.

The puzzle itself works pretty well. They don’t overplay the question of whether something (“an intelligence”) has penetrated the ship, but the crew’s odd behavior (which never seemed quite adequately explained) does keep us guessing. When there’s a series of pictures playing on the scanner, intended as clues, and the Doctor talks about his TARDIS as being able to “think as a machine” with a “bank of computers,” it calls to mind “The Doctor’s Wife” and what that episode retroactively implies about how the TARDIS really does think. For being old and (by his own admission) growing senile, the Doctor here seems young and a little naive; it takes him a while to figure things out, he seems impulsive and foolish in his reading of events and other people, and he obviously doesn’t know his own ship that well yet. One of the fun contradictions of this show is that it starts with an old Doctor with an old spirit but an immature mind, and is now showing us a young Doctor with a young spirit and a mature mind.

The Doctor tells Barbara (though he might be trying to placate her) that her “instinct and intuition” beat his “logic” in figuring out the problem, though it’s worth noting that the problem itself is as purely scientific as this show gets. (Again, contrast the “bank of computers” with “Idris.”) Barbara does have the best and most ominous (if perplexing) line of the episode: “We had time taken away from us…and now it’s being given back because it’s running out.” Beats the pants off the Doctor’s over-the-top monologue about solar systems.

Next time: back to new Who with “Let’s Kill Hitler!”

Doctor Who Season 6.2 trailer

This looks fantastic. Boo to the Weeping Angels and Cybermen (enough already with both of them) but yay to the minotaur, the robots (presumably related to the ones chasing Mme. de Pompadour), and River in an eyepatch (surely it’s a disguise, but if not…!!). And double yay to James Corden in more homoerotic antics with the Doctor — fortunately I have no baggage about Corden’s offscreen personality to prevent me from enjoying him on this show. The first half of the season was a 4 out of 7 for me; I have high hopes for a better ratio this time around.

You can tell when you’re talking to a real Doctor Who nerd if he* rolls his eyes when you mention the second-ever Doctor Who adventure, The Daleks. It’s not the content, but the title: back in the Sixties, as with the modern two-parters, every episode had its own name. If this story had an overarching title, it would have been “The Mutants,” but for several obscure and largely uninteresting reasons (the easiest of which to explain is that by the time this story needed a name, there had already been a story in the Seventies called The Mutants) that title wasn’t an option. But only a REAL real nerd would attempt to argue that calling it The Daleks isn’t perfectly apt.

I roll my eyes at this one, but it’s because of the content. This thing is seven episodes long, which is around three hours, and it feels at least twice that.

Like the previous story, it starts off really well. The first episode, evocatively if simply called “The Dead Planet,” is wonderfully eerie and well-designed for the budget and the time it was made. The tattered petrified jungle is beautiful and strange, and the Dalek city is gorgeously minimal and weirdly angled. It’s all very expressionistic and evocative. Unlike the modern series, which is slathered with annoying incidental music like a Paula Deen recipe is slathered with butter, this has a perfect minimal soundtrack. The planet itself is dead silent, and when they arrive at the Dalek city, there’s just a faint electronic hum that becomes that familiar, awesome electronic heartbeat sound when Daleks are in the room. The first episode ends with Barbara screaming at a sucker arm, and up to this point it’s just fantastic.

Then you actually see the Daleks themselves. Clearly they were something really special at the time and people loved them, and if we’re honest that’s no more than 25% Terry Nation (who came up with the idea) and 75% Raymond Cusick (who came up with the design), or maybe 55% Raymond Cusick and 20% the team that created their voices. Their bizarre shape and mode of speaking are as iconic as Tom Baker’s scarf and the TARDIS, maybe more so. But as monsters, as villains, they’re maybe too iconic to take seriously these days, at least for me. It’s so hard to forget everything they’ve done since that time and put myself in the shoes of the people watching back then, when not only had there never been an episode featuring these eggbeater-armed salt shakers, but there’d never been any episode of Doctor Who featuring aliens of any kind and this whole “rise up and defeat your tyrants” plot was brand new to this show. How scary, or at least dangerous, must they have seemed back when no one knew what to expect from them, when the pace of their dialogue was so unexpected and terrifically menacing?

