Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 6, Episode 3 of Doctor Who, The Curse of the Black Spot. If you haven't seen that episode, I don't expect this will make all that much sense to you. You should watch it first, or at least read the Television Without Pity recap. You have been warned!
By request, I'm backtracking to talk a little bit about the third episode of the sixth season of New Who, The Curse of the Black Spot. So here's what I thought about it:
It was okay. Kind of bad, even.
Want more? Well, alright. If you insist.
The biggest problem with The Curse of the Black Spot comes from its positioning in the series. This episode was originally scheduled to be shown ninth in the series, not third. That explains the fairly redundant flashback where Amy and Rory are concerned about the Doctor's death. It shouldn't be there, because the scenes they cover happened only an episode or two ago. They do make sense, though, if we're talking about an episode on the other side of the summer break, where this episode was originally scheduled. So that's a problem.
(It also means that the Doctor's death and the bit with the cyborg-eyepatch lady aren't getting wrapped up at the halfway point. I wouldn't have expected them to be, that's season finale stuff, but this serves as confirmation.)
More damning, though, is the episode's weak performance compared to what came before it and, since I'm writing this a few days after The Doctor's Wife, the brilliant episode that follows it. The Impossible Astrounaut and Day of the Moon establish a new feel for the series. There are grander vistas, a cinematic style, action and adventure, dense plotting, mysteries that matter, and a sense that, as River warned at the end of The Big Bang, "that's when everything changes."
The Curse of the Black Spot didn't get the memo. It's this season's "new historical." Back in the early days of Doctor Who, they used to have "historical episodes" where the Doctor and his crew get inserted into actual historical events. Episodes like The Aztecs, The Gunfighters, The Massacre, and so on were all in there to make the show more educational as well as entertaining. Eventually they died out as the entertainment became much more important, and lucrative, than the education.
Every season since the show restarted in 2005, though, there's been one new historical where the Doctor and his friends end up back in time and interact with a famous historical figure. There was Charles Dickens in The Unquiet Dead, Madame Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace, Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code, Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp, and Vincent van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor. And now we have Henry Avery, the notorious real life pirate who actually did steal a Grand Mughal treasure ship and then disappear under mysterious circumstances.
And you know what? Done right, that's perfectly fine. Not every episode has to be a game changing event episode. Even Babylon 5 only had two or three 'Wham' episodes every season. You need the slower stuff to make the big news actually feel important. So I expect that we'll get a few standard monster-of-the-week episodes as we go along. It's a tried and true formula for Who, and it works.
But you may have noticed that there's a caveat in there. "Done right." So does the Curse deliver?
Not really. Oh, there were a few decent scenes in there. Amy looked cute dressed up as a pirate, though Karen Gillan looks cute dressed up in almost anything. Rory "dying" again has officially become a recurring gag. The Doctor had a few funny lines. That was about it for the good stuff, though.
(Speaking of Rory and the Grim Reaper, it really is getting kind of ridiculous. By moving Curse between Moon and Doctor's Wife, you get a situation where Rory dies or has been thought dead in three straight episodes, and has been dead or been thought dead no less than five times over two seasons. Play the Dead Rory Game and try to find them all!)
On the negative side of the ledger was the fact that there was very little mystery in the episode. I figured out that the Siren was some kind of healing program almost from the very beginning. It was a gimmick that they did much better in The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. The Doctor was acting like an idiot for much of the episode, and that last bit with the CPR was especially stupid. Quick! Your life is on the line! Who do you trust to do the CPR to save your life? Your wife, who needs to have the procedure explained to her by you, or THE DOCTOR, a guy who's been saving lives for hundreds of years?
If you picked your wife, you're an idiot and deserve to drown in an air filled room.
There was also a pretty obvious editing error. We get the scene where you have the two pirates with Amy, Rory, and the kid in the armory. The kid scratches one and the other takes off, gets hurt, and the Siren takes him. Fine. Except that one who got scratched isn't there the next time we cut to the armory? Where'd he go? Since we see him in the cabin of the space ship at the end, presumably the Siren takes him too, but that would have been nice to show. Or mention. At all.
Speaking of pirates, these guys are unrepentant murderers and thieves. And the Doctor just gave them a space ship. What do you think is going to happen next? Anyone else remember The Pirate Planet?
