A Good Man Goes to War: Rory, an Army and Demons Run

Here’s a thing Doctor Who doesn’t usually do: build an army. The show’s whole approach is one clever man with a screwdriver talking his way out of a room, and it’s spent decades being faintly appalled by force. So an episode that opens with the Doctor calling in debts across the universe to put a war party together is a big statement, and the sharpest thing about A Good Man Goes to War is that it turns out to be an argument against the very thing it looks like it’s celebrating. It’s also the episode where a question the show’s been dangling for three years finally gets answered, and the answer is very good. I loved this one, and the more I think about it the cleverer it gets.

It starts with a little bit of misdirection that I really admired. Amy’s in a cell, holding her newborn, telling the baby about the man who’s coming for them, brave and unstoppable, the best man she knows, and every word of it is written so I’d assume she means the Doctor. She doesn’t. She means her husband, and when the scene cuts away it lands on Rory in Roman armour rather than a bow tie, which is the episode telling me in its first couple of minutes whose story this actually is. After last week’s ending I was expecting the Doctor to be front and centre, and he isn’t, not yet anyway. It’s a lovely bit of sleight of hand, and the first sign the episode’s going to keep doing this to me all the way through.

The last centurion

So there’s Rory Williams, in full centurion kit, standing on the bridge of a Cyberman ship asking very politely where his wife is. He gets told, condescendingly, that the Cybermen don’t negotiate, and behind him, through the window, their fleet starts blowing up, and he doesn’t even turn round to look at it. He just asks his question again. It’s a magnificent bit of showing off and I grinned all the way through it. Rory has quietly become one of the best-served characters on this show, and I’d never have guessed that a couple of years ago.

The joke of Rory used to be that he was the one who got left behind, the nervous boyfriend, the one who died and didn’t stay dead. And now he’s the man who waited two thousand years outside a box for her, and the show has stopped treating that as a punchline. This scene is him being introduced as something properly frightening, and it earns every second. He’s not angry in it, which is the scary part, just patient, the way you’d expect from somebody who’s already waited longer than anyone should. Arthur Darvill plays it dead straight, no wink at the camera, and that’s why it works as well as it does.

It also sets up what the whole episode is going to be about, without saying it out loud. Here’s a gentle man, a nurse, who’s become a legend to the Cybermen in about a minute because of who he travels with and what’s been taken from him. Hold on to that, because it’s exactly the same question the episode’s about to ask about the Doctor, only with a much bigger fortress and a much nastier answer. Rory’s been the quiet one all series, and this is the episode where that pays off.

Calling in favours

Amy has given birth on Demons Run, an asteroid fortress full of the Church’s clerics under Colonel Manton and the Headless Monks, an order who took their vows so literally that they’ve had their heads removed, and keep the hoods up so nobody has to look. Against them the Doctor brings a collection of people who owe him. Madame Vastra, a Silurian living in Victorian London who’s been eating Jack the Ripper, with her companion Jenny, who’s handy with a sword and handier with a one-liner. Commander Strax, a Sontaran serving out a penance as a nurse, which is the kind of joke that shouldn’t work and completely does. Dorium Maldovar, blue and greedy and reluctant. And a gang of others, from Spitfire pilots to a pirate ship.

That pirate ship is Captain Henry Avery and his son Toby, still crewing the alien vessel they ended up with in The Curse of the Black Spot, and that’s a payoff for an episode I’d pretty much written off. It made me think this series is playing a longer game than any one week lets on, which is a nice feeling to have. The trouble is that the army is more fun as a promise than as a fight. Vastra, Jenny and Strax are so good together that I resented how little time they get, and the Headless Monks are a superb design that the episode gives almost nothing to do, beyond standing about looking terrifying, which they do very well, admittedly. I’d watch a whole episode of the Victorian three.

Colonel Runaway

The assault is over almost before it starts, and that’s on purpose. The Doctor takes an armed fortress without a shot being fired, and then he makes Manton order his own troops to run, repeating the word until it sticks, so the man will be known for the rest of his life as Colonel Runaway. It’s brilliant, and ugly, and deeply unpleasant, and the episode knows it is. River puts it best when she finally turns up, that “Doctor” means healer on most worlds, and on a lot of others it’s starting to mean something else entirely, something closer to warrior. The reason there’s a fortress full of terrified soldiers here at all, armed to the teeth and guarding a baby against him, is him. His reputation built this place, and one of his enemies has worked out that the best weapon to use against the Doctor is somebody he loves.

Lorna Bucket makes the same point in miniature, and she’s the bit that stays with me longest. She’s a girl from the Gamma Forests who met the Doctor once as a child and joined the Church just to get to see him again, and she ends up dying on the floor of Demons Run having never really been noticed by him. He tells her he remembers her, because she’s dying and it’s kind, and I’m honestly not sure that he does. It’s a small, mean, honest scene about what it costs other people to have been briefly interesting to this man. And the episode drops it in without making any fuss about it at all, which somehow makes it hit harder.

Melody Pond

And then the trap closes, and the trap is that there was never anything to win. The baby Amy’s been holding has been Flesh since before the Doctor got there, the same stuff that took Amy’s place in The Almost People, and Kovarian has the real one. It dissolves in Amy’s arms while she’s holding it, and Karen Gillan plays that without a shred of vanity, and it’s genuinely hard to watch. The army was a distraction. The Doctor did exactly what his enemies needed him to do, at exactly the speed they needed, because they knew he’d come.

Then River arrives, having refused to come any earlier, and the answer finally lands. Melody Pond. In the language of the Gamma Forests there’s no word for pond, because the only water in the forest is the river, and that’s the line Idris gave Rory in The Doctor’s Wife as something he’d need to know one day. Here’s the day. River Song is Melody Pond, Amy and Rory’s daughter, conceived on the TARDIS in the vortex on their wedding night, which is why Kovarian wanted her so badly. It’s a proper answer, one that reaches backwards and makes things better rather than replacing them.

Every scene River’s played opposite these people has a second meaning now. Her flirting with the Doctor, which always ran a bit hot, is suddenly a much stranger and sadder shape, and her death in that library in Forest of the Dead, which from his side has already happened, is now the death of Amy Pond’s baby. The Doctor works it out before anyone tells him and goes rushing off, and the look on his face is either delight or panic, very obviously both. I had to sit for a minute after that one.

Rating: 4.5/5. I loved it, and I can’t wait to see where they go with River now.