Let’s get stared.
As I sat down to write this review, I realised that it was the first time that I’ve ever reviewed anything by Steven Moffat. That’s not a major revelation, but it occurs to me that my previous words on Doctor Who were very heavily aimed at Russell T Davies and as such I feel something of an obligation to ball any short-comings I might find in this episode into a wad of anger and hurl them at the writer at some sense of fair play. But then I remembered that T Davies suffered from a disease called I-love-David-Tennant-slightly-to-much-to-be-writing-a-part-for-him…ism, the symptoms of which include writing auxiliary characters who seem to be there purely as a projection of a writers love. In fact I re-watched a Tennant episode from series 3 and got the impression that the 9 PM watershed was the only thing stopping his then companion Martha, from dropping down and giving the tenth Doctor a blow-job.
While Moffat clearly has a lot of affection for the character he’s created (the eleventh Doctor) he maintains an unambiguous trait of treating him as fallible and mortal alien, rather than the unquestionable god that existed throughout the Davies era.
This has never been clearer than in this episode, with the Doctor being executed by some mysterious alien in a space suit, within minutes of the title sequence ending.
This leads to my first positive point about the episode, what a great shock. Killing off your title character so early on and then making sure there was no way of it being a trick by giving his body a Viking send-off. One word describes that and that word is “Davies-eat-my-balls-you-hack” – okay, sorry about the Davies bashing, but seriously, give the final ‘End of Time” episode a watch, then try to forgive him and you’ll be in my position.
This nice little shock at the beginning does, however have its downside; given the seemingly inescapable element now added to the Doctor’s death, even when the younger version of the Doctor showed up to kick off the body of the story, I found myself not really caring. This is clearly something that is going to be drawn over the whole series, but now I know how the series is going to end. And if it doesn’t end that way I’ll feel cheated, given that, in whatever shape or form, Moffat would have to use the standard retcon writing technique to erase the Doctor’s death. Knowing how the whole series is going to end, kinda makes me want to skip to the end – like everything in the middle is a bit irrelevant. I hope to be proved wrong on this point, but I really don’t see how Moffat could get out of this hole.
Right, so, if we gloss over some story stuff (watch the episode if you wanna see that) we get to my second point for the review. The villains for this episode and presumably for the series. The big-headed guys (I think they’re the Silence). In his typical habit, Moffat has come up a really good one-episode villain (when I say one-episode, I’m including double episodes in that). Basically they’re a really good idea, but there’s limited mileage in them (for instance, you wouldn’t have the Empty Child from the Eccleston series come back as a recurring villain). By the end of this one episode, I was already beginning to get tired of the big-headed guys and their automatic amnesia power, which was just serving to annoy me, rather than up the tension.
Speaking of things that annoy me, lets talk about Amy Pond. She seems to be fine as long as you don’t introduce any kind of non-sassy, non-flirtatious thought process. This is most evident in the scene directly after the older Doctor’s death, in which the principle cast run into the younger version of the Doctor and Amy doesn’t understand how he can be alive. This caused the reaction in me of thinking (but being careful not to voice) the word “hey fuck-tard, he’s a time traveller, don’t you even remember that whole series 5 finale which was like all him time travelling around the place and that one bit when you witnessed him have a conversation with his ten-minute-older self.”
This aside, the episode was pretty solid, with good performance from the whole cast, albeit a slightly iffy Richard Nixon from Stuart Milligan. It’s well directed with an especially nice bit of camera work at the older Doctor’s death scene (a nice little shake of the frame, when the Doctor’s allies rush to assist him).
Overall it’s not as good as the series 5 opener, which might indicate the Moffat might not be able to beat himself, but that’s never been something a writer should worry about.
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