Still, this is the only story when the Doctor can encounter these things without being sure how ruthless they are, and it’s definitely a little harrowing to watch our crew being vulnerable, especially after Ian’s legs are temporarily paralyzed. This isn’t so bad for four episodes.

Unfortunately, they have to go out and meet the Eloi-esque Thals and spend simply ages trying to convince them to rise up against the Daleks in the face of some plot to irradiate the planet that I couldn’t sustain any interest in. There’s endless speechifying and arguing, not unlike the caveman politics of the previous story, but it’s riveting entertainment compared to two episodes (that seem like twenty) of skulking about in caves trying to sneak into the Dalek city. I remembered that part of the story losing me when I was a kid, but I thought I’d find it more interesting as an adult — that’s what happened for me with The Two Towers, after all. But no such luck.

Unfortunately I’ve always found Dalek stories boring sooner or later, even the ones that are among the best of the season they’re in (like Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks). No matter their quality as drama (variable and debatable), there’s something monotonous about them for me. This isn’t the worst, but it’s far from the best, and I was relieved to see the back of it.

My girlfriend didn’t officially watch this one with me, but I know she was peeking from the other room while playing video games on her computer, partly because she loves Daleks. As in finds them hilarious and adorable. In episode 7, when various Daleks start to melt down for various reasons, she was sadder for them than any of the ill-fated Thals. Meanwhile, when the Doctor lied about the fluid link in order to explore the Dalek city, she said, “What a douchebag!” She still has little time for this Doctor, and while I think he was perfect for the time, I’m inclined to feel the same way.

* You might be surprised how many Doctor Who fans were female even before 2005, but the pedantic ones still tend to be male.

In the space between the halves of season “6″ of Doctor Who, I’m planning to watch Doctor Who, the classic series. I’m not watching in order or anything crazy like that; my collection’s nowhere near that complete. But I’m starting with the first three stories, since my girlfriend gave them to me for Christmas, and since I haven’t seen them in something like 15 years, maybe more.

Inspired by the brilliant, irreverent Adventures With the Wife in Space, which has conclusively proven to me that reading non-fan reactions to this show is far more fun than reading fan reactions to it, I invited my girlfriend to watch An Unearthly Child with me. I told her what she needed to know: it aired the day after the Kennedy assassination, it’s the very first Doctor Who ever, and it might be a little hard to get through. She sweetly agreed to give it a shot over lasagna with sweet red wine and fruit for dessert.

If you haven’t seen any of these early stories, you really ought to check this one out. I love the first episode, where schoolteachers Ian and Barbara compare notes on their problem student Susan: she knows history as if she lived it, and science as if she invented it, but doesn’t know how many shillings are in a pound, and has no idea how to get along with her classmates (it probably doesn’t help that she gets hysterical at the drop of a hat). The obvious explanation would be that she’s “not from ’round here,” but because Ian and Barbara are reasonable, down-to-earth types they don’t have any far-fetched theories like “she’s a Communist spy” or “she’s an alien from a race of time-travellers.” They just figure maybe there’s a problem at home and decide to follow her and see what’s up with her. They discover she lives in a junkyard with her grandfather, who is pretty much of an asshole, and what’s more, they live together in a police box, which was a pretty normal sight in the 60s, just out on the street and not in the midst of piles of junk.

Of course, her grandfather is the Doctor. I let my girlfriend point out what an asshole he is, and then explained that back in the beginning, the Doctor was not required to be a young, attractive, impeccably appealing character with zero moral failings. Instead, Ian and Barbara were our identification characters, and the Doctor was almost an antihero, at least for a while — an unpredictable, infirm alien with an alien’s moral compass. It’s frequently pointed out that there’s a moment in this first story where the Doctor appears ready to murder an incapacitated caveman in cold blood just because he’s slowing them down. Try to imagine Eccleston, Tennant or Smith getting away with that. The only other Doctor who’d even contemplate this kind of thing would be Six (Colin Baker), and even he caught a lot of shit for the morally questionable stunts he pulled. Compared to Hartnell, he’s a pussycat.

