A Very Rocky Sister Act

Quantum Leap

The Right Hand Of God

Season One, Episode Three

In most TV shows there are some episodes you love, some episodes you hate, and a whole wodge of stuff in between that summons up little more than a ‘meh’.

The Right Hand Of God is Quantum Leap’s first meh.  Like an episode of The A-Team featuring a plucky family business, an evil gang of hillbillies, a sinister businessman and a montage, this one is strictly by the numbers.

Sam leaps into a boxer, Kid Cody, who’s hoping to raise enough money to build a chapel for some nuns.  Unfortunately, like 75% of all fictional boxers, Cody takes dives.  Sam tries to reverse his fortunes, coaxing a stubborn ex-trainer out of retirement and montage-ing his way to victory.

‘Seen it all before’ is an understatement; this plot’s so old it’s eligible for a bus pass.  There’s very little threat involved, as the shady businessman who orders Cody’s dives hardly seems bothered when Sam crosses him.  It’s quite fun that even after a couple of training montages Sam still has to cheat to win the day, and then has to play by the rules anyway after his opponent gets back up.  (Strictly speaking, he still cheats, with Al offering hologram-themed help.  But we like this, as it means Al gets to offer more than just moral support.)

Cheating.  Or something.

There are some nice touches.  We laughed when God, or whoever is leaping Sam around, deliberately leapt him into the path of a knockout punch for what he did in Star-Crossed.  (Comeuppance at last!)  We like Cody’s girlfriend Dixie’s dream of retiring the stripper business to open a doughnut shop.  And Al’s subplot involving a noisy neighbour is a good source of laughs, although it goes absolutely nowhere. 

Sadly we rolled our eyes when Al boasted of his youthful boxing career; call us picky, but if someone’s going to suddenly come up with a hitherto unmentioned talent just when it’s needed, we’d rather it was the guy with amnesia.  And giving a nun back her faith?  Seriously?  Could you get any sappier?  In an episode about boxers taking dives and disillusioned trainers hoping to find a champ, it’s like a cliché explosion.

But, if there’s one thing this episode teaches us, it’s that even if something is clichéd and dumb, just add Scott Bakula and wham: watchable telly.  That’ll do, for now.

The Albert Calavicci Sleazy Files

• Cheating on Tina with Denise.  (Al's 'biographer', whom he met at a party.)

The Sleazy Professor

Quantum Leap
Star-Crossed
Season One, Episode Two

Star-Crossed is the first regular episode of Quantum Leap, and so we are treated to the first proper use of the delightful themetune (after a rather lift-musicky arrangement in the end credits of Genesis).  We love this themetune.  Unfortunately this week the clips are so few that quite a lot of the title sequence is filled with ghastly eighties-oh-we-mean-futuristic strobe lines, but even this cannot diminish our love for a themetune that means Quantum Leap is on and everything is going to be okay.  Doo, doo-dee-doo-doo, doo, doo, dee-doo!

So it’s a pity this episode isn’t actually that great.  Sam leaps into a sleazy English Lit professor (and Sam hates English Lit).  According to Al and Ziggy he’s here to stop the sleazy professor and his young female student from a shotgun wedding that ruins both their lives.  But Sam’s more interested in another student, Donna, the woman who jilted Sam twelve years in her future.  (Yes, one episode after establishing Sam’s amnesia he remembers tons of stuff about his life with Donna, apart from who jilted who.  That’s Swiss cheese for you, apparently.)

And here’s the problem.  Sam gets headstrong; all he’s interested in is Donna and fixing her problems so she won’t jilt him in the future, which seems awfully out of step with the compassionate guy we met in the previous episode.  He also completely forgets that he is not Sam but a sleazy old guy.  All those scenes of Donna building a relationship with Sam work less well when you remember the creepy old pervert she’s actually looking at.

Sam is completely selfish here.  He’s not that bothered by Donna’s feelings: his plan is to reunite her with her father, thus instantly curing her relationship-ruining fear of abandonment (as Al reminds him, Sam is not a psychiatrist, but then whaddya know, he’s right anyway), but only because it suits him.  And here the episode feels like it’s missing something.  Sam uses time travel for personal gain, we spend the whole thing waiting for some comeuppance, and there isn’t any.  Why set this up as Rule Number One if it doesn’t actually matter?

He isn’t even that bothered by what he’s actually here to do.  He is repeatedly surprised and grossed out that young women are attracted to his host, but not really concerned about it.  (And he does nothing to change it.)  In the end, the sleazy old guy gets no comeuppance either.  He comes off as a benevolent uncle figure in order to take advantage of his impressionable students.  As soon as Sam leaves, he’ll go straight back to his kinky ways.  Great.

The fun bits are Sam’s efforts to get the innocent student and her brute boyfriend back together, and these scenes really are a hoot, but there aren't enough of them and it all gets resolved practically instantly.  (Just saying ‘breathless’ instead of ‘horny’ does the trick.  And just reuniting girls with their long-last dads means bingo, no more runaway brides.  Good thing Sam's got six doctorates, this stuff is hard.)

Al’s half of the episode is very interesting.  The ‘committee’ are angry with Sam for breaking time travel rule one: Don’t change history for your personal gain, and they want to fire Al and close down the project (although what that actually means, what with Sam being lost in time and all, is unclear).  Al’s attempts to thwart them are enjoyable and there’s a brilliant scene in which the entire committee are in the imaging chamber with him, but Sam can’t see or hear them and they can’t see or hear Sam, so we get a game of charades and then Al being hoisted out by invisible beings.  This bit’s in the title sequence, and it looks great.

