Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

He Can Carry A Good Tune

Doctor Who: Proms 10 & 11 - Royal Albert Hall, 24th and 25th July

And here we are again, two years later and another Doctor Who Prom. Much has changed since that last extravaganza and the series itself has undergone something of a transformation under the auspices of Head Writer & Executive Steven Moffat. We have a new Doctor too, in the beguiling form of Matt Smith. But some things haven't changed and one of them is the music composed for the series by Murray Gold. Proms 10  and 11 at the Royal Albert Hall provide us with an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with some of Gold's most successful pieces composed for the Russell T Davies era of the show and to get to know a whole new set of themes for the first series overseen by Moffat.

What I like about these Proms is that we get a chance to hear concert versions of the music composed for the series unshackled from the extremely busy sound mix that smothers many of the episodes we see on television. You can listen to the latest themes without all manner of sound effects, including explosions and weapons fire, and dialogue obscuring some of the best music being composed for a British television series today. The music is also presented within the world of Doctor Who as live too, with all manner of monsters prowling round the Hall and plenty of interactivity including clips of the series and special appearances. Hopefully, the children attending these Proms will be inspired by Gold's music for the show but also will come away also having had a taster of some of the more accessible classical pieces within the programme.

This year's Proms get off to a gorgeous start with 'The Mad Man With A Box', an ethereal piece, almost mystical in quality, that, with its beautiful solo vocal from Yamit Mamo, manages to capture some of the magic of the man that we all know of as the Doctor. Onto the stage comes one of the hosts for our show, Karen Gillan, resplendent in a gold and black gown, who then introduces us to the pizazz of 'An Untimely Arrival' which covers the pre-titles to The Eleventh Doctor as the TARDIS crash lands in Amy's garden. Full of energy and vigour, Gold uses it as a bridging motif between the RTD era and the new adventures of a new Doctor. Familiar but also preparing the way into the new series without frightening the horses too much. It complements the John Adams piece, Short Ride In A Fast Machine quite wonderfully, itself full of syncopation and looping, repetitive rhythms and, for these Proms, it is certainly one of Adams more accessible and audience friendly pieces.

One of my highlights of these Proms is Gold's new theme for the Doctor, 'I Am The Doctor'. It's an epic signature tune for one of the most mercurial of the Doctor's incarnations and sets out to remind us that although the Doctor has changed, he is still very much the hero. The melody sticks in the mind and is instantly addictive and it's been used throughout the series but most significantly in The Pandorica Opens as he gives his speech to the amassed ships of his deadliest enemies above Stonehenge. A superb composition, a Gold standard if you like, and musically one of Series Five's greatest achievements. As this played, the Hall was invaded by all manner of alien foes - Saturnynians, Silurians, Cybermen and Judoon - and children everywhere, even those of us who are 48 years old and still refuse to grow up, were left grinning with delight.

Two classical pieces follow with the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales under the brilliant conductorship of Grant Llewellyn. If the Adams piece was a bit of a warm up, then Llewellyn gets the Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir to really give it some welly here. William Walton's Overture 'Portsmouth Point', a crafty nod to Murray Gold's home town, is a jaunty, perky work, full of gorgeous melody and rhythm. The mood undergoes a startling change with the second piece. An all time favourite, Holst's 'Mars', from The Planets gets a stunning rendition here and much kudos must go to the Choir and the percussion section of the Orchestra for really getting their teeth into this. Another highlight of the two Proms, it's stunningly performed and Llewellyn conducts like a man possessed. The boiling, doom laden aggression and pounding military crescendos sent tingles down my spine. Now, if they could have shown a few clips of Quatermass whilst this was playing then I'd have been an extremely happy telefantasy fan boy.

Back to Who with 'Battle In The Skies' from Victory Of The Daleks. Amusingly, Gold's homage to the scores of Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron and Where Eagles Dare) and Eric Coates (The Dam Busters) is heard as an ARP warden yells across the Hall, 'Put that light out!' as one of Bracewell's 'Ironside' Daleks rises from the floor of the Hall and asks everyone if they want a cup of tea...and a biscuit (thanks to Nick Briggs). The poor old Ironside is then bluntly interrupted by the white Dalek Supreme, arriving on stage in a blaze of light and dry ice. It sends the Ironside Dalek packing and then orders conductor Ben Foster to play the music of the Daleks or else! Foster teases the Dalek and on the matinee performance threatens it with his baton only to be told not to interfere with its sucker. The Supreme (aided and abetted by Barnaby Edwards) patrols the stage as Foster whips the Orchestra Of Wales into a stirring accompaniment to the episode's dogfight sequences. After a swift ice cream in the interval, it is back to the second half of the programme.

Grant Llewellyn returns and once again he wrings as much drama as he can from the Choir and the Orchestra with 'O Fortuna' from Carl Orff's Carmina burana. A medieval eruption of choral power, this iconic piece is stirring and epic, summoning up the very essence of raw nature, of life and death. And Old Spice. Yes, I'm old enough to remember those ads. Karen begins to introduce one of her favourite themes, Amy, but suddenly receives a very special message. In the spirit of Music Of The Spheres back in 2008, where David Tennant's Doctor attempted to stop a Graske from disrupting the Prom, Matt Smith pops up on the video screens around the Hall, greeting the audience from some very odd angles, even upside down at one point, in fine panto tradition. It's a lovely, witty piece, "Sir, careful with that wig. And you sir. And you. And actually most of the violin section. Oh, and ladies mind those skirts. And selected gentlemen."

He's got to fix an overloading fold-back quasar do-dah, thingumy that will turn into a "wibbly wobbly explody wody thing". And he tries to defuse it with an electric tooth brush! But here he goes one better than Tennant. He disappears off the screen and emerges, for real, in the centre of the Hall, looking for someone to help him defuse this bomb. Smith's comic timing and physicality is much to the fore and when he actually does pop up in the Royal Albert Hall for real, interacting with children from the audience, he's in his element and ad-libbing away like a good 'un. Children clearly adore him (he captivated Ellis and Ben in these performances) and he completely confirms that of all the things about Series Five, he is quite simply the series greatest asset right now. Judging by the way he handled all the gobbledegook of the script he's also fast becoming the Stanley Unwin of all of the Doctors! "ITV's been blown off the air!" he naughtily concludes after deactivating the bomb.

We return to the music from the series with 'Amy' and this time Arthur Darvill comes on stage to introduce the music. This is again one of Gold's major triumphs and definitely a high point in the Proms. Yamit Mamo returns for solo vocal duties and with nods to Danny Elfman, Gold offers a heartbreakingly lovely tune for the new companion in the series, deftly capturing the frailties and weaknesses of the woman as well as her sense of wonder and bravery. Quite stunning. It's back to more monsters with a suite of themes, 'Liz, Lizards, Vampires And Vincent', covering the music to accompany the battle between Liz 10 and the Smilers on Starship UK; the return of the Silurians (with Ben Foster surrounded by three of them as he tries to conduct); the marauding vampire Sisters Of The Water and the tragic life of Vincent Van Gogh. Of these, the standouts are certainly the motifs and themes for Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor.

The vampires get a memorably unearthly melody to accompany their sojourns into Venice and into the Hall itself as a group of the Sisters way lay a member of the audience during the matinee performance, dancing around him, much to his bemusement. The magnificent music that featured during Vincent's journey into the future and his visit to the gallery to hear how his work had affected millions of lives is presented here. Full of joy and sadness, it remains a very special, emotionally powerful theme.  The medley concludes with the nerve jangling incidentals, using a lilting piano riff, pounding chords and choir, that accompany the Weeping Angels and one of them pops in for a quick visit, scaring the bejesus out of most of the kids in the audience.

Karen and Arthur return to introduce Wagner's 'The Ride Of The Valkyries' and Grant Llewellyn gives the Orchestra Of Wales yet another energetic work out with the swirling strings and strident brass of this stirring classic. It again truly shows what a class act this Orchestra is. Karen then introduces, to several whoops from the audience, 'This Is Gallifrey', as featured in Series Three, and 'Vale decem' from The End Of Time. 'This Is Gallifrey' is here used to wonderful effect as, in the evening performance at least, the video screens show all the regenerations of each Doctor. All the Doctors get their fair share of applause and this slightly distracts from what is one of Gold's finest pieces for the series. Naturally, the greatest response is reserved for Tennant and Smith. On the matinee, either through a technical fault or by decision, the roll call of Doctors wasn't shown and 'This Is Gallifrey' was allowed to soar, full of loss and pride for an ancient society. 'Vale decem' is an amazing choral work with counter-tenor Mark Chambers beautiful voice at the centre of a moving, elegiac piece that sees the regeneration of the Tenth into the Eleventh. Both pieces are guaranteed not to leave a dry eye in the house. Superb.

Matt then arrives on stage to describe Gold's response to Moffat's two part series finale, a specially arranged work, 'The Pandorica Suite'. To be honest, it's not my favourite of Gold's recent work as it tends to resort to emotionally colouring the scenes it covers, particularly the comedy time travel bits, rather than develop big, memorable themes. There's little to remember or to hum here as it rather is incidental music and only until he gets to the conclusion of the suite with a thrilling reinterpretation, signposted with some great brass sections, of 'I Am The Doctor' does it come alive with crashing percussion and insistent woodwind.

Smith, Gillan and Darvill come back to introduce 'The Song Of Freedom', from Series Four. Personally, not one of my favourites but Mark Chambers voice is again extraordinary and Foster gets a tremendous performance from the London Phiharmonic Choir and the Orchestra for this anthemic theme. Murray Gold guests on keyboards during this and the arrangement of the 'Doctor Who Theme' and I'm still not particularly fond of his latest arrangement of the series theme, especially those very non-Ron Grainer opening orchestral tags and brass sections. That said, fortunately enough of Grainer's original composition and Delia Derbyshire's realisation remains and it's lovely to hear the old theme in such a setting driven by especially powerful bass and percussion. Both Proms rightly received a standing ovation and it is still pretty amazing to think that the little series we all love has been transformed into an unstoppable multi-media attraction. To paraphrase the Ninth Doctor, 'Fantastic!'

Get Me To The Church On Time

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang
Review by Frank Collins

I'm not sure that experience of working on Spielberg's version of Tin Tin has rubbed off on Moffat that well. The Pandorica Opens more or less amounts to a gene-splicing of the Devil's Tower sequences of Close Encounters and the catacomb exploring of the Indiana Jones films and looks very pretty but I'm not convinced on this evidence he can do 'epic' in Doctor Who. The narratives that hold these glossy visual spectacles together are really what Moffat is interested in. The rest is a bit tokenistic. The two part story that concludes with The Big Bang also reflects an ancient literary tradition that you could say Spielberg himself has deliberately woven into many of his major films. It falls into the tradition of menippea - a form of satire that signifies a mixed, often discontinuous way of writing that draws upon distinct, multiple traditions. Both The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang act as reflections of each other, at once proposing an anti-epic visual presentation in counter-point to an epic narrative.

From the sky full of spaceships above Stonehenge to the alliance of monsters with their rather ridiculously contrived plan to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica, Moffat turns the whole thing on its head and in The Big Bang simply has four people chasing around a museum whilst the universe shrinks outside the window and the Doctor cheats willfully with the time lines, bouncing around like a deranged cosmic Tommy Cooper. Bakhtin regarded menippea as 'the use of the fantastic internally motivated by the urge to create extraordinary situations for the testing of philosophical ideas'. Which sums up the finale for me and Moffat's own view of the entire Doctor Who series synthesised into a carnivalesque ambivalence for logic, an irreverent desire to break the rules and to cross boundaries. Sometimes it works spectacularly - not just in terms of visual spectacle but also in narrative complexity - and sometimes it's a way for him to cheat, avoid the implications of what he's done and refuse to answer questions left dangling by the preceding 11 episodes.

Thus we get no real answers to who was saying 'silence will fall', why the TARDIS was exploding and a reasoning for Amy's 'special' status. And presumably the missing ducks from the Leadworth duck pond ended up on the other side of the crack in time. Moffat knows his game and in the opening sequence with Vincent in 1890 he's clearly sending himself up rotten when the neighbour attending with the doctor looks at the painting of the exploding TARDIS and mutters, 'Look at this, even worse than his usual rubbish'.