Unfortunately, our identification characters are sometimes trying as well. Ian’s a rock, of course, after he gets past his “bigger on the inside” disorientation, but Barbara isn’t taking well to being kidnapped by the Doctor (that’s right — they don’t sit on their suitcases all night waiting to become part of the TARDIS crew; can you imagine?) and she does a lot of tripping and wailing and freaking out, giving Susan a run for her money as the most hysterical female in sight. It’s not like they’re even dealing with crazy rubber monsters in this one, just cavemen with some really tiresome political struggles over who can make fire and thus lead the tribe and get the only eligible bachelorette in evidence. But there’s quite a lot of blood and violence, and being introduced to one’s ancestors has to be a bit of a shock.

As you’re gathering, the last three episodes here are a bit of a drag, but they’re not the worst Hartnell has to offer, and if you’re going to introduce a series about time travel and about using brains and compassion to solve problems, you could do worse than caveman days. Every viewer understands the circumstances as soon as they see slightly unkempt actors with worse-than-usual teeth in animal skins with clubs, so you can put the focus on how our main characters react to adversity, and how they behave when forced to work together to escape. It’s not quite a changing-history thing; we know that the main caveman’s father knew how to make fire but neglected to teach his son (maybe he got mauled by a sabertooth before he had the chance), so they’ve discovered it before, and though Ian makes fire later on, he doesn’t teach anyone. The biggest change in history, then, is that this small tribe has a fire that they might not have had (so maybe they survive when they wouldn’t have), and that there’s a book of matches somewhere on prehistoric Earth that the Doctor dropped when he was captured.

What did my girlfriend think? Well, she tolerated it. We enjoyed heckling it, and here are my favorite things she said.

On the Doctor’s appearance:

“He’s like Colonel Sanders!”

On quieting a hysterical woman:

“Shut the fuck up, Barbara!”

When the lead caveman, Za, is mauled by a sabertooth:

“He is now…pieces of ‘za.”

On the title sequence:

“Doctor OHO!”

When the Doctor incites a stoning (yes, really):

“Doctor Murder!”

And my very favorite, as our title character appears for the first time:

“He looks like a fuckin’ old man sailor. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum in time and space!”

I love that girl.

Note: This episode reveals the identity of River Song and deals heavily with Amy’s apparent pregnancy. If you haven’t seen it or been spoiled about these things already, you might not want to read this yet.

I’m feeling overwhelmed about how to approach this one, so I’m going to try breaking it up into 5-minute segments.

0:00 – 5:00
Loved the reveal of Rory, and Amy’s ambiguous speech leading up to it. As he points out later, it makes no sense for him to be dressed as he is, but it’s still pretty sweet. I like that the Cybermen only have a cameo here; I’m not fond of their new-series incarnation and had feared they’d play a larger role.

5:01 – 10:00
Not really sure what to make of the “Thin Fat Gay Married Anglican Marines” joke, or whether it even is a joke. There’s some clumsy exposition here about the Headless Monks, who are by far my least favorite thing about this episode: they’re stupid on just about every level and almost entirely pointless. I’m assuming we’ll probably see them again, and their induction ritual will seem like less of a red herring, but I hope not. Also, Lorna Bucket is totally adorable and sexy. I love a woman in uniform.

And then we get the Silurian cameo, and even though I feel like she makes almost as little sense as the Monks, I love her anyway. Part of it is that, as we’ve discussed, I love Silurians, but there’s something about the idea of a bisexual Silurian samurai who has just eaten Jack the Ripper for dinner that slips right past all my filters. Also, Jenny is totally adorable and sexy. I love a woman who can handle a sword.

