It’s alright. I’ve had a good life. I’m nearly twelve.

Spoilers. Obviously. If you’ve not seen this week’s Doctor Who, don’t say you weren’t warned….

Whoof. And whoof, again. Here we are at the halfway mark of this season’s Doctor Who, and my head feels as if it’s come unglued. A Good Man Goes To War (BBC1, Sat) was an epic and a half. Even the continuity announcer was bigging it up before the damn thing had even started.

It’s funny, but usually at this point we’re looking at the season so far and wondering how the next six weeks are going to develop. Because of the change in broadcast schedule this year this feels more like a finale. Difficult to know where the hell we’re going to go from here.

Following two weeks worth of scurrying around corridors and closed sets, this week Doctor Who opened right up and played it like Star Wars. Huge hangars. Spaceships everywhere. People scurrying hither and yon. And erm, a Roman Centurion, walking into the middle of a Cyberman lair. Not Cybusmen, you’ll note, but Cybermen. I’m quietly pleased about that, for reasons which escape me.

I can’t help but think that Arthur Darvill won himself a whole legion (sorry) of fans with his remarkable first appearance this week. Delivering a message from The Doctor, and a question from himself, it was merely the start of a relentless series of quick-cut scenes, introducing friends old and new.

Steven Moffat did this to us last year with The Pandorica Opens, with that opening sequence of returnees from previous episodes. He was at it again here and I can honestly say he’s the only one who could get away with it. The whole idea of Captain Avery and his crew showing up again, not to mention “Broadsword and Danny Boy” was so gleefully gratuitous – the only thing to do was to just sit back, go with it and cheer. A lot. I can’t help but think the only reason why the Spitfires in Space were back at all was because The Mill hadn’t deleted the animation cycle from their doubtlessly epic-sized hard-drives. I didn’t mind though.Why quibble when you’re having this much fun?

Whether deliberate or not, large chunks of this week’s episode played out like a tribute to the old Eighties Marvel Comics DW strips. As The Doctor started to gather his army together I couldn’t help but be put in mind of certain strips in particular – the Kane/Abel/Frobisher/Peri team-up from the Sixth Doctor’s run for a start.

It was lovely to see Doctor Who doing what it does best – suggesting a whole universe of adventures we’ve yet to see, or may never actually witness. Given that Moffat’s showrunner on “Sherlock”, it’s obvious he’s a fan of the old “tale which the world is not yet ready to hear” routine. With the introduction of a whole slew of characters we’ve never seen before – all with their own histories –  we were a mere step away from finally hearing of the Politician, the Lighthouse Keeper and the Trained Cormorant. Things like this enrich Doctor Who so much, the implication that outside of the bounds of the series stories are going on all over the place which we’re occasionally able to dip into.

Just how did Strax end up being an unwilling Sontaran nurse? Just what do you have to do to dishonour an entire Clone Hive to that extent? Just how long have Madame Vastra and Jenny been lurking in Victorian London, solving the unsolvable? What sort of a hold did The Doctor have over Dorium that enabled him to call in that favour so easily? It’s fun to speculate.

Rather fantastically, we even got the rudest joke to sneak onto primetime Doctor Who since the “Master’s Beard” routine in Time Crash. I didn’t pick it up until the second screening today, but just watch the scene where Madame Vastra flicks out her incredibly long tongue to disarm the guard. And then just look at the expression on Jenny’s face. Saucy isn’t the word.

So pleased to see Neve MacIntosh this week. I had problems with her character(s) in the Silurian Two-Parter last year, but that was entirely down to the nonsense she was forced to spout. This time out she was superb – every inch the Victorian Adventuress, and a fine, fine foil for The Doctor. The scene where she forces him to actually work things out from first principles until he realises just when Amy and Rory’s baby might have been conceived was so wonderfully played, helped by Simon Fisher-Becker’s “come on… take your time… you’re getting there” reactions in the background. It’s a nice touch, that our hero can be so worldly wise about so many things, but so… well, squeamish about others.

Little beautiful moments abounded in amongst all the thunder and flash. The Doctor’s cot. The fact that he speaks Baby (and Melody seems to disapprove of the bow-tie as well, much to his mild annoyance). Amy’s diabolical rudeness to Lorna softening into the realisation that here in the middle of the enemy lair is someone who wants nothing more than to do a simple, gentle kindness for her.

Strax being quite prepared to deliver his gallons of lactic fluid if called for, while the Doctor apologises to Melody for everyone getting it wrong. River suddenly realising that if it’s Demon’s Run, she can’t get involved immediately and painfully, sorrowfully refusing Rory’s request. Even the look on little Toby’s face as the lift opens to reveal Captain Avery in what must be the shortest cameo in Doctor Who history.

While all this madness is going on The Eleventh Doctor takes a leaf out of his Ninth self’s book, walking straight into the enemy lair to rescue his best mate. The fact that he does it, and then cocks it up spectacularly is almost by the by. It’s like Steven Moffat took a look at David Tennant’s first season, with all of it’s “you’re having tremendous fun, but you’ll pay the price for it in the end”, and went “yep. That’s all very well. But how about if we take that idea, tweak it slightly, and do *this* instead?”

When Madame Kovarian revealed that she’d hoodwinked the Doctor twice – by the same method – I actually shouted out loud with the realisation of what was about to happen. When it did happen, and little Melody Pond disintegrated into a pile of Flesh, I shouted again. Don’t you love it when tv shows do that? When you think you’re on top of things, and then you realise you’re not? Well, I wasn’t, anyway. Frances Barber’s deliciously old-school performance was just what was needed. JN-T would have killed to cast her as The Rani, if Kate O Mara hadn’t got there first.

Then before we knew it we were into the home strait. The reveal we’ve been waiting for since “Forest of the Dead” (and doesn’t that seem like a lifetime ago)? Did it disappoint? No, I don’t think so. I’d more or less dismissed the idea that River was The Doctor’s Mother (I’m still thinking Claire Bloom might have had something to with that, and besides which that would have thrown up all sorts of horrible Star Wars retcon problems a la Luke and Leia). I’d be lying if I said the thought of River and the Child from the first episodes this year being connected hadn’t crossed my mind, but somehow the dots just failed to connect for me.

And yet, as with last year, the reveal was there. Hiding in plain sight all along thanks to a thrown away line from Idris in “The Doctor’s Wife”. We watched all seven episodes back to back this afternoon and that moment suddenly leapt out at us. I just assumed it was a prediction that River would be back at some point soon. Never did I expect it to actually be the key to the whole secret.

The revelation though – has just added more layers of intrigue. If River and The Doctor are destined to be romantically involved, does that make Rory and Amy the The Doctor’s parents-in-law? Is The Doctor going to go off and rescue little Melody, then deposit her offscreen in the fifty first century so she can grow up to become River in the appropriate timeline? Given that Rory is at least 800 years older than The Doctor, shouldn’t his son-in-law be showing him a bit more respect?

And just where is The Doctor going to end up? Are we in for a full episode without Rory and Amy shortly? Given that The Doctor’s skipped off to save Melody, leaving Amy, River and Rory to deal with a world of emotional fallout, where do we go from here? Can Madame Vastra and Jenny have their own series, please? While we’re at it, just whose skeletal hand is that hanging on to the dying sonic screwdriver?

Some of these questions may or may not be answered in a few month’s time, when we follow up the post-credits invitation, so kindly laid out by the BBC. “Let’s Kill Hitler”, indeed. Like I said at the top, “Whoof”. As soon as we’ve all got our breaths back again, let’s do it all again. Don’t mind if I do.

You know, I’m starting to get a sense of how impressive it is to hang out with me

Well, I was right. Much to my astonishment, I was right. I said in last week’s review of Doctor Who that there was something not quite right with Mrs Amelia Pond, something slightly off. Turns out that for once I was right on the money. The final five minutes of The Almost People (Sat, BBC1) were dizzying, turning everything we thought we knew about this season completely topsy-turvy. Before we got there though, a certain amount of unfinished business from last week remained to be cleared up. Did part two of Matthew Graham’s story build on the promise of the first week? I’ll say it did.

I was having a chat with a couple of mates last week, and one of them expressed the opinion that Doctor Who is no longer kid-friendly – that it’s more for adults than it is for children now. I sort of agree with that, except I think that Steven Moffat and friends are now pitching directly at the same audience that Hinchcliffe and Holmes were – the (for want of a better word) “intelligent” thirteen year olds and up. Nowt wrong with that, and there were definitely moments this week that might well have been upsetting for the younger viewer.

Jennifer-Ganger noshing down on Buzzer, the pile of discarded ganger prototypes, the hall of accusing eyes (“always the last to go”) – all striking imagery, all strong stuff  and all the sort of thing which will haunt the memory for years to come (well, with the exception of Jennifer and Buzzer, which brought back unfortunate flashes of The Lazarus Experiment) . This week was heavy on the atmosphere (Director Julian Simpson taking full advantage of the beautiful monastery location and filling the darkened corridors full of mist which diffused the light beauftifully). I know that the series has taken a serious hit in the budget this last couple of years, but you wouldn’t know it to watch this. Doctor Who has never looked better than it does now. The odd dodgy bit of CGI aside (and we didn’t *need* those ganger-monsters, the episode was working perfectly well without them), this is a show that looks lush, classy and is obviously made with love and care. Quite right too.