Moffat's end game with this finale is to focus in on the triangular relationship between Amy Pond, the Doctor and Rory Williams. The messages carried through time via Van Gogh's painting, Churchill's telephone call, Liz Ten's meeting with River after she has broken out of the Stormcage facility are simply a means to an end whilst also cleverly rewarding the patient viewer with the pleasure of recognition in these pre-titles revisitations. They throw out a number of questions that in typical Moffat style aren't likely to be answered - why is Liz Ten still alive in 5154 and why is Bracewell still working for Churchill when it was more than suggested at the end of Victory Of The Daleks that he was off in search of his true love, Dorabella. These are, like many other sequences in the story, narrative conceits.

The Pandorica Opens is in effect one massive conceit. The significance of the Pandorica and the exploding TARDIS drive the story but in the end we never really discover the answer to the latter and the former is inevitably not what it seems with much of the episode heavily signposting the fact that it's a prison cell into which the Doctor is dumped by his enemies and not the home of an ultimate 'big bad'. The most effective twist in The Pandorica Opens is the resurrection of Rory, presumed erased from history at the end of Cold Blood. His reappearance is another layer to the series themes about 'remembering' and 'forgetting' and, significantly, he isn't the real Rory but a facsimile, a memory of Rory, created by the Nestenes. They presumably replaced the real Rory who did die at the end of Cold Blood. Or was he an Auton right from his introduction in The Eleventh Hour, then destroyed in Cold Blood, and then resurrected in The Pandorica Opens? It is narrative obfuscations such as these that Moffat deliberately ignores or refuses to clarify.

Rory is that most human of non-humans, embodying the crisis of subjectivity at the heart of this revelation. He struggles with his Nestene programming and conflicting human emotions, just as Amy evoked the same contradictions in the Dalek's android Bracewell back in 1941, to reaffirm his love for Amy, only to then destroy the object of his feelings. That this death takes place simultaneously with the Doctor's capture and imprisonment in the Pandorica, the destruction of the TARDIS and the death of the universe offers the spectacle a much needed emotional grounding. Rory's non-human status and his subsequent murder of Amy is the single most powerful scene in The Pandorica Opens and legitimises what is in effect a Doctor Who episode that resembles a Busby Berkeley tap routine performed by a sweating Steven Moffat sporting a fixed grin. It's hard to be 'epic'.

Moffat uses such conceits to again fuel the narrative expectation in The Big Bang where the audience is given a linear narrative - of the Doctor escaping from the Pandorica and the dead - now alive - Amy taking his place - that is broken into non-linear and often repetitive moments of recall, planting visual and verbal information about scenes that haven't happened but will happen or that have happened and we don't know why they have until the explanation appears further along the narrative. He's testing our ideas about time and the use of empirical and metaphysical paradoxes in the science fiction genre. For me, however amusing it is, and - in the way Matt Smith performs these sequences - it is, it really amounts to more grandstanding, including the revitalisation of the Dalek as a token monster to chase our heroes down corridors, that delays the story getting to the roof of the museum and the ultimate fate of the Doctor, the Pandorica and the TARDIS.

What's more interesting in the story are the binary oppositions between men and women. Amy truly is the fairy tale figure of the mysterious Little Red Riding Hood that the series has been constructed around. She is not only the absent woman in search of her self, her journey starting as a girl, the adorable Caitlin Blackwood returning as the younger Amy, and continuing through to impending womanhood and that wedding but the story is itself a science fiction satire about getting the bride to the church on time, about getting the adolescent Amy married off.

Typically, the finale also underlines of some of the problems I've been having with this series. Firstly, the series as a whole has evidently suffered from a cut in budget. This is unfortunate because television is such a visual medium these days and you need to spend money on it to engage audiences. Otherwise, you might as well do all this on the radio and, oddly, a great deal of The Big Bang might as well have gone out as an Afternoon Play on Radio 4. No matter how much of a clever clogs Moffat is, he can't just rely on characters running around a museum engaging in time travel screw-ball comedy to define the nature of the threat to the audience. The difference here to Series Three or Four, for example, is the inward and insular way Series Five has been structured around Amy and the Doctor, including the world in which these characters are seen to exist and the way they counter the threats to this world.

There is less show and more tell in many of the scripts with, I'd argue, only The Time Of Angels/Flesh and Stone really achieving the winning mix of the epic and the personal that uses the visual medium of television well.  There are undoubtedly instances where location filming abroad has paid off, as in the Vampires Of Venice and Vincent And The Doctor, and the threats have been placed on a broader canvas (unlike the exploding TARDIS which is only ever seen on a canvas). On the whole I get a sense that the world building that's so necessary for a high concept series like Doctor Who is being presented to us in shorthand.

If you look at The Pandorica Opens the money has clearly been spent on the Stonehenge locations and the visual effects. By the time we get to The Big Bang the Stonehenge location is gone as is the visual misdirection of the massing alliance space fleet and what was indicated as threat has, ironically enough, become as fossilised as the remaining Daleks (no doubt another addition to the Character Options range). The Big Bang tells us about the threat to the universe but never actually reveals why it is there in the first place, why it is happening and who caused it. It's an unsatisfying finale because we never have a 'big bad' on which to pin the focus of the story. That conflict is absent and the Doctor spends most of The Big Bang fire-fighting whilst Moffat brings the story of Amy full circle.

Much of the series has therefore been set within a self-referential bubble, with the effects of conflict on those outside that bubble all happening off screen. We're told about the consequences from the Doctor, Amy and Rory but we never really see it actually affecting other people. As the TARDIS burns itself out we get the barest indication through dialogue that Richard Dawkins is slightly concerned about the shrinking of history and the lack of stars in the sky. These are powerful concepts that Moffat is creating but I keep feeling I'm being placed at a distance from them and I am only allowed to hear about them, never mind see them, through Amy or Rory. You have to have very strong, very identifiable supporting characters to be able to pull that switch from the broadest to the narrowest world view and to convince an audience that the apocalypse is mostly taking place off screen.

Although RTD's use of his characters families and the extended repertoire of supporting characters in Harriet Jones, Captain Jack et al might be seen as too much a reflection of soap opera, the audience accepted that world view because of its familiarity and because the conflict between the Doctor and the villain of the week was often staged on screen in familiar surroundings, often showing us the consequences. In the end we are left only with Amy and Rory as the audience identification figures and there isn't enough context to care about the threat to them and to us, as the audience. I've stopped caring, to be honest, because the series won't let me care.

Secondly, try as I do, but I don't much like Amy. I find her a rather unsympathetic character. It culminates with her finally waking up on her wedding day and getting married. How do we accept that Amy then casually waves goodbye to parents that she's desperately fought to bring back into existence, and who occupy a minimum of screen time, as she and Rory abruptly leave in the TARDIS. We don't even see them wave back! After all the reunions, I find it rather callous of her to reject that new world with her parents in it, and after restoring the Doctor through the power of suggestion, to spend her honeymoon with him in the TARDIS. Has this woman an obsession about younger, father figures?

I'm afraid there's a whiff of a straight male fantasy (the kissogram's a bit of dead giveaway) deliberately being projected onto the character possibly as as an extension to Moffat's own fantasies of a woman who doles out a form of sadomasochism to the men in her life. Moffat and Moffat's analog, Rory, bask in the power of a strong, controlling woman. Amy as the idealised woman, ironically, may both evoke in them the feelings of safety and protection associated with childhood and likewise from which Rory, and by extension Moffat, may derive satisfaction from earning the approval of that figure. Very much a case of bringing yourself to what you write I think.

Amy spends a lot of time belittling both the Doctor and Rory, trying to dominate and to an extent emasculate them (her attempt to seduce the Doctor is clearly an extension of that but he's strong enough to reject it) and it is very telling when, at the wedding reception, the Doctor congratulates Rory with, 'From now on I shall be leaving the kissing duties to the brand new Mr. Pond' after Amy has ordered the Doctor to 'kiss the bride'. Here, the Doctor firmly rejects her dominance but also confirms that Rory is no longer Rory Williams but Rory Pond. 'No, I'm not Mr. Pond. That's not how it works.' 'Yeah it is' confirms the Doctor with Rory's status underlined as victim of his own self-defeating personality disorder.

Rory is for me the best thing about The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. As I said, he's the Moffat analog and in being such is a far more humane character, even when he's an Auton, than the horribly idealised Amy Pond. This is the plastic man that hangs around for 2000 years protecting the Pandorica, marries the woman inside it and settles down to a life of hen-pecking in the TARDIS. He's a man who engages in excessive self sacrifice in order to get a response from the woman who allegedly loves him and then happily takes the humiliation from Amy when he is reluctant to find any pleasure in all the dangers that travelling in the TARDIS throws at him. He's a deeply flawed man whom most of us can relate to - 'the boy who waited' guarding the gift of hope in the Pandorica (definitely symbolically similar to Pandora's box itself) and who then emerges into manhood.

The finale is flawed, lacking a really decent conflict between the Doctor and whoever it is that caused the TARDIS to explode and told us 'silence will fall', but they are good, solid and entertaining episodes. The scripts are witty and full of life even if Moffat plunges into self-indulgence in The Big Bang. The death of Amy at Rory's hand, literally, is the pinnacle of The Pandorica Opens whilst the allegedly show stopping gathering of the alliance of monsters is just a sop to keep the kids happy (and bearing in mind my thoughts about the budgetary necessities of the anti-epic, how must they have been disappointed to find it all reduced to one pathetic Dalek screeching for mercy in The Big Bang?).

The Big Bang is more satisfying emotionally with it being the conclusion of the series long Amy arc. The stand out scene between the Doctor and Amy, the conversation with her as he prepares to hurtle into the heart of the burning TARDIS, is one of the best of the series. It adds the full stop to the whole series subtext about 'remembering' and 'forgetting' that has been drip fed into stories from the beginning and the notion that the Pandorica ultimately symbolises hope after both forgetting and remembering, much as in the ancient story of Pandora, even if it does stray rather too close to a big reset button.

Moffat's story arc, in which all of history is erased and then rebooted, in which the very act of remembering is a macrocosmic event (the key to saving the universe) -  and a microcosmic event (bringing back your long vanished parents) is surprise, surprise a main tenet in fairy tales. Amy's Red Riding Hood journey through time, symbolised very powerfully in the forest scenes in Flesh And Stone, is one about avoiding the threat of being devoured wherein the hungry wolf of the old fairy tale is now the crack in the bedroom wall. But like many readings of fairy tales, is this also a story about a girl's desperate avoidance of womanhood, her impending marriage to Rory, and to remain a child by jumping aboard the TARDIS to avoid the predations of the wolf (Rory and the crack in time)? Might this explain her defensiveness to Rory in some of the earlier stories?

The interesting thing about Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales is that they are concerned with the control of women, the control of desire. Amy as a Red Riding Hood princess whose final trajectory is marriage is a fascinating reading of a transgressive woman, acting on her own desires but who in the end must be rescued by two friendly male figures - Rory and the Doctor - the husband and the father. River, cycling through a number of identities and appearances - from earth mother to seductress - is positioned here as a trickster heroine and as literally, the figure of the old wive's tale, the woman as storyteller and an analog to Scheherazade, as one who spins her narrative ('spoilers') throughout the Doctor's timeline. Plus, of course, she's his wife and by extension she's symbolically Amy's wicked stepmother.

As ever, Matt Smith completely steals the show and is particularly impressive in The Big Bang, giving us a mesmerising range of performances within one episode, capturing ancient wisdom and youthful recklessness in one big eccentric package. He truly is the biggest success of what I think has been a fairly middling series this year and remains the sole reason for continuing to watch the show. I have no problem with Karen Gillan's abilities but I'm hoping that now we've got Amy married off the character will acquire some warmth and sensitivity. The themes in this year's series about the journey from childhood to womanhood didn't quite make it across in the performances until the very end of the series. Less flippancy and that awful shouty emphasis she puts on the ends of certain line readings would also help. But when she's good she's very good.

I'm very pleased that Rory appears to have permanently joined the crew. He is the 'everyman' figure that the series must hold on to and Arthur Darvill is completely charming in the role. Now all we need are better monsters (the new Daleks and Silurians were design disasters in my opinion), decent scares and better realised worlds as a context for the journeys the Doctor, Amy and Rory go on.

Until Christmas then...

