New Who 6.4: The Doctor's Wife

This one I did see at the time of broadcast, but I was still too unwell last weekend to get it written up straight away, and besides wanted to write about The Curse of the Black Spot first. So I'm way behind the bulk of the conversation about it again. But at least I can get my own thoughts down now before tonight's episode.

In general, I thought this was way better than last week's story. The tone and atmosphere were great, if exactly what we would have expected from Neil Gaiman. The dialogue was fantastic, ranging from lovely quotable lines like Amy's "Did you wish really hard?" to more revealing exchanges like the Doctor's comments about his role in the Time War. The plot and setting dangled all sorts of exciting opportunities for future story developments - Time Lords who can be either male or female, the ability to travel beyond the Rift, and left-over psychic imprints and indeed actual body-parts of Time Lords. Those latter may have been left behind outside the universe in the course of the story - but given River's comments about the value of Doctor's body in The Impossible Astronaut, there is obviously huge potential in the fact that we have now met actual characters walking around with the arm, spine and kidney of a deceased Time Lord. As for the Doctor and the IdRIS - what joy! Perhaps no actual, human-written script could quite live up to fandom's fevered expectations after 48 years of waiting for that conversation - but I think it would have been a tough call to do any better.

The most striking thing about the story for me as I watched it was the density of ( references to past stories )

The other thing which most caught my interest was ( the Corsair )

And might the answers to some of these questions open up another potential route for the Time Lords to be recovered somehow? Oh, I do hope so...

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New Who 6.5: The Rebel Flesh

Obviously it's always hard to judge a two-parter from the first part alone, but this has seemed pretty good so far. It has the same kind of cabin-feverish, who-can-we-trust vibe that I enjoyed so much in Midnight - with the Doctor once again playing the role of trying to understand and reconcile both sides. The issues of identity which it explored also had a pleasingly meta-referential edge to them - even the 'real' people were played by actors, after all. Of course, Matthew Graham's previous Doctor Who story, Fear Her, also explored the blurred relationship between real beings and representations of them, with real people becoming drawings and a drawing of Chloe's father threatening to become real - but so far, this story seems much stronger on both plot and characters.

The location settings were obviously excellent - I'm just enjoying seeing how they were all put together on Confidential right now. And I loved the Frankenstein-ish atmosphere, and suitably Gothic music to match. People listening to Dusty Springfield records in a monastery reminded me of The Time Meddler, where the title character's pretence of being a monk touches lightly on the same identity issues which are more central here. It is distressing to learn the solar flares which will make the Earth uninhabitable by the 29th century (according to The Ark in Space and The Beast Below) will already have started causing problems in the 22nd century. And what fun to get an evil!replicant!Doctor for next week, too - just like The Chase, Meglos, and doubtless others which I can't remember right now (or haven't yet seen).

But that's about all I seem to have to say about it for this week.

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