After big epic finales for four years, and a big epic cliff-hanger for the previous episode, it was refreshing to see a different approach taken for this episode. The stakes are still almost comically huge: the entire universe has been destroyed, except for Earth, and the Doctor has to find a way to fix that, even though he’s been locked into an inescapable prison. But the resolution of that problem doesn’t hinge on a big, dramatic space opera. Instead, it’s four people running around inside of a museum, occasionally being chased by one, single, solitary Dalek.

It takes us a bit to get there. First we have the reintroduction of little Amelia Pond, sadly drawing stars that scare and confuse the grown-ups because they know that stars aren’t real. She still has a crack in her wall, but now she also has weirdoes dropping invitations to museums through her letter-box. And then she’s meeting a future version of herself. Moffat is back to using time travel as an actual mechanic for story resolution, and not just an excuse for this week’s alien or historical celebrity. Jumping the story back nearly two thousand years and having a future Doctor set Rory up to make his own escape possible is very nearly pushing the “too clever” button. But by keeping the events of the story largely linear, despite the jumps backwards and forwards in time, the story remains coherent. What gaps that do exist are presented in such a way that the audience is allowed to fill them in, with a minimum of exposition.

There are two things that I find most remarkable about this episode. The first is the way that it brings the entire season full circle. We opened with the Doctor promising to fix the crack in Amelia’s wall. It took him thirteen episodes, the destruction of the universe, and his probably exile to a void outside of time and space, but the Doctor does, in the end, fix the crack. And for good measure he gives Amy back her childhood. Now, instead of being a lonely, weird girl with no parents and an imaginary friend, she’s just a weird girl with an imaginary friend.

The second notable thing is that we have a finale without an antagonist. We’re used to seeing the Doctor with an enemy to fight against. The one and only Dalek in the museum fulfills that function to a certain degree, but he’s really more of an obstacle, much like the coalition of aliens last week. Tools, rather than a mastermind. The “enemy” for most of the story is the end of the universe. It’s a more abstract villain than the Master or Davros, but it fulfills the same function. Granted, we still have a huge dangling plot point with the whole “silence will fall” thing, but I rather like the idea of a plot strand carrying over to a new season. It’s more satisfying than those cliff-hanger finales that American genre shows seem so fond of.

The only factor that leaves me with a sour feeling, then, is the Amy/Rory relationship. Not their relationship itself. I love the idea of a married couple as the companions, and I think we’ve seen quite enough of the Doctor/Companion routine in the last five years, so a return to the Doctor/Companion/Companion bit is welcome. And I like Amy, her brashness and her self-assurance. And I love Rory and his hang-dog expression and his world-weary optimism. But, we’ve seen time and time again what Rory does to be “worthy” of Amy. He waits 2,000 years to keep her safe, and that’s a massively romantic gesture to throw into your sci-fi fantasy show. But, after all that, on her wedding day, Amy is right back to making comments about kissing the Doctor. We’ve seen why Rory deserves to be with Amy, but what the heck has Amy done to deserve being with Rory?

There’s a lot to unpack here, which is appropriate. The opening of this episode ranks up there with some of the biggest, most complicated sci-fi “moments” that have ever appeared in the series. And that’s only the first ten minutes, so really, that’s establishing quite a significantly epic tone for what we know is going to be a massive cliff-hanger. That it only really features the Doctor to deliver the punchline, making those big, sci-fi moments just a long wind-up, unsettling that tone immediately, is a brilliant touch and masterful manipulation of the audience and their expectations.