Oooh! Monkeys, monkeys!

Doctor Who: The Lodger
Review by Frank Collins

Christ, you can smell the testosterone from here. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it's that new Lynx fragrance 'Monkeys, Monkeys'. Or the smell of omelettes. Ah, I wondered when we were going to get to this point. Let's face it, when you've got Messrs Moffat, Nye and Curtis all lined up and writing for Doctor Who by the law of probability someone was bound to introduce the whole crisis of modern masculinity schtick into the series at some bloody point. All three writers have, during their careers, paraded a number of male characters across the screen with many of them desperately attempting to come to terms with the modern man's place in a rapidly changing culture.

Traditionally, scripts from all three writers have had an emphasis on the burdens of masculinity or the crisis of male identity which have been examined with humour and irony but from an essentialist point of view which presume that there was and still exists a relatively stable masculine 'essence' that defines men and distinguishes them from women. This essentialism was one that was then reconstructed as an extension of the media created New Lad or New Man. Here, we're in the post New Lad territory of the metrosexual 'caring' man struggling with his sense of self-esteem and a severe case of unrequited love. It is the centre of a script that frames the traditional tropes of male behaviour ('I'm a normal bloke. Tell me what normal blokes do.' 'They…watch telly, play football, they go down the pub.' but looks at them from a slightly different angle.

That's because the writer here is Gareth Roberts, adapting the story he presented in the comic strip of the same name where the Doctor and Mickey do the whole flat share thing. Whilst it's clear that Roberts is having immense fun exaggerating the Doctor's eccentricity within the domestic human context of a flat share, you could argue that this urgent desire to emphasise how eccentric the Doctor actually is out of his natural habitat somewhat contradicts his history with, and knowledge of, Earth, including his long period of exile where he was seen regularly hobnobbing with politicians and scientists, scoffing their cheese and draining dry their wine cellars. An amusing reference to Pertwee singing in the shower reminds us of that previous Doctor's vast experience with human lives that Roberts rather conveniently puts aside to raise the script's comedy stakes. Roberts is also perhaps too busy churning out the charming sit-com romantic triangle between the Doctor, Craig and Sophie, that highlights how the alien Doctor is actually the epitome of humanism even though we already knew that, to recognise that he delays for too long the Doctor's solving of the mystery, allowing several nasty deaths to occur whilst the Doctor is cooking omelettes and building scanner devices out of bric-a-brac.

This is one of the major problems with the script along with the fairly rushed ending. For all the 'fish out of water' humour, the Doctor's reasoning and behaviour is shown at its most illogical here and the script tantalises, rather infuriatingly, with the mystery of the TARDIS-like time-engine and its unknown owner or owners but goes no further. Despite these problems, the set up is interesting and the threat from the man upstairs is wonderfully evocative as he or it lures in his victims one by one. The disturbing thing is that he or it uses a number of disguises, all equally suspect, to lead them to the slaughter. There's a slightly unsavoury aspect to the first sequence where the ship's autopilot lures in the young Leonardo Dicaprio lookalike and as he innocently mounts the stairs his doom is clearly in the hands of an older, more mature man who awaits his arrival. Later, what looks like a prostitute dressed like Donna Summer and someone from Eastenders are given the routine from the emergency auto pilot thing and are reduced to damp patches on Craig's ceiling whilst the Doctor diddles about nattering to Amy, who seems to spend most of the episode hanging from a trapeze, or he indulges his male bonding with Craig by playing football.

'You're weird and you can cook. That's good enough for me.' admits Craig and in doing so he pretty much sums up how many heterosexual and homosexual partnerships get off the starting blocks these days. The suggestion here is then further compounded by Craig's explanation of the customary arrangement between the flat's male occupants. 'In case you want to bring someone round' says Craig. 'A girlfriend…' and then Craig looks the Doctor up and down and crucially appends 'or boyfriend' to frame the relationship between the two men as one of male homosocial bonding with the dynamic for the Doctor's inferred homosexuality framed within that. The episode surfs along with many references to these themes and ideas with Roberts using the differences between the Doctor and Craig to deconstruct some of the masculinities on display and the wider questions of change and continuity in contemporary identities.

When we first see Craig and Sophie and they discuss the flat share advert, Sophie offers Craig a 'mission in life. Find me a man!' which he inadvertently does in the form of the Doctor and, whilst initially too reluctant to share his feelings with her, he increasingly feels his chance has gone simply because the Doctor has opened her eyes to how she can widen her horizons and escape her suburban rut. It's interesting that, even though it is done as a humorous contradiction, Craig bursts out of the front door yelling 'I love you!' at the Doctor, a mock declaration of the love that dare not speak its name. At first rather taken aback by the Doctor's rather unmanly behaviour (the double air kisses and the Doctor's compliments on Craig's taste in decor also connote the episode's witty view of metrosexual, suburban mores) Craig's initial discomfort switches to a sense of defeat when the Doctor demonstrates that he is better at the things Craig does - the things that define him as a man.

The Doctor might be weird and wear a bow tie but in the end Craig feels inadequate as the Doctor presents his abilities as a footballer and as a temp where Craig works and even as a man who can seemingly relate to women better when he convinces Sophie of her potential. The whole issue of men and work is explored with Craig's job. In a culture of recession, downsizing and market driven policies, he represents the rising occupational insecurity and sense of precariousness in the male workforce, especially when he finds the Doctor sitting in the office. There is a sense that when Craig turns up for work after the Doctor's gentle, almost feminising, administrations to his sickness, that he is immediately emasculated by the Doctor's further interruption into his working life. He has seemingly usurped Craig, is clearly using his intellect and charm to influence company policy, tell awkward customers the way things will be from here on in and is generally being praised by Craig's boss. Perhaps doing all the things that Craig himself secretly desires.

The episode also explores further notions about men, fear and weakness. Craig puts a brave face on the world, disowning his fear of rejection and yet he's weak enough to capitulate to it when faced with his relationship with Sophie. He regresses from intimacy as much as she does and this is only resolved at the end of the episode when their survival relies completely on the expression of their desire for each other. The regression and repression that Craig is acting out is also the very thing that protects him from the time-engine's search for a pilot. His seeming contentment with the status quo is at first challenged by the 'man' upstairs when the noise of what he does to his victims disturbs the male flat share but he is again rejected ('Thank you, Craig. But I don't need your help') by the threat. The time engine and its pilot emphasise his entanglement in the roots of suburbia and his lack of ambition beyond 'beer, pizza and telly'. Is he man enough to become the pilot? The only way he can do that is to want to move on, to embrace change, to be the 'man' upstairs. This can only come about when Sophie herself begins her journey to self-fulfilment under the Doctor's influence and finally when she is threatened by the 'man' upstairs too.

The episode succeeds through the three lead performances of Matt Smith, James Corden and Daisy Haggard. When he and the Doctor literally knock heads and Craig instantly discovers the Doctor's real identity and history, Corden's playing of Craig's reactions is amusing and well judged. I had my doubts about Corden but he confirms here that he's very much at home in drama and that frankly he should leave sketch shows, horror film pastiche and football punditry behind him. Where the episode falls down is in its conclusion. The 'love conquers all' solution to the threat from the time engine teeters over into tweeness and the threat is resolved in such as way that we are left with no real explanation of where it came from in the first place, reducing it to simply a device for articulating all of the character's inner desires. However, there is that interesting coda - about relationships found and lost - as Craig and Sophie are finally brought to their senses by the Doctor in contrast to Amy's discovery of the engagement ring and a relationship that has been wiped from time and leaves her and the audience asking any number of questions.

Ways Of Seeing

Doctor Who: Vincent And The Doctor
Review by Frank Collins

When Richard Curtis was announced as one of the writers for the new series I couldn't help but have some reservations. At worst, Curtis is indulgently over-sentimental as a writer and I did wonder what exactly the writer of The Vicar Of Dibley, Mr. Bean, Love Actually and The Boat That Rocked was going to do with a commission from his mate Moffat. Again, we were back to the same worries that circulated about Simon Nye writing for the series. Nye produced a great script that was bogged down by a lacklustre production and here Curtis bucks his disappointing trend of late with a rather good script. It does get lumbered with his trademark manipulation of the audience's emotions but on the face of it Vincent And The Doctor is certainly one of the better episodes in what has been, for me at least, a series that, bar a few episodes, consistently stumbles to match expectations.

At the heart of the episode is a rather moving performance from Tony Curran as Vincent Van Gogh and considering that this was a performance for an episode of Doctor Who and not a lavish and gritty bio-pic, he was able to convey a certain amount of Vincent's torment without it becoming too disturbing for a family audience. There is no doubt that a great deal of visual license has also been taken here and the Vincent we see is definitely a kinder representation of the desperately ill man that spent his final days in Auvers. It was certainly left to Curran to portray the man's unhinged state more through performance rather than through the typical visual and physical attributes that the likes of Lust For Life and Vincent And Theo provided. Perhaps the Vincent seen here lacked the edge of those Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth performances but Curran should be rightly praised for what he managed to achieve.

Much praise must also be given to Jonny Campbell, the director, as he nails the tone absolutely right and gives the episode a visual splendour that cleverly captures the intensity of Van Gogh's work, reproducing many of the signature works - The Wheat Field With Crows, The Church At Auvers - with a great deal of wit and care. Well, not quite. There are some liberties taken with the settings. The location of the story is suggested as Auvers-sur-Oise but two of the reproductions that the episode so meticulously puts onto the screen were in a completely different location. The bedroom where the Doctor goes to wake Vincent is a faithful recreation of The Bedroom In Arles painting, the cafe that the Doctor and Amy arrive at is a faithfully realised version of The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, At Night. The episode claims that these were in Auvers-sur-Oise when in fact they were in Arles. It's not as if they were next door to each other - Arles is in the South Of France and Auvers is in the suburbs of Paris. Beautiful production design, wonderfully lit and photographed but clearly a dollop of artistic license has been used with the locations of the inspiration for his major paintings.

As much of the license I suspect that was used in the various pronunciations of Van Gogh's name that litter the episode and, like the use of the paintings locations, it raises the question of historical accuracy in a series that Den Of Geek believes has returned to its Reithian 'educational' remit. Historical detail has never been one of the series strong points and I'm sure Billy Hartnell would have been fluffing all over the place ('Van Go..Goff…Guff, Chesterfield') if they'd attempted a similar story back in the 1960s. Besides, Curran's natural Scottish accent is sub-textually dismissed with a sweet joke about Amy and him sharing their origins in Holland and therefore it's clear that the production team are somewhat aware they're playing fairly fast and loose with the setting of the story. In the end, it doesn't matter because this is Doctor Who and not Vincent And Theo.

The tone is firmly Curtis' romantic comedy/tragedy stock in trade and the inevitability of Vincent's career path runs like a jet black seam through the cultural tourist bedrock of the story as the Doctor takes Amy into Vincent's world on a mission to truss an intergalactic chicken that's popped up in the window of The Church At Auvers painting. The mention of Van Gogh providing his daubs 'with no hope of praise or reward', as Bill Nighy's Dr. Black intones in the pre-titles, pretty much underlines the mission statement here. Never mind the fact that art is now an international commodity that is endlessly reproduced to such a degree that iconic paintings are divorced from the context which existed at the time of their making (the discussion about the preciousness of the paintings between Vincent, Amy and the Doctor touches on this), Vincent And The Doctor instead attempts to depict the context of their creation within the series own current obsessions with seeing, perception, memory and forgetting and bravely tries to democratise the reception and appreciation of art by describing the artist's vision itself.

This is underlined by the driver of the story - looking at something intensely enough you see something that is beyond the normal range of perception and suggests other dimensions and worlds, both in the artist's mind and, as the Doctor and Amy discover, physically existing within the real world. How we perceive things is also neatly summed up by the Doctor's gadget which can not only reveal the existence of the Krafayis but also reproduce the various faces of the Doctor when he pulls tongues at it in his Eleventh incarnation (a little Einstein reference there, I think), Amy's referal to the book of Van Gogh postcards as the official text, and the in-joke about Impressionists ('this is the problem with the Impressionists - not accurate enough. Would never happen with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters') that gently mocks the public reception of high art.