Despite Sam being a bit annoying this week, Scott Bakula is still amazing.  (Just wait for his puppy look.)  Teri Hatcher on the other hand, who we generally love, has very little to do other than get teary.  She does it well of course, but Donna is hardly the most riveting character to watch, and there’s no evidence of her and Sam’s apparent love, and nowhere in the episode for it to go.  It’s an interesting time travel idea, meeting your intended in the wrong order, but there isn’t any way for the episode to exploit it.  (And after three years of River Song, we don't really want to.)

Overall, we’re not sure that episode two is the place to explore your protagonist’s weaknesses.  How about some actual helping-people-out stories before you start on the personal gain corruption?  Or at least, if you have to do it so early, maybe deal with this problem instead of just throwing it in there for a laugh.  Speaking of which, Star-Crossed also includes the Watergate scandal as a comic footnote.

All things considered, it doesn't really tackle any of its ideas properly, but a bad episode of Quantum Leap is generally still a rollicking 45 minutes.

The Sam Beckett Genius Tally

• Has a doctorate in Ancient Languages, and can read hieroglyphics.

Pilot Episode

Quantum Leap
Genesis
Season One, Episode One

They don’t make ’em like this any more.

Quantum Leap is one of those shows where almost anything can happen every week.  We’ll let the main character, Sam Beckett, explain the premise:

‘Getting a second chance to put things right, to make the world a better place.’

Because shear away the time-travel, and that’s it.  He is a time-traveller, but unlike Doctor Who he’s not contractually obligated to meet monsters everywhere he goes (and really, what are the odds of that?).  Sam bounces around in time solving problems, some huge, some not.  He’s limited by his lifetime, so anywhere between the 50s and the 80s is fine, although rules including this one would wobble in the show’s later years.  And he can never be himself: he trades places with someone new each week, and it’s only us that sees him as he really is.  Besides these restrictions (and the general A-Team/Knight Rider structure of rolling into town and solving somebody’s problems), the writers have at it.  Quantum Leap managed to be at the same time reassuringly easy to follow and refreshingly brand new every week.  We love it.

Sam (Scott Bakula) wakes up in Texas in 1956.  He has amnesia.  The guy in the mirror has a different face, and everyone keeps calling him Tom.  To make matters worse, Tom’s a daring test pilot scheduled to make a record-breaking flight in a few days.  Oh, and there’s a weird guy in a suit and tie that seemingly only Sam/Tom can see.

We love the What The Hell Is Going On-ness of all of this, so it’s a shame there’s a pre-credits scene that gives it away to some extent.  Some time in the future, Al (Dean Stockwell), a snappy-dresser/ladies’ man, finds out that Sam has prematurely entered the Quantum Leap Accelerator.  That chucks quite a bit of the suspense out of the window right away.  How much more exciting and intriguing would this be if the episode opened when Sam woke up?  We wouldn’t know for sure if it was a dream, or if Sam had gone crazy, or what.  (Kind of reminds us of another show about a guy called Sam.)

Also, probably one of the least successful aspects of Quantum Leap is the show’s vision of the future.  Apparently, everything comes with flashing neon lights, people dress like idiots, and did we mention neon?

Predicting the future is virtually impossible, especially on a TV budget, we understand that.  (And we don’t even mind.  Back To The Future Part II had hovercars predicted for 2015.  Four years to go – we can still make it, guys!)  But it is a recurring nuisance that this show, which began in 1989, predicted by the 90s mankind would have time travel sorted and fashion would look like the 80s had hulked out.

Luckily we don’t have to spend any time there.  We are with Sam and it’s Howdy Doody Time on TV.  As all good time travel stories tell us, that means we’re in the 50s.

Sam narrates, or rather, we hear his thoughts, and for once this technique isn’t just there to paper over script holes.  Sam’s as lost as we are, and having him try to figure it out in his head is both succinct (‘We did it!  …  Did what?’)  and funny.  (‘Whoever she is, she’s certainly pregnant.  Very pregnant.’)  His inner monologue also happens to sound like a cute five-year-old, due to a mixture of his amnesiac confusion and fear of what the hell is going on; it all helps cement Dr Sam Beckett as the world’s nicest man, but he's also enormously mysterious.  In just a couple of minutes, we’re ready to watch a series about this guy.

Scott Bakula is super likeable, extremely sweet and very sympathetic.  He’s also convincing as a genius with amnesia.  This is one fairly rounded (if improbable) character right off the bat, with tons of room to grow.  He has emotional depths that’ll bring a tear to the eye, thanks largely to Bakula’s forlorn face; he’s quick-witted, funny and possesses the best withering glare of the decade.  (See beginning of review.)

Al fares less well.  Where Sam has emotional depth, Al has wacky costumes.  Where Sam is instantly endearing, Al is sleazy.  Kids might enjoy him on the level of a funny sidekick, but when they get older and actually understand what the stuff he’s saying means… euw.  Al is clearly written as the opposite of Sam.  While Sam is the wholesome hero, there has to be the grimy naughty one so the audience don’t get bored.  But we don’t find Dr Sam Beckett boring and for us Al is just a little bit too far down the gross path.  Al is here to fill in Sam’s missing memory, but can we really imagine that back in the future, these two could ever have been friends?  And while we can believe Sam is a mega genius farm boy, because we like Scott Bakula and he can’t remember it, Al’s admission that ‘I’m also an ex-astronaut’ just sounds like nonsense.  Two characters pulling talents out of nowhere is possibly pushing it.