All of the atmospheric direction in the world means nothing if there isn’t something interesting going on to keep you watching, and this week we had all sorts. The most obviously showy aspect was of course, the Matt Smith double-act. Ganger-Doctor certainly made the most of his first appearance – spouting lines from his predecessors like there was no tomorrow (and indeed, speaking in Tom Baker’s voice, which was unexpected and rather heart-warming). As he adapted to suddenly becoming the Last of the Time Lords he sprang into high gear, becoming (if such a thing were possible) – even more hyperactive than the Eleventh Doctor normally is. Finishing each other’s sentences, interrupting each other, interrupting themselves – it was impossible to take your eyes off them (I especially liked the continuation of the ongoing attempt to find a catch-phrase that would stick. This week the candidate was “Yowza”, which obviously didn’t take on. If only his previous incarnation had shown the same rigour – we’d have been spared the pain of “Allon-Sy” and “Ho-yes”).

What was fascinating this week was the sudden reappearance of the old, manipulative Doctor. The Second Doctor had his moments, maneuvering The Daleks into their final destruction then quietly directing events on Telos to his own ends. The Seventh was obviously the player of Twister on a Thousand Mats. The devious, planning Doctor’s been in remission for a few incarnations now, but here we had the Doctors swapping around in order to test Amy. The scene in which Amy was grabbed by the throat with The Doctor gasping “Why? Why? Why?” into her face was gripping in so many ways – to be fair, if someone had done that to me I’d have been a bit careful around them afterwards, but it was so sudden, so shocking. If the Flesh is identical in every aspect to the original, does this mean that The Elveneth Doctor carries these darker tendencies as well? It would appear so, given how the episode panned out.

As with last week, the Saturday evening audience were presented with some strong meat to chew on – ethical questions of what it means to be human, how we behave to others and how we present ourselves. Doctor Who’s always drawn on other influences, and it was obvious that Jennifer-Ganger owes a huge debt to Mary Shelley, with the rampaging ego-monster of Frankenstein not only turning on the Creator, but demanding the right to exist themselves. For a while it even looked like she’d snared herself a mate – something which the original Frankenstein demanded but never quite managed. Thankfully for Rory, the veil was drawn from his eyes just in time. Poor old Rory – a good man manipulated to the advantage of others. His scene when he looks through the window at the others, mouthing “I’m sorry”, repeatedly – you can tell that just for that moment he hates himself for having been taken in so easily.

I could really have done without the anvil-clanging big message of the week – as with the first episode, I’d sort of worked out that there were monsters on both sides without them actually using the line “Who are the real monsters here?” Just for a moment I was expecting Lee and Herring to wander in –

“But Who is the real monster, Stu? Is it me, who exploits the Flesh for his own corrupted ends, with no thought of how they may be feeling? Or is it the businessman… in his suit and tie?”

“Erm, it’s actually the first one I think, Rich…”

What was fascinating about ths week was the way that the older the Gangers got, the more they seemed to exhibit the good side of humanity. Ganger-Cleves turned out to be a thoroughly good egg in the end, as did Jimmy. Once “real” Jimmy gets a chestful of acid, it’s up to Ganger-Jimmy to take over and become the father he felt that he already was. By all appearances he’s well and truly up to the job. Cleaves (in either incarnation) comported herself with dignity and grace, a million miles away from the twitchy, nervous maniac of last week. The revelation of the brain-clot which was carried by both versions was a nice twist – if you take on the characteristics of a human, you take on all their frailties and weeknesses as well and it’s to Raquel Cassidy’s credit that she managed to dial back her performance to the point where by the end of the episode I was rooting for them both to survive.

This being modern Doctor Who of course, we’re big on heroic sacrifice and the episode came to a conclusion with not one, not two, but three characters biting the big one to save everyone else. In at least one character’s case I’m absolutely certain we haven’t seen the last of ’em. But is it far too easy to assume that was Ganger-Doctor we saw being gunned down at the start of the season? The way the plotting this year’s gone, I’m not at all sure.

And then… that last scene. After two entire episodes hammering home the fundamental similarities between the Flesh and real humans (even going as far as dropping two of the cast off at Weyland-Yutani sorry, Morpeth-Jetsan to argue that very point), suddenly we have an unsympathetic Doctor, totally willing to kill Ganger-Amy on the spot. Not only that, but the revelation rocks Rory’s world to the foundations as well, and he actively sides with the Doctor – stepping away and leaving Ganger-Amy to face her death completely alone. The moment she said she was really scared, my heart went out to her, and it was shocking to see the coldness in the normally warm and lively Eleventh Doctor’s eyes. It might have made more sense, surely, to keep Ganger-Amy around? As a direct link to the real Amy (as evidenced by her continuing Frances Barber visions, it was obvious that Amy’s actual experiences kept on bleeding through into the consciousness of Ganger-Amy), she might have provided vital assistance in finding the “real” version. But no – there’s the Doctor, gunning down someone for whose very right to exist he’d been fighting for two full episodes. Didn’t ring true. I still don’t think we’re done with this particular plot. Given how we’re only six episodes in there’s lots of time to explore this further. I just hope they do, because I don’t want to think of The Doctor as someone who pays lip-service to noble ideals without carrying them through. That said, this is a man who pressed the button which destroyed his entire race, so who knows what he’s capable of?

So… were does that leave us? Pregnant Amy “ready to pop” (now there’s a line I never thought I’d hear in Doctor Who). The Doctor, on the warpath. Rory, no doubt furious and desperate to find his wife (and bear in mind that wherever she is, he says he knows). Where is Amy? Is this something to do with The Silence, or does it hark back to something from last year (I’m hearing fan theories tonight that a rewatch of The Big Bang might shed some light)? Given that next week sees the return of The Arch Plotter himself, The Grand Moff… who can say?

We’ve got a “game-changing cliffhanger” to come, so I don’t expect everything to be answered. I just know that the title of next week’s episode – “A Good Man Goes To War” – carries infinite promise. I suspect we’re off into areas that Doctor Who has never explored before. Everything I thought I knew about this series has been upended several times already this year, and I’m completely wrong-footed. Good. Long may they continue to confound my expectations.

Yes, it’s insane. And it’s about to get even more insaner. Is that a word?

It has been pointed out by wiser heads than I that Doctor Who is a series capable of skyscraping highs. Episodes which leave you shaking your head in admiration, wondering if television ever gets any better than this. Off the top of my head – Revelation of the Daleks; The Caves of Androzani; Inferno; Pyramids of Mars; Blink; Vincent and the Doctor. These are the ones that really fly for me.

Conversely, it can leave you shaking your head for entirely different reasons when it plumbs such depths of incompetence that you consider trying to sue someone to get the time you spent watching added back onto your lifespan. I wonder why I wasted my life watching The Daleks Masterplan, The Chase, Time and the Rani, The Armageddon Factor, Timelash, et al.

The hardest ones to get a handle on are the workaday episodes. The ones which are neither spectacular, nor awful. By the nature of series television not every week can be superb. You’re lucky if you get a few crackers every season, and Doctor Who’s hit the spot more often than not for me recently. You’re tuning in because you love the concept, the characters – you watch because you enjoy spending time in this universe. It doesn’t have to be perfect every week (although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you log on to various forums in the seconds immediately after each episode airs).

Sometimes a perfectly competent and watchable episode of Doctor Who is just fine. For me, that’s exactly what The Rebel Flesh (Saturday, BBC1) was – beautifully made, rather fun television. Full of good bits and a few bad bits, but nothing spectacular. There’s nothing wrong with striving for the best. You’ll miss occasionally, but it’s the trying that matters. If this week wasn’t the most striking piece of television I’ve ever seen it was at the very least crammed with good stuff, even if it didn’t quite hang together as well as I hoped it would.

To be honest, given what we saw on the episode of Doctor Who Confidential afterwards I’m amazed it made it to the screen at all. Made under the most adverse of conditions during one of the coldest spells that Britain has ever seen, the production team pulled off a small miracle. You wouldn’t know to watch the actual show that anything had been amiss behind the scenes at all and I can only applaud the dedication of the people who managed to bring it all together. Any problems I had this week were very much to do with the scripting and narrative thrust of what finally made it on-screen.

It’s fair to say that Matthew Graham’s previous Doctor Who story (Fear Her) was… not universally loved. Indeed, it’s become a bit of a lazy-person’s whipping boy. It’s the one that people cite as an example of everything that’s wrong with RTD’s vision of Doctor Who (translation – it doesn’t have UNIT in it, or even remotely resembles what Doctor Who was like when the viewer was fifteen. I’m as guilty as anybody on that one – although when I was fifteen, Doctor Who was having an eighteen month rest so I tend to want it to be all breathlessness, Cricketer outfits and mouthy Australians as the nearest secure point). Personally, I could see the likes of Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel, Doomsday or Journey’s End far enough with their overwhelming smugness and insistence on hammering us over the head about things that I actually couldn’t give a tinker’s tuppeny-tit about. At the very least, Fear Her has a comedy council worker ripped bodily from the seventies iteration of The Tomorrow People, not to mention Huw News-Person being parachuted into the narrative the way Kenneth Kendall used to be when The Goodies were still on air.

Before it aired the knives seemed to be poised for this week’s episode, as if people were waiting to say “see! Told you it would be rubbish”. It wasn’t. At worst, it was a bit dull from time to time and my silly old brain had a little trouble following the narrative here and there. How many Gangers were there anyway? Are there two Jennifers wandering about, or three? If you’re going to mine acid, wouldn’t you make sure your safety precautions were a bit more effective, and isn’t it a better idea to leave yourself with a more reliable escape route from the island when things go wrong? Why was Rory hiding from Ganger Jennifer one minute, and then rushing to help her the next?