Vincent And The Doctor also pays some lip service to Vincent's bi-polar condition (the scenes where the Doctor and Vincent discuss the fact he can 'hear colours' and that 'nature is shouting' at him and later his breakdown as the Doctor goes to wake him) and briefly explores the connections between manic-depression and creative activity, the question Edgar Allan Poe himself pondered 'whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.' I admire Curtis' desire to highlight mental illness in the episode but wouldn't that point have been made more profoundly if Vincent's demons, sublimated and projected into the Jabberwocky-like Krafayis in the episode, were just simply the external realisation of the man's manic-depression rather than the obligatory 'monster of the week'?

The episode suggests that if the Doctor had not intervened then the Krafayis would simply have continued to blindly stumble around the Auvers-sur-Oise countryside polishing off the odd peasant until Vincent shot himself. It would have been far better if Curtis had simply stated that the Krafayis was just one of many phantoms that the Doctor and Amy help Vincent deal with, if only temporarily. That the creature is invisible, can only been seen through Vincent's 'mad' vision and the Doctor's equally bizarre gadget, almost elevates the idea to this level. As does the metaphor of the Krafayis as an abandoned, blind orphan ('I'm afraid, I'm afraid' says the dying creature) that offers an analog of Vincent's anger ('like the villagers who scream at me'), frustration and fear at his inevitable demise, the Doctor's loneliness and Amy's dislocated sense of herself since Rory was wiped from the time stream. This would also have fitted more aptly with Van Gogh's use of colour for its symbolic and expressive values as seen in his paintings and with the episode's concentration on how we see the world and how some are gifted to perceive it in a particularly powerful but self-destructive way.

Still, the fact that the Doctor and Van Gogh come to reproduce the 'George And The Dragon' figure that's briefly seen above the door of the church is both satisfying in its physical realisation, where Van Gogh symbolically uses the power of art, in the form of the easel, to fell the Krafayis beast, and in its nod to the 'slay the dragon' techniques used in hypnotherapy and psychotherapy where clients are required to identify their particular 'dragons' and use particular triggers to deal with recurring trauma. There's also a hint here of the mythical hero's journey that takes us back to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he delineates the stages and common elements found on the hero’s journey as a form of transformative psychotherapy.

As it is, the episode's 'cultural tourism' is rather blunt, even if it is beautifully realised, and the cachet of the 'celebrity historical' relies a little too heavily on the naturalising of recognisable cultural figures within a 21st century milieu, complete with the ever reliable excuse of 'alien monster' to drive what could have been a truly extraordinary drama about the areas of genius and madness that both Van Gogh and the Doctor oscillate between. Here, it really is a case of if not being necessary to depict the symbolic monster projected from Van Gogh's troubled mind as an actual, physical monster from another world to maintain the series credentials as fantasy or SF. Despite this concern about how physically realised Van Gogh's inner vision should be, we do get that rather lovely scene where Vincent, the Doctor and Amy lie down in the grass (emulating that 3D trailer that initially promoted the series) and they all try to see what Vincent sees.

The night sky is transformed into the swirls of his iconic The Starry Night painting and the episode makes a supreme effort to let us see the world from Vincent's point of view. It's a captivating moment that at least tries to make you understand what his artistic vision was attempting to achieve and is far more effective than the litany of Shakespeare quotes or the use of titles in the Christie pastiche that have stood in for what was supposed to be the genius of the written word in previous episodes and where the private pain of both figures was barely articulated. The Starry Night is one of his most popular works and here the sky transformed into swirling lines and glowing orbs suggest a possible representation of his mental state and embody an inner, subjective expression of Van Gogh’s response to nature. For the Doctor and Amy it is as if they are seeing the energies that bind the stars and planets together for the first time, without the use of technology as a frame of reference.

Vincent once said “Looking at the stars always makes me dream. We take death to reach a star,” and that's worth bearing in mind as the Doctor takes him to the stars and through time to allow him the grace to understand that whilst he suffered and died to reach that star, that apex of his creativity, the star continues to shine brightly long after his tragic death. What follows is a very powerful scene with Tony Curran completely stealing the episode as Vincent, overcome with the sheer joy and utter shock at the 'Van Gogh love' in the room as the camera spins around him in the gallery at Musee D'Orsay. A lovely, life affirming moment and where even Bill Nighy, as the gallery expert Dr. Black, manages to remain understated. Which is more than you can say for the irritating pop song smothered all over the start of the scene to tell you 'this is the bit where you must cry'. It didn't need it because Curran and Nighy can make you cry at the drop of a hat in that scene through the sheer quality of performance.

However, Curtis just can't bloody help himself. It's a good ending as it is despite the music, gives Vincent an emotional moment of triumph that any neglected artist would desire but doesn't tamper with or damage the fixed point in time that is his sad demise. It's the way of the world and Van Gogh's reputation must always remain post-humus and it's rather dim of Amy to think she can change that. So, it also works as a practical lesson for her. Good, leave it at that and with the Doctor's sweet 'pile of good things and bad things' speech. As they stare at the windows of The Church Of Auvers painting and declare 'No Krafayis' I really would have preferred 'cue end titles' at that moment. Instead, Curtis has to have that final zoom into the classic Sunflowers canvas with the 'For Amy' dedication. It's clearly not enough for him to show the removal of the Krafayis from a painting or suggest Vincent's inspiration earlier in the episode is Amy not so subtly sat in the middle of loads of sunflowers. As a scene that was good enough without being too trite but to then suggest that an artist who clearly sees nature through the prism of the unconscious and through the intensity of his bi-polar condition would then daub 'For Amy' onto a canvas of sunflowers, flowers he describes as a metaphor for the brevity of life and the inevitability of death, just smacks of poor judgement to me.

We get it, Richard. For a brief moment, the Doctor and Amy revealed Vincent's humanity and we saw the troubled man's psyche as the catalyst for his art and now because you feel you haven't manipulated the audience enough you slap on the corniest, most contrived coda in the book. To that end, why wasn't Dr. Black suddenly very suspicious at the changes in the painting and asking for it to be verified as a fake? It's an illogical device to use especially when the painting that has the dedication was completed a year before the episode allegedly takes place. So Vincent, feeling a bit chipper, went back and dedicated a completed canvas to a mouthy Scottish bint from Holland who came on strong to him in a cafe? Right. A pity then, because this is certainly one of the better episodes this year and despite the final manipulative twist from Curtis, the scene of Vincent in the Musee D'Orsay must stand out as one of the more moving sequences in the revival of the series even though in itself it seems at once both a generous and a cruel thing for the Doctor and Amy to show him his future, the Doctor knowing that tragedy will not be averted and Amy believing it can, before he walks into that wheat field and shoots himself.

Lounge Lizards

Doctor Who: Cold Blood
Review by Frank Collins

As writer Chris Chibnall revealed in this month's Doctor Who magazine, he went back to Malcolm Hulke's Doctor Who And The Silurians as his inspiration for this two parter. With Cold Blood it's clear he doesn't know quite what to do with the Silurians once he's woken them up and rather like Hulke's original story, once you've shown that both races simply have too many differences to be able to get along, you either have to blow one of them up or send them back to sleep. Hulke used the internal conflicts of both the humans and the Silurians to represent the Cold War and post-colonial politics of the early 1970s and used the drama to show the wider consequences of the battle for the planet before...well...the Brigadier blows the Silurians up. I suspect the Eldane voice over was Chibnall's attempt to place this story into a broader context but it sits uneasily as historical commentary to a rather weak episode that is concentrated solely in an isolated mining village.

Cold Blood at its worst presented the complex problems of racial hatred, colonialist entitlements and apartheid between the humans and the Silurians in very simple 'Janet And John' terms. The scene showing Amy, Nasreen and Eldane thrashing out their negotiations and reaching a compromise had its heart in the right place, but was truly awful when it had Nasreen turning to question Amy about the terms of Silurian immigration and settlement, devolving into just one of those interminable Star Trek Picard/Sisko/Janeway foreign policy board meetings with the rubber faced 'Aliens Of The Week'. Whereas it took the ANC and the National Party at least six years to establish a peaceful resolution to apartheid and a new constitution in South Africa, it took the three of them precisely five minutes to establish a legal framework for sharing the entire planet never mind a single country. The BA cabin crew strikes would be nipped in the bud with this team working at ACAS.

The big problem here is, of course, a sense of scale. These negotiations take place in a bubble that's divorced from the rest of the planet. At least, in previous Silurian stories the uneasy dialogue between the Silurians and the humans was given either a national or global scale with the mutual lack of trust being shown to have far bigger consequences on the wider populace of Earth. Still, the script tries its best to show that all sides are culpable here and more or less treads the same ground as Hulke's Doctor Who And The Silurians. However, instead of the Brigadier blowing the reptiles up, we've got their leader realising that enforced hibernation for another 1000 years seems to be the only solution to the war that's brewing that will allow both sides some time to reflect on and potentially evolve in their attitudes.

To that end, Chibnall quickly tries to tie it up by having Nasreen and Tony stay behind as ambassadors in situ and the Doctor offering a sermon on the Welsh hills to spread the words of peace. Whereas in Hulke's script the xenophobic Major Baker succumbs to the Silurian plague as his just desserts for inflaming the conflict between the two races, the parallel character of Ambrose does at least have the consequences of her prejudices and mistakes presented to her. Ambrose and Tony are by far the most interesting characters in the story in that they do have a clear learning curve through the story, which is more than can be said for some. Ambrose is at least full of remorse in the end (a decent performance from Nia Roberts here) and agrees to take what she's learned about herself to bring up Elliot with the proper attitude.

However, morally, there are some mind-bogglingly strange notes in the script. Malohkeh, the Silurian Dr. Mengele, has happily been dissecting human beings for years and the Doctor doesn't even question it and actually allies himself to the scientist, who fifteen minutes in is upbraiding the military commander Restac for her methods in subjugating the humans. Better than plunging a scalpel into them, eh, Malohkeh? Presumably, he's the one who's been body snatching out of the local graveyard and planting the blue grass then? The Doctor merrily slaps the lizard on the back for reviving Elliot and conveniently forgets to mention the years of cruel scientific experiments he's carried out. I'm sure Mo will be proudly showing off that dissection scar down the pub next week too and like Elliot's kidnap it's all too casually brushed aside.

The Doctor also seems to get on his high horse a little too often here with the humans, blaming them for much of what has happened when in fact Malohkeh and Alaya had actually taken it upon themselves to attack the humans. He's quite happy tearing strips off Ambrose for what she's done, looking down his nose at her and the others for not being the shining exemplar he pompously expected them to be, but he's hardly been a reliable moral compass in this story. Eldane isn't exactly leadership material either and seems a rather pallid and ineffectual creature in the face of the military might of Restac. And just why was there a vast army of Silurians hidden away underground? When did their culture become so militarised?

I was willing to give the Silurian re-design some time last week but looking at them again this week just proved to me how utterly wrong the thinking was here from the design team. To take away their one memorable characteristic - the pulsating third eye - and then deck them out in skirts and fish nets, give them masks that make them look like toothless old hags and big clunky ray-guns just reduces them to the very thing fanboy Chibnall moaned about back in the 1980s. Worse still, they smother national treasure Stephen Moore in a horrid kaftan and the Star Trek make up to play Eldane, a sort of Silurian Nelson Mandela.

He looks less than dignified, alas, just when the script needed as much dignity as it could get and whereas Neve McIntosh really inhabits the make up and adds little physical ticks to breathe life into both Alaya and Restac, Moore doesn't quite seem to make the prosthetics work for him, almost afraid to work his facial muscles to bring life to the role, looking a little like he's just left the dentist with an anaesthetised face. A shame really because the rest of the episode actually looks rather good. There is an attempt to give a sense of visual scale to the episode with a lovely Gaudi inspired flavour to the production design which for the most part is highly attractive but sadly can't quite stretch to completely disguise the familiarity of Cardiff's Temple Of Peace location shoot. The lighting is particularly good and the brief use of Plantasia in Swansea as a location is effective too.

After all the thumpingly obvious signalling in The Hungry Earth, it was only a matter of time before we got to what I assumed was supposed to be a shocking ending with the death of Rory. Again, the script, direction and acting can't quite decide how this needs to be pitched and the biggest stumbling block is that the emotional edge has been worn off this laboriously signposted conclusion by the equally similar 'death of Rory' scene in Amy's Choice. I am sad that Rory has seemingly been killed off but there really isn't any emotional value in that scene and if, as I also suspect, that Rory will be restored then what exactly was the point in killing him off. Equally, now that Amy has forgotten him completely, then it just makes all the business in Vampires Of Venice and Amy's Choice rather inconsequential and redundant.

