New Who 5.10: Vincent and the Doctor

Yeah, so - for the fifth time this season, I spent the weekend doing things that stopped me seeing Doctor Who on Saturday night, and then most of the rest of the week writing about them. It's going to happen for the season finale, too, which is a bit sad.

I'm afraid I was ( quite disappointed by this episode )

The ( history and geography were a mish-mash, too )

Still, all that said, there was some good material here too, which I believe I will present as bullet-points:

• I liked the gradual emergence of information about the Krafayis - at first presented just as a straightforward monster, but later something which we develop compassion for as we come to understand it better.
• Bill Nighy as the art critic was just great - absolutely perfectly cast doing exactly what he does best.
• The structure of a story which begins with paintings in a Parisian art gallery and later requires a visit to the era when they were painted was a HUGE shout-out to City of Death, for which much win - though poor old Foury never did get to meet Leonardo da Vinci (or not in that story, anyway).
• It's interesting to note that the Doctor puts particular stress on telling Van Gogh when he is depressed on the bed that the one thing there always is is hope - surely a fore-reference to how the opening of the Pandorica is going to be resolved at the end of the story?
• On a similar note, interesting also that the casual references to unscreened adventures at the beginning of the story are to visits to 'Arcadia' and the 'Trojan Gardens'. I'm reading those as places in space which happen to have Classically-resonant names rather than actual Arcadia or a garden at the historical Troy - but they still fit nicely with the season's theme of myths and legends, and with the Pandorica, which is presumably another example of the same thing.
• Bored!Doctor waiting outside the church for the space-chicken to appear was really funny.

In fact, there were some great Doctor moments throughout this episode, and indeed plenty of good individual moments and well-crafted lines for all the characters. I did enjoy watching it, for all I've said above. But I didn't feel that it entirely lived up to its own pretensions.

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New Who 5.11: The Lodger

The world which this story presented was ( very sweet )

I thought at first that the story was going to be ( companion-lite )

I found the resolution pretty ( disappointing, though )

Anyway, we have lots of Romans coming up next week! And the promise of resolution about River Song and the Time Crack - or at least the first half of a resolution, anyway. I'm pretty excited about that.

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