On my first viewing I was kinda cheesed off about the Sontaran, another monster I’ve always loved who’s been increasingly ill-used since its inception (which reminds me, I need to buy The Time Warrior). But on my second I liked the idea more, and found a lot to admire and enjoy in his character. The 4000s sequence alone is more exciting and suggestive of awesomeness than the entire Sontaran two-parter from the Tennant era. It kind of makes me wish Moffat were writing this sort of thing as part of a standalone episode, instead of just a moment of backstory inside an arc chapter.

10:01 – 15:00
So which two Doctors spent River’s birthday with her? Presumably they have to be future Doctors. Somehow I can picture Six being the past Doctor who’d be most game for a threesome with himself. Don’t ask me why.

I like the big blue guy. This show could use more characters like him.

15:01 – 20:00
You can see the bow tie on the Doctor’s shadow, but it REALLY doesn’t look like him at all. It looks like a twelve-year-old boy in a bow tie. Or a baby dyke. Wouldn’t that be a trip if River’s Doctor turned out to be a woman!

More Lorna. She’s so cute, I don’t even care how contrived her role in this story is.

Ew. Tied-off-balloon neck. Just gross. And then we have the “ta-da!” moment, which is moronic. I guess if your point is just “this Doctor is prone to ill-considered grandstanding,” it fits…

20:01 – 25:00
…and I guess it’s part of some plan to create paranoia between the Marines and the Monks, but it really seems like they could have sorted this out pretty quickly. Everyone knows what’s under the hood now; they just have to throw them back and it’s clear the Doctor isn’t among them. Also, we see a couple of Marines die in this sequence (unless they’re just stunned, but Colonel Runaway seems awfully upset over just a stun), so I wouldn’t say they win with no blood spilled.

Oh god, the WWII space fighters. And yep, Captain Avery is back. Mercifully it’s just a shout-out in both cases.

25:01 – 30:00
“Angry” is new? Since when?

“Speaking baby” is cute. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Matt Smith can sell just about everything, really. I wonder why he’s smelling the baby and Amy?

30:01 – 35:00
Thanks to Lungbarrow, one of the last of the New Adventures books, there’s a semi-canonical idea floating around that Time Lords aren’t born but “loomed,” and that their home life is kind of a weak ripoff of Gormenghast. I like the implication here that, loomed or not, Time Lords do still start out as babies (then again, I guess we had this confirmed by one of the Master flashbacks as well).

We get more backstory about Time Lords here, and it’s a little interesting that the Doctor explained so much about his people to the Silurian. I think I’m okay with the idea that exposure to the Time Vortex influenced Time Lord evolution over billions of years (which is a long time even in evolutionary terms, though). I’m not sure about the idea that just gestating in the TARDIS over nine months can produce the same effect, though, even if your midwife is a clever eyepatch lady. But whatever.

35:01 – 40:00
More Monks. Yawn. And they kill off Blue Guy, who asks for it in a display of stupidity that is entirely at odds with his apparent profession as a crafty fence / arms dealer. Maybe he thought he was just buying everyone else time.

Would you believe that it wasn’t until the Sontaran was dying that I realized that Rory being a nurse is a joke about him being second fiddle to the Doctor? The Doctor and the Nurse. Sheesh.

It’s probably a good idea for the Doctor to set the sonic for “dissolve Flesh clones” every time he meets someone new from now on.

40:01 – 45:00
Poor Lorna. Gosh, she’s cute.

I’d heard that this would be the “take the Doctor down a peg” episode, and it’s about time. I don’t like the idea that everyone in the universe is scared of the Doctor. Considering the next episode is called “Let’s Kill Hitler,” it’s not entirely clear that he’s come down any pegs at all, though.

45:01 – 48:00
I don’t see why River’s name should be on the crib at all. If it’s really the Doctor’s, it would be his, right? And if it’s hers, wouldn’t he already know?

In any case, my friend (also one of maybe two people who reads this) was right about who River turns out to be, or at least who she’s connected with. It’s weird, in a “Jacob falls in love with Bella’s baby” way (that’s right, I just implied that Doctor Who is cribbing from Twilight), but it’s fine, I’m down with it. I’m just relieved to have some of the mystery dealt with.

