One of the things that became clear during the Russell T. Davies as showrunner era is that he had an over-reliance on deus ex machina resolutions to series-long arcs, frequently involving someone becoming glowy and more powerful. After two seasons, it appears that the defining trait of the finale’s for the Steven Moffat era is going to be be stories that run in place and never actually resolve anything.

It’s a little frustrating, because there is a lot to like about this episode. I’m a fan of the “throw lots of big, mad ideas at the viewer” approach that Moffat frequently takes on the show. A non-linear story cutting back and forth between a very big universe that contains carnivorous skulls, death by chess, and tiny people inside shape-shifting robots and a very small world in which all of time is happening all at once could be challenging, but Moffat keeps the tone consistent and light and fun. It’s a neat trick, because either thread could have made for a good episode, but blending them together drives what little plot the episode has forward and gives each idea just enough time to breathe without being overwhelming. But then we get to the final act of the episode and it’s time for everything to be explained and it all somewhat crashes down.

There was no way that the resolution to the “Doctor dies” storyline was going to please people. We all knew that the eventual revelation of how the Doctor lives, because we all know he’s going to live, was going to be a cheat. And sure enough, having the Doctor, the real Doctor be there, technically, so that the “fixed point” can be preserved but given a convenient out with a plot point from a previous episode blatantly reintroduced in this one…I can’t really complain, because it’s a fair enough resolution to the mystery, but it still somehow feels arbitrary. The real problem is that the big questions remain unanswered. Who are the Silence? Well, they’re aliens. But, no, really, they’re religious fanatics. But, no, they’re aliens who are also religious fanatics. Why do they hate the Doctor? Well, they don’t, they just don’t want him to do something in the future. So they mess with his past, repeatedly, drawing his attention to them, in what has got to the be worst thought out plan in the history of poorly thought out plans. “The Doctor is a great and terrible force that will utterly destroy those he deems evil. Let’s go out of our way to really fucking annoy him.” And rather than draw a line under all these points, Moffat instead chooses to roll them over into a new story-arc, one where the Doctor is unknown to the universe again and destined to face off with the Silence yet again. The sole bright spot with this plot line is, Cartmel Master Plan-style, a renewed emphasis on the character of the Doctor and his exact nature, instead of constantly trying to impress us with how special and precious the latest companion is.
We’ll see if Moffat manages to follow through with this in the next series…

James Corden’s return as Craig, the Doctor’s one time roommate, brings us a welcome change of pace from the angst stories, with writer Gareth Roberts once again giving us a story that’s not necessarily lighter in tone than we usually get (the show is pretty frothy at the best of times) but has the sheer audacity to be purposefully funny for no other reason than to be funny. Most of the jokes center on Craig as a young dad barely keeping it together and constantly in fear of making a horrible mistake with his infant son. But we also get an extended series of crowd-pleasing jokes exploring the Doctor’s ability to “speak baby.” These jokes work well, not only because we all secretly suspect that pre-verbal infants see the world in terms of “mommy” and “not mommy” with everything else as a barely real thing here for their amusement, and so Alfie thinking of himself as “Stormageddon” feels right in line with that. That it’s entirely possible that the Doctor is making this all up to mess with Craig’s head is never directly stated, but given that “Rule One” has been repeated with some frequency this season, it’s still plausible that the Doctor is having a private joke on the monkey.

Roberts nicely contrasts Craig’s attitude towards his son with the relationship between the Doctor and his companion. Not just in that both Craig and the Doctor are worried for the safety and life of the person in their charge, but Craig’s total faith and belief in the Doctor’s goodness and ability to defeat evil is echoed in Alfie’s trust in Craig, which is what ultimately defeats the Cybermen. Speaking of, the annual presence of the Cybermen is starting to become almost as conspicuous as the annual reappearance of the Daleks. It’s nice that the show has stopped trying to rectify the Cybermen’s appearances with the continuity of the alternate universe versions. They’re simply around, and like the Daleks being re-established last season, as an ongoing threat instead of “one last band of survivors”, having Cybermen as a menace that could just randomly pop up feels like a needed adjustment back to the serial nature of the original series.

