Tag:

Alex Kingston

The Name of the Doctor: The One Who Broke the Promise

by Hutch Morzaria May 18, 2013

written by Hutch Morzaria

Season finales in this era tend to be enormous, noisy and slightly hollow, a lot of running and a big reveal and a reset. “The Name of the Doctor” is enormous and noisy and it is not hollow at all, because for once the answer is something the show has genuinely been building rather than something it thought of recently. It solves the Impossible Girl question properly, it goes to the one place the Doctor cannot go, and it ends on the best final shot the programme has produced in years. It also delivers the title’s promise by refusing it, which is the correct call.

Stealing a TARDIS, and a conference call

The pre-credits sequence is the boldest thing in it: Clara, in monochrome, on Gallifrey, watching a young man and his wife about to steal a museum piece, and telling him he’s picked the wrong one. The navigation system’s knackered on that one, she says. But you’ll have much more fun. Dropping a companion into the First Doctor’s escape from Gallifrey, in archive footage, is exactly the kind of anniversary-adjacent flourish that could be unbearable, and it isn’t, because it’s doing real plot work. She’s been there. She’s been in all of it.

The structure that follows is a nice piece of business, a dream conference call linking Vastra, Jenny, Strax, Clara and River Song, all asleep in different centuries, sitting round a table that doesn’t exist. River appears as a data ghost, still saved in the Library’s computer since Forest of the Dead, which is a lovely way to get her into a finale without undoing her death. The news that brings them together is that somebody has found out where the Doctor’s grave is. Jenny is murdered mid-call, in her own house, by something she never sees, a properly shocking beat even given that the episode restores her later, and the Whispermen are a good, cheap monster: faceless figures in top hats who speak in rhyme and appear where they shouldn’t.

Trenzalore

The grave is on Trenzalore, the field the show has been pointing at since The Wedding of River Song, and what it looks like is superb: a battlefield full of headstones, and rising over it, vast and broken and half-buried, the TARDIS itself, grown enormous as its dimensions leak in death. That’s a genuinely great image, and the explanation is better. There’s no body in the tomb. What’s inside is his time stream, the whole of his life, every event, laid open as a scar of light. A wound in reality shaped like everything he ever did. The Great Intelligence, with Richard E. Grant back and playing it much colder than in The Snowmen, wants exactly that. Not to kill him. To walk into his own timeline and unpick it from the inside, turning every victory into a defeat, retroactively, everywhere at once. Across the universe, stars start going out as lives he saved stop being saved. It’s a genuinely nasty piece of villainy, and it costs the Intelligence its own existence to do, which the character accepts without hesitation. Hatred as a completed project.

Before that, there’s the moment the episode is built around: the Doctor being told where they’re going, and simply refusing. He knows what Trenzalore is. He has known since Dorium told him, he has spent a year not thinking about it, and when Clara asks why he won’t go he tells her that a time traveller must never visit his own grave, and then sits down on the TARDIS steps and cries. Matt Smith plays it small and wretched, and it’s the most frightened this incarnation has ever been. Vastra, Jenny and Strax have been captured and he goes anyway, which makes the whole finale an act performed under protest by a man walking towards the one thing he has arranged his life to avoid. Den of Geek noted how much of the hour runs on that dread rather than on incident, and it’s the right read.

The impossible girl, and the man at the end

So Clara does the only thing available and follows him in. Which is the answer. She splinters into a thousand versions of herself scattered the length of his life, every incarnation and every era, each one born to find him and save him and, almost always, to die doing it and never be remembered. The barmaid in Victorian London. The girl in the Dalek Asylum. Hundreds more nobody ever saw. It’s a satisfying solve because it works backwards rather than forwards: it doesn’t require Clara to have been secretly special all along, it makes her ordinary and then explains that her ordinariness was scattered through history by an act of deliberate sacrifice. She isn’t a trap or a trick. She’s a woman who jumped. The one soft spot is the rescue, since the Doctor goes in after her, which he has spent the whole episode being told is fatal, and it turns out to be survivable when the plot needs it to be. It works in the moment and doesn’t bear a second look. River’s goodbye lands better. She’s been standing there the whole episode as something only Clara can see, and when he finally admits he can see her too, that he always could and has been avoiding it because looking at her hurts, it’s the most honest he’s been about that relationship in four years.

