The Doctor's Wife REVIEWED

Oh hai there internet. Our conversations have become a lot more unidirectional lately because of my revision and such. But now I finally get the chance to talk to you after all this time.

Much like the Tardis in the latest Doctor Who episode!

(Nice segue.)

So the Doctor's Wife. Well, I loved it. Definitely in my top 20 of all time, and possibly top 10. God, it was so frikkin' good!

I love everything that Neil Gaiman has ever written, so I was expecting to love this episode too. The steampunk setting of the Tardis graveyard and the patchwork people were such intrinsically Gaiman concepts. I thought the whole episode was so beautifully realised by the design team. It's a world away from the bright garish colours of earlier series, and of that I am hugely thankful. (On Confidential, Gaiman read from the stage directions of the script, which even written is a thing of beauty, and I was particularly taken with his description of the asteroid as the "Totter's Lane at the end of the universe". And if you don't understand that reference, go and watch An Unearthly Child now.)

The idea of the Doctor talking to the Tardis could have potentially been a terrible one. I think if another writer had done it, it could have descended into a sentimental, over-reverent pile of slush. But, Gaiman being Gaiman, he gave the Tardis character, Idris, such a mad, sexy, weird and wonderful characterisation that I instantly fell in love with it. Suranne Jones' fantastic portrayal really brought the Tardis to life, and her interactions with Matt Smith were simply joyous to watch. I loved the Pull To Open sequence, which has in an instant solved a debate that's been going on for forty years in the fandom, and there were so many other little references to Who history that it'll take me a number of rewatches to take them all in, I'm sure.

Finally we got to see the inside of the Tardis! Oh man. So good. The last time we really saw any of the other rooms was way back in The Invasion of Time, where it looked, as Neil Gaiman put it on Confidential, like an old-fashioned brick-built Victorian hospital. Probably because it was filmed in an old-fashioned brick-built Victorian hospital. But anyway, the idea of the Tardis being able to move its rooms around and delete them is very cool, and it was great to see the previous control set once more. It did amuse me that the corridors Amy and Rory were lost in had obviously not changed since the early 1970s! Rory's death this week was very unpleasant, and the whole thing about being lost in time in the corridors I thought was handled brilliantly. Though I don't know where the paint to write "Hate Amy, Kill Amy" on the walls came from....

Other things very quickly: Michael Sheen is a complete dude, I loved Auntie and Uncle and hope similar characters reappear, the built Tardis was brilliant and the little keyboard was such a great touch that only a child could have designed it, and, well, I wouldn't mind being inside Suranne Jones. *clears throat quickly* Er, I mean the Tardis. Yeah. 

Verdict: 10/10

Twitter: antmoorfield. kthxbai


PS. Since I didn't bother to review The Curse of the Black Spot last week, here's a one sentence reaction. Fun, throwaway episode, short on character and with a thin premise that could have been explored further, but still worth watching. Verdict: 6/10.

The Impossible Astronaut (BSDA #16)

Yes, it’s Doctor Who time again. One of sci-fi’s greatest shows smashed back onto our screens tonight with The Impossible Astronaut, the first of a two-part episode, set, for the first time ever, in the United States of America. And now I’m reviewing it. SPOILERS. As River would, and did, say.

The episode begins with the Doctor sending four blue envelopes to certain people, asking them to meet at a particular time and location, which turns out to be the middle of the Utah desert. Amy and Rory, River Song, and an elderly man called Canton Delaware III all turn up to see the Doctor… die. Wow. I mean, wow. What a dramatic opening gambit from Steven Moffat, to kill the central character 10 minutes into the show! The death scene was suffused with a real sense of emotion, helped by some powerful sobbing from Karen Gillan, who’s finally made the role of Amy her own. But what really made it was the utter bathos of having the Doctor spring back into the show two minutes later, bouncy, arrogant and two hundred years younger. He himself was the fourth person invited to his own funeral, and, arriving after the fact, “can’t know” how he dies.