Like several other episodes of this mini-season, Toby Whithouse’s latest episode feels almost more like a classic series Doctor Who episode than a current season one. Yes, there is the endless succession of identical corridors that the cast spends most of the episode running down, to be sure, but other little touches add to the impression as well. The random landing, the time spent by the Doctor and his companions trying to figure out where they are and what’s going on, the improbability of a bunch of people from contemporary England just happening to be on a space-ship in the middle of the galaxy.

If anything, much of this episode felt like something out of the Seventh Doctor era. There were plenty of nods to both new series and classic series continuity here, from the wall portraits featuring a large selection of new series alien designs to the casual mention of the Nimon in relation to the monster-of-the-week this week, none of which felt over-whelming or like requirements for understanding. “Easter Eggs” would be the best description for these little details. But more on point, the claustrophobic nature of the setting, combined with the notion of something nasty hidden behind the doors is very similar to “Ghost Light,” another story where the Doctor faced off against an ancient God like creature acting more out of instinct than plan. Similarly, the Doctor realizing that the only way he can save Amy from the Minotaur is to shatter her faith in him, depriving the creature of the energy it needs, is almost exactly the method that the Seventh Doctor used on Ace in order to defeat the ancient, God like Fenric in “Curse of Fenric,” right down to the moment marking the end of the companion’s time with the Doctor and her final step into adulthood. Though Ace did get at least one more trip in the TARDIS, just as I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see Amy and Rory return in the final episode of the season.

That step into adulthood is important. Much of the emotional weight of the new series has been tied up in family dramatics or melodramatic angst, so it’s refreshing to see a Doctor/companion parting motivated more by the Doctor’s paternalism and recognition that the companion has grown dependent on him and needs to move on. It’s the sort of emotionally mature and truthful departure we haven’t really seen since Susan, to be honest.

The episode itself was on a par with most of Whithouse’s previous work. It had a strong blend of humor and creepiness, never really lapsing overtly into either and instead maintaining that balance. The setting was novel, the villain somewhat incongruous, but in that way that strange juxtapositions often end up working despite themselves. A minotaur in a tacky motel is a perfectly “Doctor Whoy” idea. And, most importantly, the things that needed to be kept ambiguous, notably any information concerning the Doctor himself, were kept ambiguous, and the people around him are explored instead.

Tom MacRae’s latest episode is of very mixed quality, much like his previous Who episodes, season two’s Cybermen two-parter. It’s fairly quick-paced and minimalist, and in many ways it sometimes feels like a throwback to the original series. Where it drags however is in its replication of some of the standard flaws of the original series and an over-emphasis on the angst and “the Doctor is a dick” tropes that the new series too often wallows in.

The limited setting, essentially a few rooms in a hospital, helps keep the story lean, and the minimal, all-white layout of most of those rooms gives them a nicely nostalgic feel, like a space station set from the original series. There’s a practical point to all this as well; the lack of complicated sets and almost no guest performers as well mark this as the budget-saving episode, as does confining the Doctor to the TARDIS for almost the entirety of the story. What this means, though, is that there is a tremendous amount of “back-and-forthing” and running through corridors that all look alike. This was a frustrating, but understandable, way of padding out a story back when six-part serials were the norm, but when the new series does it, even as a cheeky “homage” to the original series, it just feels like a way to stretch out a scene or cover up a short running time.

The good parts of the episode mostly counteract this. As aggravating as Rory and Amy (particularly Amy) can be at times this season, this was a good episode to remind us about why we liked these characters to begin with. Rory’s loyalty and love and conflict with the Doctor were all used to good effect, and for once Amy’s stubbornness and selfishness were integral to the story without being simple contrivances to move a plot along. When Future Amy, strongly channeling Selfish Amy, sacrifices herself, we even get a partial answer and explanation for what the hell Rory sees in her other than a pretty redhead.

The villains of the piece are also fairly remarkable. Unlike last week’s “creepy but not really” dollies, faceless robots with human hands are just the right sort of familiar yet wrong design work to be unsettling without really intending to be. Visually, they fit in with their surroundings, a nice little touch, and their design is just contemporary enough to be recognizable, a bit like an Apple designed robot, which makes them familiar yet wrong again. That their specific threat comes from, quite literally, killing you with kindness is just cheeky enough of a meta-joke to work.