Then the last ninety seconds. Inside his own timeline, among the shades of every previous face, there is someone standing with his back turned who shouldn’t be there. Clara doesn’t recognise him. The Doctor does, and he does not want to discuss it. He explains, tightly, that the name “Doctor” is a promise he made and that this man is the one who broke it, and that whatever he did, he did in the name of peace and sanity and not in the name of the Doctor. Then the figure turns round, and it’s John Hurt, and a caption arrives: Introducing John Hurt as the Doctor. It’s a magnificent cliffhanger, and it works because it reframes rather than contradicts. The show has spent eight years having this character insist on that name as a moral position, a word he chose, a standard he holds himself to, the thing he corrects people about. Discovering there is a life he refuses to count under it tells us something real about who he is, rather than merely turning the plot.

What it leaves behind is the wrong TARDIS, with Clara on Gallifrey telling a young man which museum piece to steal, fifty years of continuity folded into a single scene. It leaves a grave with no body, the tomb being his own time stream laid open under a TARDIS grown vast in death, which is the best image the show has produced this year. It leaves a life being unpicked, the Great Intelligence rewriting every victory into a defeat and paying with its own existence to do it. It leaves the Impossible Girl solved, an ordinary woman doing an extraordinary thing rather than a special woman explained, which is the right way round. And it leaves the man he calls his secret, a face he refuses to include in the count and a promise he says was broken, in the best closing shot in years.

Rating: 4.5/5. Big, confident and unusually disciplined for a finale of this era, with a genuine answer to a season-long question and an image of Trenzalore that more than justifies two years of build-up. The Doctor’s own survival inside the timeline is a convenience and the Whispermen are underused, but the last ninety seconds are as good a cliffhanger as this programme has ever engineered. A field of headstones, a dying ship the size of a hill, and a man standing with his back turned at the end of a life that doesn’t admit he happened.

May 18, 2013 1 comment

The Angels Take Manhattan: A Gravestone With Both Their Names

by Hutch Morzaria September 29, 2012

written by Hutch Morzaria

Two and a half years, two hundred-odd years of waiting between them, one daughter, several deaths and at least one divorce. The Ponds have had the longest and strangest run of any companions the revived show has produced, and “The Angels Take Manhattan” sends them off with an ending that is cruel, elegant, and, crucially, chosen. They are not killed. They decide. It’s not a flawless episode, and Den of Geek was fair to point out that the Angels themselves have lost some of their edge here. It is still a very fine goodbye.

A book you shouldn’t read

The conceit is the best thing in it. The Doctor is lounging in Central Park reading a battered pulp detective novel, Melody Malone, private eye in old New York, and it gradually becomes clear that the book is an account of the thing they are currently living through, written by River, from the other end. Which makes it a fixed record. Anything he reads has happened, and once he’s read a chapter he cannot change it, because knowing a future event is what locks it down. So he spends the episode desperate not to turn pages, and turning them anyway, because he needs to know. That’s a genuinely clever engine for a story about time, and it turns reading into an act of destruction. The chapter headings alone become a countdown. When he finally sees a chapter title with Amy’s name on it, the show doesn’t need to explain what it means.