There was an awful lot of gabbling going on this week – I think this one’s going to take another viewing to try and catch what everybody was saying. It was almost as if at the read-through everyone realised that the episode might be overrunning, and rather than trim it they decided to rattle through it at breakneck speed in order to cram everything in. Very odd, and I suspect that’s where a lot of my problems stem from. I couldn’t actually hear half of what was going on.

An arresting opening, though. Our first sight of the Gangers was an elegant way to pencil in what we needed to know – the humans working here regard them as a lower form of life and don’t care what happens to them, so long as their pay packet is secure and they’re not docked for the damage of expensive bits of equipment. Even from that first sequence it’s obvious that someone’s being set up for a fall, as the Gangers have other ideas. Quite right too – if Doctor Who’s about anything, it’s that every form of life is sacred, no matter where it comes from or what form it takes. It’s just a shame that things were bogged down with endless scenes of “They’re not human, we don’t care” / “Yes, we are, and we’ll damn well make you care” dialogue. I got the message pretty early on. I just wish the characters on screen had because then everyone could have got on with something more exciting instead.

That said – you cannot whack a good old-fashioned Base-Under-Siege-With-Stressed-Commander story. Cleaves continued the fine old tradition begun way back in The Tenth Planet. I’ve always believed that Doctor Who As We Know It doesn’t really start until the scrag-end of the Hartnell years. Up until The War Machines  Who doesn’t visit the present day, and it isn’t really until The Tenth Planet that the bonkers base-commanders having a really bad day at work concept begins to kick in.

You’ll have your favourites. The Moonbase, perhaps. Fury From The Deep, certainly. If you’ve recently spent several months smashing your head against a brick wall, you may favour Revenge of the Cybermen. Usually, the threat’s from the outside – the base is locked down, the humans are trapped and there’s something on the other side of the wall desperately trying to get at them. This week’s episode carried on that fine old tradition, with the rather lovely twist that here, the base is actually colonised already. It just takes people a while to wake up to the threat in their midst and for once it’s not one hundred percent certain just who the good guys are.

The thing about this particular iteration of the doppelganger plot is that since each Ganger is identical to the original in every respect, it’s difficult to really root for one against the other. Jennifer is sweet, dippy and vaguely Zooey Deschanel-esque in whichever incarnation’s on screen, with a slight pinch of Cally from the new Battlestar Galactica. Cleaves is unlikeable and tightly wound whether she’s flesh and blood or rebel flesh. Ken, Ken and Ken are interchangeable at this point, albeit beautifully played.

It’s something that tends to go unnoticed about NewWho – almost everyone is perfectly cast, right down to the tiniest role. When someone delivers a bad performance you really notice it. Yes Roger Lloyd-Pack, I’m looking at you. You’d struggle to find anyone in this who isn’t a hundred percent convincing, and I love Who for that. You don’t always get that level of dedication and it’s worth applauding.

Other nice touches this week included the Ponds taking some time out at the start while The Doctor indulges in a little Museic. It’s good to hear “Supermassive Black Hole” at any time. Ten loved a bit of Ian Dury, and it’s nice to know that our man’s taste in music continues along impeccable paths while he’s relaxing and waiting for the adventure to start.

It’s lovely to see our heroes in their off-duty moments. We know that not every moment aboard Idris – sorry, The Tardis – is breakneck and exciting, and it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes there’s nothing nicer than spending time with your mates and it’s good to see this team kicking back and relaxing for a while.

As soon as the Solar Tsunami deposits our team in the middle of a medieaval monastery, things begin to go a little awry. I’m going to be charitable and choose to believe that the reason some of the characterisation seemed a little off this week is because we’re actually watching the Ganger versions of Amy and Rory rather than the originals (in which case, where are the real versions, and just what have they been up to?) I’m also going to be charitable and suggest that they’re not going to make this big shock-gasp-reveal in the last five minutes of next week’s episode. I’ll be disappointed if they do. I’ll also quite happily eat a hat of your choice if I turn out to be completely wrong about all this by the time The Almost People plays out next week.

As it is, I’ll lay money on GangerRory running off with GangerJennifer, giving both Amys a bit of pause for thought. Amy’s pulling off a neat trick this year by appearing in almost every scene and yet seeming oddly detached. There’s something slightly off about the character so far this series. She doesn’t seem to quite the same Amy that she was last series and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. She’s got plenty to do – the subplots are piling up, what with her is-she-or-isn’t-she pregnancy, not to mention the fact that she’s being haunted by an intergalactic Chad. I don’t know, but she appears different this year. Perhaps it’s just that Rory’s slowly – and gratifyingly – beginning to assert himself.

There were huge chunks of the episode this week that were driven by Rory (and isn’t it wonderful to have the he-keeps-dying meme acknowledged and referenced within the programme itself?). Arthur Darvill and Sarah Smart’s scenes were beautifully played. As Steven Moffat comments, Rory’s probably spent his entire life up to now waiting for someone to actually show him some open and honest affection, and to lean on him a little bit. It’s no wonder he goes for it, no matter which version of Rory we’re watching.

Meanwhile, The Eleventh Doctor takes on a few characteristics of one of his predecessors. Whether you approve depends on how much Pertwee you can take, because this was a Pertwee story updated and tweaked slightly. Much given to standing stock still and delivering moralistic speeches this week, all we needed was for him to thump a random passerby and then try to cruise by on charm for it to seem like a replay of the Bionic Granddad’s most golden moments. Mind you, we got something like that last year, with the return of the Earth Reptiles two-parter, and that didn’t exactly turn out spectacularly. The jury’s still out on this one. I’ll wait until part two to finally decide just how well this particular DNA sampling of one of Doctor Who’s most beloved periods actually worked.

On the whole? Nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing to leap up and down with excitement about either, but I’m not particularly bothered. Merely competent Doctor Who is several miles ahead of a lot of other television, and I’ll be quite happy to tune in next week to see what happens. As will my identical double. Wherever he may have got to. See you then.

Did you wish really hard?

Being a fan can be frustrating as all get out sometimes. One minute the object of your affections is bumbling along, doing absolutely nothing of note whatsoever. The next they plumb such awful depths of  – well, awful –  that you find yourself questioning why you spend so much of your life invested in them. Suddenly they do something sky-scrapingly magical. They achieve the greatness you always hoped they were capable of. Your heart is in your mouth. You punch the air. You howl with joy. Your entire faith is vindicated.

So it is with Doctor Who. Following last week’s shambles – an episode so terribly mundane and drab that I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to write anything nice (thank god for Cathode Ray Tube and their sterling efforts to find gold amongst the ruins), The Doctor’s Wife (BBC1, Saturday) was everything I ever wanted my favourite television show to be. Once more, Doctor Who makes me realise why it has a vice-like grip on my heart. Magic was in the air on Saturday night.

This was an episode that could only have been made by the current Moffat / Wenger / Willis team. I genuinely can’t imagine Russell T Davies coming up with anything so eerie, so otherworldly, and that’s not an insult to Russell – or JN-T, Graham Williams or any of the previous production teams. Perhaps Hinchcliffe and Holmes might have hit something similar, but this showcased everything that’s strong, that’s good, that’s absolutely bloody right with what the new gang are doing.

Yet, in forging ahead and producing something brand new and different, Neil Gaiman threaded innumerable little echoes of  episodes past, little nods and references (from Russell’s Ood, to the Time Lord Message box, even roundels on the Tardis corridors) that the damn thing felt like the ultimate distillation of Doctor Who. If you’ve ever watched an episode of this show – from any era – there’ll be something in here that reminds you of why you were drawn into it in the first place. This – my friends – is the reason why I stick around. Because every now and then (and it happens more and more often these days) the faith I have in Doctor Who pays off. My best mate strides out onto the pitch in full view of the public and plays an absolute blinder, knocking it right out of the park. Bliss.

It’s amazing to think – Doctor Who has been going since 1963, and not once on screen has anyone come up with a story that goes to the heart of the series. It’s right there in the original concept – a mysterious old man in a rickety old blue police box, wandering the universe. Yet, nobody has ever thought to look at that single concept and poke at it to see what happens.

There are references occasionally to The Tardis being alive. Hartnell does it in The Edge of Destruction. Tom has Leela pay the Ship compliments because her “primitive brain patterns are particularly pleasing to her”. Most of The Doctors refer to her as “Old Girl” or something similar (yet, oddly not Troughton – possibly the most Doctorish of them all, but the one who refuses to indulge in most of the quirks that people would immediately associate with the character). Matt Smith calls her “Dear” in his first appearance. Somehow, this most fundamental and fascinating of concepts slips away. If one man travels through the universe for centuries with a ship that is somehow alive, what sort of bond must there be between them?

Neil Gaiman tackled that particular question head-on and produced a rambunctious and joyous answer. There were grandstanding moments this week. The locker full of Time Lord message boxes. Scenes of The Doctor and Idris rattling through the vortex hanging on for dear life to their Blue Peter console. Rory, dying again but going crazily batshit bonkers before he does it this time. Nephew stalking Amy and Rory through those infinite corridors, the only illumination being from his eyes and the ever-present OodGlobe. The anti-Amy graffiti, all over the Tardis corridors (graffiti seems to be important this year. It’s all over the shop in Day of the Moon, and there’s a ton of the stuff here. Always aimed at Amy, for good or ill).