Oh, and that whole "one ship is pretty much like another" line is bullshit. The TARDIS has nothing in common with a sailing ship outside of the broadest "they are both vehicles" sense. That's like my saying that because I can drive a car I'm qualified to pilot the space shuttle. I call bullshit.
You know, the more I write about this episode, the less I like it. I think I'm going to bring this to a close while I still have any affection for it at all.
To summarize, then, there are episodes of Doctor Who, as with any other series, that are just there. They don't advance the greater plot, they don't have great writing or a great performance in them to make you want to re-watch it, and they aren't particularly memorable once you've finished watching it. The Curse of the Black Spot is one of those. You don't need to watch it, but there are worse ways to spend an hour.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Reflections on "The Doctor's Wife"
Warning: This commentary contains spoilers. If you haven't seen The Doctor's Wife yet, I strongly recommended you do so before reading this. Furthermore, since this commentary discusses the events assuming that you have watched the episode, there is little to be gained by reading it ahead of time. Go watch it. You won't regret it. If you haven't seen it and must persist, here's a recap from Television Without Pity. Read that first, and you'll have a basic idea of what's going on.
The Doctor's Wife, the fourth episode of season 6 of "New Who," aired yesterday. Surprisingly, it filled me with a certain melancholy. Part of that stemmed from the resolution of the story, but after thinking about it, I decided that wasn't really it at all. Instead, it was the fact that I miss the Time Lords.
You see, in The Doctor's Wife, the Doctor is tantalized by the idea that he might find other Time Lords somewhere on the carnivorous planet of House. He recieves a message from the Corsair, who, despite his piratical name, the Doctor refers to as "one of the good ones."
(We should also note here that the Doctor refers to the Corsair as being female a couple of times over his/her regenerations, opening up the possibility of a female Doctor at some point in the future.)
But the Corsair is dead, as is every other Time Lord who had the misfortune to visit House. All that remains are the shattered remnants of their TARDISes, bits of them put together to form Uncle and Auntie, and their last words recorded in distress signals. And when we discovered this truth, it affected me nearly as much as it did the Doctor.
It affected me because I'd been hoping right along with him that we could get some proper Time Lords back. I understand there is power in the story of being the last of something that was once great and powerful. Luke Skywalker, the Last Jedi Knight. Elric, the Last Emperor of Melnibone'. Heck, even Lone Wolf, the Last of the Kai Lords. So having the Doctor be the Last of the Time Lords fits into a storied tradition of those who struggle alone where once there were many.
I get that. And yet, I still want the Time Lords back. Because the Doctor's dynamic isn't the same without them. With the Time Lords in existence, the Doctor is a renegade force for good. He breaks the rules, damns propriety, and does what's right. Without the Time Lords there to provide the laws, the Doctor can't be the renegade who goes beyond those laws. He becomes, instead, the enforcer of the laws himself.
It's as Mister Finch said back in the second season episode School Reunion: "You act like such a radical, yet all you want to do is preserve the old order."
It's true. The Doctor isn't the radical trying to change the system any more. He is the system. And despite his best efforts, the system is breaking down. In the old days, you couldn't go back into your own timeline. The Blinovitch Limitation Effect meant that meeting yourself in a different part of your own timeline would be disastrous, save when there was something special going on like Time Lord intervention.
But those rules don't seem to be in effect anymore. The Doctor had Kazran meet himself in A Christmas Carol. He's sending invitations to himself in The Impossible Astronaut. He's messing around with time in a way that the show has never done before.
Despite the frustration and tragedy of the Doctor arriving to find a graveyard of murdered Time Lords and TARDISes, I don't think hope is lost for the Time Lords. In fact, I'm starting to think that the "game-changer" that this season is supposed to revolve around is the return of the Time Lords.
Far-fetched? Maybe, but stick with me here. First of all, you have to remember that this is literally a new universe we're dealing with. The old universe blew up at the end of The Pandorica Opens. Sure, the Doctor recreated it in The Big Bang, but who says the recreation was a perfect copy? We've already seen that things don't seem to work the way they used to. The time meddling in Carol and Astronaut. Universe jumping was supposed to be impossible after Journey's End, and yet we see the Doctor doing it in back-to-back episodes, once in The Curse of the Black Spot to the extra-dimensional ship, and again here in The Doctor's Wife. Heck, we had Amy literally wishing the Doctor back into existence at the end of Big Bang!