Still, the contrast is funny, and it gives Sam something to rage about when Al is either late or otherwise useless.  And, spoiler: Sam rages often.

This is a great pilot.  The premise is colourfully explained, and he leaps twice (thrice if you include the soon-to-be-regular cliffhanger lead-in to next week) in the space of one (feature-length) episode, opening up the possibilities to pretty much anything.  (And when those possibilities include baseball, something neither of us knows or cares anything about, and we like it, we know we’re watching a great show.)

The guest cast walk a fine line between suspecting Tom of winding them up, and thinking he’s genuinely lost it, which gives them all a different way to react that tests the format’s waters, especially when Sam comes up with life-saving medical knowledge from the future.  There’s also the beginning of a few running jokes where Sam A) talks to Al a little too loudly and attracts attention, and B) lets slip about something from the future.  Not to mention the iconic different-face-in-the-mirror shot.

The special effects (though meagre) do the job splendidly.  The episode is also very well directed: the title sequence, which so far consists of the camera racing through the clouds, pivots and pirouettes and ultimately zooms straight into Tom’s bedroom, making it part of the actual story.  How neat is that?  (We wonder if the opening shot of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who took inspiration from it.)

The only thing bugging us is the opening scene, but hey, all you have to do is skip forwards slightly on your DVD.  Problem solved!

The best stories are the ones with something for everyone.  We both love Back To The Future because it uses science fiction as a way into a funny, exciting, romantic story – so, something for everyone.  Quantum Leap is a similar concept, expanded to an entire series.  Sam flies a jet and plays baseball this week, but he also has to stop a pregnant woman going into labour nine weeks prematurely and the climax of the episode is Sam having a touching phone call with his dead father.  And all that in one episode.  Oh boy.  Imagine what he’ll accomplish before he’s done?

(Just for fun, we'll try to keep track of Sam's and Al's various accolades.  So far...)

The Sam Beckett Genius Tally

• Has six doctorates, one in medicine, one in quantum physics.
• Invented the super computer, Ziggy.
• Discovered time travel.
• Dubbed "the next Einstein."

The Albert Calavicci Sleazy Files

• Unwary lady by the side of the road.
• A little Lithuanian girl named Danesa.  (Back at MIT.)
• Tina.
• Martha.  (Met at a playoff after-party.)
• Brenda.  (The cute little redhead in coding.)

Lie-Drive

Doctor Who
The Wedding Of River Song
Series Six, Episode Thirteen


This year, for the first time ever, we weren’t terribly fussed about the Doctor Who finale.  This is possibly because Series Six hasn’t so much gripped us as pinched us in passing.  Where’s it all going?  Is it going anywhere, or will Steven Moffat just keep raising questions ad infinitum?

After twelve episodes of infuriatingly vague allusions and questions, we were wondering how he’d fit it all into one episode.  Silly us.  In a display of blatant anti-climax, Moffat ducks the Great! Big! Finale! and does something smaller instead.  Which might be fine if he hadn’t done exactly the same thing last year (right down to the weird muddled-up Earth history), and if this series wasn’t the worst one yet for unanswered questions.  Moffat lives to surprise us, but in this instance all that involves is serving up a disappointingly flippant finale instead of a satisfying one.  Wow.  You had us going there, Moff.

Contrary to what we were all expecting, The Wedding Of River Song is about what happens when the Doctor doesn’t die.  This creates a whole alternate universe where time stands still, but all happens at the same time, but doesn’t move, but also does.  (Don’t even bother trying to make sense of it, because he certainly hasn’t.)  The Doctor must die to put it right.

This is all (arguably) quite interesting (although we guessed immediately from the trailer that the Dalek and pterodactyls would be pointless cameos), but what’s it got to do with the finale?  We want to know if the Doctor dies; we want to know how he’ll escape his fate; we want to know the answers to all the questions Moffat’s left hanging over the past few months.

And, surprise!  Approximately five minutes of this episode is devoted to answering those questions.  As much fun as the previous forty minutes is, it’s all just an elaborate distraction from what little effort has gone into the finale.  Twelve episodes, an entire infuriating year, for five minutes.

Series Six has been so ambivalent on what’s an actual mystery and what’s just unclear (the ‘in the flesh’ line in Night Terrors, for instance, is just an editing mistake, and the Doctor’s bizarre costume change in Let’s Kill Hitler apparently happened for no reason whatsoever) that we don’t even know if it’s worth paying attention any more.  That trail through time the Doctor was doing at the start of the year, pointless.  Everything in The Impossible Astronaut was irrelevant, including Canton, the fourth most important person in the Doctor’s life because he has a can of petrol.  The way several parentally-themed episodes were stacked next to each other, coincidence.  The only thing that came back was that stupid robot, which is one of those ideas we immediately noticed and threw out because that would be a terrible solution.

And sure enough, it drains the entire dramatic core of the episode.  It’s supposed to be about the Doctor choosing to die, and River accepting that she must kill him.  Potent stuff.  Except, surprise!  Neither of them has to bother!  This is sledgehammeringly obvious just looking at the Previously clip, not to mention how the Tesselecta marches into the episode for no better reason than delivering the Doctor’s mail, and anyway, even before we’d ever heard of the Tesselecta, we all assumed the Doctor was faking his death.  To wait a year and get to the last couple of minutes and get, Guess What?  He FAKED his death…  Isn’t the episode supposed to be ahead of us?  Why didn’t the Doctor mention this to Amy and Rory at any point?  He’s got a perfect opportunity on top of the pyramid*, and all three of them find out later anyway. 