Winter Quay

The Angels, meanwhile, have done something new and much worse than usual. Winter Quay is an apartment building they’ve converted into a farm. They take a person, send them back in time, and place them in a room in that building, where they live out their entire natural life alone while the Angels feed on the temporal energy of the life they should have had. At the end of it, their younger self is brought to the same building to watch them die, closing the loop. It’s the nastiest idea the Angels have ever been given, and a real escalation from the relatively clean predation of Blink. Those Angels were a burglar’s trick, a life stolen and lived somewhere else. These are livestock farmers. The moment it lands is Rory wandering the building, finding a room with his own name on the door, and inside it an old man in a bed who looks at him and recognises him and dies. Arthur Darvill plays the horror of that beautifully, and Amy arriving in time to hold the hand of a version of her husband who has spent sixty years in that room alone is the single worst thing this show has done to either of them.

River gets less room than she deserves, but what she has is sharp. She breaks her own wrist escaping an Angel’s grip and then conceals it, and when the Doctor discovers it and heals her with regeneration energy she is genuinely, coldly furious with him, both for wasting it and for the assumption that she wanted rescuing. Her explanation is the most telling thing she’s said about the two of them: she hides the damage because she has learned that he cannot stand to see her hurt, and that a man who cannot stand it will eventually stop coming. Alex Kingston plays it as a practised habit rather than a grievance, which is much worse. The Statue of Liberty being an Angel is, I’ll admit, ridiculous, several hundred tons of copper that apparently tiptoes through Manhattan without one person glancing up, and I don’t care in the slightest. It’s the right kind of stupid.

The roof, and the one they didn’t see

So they beat it the only way available, by making the loop impossible. If Rory dies now, before he can be taken, then the old man upstairs never happens, and the paradox tears the Angels’ farm apart. He climbs to the roof to jump, and Amy, having done the arithmetic, takes his hand and goes with him, because the alternative is being the woman who stood on a roof and let him. It’s a suicide pact played as a love scene, and Karen Gillan is extraordinary in it. There’s no speech. There’s an argument about whether it will work, and then her deciding that if it doesn’t, she isn’t interested in the version of her life that comes after. And it works. The paradox detonates, the Angels are wiped out, and everybody wakes up in a graveyard in the present, alive, having got away with it.

Which is when the show does the thing that makes this ending stick. There is one Angel left, in the graveyard, and it takes Rory with no warning and no fight and one blink, sending him back to 1938 for good. This time there’s no paradox available to undo it, because the book has already been written and the Doctor has already read the last page. Amy stands in front of it and asks River what the odds are that it’ll put her in the same year, in the same city, and River says she doesn’t know, and Amy decides that’s good enough. The Doctor begs her, genuinely begs, with no cleverness left, just a man asking her to stay, and she tells him she’ll be fine and to look away because she doesn’t want him to watch. Then she says his name, and lets it touch her. The AV Club singled out that plea as the most affecting thing in the hour, and it is, mostly because it’s the one moment where he has nothing to offer.

The gravestone is the punchline: Rory Arthur Williams, 1890 to 1994. And his loving wife Amelia Williams, 1894 to 1993. They got the whole life, eighty-odd years of it, together, in the wrong century, which is more than most companions get and is precisely nothing like what the Doctor wanted for them. He can’t follow, because New York in that period is so damaged by the paradox that the TARDIS can’t land there, a rule the episode states firmly and which does not entirely survive examination, since time machines are notoriously good at approaching a city from a different year and taking a train. It’s the one place the ending’s logic is doing what the ending needs rather than what the story allows. But the feeling underneath it, that he has finally lost something he cannot solve, is strong enough to carry it. Amy’s afterword, written into the last page of a book he swore he wouldn’t finish, is the right final note: a message telling him to go back and find the little girl waiting in the garden, and tell her a story about how she grows up and travels the universe and is happy.

What it leaves behind is a book that fixes whatever it describes, which turns turning a page into something you can’t take back. It leaves Winter Quay, the Angels as farmers keeping people in rooms to harvest a life they were never allowed to live, easily their most disturbing outing. It leaves a room with Rory’s name on the door, where he watches himself die of old age and Amy holds that man’s hand, brutal and completely earned by two seasons of this couple being separated by time. It leaves a choice rather than a death, since both of them go voluntarily, twice, off a roof and then in front of an Angel. Nobody takes the Ponds. They leave. And it leaves 1890 to 1994 carved on a headstone, with a Doctor standing in front of it and nothing clever left to say.

