Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Swarm in here, or is it just me?

Elves.  I've always hated those bastards.  I'm not talking about those diminutive little indentured servants slaving away in some sweatshop at the North Pole making toys.  I'm talking about those effete creatures from the diseased mind of  J.R.R. Tolkein.  Hated them in the books.  Hated them in the movies. 

"Blasphemy!" you say.  How, you ask, can I possibly feel such contempt for elves?  They're tall and blonde and beautiful and magical!  Their skills at, well, pretty much anything are unmatched in all the realms of dwarves and men!  When they sing, the birds stop to listen!  Criticizing the elves is like criticizing angels from heaven!  They're perfect in every way!

"Blasphemy!" you say.

This is exactly why I hate them, the entitled, superior gits in their gated communities.  I like to think of them as sort of Upper-Middle Class of Middle Earth, but there's nothing "Middle" about them.  Wealthy and powerful and morally pure, beyond reproach in all conceivable ways, they're genuine Übermenschen.  They're even immortal, for fuck's sake.  They're like the sort of aristocratic Aryan people you'd see picnicking in those fascism-evoking Claritin commercials.  It's all so goddamned twee I can still taste it.

And, just for the record, I piss on angels, too.

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

As you can tell from my previous oh-so-timely review, The Shadow-Nose, which I don't believe anyone read besides the late James P. Coleman, former Governor of Mississippi, and famed Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, I had rather high hopes for Forest of the Dead.  Stephen Moffat was scripting it!  The first half was a spectacular exercise in building tension.  The characters were wonderful!  The cliffhanger left so many tantalizing questions unanswered.  It was scary as all git-out!  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I hate to say it, but, speaking of blasphemy, I found the episode to be a bit of a crushing disappointment after Silence In The Library.  Oh, it's not to say there weren't a number of nice things I could say about Forest of the Dead, but from the miserable resolution of last week's cliffhanger to the use of a literal deus ex machina in the unnecessary extra ending, the episode couldn't hold a candle to its thrilling predecessor. 

Can't See The Forest for the Trees

It's not so much that I can't see the forest for the trees.  I recognize that Forest of the Dead was veritably pockmarked with witty dialogue, fine performances and clever conceits.  The Mill turned in some stunning work, and Euros Lyn's direction was excellent, as always.  I nominate Alex Kingston for Guest Star of the Month.

However, every time I try to look at the whole forest, I end up walking into a tree.  The branch that stuck me in the eye hardest was the happy ending, which more or less ruined everything for me.  Neil has already run on at length about many of the annoying things about the whole bringing-river-back-from-the-dead cop-out, so I'll let you go read his review for much of that.  My problems with the ending, however, go far beyond the basic concept of bringing River back.  I was also annoyed by the way her resurrection was executed, most notably: the pretentious disembodied narration was enough to make my skin crawl audibly.  It was gravely intoned nonsense like "Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days when the wind stands fair and the doctor comes to call...everybody lives!" that had me thinking of a haughty Cate Blanchett droning on about the history of the One True Ring, the whole unbearable thing culminating in River and her four cohorts ending up in that Claritin commercial I mentioned earlier, and the until-this-point interesting character of River settles into a never-ending domestic nightmare.

Vashta Nada

If there was one true shining light, if you will, of Silence in the Library, the one blindingly bright glowing beacon of brilliance, it was this: the Vashta Nerada.  As an airborne flesh-melting plague, they served their purpose spectacularly in terms of creating an unflinching atmosphere of dread.

No longer much of a credible threat, they spend much of the episode trying ineffectively to gum everyone to death.

"Piranhas of the air" they may be, but in Forest of the Dead Moffat has held them all down and pried out their teeth with a pair of pliers.  No longer much of a credible threat, they spend much of the episode trying ineffectively to gum everyone to death.  From the moment they stop being a mindless swarm and start treating Proper Dave like a Furby, their menace diminishes exponentially.

I'm also tired of the schtick where all the Doctor has to do is say "Hi!  I'm the Doctor!" and all of his enemies cower in fear.  Just one little rant about "you're in the biggest library in the universe...look me up!" (Can they even do that?  How are they going to open the books?  Can they read?  Can they even see? ) and all trillion-plus Vashta Nerada decide it's time for a holiday. Trustworthy little biters, too, as they don't bother to take a nibble even when the Doctor is unconscious or handcuffed to a wall in the basement.  It's the same annoying phenomenon as the alien of the week invariably deciding to postpone his execution whenever he reveals that he knows they're called "Sontaran" or something.  Rose even did it with Daleks in Doomsday.  It's like a fucking "get out of jail free" card

Breeding Discontent

Despite the usual tour de force performance from Catherine Tate, there are a number of things about her imprisonment in the computer that don't quite work for me.  For one thing, I'm tired of the writers of Doctor Who saddling what is supposedly a family drama with their heterosexual agenda.  Think of the children!  Actually, I'm trying not to think of the children.  From the moment she's wheeled into Doctor Moon's sanitarium Donna is apparently intended to be part of some sort of captive breeding program.  Perhaps it's because her sudden retreat into domestic bliss and playparks sounds like my idea of Hell, but the entire virtual reality sequence failed to capture my imagination.  Her whirlwind romance with Lee is unconvincing, and when Lee and Donna are melodramatically torn apart as CAL has her breakdown, Donna vows to find him.  I rather hope that we never see Lee again after their near-miss on the teleport pad, but I fear this is more of that foreshadowing I've heard so much about.  Donna is supposed to travel with the Doctor forever, not run off with some bloke she's managed to fall head-over-heels for in a matter of minutes.

For one thing, I'm tired of the writers of Doctor Who saddling what is supposedly a family drama with their heterosexual agenda.  Think of the children!

Fortunately the Cubist version of Miss Evangelista happens by to do Donna a favor by ruining her sense of domestic bliss.  She looks a couple of orders of magnitude more realistic then the inflatable sex-doll she was in Silence In the Library. While I was rather nonplussed with the comically shallow and ignorant Miss Evangelista in first part of the story, the explanation  offered for why Miss Evangelista Mark II happens to be the Chosen One smells suspiciously of bullshit: "I think my face has been the bigger advantage.  I have the two qualities you require to see absolute truth: I am brilliant and unloved."  Well, I'll be...she was stupid because she was beautiful!