Better still, why didn’t he tell River the first time round on the beach, instead of being pointlessly evil and making her think she was murdering him?  But then, maybe he just doesn’t want her to know her life sentence is really a total waste of time.  As we knew it would be.

(And what’s all this faking-his-death stuff actually in aid of?  Steven Moffat supposedly wants the Doctor to be less well-known, and we get a throwaway line at the end about the Doctor getting ‘too big’, but how’s that possibly going to work?  Isn’t a member of the Silence going to notice that he’s still zipping about righting wrongs?  Because, call us psychic, we think he might keep doing that, it being the premise of Doctor Who.  Talk about shortsighted.)

The sad thing is, for all his efforts to surprise us, Moffat’s just not that good at it.  Who’s in the spacesuit?  Exactly who you thought it would be.  Who’s the Good Man that dies?  Exactly who you thought it would be.  Who is River?  Exactly who she tells you she is every week.  What is the Oldest Question In The Universe?  Exactly what you were absolutely terrified it might be but prayed it wasn’t.  (Dear God.)  If these revelations aren’t revealing anything new to anyone, as few of Moffat’s revelations ever are, why drag them out?  It just increases the disappointment.

Speaking of disappointments, poor Amy and Rory!  The heart of the show, reduced to bystanders by this point.  What a lovely way for them to spend the finale: blank parallel universe copies with sort-of amnesia.  Did he really only invent them in the first place so that River could be born?  Well, this is River Who, after all.

Not that we learn anything new about River.  The Doctor marries her because… why?  No idea.  There’s still no reason for her to be in love with him (she’s a psychopath, oh right, well that explains that), and their relationship continues to be entirely tell rather than show, so it’s impossible to get invested.  (Yet another scene of them flirting while a bystander rolls their eyes does not help in the slightest.)  At least it’s over now, sort of, we think.  We have no idea if this is the last we’ll see of River, or for that matter, Amy and Rory.  Their journeys aren’t over, but they didn’t go anywhere.

Does River’s journey to Lake Silencio make more sense now?  Er, not exactly.  It’s irrelevant that she was trained to kill him, since the suit shoots automatically.  And once again, she is the worst person to pick to assassinate him, because while she might be fresh out of life-giving regenerations, she can now apparently control the suit enough to not kill him if she feels like it, which she obviously will, since she apparently loves him more than anyone**.  Aargh!  The whole thing is pointless.  (And all based on the frankly loony premise that you can just invent a fixed point in time.  Eh?  Since when?  And why didn’t any of this happen in The Waters Of Mars?)

Which reminds us: what, exactly, was the point of Madam Kovarian?  Did the Silence even need a human rep?  What do the Silence actually hope to achieve, and why does their mission statement keep fluctuating?  Why do they even need River/baby Melody if the Doctor can be killed by poison and/or a gun?

Amy’s cold-blooded murder of Madam K is probably meant to be closure of some sort; what a pity that this is the first genuine feeling Amy’s had on the matter since it kicked off.  (And you call this closure?  Most people we’ve spoken to were hoping for something positive, like River rewriting time so that the Doctor didn’t have to die and Amy got to keep the baby, or something at least.  Alas, we get a nasty out of character didn’t-really-happen murder which sends horrendous signals to the kids in the audience.  Don’t like someone?  Kill ’em!  It just goes to show us, never speculate.  Your best theories will never happen, and your worst fears are the cream of Steven Moffat’s wish list.)

It’s the finale’s job to make sense of the series before it, and The Wedding Of River Song just doesn’t try.  Take that blanket explanation for everything, ‘the Doctor lies’, which is swiftly becoming the verbal equivalent of the sonic screwdriver.  Now River’s caught the lying bug, too.  How come she had no idea what was going on in The Impossible Astronaut?  Oh, right, she was pretending.  How tediously disappointing.  (And unconvincing.  Call us pessimists, but we don’t think Alex Kingston brought ‘lying’ across in her acting.  Just look at all those times she had no chemistry with Amy or Rory.)

We’d get all angry about how this was clearly made up on the spot, if it weren’t for the Doctor contradicting this by telling River she won’t remember a thing.  Er, which is it then?  And how are we ever supposed to follow any of this if the characters retroactively turn out to be ‘lying’ whenever it suits the writer?  It’s cheating, and it’s a slap in the face if you’ve bothered to keep up with the series.

If you’re not invested in this at all, maybe it’s not that bad.  Matt Smith’s very good, especially during the phone-call to an old companion (at least one of us had a lump in our throat), and the rest.  Arthur Darvill’s very good, although he’s not playing Rory per se, which is a shame.  The episode has enough budget crammed into it to look good; what a pity all the pretty stuff is totally wasted.  (Air balloon cars?)

But we are invested in it.  Weird and vague as Series Six might have been, we still tried to follow it, and yet it turns out most of it was a mixture of red herrings and muddy writing.  THAT was IT?  We’re guessing it’s a little late to ask what the hell the Series Five finale was about, then, or any of it really, because at this point God only knows.  And now we’ve been given even more portentous nonsense that may or may not actually bother going somewhere.  Next time, we just won’t care.

We don’t want portents.  We don’t want arcs so heavy they ruin stand-alone episodes, and when we pay attention, we want it to count.  We want to enjoy the show.  If only we could tear off our Eye-Drives and go back to the relatively blissful days of Series Five.  Is it just us, or has everything since then felt like a bad dream?