After that, the rest of the episode feels startlingly procedural, with the Doctor, River and Amy trying to decipher the twin mysteries of the prophecy of the TARDIS’ destruction and the determination of what precisely the Pandorica is and who is in it. The way in which this unfolds is quite well done, with little revelations of details being wrong or out of place occurring naturally. A stray Cyberman showing up…well, that just means that the Cybermen have something to do with the Pandorica, right? Rory is still alive and he’s a Roman now? Well, that requires a little more explanation than a hand-wave from the Doctor. Virtually every enemy the Doctor has ever made is on its way to Roman Britain and the Pandorica? Steven Moffat lets the growing realization of what all these seeming inconsistencies mean dawn on the audience before the characters realize them. From the beginning of this season, the Pandorica has been presented as an event of importance in the Doctor’s future, though it’s played second-fiddle to that damn crack for the most part. Of course it was a trap for the Doctor all along. What’s clever here is that the question is raised of how much was a trap? Was everything? Was Amy? The inversion of the Doctor from the hero, the man who sets things right, to the one who comes along and destroys everything and ultimately destroys the whole universe is more than just switching the perspective on his actions from the companions to the enemies. It’s been an idea drifting around in the subtext of the show for years. But what I especially like about how Moffat handles it is the way he uses it to mark the change into tone in the show. While Russell T. Davies used his “Time Lord victorious” moment to show how bad the Doctor can be when he lets his darker side out, as an angst moment, Moffat uses it as a moment of crisis, as one more thing for the Doctor to try to fix, the ultimate misunderstanding.

The episode also stands as one of the biggest cliffhangers to date, though the over-ramping of finale cliffhangers has been notable since the series revived. I mean, why settle for the Daleks about to invade a broadly sketched future Earth when you can have for Amy dead (at the hands of her fiance), River dead (at the hands of her…whatever the Doctor is to her…TARDIS), the Doctor imprisoned for all time and, just for good measure, every star in the universe going super-nova, essentially destroying everything everywhere?

Comedy has been a staple of Doctor Who in both the original and the current series, despite the occasional season of tedious self-importance or morbid horror. And even in those periods, some comic relief always managed to sneak its way into the episodes. The serial nature of the original series gave writers very few opportunities for episodes devoted entirely to comedic stories, but the more episodic nature of the revived series has allowed writers to explore the more humorous side of the franchise.

To be fair, the results have been fairly mixed. Fan reactions have tended towards the negative when episodes have seemingly drifted too far towards outright comedy, something I continue to find baffling given, as I said, that humor has almost always been part of the show’s make-up. For myself, I frequently find the pretenses towards science-fiction an unwanted intrusion into the comedy episodes, especially as they have mostly occurred late in the season, often as a sort of “last gasp” of fun and frivolity before the sturm-und-drang of the finale. Gareth Roberts’ adaptation of his Doctor Who Magazine strip is probably the most satisfying of the comedy episodes in the new series to date. Partly I think this is because it is almost entirely a comedy episode, with the fantasy elements restricted to a sub-plot that doesn’t come to the fore until the end. And even then, the story of the time-lost space-ship killing humans in an effort to find a new pilot (computer logic, or lack thereof, being the real culprit), is dealt with almost as quickly as it is introduced. The resolution even to this element hinges on the comedy-romance of guest stars James Corden and Daisy Haggard, further pushing the comedy elements to the front.

That leaves the bulk of the episode as a mix of Corden’s sweet romantic story, as an average guy unable to bring himself to declare his feelings for his seemingly platonic female friend, and the comedy of errors that results when we discover that she’s in the same situation-and the Doctor’s inept efforts to fit into 21st century society as an average person. Corden and Haggard’s story works because they’re both very believable in their roles and play them with the right amount of mannered style to communicate the joke. The Doctor’s story works very well because at this point we have already had ten episodes of Matt Smith playing an angst-free, more relaxed Doctor, one who is open to making jokes and far more oblivious to human mores and customs than his two immediate predecessors. It is probable that the episode wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as well with either Eccleston’s or Tennant’s Doctors. Both in terms of visual style and personality, those Doctors were very of their time and place, their alienness more implied. Smith’s Doctor feels more obviously out of place in contemporary society, and pairing him with an average guy and having him attempt to make a go of such basic situations as “working” and “playing a game” makes for jokes that work better than they would with other actors.

Emotional maturity isn’t an area that most science-fiction or fantasy television shows are comfortable dealing with. It’s not really within their remit; people tune in to see heroes make things go boom, not have the essential nature of humanity explored. Allusion, metaphor, that sort of thing is okay, usually because it’s so transparent that they are using metaphor to talk about The Issue without addressing The Issue, that the audience doesn’t become uncomfortable. And, when actual, realistic, emotionally mature story-telling is attempted, it’s usually so clumsily done that it just becomes embarrassing to watch.

