Here is an episode with a wonderful idea, a lovely heart, and one of the worst endings this show has produced in years, and I find I don’t mind nearly as much as I should. “The Power of Three” spends forty minutes doing something Doctor Who almost never attempts, which is sitting still, and then remembers with about four minutes left that it needs a monster defeated, and defeats it with a wave of the screwdriver. Everything before that is rather special.
Cubes
One morning, a billion identical black cubes appear all over the world, roughly nine inches to a side. They do not open. They do not hum. They cannot be cut, burned, dented or scanned. They simply sit there. And then they keep sitting there, for a year. It’s a genuinely brilliant premise, because it takes the standard invasion beat, where objects appear and everyone panics and it’s resolved within the hour, and stretches it past the point where panic is sustainable. People get bored. People put them on mantelpieces and use them as doorstops. Someone starts a Twitter account. There are cube-themed novelty items. Humanity, faced with an inexplicable alien presence that refuses to do anything, absorbs it into the furniture, because that is exactly what humanity would do. Brian Williams, alone, takes it seriously. Rory’s father has been quietly stealing episodes since he was dragged aboard in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and here he sets up a chair, points a camera at one, and watches it for days, recording a log of nothing happening at four-hour intervals. Mark Williams is once again the best thing in his episode, and the joke of a man diligently documenting a stationary object quietly becomes the most sensible response anyone in the story has.
There’s a genuinely unnerving thread running alongside it, and it’s the part of the episode most people forget. People are being taken from a hospital, walked out by orderlies who aren’t orderlies, past a little girl who watches from a doorway and says nothing. Rory, working a night shift, follows two of them through a set of doors that shouldn’t be there and ends up somewhere else entirely. It’s shot like proper horror, the girl is genuinely eerie, and the sequence has nothing to do with cubes at all until the episode abruptly announces that it does. Given more room it would have been the best thing here. As it is, it’s a strong idea sharing a runtime with a domestic comedy.
The Doctor, bored
Because the invasion is slow, the Doctor has to stay, and this is where the episode earns itself. He is dreadful at it. He repaints the living room, mows the lawn, reorganises the kitchen, plays keepie-uppie against a wall for hours, and lasts about four days before fleeing to do seven weeks of adventures and returning as though he’d popped out for milk. Matt Smith is very funny playing a man with no capacity for stillness, and the physical comedy is some of his best. But the reason he’s staying is that he’s watching them. Amy and Rory now have a life with weight in it, since she’s got work she’s good at and he’s been offered a full-time nursing post, and the show is honest that this is a competing offer rather than a consolation prize. They are being asked, gently and continuously, to choose.
There’s a beautiful two-hander on the Tower of London riverbank where he finally says the thing out loud: he doesn’t take people with him because he’s lonely, or not only. He runs to things rather than away from them, and he keeps coming back to these two because they were the first thing he ever saw properly. It’s the warmest the Eleventh Doctor has been about his own habits, and coming after the goodbye he engineered in The God Complex, it lands as a man admitting he was wrong to try. Brian gets the other great scene, asking bluntly what happened to the previous ones, being told the truth, and then telling the Doctor to take them anyway because they’re better with him. That’s a father knowingly signing a permission slip he may regret, and it’s played without a shred of sentiment. The title is doing more work than it looks, too. The power of three is the Doctor, Amy and Rory, a configuration the show has run for two and a half years and is about to lose, but it’s also the episode’s quiet argument that three is an unstable number. Two of them live here, in a house, with jobs and a father down the road. One of them doesn’t, and can’t, and keeps arriving through the wall.
The episode also quietly hands the show something it will be glad of: UNIT, rebuilt. Kate Stewart runs its scientific arm on the principle of science leads, and Jemma Redgrave plays her as calm, dry and entirely uninterested in being impressed. The reveal that she’s the Brigadier’s daughter is handled with real restraint, no fanfare, just a quiet acknowledgement between two people who both loved him, and coming so soon after the phone call to that nursing home in The Wedding of River Song, it’s a generous piece of repair work.
And then the ending
The cubes activate. They stop a third of the world’s hearts. It’s a superb, frightening turn, because the doorstop in your living room was a weapon the whole time and it was in your house because you invited it. Then the Shakri appear, explain themselves in about ninety seconds as pest controllers culling humanity before it spreads, and the Doctor reverses the entire thing by pointing the sonic screwdriver at a control panel and restarting a billion stopped hearts at once. Total elapsed time: under two minutes. No cost, no complication, no consequence, and the people who died of cardiac arrest simply get up. It’s not that the resolution is rushed, exactly. It’s that the episode spends forty minutes carefully establishing that the terrifying thing about this invasion is its patience, and then defeats it with the least patient solution available. A year of dread, undone by a gadget.
Rating: 3/5. Charming, funny, and genuinely moving about what it costs to live two lives at once, with the strongest domestic material the Ponds have ever had. The Shakri are a non-entity and the resolution is close to insulting after the build it follows. Watch it for everything that isn’t the plot. A billion boxes that did nothing for a year, a man who watched one anyway, and a Doctor who finally admitted he keeps coming back on purpose. The clock is nearly out on all three of them.