*What are they doing on that pyramid anyway?  Everyone in the universe has come to help you!  Oh well, moving on and ignoring that before it goes anywhere interesting…

**And welcome to Rose Tyler levels of selfishness.  The entire population of the universe suffering and dying is worth it if she gets to hang out with the Doctor.  Don’t marry her, slap her.

Retail Therapy

Doctor Who
Closing Time
Series Six, Episode Twelve


We weren’t exactly jumping for joy when we saw the Closing Time trailer.  Both of us liked The Lodger, but we had no desire for a sequel.  The idea of an episode sans Amy and Rory wasn’t entirely welcome, as the Doctor’s been getting increasingly gloomy and mean lately.  And, Cybermen?  Stompy, humourless, ridiculous Cybermen?  Surely not.

We might as well end the suspense.  We liked it.  Turns out it was much needed alone time with the Doctor, and thank God, we still love him.  In general we haven’t had this much fun with Doctor Who since Melody Pond was just a couple of silly unrelated words.

Russell T Davies and Toby Whithouse have copped plenty of flak for this, but Gareth Roberts’ episodes in particular are often outright dismissed as ‘fun’.  We think that’s unfair.  Fun is underrated, and not as easy as it looks.  With Series Six getting increasingly complicated and melodramatic, we’ll take all the fun we can get.

Some of the jokes are a bit obvious, not to mention overdone – the old ‘We’re not a couple’ gag is neatly inverted, but then dragged to a slow death, along with the interminably cute ‘I speak baby’ routine and the Doctor’s funny-at-first ‘Shh’ powers – but we really don’t mind.  This year has been so heavy and (dare we say it) disappointing that a so-called ‘fun’ episode makes all the difference, especially just before the inevitably headscratching finale.  Frankly, we needed it.

It’s refreshing to have the Doctor do some actual investigating for once.  (Although his initial determination not to do anything is all gold.  ‘What is it?’  ‘Nnnnnothing.  Didn’t even notice that, for example.’)  Going undercover in a shop is a great idea – and a gentle borrow from School Reunion – but Roberts thankfully doesn’t over-do it.  It’s an excuse to put the Doctor among kids, where he’s in his element, and it’s great to see him effortlessly win the trust of his colleagues while poor Craig flounders.  (Also, we have to mention the bit where he strokes that plastic dog.  No particular reason, it’s just great.)

Despite the zany premise, Closing Time isn’t all nonstop comedy.  This is the Doctor’s last adventure before the (supposed) end, and it’s full of superb Doctorly contemplation and conflict.  That stuff’s riveting, despite the fact that the Doctor obviously isn’t going to snuff it next week.  (Sorry, Steven.)  And this being Matt Smith, even the funny bits are tinged with complex, seemingly subconscious emotions that frankly we could watch all day.

He hasn’t got much to work with – wacky James Corden, a sleeping baby, Amy and Rory at a distance – but he still turns in a beautiful performance bubbling with all the best his Doctor has to offer.  The fact that he’s done this more than once this year makes us absolutely certain this is our favourite Doctor.  We could not love this guy more.

As for Craig, we weren’t desperate to see him again but he makes a good double act with Matt Smith.  The Doctor’s more comfortable with him than he is with Amy or Rory because there’s less baggage, and that’s fun to watch.  (And thank you, Craig, for pointing out that generally it’s the extras who get killed off, not the companions.)

Also fun to watch, in a sharp break with tradition, the Cybermen.  Neither of us likes the metal morons much, as let’s face it, they’re less interesting Daleks on legs.  But Closing Time puts them in the shadows, broken and a bit desperate, and we like them a lot better that way.  At least, we did once we dislodged the mental image of what that Cyberman was doing in the dressing room.

Plus we finally get to see Cybermats.  This is great news for the nerds/loyal fans, and for everyone else there’s Craig’s line, ‘Don’t have a go at me just because I don’t know the names’.  What do we think of the angry little paperweights?  They’re a bit creepy, a bit funny.  We like them.  (The Doctor calls his one Bitey.)

Alas, as much fun as we’re having, there must be an actual plot, and this one’s not going to trouble the Hugo committee.  Still, we love the smallness of a bunch of ratty Cybermen trying to rebuild from nothing, and we don’t really comprehend the fanboy rage about the Cybermen being reduced to appearing in a small-scale comic episode.  (To this we say, in our best Danny John-Jules voice, ‘Reduced?’)  You can have an episode with one Dalek, and you can have an episode with a small bunch of Cybermen.  We’ve seen more than enough Invasion Of Earth stories for the time being.

There are logical holes, because it’s the Cybermen and virtually nothing they do ever makes sense.  They do at least partially explain why Craig would make a good Cyber-Controller (hey, they’re desperate), and they’ve completely changed how they convert people into Cybermen before now, so it’s no particular shock that they’ve suddenly taken to gluing them together over people’s bodies.  We do object to the ‘emotional influx’ being enough to blow them up on the spot, but it’s happened before.  Blame Tom McRae for setting that dipstick precedent.

As for Craig’s heroic Daddy moment at the end… well, it’s a direct repeat of Night Terrors.  It’s cheesy, and it’s downright stupid to blatantly rehash a plot from three episodes ago, and it makes no sense, but what can we say?  It’s a lot better than Night Terrors, and for all we know it’s part of some over-arcing parent theme that’ll tie up nicely next week.  (No pressure, Steven.)  We’re tempted to forgive all just because of Matt Smith’s hilarious epilogue, blurting info-dump at clueless Kelly for demonstrably no reason.  It’s cheeky, but we laughed.