So: did we see the murder she’s been doing time for in “The Impossible Astronaut”? Or is this going to be a Doctor/Rory switcheroo again and she’ll have killed her own father instead, in some episode we haven’t seen yet? I’m going to have to go back and watch “The Impossible Astronaut” again to see how she reacts to seeing what is presumably her own past. Heck, I’m gonna have to go back and watch the Angel two-parter from last season now to see how she reacts to Amy. Something tells me she kept a total poker face throughout all those episodes where she saw her mother and father.

Of course, now we know how they’re going to do Young River Song. She’s going to have regenerated, and they can cast whoever they want. Is she the Doctor’s companion next season? Do they already have someone in mind?

All in all, I really enjoyed this one, probably more than any of the other episodes so far this season. I can think of reasons I shouldn’t have — all the bombastic action and derring-do that feels so out of place on this show, the rushed “magic trick” elements of the Doctor’s plan which make the details mostly irrelevant, the way the whole thing is largely a contrivance to set up the final revelation and the supposed character development which I’m not sure we’ve seen (has he already fallen? is it still to come?) — but I did anyway. I wouldn’t even call the ending a cliffhanger; I’m looking forward to the second half of the season, but I’m not on pins and needles, and that’s just how I like it.

Once again I think I’ll be alone in preferring the action-packed second half of the “morality play” two-parter (i.e., this episode and “Cold Blood”) to the clumsy, uneventful, implausible setup of the first half (i.e., “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Hungry Earth”). I think it’s easier to make the case for this one, though: even if you get nothing out of the more genuinely moving moments, chiefly the bit where that one fellow’s ganger has to take over for him in the fathering department, you can still probably enjoy the terrific banter between the two Doctors and the competition between the two Cleves.

I hated Jen in the first half, so I had no regrets about seeing her turn monstrous in this half. I didn’t quite understand Amy’s lack of concern about Rory’s apparent affection (nursely concern, yeah right) for Jen, though the ultimate revelation about what was going on with Amy provided a half-explanation, I suppose. This was quite a long way to go to set up an impostor, though, so I assume the Flesh will continue to play a role beyond this in the arc story.

What else is there to say, really? Lots of urgent imminent explosions and deadly gases, some thoughtful cover-your-ass stuff with the wounded Jen (so yes, Amy can cut herself in that pirate episode), and most importantly a resolution that more or less makes sense given that these are not just evil duplicates of people but the people themselves, incarnated in false bodies. I guess if I’d thought more of the setup I might have been more disappointed by the outcome, but as it is I was just happy we got out with some measure of grace.

I try not to read other reviews or discussion of the episodes before I post mine, but I’ve broken that rule today and seen comments to the effect that Rory and Amy are really very stupid and unpleasant (to say the least) this time around. I’d agree. I really am not very fond of the two of them at all these days and it’s getting worse. I wouldn’t be shocked if this turned out to be their last season with the Doctor. I’ve also seen comments about how the Doctor’s action at the very end of this seems to undermine the morality tale, though I’ve also seen comments about how Amy’s ganger wasn’t the same as the others. Still, it raised a thought for me about this era. Was this bit, as the speculation goes, Moffat’s arc segment tacked onto the end of the regular episode? If so, what’s up with his conception of the Doctor as a guy who points guns (or gets excited when others do) and makes grandiose threats? See “The Eleventh Hour,” “Time of the Angels,” “The Pandorica Opens,” and “Day of the Moon,” and now this. I don’t like this trend.

Yes, it’s the “classic” two-parter, the counterpart to last season’s Silurian story. Here are the elements that feel “classic” to me and the classic stories where we’ve seen vaguely similar things before.

1. There’s a preexisting world here that the Doctor (apparently) stumbles into, as opposed to what feels like a pantomime arranged for his benefit. (See: almost every classic story except for the overrated, unnatural allegories of the latter McCoy era.)
2. We have not one but two types of deadly industrial sludge to contend with. (The Green Death.)
3. The “expendable” servant class becomes self-conscious and rebels. (The Sunmakers, The Robots of Death, sort of.)
4. Oh no! double Doctors! (The Android Invasion, Meglos.)
5. “Operatic” costumes, in this case acid suits. (Terminus.)
6. Miracle technology gone awry. (The Robots of Death (again), Inferno, Nightmare of Eden, but then also a zillion billion other science fiction stories.)