New universe means new rules.
So let's talk about them. The universe was re-written by combining the restoration powers of the Pandorica with the power of the TARDIS exploding. But, lest we forget, the Doctor was in the Pandorica at the time. Therefore, you have to assume he had some influence on how the universe was recreated. And if he did, what would be the one thing he'd want more than anything else?
You bet, he'd want to bring back the Time Lords.
Now, let's step back even further.
Why did the universe blow up? Because the TARDIS exploded.
Why did the TARDIS explode? Because someone else took control of her and made her blow up. Someone who whispered "silence will fall" before they did so.
Who can do that? Who would do that? And why?
My guess is that the answers to those questions are: The Time Lords, The Time Lords who are about to die anyway, and because they needed the universe destroyed and rewritten so that they can return.
Put in that context, the events of Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon make sense if you assume one thing: That the Silence are servants of the Time Lords, and that the only thing they desire is to manipulate things to bring about the return of their masters.
If that's the case, then you need two things. You need a way to breed more Time Lords, and you need a way to get them around time and space. So their kidnapping of Amy and messing around with her biology is a step towards the former, while the proto-TARDIS that we saw in both Astronaut/Moon and The Lodger the latter. In fact, that would explain why the proto-TARDIS in The Lodger kept frying everyone who tried to pilot it...it needs Time Lord DNA, which the normal humans in London couldn't provide.
So here's how I think it went: Amy was pregnant with Rory's child when the Silence grabbed her from the orphanage. They messed around with her unborn child by introducing Time Lord DNA to it. As Amy's already a time traveler, not to mention all the crack energy she absorbed while growing up with a time/space rift in her bedroom, she's able to survive carrying the child in a way a normal human woman couldn't, which is why it has to be Amy and why the Silence never succeeded before now.
(Possibly River could have survived it as well, being another time traveler, but they never got their hands on River. She even did the swan dive rather than be captured by Canton. Also, I have a suspicion about River that would make it impossible for it to be her.)
So that's why the TARDIS scanner is freaking out about her pregnancy. She is pregnant. Positive! But not with a human baby. Negative! Positive, negative, positive, negative, etc.
(You know, the Doctor really should have asked Idris what the hell was up with the pregnancy scan while he had the chance, but I suppose he was too preoccupied.)
Now, in some episode we haven't seen yet, Amy ends up in 1960 or so and either already has her baby with her or else gives birth there. The Silence take the baby and she grows up to be the girl in the spacesuit who regenerates at the end of Day of the Moon.
While the 'Amy gives birth in 1960' scenario seems easiest, the fact that we keep seeing eyepatch lady suggests to me that Amy actually gives birth in some future time, possibly the year 5000, when both River and Jack are from, and then loses the baby later in the 60's. I expect that while everything we've seen this season so far actually did happen, and likely more or less as we've seen it, we're viewing it through the lens of Amy's memory as she's giving birth in the future.
So who's she giving birth to? I've become more and more convinced that it's River. River, who went to jail because she killed "the best man (she) ever knew." River, who Octavian was sure to warn the Doctor about in Flesh and Stone, who he would know was dangerous to the Doctor...because she's the one who killed him.
So that would make River a half-human half-Time Lord, which explains how she's able to pilot the TARDIS so effortlessly. It also means that when she tells the Doctor in Forest of the Dead that he won't be able to regenerate after using himself to connect to the core, she knows what she's talking about. And since doing so means that she won't be able to regenerate either, it explains why River's death was final, save for the echo saved with Cal in the core.
So, to summarize my wild ass guesses, I think that the Silence have already altered Amy's pregnancy, that she'll give birth to baby River, who eventually ends up being young adult River who kills the Doctor. Hence the little "of course" when her shooting herself in the back has no effect, she already knew it wouldn't do anything, since she was there the first time. Space suit River is the one who meets the Doctor a little later on and starts to get to know him, even as he knows less and less about her until they cross again at her death in Forest of the Dead. So each is there at the other's death, and their relationship crosses itself over time.
Elegant, really.