CAL unfortunately leaves dozens of other unanswered questions left hanging about.  I know it seems exciting in Tron, but why does CAL even feel the need to create a virtual suburbia for her wards?  Are the files on my computer mating with each other?  Why doesn't CAL know anything about what she's supposed to be doing as the computer?  Why can she turn her dad off with a meta-remote?  More importantly, why can she do it to Doctor Moon?  Why is Doctor Moon a moon anyway?  Why does the computer think it's a good idea for them to jump around from place to place "like in a dream"?  Do dreams even do this?  How can people interact if they get jumped into the future every time they think "proctologist appointment"?  Why is the virtual world a model of a 20th Century UK suburb if 4022 of the 4023 inmates are space travelers from the far future?  Why exactly does a library have a self-destruct feature anyways?  Moffat's many plot layers are carefully and cleverly organized, but unfortunately on close inspection it doesn't hold together as well as I'd like it to.

Collected Volumes

Murray Gold.  You did so well last week.  We even all said nice things.

How could you do this to us in return?

Okay, maybe I can give you some nice credit of having the incidental music on the Telly change whenver CAL switched channels, and to have that incidental music different from what we're hearing at home...but then again, I'm not even sure if this was your doing.  Unfortunately much of the rest of your score is either bludgeoningly cackhanded or just plain insufferable.  The worst culprit in this second category is the horribly twee music that plays when Donna is rolled out of the ambulance.  Variations on this cringeworthy theme is repeated a number of times during Donna's "integration" and her quickie with Lee.  In the final scenes, however, your heavy-handed score obliterates everything in its path; it reaches particular lows whenever that little bit of willowy vocals creeps in.

What I wouldn't give for a little Silence in the Library.

Epilogue

Despite my misgivings, there are still a number of positive items shelved in Forest of the Dead and maybe some of those items would have buoyed the episode higher if the first part wasn't so bloody spectacular.  It was generally awash with brilliant dialogue; I particularly enjoyed Tennant in Scenery-Chewing Mode discussing hair-dryers and whether screwdrivers work in the dark with Other Dave.  There were also great character moments (the Doctor and Donna discussing being "alright" is very much a highlight.)    Tinting Anita's visor was a clever plot trick so we wouldn't know precisely when she got it (though I can't help but wonder if her woodenness was intended for this purpose as well.)  The running gag about "spoilers" was fun.  The kids questioning their own existence was a nice touch too.

I suppose it's some sort of testament to how good a writer that Moffat actually is that he managed to pull of as good an episode as he did, despite so much of it being utter bollocks.

River's Run her Course

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

I've come to think of the second two-parter of a Doctor Who series as having a special importance. For those playing along at home, I'm referring to "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" in 2005, "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" in 2006, "Human Nature/The Family of Blood" in 2007, and the most recent story this year. The first two-parter is still concerned with weaving the fabric of what the year will be. The final two-parter is focused entirely on unraveling it like Peter Davison did in Castrovalva. The middle two-parter then, is the only long-form Doctor Who story in which the writer has total freedom to play around with the characters and their relationships before everything goes to shit (for the characters or for the viewers as the case may be). It is, essentially, The Empire Strikes Back. I know, I know. Last week I compared it to Lost, this week it's Star Wars. What's next? Harry Potter? Sex and the City? Grand Theft Auto? Why not Superman? I could say, "You'll believe a Time Lord can fly!" I've certainly got the appropriate image. But no. Rest assured, I'm not going to spend this review making another extended comparison or even make any further such comparisons in this review. That's old hat. This time I actually want to talk about Doctor Who.

As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the second two-parter is often not only an example of second-act storytelling in the Doctor Who universe, but also the emotional anchor of the season. This was certainly true in Paul Cornell's two-parter last year, which was the emotional equivalent of being punched in the gut after a series of light nudges throughout the earlier part of the series. I was worried that Forest of the Dead would fail to serve this function if only because Series Four is already destined to be remembered, if nothing else, as the emotional series. Which is a rather lame way to be remembered, but it's the best descriptor of the series I can think of anyhow. I mean, Donna cries in very nearly every episode. And this sudden renewed interest in heavy emoting every episode has given David Tennant and Catherine Tate the ability to really show off their acting muscles. Which raises the expectations for this, the emotional ride that we need at this point in the series. And Moffat rises to meet the challenge as he never has before. Out of the Doctor Who we've seen from Moffat, only The Girl in the Fireplace has even attempted to emote at the Paul Cornell level, but it doesn't go nearly as far as this episode does.

River Tam. I mean Song.

Personally, I had expected that last week's cliffhanger had been simply a way to get Donna out of the way so that we could focus more on the interaction between the Doctor an River Tam. I mean Song. But while I was right about the increased focus on their relationship and interaction, I was wrong about Donna being merely shoved aside. Her emotional journey in this episode is perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most tragic of the three in this story. And it's greatly to Moffat's credit that he can leave the viewer with a sense of tragedy even while he pulls the same "nobody dies" shtick that he did in The Doctor Dances. And Donna's tragedy isn't even terrifically original, as it recycles elements of Cornell's aforementioned two-parter as well as the trick ending of The Doctor's Daughter just weeks ago. Still, Donna's relationship with Lee McAvoy, though it took place in the Matrix, had a life and a reality that exceeds that between the Doctor and Jenny or even the one-week romance between John Smith and Matron Joan Redfern.

The sudden resurrection (if you can even call it that) of River Song and friends (well, colleagues at least) is perhaps a bit too cheap, as Neil has accused. But it was nonetheless a greatly thrilling moment accomplished by a convincing trick ending which enhanced the thrill. Because of the pacing of the episode, particularly the rather convincing false coda, I honestly expected the episode to end with that shot of the screwdriver resting upon the diary. I completely forgot that there were another four minutes left in the episode and I thought I was just seconds away from the trailer for Midnight. This episode did basically the opposite of what was done in Peter Jackson's The Return of the King with the oft-panned "multiple endings" (I lied about there being no more comparisons to other works). While that film simply tacked coda upon coda upon coda, this episode ends a trick coda with a surprising jolt back into the sort of fast-paced, running-through-corridors action you'd have expected ten minutes earlier, and that makes it feel less like a burdensome continuation and more like an additional four minutes of the good stuff.

This is not a fitting ending for such a beloved and important character. Not that she's either of those.