The only real problem, then, is the overuse of angst at the end. Yes, Future Amy sacrificing herself to save Rory from the pain of loss is nobly and works in character, but it’s oversold as a feel bad moment. We’ve had plenty of those so far. That we have this on top of the Doctor deliberately lying and allowing someone to die, even a parallel future Amy is wearying. It simply doesn’t ring true, especially when we remember that the Amy and Rory who are perfectly happy with creating a major temporal paradox are the same Amy and Rory who shrug their shoulders at the prospect of their infant daughter being raised by religious terrorists from space because they know an older version of her. Apart from these issues, the episode is fairly satisfying, especially when it blends elements of the original series and the new series styles.

I’m perhaps inclined to be overly forgiving of a Mark Gatiss episode. I’ve admired his television work and novels for some time, his A History of Horror documentary series is the best overview of horror film history I’ve seen, and he wrote what I consider one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And so while there are a few flaws in this episode, I find it hard to say that they hurt the episode overall, partly because I like Gatiss, but also because, despite those flawss, this is the episode where it feels like we’re back on track a bit.

Scaring children has always been part of the show’s DNA, intentionally or not, and a recurring theme since 2005 has been to take something that isn’t scary and make it horrifying. It seems only natural that eventually we would get an episode that not only continues with that theme, but also makes itself explicitly about a frightened child. It’s interesting that Gatiss makes the relationship between the father and son in this episode both the thing that lies at the heart of the boy’s fears but also the means of resolving the threat. It feels like something of a call back to “The Idiot’s Lantern,” another Gatiss episode that had the relationship between a father and son at its center. Most of the efforts to plumb realistic emotional depths on the show tend to fall a little flat, as if the “drama checklist” is being gone down, but it mostly works here, perhaps because it is used to resolve the conflict.

Most of the flaws then are in the little details. The supposedly menacing dolls end up looking rather cheap and unspectacular, like something out of the “wobbly corridor” era for the show. Mileage varies greatly on the scariness of dolls in the first place, but it’s hard to see how tatty looking plaster mascot heads are particularly unnerving. What little scariness there is to be found in a dollhouse populated by albino bobbleheads is somewhat undone, though, by the revelation that the boy is not, in fact, a boy, but an alien. An alien whose psychic powers are causing all the things that are scaring, well, him. It’s a circular sort of story, which mostly works in context, but the notion of the boy being an alien or that he is the cause of the problem are enough. To combine them into one plot point feels like gilding the lily somewhat.

If the theme of the first half of the season had been “keep questions unanswered,” this appears to be the episode in which the answers to those questions were thrown at the viewer. This might have been more palatable if the answers had been given in the context of a fun adventure episode. The title of the episode suggests a fun adventure episode. Instead what we got was a great deal of information about River Song/Melody Pond, and none of it really enlightens the audience. Instead the answers we got draw a line under many of the previous questions, as if to say “there, that’s done, moving on.”

Chiefly this can be seen in making it explicit that Melody was the girl in the astronaut suit was Mels was River. Yes, “time can be rewritten” has been suggested as a theme for the Eleventh Doctor era, and that idea is reiterated here, but establishing that Melody has been with Amy and Rory all their lives cuts off the dramatic necessity of searching for the baby, as now she is already an established part of Rory and Amy’s timelines. Granted, a dramatic reshuffling of the timelines is still a possibility at this point, but the impression given by the characters in this episode is that they have resigned themselves to the current status quo as it plugs the existing holes in the Melody Pond timeline. That this also makes the universe of the show ever smaller by making Melody and River and Amy’s best friend all the same person is just another frustration with this episode.

Let’s go back to the title. That is a title that promises a romp. Instead we got an infodump. Yes, it was nice to see Alex Kingston chewing the scenery as a newly regenerated Melody Song, and displaying some of the behavior that earned her the reputation she apparently enjoys. But all of that only served, in the end, to provide other characters an excuse to detail River’s timeline or the backstory of the latest baddies. The closest we get to the sort of fun that the episode promises are the two brief Nazi punching segments. The only other bit of aggressive weirdness in the episode, the Tesalecta, was unfortunately given short shrift as well. An overly bureaucratic race of shrunken humanoids who travel through time punishing the greatest villains of the universe because they never received the ending they deserved? That’s a mad idea, a big crazy idea, suitable for the show. Instead they’re used for exposition and some pointless false dangers for Amy and Rory while River gets to be the main villain.