The series, in trying to build the moral and emotional dimensions of its characters and the consequences of the stories, when its subtext has been about remembering and forgetting, ironically seems to either forget that they exist or remove them completely just after they've been introduced. Amy and the Doctor have an adventure, something terrible and emotional happens, and then they go on a trip to Venice, or Rio or Wales and forget about it. Whether this is a consequence of related scenes being dropped from episodes isn't clear but both The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood feel like they've been victims of some very judicious editing. I can perhaps understand the Doctor's attitude because he's alien and has lived a long time but Amy trots through each story without the character palpably growing in stature. Even with Rory's death, she's robbed of her grief by the very 'crack in time' story device that Moffat's using across the series. That's either a very clever or a very stupid thing and I'm not sure we'll know which until the bloody Pandorica finally opens.

I'm not proposing a return to RTD's use of the domestic drama to ground the stories and develop the emotional range of the characters but just an acknowledgment that if you are going to make a series-wide arc so prominent in the stories, to the point of using it to actually kill off characters, then the consequences need to be seen to affect the other characters and story developments in significant ways across the episodes. There's a problem for me as, by not caring about Amy, then I don't really care if she can remember Rory or not. I'm not emotionally invested in the character enough for the death of Rory to really matter to me.

And if the Doctor knows how terrible the crack in time is then why has he spent nine episodes not doing anything about it? Unlike, say 'Bad Wolf', 'Saxon' or any of the other series-wide memes that have threaded each series together and led towards a two or three part finale, the 'crack in time' sub-plot is actually more front and centre than any of those memes and we, both the audience and the characters, know what it does and see the obvious threat again and again. The urgency it signals is ignored and the attempt to build a mystery into the series is constantly interrupted by the blatant moving of gears within certain stories to underline but not challenge the threat. 

Cold Blood is pretty to look at (apart from that poor CGI explosion of the drill head) but never really gets its hands dirty with the wider political, moral, environmental and global consequences of waking the Silurians up. There was a chance here, suggested by the Eldane voice over, to do a big story that would deal with many of the wider implications of the Doctor Who and Torchwood universes, of dealing with another species face to face in a world that has already seen alien invasions and where government agencies already know about the existence of the Silurians. Instead, we simply got a lot of species-ist agit-prop in an isolated Welsh village with a population of about a dozen, the destruction of a multi-million pound drill head (won't the government investigate the explosion and the disappearance of Tony and Nasreen?) and the contrived death of a supporting character.

Down, Down, Deeper And Down

Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth
Review by Frank Collins

As far as fairy tale allusions go then The Gruffalo is I suppose an interesting allegorical choice for this week's Doctor Who. Julia Donaldson's story about the mouse that exploits fear of a mythical beast to scare away predators is pretty much at the heart of The Hungry Earth as father and son read it together and later the father sits and reads it whilst on night duty at the drilling complex. It conjures up a number of ideas and themes. It is traditionally a book that parents and children read together, often amongst the first books used to teach a child to read. With Chris Chibnall's overtly Pertwee-a-thon of a script, bolting together an array of 1970s classic Doctor Who tropes, we could almost be getting the same experience.

A very child friendly, mildly scary Doctor Who that can be digested by children and parents in the same company and about as non-threatening a version of Doctor Who they're ever likely to share as viewers. It once again skews the series to the more child friendly end of the audience spectrum and again, like many of the episodes this year, throws in familiar childhood fears that evoke in adults their own memories of such anxieties. Hence, we get a central child character who, after his father has been swallowed up by the earth, is allowed to go wandering about unchaperoned in the dark (by a Doctor who is as much a child himself when it comes to facing dangers) just as the monsters have started skulking round the graveyard. The fears of parental abandonment by children loom large in this episode and the central figure of over-protected Elliot is separated from both his mother and father in the story and is likely the symbolic trigger for what will be Ambrose's attitude to the SIlurians.

It also evokes some very Gruffalo-esque qualities in the Doctor. Surely, the Doctor is the mouse who, like a Zen master that uses his antagonists' aggression against them, here reassures the child that he has met monsters before and they're usually the ones afraid of him. By his very nature, the Doctor is the tallest of all tall stories (especially now that he's played by the gangly Matt Smith) but the current series is in danger of over playing the whole fairy tale motif until it becomes obvious and dull.  This Zen like approach to confronting one's enemies, where The Gruffalo is a story of a mouse and a monster that shows no matter how gruesome the monsters children can create in their own minds, they are never as bad as they imagine them to be, is given strength by the Doctor's encounter with Alaya where he at first removes the mask from her face and, like the liberal Englishman he is, pulls up a fold away chair, crosses his legs and calmly gets behind her defensive bullshit. It's certainly one of the best scenes in a well paced slow burn of an introduction, and suggests that the morality of their relative positions might be further built upon in the concluding half of the story.

What's less intriguing is the all surface and no substance Pertwee love-in. Welsh mines and infected green-veined miners (he should have been called Bert) straight out of The Green Death; a drilling project that Sir Keith Gold would have fretted about only if the boss was Stahlman and not Chaudhry and they were looking for a new form of energy (and just where are the hand wringing politicians in Doctor Who these days?); a village and its church surrounded by a force barrier and Silurians that appear to have a 1970s wardrobe designed by Paco Rabanne. Writer Chris Chibnall clearly has great affection for the Pertwee years but it's a pity that none of the real political vitality of those halcyon days was present here.

They seem to be drilling for the sake of it and no none yet seems remotely bothered about the effects on the environment (quite serendipitous that this was transmitted in the aftermath of the appalling oil drilling disaster in the Mexican Gulf) and the encounter with the Silurians has barely explored the political theme of the indigenous species versus the rampant colonial invader, a very British concern that Doctor Who used to tackle with gusto in the 1970s and which has lost its resonance since most of our colonies desperately demanded independence from us years ago. There is potential to see further analogies to the 'Britain for the British' tub-thumping albeit reversed here with the Silurians spitting blood about us pesky apes. No, for the moment this is all suggestive window dressing until hopefully we get some serious sub-text in the second half.

There are some oddly unexplained moments here too. Why are the bodies of the dead being removed from their graves? It's a nice little way to split Rory off from the Doctor and Amy and have him doing his own bit of investigating but after standing in one of the graves pondering on what exactly to do the idea sort of fizzles out. What was the point of the Silurians blocking out the daylight when they surrounded the village with the energy barrier? Just so the Doctor could swan about with a pair of clever heat vision Ray-Bans? There's a sense here of delaying tactics, putting enough of these oddities into the script to prevent it rushing too quickly to its conclusion and, again, based on this sense I reckon the meat of the story is in the second part.

There are enough rewards to be had though. I rather enjoyed that the supporting characters were actually fleshed out, given the extra time afforded by a two-parter. The relationship between Nasreen and Tony blooming as disaster strikes; Nasreen's reaction to the trip in the TARDIS and her growing admiration of the Doctor, with its 'old school' charm momentarily bringing Amy's cynicism and bitching into very sharp relief; and the Doctor's empathy with dyslexic Elliot ('Oh that's all right. I can't make a decent meringue') were all decent moments. The chase in the graveyard and Elliot's kidnap was also very atmospheric and tense as was Amy's rather horrified reaction to a potential dissection by Silurian (a neat parallel with the Doctor's criticism of Tony's willingness to dissect their attackers earlier in the episode).

I don't know about you but to me it's a bit obvious that Rory's days in the TARDIS are numbered. There is the heavy telegraphing of that opening scene between him and Amy where he takes her engagement ring off and puts it in the TARDIS for safe keeping. I can already see a distraught Amy finding that ring and wishing there had been another way. To really emphasise it, Chibnall plonks Rory in the middle of a graveyard and stands him in an empty grave. Subtle! And just what on earth was going on in the scene where the Doctor, Amy and Rory spot another Amy and Rory waving to them from a hillside? The Doctor brushes it off as a future version of them coming to relive past glories but that just sounds either like obvious misdirection or some serious over-indulgence. Or are they on that hill trying to warn themselves of the danger they are about to face. Something is afoot and we should cast our minds back to that original 3D trailer which climaxed with the screen filling with a Silurian mask.

Shall we also take bets on who is going to start the war with the Silurians and fulfill Alaya's martyrdom complex? Will it be Tony, going all green veined on us or will it be Ambrose and her anger management issues symbolised by the huge pile of blunt instruments and guns that she's piled into her van? Again, the big speech from the Doctor about how they must be the best humans they can be in the impending crisis and how they have the potential to be brilliant just sounds like he's making excuses for what will be a regrettable blood-bath in next week's episode. It was hardly surprising that Nasreen was the only one clapping after that pompous twaddle. Ambrose will seek to protect her child and husband with as much zeal as Alaya, an equally determined female, will continue screaming for a war to reclaim what is rightfully the Silurians home.

One of the big problems with The Hungry Earth is the re-design of the Silurians. I can understand that it must be easier for an actor to give a better performance if the special effects make up allows you a wide range of expressions but here the Silurians we know and love, with their big ears, circular mouth/nose and that wonderful third eye have been replaced by a close cousin of  the Jem'Hadar. It's a very good make up but it's hardly a radical re-design and why have they suddenly got into the habit of popping on a mask? It's a good performance from Neve McIntosh but, old fashioned as I am, I want Radiophonic strangeness over my dodgy and not so dodgy accents and that pulsating third eye. But that's me wanting my cake and eating it and there are I suppose enough moments of Pertwee pastiche already in evidence.

For an episode completely driven by the return and reveal of a classic monster and their vast underground city, the new Silurians still need to go some distance to differentiate themselves from their Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cousins. It's not a bad episode and is certainly an improvement on Chibnall's previous efforts on both Doctor Who and Torchwood but it perhaps suffers from the stuffing in of all the familiar Doctor Who tropes from the 1970s as pure set-up for the second part of the story. Some good performances, some tense and scary moments but it didn't quite make the earth move for me. Let's hope the pay-off is a good one.

In Cold Blood

Doctor Who: Amy's Choice
Review by Frank Collins

Something's been nagging at me for a few weeks now with this new series. And no, I'm not referring to Amy Pond. Although, she has been the source of much of my consternation too and will be again by the time I've finished with this review. This series is not really engaging me as much as I thought it would and with Amy's Choice some of these concerns are thrown into sharp relief. On paper, this is terrific. A very witty and imaginative script from Simon Nye. Nye is a seasoned television writer and an extremely well thought of translator of Moliere and Dario Fo so I wasn't in the least bit worried that he was writing for Doctor Who, unlike others who immediately fixated on his Men Behaving Badly credentials and though the sky was falling in because a mere sit-com writer was daring to write telefantasy for a Saturday night BBC1 audience. I mean, how dare he!

There is a great deal to admire. Nye succinctly grasps one of the central conceits of Doctor Who here - what makes the ordinary so extraordinary, the domestic so terrifying - and weaves a magical little tale about repression, guilt and deadly pensioners. It's good to see that what is clearly the 'cheap' episode of the series is being used to unpack a few of the Doctor's darker aspects without tipping the whole thing over into the hyperbole of the 'Time Lord Victorious' of The Waters Of Mars and it's following in the tradition of the much admired Turn Left and Midnight. Like Buffy, Nye uses the fantastic to try and deal with a number of personal themes; Amy's child-like relationship to and dependency on the Doctor, her wavering love for Rory and the constant check that the Doctor keeps on his dual nature.

There's genre hybridity too, where he emulates The Avengers and its use of a threatened English pastoral (and by extension an erasure of Rory's particular hopes and desires); the comedy horror of Peter Jackson's Braindead (minus the hyper-gore - well it is 6.30 in the evening, after all) and the reality versus dreamscape games of the series own The Edge Of Destruction, The Mind Robber and The Deadly Assassin. The episode opens with an establishing scene of the English countryside, verdant and sunny, with a domesticated, pregnant Amy and a pony-tailed Rory fretting about her contractions in their idyllic little country cottage. I was struck by how much this also reminded me of the relationship between Charlotte Coleman and Dylan Moran in Nye's equally surreal series How Do You Want Me? about urbanites coping with life in the country. In fact, if Coleman were still alive and was the same age as Karen she would have been a shoe in for the role of Amy Pond.