While this sudden salvation of River Song (and, less importantly, the other members of the expedition) is a natural part of the Doctor's emotional arc for the episode, it does somewhat distract us from the truth of River Song's emotional arc by putting her in the position of simply another poor schmuck saved by the Doctor. Which, as far as the Doctor is concerned, she is: although he knows intellectually that she's far more, he doesn't have the history with her to make him think of her like he would Rose, Martha, Donna, Sarah Jane, or any of his companions. She's not a loved one but a puzzle, and her salvation is satisfying from the Doctor's end, but from River’s end it looks more like she's trapped in a computer forever separated form the man she loves. There's actually little different between her fate and the fate of Rose in Doomsday (never mind how quickly the undoing of that fate is approaching, I'm talking about the emotional arcs of the respective episodes). The fact that she merely grins and comments on the Doctor's indefatigability sells her short. This is not a fitting ending for such a beloved and important character. Not that she's either of those. But Moffat seems to be assuring us that she will be. But it will be difficult to take her seriously if we know that her story ends with such a relative whimper.

But for the Doctor and Donna, the emotional storm is raging as hard as ever. And if the impending return of Rose is any indication, not to mention the progressively more and more emotionally heavy finales Russell has done, I'm quite curious to see whether this series will end up collapsing under its own emotional weight.

Moon River

The Sock Gap... The Giggle Loop... The Nudity Buffer... Even The Melty Man, for godsake. I've been spending a little too much time in close proximity to a sofa of an entirely different construction. Going through The Grand Moff's back catalogue of greatest hits, in a vague attempt to get a handle on how Who might evolve from 2010. Of course, if you start and end with Coupling then you'll probably come away with the impression that Who might be heading for it's most squelchy period to date. But at least we would be entering an era where when we're told a three word episode title will remain hidden because it just gives too goddam much away we'd not end up with The Stolen Earth, which I'm sure is the episodic title equivalent of trying to light a piss-soaked Catherine Wheel.

No. The very least you can expect something a little more incendiary than that, probably along the lines of Lesbian Spank Inferno...

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

This entry into The Moff's canon, a mighty weapon in its own right, has more than a whiff of a retrospective of his own past Who works about it. Even if after a scant few stories, strewn over the past four years, it feels more like a greatest hits album spunked out by a machine tooled boy band after a recording career spanning 14 nanoseconds. You know the sort, it's usually issued in time for the lucrative Christmas market and rammed with a couple of new tracks which a) seems a tad apologetic because of the lack of existing 'hits' means they can't even pull together a full 'best of' compilation and b) seems a tad presumptuous of them because if these new tracks don't attain the high standard set by the previous outpourings then we, the general public, will be held responsible and more than likely prosecuted by some sort of secret state police - a musical branch of the Gestapo - wielding conductor's batons and firing jazz cannons into a confused and largely impotent crowd.

I doubt whether even Lawrence Miles has equated Doctor Who to Nazi propaganda.

In fact, instead of another soundtrack album, why not put out an entire CD of the simple, repeated messages, that have been such a hallmark of his Who oeuvre (or Whoeuvre) to date. All your favourites are here, "Are You My Mummy?", "She Is Not Yet Complete", "Don't Blink" - including the all new tracks "Class, Dismissed" and the deeply haunting circus refrain "Beware The Painted Clowns". A friend of mine was always keen to point out that simple phrases, repeated frequently to reinforce the message, has been used time and time again throughout history (usually in the communication of propaganda) by people as diverse as Status Quo and the Third Reich. And I doubt whether even Lawrence Miles has equated Doctor Who to Nazi propaganda!

Jumpers for goal posts, fists for sink plungers.

Of course, to make a Who monster really, really stick in the psyche of a generation you need to make it easy enough to replicate in the playground. The grating rasp of "Exterminate", coupled with an outstretched arm and hey presto you're a Dalek (or a slightly hoarse Nazi, take your pick). It's a little bit like football in that respect, all you need is a ball and it's game on - no complicated set up, no fancy equipment, and you're away. Jumpers for goal posts, fists for sink plungers. You don't even have to climb into a dustbin, although that might certainly help, it's all in the stiffness of the arm and the rasp of the voice. Only the inmates at the Little Lord Fauntleroy School of Soft Knocks have the wherewithal, not to mention the resident makeup artists, to pull off even a remotely convincing Clockwork Robot. This also means that playtime is reduced to a mere 30 seconds by the time they all get out of makeup. And aside from increasing terror threat from chemical vectors delivered via dirty bomb there's no way gas masks will become standard issue again - so apart from Daily Mail readers the rest of us aren't currently petrified enough to be found wandering around with a gas mask readily to hand (and most of them are probably just thinking that the Germans might try for the hat-trick).

Getting back to Coupling, you can tell that The Moff delights in showing us the same situations from different perspectives. This happens in both parts of this story. It wouldn't be at all hard to imagine that when time comes for the 2010 series Doctor-lite story you could have a situation where the two episodes that are double-banked are in fact the same story, told from the separate perspectives of the Doctor and the companion with both episodes playing out in the same time frame but not necessarily in the same time and place. With one affecting the path the other story takes. I actually thought that with Midnight being Donna-lite and Turn Left being Doctor-lite they might have attempted something similar. But once again I'm wrong.

So instead of jabbering aimlessly about the second coming of Hinchcliffe, perhaps we should be looking a little further to see what Moffat shaped Who might take...

Perhaps... Perhaps... Perhaps.

Can’t see the wood for the trees

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

I suppose if you were being charitable, you could at least say this two-parter didn’t go off a cliff, unlike its predecessor this season.

If that seems harsh, then it possibly is.  There was a lot to love about Forest of the Dead, an episode that positively dripped lushness, from the performances to the visuals, and even the score, there was a real glow about this as an episode of Doctor Who.

But there was also something not quite there with it.  Yes, it looked great, yes everyone played fantastic in it, and yes the whole package had this sumptuous feeling of terror and cool running almost simultaneously through it.  But it also had something much less than the week before.

And ironically, that something - specifically, a preservation of life - left the ending feeling somewhat lifeless.

A title as blunt and obvious as being bludgeoned around the head by a hardback Jeffrey Archer

The plot felt somewhat stretched at times, not helped by a title as blunt and obvious as being bludgeoned around the head by a hardback Jeffrey Archer. As soon as the Klaatu Barada Nikto or whatever they were called said they were in their forest, it was obvious where the episode was going. 