Then the Doctor leaves, and all the fun we’re having not wading through the arc comes to an abrupt end, as the arc crashes in and shouts, ‘DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME!  ME ME ME!’  Thanks, because we really needed that.

Actually, hard as we try, we can’t forget about the stupid arc.  (It’s like the Doctor says: everything we find out makes less sense.)  We don’t object to it poking its nose in – it worked fantastically well in The Almost People – but it has to intrigue us, not bash us over our heads.  This scene is rushed, extremely silly, and about as subtle as Monty Python’s foot.  What were they thinking with those ‘witness statements’?  Why is River surprised by any of this?  What have the Silence been doing all this time, besides laughing evilly?

With only two minutes of screen-time, Alex Kingston and Frances Barber have to ramp up their performances; they come across as a total simpleton and a panto villain respectively.  Add the ridiculously on-the-nose sing-song from (urgh) Night Terrors and we’re already dizzy from rolling our eyes.

But you know what?  None of that’s Closing Time’s fault.  Steven Moffat almost certainly wrote this bit, so blame him.

We like Closing Time.  It’s intended as fun, and fun was had.  It has a handful of really effective moments, like the Doctor nearly bumping into Amy and Rory, and the self-contained story makes us nostalgic for Series Five.  We had a great time.  Alas, our time has run out, we can’t put it off any longer: we must watch the finale.

Faulty Towers

Doctor Who
The God Complex
Series Six, Episode Eleven

Between us, we’re a big Toby Whithouse fan.  Not because of Being Human; no, we’re basing this entirely on his two previous Doctor Who episodes, because we’re rational adults like that.  So with The God Complex, we were all geared up to make it a hat-trick.

Damn and blast.

What is it we like about Toby Whithouse’s episodes?  Is it the plots?  Ahem, no.  Sorry, Toby, but we’re still baffled by the vats of Krillitane-killer the Krillitanes lug around, which somehow double as IQ-enhancers for kids, not to mention the 10,000 fish people still swimming in Venice.

No, it’s dialogue and character where he shines.  The God Complex is no exception.  We laughed a lot, particularly during the bit where the TARDIS team meet their co-habitants.  ‘Amy, with regret, you’re fired.’  ‘Our anthem is called Glory To, insert name here.’  ‘In two days it never occurred to us to try the front door, thank God you’re here.’  ‘Big day for a fan of walls.’

It’s not all Matt Smith, either.  One of us loved Gibbis, the other fell for Rita.  David Walliams is reliably funny but also deliciously dark as the frequently-invaded alien, and Amara Karan gets away with all sorts of clever, witty dialogue whilst still feeling like a real person.

Arthur Darvill is his usual effortlessly brilliant self, despite the unsettling joke about Amy clobbering him, and did somebody mention Matt Smith?  Funnily enough, another of Toby Whithouse’s strengths is writing for the Doctor, and The God Complex is a Doctorfest.  From his whimsy at finding ‘the most exciting thing [he’s] ever seen’* to his no-nonsense ‘I think you should come with me’, through his sympathy with the Minotaur and his total willingness to torpedo Amy’s beliefs to save the day, this episode pretty much runs the gamut.  It may not be his most successful outing, as he winds up misleading two people to their deaths, but frankly we can’t blame him for not knowing what the hell’s going on.  (Although that is a bit of a Whithouse-ism.  Don’t worry, the Doctor will save the day… or you’ll all die.  Whoops.)

Ah yes, the plot.  ‘Make a hotel scary’ was Steven Moffat’s brief, and Toby Whithouse hasn’t quite done that.  It’s full of scary things, but not in an over-arcing, The Shining kind of way.  Each room contains something scary, meant for each individual person trapped there.  This is a neat idea, but unfortunately it translates as everyone besides them being visibly unafraid of it.  We can (almost) understand poor Lucy being terrified of that guy in the (awful) gorilla suit, but what’s in it for the audience?  The premise keeps subverting itself, with the Doctor smirking at a room full of catty women, and Rita talking to that clown.  On top of that, the characters stop being afraid the moment they leave the room; then they’re possessed, and off we go with the kooky possessed acting.  The episode doesn’t seem to be trying.

Especially with Murray Gold’s supposedly creepy muzak, which sounds like most of the comedy music he’s done in earnest over the years.

I really liked the muzak, especially the way it kept, creepily, turning itself back on.  One of my favourite parts of the episode.

But anyway, back to the plot.  People are brought here to be frightened, and when they’re frightened they retreat to the thing they believe in, and the Minotaur feeds on their faith.  Except their specific faith (religion, superstition, whatever) is immediately transmuted into believing in the Minotaur.  All of a sudden they know they’re going to get munched, and they really like the idea.  They also sort of get over their fears, in some cases.

Complicated much?  Not to mention abstract; what is faith?  If something as sketchy as believing in conspiracies could really make you feel better about your fears, how can Rory possibly have no faith in anything?  We doubt anyone has no belief in anything, but this is a guy who spent 2000 years protecting his girlfriend, his love for whom is supposedly strong enough to rip through time.  There’s something he’s going to believe in quite strongly, don’t you think?  Sort of, faith-like?  (And anyway, doesn’t a person with no faith present a possible way to defeat the Minotaur?  Why bring it up if it’s totally irrelevant?)  How the hell does disrupting the faith of one person shut down the program and kill the Minotaur?  How come the Minotaur wants to die and is fine with someone killing it – which is terribly convenient – but also can’t control its 'instinct' to kill when the episode requires it?  Virtually everything to do with the Minotaur is 24-carat nonsense.