Rating: 4.5/5. A gorgeous, grim, properly upsetting farewell, shot beautifully and played to the hilt by Gillan and Darvill. The “he can’t ever land there” rule is a piece of convenient physics the story leans on harder than it can bear, and River’s material is slightly crowded out. Everything else is as good as a companion exit gets. They jumped off a roof holding hands and it wasn’t enough. So she looked at the angel, and said his name, and chose the wrong century over the right one without him.

September 29, 2012 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Day of the Moon: An Army You Can’t Remember Recruiting

by Hutch Morzaria May 21, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

The problem with a monster you forget the instant you look away is that it’s very hard to write a way of beating it. “Day of the Moon” solves that problem so elegantly that the solution is genuinely thrilling — and then spends the rest of its runtime on the most frightening half-hour Doctor Who has produced in years, plus a two-minute scene that quietly guts you.

Three Months Later

We open three months on, with Amy shot in Utah, Rory gunned down in a canyon, River throwing herself off a skyscraper, and Canton Everett Delaware III hunting all of them across America — and none of it is what it appears. It’s a ruse, elaborately staged so the Silence stop watching, and the reveal that the team have been running an operation the whole time is a good bit of misdirection after the disorientation of The Impossible Astronaut.

The tally marks have multiplied horribly. Amy’s arms are covered. Rory’s are worse. They’ve been counting encounters they cannot remember having, and the sheer density of the marks tells its own story about how thoroughly infested the world is.

The dwarf-star-alloy cell in Area 51 is a nice touch too — they’ve built the perfect prison and then locked themselves inside it, because it’s the only room on Earth the Silence can’t get into.

Canton is the quiet pleasure of the episode. Mark Sheppard plays him as a man doing an absurd job with total professionalism, and the show gives him a small, sharp bit of characterisation on the side — he was forced out of the FBI for wanting to marry the wrong person, and when Nixon asks whether the problem was that they were black, Canton confirms it and adds that he was also a man. Nixon’s baffled, non-committal reply lands the period detail far better than a speech would have.

The Orphanage

And then Amy goes to Graystark Hall, and the episode becomes something close to unbearable.

The orphanage sequence is the finest sustained horror this show has attempted. A crumbling building, a caretaker whose memory has been so thoroughly eroded he can no longer track a conversation, and words scratched into every surface by someone desperate: GET OUT. The Silence are nesting on the ceilings, in the dark, in their dozens.

Amy has a torch and a camera-phone and no way of retaining what she sees, and the show plays the whole thing with a photographic flash — light, a room full of them hanging above her, darkness, and she’s forgotten again by the time the next flash comes. It is a genuinely nasty use of the rule established last week, and Karen Gillan carries it alone.

The detail that finishes the job is the woman with the eyepatch, glimpsed through a hatch that opens in a wall where no hatch should be, who looks at Amy, says “no, I think she’s just dreaming,” and closes it again. No explanation. No follow-up. It’s the most disturbing thirty seconds of the season.

And then a photograph of Amy holding a baby, in a room she has no memory of being in.

There’s a second, quieter cruelty running underneath all of it, too. Amy has a live comms link open the entire time she’s missing, and at one point — convinced she’s about to die, and believing the Doctor is the one listening — she says a great deal about how she feels, and about Rory, and about which of them she was really waiting for. The Doctor isn’t on the other end. Rory is. Arthur Darvill plays a man hearing something he was never meant to hear and deciding, in real time and completely silently, that he is never going to mention it.

Weaponising the Moon Landing

The solution is superb, and it’s built on the monster’s own mechanism. If the Silence implant post-hypnotic suggestions that people obey without remembering why, then the trick is to give humanity a suggestion of its own. So the Doctor takes footage of a Silent saying “you should kill us all on sight” and splices it into the Apollo 11 broadcast — the single most-watched piece of film in human history.