Richard Curtis attempts some of that mature storytelling here in this episode and the results are mixed. Tony Curran does an excellent job portraying Vincent van Gogh as an emotionally mercurial and unstable man who feels with such a depth and intensity that it is clearly driving him mad, despite his obvious and unappreciated genius. When Curtis trusts the acting in the scenes Curran has with Matt Smith or Karen Gillan, it’s thrilling stuff. It’s the proper, adult version of Doctor Who that so many fans say that they want. This isn’t terribly surprising, as emotional fare that hinges on audience investment is the primary keystone of Curtis’ career as a writer in film and television. He’s in his oeuvre here with this material, and it shows.

And it’s a pretty compelling story. The Doctor and Amy bringing peace, however brief it may be, to a troubled man is the sort of quiet, under-rated type of heroism that a show like Doctor Who should traffic in. It’s an original story, too, within the television science-fiction and fantasy genres.

But in order to get to that, we have to sit through a rather silly story about an invisible monster that only a madman can see, an unfortunate use of the “crazy people are more in touch with a magical, otherworldly realm” trope. I’ve got no problem with silly stories in Doctor Who. If I did, I wouldn’t watch Doctor Who, after all. But like other stories we’ve seen this year, that story, and the story about Amy and the Doctor trying to help a man in torment, never quite mesh together well, giving us a whole that’s a little bit less than the sum of its parts.

Chris Chibnall is one of those writers in the Doctor Who stable that some fans just seem to love to hate. I’ll admit that his work tends to be more uneven than that of other writers, but I just don’t get the hate*. (Hell, even “Cyberwoman” has a few redeeming qualities.)

But as a whole, this two-parter really drives home the uneven nature of Chibnall’s scripts. After the pretty good set-up of the last episode, we’re treated to a thrilling story about people sitting around a table and talking. There’s a lot of running around, mostly between the same three underground locations, in place of real action or dramatic tension. In fact, the entire enterprise feels very reminiscent of a Pertwee era story. And that right there is the biggest problem. The episode slides over from paying homage to a Third Doctor style of story into more or less being one. Including the running around, the kill crazy military officer, and a nagging suspicion that the entire enterprise is at least a half-hour too long.

As I said before, a certain amount of rebooting was probably necessary to make use of the Silurians in a contemporary context. And while “The Silurians” is one of the best stories in the show’s history, it didn’t really need to be remade. All the big motifs and plot points are lifted from that original story. We even get a genocidal Silurian killing one of their own for wanting to live peacefully with the humans again.

That just leaves the big shock of the episode, the apparent death of Rory, as an original idea. Companion deaths are so rare in the series as to be noteworthy when they do occur, but the “shock” of this one is mitigated somewhat by the audience prep for it that took place in “Amy’s Choice.” In hind-sight, that was fairly blatant fore-shadowing, but to add “everyone forgets about Rory” on top of his apparent death feels almost like cruelty to the audience. It’s a standard “heroic sacrifice” death, yet another innocent who dies to save the Doctor from the minor inconvenience of regenerating.

We’ve already been given numerous hints this season that time can be changed, so it wouldn’t be too terribly surprising if Rory’s death is undone or modified in some way, making his fake-out death in “Amy’s Choice” even more foreshadowey in retrospect. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily a good thing. As I said, the death of a recurring character on the show is such a rare event, it feels like the dramatic impact of it, and the psyche-shattering effect it had on children, would be diminished. I mean, I’d feel pretty cheated if Adric suddenly turned up and revealed that no, actually there was a Vortex Manipulator on that space-ship and he didn’t get blown up after all.
Okay, that’s a bad example…

_{* It’s not like he’s Pip and Jane Baker, people…}

Ah, another mid-series two-parter, another chance to reinvent a classic series enemy.

That’s not entirely a fair statement, as representing old series enemies in a more contemporary context has been a fairly standard theme throughout each series. Even “Rose” used the Autons as bad guys for the first episode, rather than an original enemy. But it probably is fair to say that the success of these various reintroductions has been…mixed.