That fretful acclimatisation to 'country ways' is writ large here by the marauding villagers who all turn out to be infested with alien creatures. Into this nightmarish idyll plunges the TARDIS, 'Leaf blowers! Use a rake!' shouts Rory over the distant wheezing and groaning of the TARDIS engines. Similar to the depiction of English pastoral in The Avengers, and as James Chapman points out in 'Saints And Avengers', Leadworth is seen as 'a facade of olde England that hides deadly secrets'. Here the tranquility of Rory's idealised English green and pleasant land is twisted by the darkest aspects of the Doctor, in the form of the Dream Lord, into a nightmare of alien possessed old codgers who vaporise children, and ultimately Rory, into dust.

Even the Doctor, who should be so used to the slow path of life in the English home counties after his exile on Earth in the 1970s, finds little to inspire him. 'What a result. Look at this…bench…what a nice little bench. What will they think of next,' he observes after confessing he's turned up by mistake five years later into Amy and Rory's countryside bliss. It's a line that Dylan Moran would have delivered with similar disparagement in an episode of How Do You Want Me?. To his enquiry about staving off boredom, Amy and Rory counter with an uninspiring but slightly nightmarish litany. 'We relax. We listen to the birds.' The birdsong volume goes up and a flip to the interior of the TARDIS confirms that what we've just seen is far more complex that it seems.

Nye establishes two realities and manages to generate suspense and tension about those realities very consistently throughout the episode, leaving the viewer and, to an extent the characters, with a guessing game as to which reality is true and which is false. The denouement, that posits a third reality, is clever because it's the Doctor himself that has created the other realities but it also loses credibility with the dreadful reveal of the space pollen 'MacGuffin' that supposedly promulgated the narrative in the first place and, alas, that falls into Terry Pratchett's criticism that the series often does rely on 'Deus ex Machina' to quickly resolve its plots.

There is a lot to enjoy - the scene in the old people's home has a lovely, creepy vibe to it, the frosted up TARDIS (a classic fairy tale motif, think of The Snow Queen and her icy palace, and the frozen and sleeping curses of so many similar tales, that provide a further self-conscious exploration by the writer and the characters that they are "caught in a story"), the marauding old pensioners (the threat of old age as a nightmare concept) taking a battering ('Whack her!) from Rory and the Doctor, and the multiple personalities of the Dream Lord (the doctor, the butcher) are rather fun.

In the centre of this there is also the examination of the Doctor's nature and the sparring between what is, essentially, the ego and id, between Time and Dream Lords, in one of the more enjoyable elements in the story. Apt that this was shown in the week that those other ego and id sparring partners of Cameron and Clegg sealed their marriage to save England from the marauding spectre of the deficit. It works especially well here because you've got Toby Jones as the Dream Lord, playing with relish a vindictive fantasy version of the Truman Capote he played in Infamous. Nye's theme is clear. The Doctor has accumulated enough trauma over the centuries for the 'space pollen' to trigger the release of his id (and, no, it's not the bloody Valeyard). It's a classic Freudian analysis of the Doctor suggesting that for the majority of the time he exists in a state where he can channel the libidinal energy of the Dream Lord, or his own id it is revealed, to more socially acceptable ends.

Normally, the Doctor is able to put his id to work for him when he needs to. It just so happens to manifest itself here and sets the ego the task of reintegrating the id back into itself. The Doctor's ego must therefore integrate the id in order to function properly at an instinctual level. It's also, broken record time again, a classic fairy tale mechanism where the hero of the tale must restore order and healthy function to blighted kingdoms, oppressed villagers and must rescue the sacrificial maiden. Rory and Amy are there as the super-ego, always unsatisfied with what the Doctor's done ('I was promised amazing worlds. Instead I get duff central heating.') and his inability to heed their warnings, take their advice or answer their questions ('I can't know everything. Why does everybody expect me to, always?').

That said, the Dream Lord, if he is an amalgamation of all the Doctor's repressed anxieties and traumas, should really have been more vicious. There's 900 odd years of skeletons in the closet he could have exploited and instead he spends his time babbling on about his appearance ('the clothes designed by a first year fashion student' - I bet Ray Holman was chuffed about that line) and Amy's choice ('Oh, Amy. You'll have to sort your men out. Choose even.'). The really uncomfortable moment is when he's alone with Amy in the TARDIS and transforms himself into a libidinous, open shirted sex fiend. Bring him back and let's see him do some real damage because the idea of an adventure where the danger lies in the Doctor actually talking to himself is only scratching the surface about the psychologically damaged Doctor and his companions.

That problematic ending aside, there are also other problems for me here. Karen Gillan does put in her best performance as Amy but the character really has failed to engage me over the last six episodes and therefore the emotional and moral choice that forms the heart of the episode actually lacks a consistent development. Whether that is symptomatic of performance, scripting or direction is hard to tell. It could be a combination of all three. The producers have been so busy over the last six weeks positioning Amy as this spiky, feisty, spirited, plucky…(insert any description that Messrs Moffat, Wenger and Willis have used here)….woman that I've actually found myself drawing further and further away from her. She's teetering on the brink of becoming one dimensional.

This problem was then exacerbated with the inclusion of Rory Williams. A complete charmer, bumbling but brave, insecure but loyal, he's a character I've warmed to instantly and Arthur Darvill has deftly manifested his idiosyncratic attractions. Frankly, I really don't get what Rory sees in Amy and that's obviously intentional. If you look at the body language between the two of them, which is deliberately highlighted in The Vampires Of Venice for instance, they have some emotional and physical intimacy issues that clearly need resolving. He's a 'giver', often needing emotional dependency and she's rather aloof and seems to be pushing Rory away just as he tries to get closer to her. I've found that her act of keeping Rory at a distance has translated into the character's so called 'feistiness' and 'kookiness' also putting me at a distance. Rory's persistent, I'll give him that.

Amy's Choice is obviously an attempt to not only demonstrate that Amy and Rory actually do love one another (and it takes Rory's nightmare death for Amy to realise this) but it is also used as a narrative mechanism to ring fence their relationship in opposition to the ill-defined, 'will they - won't they' dynamic between Amy and the Doctor, expressed by that 'one night stand' that Amy attempted, rather dubiously with the Doctor, the night before her wedding at the end of Flesh And Stone. The difficulty with this is that as I draw away from the character of Amy I also find it very hard to emotionally empathise with Rory's death scene. Yes, it's upsetting but it didn't move me. And that's a tragedy because it should. Ironically, given the theme of the story, the emotional core of the narrative is at the mercy of 'choices' in performance and direction. The scene on the page may well have been terrific but even the combined efforts of Gillan, Darvill, Smith and director Catherine Morshead can't fully communicate the truth of it.

The choice for Amy, deciding that this English idyll is a false reality and life is not worth living without Rory, is a great way of finally exposing the humanity of her character and 'having to grow up eventually' (both Amy's choice and Rory's symbolic shedding of the pony-tail) but is too little and too late no matter how good Gillan, Darvill and Smith are in it? I have to ask myself, do I really care about her? And, I find I don't. Not just because her humanity has only just scrambled its way to the top of the heap of the soundbites that have drowned out the initially intriguing idea of Amy but because her choice barely acknowledges the fact that she's also pregnant and carrying Rory's child. That she doesn't give the child a thought, or that it is articulated in the script at that point, is the final straw that breaks the camel's back as far as the appeal of the character goes for me.

I'm not looking for the histrionics of Rose Tyler here, much of which tipped the series into over-wrought melodrama in the first year with Tennant, but just a woman who you can even begin to like, who even registers that if the camper van crash is actually real then she's killing herself, the Doctor and her child. To get that across properly is really the point of the episode (as much as Amy observes 'what is the point of you' to the Doctor) and it fails to do that for me, even if it is all revealed to be an inconsequential set of dreams concocted by the Doctor's alter-ego the Dream Lord. However, it's effective when Amy and Rory emerge from their sleep in the frozen TARDIS, a very tender scene indeed, as they banish the damaging id of the Doctor and declare their love for one another.

The ending, in which the dreamscapes are revealed to be the symptom of 'space pollen', doesn't quite help shore up Amy's choice. It's just cheapens it and that's a shame. Not only do we have the space pollen sending the Doctor on some kind of psychedelic trip but the Doctor clearly knows who the Dream Lord is and that they've been given two dreams to choose from, acknowledging the cold star they were plunging into was a fiction. Very convenient of him to realise but I can live with that and the Doctor blowing up the TARDIS as a way of restoring reality, mirroring the destruction of the Leadworth reality with the camper van crash.

The psychic pollen is just a bit of guff unnecessarily tacked onto the end to explain the Dream Lord and the dream states. Why not leave it ambiguous with that sudden reflection of him in the TARDIS console? Overall, it's a good script but horribly marred by very average execution, with some quite disappointing direction from the usually reliable Catherine Morshead (the quirkier style of Adam Smith would have suited this down to the ground) who doesn't add vision and energy enough to the threat of the dreamscapes, making them creepy but not particularly scary.

Don't Make Waves

Doctor Who: The Vampires Of Venice
Review by Frank Collins

As Stuart Ian Burns has already pointed out, in this week of political insecurity it's a relief that we can rely on something like Doctor Who to provide a salve for our troubles. But as the pre-titles of The Vampires Of Venice get underway, you'd be forgiven for finding an equanimity between the hung parliament rhetoric of Brown, Cameron and Clegg (pleading every five minutes that we must think of the country's need for a strong, stable government) and Rosanna Calvierri as she offers to her son ' I believe protecting the future of one's own is a sacred duty.' That later discussion of a pact between her and the Doctor uncannily echoes the various open offers that the Tory and Labour parties have been trying to tempt Nick Clegg with. Rosanna is just as unlikely to go for proportional representation as Cameron is, so the Doctor's on a hiding to nothing trying to persuade her to rethink her policies. She instead goes for unleashing a very different kind of Eurozone crisis and one that certainly won't help clear up that ash cloud.

Alas, if anything, The Vampires Of Venice is cookie-cutter Doctor Who. Yes, sumptuously lovely to look at, entertaining and witty, but it's just rehearsing any number of rather tired scenarios from the previous series and not really bringing anything new to the table. Hence, we get highly contrived plans to sink Venice made by aliens on the run from 'Amy's Crack' (rather too similar to those refugees of the Time War including the Nestene Consciousness, which lost all its protein planets and then turned up on Earth in Rose, and the Gelth, who were forced to exist as gaseous beings and then had to form a bridgehead on Earth in The Unquiet Dead). Then there's the whole climax of the Doctor climbing up the bell tower to stop the space-fish terraforming device which just looks like a rehash of him climbing up Alexandra Palace television tower or clinging onto the top of the Empire State Building. And lest we forget, the noble self-sacrifice of a supporting character is back again with gun-powder loving Guido blowing himself to bits to stop the vampire brides of Rosanna.

Yes, it's difficult to try and be original after 47 years and the series is bound to keep offering up traditional stories every year but this just smacked too much of repetition. And for once couldn't we just have a Doctor Who story where the vampires actually are the supernatural bloodsuckers of legend and myth, maybe even tying in with the Great Vampires of State Of Decay? Why do they automatically have to be space-fish aliens? Either go for the vampires or go for the marauding space-fish because in the end it'll help avoid all the contrivances chucked into the script to explain why the space-fish are pretending to be vampires and the silly inconsistencies of having creatures that react badly to sunlight romping through the episode in broad daylight only for one of them to be vaporised by a quick flash of sunlight from Amy's Boots No 7 make up mirror.

It also joins the myriad of novels and films that partly look at the vampire genre as a representation of race and nation. Again, immigration was, and continues to be, an anxiety for those who have just voted in the election and, debatably, 'Bigot-gate' may have been one of the factors that influenced the electorate on May 5th. How timely then that The Vampires Of Venice uneasily reflects much of the concern about European immigrants. The vampire genre often expresses some of the discourses on race and nation that are reflected in changes in immigration laws and the public perceptions of immigrants and immigration. Vampires, particularly, are often treated in such narratives with much the same hostility as actual immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Here, the space-fish seem to assume the role of asylum seekers from the oncoming silence at the end of the universe and, much to the fear of the Doctor and everyone else, would rather like to impose their culture on 16th Century Venice and annex it for themselves to rebuild their population.