All of it wonderful to watch, obviously. But… what it comes down to – as ever, with Steven Moffat’s version of Who – is words and concepts. Dialogue and ideas. If the script is right and you get a team of totally dedicated, inspired actors to rip into it and give it everything they can to make it the best it can be, everything else will fall into place. The moments this week that made this episode sing were the little two-handers.

Amy and Rory’s time-twisting chase sequence took one of those things that people used to make jokes about Doctor Who doing and ratchetted it up several notches. This episode really did feature a hell of a lot of running up and down corridors, but boy, was it eerie and unsettling.

I can’t help but think that it ain’t just running up and down corridors for the hell of it, either. This all means something. Yet another of the Moffat themes appeared this week – abandonment and the effect it has on those left behind. We saw it with Amy and The Doctor, and Rory and Amy last year. This time Rory shows his claws a little. As he says, “I waited 2000 years for you and you did it to me again!” Poor sod. No wonder he’s been driven bonkers. Nice pickup on The Doctor and Rory’s conversation from Day of the Moon too. That pretty much clinches it – the 2000 year vigil that Rory spent – he remembers it. All of it. There’s more of this to come. Much more.

You want essence of Doctor Who? You want a Holmesian double-act of the finest vintage? You want lines that make you giggle with happiness, followed by moments that punch you right where you live? Look no further than The Doctor and Idris. Standing aside from the action in the main episode (all they’re doing is trying to get back home and stop House escaping to eat the rest of the Universe), they somehow manage to be the most important thing in the episode. How the hell does Neil Gaiman do that? To take two people talking together, hang madness off it and then somehow make it all make sense in the end? What a talent that boy is. Someone should keep an eye on him. He’ll go far.

The introduction of Idris is another one of those little throwaway moments that makes you shudder when you think about it. This woman has voluntarily sacrificed her life. She’s thrown away everything that identifies her as herself, with no hope of coming back –  just because she’s been told to. That’s horrible. Really horrible, when it comes down to it. Suranne Jones leapt into Doctor Who last night, grabbed it by the scruff and didn’t let go until her final achingly poignant moments. If this doesn’t go down as one of those textbook definitive one-story performances, I don’t know what will.

It’s a part that demands a lot from an actor. Jones was more than up to it. Playing opposite our most mercurial of Doctors she keeps up with Matt Smith with ease, switching from her initial understandable fear into ear-biting frenzy, then on into mad gabbling. Except – not quite so mad. Everything she says in her first scenes turns up later on in the episode, as The Tardis tries to makes sense of everything happening slowly and in the right order. How lovely.

The Doctor nicked The Tardis, did he? Not according to her. She nicked Her Doctor, which is a head-spinner. Jones turfs the line into the mix almost casually, but it’s great – all these years, and these two have turned into something reminiscent of John Peel and John Walters – a dog and their owner, each one thinking they’re the one in charge. Sweet. Perfect.

Her fantastic spat with The Doctor in the junkyard (and there’s more of Doctor Who’s DNA, right there – we started by finding a Time Ship in a junkyard, and here’s The Doctor trying to build one out of junk) is another highlight. How many episodes of Doctor Who have you watched, and never noticed that the Doctor pushes the doors of The Tardis rather than following the “pull to open” instructions? No, I never noticed it either. I love the way Idris focusses on that as a way of getting to the heart of the conversation with The Doctor. It’s her way in, appropriately enough. The scenes between Smith and Jones (oh, very good) are like the greatest Wimbledon final you’ve ever seen. They keep volleying at each other – first one getting the upper hand, then the other. I didn’t want them to stop, ever.

Soon enough though everything is back to normal, or what passes for it. House has been evicted, and The Tardis heads back Home. Not before another moment of gold, though. How many times have we seen The Doctor cry before? The Green Death? The End of the World? He’s always in control, even as he lets a tear fall. Not this week. He’s bereft. He’s just met his soul mate, his best friend ever, and now he’s got to say goodbye all over again. Matt Smith in tears. I shouldn’t be surprised by how much it got to me, but it did. Silly old me. Silly old show.

Brief pause for this week’s shining Arthur Darvill moment. If you get the chance, watch the episode again and look at his face when he looks up from cradling Idris and says “she’s dying”. The naked pain on his face as he realises he can’t save her is real. It’s almost thrown away, but it’s there.  The Doctor may be be what our hero calls himself, but Rory actually is a Doctor, to the core. Kind, good hearted, dedicated to saving lives. That he can’t manage it breaks his heart, and it’s lovely to have that just sitting there in amongst all the mayhem. Doctor Who’s always been a big, kind-hearted show. Now we have a big, kind-hearted team on board to match. Is it any wonder I love it as much as I do?

Idris dies, but not before she gets the chance to say “hello” to her Doctor for the first time. I don’t mind admitting there might well have been something in my eye at that point, but while I was brushing it away, Idris is gone, leaving another mystery in her wake. I’m assuming that stuff about River and Forests is referring to our beloved Alex Kingston but the way this series is going, who knows? We’ve got a dead hero, something playing Schrodinger’s Cat with Amy’s baby, The Doctor and River jumping totally out of sync, Eyepatch Lady and…. oh, it’s difficult to keep track of it all. So many ideas, rolling and tumbling out of your television screen on a Saturday night. As Steven said about The Pandorica Opens last year, “why does the rest of television even bother to show up?”

The Tardis may not get The Doctor to where he wants to be. As Idris says, it gets him to where he needs to be. Faulty old Tardis, my eye. She’s been operating exactly the way she should ever since the series began. Long may you continue to do so, you sexy, sexy thing.

I’m not reviewing Doctor Who this week

There’s nothing I feel that I can add to the debate that the quite frankly superb Cathode Ray Tube hasn’t already covered.

He’s brilliant, and you owe it to yourself to bookmark him and check back. Best DW reviewer on the web, bar none.

http://cathoderaytube.blogspot.com/2011/05/doctor-who-series-6-curse-of-black-spot.html

The little girl gets frightened, the most powerful man on Earth gets a phone call

There are times – and those times are happening gratifyingly often these days – when an episode of Doctor Who leaves me gasping for breath, unable to fully process what it is that I’ve just experienced. Moments when all of the promise ineherent in the format suddenly pays off, massively and satisfyingly. These are the occasions when you count yourself fortunate to have kept the faith all these years, because you’ve been served up a treat that so totally justifies your love for the programme that you’re stunned at the idea that anyone – anywhere – might not love it as much as you do.

Day of the Moon (Saturday, BBC1) was one of those occasions. Ever since Steven Moffat moved from Russell T Davies’s Crown-Prince-In-Waiting to The Man In Charge, he’s been slowly shifting away from everything that was established in the previous few series. This is how it should be. No two eras of Doctor Who have ever been exactly identical. Indeed, it’s the juxtaposition of styles that keeps things fascinating. Every few years you get a shake-up and you’re watching a new programme, but one with just enough links to the past to make it feel like a massive, never-ending story.

Last year saw a few remnants of the Davies breakneck hugger-mugger, everything-at-once style. The Elveneth Hour started with the traditional Match of the Day zoom into a pell-mell opening scene with Murray Gold belting out something strident over the top, before the weirdness began to creep in. The weirdness was there all through last season, getting stronger and stronger.

That weirdness took over last night, in the most wonderful way. At times, I felt I was watching a magimix of all of the tv shows I’ve ever loved, from the torches-in-cellars antics of The X-Files, a bit of the hell-for-leather rampant adventure pacing of all of the best adventure serials,  to the random, never-quite-explained weirdness of  Twin Peaks. All fed into that beautiful Doctor Who format and spat out the other side as something unique.

It confused the hell out of me. It shocked me. It surprised me, constantly, and finally it delivered an authentic drop-me-bacon-sandwich moment which presumably set the internet forums into meltdown. I wouldn’t know, I was too busy gaping at the screen in astonishment.

There are certain things that appear in Steven Moffat scripts, over and over again. Some of them are immediately obvious – his love for twisting the plot and making your brains scream in your attempt to keep up. Some of them are perhaps slightly less so. He’s terribly fond of leaving little gaps in the narrative, forcing you to pay attention as you try to work out what’s been happening while your back was turned. Last week, Canton was very very much onside as we shivered our way towards the cliffhanger. Shockingly, this week we started one of our heroes captured already (The Doctor, in Area 51 and getting a little taste of the medicine that was doled out to the lone Dalek back when Eccleston was on the American beat). River, Amy and Rory were all on the run from the suits. We see Amy and Rory gunned down in cold blood by Canton, and River seemingly commiting suicide rather than suffer the same fate. All before the credits even rolled.

In a script that plays with concepts of perception and memory of course, all is not what it seems. Everyone is on the same side, attempting to combat an occupation that has happened off-screen and long ago. If Nigel Kneale were still with us, he might grump a bit about Doctor Who once again treading on his territory. He always said there were three basic science fiction plots – we go to them, they come to us, they were here already. Last night, we discovered that they were not only here already, but had been for a very long time indeed.

How do you defeat an enemy that lurks in the shadows, who is always there just behind your shoulder, and who you forget the minute you turn away? The Weeping Angels will get you if you don’t keep an eye on them at all times. The Silents will get you if you do. They’ve been here forever. Working themselves into our mythology, into our paintings, into our fiction, into our paranoid imaginings. Much like the Fendahl all those years ago, Mankind exists purely to be shaped and moulded into something that’ll prove useful for someone else. And the worst of it is, we never even know about it.