While “Rose” did bring back the Autons, it also failed to provide any real personality to them. In the past, the Nestene Conciousness behind the Autons always worked through a human collaborator. There was no sign of that here, leaving the question of how, precisely, mannequins with guns inside them were placed throughout London shopping centers. While they do provide the benefit of a recognizable enemy to bridge the old series and the new, they may just as well have been generic aliens.

“Dalek” did a much better job, making a sometimes inelegant piece of design seem scary. There was a real sense of menace and danger to one, single, solitary Dalek that made the idea of an entire army of them seem truly Earth-shattering. Too bad all of that momentum was wasted by several stories in which the Daleks came back for really-reals this time, only to be banished forever, again, by the end of the season. Three times.

The redesigned Cybermen from “The Rise of the Cybermen” seem to have been one of the more contentious redesigns, judging from online reactions. This is one of those situations where I find my own reaction to be heavily mixed. On the one hand, bringing back the original Cybermen raises the specter of all kinds of incredibly dodgy and dated bad science-fiction concepts, such as their planet of origin, Mondas, being a “twin” of Earth that orbits on the other side of the sun. Having them come from a parallel Earth retains much of the same intent, but makes them a little less dated. Aesthetically I’m rather fond of their new look, save the stylized “C” on their chests, and given that their looks were modified a number of times in the old series, I’m not too put out by the change. On the other hand, though, I think the efforts to make them inhuman and robotic have gone too far in the series. For the most part, the new Cybermen may as well be robots. The original Cybermen had flashes of anger and arrogance and pride that served as a reminder that these are creatures that were once human.
I also wish that they were still killed by contact with gold, but I’m willing to admit that I might be in the minority on that one.

They certainly did bring back the Macra in “Gridlock,” didn’t they?

The Sontarans were actually changed very little when they were brought back in “The Sontaran Stratagem.” They’re still a race of short, belligerent clones who look vaguely like potatoes and shout a lot. The only real change is that this time there’s a lot of them instead of one or two skulking around in the back-ground. Their design is updated, but still fundamentally the same.

And then we’ve got “The Hungry Earth” which brings back the Silurians, which we all know everyone is going to call them no matter how embarrassed the writers get over the name not being scientifically accurate. This has been another seemingly controversial update, and I will admit that part of the appeal of the classic Silurians is that they were utterly inhuman looking. The practical nature of this change is obvious, as now actors can actually, well, act if they’re playing a Silurian, but I will miss the third eye and head ridges. But establishing that this is yet another sub-species of the classic Silurian model does somewhat mollify the change. If purists really want to worry about it, the “real” Silurians are out there, somewhere. Probably somewhere under western England.

As for the episode itself, even more than most two part stories, much of this episode felt like set-up for the “real” story in part two. Even the ending is not so much a cliff-hanger as a “to be continued” moment. Which is odd, because otherwise most of the story felt very small scale. One little group of people being endangered by something unknown and inhuman. It’s a classic premise for the show, but the flip into “the great meeting of the cultures” doesn’t quite seem to mesh. And, yes, knowing what it is to come in the second part goes some way towards explaining that, but we’re still left with a story that feels less like a whole than two different concepts clumsily joined together.

The first batch of Doctor Who novels featuring the Eleventh Doctor and Amy came out not too long ago. I’m a fairly consistent reader of these books, mostly because the bulk of my free time to read these days is shortly before bedtime, and frankly I’m never in the mood for anything too heavy, or too compelling, at that time of night. (I did skip out on the last few batches of Tenth Doctor novels, because honestly, I really don’t care about more adventures with the Krillitane or the Slitheen, especially when almost all of them felt compelled to include a plucky teenage girl as the Doctor’s temporary side-kick. I should probably go pick up that Sontaran one, though, because I guess it has Rutans in it too, and that’s the kind of nerd I am. Anyway…)

In comparison to previous offerings in the line, the new set of books are slightly larger, though still in hardcover. This makes them more durable, especially considering that the primary audience for these books is children, but as an adult reader it does rather make me feel like I’m reading a Perma-Bound book. It’s not exactly infantilizing, since the Torchwood books were in the same size and hard-cover format, but I prefer the cover-stock that BBC Books used for their Being Human tie-in novels. Those are closer to something in between a standard trade size paperback and that elongated mass-market size. On the other hand, with the new season, it does slightly feel like the core audience for the franchise is aging up a bit, and being closer in size to “real” books does have a slight psychological effect, possibly, of making the books seem more grown-up. In any case, moving away from the smaller, mass-market format does make them stand out from the rest of the tie-in novels in a bookshop, and that’s probably not a bad thing.

