Split up into two halves over the last year the 2011 series has come and gone so quick, except for me, I’ve been really slow about it, however, I’ve just spent two nights watching episodes 2 to 8, faithfully recorded, and after an eight month gap I picked up on part two of the 'girl in an astronaut suit' story as Day Of The Moon had my head spinning for the first few minutes. The big mystery theme that runs through each series had been effectively established in part one, in the past there’s been cracks in the wall of existence, and now we have ‘the silence’ threatening to fall on us. I’d barely a space to remember the finer details of episode one for as always with Steven Moffat as producer his each new tale is an ever-increasing head charge into frenetic-dialogue-guns-blazing-convoluted-but-skilfully-executed-ploting. The maximalism of it all did make me groan momentarily like I’d been whacked round the head, but you sure cant complain about lack of momentum in Stevens new stories, and having been sucked into the tale once again I rode out the whirlwind pacing, this along with the blink too quickly and you might just miss all the memorable images fired throughout the plot by the excited imagination of the producer/writer.
I think I’ve guessed now Stevens secret childhood influence, seeing as how we’re of the same age group I’m chancing that one of his television ‘most watched’s’ was Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game (that big light entertainment game-show favourite started back in the 70s). I bet Brucies voice (or why not even that of Larry Grayson who later helmed the show!) is firmly implanted in Stevens head where it encourages him to line up a succession of trophy images positioned for us in his stories, its much the same as Brucie did in his interaction with the contestants where prizes such as cuddly teddy bears, hairdryers, and teasmades had quickly sped past along a conveyor belt. Brucie/Steven like to stoke our enthusiasm, and ”lots of items gonna pass before your eyes, 45 seconds/minutes to have a look starting from now!”, and today its with these specific prizes: “Some scary-faced alien’s in black suits and appearance’s based on Edvard Munch's Scream painting”, “a little girl held prisoner in an outrageously scary horror orphanage that should be closed down right away due to health and safety”, ”a cuddly bearded Doctor Who held hostage and bricked up within a dark cuboid prison”, “the Doctors handy nano-gun-recorder that would make a good merchandising spin-off toy product”, and finally, (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) ”Amy and Rory shot and killed and zipped into body bags and River Song jumping to her gory death from the window of a tall building”.
A complete contrast followed the avalanche of those events when the third episode The Curse Of The Black Spot had a lot less to offer moving along its conveyor-belt of the imagination. In swapping Waitrose for Iceland I didn’t need Brucies help in recalling just two items worth taking home, these being that: ethereal geeky-bug-eyed supermodel’s like Lily Cole are perfectly adapted for the role of geeky-bug-eyed supermodel alien’s (with no make-up required), and who said that supermodels cant act? Also, if you’re ever onboard a transatlantic flight and the stewardess runs screaming down the aisle because the flight crew have all disappeared then don’t panic, just simply look amongst the rest of the passengers for a 17th century pirate captain (easily spotted due to the parrot on his shoulder), it’s a little known fact that ancient pirates can instinctively steer futuristic technology just as easily as wooden ships, ”second star to the right, and straight on til’ morning…”
The Doctors Wife was a surprise. Three episodes in and I’d settled for a return of the nature of the previous series, a few mad romps twisting and turning at beginning and end written by Steven and a lot of ‘so, so’ episodes in-between, but amazingly Neil Gaiman’s story took the development of the Doctors character to another level beautifully expanding the mythology of the fantasy, mind you, it started off looking almost like the pantomime of a really old series episode, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy might have stumbled in at any moment dressed in silly costumes. In one of the best Doctor Who stories ever we got a classic episode, I guess that’s what happens when a cult fiction author is recruited. An asteroid entity steals the Tardis after first removing its living matrix and transferring it into the body of a woman, in result we get an opportunity for the Doctor to adventure with and conduct a one to one relationship with the soul of the machine that's so inseparably part of him, as a bonus we also get to see that the Tardis interior has lots of corridors, and there’s brief mention of bedrooms and his and hers toilets, sadly we don’t get to visit any of these.
The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People is a reasonable two-parter about artificial people set in a Welsh Castle that’s supposedly a 22nd Century Monastery, I think in reality this was more of a ‘one and a half parter’, it seemed to stall on ideas in part two with a lot of repetition around people running back and forth (not unlike all the padding in the original series stories dragged out over four episodes). Prior to watching this story I discovered that someone I work with is a secret Doctor Who fan, and in one of those ‘it’s a small world’ type of instances she pointed out to me that a retired ex-colleague of ours has her actor son playing a role in these episodes, in her only criticism of his acting (perhaps being self-consciously Scottish) was that she felt his Scottish accent stuck out a bit, but hey, overseas viewers will likely think he’s Welsh or Irish or something, it’s a small world alright.
In another Steven Moffat double (a lot of two-parters this season) A Good Man Goes To War introduced us to headless religious electric-flame-sword wielding aliens together with an amusing war-mongering Sontaran nurse who can lactate, and most interestingly of all a ‘tipping the velvet-style’ Victorian crime-fighting duo of a reptilian Silurian warrior ‘Lady’ and her human female maid/companion, both of whom either escaped from an unscreened episode of ‘adult’ Torchwood or deserve to have their own spin-off TV show. Its eventually revealed that River Song’s earth name is Melody Pond and that she’s actually the child of Amy Pond and Rory, which explains a lot as to why she’s such an annoying character, but the biggest mystery for me was how Amy and Rory could be so unemotionally involved about their lost daughters misplaced life without them, having spent her childhood stuffed into a spacesuit (episodes 1 and 2), growing up in a horror asylum (episode 2), being abandoned and then living her adulthood as Alex Kingston (many previous episodes), and alternately escaping from and being locked up again in a galactic space-prison. Now surely that would drive any child mental and indeed it did, sort of, in Lets Kill Hitler a title I’d previously heard about but thought was surely a joke is a story where River Song at long last makes any sense for me, you see, she’s a psychopath! She stops merely waving her silver gun around pretending to be hard when she’s so obviously not, now she’s a certified crazy woman, its the first time I’ve ever liked her. This is a best ever fun Steven Moffat episode and my absolute favourite, his imagination runs riot as the Doctor and companions materialise in Hitler’s wartime office, the great dictator is about to be tortured for war crimes by a cunningly disguised robot man from the future that’s controlled by a crew of miniaturised people within its body, (did Steven read The Beano as a boy? he must have been a fan of the Numskulls!). Later in this totally madcap episode River Song runs amok in 1938 Berlin forcing a large group of Germans to take off all of their clothes at gunpoint, and forcing me to eat my words about calling Alex Kingston’s character ‘mumsy’ in the past, and it also has me forcibly heil-hailing Steven Moffat as a scriptwriting genius.