The episode’s big dramatic reveal was also frustrating, mostly because it was arbitrary. It’s suggested by River’s dialog that her desire to kill the Doctor is left-over programming from the Silence, but also that the Silence are, by this point in River’s timeline, no longer a going concern. Despite the insistence that “Mels” River had a crush on the Doctor before she met him, the transition from “psychopathic murderer” to a person willing to give up her regenerations in order to save him was far too abrupt and without a clear motivation. And that’s probably the real problem with this episode. There’s now so much the show has to do, in terms of character and plot and explanation, and so little time to do it in, that everything feels rushed and hurried. There’s no time to enjoy the highlights, because the two-series long arc has to be resolved.

I think this has been one my favorite episode of this season of Doctor Who so far. There are moments, numerous ones, that really stand as stellar examples of what makes this show appealing and of Steven Moffat’s strengths as a writer and show-runner.
There are also lots of moments that emphasize how frustrating much of this season has been.

Most of the best elements are in the first half. Commander Strax, Sontaran nurse, is introduced in a scene that is incredibly funny and moves the plot forward while enriching the background of one of the show’s alien races tremendously. It’s clever, self-referential writing that actually fits tonally with the show and doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. The same goes for the introduction of Madame Vastra, lesbian Silurian, a character who hits so many buttons that it’s hard to see her as anything other than a calculated move to make certain segments of Who-fandom hit pause on the DVR and run, “squeee”ing all the way, to the internet to talk about how awesome the character is. But Moffat still manages to make the character charming and endearing and slot her into the story in a way that she actually works, and works well, in the context of the episode. (Moffat also uses her to get in an oral sex joke even more blatant than the one in “Love and Monsters” which, oddly, seems to have elicited no outraged “harrumphs” from online fans, indicating that either fans are getting less uptight about such matters or that IOKIYSM.)

The rest of the first half of the episode shows us the Doctor infiltrating the base of his enemy, outsmarting them and humiliating them and saving the day with the help of his friends and companions. It’s rousing, it’s on target, it’s funny, and it’s the show we’ve all tuned into to see. It’s not until after the day is won that things start to fall apart. Partly this is because Moffat has made a very deliberate choice to show the Doctor “falling,” to show him failing to save the day in as spectacular a fashion as possible. It’s an understandable choice, given how the season storyline has developed, but coming in at the half-way point of the mid-season finale makes for just more viewer frustration as yet more plot threads are left unresolved.

“Unresolved” could be the theme for the episode. As much as Moffat likes to emphasize the “timey-wimey” nature of the show, it’s hard to feel emotionally invested in a conflict when, after seven episodes, the antagonist is still a blank slate. We know that, at some point in the future, the militarized Anglican church, with the assistance of Madam Kavorian (aka Eyepatch Lady), kidnap Amy to use her daughter as a weapon against the Doctor. We don’t know why. The Doctor doesn’t know why. In fact, the last time we saw any hint of these storylines was in the last season, when the church was more than willing to work with the Doctor and seemed to view River Song as the real threat.

As for River Song, while I still generally like the character and her portrayal, I’m not sure what to make of the big revelation about her here. On the one hand, it’s something of a non-revelation, as her parentage is just about the least interesting thing about her in the context of the show, and really only serves to make the universe of the show that much smaller (later in the year we find out that Amy’s great-aunt Barbara was a school-teacher!). On the other, it’s the kind of revelation that means that either the implications weren’t completely thought out or that information is once again being held from the audience for no good reason, as it means that River knew exactly what was going on in the first two episodes of the season.

In any case, this episode gave us a joke that must have had the “gay agenda!” crowd in apoplectic fits, so it was worth it on that score.

Given how the rest of the season has been so far, I was actually feeling fairly pleased with this episode. Up until the end. But we’ll get to that.