Then it gets even more interesting. The Doctor visits President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office and has to deal with mysterious voice who keeps ringing the President’s direct number. Weird. I can’t write any more about this strand of the plot at this stage, because I know as little as you. So then we meet the aliens, who are creepy. They are a very Moffat creation, scary by concept rather than by physical appearance; their unique twist is that you can only remember them when you are looking at them. (An interesting inversion of the Weeping Angels, really.) I have to say, I like this idea a lot. I hope it’s explored more next time because it is, really, brilliant.

America The Beautiful. This episode didn’t mess about with its presentation of the USA at all. All the classic elements were there – the stetson, the Mustang, the yellow school bus, the diner, the Oval Office; a veritable smorgasbord of Americana. Added to this, the production team managed to find some staggeringly beautiful locations to film in, with a wonderful sunset (or, in fact, sunrise, according to the behind the scenes footage on Doctor Who Confidential!) illuminating the Doctor’s cremation gorgeously. The brightness of the Utah sun really gave this episode something more in visual terms, and the whole thing had a wonderfully filmic quality about it.

It’s now clear to me that Doctor Who has completely left behind the Russell T Davies era. The kitschy set design, bright colour palette, soap opera characters and bombastic plotting all belong to the past. This is now definitely Steven Moffat’s show, and, as such, it’s cleverer, darker, more humorous, more experimental and more cinematic. I personally like this style A LOT more. It feels more like science fiction, and seems both more modern (or even a bit postmodern) and more traditional in terms of the show itself – I was recently watching 1980’s Full Circle, and you can definitely see the similarities with 2011 with regard to the pacing, dialogue, visual style and concepts. In short, this is Doctor Who again. Similarly, Matt Smith, who I confess took a while to get used to, has now leapfrogged David Tennant and Patrick Troughton to move from fourth to second in my list of favourite Doctors. He now sits below only Tom Baker. And, as his Doctor develops, I think he could have a real chance at the top spot.

Overall, this was a wonderful episode, though not without its flaws. It was so very different from any other season openers that it’s difficult to compare it to anything, but nevertheless, I’m going to compare it to something. You have to question how much of the plot would have been understood by younger viewers and the fact that it raised SO MANY questions while providing so few answers must have been disconcerting to people used to watching episodes as discrete stories in their own right. I guess I need to wait until Day of the Moon to see exactly how good The Impossible Astronaut was, but, on the whole, I was thoroughly impressed.

Verdict: 9/10

Other things I didn’t have time to write about: the Doctor and River flirting, the reusing of concepts such as secrets and hidden memories, the awesomeness of Mark Sheppard, the fact that Stephen Milligan looked more like Lyndon Johnson than Richard Nixon, and Amy’s pregnancy.

Your thoughts would be welcome in comments. Follow this blog, tweet me @ antmoorfield, and be back here next week for the Day of the Moon review. In the meantime, politics. Because.

Firefly. (BSDA #12)

When I was younger, my dad tried to introduce me to Buffy - I did not like it at all. Now I simply cannot work out why that is, because after it being recommended to me by the world of internet geekdom, I decided to get Firefly, Joss Whedon's next series, a western in space, on DVD. And ohmygoditsoneofthebestthings-iveeverseen!

Wikipedia's synopsis tells us that the series is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship. The ensemble cast portrays the nine characters who live on Serenity. Whedon pitched the show as "nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things". The show explores the lives of some people who fought on the losing side of a civil war and others who now make a living on the outskirts of the society, as part of the pioneer culture that exists on the fringes of their star system.

So that's a decent summation. But what it doesn't tell you is how brilliant this show is. I mean, incredible. Its colourful, complex, funny, wonderful characters, who speak Whedon's trademark cool-but-unusual style of language - "corpsifying" - inhabit a world which is as familiar as it is original, a quite genius mix of the American West, traditional oriental culture and the classic world of conventional sci-fi, all of which influences are melded into something consistently fascinating. I've only seen 5 episodes so far (come on, the box came 26 hours ago and I had to sleep and go to school in that time!) but this upcoming Easter break will see the rest demolished with glee. (No, not with Glee. Just - no.)

OK. That's enough lyrical waxation. Follow this blog, follow me on twitter, yadda yadda. And I leave you with the theme tune, written by Joss Whedon and performed by the wonderfully-named Sonny Rhodes.