And that’s not all.  Matt Smith has to do a lot of info-dumping, like his chat with the Minotaur**, but there’s not enough actual info.  How did the TARDIS get here?  ‘I dunno, something must have yanked us off course.’  Why is the Minotaur in a floating prison with an endless food supply that indiscriminately abducts anyone in the universe?  Because its followers ‘got all secular’.  As explanations go, it’s like reading a first draft.  And not a very clever first draft.

And then there’s the really stupid stuff.  The Doctor knows the rooms are out of bounds, and even says so, so why does he think it’s a good idea to hide in them?  How does tricking the Minotaur even work, considering the whole place was created for its benefit?  Whose bright idea was it to leave Howie with the surrender monkey?

So… why did we like it again?

Well, besides being really funny and stuffed with wonderful character moments, it’s got That Ending.  This is the moment where the Doctor decides to send Amy and Rory home.  Do we like it?  Yes.  It’s seeded through the episode, with Rory talking in the past tense, the Doctor ‘interviewing’ a new companion, that companion dying and the Doctor realising Amy’s faith in him is dangerous.  (Not to mention the running theme this season of the Doctor distancing himself from them, particularly last week, with Rory having more reason than ever to want out.)  It came as a bit of a surprise, but it still felt perfectly natural***, again thanks to the dialogue and the beautiful performances.  We don’t think it’ll stick, as these things never do, but for the chance to see a few companions leave the TARDIS and live actual normal lives (rather than joining UNIT or Torchwood, or starting some other adorable mini-Doctor organisation), it’s a risk we’re willing to take.

And before that is something even better: the Doctor telling little Amelia that she’s there to feed his vanity, and they ‘need to see each other as [they] really are’.  Does he really mean it?  We think so.  It might be on loan from The Curse Of Fenric, but Matt Smith sells it beautifully, and so does the reliably wonderful Caitlin Blackwood, sat there not saying a word.  How amazing is she?  The script is well up to the actors’ standards, boiling this whole sequence down to two words: Amy Williams.  Good Whithouse.  Have biscuit.

So where does that leave us?  A scary episode that isn’t scary – again – with a plot that requires buckets of explanation to work properly, but doesn’t have enough actual buckets handy.  Still, in-between the rubbish there’s some great acting, lovely writing, and a sound emotional ending.  And that’s what we’d forgotten about Toby Whithouse.  He’s good with character and great with dialogue, which is just about enough to distract us from his generally horrid plots.  And that’s sort of okay.  We’re mostly in it for the character development anyway.

* Even though he sees reproductions of Earth pretty much everywhere they go.

** We suppose we should mention the Minotaur, and the way it obviously parallels what’s going to happen to the Doctor.  So there, now we have.

*** Although don’t bother saying goodbye to Rory, will you, sure he won’t mind.

Rory's Choice

Doctor Who

The Girl Who Waited

Series Six, Episode Ten

In Doctor Who, the rules of time travel can be a little… hazy.  Some things you just can’t change.  Some things you can.  And some things you can't, except for when you decide to anyway, which may or may not have consequences.  Got all that?*

Then, just when you're making sense of it, along comes The Girl Who Waited with a new spin on things.  Some things you can change, but what if they don't want to be changed?

Amy is trapped in a fast timestream, so she waits for rescue.  She waits for 36 years.  But that's no problem: just go back and rescue the Amy from 36 years ago, and Bob's your uncle!**

Except Future Amy doesn't want to be erased from existence, crappy life or no.  Bob is definitely not your uncle.

We like this.  It's a logical worst case scenario version of The Eleventh Hour, where the Doctor's lateness irrevocably mucked up Amy's past, and here results in an entire misspent life.***  Amy is unwilling to let him wave it away with a sonic screwdriver and a smile, and quite right.

Old Amy has a perfectly valid point: thirty six years of her life will be erased.  As bad as it might have been, there’s no way of telling if the new version will be any better.  Also, erasing the thirty six years will erase the Doctor's mistake.  Perhaps Amy wants the Doctor to live with the consequences for once, no quick fixes, no magic wands, just Old Amy and a guilty conscience.  Big surprise, he feels differently.

This episode is very good to Amy and Rory, and about time, too.  No more ambiguous hints about Amy and the Doctor: this love is so strong, it can rip through time.  (And yes, we love the bit with the Macarena.)  Of course, Rory’s always great, but this is the first time in two years we’ve felt anything for Amy.  What a relief.  Karen Gillan is amazing.  She's convincing as her furious older self, hiding a forever love for Rory under anger and abandonment.  She's convincing as her younger self, trying to convince her counterpart to let go and give it up for love.  Scenes of the two thrashing it out could have been boring, but they're in safe hands.  Plus, she’s super pretty.

But what is Amy without Rory?  Like we said, Rory's always great, but Arthur Darvill's non-stop gem of a performance here deserves a repeat.  We love him.  Plus, the glasses are adorable.

It's a good-looking episode.  The white set is a SF staple, it’s obviously really cheap but it looks cool, especially against the TARDIS.  The director gets the most out of it, particularly when switching between red and green rooms.  It's an oldie, but a goodie.