Certainly puts a whole new spin on the idea of a book being a killer read, anyway.

But the Vashtu Nerada felt like a sidebar this week.  Almost like the Husks of Ghost Light, at times their presence felt shoehorned in to provide  a monster where one was no longer required.  They were an undercard to a main event dominated by the mystery of CAL.

The CAL’s world stuff worked remarkably well, even as it became clear just how 90s and clichéd an idea it was, one that we all thought Keanu Reeves had nailed shut a few years back.  A large part of that was down to the presence of Colin Salmon, who helped imbue Doctor Moon with an incredible sense of creepiness and unsettling calm. 

In fact, the only sad bit was that we never got to see Tennant and Salmon on screen together.  If ever a character deserved a face to face with the Doctor, it was Doctor Moon.

A cameo appearance by the Scottish Widows advert from hell

But to make up for it, and after sidelining Catherine Tate last week, we got a hefty chunk of her this time round, in the virtual reality world where CAL had preserved her. 

A disturbingly fractured reality at that, thanks to the constant timeshifts, a wonderfully uneasy and distracted performance by Tate playing someone who obviously thinks she has a mental illness, and a cameo appearance by the Scottish Widows advert from hell.

My particular favourite moment of the whole episode came among that, as we see Donna turn up for a date with her fellow resident, to go fishing, in a spangly black number.  A nice, throwaway gag, that underlined Donna’s character far more than any dialogue could. 

Between that, and the horrific moment she thought her children - no matter how fictional - had been taken from her, any doubts that bringing Tate back was the right move must now surely have been put to bed.

And by and large it all came together.  How the Vashtu Nerada arrived on the planet made sense, albeit being so obvious.  The CAL stuff made sense.  And how they all meshed together made sense - just.

So my only real problem, but it’s a biggie, with the episode is the finale.  Killing River Song off was a brave if obvious decision, and she was given a heroic sending off as befits her character.  In many ways she’s the new series’ version of Sara Kingdon - you’re never quite sure if she counts as a companion, but she does nothing to justify not including her in that roll of honour.

So the ending felt like a cop-out.  It felt like an attempt by the writer to have his cake and eat it.  Let’s kill off the companion, but hey, let’s give her a happy ending anyway.  And worse, it felt like a cheap emotional rehash of the end of The Doctor Dances, with its cheery ‘everybody lives’ denouement.

It wasn’t like we needed such a stunt anyway.  It’s been established that River’s very much from the Doctor’s personal future, so if he ever wanted to resurrect the character, there’s a natural route into it - in fact, one that would be tinged with more emotional punch knowing the Doctor had watched her die.

The sad thing is that Moffat’s best script, for me anyway, is the one where he didn’t pull the cop-out ending, and instead went for heartbreak by offing Reinette.  It struck me that perhaps that's why we keep seeing these 'keep everyone alike' conclusions - that the Future Doctor is more heartbroken over her death than it seems.  But if so, we need something more concrete to back that up on screen.  Otherwise, it just feels like a cop-out.

Last week I wrote about not drawing too many conclusions about Moffat’s forthcoming tenure running Doctor Who based on the evidence of this two parter.  And I stand by that.  But I can’t help but fear, at the back of my mind, that we’re going to get the same self-proclaimed position as taken by RTD OBE - that we’re not going to see companions get killed off.

And sometimes, we could do with the odd bit of gratuitous death now and again, just to keep the Doctor - and the audience - on its toes.

Vote Result: Forest of the Dead

Here are the results for the ninth blog poll, for Forest of the Dead:

• 94%: Superb - Dead Good
• 6%: Not Good - Dead Wood

The tenth Doctor Who poll, for Midnight, will be online later tonight following the broadcast of the episode.

Sweet dreams (are made of this)

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

For a show about a time traveller, Doctor Who has always been strangely unforthcoming on the subject of time. Sure, in the early days we had the standard pulp sci-fi stuff about not interfering with the course of history, and lectures on how saving an Aztec from sacrifice in 15th Century Mexico could one day result in Primark closing down in Bracknell (or something) but, with the odd notable exception, the show’s writers have been largely silent on the subject ever since.

The man has wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff where the rest of us have DNA

Not Steven Moffat, though. The man has wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff where the rest of us have DNA. He would, as an old friend once said, get dizzy trying to walk in a straight line. I bet he even writes his shopping lists backwards (after he’s got back from the supermarket, probably).

Look at the evidence: The Girl In The Fireplace is a love story about two people who are unable to overcome their age difference – specifically, the difference between the Age of Enlightenment and the 51st Century. And Blink, Time Crash and now Forest of the Dead all use time, and the benefit of turning hindsight into foresight, as a way of solving thorny plot problems. Even his sitcom Coupling got laughs by replaying the same scenes from different perspectives, making time travellers of the audience even while his characters remained firmly tied to a west London wine bar.

The cheeky bugger also takes advantage of the show’s unique relationship with time to forward date his CV and tell us that, hey, if you think Doctor Who is cool now, you should see the stuff we’re doing in the future

In Forest of the Dead, Moffat has time working harder than a child in a Bangladeshi sweatshop, using it to give his story velocity (Donna’s hyper-accelerated alternative life, which slyly riffs on the conventions of television editing to pack several years’ worth of soap storylines into a matter of minutes), humour (“Why have you got handcuffs?” “Spoilers!”) and, ultimately, heartbreak (“Time can be rewritten.” “Not those times, not one line, don’t you dare.”)

And, cheeky bugger, he also takes advantage of the show’s unique relationship with chronology to forward date his CV and tell us that, hey, if you think Doctor Who is cool now, you should see the stuff we’re doing in the future - we’ve got red settings, Alex Kingston out of ER, the lot. And if the Tenth Doctor you know looks like the grooviest urban spaceboy on the block, he’s Iggy bloody Pop where I come from! (Oh, and he also looks set to be wearing the same face for some time to come – casting news from the future, perchance?)

For a moment there, I think I may actually have forgotten I was British and punched the air

Not that he’s exactly underplaying the Doc of today, of course. Ten may not have pimped his screwdriver with dampers yet, but it seems the Moff can’t help but write our goofy hero as a powerful being whose name – whatever it might be – echoes across the universe, as evidenced by his thrilling confrontation with the Vashta Nerada: Where most screen heroes would pull out a gun, the Doctor puts the lengthening shadows of death to flight with a simple: “I’m the Doctor and you’re in a library – look me up.” (For a moment there, I think I may actually have forgotten I was British and punched the air.)