Every person on Earth sees it. Nobody remembers seeing it. And from that moment, the entire species is carrying a standing order to destroy them on sight, which it will act on without ever knowing why. It’s ruthless, it’s clever, and it’s morally quite dark in a way the episode doesn’t dwell on — the Doctor has just committed an entire species to a genocide it can’t consent to or recall. Nobody raises it. It sits there.

It’s worth noting how neatly the solution fits the monster, though. The Silence never conquered Earth by force; they simply stood behind humanity for thousands of years, suggesting things, and let people build what they wanted built. The Doctor doesn’t out-fight them, and he doesn’t out-think them so much as out-use them — he takes the exact mechanism they’ve relied on since the Stone Age and points it back down the way it came. Beating a parasite by turning its own host against it is a genuinely satisfying shape for a resolution.

The Kiss

And then the two minutes that hurt. River kisses the Doctor. She’s been circling it for two seasons, and she finally does it, and he’s startled and delighted and completely unprepared — because he has never kissed her before. And she understands immediately what that means. Their timelines run in opposite directions. If this is the first time for him, then they are past the point where their meetings overlap, and everything ahead of her is a road where he knows her less and less. She’s just had her first kiss with him and it was, from her side, one of the last.

Alex Kingston plays the realisation and the collapse in about four seconds without saying a word about it, and it is devastating. Since her death in a library in Forest of the Dead — which for him has already happened — the show has been running this relationship backwards, and this is the first moment it lets us feel the arithmetic properly.

And then a coda that the episode barely bothers to explain: the little girl, out of the spacesuit and loose in New York six months later, collapsing in an alleyway and beginning to glow — regenerating, alone, with nobody there to see it. She’s a Time Lord, or something very like one. Not a single character in the story is present for the reveal. It’s aimed squarely at us.

What Day of the Moon Leaves Us With

Frightening, clever, and quietly cruel. Here’s what it plants:

The orphanage. Torchlight, a ceiling full of Silence, and a woman who forgets each time the light moves. The best horror set piece the show has done.
A post-hypnotic genocide. Beating the monster with its own weapon is superb plotting, and the ethics of it go deliberately unexamined.
The eyepatch woman. Glimpsed through an impossible hatch, unnamed, unexplained. A single line, and it’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about.
A photograph of a baby. Amy holding a child in a room she doesn’t remember. Combined with the pregnancy she denied, something has been done to her.
River’s arithmetic. First kiss for him, last for her. The relationship’s whole structure delivered in one silent reaction shot.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A resolution that fully earns its cliffhanger, with a horror sequence that stands with the show’s very best. It’s dense to the point of occasionally being wilfully confusing, and the little girl’s regeneration in a New York alleyway raises more questions than the two-parter answers — but the ambition is thrilling.

Tally marks up both arms, a message hidden in the moon landing, and a woman who has just worked out that her love story runs the wrong way. Somewhere out there a child in a spacesuit is regenerating in an alley, and nobody knows who she is.

May 21, 2011 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Impossible Astronaut: They Killed Him on the Beach

by Hutch Morzaria May 14, 2011

written by Hutch Morzaria

Most seasons open by establishing a threat. This one opens by killing the Doctor, on a beach, in broad daylight, about fifteen minutes in, and then spends the rest of the episode getting on with things as though that’s a perfectly reasonable way to start. “The Impossible Astronaut” is the most audacious premiere the show has attempted, and it introduces a monster so good it makes you check the corners of your own living room.