In amongst all this shuddering paranoia, we had room for one of the most breathtakingly audacious jokes that Doctor Who has ever seen. I’d been warned a few days before – there’s a routine involving one of the Tardis rooms that will have you groaning at the sheer levels of ridiculous on display, yet punching the air at the same time. That’s what they said. They were right. I didn’t punch the air. I bounced on the sofa and cheered though, as River trumped last year’s blown-out-of-an-airlock rescue with a plummet into the Tardis swimming pool. It was so beautifully thrown away, too – one minute she’s falling off a building, the next Alex is joining the gang and drying her hair. The confidence, the sheer brilliance of that moment, and it’s just chucked at you with no time for you to appreciate it, because there’s something else to move on to.

The best Doctor Who makes you grin like a maniac while the chills are creeping down your spine. Last night I switchbacked from cheering with joy to being freaked out like the programme has rarely managed before. When Amy turns round to reveal a nest of Silents hanging from the ceiling, batlike and watchful… the cold crept deliciously into the bones.

All through the episode every time things were getting too grim, we’d have a moment of comedy gold like Matt’s “There’s always one bit left over, isn’t there?” while sitting in the Apollo space capsule, or Tricky Dicky being heralded by a blast of “Hail to the Chief” on his every appearance. I swear that cue got shorter everytime, like Jack Elam’s does in The Cannonball Run.

The twists and turns and questions kept on coming. The mysteries, piling up. Just how long have The Silents been here? Is Amy pregnant, or isn’t she? Is that little girl her child? Was her pregnancy manipulated by the Silents, and if so, what happened to the child? Is the little girl related to Amy? Will she grow up to be River? What’s with River and The Doctor, anyway? Are they even more out of sync with each other than before? And then…

Everything slowed down, just for a few moments. While the main plot grumbled along in the background the focus shifted to Rory.

A lot of the noise and thunder about MoffatWho has focussed on the relationship between The Doctor and Amy, and quite rightly so as it’s a fascinating dynamic. Thing is… to concentrate on all of that is to miss out on some of the best, most subtle and affecting stuff that Doctor Who has ever been blessed with. Rory’s little conversation with The Doctor as he reveals just how much of his 2000 year vigil he remembers. His total devotion to Amy. Just watch Rory’s quiet determination as he lays it on the line for the Doctor – “She can always hear me, Doctor. Always. Wherever she is and she always knows that I am coming for her, do you understand me? Always.” That’s beautiful, romantic writing, and I felt my heart crack slightly as Amy seemingly ignored all of this in favour of yet another plea for The Doctor to come to her rescue.

To be honest, moments like that make me dislike Amy slightly, possibly because my tarnished, romantic soul wants Rory to have the ultimate fairytale ending. He deserves it, and it seems that Amy is totally unable to appreciate just what he’s done for her, and continues to do. As it turns out though, the little girl who waited is well and truly aware of just what the little boy who waited means to her. She’s just not very good at expressing it conventionally. As Amy and The Doctor had that little chat leaning against the console, I wanted Rory to come out of the shadows and punch them both. Thankfully we got something much more satisfying, and I’m glad that The Ponds now seem to be as devoted to each other as it seemed Amy was to her Raggedy Doctor. Lovely.

Meanwhile back at the main plot, threads were being drawn together. The console room from last year’s The Lodger was – presumably – left behind after humanity delivered a righteous kicking to The Silents, and if Moffat really had that planned all along, my hat goes off to him. Or would, if I was wearing one.

A little flashback sequence reveals just a bit more about all that foreshadowing last year, but with the promise of much more. Then… well, you know how Tom’s “Homo Sapiens…” speech in The Ark In Space is the moment when he nails it completely, where his Doctor gets a moment that you know will be quoted for years? Here comes Matt Smith, in yet another showboating, showpiece moment, but which feels like a genuine, old-style throwback to original flavour Doctor Who. Doctor against the enemy. No hope. With a fluorish, he saves the day, and the monsters get their backsides handed to them on a plate.

The last time humanity pitched in to help themselves, it was all a bit messianic with a magic Doctor floating across the screen and a Return of the Jedi funeral.

This time, humanity is saved by television, and the whupping is handed out off-camera. As someone once said, The Medium is The Message. Never more so than in this case, and it’s all because there’s a teeny-tiny gap in Neil Armstrong’s legendary speech. Just enough for The Doctor to go to work in. How very clever. How very wonderful.

Monsters despatched, it’s time for another Moffat favourite, where the main plot is neatly cleared away leaving room for a coda which leaves time for a few farewells before throwing things wide open again and making you question everything you’ve just watched.

River’s waters are muddied again (sorry). Now, not only are The Doctor and River travelling in opposite directions, but they’re meeting out of sequence. The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite. Who will be born to set it right? Amy’s little child, perhaps?

There’s even time for a little farewell to Canton and Tricky Dicky. Thanks to a word from The Doctor, it looks like Canton’s going to get to stay in the FBI after all. Nixon’s non-plussed reaction to Canton’s little revelation was another tiny moment, shining out in an episode of bigger, grandstanding moments. It’s a credit to both performers that it works so well.

One criticism I read today of Stuart Milligan’s portrayal of Nixon was the levels of charisma on display – in that Nixon’s defining characteristic is that he didn’t have any. Fair comment, I suppose, but I couldn’t help enjoying that little twinkling in the eye. Nice to have it confirmed that The Doctor had a hand in Nixon’s tape-recording of all of his conversations. Good one mate. Thanks to that, our hero sets events in motion that unseats another villain, almost by accident. Or is it?

At long last, we have an unattached Doctor with his best mate(s) travelling the Universe having rollicking adventures. As they set off for an exciting adventure with some pirates and a homicidal Lily Cole, it looks like we’re finished for the week.

Oh, no. Moff’s got one last surprise for us. If you saw it, you’ll know that it throws things wide open. Again. Who is that child? Why is she regenerating? Is Amy actually a Time Lady, slumming it in the manner of The Family of Blood, or Utopia? Is this connected with the energy drawn out of The Doctor when he died at the start of last week’s episode? Just how are we going to find our way back to that moment as the season wears in? I have no idea. No idea at all. And I love it. Is it Saturday yet?

Oh, and Kerry Shale was in it too. Like I needed any more reasons to love it.

Human Beings. I thought I’d never get done saving you

So here we are. It’s that most precious of moments – a new season of Doctor Who. We’ve been here before on so many occasions, but the first night is always sacred. All the build up, all the anticipation. Will it all pay off? Was the waiting worth it? To judge by the evidence of  The Impossible Astronaut (Saturday, BBC1), the answer from this side of the sofa is… oh, my. Yes. I do believe so.

Sadly, for most of us the last few days have been tainted with sadness. We lost one of the most beloved members of the Doctor Who family last week with the passing of dear Elisabeth Sladen. Instead of crashing straight into the first episode Doctor Who started with a simple, tasteful dedication to our absent friend. Lump in the throat time, before we’d even started. It had to be done though, and I’m so glad they did.

Within seconds though, we were off. Steven Moffat’s been promising for months that this would be the season where everything went darker than we’ve ever been before. You wouldn’t have known it from the pre-credits sequence.

There’s always a moment at the start of a new season of Doctor Who (not to mention various Christmas Specials) where you wonder how the Doctor’s going to make his appearance. Most of them since Who came back in 2005 have been relatively low key. Eccleston made his debut with one word –  “Run”. Not counting the Children in Need trail, David Tennant first appeared falling out of the Tardis in his predecessor’s gear. Next season he spent a couple of minutes slouching about on a bit of Apple Grass. The year after that he took off his tie and chucked it at an understandably non-plussed Martha, and for his last season he mooched about for fifteen minutes not crossing paths with Donna. All fairly relaxed, easing you back into the routine.

Matt Smith has no truck with such nonsense. Much more fun to fall out of the sky at high speed, then demand an apple. In last year’s Christmas show, he made his first appearance cannonballing out of a fireplace. This time? Stark naked, under the skirts of a young lady. What a boy.

The quickfire comedy opening was a sweet way to grab the viewer and drag them into the action before the serious business starts. My little heart sang at the sight of Eleven dancing in a fez with Laurel and Hardy. Two of my favourite things colliding in one show. Lovely. But then…

Things started to get dark. Then darker. Then a bit darker again. Then, a bit more dark. By the time we’d reached halfway, Doctor Who was as sombre as I’ve ever seen it, even when Tom Baker was towering over us being sepulchral. Despite this (or perhaps, because of it) the one-liners which peppered the episode hit the spot perfectly. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, but thankfully our regulars have the chops to cope with these sudden gear changes.

Interesting to note that this year wasn’t really the traditional “jumping on” point for new viewers. The episode wasn’t impenetrable to the casual viewer, not by any means – its just that Steven Moffat knows enough about television writing and respects his audience enough to assume that we’re smart enough to pick things up as we go along. A quick interlude with The Ponds, a visit to the Stormcage to pick up River and we’re off to the heartland of America.

My word, but Doctor Who has never looked this good. So expansive, so downright beautiful. The location’s been rightly talked up as somewhere the programme has never been before, and Toby Haynes made use of it. That gorgeous long shot as the Ponds get off their Little Yellow Bus. Matt Smith, lounging on the bonnet of the car. River, backlit and iconic as she delivers one her trademark “I’m here!” introductions. Couldn’t get that in a studio at BBC Wales, no matter how much money Doctor Who has hurled at it these days.