And yet, as the Moff pointed out on this week’s podcast commentary, the Doctor is also just an ordinary bloke at hearts – a point amply demonstrated when, still reeling from having his holiest of holys whispered in his ear, we saw him physically shrug back on that facade of breezy, matey bonhomie he uses to keep other types of shadows at bay – a beautiful moment, exquisitely performed by Tennant who, by now, knows this character inside out and, indeed, back to front.

Poor Miss Evangelista, a badly copied, market-stall knock-off of her former self, destined to live a half life, brilliant, unloved, and definitely no oil painting (unless you’re a fan of Dali, of course)

It wasn’t just the Doctor who was served well by his new curator, either – every character had something to add to the rich tapestry of this episode. There was Anita, stoic, but not too stoic, in the face of death (“I’m only crying. I’m about to die – it’s not an overreaction.”). There was The Girl, railing at the terrible power to casually switch off her own daddy like an episode of Castaway, and Doctor Moon, dutifully presiding over the ebb and flow of the world’s virtual tides, and Lee McAvoy, who’s stammer not only denies him the woman he loves, but leaves her convinced he never even existed. Now that's tragedy. And then there was poor Miss Evangelista, a badly copied, market-stall knock-off of her former self, reduced to a half life, brilliant, unloved, and definitely no oil painting (unless you’re a fan of Dali, of course).

If Moffat had fun alluding to his own future history, this was also the week that saw him embracing his past, playfully reworking his greatest hits with some cool new riffs and a few subtle changes to the lyrics. The “so why are there six of us?” sequence is a motif that runs through his stories like a watermark. First seen in The Doctor Dances’ “if the tape’s finished, why is he still talking?” heart-stopper, (officially the Greatest TV Moment of 2005, lest we forget), it re-emerged in the same story’s “who’s typing?” scene, and again in The Girl In The Fireplace’s “the clock’s broken, so what’s ticking?”. Some may call this laziness; I prefer to think it’s the sort of signature trope Hitchcock might have relished in his pomp.

The average Doctor Who guest character has the life expectancy of a chain-smoking Mayfly

Zero body counts are another Moff trademark, but The Forest of the Dead went further with a blatant allusion to another iconic moment of ’05 vintage, the Ninth Doctor’s triumphant “everybody lives!”. Here it was packaged as nothing less than a part of Who – or at least Moffat Who – folklore: the Doctor who always wins, always heals. This cheerfully ignores the fact that, most weeks, the average Doctor Who guest character has the life expectancy of a chain-smoking Mayfly, but the idea this battle-scarred war veteran never gives up hope of a happy ending – “I do think that all the skies in all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment accepts it” – is an irresistible one. (Just look at the smile the Doctor flashes The Girl as he’s saving River – it could melt your heart, or turn you gay, or both.)

The most audacious manner in which Steven Moffat plays with his own reputation, though, is in the episode’s closing moments, as River tucks in her children (including, significantly, The Girl – chalk that up as another child who stops wreaking havoc the moment she finds her mummy) and wishes them – and us – sweet dreams.

That’s right: The master of nightmares, the man responsible for more bed sheets going into the wash than Russell Brand, is tucking us up and telling us to sleep soundly.  Because it’s okay – the Doctor has fixed it: Everybody’s saved and, this time at least, they're safe as well.

Resurrection Shit

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

This will have to be a very quick appraisal because I'm currently going through a week from hell. This includes being stranded in Scotland for three hours after a woman decided to throw herself in front of a train I was traveling on. If only Steven Moffat had been around - he could have clicked his fingers and brought her back to life. The selfish cow.

And that, in a nutshell, is my problem with The Forest of the Dead, and nu-Who in general.

The rot started to creep in with the climax to the 1996 TV Movie with the Pertwee Logo on it when the TARDIS resurrected Grace Holloway and Chang-Lee with the help of some fairy dust and a temporal "fucking" orbit. But given that the episode also revealed that our hero was half-human this dramatic faux pas was the least of its problems, even though it went against the very ethos of the show. If the Doctor can simply reverse time - not to mention death - then what's the bloody point?

I can still remember the days when noble, heroic, gut-wrenching deaths actually meant something: Katarina - dead. Sara Kingdom - dead. Adric -  so dead it's almost funny. If they were making the classic stories today then Marcus Scarman would end Pyramids of Mars with his feet up having a nice cuppa, Nicholas Parsons would give us a life-affirming sermon before the credits rolled on Fenric, and the parallel universe from Inferno would have a nice bucket of cold water poured all over it.

In fact, the only really significant goodies from the current series that are killed heroically and then have the audacity to *stay dead* are Lynda with a Y, Suzie from The Long Game and Jefferson from The Satan Pit. I'm sure there's a couple more that you'll all throw at me in the comments section but as far as I can remember everyone else either escapes death or cheats it outright: Jenny, Captain Jack (who's made a career out of it), and now River Song all manage to scoff in the face of death despite being, technically speaking, corpses! Even Kylie Minogue gets brought back as fucking Tinkerbell. Face of Boe? Natural causes (well, as natural as a 78 billion year old omnisexual's death can be). Ditto for Reinette. Japan gets roasted alive but even that gets rewritten. A whole country brought back from the dead! Mickey sort of gets killed in The Age of Steel - but don't worry, they've got a spare! Same goes for the rest of the Tylers.

It's a never ending series of cop-outs, and while you could argue that River isn't really alive at all and she's actually trapped in a perpetual suburban limbo for all of eternity, with no possible hope of escape - which is a fascinating and fairly contentious idea (surely it's a bit cruel?) - the episode never really addresses this. It's played as a straight happy ending. So happy I almost vomited.

Whatever happened to "Everything has its time and everything must die"? I thought this programme was supposed to be steeped in death? Death isn't the undiscovered country anymore, it's a short stop-over in Majorca.

And as a result of this, if anyone significant (say, for example, Donna or Rose) were to pop their clogs heroically in the very near future I simply won't buy it. I'll just be waiting for the inevitable magical cop-out. So cut the tears, drop the cod-emotion, and stop pulling of our heartstrings. Unless you have the balls to really go through with it, of course.

Death isn't the undiscovered country anymore, it's a short stop-over in Majorca.