Despite the stereotypical images of vampire brides, there is also something more going on here about the familiar themes of unfettered sexuality. Not only is the story positioned as a response to the deliberately flirtatious cliffhanger of Flesh And Stone, showing Amy practically jumping on the Doctor, where now the Doctor seeks to contain her passions and cool her ardor by bringing fiance Rory along for a romantic trip to Venice, but it also shows an alien race who can only survive by converting young girls into suitable wives for the male children of the queen-like Rosanna. Rosanna also suggests the possibility of both a political pact with the Doctor and also a physical congress with him. This further opens up some of the miscegenation anxieties at the heart of the story.

The Doctor's rejection of the vampire Other in this story could partly be seen as a reaffirmation of his own nationalism, his own heritage as a Timelord. One of the moral conundrums here is that the Doctor quite clearly allows the space-fish species to die out rather than do much more to help them and uses his own example with Gallifrey ('I told you you can't go back and change time. You mourn but you live. I know, Rosanna. I did it.') as a yardstick by which to make this decision and it convinces Rosanna that she has no alternative but to throw herself in the canal.

The Doctor's morally questionable destruction of the 'monsters' at the end of the episode ('One city to save an entire species. Was that so much to ask?' 'Tell me Doctor, can your conscience carry the weight of another dead race?') uneasily posits The Vampires Of Venice as re-enactment of an imperialist fantasy of defining and drawing frontiers, both the national (preventing the isolation of Venice by the space-fish) and galactic (the Doctor repelling those that wish to possess the Earth) and sorting out the aliens, perhaps attempting to humanise them ('you didn't know Isabella's name' is enough of a test for the Doctor), without the whiff of racism.  It's highly ironic then that the shoot for The Vampires Of Venice took place in Croatia, itself historically enmeshed in balkanism and wars of independence.

Despite these uneven subtexts and themes, there is much to enjoy but it's status as a 'romp' doesn't quite give it the stamina to make a favourable comparison to the likes of The Time Of Angels and Flesh And Stone. It rattles along happily enough on a succession of quick-fire witty and funny lines. What I enjoyed was the re-introduction of Rory into the series and much of the witty interplay between him and the Doctor. Matt Smith, it now goes without saying, provides yet another thoroughly appealing performance as the Doctor.

I'm no doubt going to upset some by saying that Amy is beginning to annoy me now. She's slowly losing her appeal for me and I'm finding her quite a cold, rather odd, character and I simply don't believe that she was interested in marrying Rory at all. This might well be part of Moffat's arc for the character so I'm prepared to see what happens but it underlines something about her that I don't honestly find that appealing. Arthur Darvill fulfills the potential he displayed in The Eleventh Hour and makes Rory such a fresh presence through his very normality. He's a welcome addition to the TARDIS crew simply because he offers a balance to the overwhelming 'kookiness' and cynicism of Amy and the full blown eccentricity of the Doctor and even offers a critique of the Doctor's ability to make people want to impress him. The sword fight between him and Francesco is a lovely bit of physical comedy too.

Helen McCrory is suitably enthusiastic as Rosanna and she looks magnificent, works very well with Alex Price as her son Francesco and is especially good in her stand-off against the Doctor, giving us one of the best scenes in the episode. Some very funny moments to cherish too; from the Doctor popping up out of the cake to 'The Stripper' ('There's a girl outside in her bikini. Could someone let her in, give her a jumper?'); the confrontation with the Brides of Calvierri using the library card with the First Doctor's image; Rory and Amy pretending to be brother and sister when talking to the Calvierri ('I'm a gondola…driver'); the 'Ofsted', 'yours is bigger than mine' and 'Cab for Amy Pond?' gags and many more.

It's also sustained as television spectacle by virtue of the beautifully photographed locations in Trogir and some digital magic to make it look like 16th Century Venice, playing on the 'quality television' denoting period cozzies and, what Matt Hills regards as, the series flirtation with 'historical citations and high cultural aesthetics' (its visual nod to Visconti's Death In Venice amongst them). It taps into the popularist vampire genre via the prism of Hammer's exploitation style horror rather than the teenage romantics of Twilight. The vampire genre it emulates is unfortunately rather diluted here but, granted, this is going out at 6pm so it can't have too much blood and thunder these days.

The spectacle takes a slight dive in quality with the not so convincing CGI depiction of the space-fish, particularly in Francesco's death scene, and the terraforming over the stormy Venetian skies. There's also a tendency to describe rather than show and that is particularly problematic in the sacrifice of Isabella where she thrashes about in the water and tells us what is happening. A couple of underwater shots of 'things' grabbing at her would have sold that scene more convincingly. Again, perhaps considered too traumatising for the kiddies. The finale on the top of the bell tower also doesn't quite work either as the dramatic tension is dissipated by some very lacklustre studio based green screen work and an odd choice of using static shots.

Dare I say it, but the promises made by the current production team, especially in Moffat's comment "If you took a vote amongst the playgrounds of Britain they'd all be saying, 'Make it scary, you're meant to be behind that sofa!'", have so far only briefly emerged in the last two-parter. My inner 8 year old is still looking enticingly at the sofa behind which only one or two momentary visits have been made this year. The only moment in The Vampires Of Venice that threatened to disturb the peace was the sequence in which Amy is taken to the green, eerily lit room to be processed and is bitten by both Rosanna and Francesco. Trying to do vampires at 6pm was always going to be bound by the BBC's regulations and the audience's idea of what could be acceptable in an early evening slot.

Long gone are the days when Hinchcliffe and Holmes would cover the screen in graphic strangulations, shootings, drownings and disfigurements. Dressing it up as a mix of late Hammer (European glamour models inducted into vampire schools in Lust For A Vampire is as good a place to start and it's even referenced by the Doctor's dialogue ('Blimey, fish from space have never been so…buxom'), but the visual and sub-textual nods to the plague analogies and Venetian-medieval opulence of Death In Venice and the ropey Venice based sequel to Nosferatu starring Klaus Kinski won't quite work unless you bung in either some highly charged eroticism or some genuinely scary moments.

Into The Woods

Doctor Who: Flesh And Stone
Review by Frank Collins

For the concluding episode of the story, Steven Moffat makes like a whirling dervish, spinning narrative plates like a mad thing and delivering them with such pace and force that, as with most of us found in the same predicament as the Doctor and his chums, it's a case of blink and you'll miss something. Flesh And Stone is pure adrenalin rush generated by a fusion of traditional Doctor Who 'base under siege' default narrative and the childhood memories of playing blind man's buff. However this version of the game, (it originally dated back to the Greeks), is definitely the biggest test of the trust that tenuously exists between the Doctor and Amy to this point.

As the episode races along what is surprising is that Moffat actually puts the inexorable attack of the all devouring Weeping Angels on the back burner about half way through the episode to switch the story round instead to deal with the series' repeated meme of the 'crack in the universe', then finally using it as the somewhat convenient way to despatch the pesky quantum locked creatures to oblivion. The Angels are seemingly less important to him than the cycle of history he's mucking about with over the length of the series. Flesh And Stone, entertaining as it is, was overwhelmingly rather like a fully loaded Gatling gun blanketing the audience with ideas and concepts. Most of these probably thrilled the fan boys and girls but left the general public slightly baffled as it blazed away at them for forty odd minutes.

Director Adam Smith continues to demonstrate that he fits this material like a glove. A number of visually impressive moments are scattered through the episode; the camera twirling round to show the Doctor, Amy, River and the soldiers all sticking to the skin of the Byzantium via the artificial gravity and then the Doctor's disorienting climb into the ship; the staccato visual flourishes and pressure cooker atmosphere of the Angels breaching the airlock and then some lovely hand held shots as they begin attacking the control room; the impressive reveal of the forest (with a witty summary from the Doctor 'a forest in a bottle, on a spaceship, in a maze. Have I impressed you yet, Amy Pond?'); and the pulsing and strobing lights deep in the forest accompanied by some amazing focus pulls as the Angels advance. Visual lyricism and fantastic use of the Puzzlewood locations that compliment Moffat's enchanted fable perfectly.

At the centre of this episode is a fascinating idea. The Doctor postulates that the crack or the time spillage that eats through the universe is eradicating or overwriting what we know to exist and what we know to have happened in the wider Whoniverse (he quotes himself about the Cyber King stomping over Victorian London in The Next Doctor as such a mind bogglingly precise moment in history that it should have been remembered by those that witnessed it).

The oncoming time spillage accelerates through the concept of 'history' itself and, rather in the way Baudrillard asserts that "the end of history should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress", the 'reality' of the Doctor Who universe is here threatened with utter collapse. All that might remain of it is the Doctor and his fellow travellers only continuing to exist via their combined memories, forming a crisis of self-hood with the very disappearance of that reality. The trauma of forgetting is something that was touched upon in The Beast Below, and the series to date has had a Last Year In Marienbad kind of emphasis on the concept of memory and the terror of recalling things out of order or losing memories (here the 'out of time' development of the Doctor and River's relationship is also a key component).

The loss of 'real history' also explains Amy's failure to recognise the Daleks and the eradication of the Church's troops. Some have speculated, in error I believe, that Moffat is planning to use this as a way to ret-con many of the events ('time can be re-written' as the Doctor excitedly claims), or at least the implications of events, of the last five years which does seem of him rather ambitious and somewhat disingenuous of the last production team's efforts. Those RTD haters are already having a field day with this idea. Mind you, I would see it as a favour if he could ret-con The Doctor's Daughter out of existence for a start.

The idea that the Pandorica, which may well be the name of the time fissure, is itself a 'fairytale', a legend known to the Doctor, also reflects the Milton-esque quality of Flesh And Stone where the 'war in heaven' of Paradise Lost is here retold as the Fall of the Weeping Angels and their banishment from the tree-borg 'Garden Of Eden'. It forms part of the episode's eschatological vision of the end of time, flirting again, as I proposed last week, with 'war on terror' imagery. The Church and its conflict with the Angels is a battle on the fringes of this 'end-time' where both sides defend their fundamentalist principles despite living on that borrowed time. As time runs out in the forest of Byzantium (calling the space ship the Byzantium is surely a reference to the disastrous Christian crusades of the 13th Century where they sacked the eponymous city) then it is only the moment of conflict that is real to them or the desperate moment of escape when the Angels request that the Doctor sacrifice himself.

One of the key sequences in the episode is where Amy, forced to keep her eyes shut and dressed for all the world like Red Riding Hood, is 'talked' through the forest and past the Angels by the Doctor. Not only does the chilling scene play out all those childhood memories of blind man's buff but it also connects to the symbolism of forests in fairy tales and romance legends the world over. The very earthiness of the environment is described to us by Adam Smith's close ups of Amy's shoes trudging through the muddy ground, by her fall and by her near death as she curls up in the greenery.

These are very powerful sequences that trigger associations of sylvan terrors with the perils of the unconscious. It's even harder for Amy as the Angel inside her mind exacerbates her loss of reason, her dilemma evoking Dante at the start of The Divine Comedy ("In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost"). Her lost path in the impenetrable forest of Angels is her lack of trust for the Doctor and, like all fairy tales set in the 'deep dark wood', her uncertainty about the man must be resolved. It's beautifully played out in that very tender scene where the Doctor takes her hand and then rests his head on her forehead, encouraging her to trust him, to remember the trust she had in him as a seven year old. She is, however, gradually abandoned as the troops escorting her wink out of existence. It boils down to her faith in the Doctor to help make her way back to the ship.

I also particularly enjoyed the last scene between the Doctor and Father Octavian as it gave the story a much needed emotional coda. 'I wish I'd known you better', he says to Octavian as he sadly leaves him to his fate. Matt Smith and Iain Glen were quite superb as both characters acknowledge and respect each others courage as the Angel prepares to strangle Octavian. Nice too that he offers to the Doctor the fitting salute of 'bless the path that takes you to safety'. The very profound sadness in Matt's eyes is a moving contrast to the earlier witty banter with Angel Bob (the 'I made him say comfy chairs' joke is lovely) and the cute eccentrics of his analysis of the crack ('Oh, that's bad. Oh, that's extremely not very good') and the rage at both the way the Angels find delight in making Amy count down to her death and at River on the Primary Flight Deck. Like a broken record, I have to repeat myself and say how really amazing he is in this episode.