At first we’re presented with some fairly stock Doctor Who plots in the set-up for this episode: isolated location, science gone wrong, “who is the real monster” moralizing. It’s pretty typical “base under siege” territory for Who. The Doctor brings Amy and Rory to an “acid mining” factory off the coast of England, but remains cagey about his reasons why. The mining is done not by humans or cost-effective robots, but by remote-controlled “Flesh” clones of the miners, which are identical in every way to the minors on the biological and genetic level. Under normal circumstances, in past seasons, this would prove to be the set-up for a new origin for some pre-existing monster, like the Autons or the Sontarans or some other clone/mass-produced enemy the Doctor has encountered. But no, not this time. This time it’s just a set-up for a story about humans coming into conflict with shape-changing clones.

Which isn’t actually a bad story. Yes, it’s a very by-the-numbers story on many levels. There are monsters in the base and no one can leave. The TARDIS has sunk into the ground and is not accessible. There are duplicates of all the guest actors running around making it impossible to tell who the good guys are from the bad guys. (Except, of course, that the sonic screwdriver can detect the difference, which rather renders the whole point of the duplicates being genetically identical to the originals moot.) But even rote Who has its own charms and nuances. We all know that order will be restored in the end and that there is probably going to be a small pile of bodies tucked away into the corner by the end of the episode (quite literally in the case of this episode). We hope that the bits in between the TARDIS landing and the TARDIS taking off will be entertaining and hopefully clever. We expect the Doctor to act like he knows what’s going on, make an avoidable mistake and then pull off an eleventh hour victory. That’s mostly what we got here, all in all, and mostly I was happy with it.

But in keeping with the trend of the season so far, there were…issues with the episode. Mostly related to how the episode was used to build up to the mid-season finale. For all the episode tried to emphasize that the humans and their Flesh counterparts are identical, and that the Flesh aren’t actually monsters, the main antagonist was, well…pretty much a monster. Her arguments against the humans go beyond immediate self-preservation and into plans for full on genocide. When one side of an argument is making the self-evident point that “I’m the original and you’re still a copy” and the other is calling for the death of every human on the planet, a “are the humans the real monsters” plot rings pretty damn false. That was a minor problem, though, in relation to the utterly infuriating conclusion to the story in which we find out that Amy has actually been a Flesh duplicate of the real Amy all along. And the Doctor knew this. And this is the resolution to both the Schrodinger Pregnancy problem and the Eyepatch Lady hints.

Presenting a situation where information has been held from the audience for six episodes feels like an enormous cheat, as the only reason to not provide the audience with clues regarding this is in order to have a “shocking” surprise twist ending to act as a cliffhanger. We’ve already had plenty of cliffhangers this season as it is. It’s also something of a problem because it sets up another dark/manipulative Doctor situation. I don’t have the problem with dark/manipulative Doctor that many fans have, hell Seven is one of my favorite Doctors, but that kind of characterization doesn’t really feel like a good fit for Eleven. Hints that the Doctor drops to his clone further suggest that the Doctor is well aware of his future “death” and has been for some time, possibly as long as he’s known that Amy has been swapped. I suppose this behavior could be justified if its used as an explanation for why the Doctor was so uninterested in finding out who the girl in the astronaut suit was or what became of her. But it’s more likely that what we have here is a series of “thrilling” moments strung together into a narrative without enough consideration given as to if they hold together.

Well. That was certainly a Doctor Who episode written by Neil Gaiman.

It’s not that I particularly find Gaiman a bad writer. He can be quite good at times and is frequently a very funny writer. But I find his stock plots rote and frequently derivative and his fans, like Joss Whedon’s, tend to favor the “omigod” and “awesome” and “win” schools of criticism, and an intense negative reaction to any apostates or heretics offering more nuanced critiques. So my expectations going into this episode were that we would get a moderately clever idea, though possibly a bit fanwanky, good dialogue for the leads, and that the reaction from fans would be far in excess of the episode’s actual merit.