Another problem I have is with this episode is the Vashta Nerada. They are introduced as an implacable force of nature that you can't negotiate with and yet they end up as thoroughly reasonable chaps who are quite happy to let the Doctor sort his shit out while they hang fire for 24 hours; reading old Target novelisations and quaking in their boots, no doubt. But then what? Unless I've missed something obvious I just don't understand what happens to them after that. Will the library have to be shut down forever (or until the little blighters starve to death)? Or will special library staff be employed to stand in around the cookery section, chucking chicken legs into the darkness three times a day?

Something else that bugs me - the Doctor happily lets a book about his future adventures sit around in a library for any passing super-villain to stumble across. This is either very clever foreshadowing by Moffat or utter stupidity on the part of the Doctor.

And let's be honest here, who's happy with the Doctor opening the TARDIS doors as if he's the Fonz? Seriously, how smug is that?

Aside from these misgivings, Forest of the Dead is still a bloody great episode of Doctor Who that's comfortably head and shoulders above anything else we've seen so far. It's certainly the most interesting and consistently witty story we've had for a very long time and I can't fault the passion of the acting, the direction, the score, the set-design or the sheer inventiveness of the whole thing. Donna's simulated domesticity gave Tate something to get her teeth into, Lux's role was genuinely surprising (but his actions are just as suspect as the Doctor's), and River's role in the story was quite brilliant. That Moffat is a clever bastard, isn't he?

I'm now convinced that River travels with two future Doctors. She certainly understands regeneration and when she implies that the Doctor looked younger to her last week it doesn't necessarily mean that she meant this version of the 10th looks younger. She initially believes that he is a future incarnation before realising that he is a past incarnation. Which he is to her. So does this mean we will we see a scene with the future Doctor knowingly sending River to her death? Not that he'll be overly bothered of course - he knows that death is not the end.

Not in this show.

Shadow Of A Doubt

Doctor Who: Forest Of The Dead

The nature of reality is a tricky one for television producers. It is clear that genre hybridisation is the central thrust of shows like Britain's Got Talent and I'd Do Anything where the talent show collides with variety and the 'soap' anxieties of 'real' people who are participating in such super-genre shows either as contestants or even as members of the audience. Forest Of The Dead quickly, and rather dully, dispenses with its cliffhanger resolution (the bloody squareness gun again) but as a result opens up a door in the narrative that takes us to a reality in which the very act of watching, making and editing television is commented on and then juxtaposed to the fiction of the Doctor Who universe with a child watching the Doctor's adventures on TV.

Forest Of The Dead, as the series own collision between reality show, adventure and romantic fiction and soaps, suggests the jump cuts in Donna's new reality are the jump cuts imposed by an eager child surfing through programmes and channels with a television remote. Moffat's take on virtual reality has much to say on our own perception of the kind of lives we lead and this is by far the most interesting concept at the heart of the episode. It takes the series well outside of its normal boundaries and with its digital children questioning their own existence offers an uncomfortable and disturbing insight into how we love and are loved in return. Donna's fictional life, and Catherine Tate's superb playing out of its tragedy, is echoed by the lynchpin plot turn of Lux revealing that he isn't a hard hearted business man but simply a relative searching for a lost and dying child protected in a computer created reality.

Virtual reality in the story is dominated by the feminine and the female with Evangelista as literally a digital distortion in the episode's most powerful reveal.

As well as this, Moffat also riffs on the out of time romance of The Time Traveller's Wife and the relationship between the Doctor and River Song is the episode's other narrative triumph as it mimics the notion of julia Kristeva's concept of 'women's time' where narrative structures are built around the cyclical nature of changing seasons or the natural cycles of reproduction. Here birth becomes death and vice versa and narrative is folded in on itself in an unorthodox attempt to return the Doctor and River Song to the moment before loss, before death. This also plugs into Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope - a time-space in which the conscious mind frames and organises the real (the library) but it can also be the time space where it disorganises and re-presents the real (virtual reality). The chronotope allows shifts in reality and features in pretty much all of Moffat's scripts as his mind-bending observations on the nature and structure of time and space. It is also interesting to note that it is Miss Evangelista who unpicks the virtual reality of Donna's life and the progression of 'women's time'. Virtual reality in the story is dominated by the feminine and the female with Evangelista as literally a digital distortion in the episode's most powerful reveal.

It's almost as if Moffat can't bear to let the tragic really remain tragic - he intervenes here with River Song's death as much as he requested Russell T Davies to not kill off the abomination of Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter.

In my review of Silence In The Library I made the point that Moffat seemed to be recycling a number of his own tropes and this second part of the story very much recycles the 'everybody lives' coda of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and here he further postulates on some ideas about what an afterlife might be and that it may well be a sort of heavenly download for the dying soul. But it is an afterlife that is rather disturbing and blunts the positivity of The Doctor Dances and its joyous  'everybody lives' narrative climax. He may be cleverly riffing on his own ideas here but should he undo the satisfying coda he wrote for that episode in the process and propose neither life nor death at the hands of the Doctor but instead a kind of living death in the library's hard drive? I also felt he undermined the stunning scene of River Song's self-sacrifice and the Doctor's loss, which we all knew was coming and was one of many elements - the hard drive saving the visitors, Dr. Moon as a kind of anti-virus/reboot programme - that we'd already second-guessed him on last week, by using the 'cheating death' epilogue involving the sonic screwdriver. You could argue that it isn't cheating death at all because River and her crew are, in effect, still dead. But I've a sense Moffat is providing himself with some insurance so that he could bring the character back easily if he so desired. It's almost as if Moffat can't bear to let the tragic really remain tragic - he intervenes here with River Song's death as much as he requested Russell T Davies to not kill off the abomination of Jenny in The Doctor's Daughter. Can we just put the Doctor through the emotional wringer and be done with it? I suppose River is different in that she exists in the Doctor's hypothetical future that's already been hinted at and might be properly described in future episodes.