Of course, the Doctor can't really stay dead, unless they're planning on ending the series with Matt Smith, so there's some loophole we haven't seen yet. Maybe it's as simple as a memory alteration. If Amy is in enemy hands right now with eyepatch lady, maybe the facts of the Doctor's death have been altered in her memory so that she only believes he's dead , allowing him to pull something when no one expects to be able to. Maybe it's something else. We'll see, though possibly only in the fall when episode 13 hits the air.
But between now and then we've got the mid-season game changing cliffhanger. And maybe by then we'll see if some of these guesses are right.
Bring back the Time Lords!
The Doctor's Wife, the fourth episode of season 6 of "New Who," aired yesterday. Surprisingly, it filled me with a certain melancholy. Part of that stemmed from the resolution of the story, but after thinking about it, I decided that wasn't really it at all. Instead, it was the fact that I miss the Time Lords.
You see, in The Doctor's Wife, the Doctor is tantalized by the idea that he might find other Time Lords somewhere on the carnivorous planet of House. He recieves a message from the Corsair, who, despite his piratical name, the Doctor refers to as "one of the good ones."
(We should also note here that the Doctor refers to the Corsair as being female a couple of times over his/her regenerations, opening up the possibility of a female Doctor at some point in the future.)
But the Corsair is dead, as is every other Time Lord who had the misfortune to visit House. All that remains are the shattered remnants of their TARDISes, bits of them put together to form Uncle and Auntie, and their last words recorded in distress signals. And when we discovered this truth, it affected me nearly as much as it did the Doctor.
It affected me because I'd been hoping right along with him that we could get some proper Time Lords back. I understand there is power in the story of being the last of something that was once great and powerful. Luke Skywalker, the Last Jedi Knight. Elric, the Last Emperor of Melnibone'. Heck, even Lone Wolf, the Last of the Kai Lords. So having the Doctor be the Last of the Time Lords fits into a storied tradition of those who struggle alone where once there were many.
I get that. And yet, I still want the Time Lords back. Because the Doctor's dynamic isn't the same without them. With the Time Lords in existence, the Doctor is a renegade force for good. He breaks the rules, damns propriety, and does what's right. Without the Time Lords there to provide the laws, the Doctor can't be the renegade who goes beyond those laws. He becomes, instead, the enforcer of the laws himself.
It's as Mister Finch said back in the second season episode School Reunion: "You act like such a radical, yet all you want to do is preserve the old order."
It's true. The Doctor isn't the radical trying to change the system any more. He is the system. And despite his best efforts, the system is breaking down. In the old days, you couldn't go back into your own timeline. The Blinovitch Limitation Effect meant that meeting yourself in a different part of your own timeline would be disastrous, save when there was something special going on like Time Lord intervention.
But those rules don't seem to be in effect anymore. The Doctor had Kazran meet himself in A Christmas Carol. He's sending invitations to himself in The Impossible Astronaut. He's messing around with time in a way that the show has never done before.
Despite the frustration and tragedy of the Doctor arriving to find a graveyard of murdered Time Lords and TARDISes, I don't think hope is lost for the Time Lords. In fact, I'm starting to think that the "game-changer" that this season is supposed to revolve around is the return of the Time Lords.
Far-fetched? Maybe, but stick with me here. First of all, you have to remember that this is literally a new universe we're dealing with. The old universe blew up at the end of The Pandorica Opens. Sure, the Doctor recreated it in The Big Bang, but who says the recreation was a perfect copy? We've already seen that things don't seem to work the way they used to. The time meddling in Carol and Astronaut. Universe jumping was supposed to be impossible after Journey's End, and yet we see the Doctor doing it in back-to-back episodes, once in The Curse of the Black Spot to the extra-dimensional ship, and again here in The Doctor's Wife. Heck, we had Amy literally wishing the Doctor back into existence at the end of Big Bang!
New universe means new rules.
So let's talk about them. The universe was re-written by combining the restoration powers of the Pandorica with the power of the TARDIS exploding. But, lest we forget, the Doctor was in the Pandorica at the time. Therefore, you have to assume he had some influence on how the universe was recreated. And if he did, what would be the one thing he'd want more than anything else?
You bet, he'd want to bring back the Time Lords.