Mostly I think my expectations were met. The banter in this episode, particularly between Idris and the Doctor was frequently hilarious and sparkled with well-observed statements about the Doctor and his relationship to the TARDIS. The performances of Matt Smith and Suranne Jones were excellent in this regard as well, showing that good actors and good dialogue are an absolutely necessary combination for genre material. Though it drifts heavily towards fanwank territory, giving the TARDIS a voice, however briefly, is a nice way to play with the show’s format and history. The notion of the TARDIS thinking of the Doctor as “her thief” and of taking him where he “needs to go” puts a new spin on much of the series back-story while opening up possibilities for future stories. Rory and Amy didn’t fare as well in this episode, but with what little they were given to do, that’s not surprising. This is actually the place where I felt the episode was most lacking, with Amy and Rory running through corridors in what was either a deliberate nod to the original series or an attempt to save on the budget by creating just one set to shoot from multiple angles. And, of course, Rory dying again, in what has become the most tiresome running joke in television history. Most of their story seemed to exist merely to provide some characterization for the antagonist, House, a living asteroid/disembodied voice. And since most of that characterization amounted to comically sinister threats of execution, this left all the Amy and Rory bits somewhat lacking in drama.

Most of my fears of Gaimanisms weren’t met, thankfully, with the exception of the characters of Auntie and Uncle, two patchwork Victorians who could be dropped into virtually any other work Gaiman has written and fit right in. They didn’t feel “right” for this episode somehow. They were a bit too deliberately odd and out of place in a story that was already fundamentally weird given its central premise. And it was, indeed, very fanwanky. Yes, I did like the idea and the characterization of Idris the humanoid TARDIS. And yes, I liked her relationship with the Doctor. But the premise felt like Gaiman’s Who fan-fiction and veered dangerously close to plot-lines from the Eighth Doctor novel line (or, as I like to call them “the books that the guy who read every New Adventures novel couldn’t even get through”), not to mention Gaiman’s own Stardust.

So the end result, in line with the rest of the episodes so far this season, was something that was good but not great. Good characterization for the Doctor, a fan pleasing spin on prior continuity, and a heavy-handed hint at the season meta-arc with Idris’ “the only water in the forest is the river” line. Well, at least it wasn’t the Rani peeking at Amy through a cupboard.

There’s actually quite a bit to like about this episode. First of all, it has pirates, and who doesn’t love pirates. Okay, sure, their moment in the pop-culture spotlight has pretty much passed, replaced by zombies and ninjas and God only knows what else by the time this post goes up, probably wombats or something. But they’re pretty enduring icons of adventure fiction, and apart from a William Hartnell story, not territory the show has really gone to before. The setting is fun, and the writing is actually pretty crisp, with a fair amount of time and activity given to each lead, good patter from Amy and Rory, and a Doctor who is slightly out of his depth, which is always nice to see.

So why did the episode feel slightly disappointing? Well, even though the story has pirates, this was still your standard Doctor Who “base under siege” story, with a mysterious alien presence picking off the crew one by one. Yes, it’s a fairly original modication to the trope to turn the base into a becalmed pirate ship, but if you watch enough Who you know that these stories tend to end in either one of two ways: pile of bodies or misunderstood alien. We’ve got the misunderstood alien here, with Lily Cole’s spookily seductive siren turning out to be just a really aggressive computer program trying to fix all the humans of ailments both minor and serious. It’s clever, but it’s not ambitious. And it’s coming right after two big episodes that opened the season and left many significant questions unresolved. As a mid-season story, something slipped out after the “let’s reintroduce an old monster” mid-season two-parter, but right before the build-up to the finale, this would have been a perfectly good “breather” episode. A nice diversion to keep us in front of the TV on a Saturday night, but nothing that we’d have to sit and try to decipher hints about this season’s major threat.

Which is the other aspect that felt jarring, the insertion of elements of the “story-arc” for this season into a story that didn’t feel like it had room for them. We’ve got more ponderous hints about the Doctor’s death and Amy’s pregnancy tacked on to the end, and we’ve got Eyepatch Lady showing up in an odd place again. All these things are going to be dealt with, I’m sure (and I’ve already seen lengthy and exhaustive fan theories “proving” that Eyepatch Lady is really The Rani–keep beating that drum, fanboys), but the felt like late additions here. As a story that could stand on it’s own, this would have been a perfectly fine, but not remarkable episode. As a piece of a larger puzzle, this felt like a miscut edge.