A death at the lake

Amy, Rory and River are each sent a numbered envelope in TARDIS blue, and they converge on Lake Silencio in Utah, where the Doctor is waiting in sunglasses and a deckchair, delighted with himself. Except this Doctor is eleven hundred and three years old, two centuries further along than the one they last travelled with, and he has clearly brought them here for a reason he won’t explain. Then an astronaut walks out of the water. The Doctor goes to meet it, tells his friends to stay back whatever happens, and is shot. He begins to regenerate, and the astronaut shoots him again mid-process, which stops it dead. He dies on the sand in front of the three people who love him most, and they burn his body in a boat because that’s what you do with a Time Lord. It’s a genuinely shocking sequence, played with absolute sincerity, and the episode does not offer a single reassuring wink. Fifteen minutes in, the lead character is ash.

What really sells it is the aftermath rather than the shooting. There’s no swelling music and no vow of vengeance. Three people stand on a beach and do the practical things: find a boat, gather driftwood, work out that you have to burn a Time Lord because a body that might still regenerate cannot simply be left in the ground. River is the one who knows the correct procedure, which tells you something about her that nobody in the scene stops to comment on. Amy is just wrecked. It’s a funeral staged in the first act of a season premiere, and the show plays every second of it straight.

The rule

And then, in a diner, they meet him again, a Doctor two hundred years younger, alive and cheerful and entirely ignorant. He got an envelope too. That’s the trap the season sets, and it’s a beauty. They know how he dies. They cannot tell him, because a person cannot be allowed to know their own future, and River is explicit that time would unravel. So the three of them have to travel with a man they’ve watched die, being cheerful about it, carrying the worst secret imaginable. It’s the sharpest use yet of the River Song problem. She’s spent her run being ahead of him, promising him the Pandorica in Flesh and Stone when he had no idea what she meant, and from his side she already died in a library in Forest of the Dead. Now Amy and Rory have joined her on the wrong side of the information, and Alex Kingston plays River’s weariness at it beautifully. She’s used to knowing things she can’t say. They aren’t.

Amy has a second secret of her own. She tells the Doctor she’s pregnant, and then, a scene or two later, tells him she isn’t, and the episode leaves you genuinely uncertain which of those was the lie. It’s a small hook, well buried, and it lands differently given how much this season has already established that Amy’s memory and perception are not to be relied upon. She’s been travelling since her honeymoon in A Christmas Carol, and something has plainly happened to her in the interim that neither she nor we have been let in on. Meanwhile the younger Doctor’s envelope points him to 1969, and to Richard Nixon, who is taking phone calls in the Oval Office from a terrified little girl who won’t say where she is. The period setting is superb, the most expensive-looking the show has ever been, all Utah desert and Washington marble, and Canton Everett Delaware III is a fine addition, an ex-FBI agent drafted in because he’s the only man Nixon trusts and thoroughly unimpressed by everyone in the room. Mark Sheppard plays him dry as dust. The Doctor’s approach to Nixon, which amounts to barging into the Oval Office, being arrested, and then being so obviously useful that the President keeps him, is very funny, and the episode balances the comedy against genuine dread without either curdling.

The Silence

Because the monster is the best thing here. The Silence are tall, thin, suited figures with blank grey faces somewhere between a Munch painting and a decomposing skull. They have been on Earth for as long as there have been humans. They are everywhere. They are in the room right now. And you cannot remember them, because the instant you look away the memory goes, not fades but goes, and you carry on with your day. That’s the whole rule, and like the best of this show’s monsters it’s something you can test yourself: how would you know? What would be different? Den of Geek got at the design nicely, a skeletal head on top of a Men In Black suit and tie, and the suit is doing more work than the skull. They don’t lunge and they don’t roar. They stand very still in the middle distance, in ordinary rooms, under perfectly adequate lighting, and they are considerably worse for it. That’s the detail that finishes the job, because a monster in a lounge suit looks like something that has business being where it is, something that belongs in the room and expects you to leave. The effect isn’t a creature attacking. It’s you walking in on something that was always standing there.