Our heroes are given one brief moment of happiness together with a rather charming picnic scene. Within moments the alarm bells start ringing. Suddenly the Doctor’s age has jumped by a couple of hundred years. His little speech sounds like someone saying “goodbye” for the last time. So it proves to be, as he’s summoned to the lakeside by someone in an astronaut’s costume. Then shot. My heart reached my mouth at this point, and stayed there as the Doctor started to regenerate. It nearly exited my mouth when he was then shot again, and died. No tricks, no last minute reprieve. As has been threatened in the publicity, one of our team did indeed die. No coming back from this one, especially after W. Morgan Sheppard turned up with a petrol can. I spent an entire day trying to place where I’d seen him before, and eventually it clicked. It’s probably not deliberate, but the idea of one of Babylon 5’s soul-hunters turning up just at the moment our central hero breathes his last… well, it’s a nice tip of the hat to an American SF series that did so much to revive interest in the genre during the nineties. I also find it resonant that deep in the American desert, a hugely charismatic cult figure beloved by many is given a viking funeral by his best mates. I wonder if Steven Moffat’s a Gram Parsons fan?

Thank god for a traditional Moffat time-travel twist, then. Within seconds  the Doctor’s back. Two hundred years younger, and utterly mystified as to why all his friends are so angry with him. River’s beautiful “even for you, this is cold” moment was another highlight, as was Amy’s desolation. Karen Gillan’s grief over the Doctor’s body moments before was so real, so heartbreaking, that it actually felt offensive when he turned up again with a straw sticking out of his mouth.

It’s remarkable the way this first episode uses familiar characters to explore unfamiliar territory. We’ve never seen the Doctor’s friends angry with him for such a concentrated period of time. We’ve never seen him so wrong-footed (that moment where he attempts to claim superiority while so obviously knowing nothing at all). We’ve certainly never seen the focus of the series shift so comprehensively away from the Doctor that he has to poke his head into a scene to draw attention back to himself. While hanging upside down. As ever, Matt Smith nails this remarkable new version of The Doctor to the point where I think – I really do think – that he might well have displaced the blessed Troughton as my favourite Doctor. The line that did it this time was (and I paraphrase) “I’m doing something terribly clever and none of you are even up here to be impressed. Honestly, what’s the point in having you?” He’s such a little boy, always keen to be at the centre of things, wide-eyed and impressed by the world. But only if he has some chums to be impressed with him.

Things began to get seriously disturbing when we got to 1969. A return of a Moffat favourite with the freaky child’s voice on the tape-recording (hello, “Empty Child”), and a welcome return to Doctor Who for Stuart Milligan (“Dreamland” seems mere moments and an eternity away now). Not that Nixon really looked like Nixon. Or indeed, sounded like him. Even Frank Langella was more convincing, and that’s saying something. Mind you, Nixon these days seems to have existed entirely as a caricature of himself. It’s as if even with acres of footage of the real thing, we’re content to remember the tics and the impressions. Still, he got across the essence of the man, albeit one who was oddly ineffectual. Battlestar Galactica’s very own Mark Sheppard is clearly the alpha male in the White House at this point, taking charge and putting Tricky Dicky in the background. I’m amused to find Nixon tape-recording his own phone conversations though. Presumably that one’ll go missing or be rendered unintelligble as well.

As for our monsters this week… well, the Silence are the freakiest we’ve had for quite some time. I believe they’re (in part) based on Munch’s “The Scream”, which presumably is why when they took out the poor innocent in the washroom they began to look like the painting. Sucking away someone’s life essence and then rendering any witness unable to remember what’s happened… that’s something new. Karen, Arthur and Alex were all called upon to switch-back between terror and normality within seconds this week, and they all managed it effortlessly. I’ve said before that the teaming of Eleven, Amy and Rory is one of the finest we’ve had in years. Adding River to the mix makes it almost perfect. We’re blessed with a group of actors who quite obviously love working together, who spark off each other even in the simplest scenes. When you’ve got that, you’re off and running.

Speaking of River…

In amongst all the mayhem, this week’s episode found time for one of the things that Doctor Who does best – when it just… stops, and concentrates on a tiny human moment. River’s conversation with Rory as she tries to pick the lock was one of those. I’m not sure what the opposite of a foreshadowing is, as she manages to refer back to events we’ve already seen, but which have yet to happen for her. “He’s not even going to recognise me. And I think that’ll kill me”. We know that’s true, because we’ve seen it. With every one of her appearances I find myself resenting that first two-parter more and more. A character so rich, so full of life, so much fun, and we know that we’re destined to lose her. Because we’ve already seen it. Good lord, but that’s smart writing.

All that, and a moment of elegance for Rory as he responds and empathises with everything River’s saying, because something similar has happened to him, once removed. I’ll keep saying this – Arthur Darvill is one of the show’s greatest assets. Never flashy, never showy, but absolutely the perfect audience-identification figure. “Rory, would you mind going with River?” “Yeah. A bit!”. Very nice. Very nice indeed.

The surprises kept on coming. That console room, as last seen in “The Lodger”. Amy’s little revelation to the Doctor, at the most inconvenient moment. Her sudden willingness to pick up a gun and try to kill a child, in order to save the man who means so much to her. Does she even realise the irony in that, given what she’s just revealed? Could it possibly be her own child, several years in the future? How will our heroes even be able to carry on for the rest of the season, if all of this is going to lead up to the death of the central character? As we heard back in Flesh and Stone, can time be rewritten? Will next week perform a traditional Moffat two-parter left turn, refusing to pick up where we left off?

It’s tantalising, fascinating, and I’m more pleased than I can say to have it back. Welcome back, Doctor Who. See you next week.

Dated a Nestene Duplicate Once. Swappable head, kept things fresh.

So here we are. Thirteen weeks have just flown by, haven’t they? Three and a bit months ago I sat down to watch the new season of Doctor Who with no idea of what to expect. We’d just come off the back of going on for five years worth of one production teams vision. It felt like it was time for a change. Did we get it? Hell, yes.

Prisoner Zero, Star Whales. Tonka Daleks. Weeping Angels. Fish pretending to be vampires. In Venice. The Valeyard (it is, you know). Silurians. Vincent Van Gogh. A Footballing Doctor. The Great Monster Team-Up of 2010. It’s been a hell of ride. The Big Bang (BBC1, Sat) was where we would see if there was any big pay-off waiting for those of us who’d stuck with it for the entire season, hoping  it would all tie up neatly at the last.

And did it?

As I said thirteen weeks ago, What do you think?

Of course it did.

Taking The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang as a two-part finale we were presented with a season conclusion that managed to reference back to ten out of the previous eleven episodes, told a rollicking story, and also turned a simple, ordinary man – one much battered by fate in his previous appearances – into something rather extraordinary. After all of the talk of Amy Pond being the focal point of the season, Rory was the one who walked away with it all in his pocket.

He had to take the long way round, mind.  Dying twice, then reincarnated as an unwitting footsoldier in the service of an alliance of the Doctor’s oldest enemies.  There are echoes of Bracewell several weeks earlier in Victory of The Daleks. Bracewell loses an arm to enemy fire and discovers his true nature. Rory discovers his when his arm becomes an enemy weapon in itself.

In hanging onto his humanity, Rory becomes the beating heart that drives Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who. In choosing to watch over the woman he loves for nearly two thousand years, Rory becomes the true stuff of legend. A hero. A myth. A fairytale. And as with all the best fairytales, the little man with the heart of gold gets the beautiful princess at the end.

It was all laid out before us in the pre-publicity of course. Every single interview Steven gave, he emphasised that this was going to be the season where Doctor Who trod the path of fairy tales and dreamstuff. It did that, to be sure. I can’t remember a season of Who that ever wrong-footed me to the extent that this one has. I also can’t ever remember a season of Who that ended on a note that seemed so perfect, so logical, so bloody right as this.

It’s only a tv show, they say. Absolutely true. But Doctor Who is so much more than just a tv show to me. It gets under the skin, into your brain. Into your heart. And it stays there, which is why when it gets it so spectacularly on the button as this finale did, I pretty much got up and did a little dance of happiness around the room at the end.

Box falls out of sky. Man falls out of box. Man eats fish custard. From that moment, I was sold. I continued to be sold as week by week Eleven proved to be compassionate, barmy, irrationally angry. Insensitive, tactless. Huggable. Wise. Gentle. And just for a moment this week when it looked as if The Doctor was going to be completely written out of his own world, I knew I didn’t want to lose him. He’s a character in a tv show. But he’s the best character in the greatest tv show in the world, and I’ve loved pretty much every minute I’ve spent in his company this year. It’s been a bloody long time since I was able to say that.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you get used to looking for the little moments that save the most inept and badly written stories. There weren’t any inept stories this year, but there were a couple that fell pretty far short of impressive.

It’s the nature of series television. You can’t have thirteen perfect shows out of thirteen. But I’ll bet you that the ones that I thought weren’t that striking weren’t the same as the ones you thought weren’t any cop. That’s Who in a nutshell, right there. It’s yours, and it’s mine. And what you get out of it is equally as valid as what I get out of it. What I got out of it was a brand new face in the role who saved those less-than-spectacular stories in any number of surprising ways. Even when the shows weren’t great, Matt was. If he’s this good now, he’ll be terrifyingly magnificent next year. I can’t wait to see where he goes now.

