“Hello Sweetie”
River Song is back and much, much more than simply a reverse companion, now she is a very significant event in the Doctor’s future. Both episodes threw all manner of suppositions and questions on their relationship and River’s murky past but most of it seemed complication for complication’s sake. Very little of it drove any character or plot development forward and a lot of it relied on the tired trope of characters deliberately not finishing their sentences. Father Octavian was the worst for his “I can’t tell you what she did, also she killed a man.” I still like the River Song character, and I like her reverse development, but that is enough for me. The incessant need to over complicate good plot devices with forced intrigue and bad writing was a hallmark of this two parter, the second part of which is the first bad episode of this series. I look forward to more of River, but mostly because next time it looks like all will be revealed and we can just enjoy the character and her storyline without schoolboy mystery writing.
“It’s the 51st Century, the Church has moved on.”
Father Octavian and his Clerics was classic Doctor Who, normal, recognised terminology applied to something very alien, very odd, and it worked beautifully. They acted like an army but spoke and justified themselves as a church, not enough weirdness to sustain an episode but certainly enough to add intrigue to a story such as this. It also opens the possibility of them coming back in future episodes where their piety and motivations can be explored more, whether the Doctor will still be on their side when they’re not fighting something as malevolent as the weeping angels. Father Octavian at their head was a well realised military commander in the Doctor Who tradition, unflappable, and courageous but never grasping the situation as clearly as the Doctor.
“Don’t look in the eyes.”
The Angels were simple, they touch you and you jump back in time. Simple. You look at them and they cease to exist, turning into stone. Simple. One of the problems with this episode was the manner in which they gained powers and broke their old rules about once every 10 minutes over the 90 minute running time. They can turn people into Angels, can’t be contained in images, can use dead bodies to communicate, and can now move when in their stone form. Also they do not automatically turn to stone when seen, but when they believe they are being seen, and they seem to define being seen as being lit. Over the course of the second episode the director, Adam Smith, clearly ran out of ideas of how to generate tension with the angels and the set pieces became increasingly poor. The angels got usurped as the main threat in the second episode as everyone ran from the crack, making the threat of the angel army dissipate and waste much of the fantastic setup of the first episode. Surely the way to write a 90 minute two parter is to imagine it as a 90 minute Doctor Who film, and yet in this one the first 45 minutes was spent developing a threat that was then ignored for the second 45 minutes, it was one of the worst structured Doctor Who stories I can remember even if the content was still mostly good.
“It looks like the crack on my bedroom wall Doctor”
So the second part became, in effect, the first part of the end of season finale as the time rift opened and swallowed all before it, clerics, angels, plot, suspense, and character development. The idea of the Doctor battling to escape a crack in time that he could stave off if he sacrificed himself is good, that’s why Father’s Day was such a good episode, the idea of the Doctor battling an angel army is good, that’s why The Time of Angels was an excellent episode. To battle both was to ruin all tension, as the cast quickly became reduced to only those who could not die and the angels ignored the Doctor in fear of the crack. Indeed the angels running from the crack could have become a neat plot idea, if Stephen Moffat had used the Angel Bob much more over the course of part two. Ultimately, both literally in the story, and for the viewer, the threats negated themselves, distracting from each other and weakening the threat of the other. It was a story where too many ideas were used at once, River, Angels, Time cracks, clerics, spaceships, and, finally, laughably, Amy as The Most Important Person in Time. They each in turn struggled and died, starved of oxygen and eliminated from the plot to save time, an episode that needed the harshest of script editor’s rewrites was instead consigned to the first bad episode of this series.
“I need to fix you right now Amy.”
Never a truer word spoken by the Doctor but perhaps not as he meant it. In the last 5 minutes, Amy ceased being a companion, a character or a useful addition to the Tardis, instead she is now a sex crazed plot device, an arc to be resolved, another female character fawning over the Doctor’s approval. Five minutes has rarely done such damage to my enjoyment of a series, not only has Amy become over sexualised for the context of the show but so has Doctor Who for its time slot and audience. But even in a post watershed adult Sci Fi drama the dialogue and sexual hunger would be cringingly bad as Amy attempted to force herself on a bewildered Doctor. If the series can come back from this lowest of low points I will be intensely surprised as it did massive damage not just to Amy’s character but to Moffat’s reputation as the resolution to the RTD era. Now his series arc has eaten its principal characters, now his companion is little more than an avatar for the writer’s repressed sexual envy of time’s greatest adventurer, now his only idea is to throw more and more stuff at the screen in the hope that some of it works. New era Doctor Who has eight episodes to convince me that anything will change.