The episode wrings extraordinary things out of it. Amy walks into a bathroom, meets one, watches it kill a woman, and forgets all of it before she’s back through the door. She starts marking her arm with tally strokes every time she sees one, and the marks accumulate on her skin while she has no idea where they came from. It’s a brilliant, unnerving image, evidence of an encounter you cannot access. The implication is worse than the monster. If they’ve been here since the beginning and nobody can remember them, then every unexplained thing humanity has ever done might have been suggested to us by something standing just behind us.

What it leaves behind is the Doctor’s death, up front, not as a threat or a prophecy but as an on-screen killing, witnessed, with a body burned, so the season now has to earn its way out of that. It leaves a secret his friends can’t share, which is a superb engine and poisons every scene between them. It leaves the Silence, a monster you forget the moment you look away and a rule the viewer can test at home, the best new creature since the Angels. It leaves tally marks on skin, proof of something you cannot remember, which is the most chilling image the show has produced in years. And it leaves a girl in a spacesuit, with Amy firing a gun at a child because she thinks it’s the thing that kills him.

Rating: 4.5/5. A bold, gorgeous, deeply unsettling opener that trusts the audience completely. It’s dense to the point of occasionally being hard to follow, and it’s the first part of a two-parter, but the ideas here are as strong as anything the show has done. A dead Doctor burned on a beach in Utah, a President taking telephone calls from a frightened child, and monsters standing in the room that nobody alive can hold on to for more than a second. And Amy has just pulled the trigger on a little girl in a spacesuit. I genuinely have no idea what happens now.

May 14, 2011 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Flesh and Stone: Don’t Open Your Eyes

by Hutch Morzaria May 22, 2010

written by Hutch Morzaria

The second half of the Weeping Angels story does something I didn’t expect: it barely bothers with the Angels. “Flesh and Stone” resolves them almost casually and spends its real energy on something far more frightening, a crack in the wall of the universe that doesn’t kill you so much as delete the fact that you ever existed. It’s the episode where Series 5 stops being a fun new era and starts showing its teeth.

Out of the crash

We pick up from The Time of Angels with everyone about to be torn apart, and Moffat resolves it with the sort of trick he’s very good at: the Doctor shoots a gravity globe and the whole party falls up into the crashed hull of the Byzantium. It’s clever, it’s fast, and it buys the episode a much better setting, an oxygen forest growing inside a starship, all trees and dappled light and sprinklers, with an army of stone angels closing in through it. The forest is a lovely piece of design work, a vast internal biosphere gone dark, tree borgs humming quietly to themselves, shafts of emergency lighting falling through the canopy, and it gives the Angels somewhere genuinely unnerving to stand. Statues among trees work very differently from statues in a corridor: every trunk might be one, the shapes keep resolving wrongly at the edge of frame, and the camera keeps letting you check and then declining to let you check again.

Father Octavian’s clerics are the best guest ensemble the new era has had. They’re soldiers doing an impossible job with good humour, and the episode kills them methodically. Octavian himself gets one of the finest exchanges of the season, because dying, held in a statue’s grip, he tells the Doctor he wishes he’d known him better, and gets the reply that he did know him at his best. It’s a lovely, sad little beat in the middle of a monster chase. It’s a strong showcase for Matt Smith too. His Doctor is at his best here, a young face carrying a very old temper, snapping orders at armed soldiers twice his size and being obeyed without argument. There’s a moment where he tells Amy to trust him and she simply does, instantly, because of who he was to her when she was seven years old, and the weight of that lands without anybody having to stop and explain it.

The angels, and the thing behind them

The Angels here are meaner than the ones in Blink, and the story keeps adding rules to them. They snap necks now rather than politely displacing people in time. They talk, through a dead man’s cortex, which is genuinely horrible. And the nastiest new rule of all is that whatever holds the image of an Angel becomes an Angel, so Amy, who looked one of them in the eye, now has one growing inside her head with a countdown to prove it. That gives the episode its standout sequence. Amy has to walk through a forest packed with Angels with her eyes shut, alone, pretending she can still see them, because the moment they realise she’s blind they’ll take her. Karen Gillan is superb doing it, the shaking hands and the counting and the forced calm, and it’s the most nerve-shredding four minutes of the season so far. If there’s a criticism, it’s that the Angels are ultimately dispatched rather offhandedly. They fall into the crack and are unmade, and the episode moves on. Den of Geek put it well, that everything resolves very suddenly around the thirty-five minute mark. For a monster this good it’s a perfunctory exit.