Now, let's step back even further.
Why did the universe blow up? Because the TARDIS exploded.
Why did the TARDIS explode? Because someone else took control of her and made her blow up. Someone who whispered "silence will fall" before they did so.
Who can do that? Who would do that? And why?
My guess is that the answers to those questions are: The Time Lords, The Time Lords who are about to die anyway, and because they needed the universe destroyed and rewritten so that they can return.
Put in that context, the events of Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon make sense if you assume one thing: That the Silence are servants of the Time Lords, and that the only thing they desire is to manipulate things to bring about the return of their masters.
If that's the case, then you need two things. You need a way to breed more Time Lords, and you need a way to get them around time and space. So their kidnapping of Amy and messing around with her biology is a step towards the former, while the proto-TARDIS that we saw in both Astronaut/Moon and The Lodger the latter. In fact, that would explain why the proto-TARDIS in The Lodger kept frying everyone who tried to pilot it...it needs Time Lord DNA, which the normal humans in London couldn't provide.
So here's how I think it went: Amy was pregnant with Rory's child when the Silence grabbed her from the orphanage. They messed around with her unborn child by introducing Time Lord DNA to it. As Amy's already a time traveler, not to mention all the crack energy she absorbed while growing up with a time/space rift in her bedroom, she's able to survive carrying the child in a way a normal human woman couldn't, which is why it has to be Amy and why the Silence never succeeded before now.
(Possibly River could have survived it as well, being another time traveler, but they never got their hands on River. She even did the swan dive rather than be captured by Canton. Also, I have a suspicion about River that would make it impossible for it to be her.)
So that's why the TARDIS scanner is freaking out about her pregnancy. She is pregnant. Positive! But not with a human baby. Negative! Positive, negative, positive, negative, etc.
(You know, the Doctor really should have asked Idris what the hell was up with the pregnancy scan while he had the chance, but I suppose he was too preoccupied.)
Now, in some episode we haven't seen yet, Amy ends up in 1960 or so and either already has her baby with her or else gives birth there. The Silence take the baby and she grows up to be the girl in the spacesuit who regenerates at the end of Day of the Moon.
While the 'Amy gives birth in 1960' scenario seems easiest, the fact that we keep seeing eyepatch lady suggests to me that Amy actually gives birth in some future time, possibly the year 5000, when both River and Jack are from, and then loses the baby later in the 60's. I expect that while everything we've seen this season so far actually did happen, and likely more or less as we've seen it, we're viewing it through the lens of Amy's memory as she's giving birth in the future.
So who's she giving birth to? I've become more and more convinced that it's River. River, who went to jail because she killed "the best man (she) ever knew." River, who Octavian was sure to warn the Doctor about in Flesh and Stone, who he would know was dangerous to the Doctor...because she's the one who killed him.
So that would make River a half-human half-Time Lord, which explains how she's able to pilot the TARDIS so effortlessly. It also means that when she tells the Doctor in Forest of the Dead that he won't be able to regenerate after using himself to connect to the core, she knows what she's talking about. And since doing so means that she won't be able to regenerate either, it explains why River's death was final, save for the echo saved with Cal in the core.
So, to summarize my wild ass guesses, I think that the Silence have already altered Amy's pregnancy, that she'll give birth to baby River, who eventually ends up being young adult River who kills the Doctor. Hence the little "of course" when her shooting herself in the back has no effect, she already knew it wouldn't do anything, since she was there the first time. Space suit River is the one who meets the Doctor a little later on and starts to get to know him, even as he knows less and less about her until they cross again at her death in Forest of the Dead. So each is there at the other's death, and their relationship crosses itself over time.
Elegant, really.
Of course, the Doctor can't really stay dead, unless they're planning on ending the series with Matt Smith, so there's some loophole we haven't seen yet. Maybe it's as simple as a memory alteration. If Amy is in enemy hands right now with eyepatch lady, maybe the facts of the Doctor's death have been altered in her memory so that she only believes he's dead , allowing him to pull something when no one expects to be able to. Maybe it's something else. We'll see, though possibly only in the fall when episode 13 hits the air.
But between now and then we've got the mid-season game changing cliffhanger. And maybe by then we'll see if some of these guesses are right.
Bring back the Time Lords!
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