Narp.

Less likable, yeah, but she's a bit different to your average companion, given how she met him and all. She's bound to be a bit mixed up and prone to throw herself at him. Still think she's a good companion. As long as she doesn't mope over the doctor all is good.

Also, I had to have this pointed out to me, but when he comes back to comfort her when she has her eyes closed, he's got his jacket back despite losing it to the angels. Continuity error or has the doctor come from some point in the future to say those things. Seems there's sone deliberate errors on screen like the badge.

I think, and it's very much a guess, that this is because of the very different situations the Angels found themselves in. As the Doctor stated, in Blink it was a group of scavengers who transported people through time in order to feed off their potential time energies; it was out of survival, not outright malevolence that they did so. In this double bill, however, they were specifically in the maze of the dead in order to reach the time crack of the Byzantium believing it to be a plentiful supply of energy to feed off, meaning they had no need to feed off the potential time energies of the humans. As such, they killed for the exact same reason that they toyed with Amy; "fun". They didn't feel jeopardised in any real way, and so they indulged in their odious tendencies; it was like choosing to use apples to play a quickly improvised game of rounders rather than eating them, because you know you have dinner waiting for you at home or something.

I agree to the point that how she met the doctor would mean that she would be extremely attracted to him, and that him showing up the night before her wedding would cause her to be mixed up, but the fact that she is so eager to jump his timebones immediately after confessing her engagement without second thoughts or guilt is really off putting. It would be different if Rory had been painted as an idiotic douchebag who didn't really love Amy, but the show has shown him to be an intelligent well-meaning guy, and in the confidential it was explicitly said that he has loved Amy since they were kids.

It's silly that this bothers me so much, but it just seemed like every review or comment I read/heard was just about how funny the scene was, and not about how Amy had no qualms about hurting the guy who loves her in order to fuck a man who is not an option and says so himself.

Don't read too much into it, lad. All this will come to pass as what you say will bite Missy Sexy Redhead on her pert derriere. Mostly - Amy came out of this double episode the best UNTIL that bit. The Doctor is hot admittedly but having some lass moon over him always always leads to STUPID PLOT INEVITABILITY. I am disappointed in The Moff for letting this happen. He kind of lost me at 'Sacred Bob'. Even though Bob himself was quite pretty ... i digress ...

Zoz is damn right - why contradict so much on the Angels? Having them speak at all made them loose some of their enigmatic power - I mean, why?

Plus, River Song can be so superly smug and annoying. I see less chemistry with Kingston & young Matthew. If she is gonna come back, she needs to stop smirking and talking about the future.

I think it's all Moff trying to show is Amy isn't quite all there. Hence why he says sort her out, maybe the crack is messing with her head, aside from any abandonment issues she might have.

Though the main reason I thought it was a bit off was the same as you guys, that she has a fiancé, a nice decent fiancé too who loves her. And it's good to see that Rory seems to become a companion from Saturday onwards.

I don't think Moffat would make such an arsey person a companion, and all will become clear.

That said, it could have just been a light hearted scene to end a tense episode, and there may be no moping over the doctor/attempting to rape him. No means no, Amy!

I thought one of the creepiest things about them was how they dispatched people, snapping necks doesn't have quite the same elan.

As Sefi said the talking, plus the don't look into the eyes bit (didn't seem to have any effect on them last time), not moving if they think you've seen them (?) and some of the rather camp positions they ended up in during their prolonged game of 'what's the time mr wolf' all conspired to make them rather less scary than last time.

It was a mistake to bring them back.

There was potential with Amy's little red riding hood trek across the forest, but it was over before it began and they didn't really use the visual metaphor enough. It ended up being more reminiscent of 'The Village'.

I also agree about River, smug smug smuggio. Reminded me there were actually only a few striking scenes in the Silence in the Library double bill and as a whole it was a bit plodding and she was very irritating. As expected her flirting with baby faced Matt was all a bit creepy.

*sighs*

I'll stop whining, it was still a million times better than Daleks in Manhattan, the nadir of what we've had to tolerate for the last few years.

I enjoyed that double-bill a great deal, but I agree that the changes to the Angels made them less, rather than more, scary. I thought the whole Ringu bit in the first half was terrifically scary because it ever so slightly expanded on their abilities from Blink without completing changing what they could do. The second part, complete with "they think you can see them" didn't really make any sense, even with the explanation that they were scared and that their instincts would just kick in naturally. I didn't mind Sacred Bob being used as a voice for them, since allowing them to talk gave Moffat the opportunity to expand on the cracks in space and time and advance the season arc, but I think the scales tipped too far in favour of serialisation at the expense of the individual episodes. It also felt a little bit derivative of the Vashta Nerada using the communicators of the dead scientists in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.

Having said all that, I liked a lot of the character stuff this week, I thought that Karen Gillan gave her best performance of the run so far, that the scene between her and The Doctor after she is told that she can't open her eyes was really sweet, and the scene with Octavian, The Doctor and The Angel was very poignant, particularly the exchange, "I wish I knew you better."/"You knew me at my best."