The idea of duplicates that consider themselves equal to the humans they’re duplicating also feels familiar somehow, but maybe I’m remembering Battlestar Galactica instead. The point is, all of these seemed like ingredients for the sort of old-school adventure I’d really enjoy.

Unfortunately, it’s weak enough that I almost wished for more pirates instead. After an opening scene I really liked, where the ganger falls into acid and no one seems especially put out about it apart from the need to reset the counter since the last accident in the workplace, it’s downhill, from that bit with Amy and Rory playing darts in the TARDIS while listening to that Muse song they used in Twilight onward. The dialogue utterly lacked the crispness of the Moffat and Gaiman episodes, for a start. And somehow the way this Doctor injects himself into situations just doesn’t ring true to me. Not that you get too far in a story if people always say “no unauthorized personnel” and throw you out, but surely there’s a happy medium.

The theme is promising enough. I get it: the technological proxies are allegories for the human proxies we send to do our dirty work and write off when they’re hurt or killed, but they’re people Just Like Us, in this case literally. Then there’s the added wrinkle of Which One’s the Real Me?, which I can’t help thinking somehow undermines the main point in some way but is still, in theory, interesting. It’s The Thing crossed with Frankenstein, which is a respectable enough pedigree.

But then there’s silly stuff like Jennifer-ganger’s head spiraling out of a hole in the lavatory door and moaning a scary phrase that seems at odds with the way her character acts before and after, and looking totally ridiculous besides. There’s her slightly uncomfortable quasi-romance with Rory. There’s thunderingly obvious “how do you tell them apart?” bits like the sneezing and the wedding ring. And of course there’s the cliffhanger, which we all saw coming a mile away and which doesn’t seem like much of a crisis. Yes, on the one hand, if the Doctor-ganger is loyal to the rest of the Flesh, he’s going to be the perfect adversary for the real Doctor. On the other hand, if he’s a perfect copy, he’s going to recognize the need for either peaceful coexistence or some humane euthanasia for the Flesh. So the ending is pretty much written.

A couple of questions:

1. How many times can the Doctor keep looking at the Schrödinger’s Pregnancy readout?
2. Didn’t the stupid “psychic paper” stop working a while back? Did he get a refill pack?

Man, I’m too bored even to critique this one properly (as if I ever do). Maybe I’ll have more energy to do it next week.

I don’t love everything Neil Gaiman’s done. Some of his post-Sandman stuff I’ve found just okay, or struck me as almost self-parodic (Coraline and Neverwhere), and some of it’s really rubbed me the wrong way or just been shockingly off-putting (Stardust and almost all of his short stories). I always enjoy him the most when, as in American Gods, Anansi Boys, and of course Sandman itself, he’s putting a voice to something that typically doesn’t speak. Usually it’s a god, or the personification of an idea. This time it’s a time ship.

It’s funny how self-effacing classic Doctor Who fans can be. We’re always worried about how everyone else is going to react to Our Show. Will the kids be too scared? Will the casual viewer be confused? This time I catch myself worrying about whether this episode will resonate with the newer fans the way I imagine it resonated with Nerds Like Us. I forget that the new fans have had five or six years (depending on how you count them) to fall in love with the renegade and his trusty blue box. Heck, I’ve only had about 26 myself, which is just over half the show’s age and includes the 16 years it existed only in books and reruns.

It’s not just about the Doctor finally having a heart-to-heart with his favorite thing in the universe. It’s about the fairly terrific idea that the TARDIS stole him rather than vice versa, the only slightly less terrific idea that her erratic steering wasn’t entirely accidental, and the kind of awesome idea that the TARDIS is somehow conscious of its entire lifetime simultaneously. It’s about the personification of these ideas. It should feel self-indulgent, but it just feels fun, and rather satisfying. There’s the twinge of a mystery made too plain, but science is all about solving mysteries, and if you don’t love that, why even watch a science fantasy show?