There’s very little continuity between the three books, or between the books and the television program. Normally, this is perfectly fine, but there are moments in each book here that give off the impression that the books were originally written with a Generi-Doctor and Companion in mind, with sudden declarations of the Doctor’s or Amy’s appearance or mannerisms inserted afterwards. More probably, the authors were writing from a brief, without having seen Matt Smith or Karen Gillan in the roles, and a more natural characterization simply wasn’t possible.

The first book in the set is Apollo 23, by Justin Richards, which also has the distinction of having the best cover of the three books, by far.

The plot involves the Doctor and Amy investigating the appearance of an American astronaut in a London shopping center, conincident with the death of a woman and her dog on the moon. This leads them to discovering an American prison on the moon for “the worst of the worst,” with a strong yet unspoken implication that the prison is housing mostly political prisoners, with again unspoken comparisons to the American prison in Guantanamo Bay. The political subtext is probably subtle enough to escape kids, but it’s mostly forgotten in favor of an alien invasion plot that bears more than a passing resemblance to the plot of “The Idiot Box.” Though the Doctor and Amy end up separated from one another for much of the story, and the American setting is novel for the series, the solution to the problem sounds, from a non-technical stand-point, much like the Doctor endorsing homeopathy. An “I’ll explain later” can go a long way in situations like this.

Next up is David Llewellyn’s Night Of The Humans, which features the Doctor and Amy investigating a distress signal at a planet-sized garbage dump in space, only to get separated from one another. Amy ends up with the Sittuun, a race of humanoids who all adopt Arabic names for themselves, while the Doctor ends up with the humans, savage primitives who worship cowboy films. Again, the political subtexts are probably going to go right past any kids, and the casting of humans in the role of evil aliens is clever and a subversion of the shows usual tropes, the inclusion of Dirk Slipstream, as a criminal Captain Kirk/Flash Gordon/Buck Rodgers type of space hero is gilding the lily somewhat, especially with his occasional references to previous encounters with the Doctor. (His recognition of the just regenerated Doctor is one of those moments that would seem to suggest that the book was written with a previous Doctor in mind.) Night of the Humans is also noteworthy in that it’s one of the very few of the new series book tie-ins to feature a “pile of bodies” ending.

Finally, there’s The Forgotten Army by Brian Minchin, featuring the Doctor and Amy at some relatively contemporary version of New York City that is being menaced by a resurrected albino mammoth. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be a cover for an alien invasion, from tiny beings whose resemblance to troll dolls we are frequently reminded of. They’re a visually interesting idea, and a concept beyond the scope of a reasonable television budget, so they work well as villains here, though the separation of the Doctor and Amy is starting to feel a bit forced at this point, and while the invasion strategy, to make New Yorkers so afraid of nonspecific, invisible and potentially nonexistent threats is cleverly described, once again it feels like some political subtext has sunk in.

Overall, the three books are light, distracting reads. Fun for a fan of the franchise, but probably of little appeal to anyone else. Night of the Humans is probably the best of the three, and also the one that feels most like an episode of the television series. All three books suffer slightly from a similarity in plot, particularly the reliance on the Doctor and Amy being separated for much of each story. To be fair, it is a trope of the series itself, but as a plot device it feels extremely heavy-handed in this set of books. The next set of books, for my own taste, looks to be more promising, with another Gary Russell novel in the offering and the presence of Amy’s fiance Rory as a full cast member. Rory is great, and I’m looking forward to getting as much of him as possible. I even love the “talk to the hand” pose he has on this cover.

It’s good that the show is making use of him and…wait…what?

Really?

Well, fuck.

When, as a viewer, you’re told from the outset of the story that it is taking place in “dreams” you know that you’re in for something fairly consequence free. And that’s the primary problem with this story. Once the notion of anything we see not being “real” for the characters, we know that they’re safe. Nothing’s really at stake.

