(By the way, when I post my Who reviews on a Monday I'll do Music Monday on a Tuesday, just to spread things out a bit. This is how I roll, baby. Just call me an anarchist.)
This week, the Doctor and Amy (in nightdress and slippers) went to a future dystopian 'Earth' comprising of a bunch of towerblocks floating through space, looking for a new planet to call home. It's a police state, ruled by those creepy heads in glass boxes you get at carnivals that spin to reveal three faces: 'friendly but weird', 'scary and weird', 'demonic with teeth, coming soon to a nightmare with you. Oh and by the way, you're about to be eaten by a giant monster. Bye!' Stephen Moffat, as has been observed by many before me, has a real eye for the everyday stuff that, with the most minor of twists, can traumatise children for life.
I didn't enjoy this quite as much as last week's - junior Amy Pond was sorely missed (I really hope we get to see more of her, though timeline-wise I can see it might not quite work) - but partly, I suspect, it's because Doctor Who seems to have taken a more child-oriented direction, and that can only be good. So it was unhappy children who moved the Doctor's heart to disembark at that particular articulation of Earth, and unhappy children to provided the denouement of the whole tale. The world seemed to me to be highly evocative of children's nightmares: do your homework or you will be dropped into a fiery pit and eaten alive. I didn't find it all that scary, but I'm about to turn 34. I don't think that I should be the Who target audience. Having said that, I found the "protest or forget" polling booth unaccountably sinister, so maybe Moffat will prove just as good at tapping into dark corners of my subconscious too.
However, my particular pleasure in this episode was the development of the eleventh Doctor's character, and especially what I'd been hoping for ever since the announcement of Matt Smith's casting: that he would be an old head on a young body. His Doctor moves old, sounds old, dresses old, acts old. But he's full of bonkers enthusiasms and inexplicable behaviour. He's basically an ancient, eccentric, boffiny professor trapped in a young man's body. Which is exactly the way I want him to be. I was also pleased to see him lost patience with the human race, as it was all getting a bit lovey-dovey under RTD's stewardship, and was properly taken aback when he lost it with Amy and threatened to send her home.
Amy is proving herself smart and resourceful as well, and it was nice to have her save the day so early on in the series. I liked gun-toting Liz 10 as the guest star, and if the "star whale rescues crying children" ending was a bit sappy, so be it - seems appropriately reassuring for a younger audience. (My contrary head was full of questions like how come the whale's tentacles had teeth, and if Scotland really had gone on a "different ship" does that mean that they all died?)
All in all, another good effort, and I'm looking forward to see what Moffat does with the Daleks next week.
(Picture courtesy of Rob's review on The Medium is Not Enough, always an excellent purveyor of Who and other TV / film-related stuff.)
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6 comments:
Good point about Scotland. So many questions.
There were enough great ideas here to fill about ten episodes, and that was the problem for me. It ended up just not making sense. A society executes all dissenters, kidnaps children as slaves, and the happy ending is that it stops torturing a whale? So hm. I loved the initial Nightmare Enid Blyton look, but then we've got Ventian masks and monks and the "smilers" are a great image, but what actually were they? Oh phew they've been SHOT IN THE HEAD, well that stopped them walking. "They're half-human, half-smiler"- Again, what? And why does the whale have to eat humans? And so what's it going to live on now?
Maybe Stephen Moffat just needs someone else as script editor, I don't know how it works, but I'm afraid I'm going off Matt Smith as well. When he's doing nothing he suggests multitudes. As soon as he opens his mouth though he reminds me not so much of an old soul in a young body as of a talented young actor playing an absent-minded superhero in some TIE.
Then again I'm thirty-FIVE.
Cheers.
Agreed, good but not as fun as the first episode.
I like the oddness of this fish sticks & custard doctor too, and the fact that he's more truly alien (and not mooning about humanity).
That was quite a long hug at the end, eh? Hmmm.
My questions were, if the whole world was taking off on ships, why was England left behind? I understood the plot to be that each country left on their own (presumably also Scotland?) but that England had no ship, ergo the crying children and the miraculous whale. But why wouldn't England have had a ship? And why would the rest of the world take off with out them? And where did they (Earth) go?
But anyway... I guess those questions are neither here nor there. I liked Liz X too, but thought she might have realized that the whale didn't need to be coerced a little earlier.
Visually it was a great episode.
Nonsense! Steven Moffat is a Scot. He wouldn't kill off Scotland! (Has he a record of being a bit of a Scottish Nationalist?) I expect, being a Scot, he also imagines England being a bit of a stick-in-the-mud about getting the heck off Earth.
As for this episode, I sat there with the Resident Fan Boy and remarked: "Do you think they're all going to be this good?"
Surely not...
Scotland? At least they got a mention. What about Northern Ireland? Has there been reunification there or should the Brit ark have been a UK ark? And where's Rusty when you need a Welsh reference?
Thanks for the link, BTW!
The episode was a tad disappointing but that's hardly surprising given the excitement of last week's opener. And, no, it didn't make sense to me either, but then I'm, ahem, nearer the Doctor's age.
If the whale regurgitates children as easily as the Doctor spits out baked beans, why haven't they twigged that there's not a lot of point in the punishment? There are children of my acquaintance who would infinitely prefer being whooshed down a chute into a bath of slime to doing their homework. No contest.
Still, I'm very much looking forward to the Daleks next week. A Doctor without Daleks is like, erm, fish fingers without custard.
This was crying out to be a two, three or even four parter if all the ideas were to be explored.
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