It’s a drag to be teased with all of those Time Lords, certainly. I can see why RTD killed them off, and even though there are some I miss (chiefly Romana, and I’m crossing my fingers she shows up again though I don’t see how it’ll work) I can understand why the choice makes dramatic sense. (The awfulness of “The End of Time” certainly drove this point home.) Maybe this made it all the more sad for me when they turned out to be unalive. And the tortures House put Amy and Rory through seemed a little pedestrian at first, though again, maybe this made them all the more plausible.

So honestly, I don’t have much to complain about, except maybe the Doctor’s early slapstick (that guy who sat up out of a pratfall, went all cross-eyed and yelped “I’ve got mail!” was never the same guy Pertwee played), which thankfully settled down as the episode wore on. Well, that and his propensity toward threats and vengefulness, which was treated as a serious product of pain in the RTD era and which is treated as action-hero bravado in this one.

Other than that, I gotta file this with the good ones, Gaiman. Yours and Who‘s.

P.S. Lawrence Miles has already deleted his comment on this episode, which is a shame because even though he didn’t like this story (or any of the Matt Smith stories, from what I can see), his reasons were hard to argue with. There’s little question in my mind that, judging from what I’ve read of his novels and his take on the show, he’d write some amazing scripts for this show if he were somehow able to get along with the people who produce it and willing to meet halfway with their (apparently accurate) vision of what sells.

But that’s not why I bring him up. I bring him up because as soon as the TARDIS was infused into a female shape, I instantly thought of Marie and Compassion. It must be maddening to watch a showrunner you dislike steering so close to (yet still so far from) some of your best ideas.

Or: Curse of the Third Episode. Okay, maybe two seasons isn’t enough to set up a curse, but this has a lot in common with “Victory of the Daleks.” Both are weaker stories following two strong season openers. Both are too rushed to build up any real suspense leading up to the twist. Both attempt to distract us from the thin story by tugging at our heartstrings. And both seem designed as launchpads: “Victory” for a new bootylicious race of Daleks, and “Curse” for Captain Whatsisface and his newly spacefaring crew. I’d be amazed if we didn’t see this ship again, most likely when someone needs to be saved from certain death. Hey, it wouldn’t be the worst deus ex machina this series has given us.

Full disclosure: I hate pirate stories. I don’t know why, and as far as I can remember I always have. Pirates of the Caribbean was just tolerable, thanks largely to Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush and a pretty well-constructed story, but it turns out the latter was the crucial element, and the sequels lacked it. To its credit, “Curse” doesn’t try to make pirates out to be glamorous yet cuddly anti-establishment rogues who just wanna be free, man. To its detriment, “Curse” is so bland that we can’t really be sure they’re pirates until we’re told.

The first half hour or so is almost entirely asinine. There are some excruciatingly bad jokes on the Doctor’s part, some ludicrous business with Amy and a sword that’s only marginally plausible given the premise, and a rather stupid move with the TARDIS that I still don’t understand, except that it filled the plot hole. The heartstring-tugging is nice and not too heavy-handed, but how could it be when no one has any discernible personality and the overall tone is reminiscent of a Scooby-Doo episode?

Hey, wait a minute…pirates, a hot redhead, a male lead with questionable taste in neckwear, their stoner-eyed comic relief companion, a dangerous medallion, and a glowing green ghost? This whole thing is a Scooby-Doo episode!

Anyway, I did like the twist when the glowing green ghost’s mask came off, though I must say I couldn’t help thinking of another television SF holographic character with a similarly lousy bedside manner. I was really beginning to think we wouldn’t get a decent explanation. Then again, it’s the same twist as in “The Lodger” (except that the victims don’t die in this one) and “The Beast Below” (except that here it’s the Doctor, not Amy, who figures out that the scary creature is actually benevolent). The Moffat era sees a lot of threats that turn out to be just misunderstood, which I actually think is a pretty progressive story structure (compared to the xenophobic/technophobic invasion story, for example), but how many times can you trot it out?