That being said, STOP FILMING IN THE ARMADILLO – it’s the most recognisable building in Britain! 

The Armadillo?

The Wales Millennium Centre.

I'm not sure the, er, Armadillo is the most recognisable building in Britain. The Welsh might think so, I suppose.

I think it is.  From the inside, I've never seen anything like it.  Couldn't possibly ever mistake it for anything else.  Most buildings are pretty generic on the inside.

Looks kind of like an airport terminal.

No it doesn't. It looks like an armadillo.  It's all sloping and bronze.

I suppose.  But then I didn't think of the Millennium Centre at first.  I, uh, thought of New Earth.  Is that bad?

Yes.

The slow motion sequence at the end goes on a bit - was the episode running under? - but there are a lot of nice camera shots, sticking two people’s faces in the frame and it really works.  Especially if some of them are super pretty.

Shame about the robots.  They actually look fine, until they start walking.  Seriously had enough of slow shuffling polite monsters now.  And how rubbish are they?  They have an incredibly basic understanding of phrases, Star Trek style (no one told me there were aliens, therefore you’re definitely lying, even though I am capable of scanning you and seeing you only have one heart), and their own hands short them out, along with artwork as thin as a poster.  Worst design ever.

So.  We like Amy, Rory, and Amy-and-Rory.  We like the moral dilemma and the look of most of it.  But we're not sure about the Doctor.

First of all he's got some funny ideas about kindness.  There's a lot to be said for quality of life over quantity, and apparently it's entirely up to Rory to notice that stuff, despite the Doctor being the universe's biggest humanitarian.

Secondly, after an episode spent setting up that Old Amy is a person too, the Doctor decides she's ‘not real’ and that's that.  Is he just preserving the timeline, does part of him want to conveniently get rid of the Amy that hates him, or is this about guilt, for Amy's past and for doing it all over again?  Saying ‘She's not real’ doesn't make much sense for the Doctor, who'd probably assign human rights to a sausage roll.  Is he trying to convince himself as much as Rory?****

Although it’s obvious from the start that Old Amy ain’t gonna make it, we’re really not sure what we’re supposed to get from the ending.  Old Amy wants both her and Young Amy to survive.  The Doctor tells her it’s possible.

And we know bigger paradoxes have worked in previous Who.

Example?

There's an obvious one, which involved making the TARDIS red instead of blue, but even so, it IS possible.

Huh?

The Master?  Murdered the human race with the decendants of the human race?

That involved turning the TARDIS into a Paradox Machine. 

He turned the TARDIS red.  

It was a Paradox Machine.  The plot deliberately dealt with how that paradox was going to work.

Clearly the TARDIS is capable of controlling paradoxes then.

Clearly?  That was the Master for a start, and the TARDIS 'hates' paradoxes.

Says the Doctor.  Turning the TARDIS red/into a Paradox Machine was for a really big paradox.  This is only a little one.  So just make one corner red.

So is the Doctor lying to get her on side, or does he only realise it's not possible after the glasses short out, leaving him with no way to break the bad news?  Honestly, we doubt it's the latter.  He refers to Amy as ‘the nasty Amy’ to his TARDIS, he mentions lying, and when Rory asks him outright, he avoids answering the question.  It just cuts away at the end – what are we meant to take from that?  Is this poignancy or the writers copping out?  We're really hoping this situation will have echoes later on, but you never know with this show.

It doesn't help that this is almost a Doctor-lite episode, with Matt Smith stuck looking on in the TARDIS.  That'd be fine if the episode really was about Amy and Rory, but it's more about the tough call he makes, and the way he goes about it.  We don't know if the Doctor's reasoning is valid, because we don't see it.  And even if it is, which is probably is, why then does he stare Old Amy in the eyes and wait just long enough so he can slam the door in her face?  Why make a choice, then foist it on Rory, manipulating someone he knows is sensitive and kind into thinking it’s his fault?  Old Amy actively has to take the decision away from Rory to save him from the Doctor.  And then the Doctor sits there and actually waits for her to die before he leaves and rewrites time.

Rule one, the Doctor lies.  So does his catch phrase have to be ‘Trust me’?

Just what is this episode trying to tell us?  Amy trusts the Doctor, and wastes thirty-six years in a living hell; then the moment she trusts him again, he slams a door in her face and leaves her to die, before then erasing her from history.  I think what I’m getting here is ‘Don’t Trust The Doctor’.  Considering how manipulative he’s been this year, I wasn’t about to.  Someone hurry up, don a spacesuit, jump in a lake and take the bastard out.*****

Still, it's a very interesting idea and the actors give it their all, though it drags a bit in the end.  Somehow I doubt it's a big hit with the kids, with its emphasis on relationships and paradoxes, not to mention the shuffling Robots Of Dull.  Anyway, despite the moral minefield, I like it.

I don't.

* We're looking at you, Episode 13.

** The characters fathom what's going on much quicker than we did.  It should be an instantly understandable premise so you can concentrate on the emotions, but there's a lot of wiffly science and technobabble getting in the way.  Something about three levers?  And the Doctor’s theories on whether a timestream can be rewritten change every thirty seconds.

*** Thirty six years doesn't actually feel that much, considering Rory waited two thousand years, but whatever.

**** Because that’s just what the Doctor's personality needs.  More guilt.

*****Another week, another episode, glad there’s no River Song, infuriated there’s no mention of Melody.  Since it’s now apparently possible to see someone’s future and then change their past so it never happens… go and save your daughter maybe?  Just a thought.