Because the crack is what the story actually cares about. It’s the same crack that was in Amy’s bedroom wall when she was a little girl, back in The Eleventh Hour, a split in the universe itself, glowing white, and it is here too, on a different world in a different century. What it does is far worse than killing. Anything that falls into it is erased from having ever existed. A cleric walks into the light and vanishes, and thirty seconds later nobody in the room can remember him, not his name, not his face, not the fact that he was standing there. Only the Doctor remembers, because he’s a time traveller and the rules bend around him. Amy doesn’t. She’s talking to a man one moment and has never met him the next, and she doesn’t notice a thing.

The show is unusually disciplined about it. There’s no scene where somebody explains the mechanism, no helpful diagram, no moment of the Doctor working it out aloud for the audience’s benefit. People simply stop having been there, and the episode trusts you to spot the gaps on your own. By the final act the surviving party is a fraction of the size it started at, and nobody in the room besides the Doctor, and you, has the faintest idea that anything has gone missing. That’s an exceptional horror idea and the episode plays it patiently. The group gets smaller and the survivors don’t grieve, because there’s nobody to grieve for. It’s also doing quiet arc work: Amy can’t remember the Daleks, she can’t remember the year the stars went out, and the Doctor’s face when he realises how much has been eaten out of her memory is not reassuring.

River, and a date that matters

River Song remains the most tantalising thing in the show. She’s here as a prisoner on day release, escorted by armed clerics, working off a sentence, and when the Doctor asks what she did, Octavian tells him she killed a man. A good man. A hero to many. Possibly the best man she ever knew. She still knows the Doctor’s future. He still doesn’t know her. Since Forest of the Dead, which from her perspective hasn’t happened yet and from his has, the imbalance has flipped in a way that makes my head hurt pleasantly. She promises him he’ll see her again, at the Pandorica. He has no idea what that means. Neither do I. The AV Club makes the point that the two-parter is really about advancing her and the crack rather than the statues, and that’s exactly what it’s doing.

Then the episode does something genuinely awkward, on purpose. Amy, wired on survival adrenaline, throws herself at the Doctor, and he is completely, comically out of his depth, all flailing limbs and horrified politeness. It’s played for laughs, but there’s a serious point underneath. The Doctor asks about her wedding, and the date, and the date is the twenty-sixth of June, 2010, and something about it clearly matters enormously. He drags her back to the TARDIS not because he’s offended but because he’s worked something out and won’t say what.

What it leaves behind is a crack that unmakes people, erasure rather than death with nobody left to notice, which is the most frightening idea the new era has produced. It leaves Amy’s blind walk, four minutes of pure nerve and the moment Gillan proves she can carry a sequence alone. It leaves Angels with new rules, talking and neck-snapping and infectious through the eye, meaner than Blink if less elegantly used. It leaves holes in Amy’s memory, things she was present for and has lost, with the Doctor visibly alarmed about it, because something has been eating this universe for a while. And it leaves a wedding date that matters, the twenty-sixth of June 2010, which he wouldn’t explain and I’d very much like to understand.

Rating: 4.5/5. A superb, tense hour that trades a bit of monster satisfaction for a much bigger idea, anchored by a terrific Amy and the best guest cast of the run. The Angels deserved a better exit; everything else is close to flawless. A forest growing inside a crashed spaceship, a girl walking blind past a hundred statues, and a crack in everything that quietly eats you out of history. Also, River Song killed a hero, a good man, the best she ever knew, and she still won’t say who.

May 22, 2010 0 comments