As with so many occasions in the past The Doctor steps up and sacrifices everything to heal the hurt. Because that’s what he does. The clue is in the name. In rebooting the universe, he deletes himself. He’s forgotten. And in a season which is all about memory, it’s an act of remembering that brings him back.

The crack in time eats people’s history, makes them forget. Amy has her past erased completely, which draws Eleven to her. As he says, “The girl who didn’t make sense. How could I resist?”

The clerics are erased. They get forgotten. Several episodes later, exactly the same thing happens to Rory. The Doctor points out  if even one person remembers, then miracles can happen. When Amy begins to remember, Rory takes the first step back to humanity. Meanwhile, River keeps the faith. In gifting her diary as a wedding present (albeit one that’s now full of blank pages), Amy saves the Doctor. One person remembers. And that’s enough. It was all there, right from the first moments of the season, hiding in plain sight. What a great pay-off.

Meanwhile, Matt Smith showed yet another side to his Eleventh Doctor. Shot by a not-yet-back-to-full-strength Dalek, he’s on the verge of death. But he carries on.

In the scene between Eleven and Amy as he sits slumped in the Pandorica, you see a man with the weight of ages on his shoulders. The eyes, so full of pain, but so gentle and compassionate. Simple farewells, quietly said. But those few sentences spoke more to me than any number of grandstanding speeches with swelling emotional music.

To switch within seconds from fez-wearing, time-hopping, mop-wielding maniac to your best friend, dying in front of your eyes but maintaining all the dignity he can muster – how can you not love this man?

Sterling support – as ever – came from Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill. We would appear to be heading into a Christmas Special with something we’ve never, ever had before. A husband and wife team on board the Tardis. Forty seven years in, and they’re still finding new plot avenues to explore. How good is that?

Amy… well, she seems to divide people somewhat. I’ve heard some appalling accusations flung against the character. She’s a cypher. She’s there to provide an image of woman-in-her-place, wanting nothing more than cosy domesticity, home and hearth. Sorry folks, but I don’t see that at all. Amy’s been wonderful from one end of the series to the other.

She started the season walloping our hero with a cricket bat. She ended it by not only bringing him back into the world, but saving us all from the terror of a fez-wearing Doctor for the entirety of the next season. In between, Karen Gillan took the tried-and-tested companion template, and she reshaped it. She screamed, yes. Amy was a damaged, broken little girl at the start of the year. She ended it a confident, wise young woman, heading off on the best honeymoon anyone could ever hope so. Got her time machine, got her boys. Her work here is so not done, and I couldn’t be happier.

As in all the best weddings, you need something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. If you watched on Saturday you’ll know how well that line paid off. If you didn’t give a little cheer when Eleven popped his head out of the Tardis door in a magnificently foppish dress, then led an army of children in some of the silliest dancing ever seen on television… well, then you didn’t. But I did. Give me a series that takes the time out between the heavy stuff for moments like that, any day of the week.

In conclusion then, did this season live up to the impossible hopes people had placed on it? Those of us who wanted a massive change from what had gone before were watching with a critical eye. Those who loved the previous era were watching with an equally critical eye. Eleven following Ten was almost as much of a crucial nexus point in Who’s continued existence as when Patrick Troughton said “yep, I’ll give it a go” back in ’66, and ensured that the series didn’t finish when William Hartnell did.

It could have failed. It could have fallen flat on its little face. It didn’t. This season was magical. It was indeed a fairytale, with a happy ending. For many money, Season Fnarg (or 31, or Series 5, or whatever you want to call it) was the single finest series of Who we’ve ever had. It could have been written directly for me, so accurately did it hit my own personal idea of What I Like About Doctor Who.  That little boy who I let out for a trot to enjoy Who the way I used to be able to do was well satisfied this year. So was the grown up me. Oh, yes.

Best of all? There are still unanswered questions out there. What is the silence? When will it fall? Who is that mysterious voice in The Tardis? Will we ever see the beginning of River’s story?

Even better than that, though –  we’ve got a Tardis team heading off out into the universe to have fantastic adventures together. I’ll be there. You couldn’t keep me away. I hope you’ll be there too.

Who takes The Pandorica, takes The Universe

Whoof. Where to start? Where on earth do I start?

I normally review each week’s Doctor Who on the Sunday night after initial broadcast. Usually I find 24 hours is enough time to mull over anything I might want to say and to form it into something that (hopefully) makes some sort of sense. I couldn’t do it this week.

The Pandorica Opens (BBC1, Sat) was just… too big. Not in terms of physical scale (the most of it took place in just a very few sets, with a bit of location work on a very special site indeed). Nope, in terms of what it did, how it did it, and the ideas it was playing with… that’s what tripped me up. I’m still not sure I’ve altogether come to grips with it. I probably won’t until this weekend when the conclusion airs. For now, I must go with my gut reaction on the night which was… whoof.

From about thirty minutes in my hand strayed up to my mouth in a “oh, my word” sort of gesture. It stayed there for the next fifteen minutes. As the episode concluded that hand was finally brought down, but only to grip tightly to the arm of the sofa because I was actually trembling slightly. I’d been so tensed up that I’d almost forgotten to breathe.

We knew this was going to be the start of something big, of course. It had to be. Steven Moffat’s been claiming as much in interviews for months, with comments like “this is the one where all the wheels come off” or “everything that he’s ever run from is about to land on the Doctor’s head”. Thing is, the last fifteen years or so of following series television has left me with a deep-seated distrust of the big season finale. What you usually get is something huge in the first season. Second season, they feel the need to top it so they go bigger and grander, with splashy effects and gigantic explosions everywhere. The next year, the cycle repeats. By the time you reach season 5 or so there’s nowhere to go. The characters say “this threat is the biggest we’ve ever faced. It could end the universe”. And we shrug and say “so? Bigger than the biggest threat you ever faced and which could end the universe around about this time last year?” Joss Whedon spotted this and actually had Xander pass comment to that effect within the narrative of Buffy. When even the characters themselves are becoming blase, it’s time to rethink.

Doctor Who’s more or less gone this route since 2005. Huge Dalek menace in year one. Daleks vs Cybermen in the big punch up in year two. The Doctor’s evil nemesis returns, becomes ruler of the world and wipes out a tenth of the world’s population in the process for year three. Year four, it’s Daleks again, only this time they don’t just become rulers of the world, they nick it as well. Oh, and there’s an attempt to wipe out reality. Last year, Gallifrey reappeared. The Time Lords (with additional Tim Lord) showed up. The Doctor’s evil nemesis suddenly became a genuine comic book supervillain and a much beloved-by-the-public Doctor breathed his last. That’s about as big as you can reasonably go. Or unreasonably.

So what to do this year? Scale it back, make it personal, focus on the small story and hopefully hit all the appropriate emotional beats that may have got lost in the sound and fury during previous finales? Well, yes. But then again, no. There was more than enough spectacle to focus on this week. Roman Soldiers! Stone’enge! An exciting Horseback sequence! A Headless Cyberman (who was still highly effective, despite being literally ‘armless)! Thousands upon thousands of spaceships!

You know what? All window dressing. Every last bit of it. Because for me it all came down to the way those disparate threads started to weave together, as I’d hoped they would throughout this season. When the BBC ident came up at the start the last thing I expected was a return visit to Vincent Van Gogh. Or Winston and Bracewell. Or Liz 10. I knew that River was going to be back. She told us so back in episode 5, apart from anything else. Everything else before those credits – continuity overload, but all there for a reason. All there in the service of one thing, and one thing only. The story. All of a sudden those disparate visits made by the Doctor over the last eleven weeks seem to form into one seamless narrative, and it was a joy to watch it happen.

That said, on first viewing I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the next section of the story (from Eleven and Amy arriving in Roman Britain to the big Rory reveal, basically) didn’t quite ring true. It all seemed a bit glib, everything seemed to happen far too quickly. Silly me. By the end of the episode I was kicking myself. Of course, it’s all a massive trap. Designed for one person. So of course it’s going to be designed to get him there with maximum expediency and minimum fuss. Couple that with the strange, dreamlike feel that’s pervaded through most of this season and I’m beginning to think that this time next week I’m going to be attempting to come to grips with just how much of the season was real (at least, in narrative terms), and how much was dragged out of the hyperactive imagination of young Miss Pond.

Know that feeling when you’re dreaming where you leap from one place to the other, with no regard to the mechanics of getting there – but it doesn’t seem to matter? That’s what that whole sequence felt like, especially the Cyber Attack. There’s more to this than meets the mind’s eye, that’s for sure. I’m certain when the bigger picture is revealed I’m going to feel like a complete berk. Just this once though, I don’t mind a bit, because you needed that whole sequence in order to bring in the not-unexpected-at-all-return-of-Rory.

Said unexpected return was followed in short order by yet another candidate for favourite moment of the season, delivered (as every moment this year has been) by Matt Smith, exuding a natural eccentricity that you just can’t fake. More so than anyone since Tom, you get the feeling that what you’re seeing on screen is simply an extension of what the performer is like as a person. It’s just a bonus that Matt is such a great actor as well. Delivering machine-gun dialogue that you could sing, touting a ridiculous prop and then wandering off camera for a moment, he comes wandering back in and tests the reality of Rory-reincarnated by prodding him with a finger. The way Arthur Darvill counters this by rocking backwards and then back into the same position makes a great scene even better. It’s then capped by “So, how’ve you been?” followed by Rory’s perfect comeback. All while Amy’s crashed out in front of them, almost incidental to the scene.