Donna very much comes off the worse in this situation. Her kids may have been digital creations but her husband Lee was one of the surviving visitors and it was achingly sad that at the conclusion they both were whisked away from each other. Tate's performance in the alternate life of Donna is nothing short of brilliant and both she and Alex Kingston actually outshone David Tennant this week. Tennant's exuberance is wonderful but he spent a lot of the episode rattling off various info dumps at such speed that many of the scenes lost focus and clarity and I suspect a lot of the concepts, and his delivery of them, would have left many younger viewers confused and, in the end, somewhat indifferent. There were an awful lot of ideas that Forest Of The Dead packed in with a slightly detrimental effect on Tennant's blustery performance even if in the end it worked merely as a reflection on the Sky+ record and rewind, edited highlights of Donna's life in the hard drive. Life is complicated and you often don't get to edit out the bad, confusing or boring bits its seems to say. But I forgive him his over-ebullience of delivery just for that sublime and far subtler interplay with Alex Kingston.

The pell-mell pace of Forest Of The Dead rather begs the question that with a bit judicious editing the entire story could have been told in 45 minutes and it may be a clue as to why the pace of Silence In The Library was so sluggish and he obviously recycled any number of his motifs in it.

What fails here is the rather unsatisfactory use of those flying piranhas of the air, the Vashta Nerada. It's a great concept but their threat is hurriedly dealt with in that rather ineffective scene where the Doctor tries to reason with the Vashta Nerada and finds out they came as microspores in millions and millions of books and then hatched. He just tells them off and they go away? Their threat dissipates completely from that point on and they are reduced to being the story's MacGuffin rather than being part of its central narrative in the way that the Weeping Angels were in Blink. Rather, Moffat is more interested in the 'romance' between the Doctor and River Song, the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff and narrative construction. The pell-mell pace of Forest Of The Dead rather begs the question that with a bit judicious editing the entire story could have been told in 45 minutes and it may be a clue as to why the pace of Silence In The Library was so sluggish where he obviously recycled any number of his motifs in it. The problem here is that he's trying to have his cake and eat it and, for example, where he, at once, redefines the symbolism of the sonic screwdriver as a potential life saver he also uses it again as a dumb 'get out of jail free' device that makes a mockery of imbuing the object with these better qualities in the first place. It's a kind of frenetic narrative indigestion that plagues the episode and with the biggest culprit being the sad ending / happier ending reverse payoff.  Strip way the flummery about the Vashta Nerada and the library and you do have a potent story where both the Doctor and Donna have the 'happy ending' carrot dangled before them but for each it's cruelly removed. Donna gets Lee and the kids and has them taken away from her. The Doctor's whole relationship with River Song is destroyed by a huge spoiler (Moffat's witty side swipe at obsessive fans as well as a cautionary remark about the dangers of time travel) because he already knows how she will 'die' and her doom is the driving force behind their future encounter. The Doctor loses this version of River the day he meets her. However, the allusion to an afterlife, is for me, a rather unsubtle bit of symbolism that didn't need gluing on as a meaning to the episode's conclusion

Whilst it might struggle to be comprehensible, it's still a powerful, intelligent episode (best of the series this year, no doubt) and, as an emblem of narrative complexity, will reward repeated viewing. As a two parter it suffers from structural and pacing problems, with a very slow first 45 minutes followed by a desperate race to the finish in the final 45 minutes. As an hour long finale this would have been absolutely great but the longeurs of Silence In The Library with its misdirected focus on the Vashta Nerada don't dovetail well enough with the central conceit, at the heart of Forest Of The Dead, of the Doctor meeting his future wife only for it to be the last time he sees her. It's got bags of rich ingredients and some very interesting ideas about reality, love and death but the resulting pudding is only properly baked on one side.  These more conceptual episodes only work in relation to the other stories that surround them and it would be disastrous if Moffat, as head honcho, made an entire season of them. I believe his comedy writing talents and his flair for misdirection will allow him to prove otherwise and Series 5 may end up far and away removed from the expected Hinchcliffe Mark II that many fans are already salivating about. 

Who's Britain Supporting?

Who. That's right. The Doctor Who News Page reports that unofficial overnight figures show that Forest of the Dead got 7.1 million viewers (a 40% share) and won its timeslot against Euro Pigskin Lob Championships '08 (which was watched by 4 million).

Perfectly Bound

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

During Doctor Who Confidential tonight I was largely distracted during Steven Moffat’s interview by three things.  Firstly, the sudden random exposition in the middle about the mechanic of the nu-Whoniverse with interuptions from Russell T like “Although Sarah-Jane is aware of Torchwood – as we shall see” all clearly there to foreshadow some mega team up at the end of the series.  Secondly, the rather precarious mound of paper in Moffats in-tray, perhaps letters and manuscripts from old Doctor Who writers hard on their luck and looking for a job.  Finally, the collection of spin-off novels on the shelf behind him. 

Like a pensioner trying to name old friends on a faded school photo I found myself trying to identify which books I could see.  At one end, usually obscured by Steven’s head was Vampire Science, the first really good Eighth Doctor novel  published by BBC Books.  On the other side, I could see the Big Finish published Bernice Summerfield anthology The Dead Men Diaries (for which The Moff wrote about The Least Important Man), a Virgin New Adventure which could well be Ben Aaaronovitch’s Transit, Decalog 3 in which Moffat’s story Character Pieces was published, what I’m sure is Jonathan Morris’s Festival of Death, Paul Leonard’s Genocide and (he’s going to love this) Lawrence Miles’s Interference Book II. 

There may have been others, but what’s striking about this selection is that most of them aren’t simply alien invasion or historical stories but deal specifically with time travel and the effects it has on the Doctor, his companions and acquaintances and the fabric of the universe, themes which have become Moffat’s signature across all of his stories and reached their apogee in the Forest of the Dead.  Whether Moffat planted them there as an in-joke to see if there was a fan sad enough to try and identify them or this is just a coincidence we might never know.

the first episode this year to have me bouncing up and down, applauding and roaring at the television in a consistent state of giddiness

But as well as showing that our future leader was there for the dark times along with us reading the same novels, he absorbed that writing, some of which was the most experimental in the history of the franchise and essentially shaped it for Saturday night telly.  Forest of the Dead was the most challenging, most surprising, most intelligent piece of Doctor Who we’ve had the opportunity to enjoy since the series returned and was the first episode this year to have me bouncing up and down, applauding and roaring at the television in a consistent state of giddiness.

Excited about 2010 yet?