The attempt to get around this problem by suggesting that one of the “realities” presented to the characters is the really real one fails to be convincing, as an astute viewer will have noted that the antagonist is styling himself “the Dream Lord” and he’s able to manipulate both realities. That it takes the characters forty-five minutes to clue into the fact that this means that both realities are false suggests that episode writer Simon Nye doesn’t think much of Amy or Rory’s intelligence.

It’s safe to say that I didn’t think much of this episode. At least on the plot level, it’s a bit of a cheat, falling into the same traps that all dream menace stories tend to fall into. But apart from that, there are a few things here to like, or to at least find interesting. The ongoing efforts by the production team to scare the living hell out of British children with mundane things are well represented here, with a horde of evil grand-parents who disintegrate people with their breath. And the suggestion that the Dream Lord is a representation of the Doctor’s own dark side, particularly his self-loathing and anti-social personality traits is enough of a call-back to the idea of the Valeyard, the potential future evil version of the Doctor, that I’m going to go ahead and presume that this was the intent all along. It may not actually be fan service, it’s probably not, but at the very least it will keep people arguing on message boards and in blog comments, and the entertainment value of that alone is worthwhile to me.

The real crux of the story turns out to be development for Amy, then. Her relationship with Rory has frequently come across as one-sided, with Rory showing far more devotion to her than she has to him. Her treatment of Rory, her casual approach to their relationship, the way she appears to take him for granted, has been her most notable personality flaw. Establishing that Amy doesn’t consider life worth living without Rory goes some way towards fixing this problem. It makes Amy less flighty, and strengthens the interpretation of her last-minute departure with the Doctor in “The Eleventh Hour” as a sign of her fulfillment of her childhood dreams.

Whether or not devoting an entire episode to clarifying a characterization problem that only existed because of imprecise motivations in previous episodes was a good use of resources is another issue entirely.

Having Toby Whithouse, the creator of “sounds like the set-up to a really painfully bad nerd joke” series Being Human, about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a house, (which is actually really quite good, and I’m not just saying that because it features Russell Tovey in the nude from time to time) write an episode of Doctor Who that features the fourth distinct vampire-like creature in the show’s history, sounds at first like the sort of thing that might potentially be a little too on the nose to really work. Instead we got a very strong episode, and a surprisingly comedy-driven one at that, given the subject matter.

The lighter aspects of the episode are apparent from the beginning, with a pre-credits sequence in which the Doctor interrupts Rory’s bachelor party in a particularly memorable way, and catches the audience up on the cliff-hanger from the previous episode by choosing the exact wrong moment to tell Rory, and every other man in Leadworth apparently, that Amy has been kissing him. Matt Smith has been given a fair amount of comedy work in the series to date, but his delivery here nails a perfect mix of naivete about the faux pas he is committing and a very Doctorly smug satisfaction with having been kissed impressively by a pretty girl. What’s even better, though, is Arthur Darvill getting the chance to make Rory a real character, and not just a rehash of first season Mickey. The interplay between Rory and the Doctor is rather prickly at first, notably with the Doctor’s visible annoyance at discovering that Rory has actually sat down and taught himself about aliens and dimensionally transcendent vehicles, and Amy’s none too subtle comparisons in which the Doctor is clearly favored in her mind don’t help.

The story itself is, well…fish aliens disguising themselves as vampires is certainly a novel approach to inconspicuous infiltration of another world, but it’s not a plan that holds up to much scrutiny. Whithouse seems to have noticed this too, though, and the pretense is dispatched with fairly quickly in favor of a story about the Doctor’s attempts to infiltrate the alien base and undo their plan. The obligatory “tragic sacrifices” necessary to resolve the story end up feeling a little tacked on after that, though, almost as if a traditional Who “pile of bodies” ending was felt to be needed somewhere in the season.