Although River Song is somewhat sidelined here, we do get some intriguing back story. There's the thundering great hint that she isn't quite all she sees to be with her doing time in the Stormcage facility for murdering a 'good man' and all the indications it was the Doctor ('the best man I've ever known') she's killed. We'll possibly see that story played out in the finale as the Pandorica opens and she's faced with that decision. But then, as the Doctor says, 'time can be re-written' so he may yet find a way around that seemingly inevitable destiny. Bound to, isn't he? Still, she gets that wonderful final line, 'You...me...handcuffs. Must it always end this way?' and their last scene together underlines the whole fairy tale ethos of the series. 'That's a fairy tale' he counters at her mention of the Pandorica. 'Oh, Doctor. Aren't we all?', she replies with a twinkle in her eye. Either good witch or bad witch, she vanishes in a veritable puff of smoke.

Finally, I was a little nonplussed by that coda to the episode wherein Amy decides to try and have a one night stand with the Doctor before her own wedding day. It's played by Matt and Karen perfectly well but I wanted to believe that Moffat was keen to ring the changes further by not having the companion fancying the Doctor. He does seem to enjoy the one-man ship of, in this case, actually having the companion throw herself at the Doctor. No romance, no unrequited love for him. I'm not against the way that Russell T Davies introduced the idea of romantic love into the series but this was a bit bizarre and, although I think Moffat did try to communicate how wrong this felt via the Doctor's own reactions, does he really think this is how young brides to be behave on the eve of their nuptials? And that companions should be seen to be having the Doctor against the door of the TARDIS! What would the neighbours think...with all that wheezing and groaning going on.

As a gay man, historically (or should that be hysterically) I've always been capable of sublimating the heterosexual (at least in Amy's case as I'm not entirely sure about the Doctor) desire of on-screen characters for my own pleasure and managed to enjoy the relationships the Doctor had with Rose and Martha but even for me this was quite a stretch. Enough to make me not quite like Amy as much as I did. Unless, of course, Moffat eventually reveals to us that Amy wasn't quite herself. She is bloody unhinged, after all. Let's face it, it was a somewhat awkward means to an end where it's really about the Doctor suddenly putting all the clues together and realising how important the date, Amy and her crack (and I could probably write a book on the subtextual meanings of that) are to the fate of the universe. An odd ending to an otherwise great episode.

Cry Me A River

Doctor Who: The Time Of Angels

Review by Frank Collins

The breathtaking thing about The Time Of Angels is how adroitly it switches tone several times throughout the episode without bending the entire narrative out of shape.

The pre-titles, simulating much of the frisson of similar sequences that opened many a James Bond movie, especially those that contain huge, gimmicky stunts, are slick, dynamic and full of splendid excess. The very clever opening starts with a brilliant piece of editing, jumping from the imaginings of one of the crew of the Byzantium, lost in drugged reverie from the application of River's hallucinogenic lipstick, to his real location on the ship. We the see River make her escape, close ups on her shoes (so glad the 'shoe agenda' has made a return after Chrissie clobbered that Sontaran with a pink slingback in The Sarah Jane Adventures), close up on her sunglasses as she burns a message into the Home Box and then a bewildering leap to the Delerium Archive some 12,000 years later where the Doctor picks up the message and sets off to rescue her. Only Doctor Who could audaciously bound from one location to another in the space of minutes.

River's confronted by the suave Alistair and his henchmen in a wonderful piece of metatextual playfulness with actor Simon Dutton in tuxedo and bow tie, looking for all the world like he's stepped off the set of The Saint TV movies he made in Australia in the late 1980s. River's evacuation from the Byzantium and the rendezvous with the Doctor contains more excitement, visual spectacle and wit in its four minutes and fifty five seconds running time than the entirety of last week's Victory Of The Daleks. As River says, 'You might want to find something to hang on to' as she primps her hair and reads out the co-ordinates for her impending rescue. You could bottle this and sell it back to Barbara Broccoli.

Immediately she collapses on top of the Doctor, the tone shifts again. Alex Kingston and Matt Smith dash around the TARDIS set, she channelling the sophisticated wit of Kate Hepburn and he the sulky, petulant jitteriness of Jimmy Stewart in what feels like a restaging of The Philadelphia Story. Moffat's comic timing and repartee provides both actors with a gift and they respond with performances that balance eccentric humour, wisecracks and sentimentality. As they nag at each other there's that lovely moment where River uses the blue stabilisers and lands the ship. It's one of Moffat's reflections where he shares with fans those little things that are clearly iconic of the series  and offers them back to us through the prism of the narrative itself. As Matt does his impression of the TARDIS materialisation sound effect, now denied the machine by River taking the brakes off the ship, I wonder how many of us recall trying out our own impression of that 'wheezing and groaning' as children and adults. Knowing the Doctor he'll put the brakes back on for take off because, as we all agree with him, 'they're blue boring-ers' and it wouldn't be the same without that familiar sound.

And it's the details that matter too. The playful comedy as River hangs her shoes up on the scanner screen as she spouts a load of gobbledegook and taps away at a keyboard whilst Amy, eyes popping out of her head at this amazing woman piloting the TARDIS, is just sheer joy. As much pleasure to be had as in hearing the old 1980s console sound effects too. Matt is superb as the indignant Doctor, huffy and childish, as he sarcastically counters River's need for environment checks by standing at the TARDIS door and rather smugly reels off his own assessment.

We then move to 'epic' mode with the production team pulling out the stops for the crash of the Byzantium with some impressive visual effects and gorgeous location work where director Adam Smith, in homage to David Lean, dwarfs his human figures with the sweep of their surroundings. Whilst the pretty pictures keep you agog, the screwball comedy continues and Amy and River get to bond over the Doctor's discomfort and rib him mercilessly as River clambers over the wreckage in evening dress, clutching her shoes with a handbag over her arm. The woman certainly knows how to make an entrance, I'll give her that.

When River signals a group of soldiers from the 'Church', lead by Father Octavian (Bishop, second class, 20 clerics at his command) and enquires of the Doctor about the Weeping Angels, then the tone shifts again. Amy, wonderfully oblivious to all the machismo being played out around her, goes for the jugular in her conversation with the Doctor, asking that vexed question about River Song we've all been wanting a definite answer to. Moffat and the two Smiths conspire against us with that extremely deft bit of line reading which either answers the question directly or merely confirms that he is indeed Mr. Grumpy Face today. It's back to how you interpret it for yourself.

Night falls and the episode becomes plainly what Moffat had been telling us would be his Aliens style sequel to the standalone Blink. Again, director Smith goes for those widescreen landscape shots to establish the change and the story takes on board the visual tropes and allusions to Cameron's film as well as harking back to the series own Earthshock, that game-changing story of 1983. Where Aliens was partly a metaphor about the Vietnam War, Moffat offers something quite intriguing here. This is clearly a religious war of some nature. As the Doctor pronounces to Amy, after she's now accused him of being Mr. Grumpy Face (a lovely bit from Karen) and he's catalogued his rather busy day to her, it's the 51st Century and the church has moved on.

Once the story's framework is established, our expectations are focused initially in the chilling sequence where Amy is locked in the landing craft (by whom is not revealed and remains a mystery) and watches the video tape loop of the Weeping Angel in the Byzantium's hold. Moffat has obviously been watching his Asian horror films, particularly Ringu with its own deadly videotape, its folklore about the 'monstrous' and its fetishisation of fear. The urban legend of the Weeping Angels ('don't blink'), promulgated by that equally interesting use of the familiar medium of DVD 'easter eggs' where the Tenth Doctor provides Sally Sparrow with a bluffer's guide to these quantum locked beasties, is augmented here by further extending their power in the haunted landscape of communications technology and surveillance footage.

Like the iconic image of of the monstrous Sadako in Ringu, the Weeping Angel materialises out of the video loop to kill Amy simply by virtue of her own fascinated gaze at the video image. Moffat is no longer confining these agents of fear within the video image but is allowing them to spill out into Amy's (and by extension our own) reality. Amy's gaze into the image of the Weeping Angel offers a complex weave of character, spectator and viewer all colluding to seal the fate that befalls her, where she, us and the monster all become one, the surveyor and the surveyed. Amy's curiosity and interrogating gaze replicates our own fascination with viewing the fearful and the horrific and Doctor Who's own obsession with monsters, fear and death. Ultimately, this fascination becomes the instrument of possession that then plays out as the image of the Angel burned into her retina enters her consciousness and changes the nature of the threat from the physical materialisation of the Angel to something more troubling; her loss of control and loss of humanity.

Moffat subverts that old phrase 'the eyes are the window to the soul' (various sources from Cicero to Matthew) by suggesting that images have the power to change us, possess us, enter us. Amy has been changed, even 'radicalised' by the image of the Angel. "That which holds the image of an Angel, becomes itself an Angel" doesn't merely allude to the creation of Angels but also to how the image affects the viewer, with the crackling, indistinct footage of it interestingly alluding to proselytising grainy video messages from the frontline of the jihad. She is aware she is being transformed by them, her mind altered by their cause, further emphasising the episode's subtextual interpretation of religious indoctrination via media and warfare. The conflation of religious order - the bishops and clerics in the squad - with the camouflage gear that wouldn't look out of place on the troops in The Hurt Locker - indicates a scenario caught up in the aesthetics of the 'war on terror' with an apparent 'crusade' to find the Weeping Angel in the hold of the Byzantium and destroy it.

In a similar way that Aliens itself could be seen as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, then this 'holy war' on the Weeping Angels could be seen as a possible reflection on the continuing cultural and ideological clash between the West and Islam. The Weeping Angels as a creeping, amorphous, unpredictable army (the 'difference between dormant and patient') waiting for the call to re-emerge suggests the only partly perceived and often invisible threat from the 'war on terror'. As the episode unfolds in the catacombs this threat refuses to be fully described, pinned down, filling the characters with a sense of great uncertainty. If anything, The Time Of Angels articulates some of our own fearful distraction with national security and global security.

As the Church's army, the Doctor, Amy and River attempt to get to the Angel in order to destroy it, the episode mimics the structure of Cameron's Aliens in that the technologically superior force of the soldiers (and one presumes their Western religion) is slowly reduced to desperation by the 'other', the Angels and their alternate doctrine. Moffat uses classic genre tropes, showing young soldiers gradually being compromised by the Angel, and adds a further twist to some of the ideas he developed with the data ghosts in The Silence In The Library by having the Angels possess the dead men's consciousness to use them as the voice of the enemy, broadcasting back to the survivors about the Angel's subversive conquest. Fear, and not overt horror, is the episode's stock in trade and the sequences in the maze of the dead are beautifully shot, the darkness constantly pierced by torches with Adam Smith's cinematic framing and cutting rehearsing much of the similar hand held material present in Aliens, and articulating the episode's desire to paralyse with anxiety and dread.

There is also the question of gender here where the Angels, when fully formed, appear to be female and the story plays on the patriarchal fear of the feminine power embodied in the creatures as they hunt down the gun toting squaddies. The nature of this fear, whether it be gender based or not, is also nicely flagged up in the conversation with Bob (with Moffat knowingly transposing Sacred with Scared - also suggesting some form of divine terror perpetuated in clash between the Church's soldiers and the Angels) that underscores the series continuing fascination with fairy tales as a mechanism for coping with fear.

What's also clear is that with two parts to the story there is plenty of time to create atmosphere, develop the story and invest emotionally in the supporting characters, particularly the return of River, which was something that last week's episode singularly failed to achieve. Considering this was shot in the first block of filming, Matt Smith shows us that he was no fluke, hit the ground running with an assured performance, fulfilling his promise from day one. Kingston is splendid as River Song and is well on the way to creating one of the series most iconic characters. Karen Gillan continues to surprise with a spiky interpretation of Amy and is showcased particularly well in the chilling scene with the Angel in the tape loop. Cinematography, production design, visual effects and music all adeptly decorate the story and in director Adam Smith the producers have found a talent who seems more than capable of bringing this mix of Guillermo Del Toro and James Cameron, screwball comedy and spy-fi, spectacularly to life.

A classic in the making. So please don't drop the ball for the second part.