Almost immediately after this Rory’s agonising is stopped short in what at first seems like a brutally callous manner, with a bellow of “oh, shaddup!” from Eleven – only for him to then reveal that his hearts are as big as they ever were. Rory heads off, man with a mission, and it’s in the simple act of handing the ring over to him that things start to unravel for The Eleventh Doctor. He’s been trying to sort out Rory and Amy’s relationship ever since the series started (and which has been coloured by his presence for well over a decade by the time The Eleventh Hour really gets underway). Now he unwittingly sets the events in motion which will lead to Amy’s seemingly fatal meeting at the end of the episode (I don’t mind admitting that there was a certain “Noooooooo!” from me at that point). It’s terribly sad that while this is happening he’s in no position to help, because the ultimate fanboy teamup has happened at last.

Ever imagined a Doctor Who story where you team up multiple threats to take out The Doctor? It happens here. Moffat completely blindsided me here – you could probably have heard the shriek of “AUTONS!!!!” from the moon when the soldier’s hands dropped away to reveal those guns. I genuinely, honestly had no idea it was coming. I knew that the Tonka Daleks would have to turn up again. That was obvious from the inconclusive way they disappeared at the end of Victory of The Daleks. I suspected the Cybermen might. I didn’t expect The Sontarans (beautifully represented by a returning Christopher Ryan, in a remarkably sickly looking makeup). I definitely didn’t expect The Hoix. Or The Judoon. Or The Silurians. Or The Roboforms. A masterful trawl through the wardrobe department, and one in the eye surely for people who claim that Steven’s been trying to negate everything about RTD’s years on the show. If you’re trying to make people forget it ever happened, you wouldn’t be bringing back one of the definitive performances of the era, would you? Christopher Ryan makes every line count, as does a doubtless rolling-in-overtime Nicholas Briggs.

It’s all been the perfect trap, laid to ensnare the one man that this bunch have in common. They’ve all been beaten by The Doctor. You’d expect them to join forces at some point in order to take him out once and for all,  but in this case the alliance has been formed for an altogether different reason. They’ve united to save The Universe. Because the one thing that will seemingly cause the destruction of everything… is the one man who spends his life trying to  ensure that doesn’t happen.

The Doctor falls, finally. The most defeated we’ve ever seen him, panic and despair colliding in his voice as he pleads for the future of everything. “Only The Doctor can control the Tardis”, grates a Tonka Dalek. Is this a mistake on the part of the Daleks, or is River really more than she seems? Is she genuinely a future incarnation of The Doctor himself?

At this point it looks like we’ll never know. River is seemingly trapped in the Tardis as it explodes. The Doctor’s wailing cries are shut off as The Pandorica closes. Amy lies dying in the arms of revenant Rory. And in a moment of pure sensitivity from Murray Gold, the music stops. Everything goes deathly still as – one by one – the planets begin to wink out.

To be continued.

Right now, I’m behaving like a six year old boy. Want it to be Saturday nooooooowwwwww! As of this moment, Doctor Who has left me convinced that episode will never be topped. Except I have a feeling that it will, in the very next instalment. But will we pick up where we left off, or will it be one of Steven’s traditional second-part-left-turns?

There’s a lot to get through next week. The nature of the crack. Who is that saying “Silence Will Fall”? What happened to River? Is Amy alive? Does any spark of the real Rory remain after this? How much of this is even real? And will The Doctor manage to escape and undo what everyone thinks is his fault in the first place? Is that a time-hopping Doctor who pops up every now and then in the preceding stories? Is Amy even real? Why does Baby Amy’s house door not only look like the Tardis door, but bear a distinct resemblance to the entrance of the Tardis-like spaceship from last week’s episode? Am I reading too much into things?

Probably.

But I bet you are too.

Squeaky Fun Time!

This one’s a bit spoilery. Be warned, because it’s not possible to discuss Saturday’s Doctor Who without talking about the last ten minutes. Oh, those last ten minutes. Cold Blood (BBC1, Saturday) was a heartbreaker. It took a while to get there, but it more than paid off.

However, one thing needs to be said first – Stephen Moore. Stephen Bloody Moore in Doctor Who! I think I’m in heaven. Those hangdog, kindly eyes peering out from under heavy Silurian makeup just about papered over any cracks (ho-ho) that this episode might have had. I love that man. One of my very favourite actors, and I’ve waited a long time for him to turn up on screen. He’s already been inducted into the family via the audio adventures, and here he is on my telly. Bliss.

So – having spent a week waiting to see if the second part of this adventure would pay off, how did it all work out? Weeeeell… tell you one thing, The Doctor should just turn around and go somewhere else any time the Silurians turn up, because it never, ever works out. You wonder why he bothers trying to broker a peace between Reptile and Ape. The two viewpoints would appear to be fundamentally opposed.

That said, some great work was done this week showing that there are good people and hot-heads on both sides. Ambrose acts out of fear for her family, Restac acts out of an urge to protect her race. Both are blinded by prejudice, and both undo the good work done by others. It seems to be a constant of any story involving this lot – at least during the Pertwee years – that it all goes west just as the big breakthrough occurs (Warriors of The Deep bucked that trend somewhat by being a bloodbath from one end to the other). As a love letter to the work of Barry Letts, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, this worked terribly well. I think Mac would have loved the idea of a pyrrhic victory in which humanity gets a thousand years to sort itself out.

Thankfully, we seem to be off to a good start – just look at Elliot’s repulsed reaction when he finds out what his Mum has done. Hopefully Ambrose will take to heart Eleven’s little pep-talk. I get the feeling that there’s a lot of work to be done there because quite frankly I can’t remember liking a character in Doctor Who less. Pretty much at every turn, Ambrose gets it completely and fundamentally wrong. Here’s hoping that Elliot proves to be substantially different in his outlook. He certainly seems to get the message. He’ll be splendid.

It’s interesting how this first season of Moffat’s reign seems to be revisiting various themes from the immediately preceding era, and twisting them slightly. Here, we revisit the idea of word-of-mouth and storytelling being used to create something powerful. It’s slightly longer term than Martha’s year as a mobile Jackanory unit, but the principle is the same. In this case, we’re going from generation to generation in the hopes that by the time our scaly friends re-emerge, they’ll be greeted with a more understanding, caring humanity. Unfortunately, I suspect they’ll re-emerge to be confronted by all the weaponry that humanity has spent the intervening thousand years developing to wipe them out.

Thankfully, Eldane has Nasreen and Ambrose’s kindly, wise old dad to show him that not everyone is irredeemable. I’ve loved the supporting cast in this two-parter, but Meera Syal needs special praise. As an example of just how good humanity can be, Nasreen’s been unbeatable. The look of pain that passes briefly over her face before she gives up her life’s work is merely one exquisite example of how a great actor, well cast, can lift a story up several notches just by being there. Top stuff.

Likewise, despite bringing back bad memories of Frank Ashmore’s return in “V” as his identical brother (“we were cloned from the same zygote”), Neve MacIntosh did sterling work as two equally unpleasant characters. Alaya taunts her way to what she thinks is a martyr’s death. Restac… quite apart from blowing the fragile peace wide apart, she also… hang on a minute, I’ve got something in my eye.

Oh, Rory. Poor, poor Rory. He dies a heroic death. And then it’s all undone mere seconds later. And it’s all The Doctor’s fault. As ever, curiosity is his downfall. If he hadn’t stopped to investigate the crack in time, and had done what he’s promised over and over again to do – to keep innocents safe – things might have been alright. But once again, as in the best tragedies the hero has one flaw that brings him down. I don’t doubt but that this is the start of everything landing on Eleven’s head by the end of the series. Rory is merely the first to fall.

I’m going to miss Arthur Darvill. In a mere five episodes he’s worked miracles. I loved the dynamic between the three regulars and last night it actually hurt to watch Rory die. It hurt even more as slowly, inexorably, he faded out of existence. The scene in the Tardis between Eleven and Amy as she roars with inconsolable grief then slowly changes to her usual happy-go-lucky, carefree self – it broke my heart. Yours too, probably. Matt Smith and Karen Gillan played a total blinder, Eleven desperately trying to save Rory’s memory, Amy’s inability to do so, and the look of devastation that passes across his features as he realises the battle is lost. Beautifully played and I’m unashamed to admit that there was a tear in my eye.

When Donna “dies”, she completely forgets everything about her new life, and it’s left to everyone else to carry the burden of remembering what’s been lost. Here, Rory dies and nobody remembers. It’s a burden The Doctor has to carry alone. His race, wiped out of existence. An individual, fallen in his service. I’d say that was equally as important to him, or at least to the character as I like to think of him.

But hang on – the engagement ring is still in existence. I wonder if this might be more than a little significant? Surely it would have gone too? I hope so, because I’d dearly like to think that Rory will turn up again. It might be a harbinger of disaster if he does, but given the theme of the season seems to be that time can be rewritten, undone, changed – who knows?

One thing’s certain – no good can come of this. At the end of the episode time has rewritten itself. Future Amy’s alone on the hillside, The Doctor is left clutching a fragment of shattered Tardis shell. It’s all downhill from here. Just four weeks to go. Where do we go from here? I still have no idea. But I’ll be counting down the days until next Saturday. I can’t wait to find out.