But quibbling over plot feels like a good way to miss what seems to have been the point of this episode. The structure here is on reintroducing Rory and giving us a reason to care about him. From what we see of him here, he’s brave and clever, intimidated by the Doctor but also not afraid to speak his own mind. He’s also stupidly devoted to Amy, a devotion that she may not entirely deserve. The comparison some have made of Rory to Mickey isn’t fair to Rory; Mickey, at least in the first season, was a bit of a prick. He cheated on Rose and tended towards the selfish in his behavior. In a certain sense, then, Rory is the anti-Mickey. However, the Rose/Mickey dynamic, at least from the Rose side, is somewhat replicated in Amy’s attitude towards Rory. She takes him for granted and clearly favors the Doctor and otherwise gives a general air of having somehow “settled” for Rory or simply fallen into a relationship with him out of a lack of other options. It’s still an obnoxious character flaw for Amy.

The first big two-parter of the new season of Doctor Who comes to an end, and there are two notable things about it. It’s a slightly odd set of episodes, because the two-part format feels slightly off for it, like it would be better served as one extra-long story. But, at the same time, it’s one of the most continuity, season-story-plot dependent episodes we’ve had since the season opener.

While the first episode featured multiple and visually varied locations, the second consists mostly of the Doctor and company either running down corridors (even if one of those corridors is a forest on a space-ship, one of the best ideas served up in the show in terms of world-building in years) or standing around in control rooms. It’s like part four of a seven part Pertwee-era story. It’s almost as if Moffat, after spending all that time the previous week to introduce and establish new characters, reintroduce older characters, and give us a visually interesting setting for a story, decided that this week all he really needed to do to keep the audience engaged was, well…have Amy walk through a forest.

It’s dangerous to let expectations for episodes build up too much, and the two-parters are a good example of why. In the first part, the Weeping Angels have their abilities and nature expanded into something quite powerful and quite sinister. Here, when it is explicitly explained that the whole point that they are hiding within Amy’s eye is to scare her to death, because it is fun to do so, comes off not as evil so much as petulantly bullying. There’s nothing wrong with having a bully as a villain, but when the bully is a creature that can’t move when you look at it and kills you by sending you back in time and can steal your voice…it’s a bit banal.

The method used to defeat them is also a bit underwhelming. They all…fall down. Yes, on the one hand, it’s a clever use of the fact that space is not two-dimensional and “up” in a space-ship is relative. But on the other, the Doctor doesn’t have to outwit his enemies…he just has to wait for them to fall into a big glowing time-space energy crack thing. As far as left-field, deus ex machina endings go, it’s not “Tinkerbell Doctor” but it’s still awfully convenient.

And about that crack…this is the first time since the first episode that it has actually featured as a significant plot point. The use of “story-arcs” within seasons of the new series of the show has been controversial with some fans, not least because when every single program on the air has a season long story-arc, it becomes less of an original, unifying element and more of a tedious box that needs to be checked off to make sure that the audience is still paying attention. Apart from the conveniently eating the enemy of the week, the crack’s appearance and Amy’s realization of its significance is well used. That the Doctor is taken aback by it, and by Amy’s behavior at the end of the episode, is at odds, though, with the suggestion in the first episode that the Doctor is aware that something involving Amy and the cracks is afoot, when he turned off the TARDIS scanner before Amy could see it. I think we also witnessed a significant clue for the story-arc in the forest, with the easily missed clue when the Doctor returns to console Amy.

Speaking of Amy’s behavior, it’s a little hard to tell what precisely the final scene, when Amy makes sexual advances on the Doctor, is meant to mean, exactly. The simplest, and most likely, is that it’s the final clue the Doctor needs that something is manipulating Amy, and the date of her wedding is an element of that manipulation. To go further into that invites discussions of fan angst, fan rage and the dreaded “shippers.” I’m not of the subset of Doctor Who fans who think that the Doctor should never ever have any suggestion of a sexual identity. I’m on record as thinking that “Looms” were the single stupidest idea to ever crop up in connection to the series, after all, even worse than “half human.” Heck, it’s pretty much impossible to read the Doctor’s reaction to the departure of Jo Grant as anything other than that of a jilted not-quite-boyfriend. But since I’m also of the school of Doctor Who fans who think that the primary in-story reason why the Doctor keeps traveling with young girls is because they’re Susan substitutes, it was nice to get even a brief in-story suggestion that the Doctor is put off by the suggestion of having a physical relationship with a companion.