I suppose at least there’s this nice translation from despair on the high seas, a doomed and broken family, and superstitious horror to hope, unity, and scientific adventure. Fear of the water, the deep unknown, turns out actually to be fear of one’s own reflection, so that’s all symbolic and stuff. Unfortunately I just didn’t find it that entertaining, and even on the first viewing it didn’t hold my attention. The second wasn’t much better, and the pirate ship set looked just as fake, which is unfortunate because I think it’s probably real.

Next week: “I’ve got mail” and it says that joke was dated 12 years ago. Not a good sign.

(Big old spoilers ahead, sweetie.)

A partial list of the questions I still have after watching this episode twice:

1. Did Amy and Rory know just to fall down when they were shot? If so, why didn’t River get the same briefing? If not, what were they shot with and why didn’t any of the other agents notice the lack of blood?
2. If the little recorders were telepathic, why bother making their owners speak into them, as opposed to just thinking?
3. Was it Canton that captured the Doctor (under a Silent suggestion)? If so, when and how did the Doctor get him back in the good fight?
4. If videophones seem like exotic futuristic tech to the 1969 FBI, why don’t they bat an eyelash at dwarf star alloy prison bricks? Where did the bricks come from and why would the Silents want such a prison built?
5. Once Amy’s in the room with the Silents who are sleeping like bats, and she’s noticed enough of them to mark herself, why would she look away from them? And why not write something useful, like “THEY’RE ABOVE YOU, SO TRY NOT TO TRIP OVER ANYTHING”?
6. Was that orphanage guy trying to imitate Forrest Gump?
7. What actually happened in the room where Amy met the little girl? Was it a trap for Amy, or the girl, or just a lucky coincidence? What was up with that disappearing peephole hatch?
8. If that little girl was so important to the Silents, why did they let her get away? Maybe so she’ll be in a position to shoot the Doctor when he’s 200 years older?
9. Will the Silents find a way to implant a post-hypnotic suggestion during Nixon’s resignation speech (if not way earlier) — something like “just kidding, you shouldn’t kill us on sight, we didn’t really mean that”?
10. Is their Dark TARDIS actually a time machine, and if so, can they use it to undo the Doctor’s revolution, or is it something they’re hoping to activate, maybe with the little girl’s Rassilon Imprimatur (?!)?

Obviously some of these questions are things that didn’t seem to make much sense, and others are really interesting riddles that made the episode worth watching. Though to be honest, it was worth watching anyway. Here’s a partial list of the reasons why:

1. We’ve seen these characters die enough now that we think they’re really (if temporarily) dead at the beginning, so when they’re not dead at all, it’s actually a terrific fake-out. Not to mention the “perfect prison,” which ALSO sounds like a Pandorica retread until we see it’s a fake-out too.
2. River Song. Okay, she’s a female Indiana Jones, she’s implausibly great with a gun*, she very conveniently returns to prison whenever her guest spot is over, and her real name probably is Mary Sue, but like I said last week, I really enjoy her now, and frankly can’t wait until she shows up again. Her arc is really genuinely heartbreaking, at least for me.
3. The creepazoid orphanage. Nothing we haven’t seen in horror movies before (the writing on the walls, the unheimlich association of childhood with terror), but nicely atmospheric and well-used here.
4. The Dark TARDIS. Always a chilly pleasure.
5. Canton’s marriage woes. Called it last week, but it’s nice to be right.
6. The regenerating runaway! It kills me that we’re probably going to have to wait at least 3 more episodes before we get another piece of this puzzle.

A complete list of the things I liked about the trailer for next week’s episode:

1. It’s probably not a two-parter.

* And a way for the Doctor to condone violence while pretending not to, and he even acknowledges this in so many words, but then again this is the post-Time War Doctor, and he was starting to bend his own rules as early as his fifth incarnation anyway. But still: it seems a touch hypocritical.