At the risk of attracting the ire of Stephen Fry because he hates that sort of thing (I’ve no doubt he reads this blog) my excitement worked on two, no three, no four, oh alright, multiple levels.  Firstly, at the risk of also sounding like Phil Collinson, it was the sheer cleverness of the writing; at no point in the past forty-eight episodes did I think that one day I’d be shouting “It’s a metaphoric construct!” at the screen, swiftly followed by “No metaphysical, no, oh fuck that’s good…”  I found myself searching through the recesses of my brain trying to remember everything I’d forgotten about Baudrillard, Barth, Jameson, Jung and Lyotard (and I don’t mean as in Georgia Moffet’s gymnastics). 

Some of that had to do with the possibility that Donna’s b-story was somewhat like The Matrix as if it had been written by Charlie Kaufman, but also that Moffat was willing to attempt that kind of thing, again I’m repeating, on Saturday night television.  It hopes that it will find an attentive audience looking for drama which doesn’t talk down to them and is willing to accept big philosophical and psychological ideas, drama written for everyone and no one at the same time.  The reviewer in the Radio Times apparently couldn’t follow what was going on which as far as I can see is a step in the right direction -- as is the fact the episode clashed with an opera on BBC Two (Harrison Birtwistle’s reworking of The Horns of Nimon), which I’m sure hasn’t happened since the 1970s.

I found myself searching through the recesses of my brain trying to remember everything I’d forgotten about Baudrillard, Barth, Jameson, Jung and Lyotard (and I don’t mean Georgia Moffet’s gymnastics again). 

There was a wonderful moment during last week’s podcast in which Euros Lynn asked Phil Collinson what he thought was the biggest difference between Steven’s writing and Russell’s.  Collinson simply didn’t have an answer.  He spluttered, and said they were very different and muttered something about Davies’s scripts being faster and Moffat’s being slower.  Lynn had the right answer; he said that Moffat’s writing was more intricate whereas Davies’s use broad strokes.  But it’s more fundamental even than that – the current lead writer often attempts to make the show all things to all people and have as many of the expected elements in as possible, whereas his successor isn’t afraid to be experimental and risk alienating some of the audience (just as a side question did anyone else get the impression from this week's podcast that David really is sticking around for the whole of series five?).

Name another recent British drama series for whatever demographic that would use such intertextual stuff as the natural scene changes of television to show the passage of time in Donna’s collective dream world and have her aware of the locations shifts or having parts of the library location appear on television, Murray Gold’s themes changing with each flick of the channel.  Then not content with that there is a character who it turns out really is from the Doctor’s future, which means that when he meets her at some unspecified time already knows her fate, something he must keep from her throughout their adventures, the secret he can never tell her (yes, Charlie Pollard’s in much the same predicament at the moment at Big Finish, but this is the television series actually doing it and on a more emotionally charged level because the implications tragic rather than just intriguing).

Then there was the finesse of each scene, the transitions from moment to moment.  The re-emergence of Miss Evanglista, her face looking like a Francis Bacon portrait, aware that she’s more intelligent than she was and why and that she’s the exact opposite of that person and that she’s in nothing but the whisper of an experience.  Revealing that in reality everyone is the villain, since we cut down the trees to make the books which transported the Vashta Nerada to The Library, and in the process making kids not only afraid of the dark but also paper, which should put a dent in the profits of publishers.  The Doctor defending himself just by telling them who he is and suggesting they look him up.  River gaining his trust just by repeating back to him the one thing he doesn’t tell anyone, his real name.  And I’m glad she didn’t turn out to be just another timelord…

I’m glad she didn’t turn out to be just another timelord…

It’s difficult, not to mention unfair, to compare everything which is going on in here with the workmanlike efforts of other writers who tend to gather the elements of what they think should be in a Doctor Who episode and string them together with a scribe who knows what they are then chucks them out.  In the hands of another writer, I’m sure the Doctor’s tumble through miles of space before reappearing clutching to a girder would have become the big action sequence in the middle of the episode.  Here it was just an incidental incident, with a cut to Cal doing what I imagine most kids do during similar sequences (a veiled criticism from the writer?).  Yes, everyone, I’m reviewing a Moffat episode again, and allowing my sycophancy to run riot.  But what else can you do when you’re faced with writing that has a quality far beyond what generally accept from the show?

Credit the rest of the team.  Congratulations to the set designers for perfectly judging the world within a world, making it look just slightly wrong.  I can’t think of many directors other than Euros Lynn who have taken such ambitious ideas and been able to present them in a manner which didn’t muddle them and actually made them accessible – he also deserves a lot of credit simply for making the episode feel like it was part of the fabric of the series and yet also very special.  I didn’t talk much about the production last week, but this had depth and an epic quality despite the somewhat mundane settings in places.  Gold too offered some of his best orchestration of the series, particular in his monumental reworking of the Doctor’s theme.  When does the season four soundtrack get released?   

Another great week for the ensemble.  It was quite outrageous to see that footage in Confidential of Alex Kingston unsure if her performance was any good.  She was pitched just right, as though she’d been a fan of the series from the get go (although whether she’d actually seen Doctor Who before taking the job is open to conjecture, c.f. last weeks podcast).  She was sweet and likeable and you absolutely believed that she already knew the Doctor each time she looked at him.  Steve Pemberton got to give the big emotional Doctor Who speech he’s probably waited his whole life for, and nailed it.  Catherine Tate’s luminance goes without saying; she cried again true, but comparing this performance with her first shoot of the series for The Unicorn and the Wasp is like chalk and cheese, as though at some point she realised ‘So that’s it!’  Tennant too seemed to step up a gear; I suggested a few weeks ago he looked a bit tired, but here that was working to his adventures as the pressure of being him took its toll.

Despite all of this I’ve already seen criticism elsewhere online, but they're wrong.

Despite all of this I’ve already seen criticism elsewhere online, but they're wrong.  They've said things like that its another story in which no one properly dies and someone’s sort of saved at the last minute by the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver (see also Ursula and Astrid), even though like Jenny it offers another likeable character that Moffat could resurrect should he want to in the next new age.  That the cliffhanger resolution was perfunctory as though every other one and as we discussed last week, aren’t why people would be tuning in this week.  That most of the episode was simply resolving issues set up the week before as though satisfying drama is about tell half a story and then starting all over again.  That Moffat keeps returning to the same ideas such as the solution to a puzzle being passed down through the years but isn’t it better to have a writer that keeps returning to formulas that work rather than a writer who doesn’t have a formula in the first place and keeps turning out something rotten?

Next week:  The Doctor parks the TARDIS so that he can take an excursion, demonstrating in the process that it really is the journey which counts.