After the tension of Flesh and Stone, Series 5 does what this show always does after a heavy two-parter: it goes somewhere sunny, throws in a monster, and gets on with the character work. “The Vampires of Venice” is a perfectly decent runaround with a good gag at its centre and one genuinely excellent scene. It’s also the episode where Rory Williams stops being a punchline.
A wedding to save
The Doctor’s motivation here is unusually personal and rather funny. Amy threw herself at him at the end of the last episode, he panicked, and his solution to a delicate emotional situation is to leap out of a cake at Rory’s stag do and take the pair of them on a romantic minibreak to sixteenth-century Venice. It is exactly the sort of thing this Doctor would consider a sensible plan. That framing does a lot of work. Rory has been on the periphery since The Eleventh Hour, the fiancé at home, the one who isn’t magic, and putting him in the TARDIS forces the show to decide what he’s for. It turns out he’s for telling the truth. The triangle the episode sets up is more honest than these things usually are, too. Amy isn’t really torn between two men, she’s torn between two lives, the ordinary one waiting for her in Leadworth and the one where she gets to be extraordinary, and Rory understands perfectly well which of them he represents. There’s a small, well-judged moment where he watches her light up at something the Doctor has said and simply absorbs it without comment, and Arthur Darvill plays the resignation of a man who has been quietly losing this particular argument since she was seven years old and he was the boy playing the Raggedy Doctor in her back garden.
The house of Calvierri
Venice in 1580 is beautifully realised, all sunlight and canals and plague paranoia, and the city is sealed against outsiders. The show hasn’t done a properly sunlit historical since it handed Shakespeare a very strange Tuesday in The Shakespeare Code, and the change of palette does the season good after weeks of dark corridors and crashed hulls. It also does the thing these episodes tend to do well, which is give the period a working internal logic. Venice is sealed because of plague, which conveniently explains why nobody beyond the walls notices a steady trickle of girls disappearing, and the Calvierris’ quarantine story does exactly the job a locked wing does in a gothic novel. Signora Rosanna Calvierri runs an exclusive school for the daughters of good families, and girls go in and come out pale, hungry, veiled, and unwilling to see their parents. The vampire staging is well done. The girls have fangs, they hiss, they move too fast, they don’t appear in mirrors, and they cannot bear sunlight. It plays as straight gothic horror for a good half hour, and Helen McCrory is superb as Rosanna: composed, weary, and entirely without remorse, treating the abduction of children as a tedious administrative necessity. The best sequence belongs to Guido, a boatbuilder whose daughter Isabella has been taken and who wants her back, and her death, trapped outside the gate in the sunlight and unable to run, is the one moment where the episode’s stakes genuinely bite.
Then the reveal, which is a good one: they aren’t vampires at all. The Calvierris are Saturnyne, a fish-like species from another world, using perception filters to appear human, and the fangs and mirror trick are side effects of a disguise rather than folklore made real. Under the filter they’re rows of teeth and gills, which is a much more unpleasant image than a cape and a widow’s peak. More interesting is why they’re here. Their world is gone. It was consumed by a silence, and they escaped through a crack, the same crack in the universe that was in Amy’s bedroom wall and in the hull of the Byzantium. Rosanna is the last mother of a drowned species, converting Venetian girls into brides for ten thousand surviving sons, and planning to sink the city to make a sea she can live in. That’s a genuinely sympathetic motive attached to a genuinely monstrous plan, and the episode is smart enough not to resolve the tension. She isn’t evil so much as bereaved and entirely without limits, and her end, throwing herself into the canal to be eaten by her own children rather than live alone, is the bleakest note in it. The mechanics around her are the weakest part of the hour. The Saturnyne plan requires a weather-control device at the top of a tower, and the resolution requires the Doctor to climb the tower and switch the device off, which is about as generic as this programme gets, and a man pressing a button is a poor finish for a season this strong. There’s also a regrettable quantity of running up and down the same flight of stone steps. The crack getting a second mention in as many weeks is the thing to watch here. Whatever it is, it isn’t just eating this universe. It’s driving refugees ahead of it.
You make them want to impress you
And then the scene that justifies the episode. Rory, sick of being talked over, turns on the Doctor and tells him what’s actually wrong with him. It isn’t that he makes people take risks. It’s that he makes them want to impress him, that ordinary people around this man start behaving in ways that get them killed, because they’re showing off for someone they admire. It is the sharpest criticism of the Doctor since Davros, and it comes from a nurse from Leadworth standing in a Venetian courtyard. Arthur Darvill plays it without any bluster at all, which is what makes it land, and Matt Smith’s Doctor has no answer whatsoever. He just looks caught. After a run of stories where everyone falls in behind him instantly, having somebody name the effect he has on people is bracing. It also redefines the trio. Rory isn’t a spare part or an obstacle to a romance, he’s the one person in the TARDIS who isn’t dazzled, and the show is far more interesting with him in it.
“You make them want to impress you” is a genuinely damning line to level at the Doctor, and it lands harder for coming from the least impressed person in the room. That’s Rory’s real arrival: he starts the episode as the joke fiancé and ends it as the one person willing to say that out loud.
Rating: 3/5. Perfectly enjoyable and entirely middle-of-the-road, with a monster plan that doesn’t bear much prodding and a resolution that amounts to climbing a tower and flipping a switch. Worth it for McCrory, for Venice, and for Rory finally getting a spine. Fangs that turn out not to be fangs, a mother trying to save a species that drowned in another universe entirely, and a nurse from Leadworth calmly telling the Doctor exactly what he does to the people who travel with him. The monster plot I’ll have forgotten by Christmas. That last bit is going to matter.