And I like River Song, smugness and all. Pairing The Doctor up with someone who knows more than he does about his own life shakes up the dynamic a little bit, and prevents

Not Moffat's best work, but still leaps and bounds ahead of the two-parters we had under RTD (Empty Child/The Doctor Dances aside). This current run hasn't set a foot wrong so far, as far as I am concerned.

And that was a Moffat, anyway.

My feelings towards it are much the same as everyone else's I think, I have little to add.

I fear so.



I hated the beginning of the first episode so much for her attitude.



For certainly. Funny to think how shit it used to be. It really was terrible, wasn't it? Already the quality has improved tenfold.

Overall I liked it.

Much better than Tranny and Susanna sharing the stage with a futuristic Anne Robinson finale that brought Bad Wolf to a head.

There are a few things that make this set of stories more complicated than others - River and her appearences within The Doctor's timeline, his saving her in the future when she seemed much more caring and less blasé about things, his possible death at her hands, what future/past adventures they have - It'd be cool to see how this is made to happen.

Plus the scene with the jacket in it - that wasn't there through crap continuity - I think that's from a future episode, he comes back to reassure or prompt Amy into remembering something that he told her when she was a little girl (But what?!) and I'd expect more of these little one-on-ones as the series unfolds.

Angels - still scary. Perhaps not as scary anymore due to us knowing more about them, but I'm pretty sure there was 5-9 year olds up and down the country cacking themselves.

My final interesting indicator from this episode is when, at the end, The Doctor tells River that the pandorica is a fairytale and she replies "Aren't we all?" - quite clear that the Moff has plans to bring 'the magic' back into the storyline and rewrite events of recent years.

The fact that Amy can recall the Angel that was in her mind but not the Power Ranger Cyberman of Victorian London is a bit of a tell for who gets to remember what and what actually occured when or when.

Looking forward to more

-m0r

Too many deliberate 'mistakes', I think the Doctor really came back from the future.

Learning how to land the Tardis without a sound at the beginning of the previous episode set the scene up, so he could land near Amy without detection methinks.

As for the Pandorica, I reckon that's where everything that was 'wiped out' has turned up.

But then I thought the Pandorica was a place where all the nasties of the universe were kept (the prison that Prisoner zero escaped from).

It was an OK conclusion. Not the best episode ever, but not the worst by a long shot.

Nice to see Spoon in there. Didn't notice him in the first part.

I don't remember the "jacket" bit

Did anyone else find the soldiers vanishing and not being remembered rather creepy / scary as well or was that just me?

No, I found that really weird and unnerving too. Amy's frustration at it, heightened by her being unable to see anything and stopped them, really added to the sense of futility of the scene when the last soldier walks off.

The not-remembering was a good bit.

The Moff clearly watched Aliens recently.

In the pictures, am I going crazy or does Rory have a ponytail?
Did he always have it, and I've just missed it?

What? What? WHAT?

He does. It looks awful.

He didn't have it before as far as I know.

Kinda horrific.

Pratchett: 'Doctor Who is ludicrous'.

Pratchett says stuff like that all the time, bless him. I'm not a fan of his work personally - but the point of DW is that it is ludicrous. He just sounds like a killjoy when he says stuff like this.

It's alright, he'll forget all about it soon enough.

He's right about it being guilty of last minute solutions, but I've not seen it in this series so far, it's all being built up.

RTD's who was all a bit "make it up as you go along" but hasn't doctor who always been a bit that way? As sefi said, it's the point of the show (and a lot of sci-fi). It's a show about a 900 year old alien who time travels in a little blu box that's bigger on the inside. It's a ludicrous concept to start with!

If he's on about RTD's era, then I completely agree. This latest series seems to have shyed away from that, though.

Still, I do find it quite funny that Pratchett's slagging anything off for being ludicrous. Especially seeing as every book I've read of his has been ludicrous. And pretty much exactly the same as each other.

Aww they aren't the same! They are pretty ludicrous for the most part though and a fair few Deus ex machina occuring. But he's old, and his minds going a bit and look at his little face!

I'll laugh if Gaiman's episode next season utilises Deus ex Machina.

Here's the original article from SFX.

I'd say Pratchett is attacking the RTD/Tennant era more than the New Doctor overall he actually mentions the episodes he likes from the 2005 revival and guess who was the writer of each of them?

That's right - David HasselMoff.

-m0r

Makes more sense in the article - in fact, I agree with most of it. And he is right about Small Worlds - the Torchwood episode - being clever. His fav episodes are mine also.

Those choice comments are more likely to generate debate than the more measured and even-handed tone of the rest of the article. It's just like that time that the papers took his comments about Harry Potter (which he never actually said, just wrote in an early draft of a speech which he then changed to remove the Potter comments) and spun them to say something he didn't intend to say.

Thanks for linking to that, I should have added "I suspect DS are taking this out of context," but as it was a DS article it kind of goes without saying.

A discussion for another thread, perhaps, but I can see what Glenn is getting at when he says Pratchett’s books are a little samey. I've been reading them now for over twenty years and the more recent ones don't seem to be bringing anything especially new to the table. They are well written, entertaining and have good ideas and jokes in them, but I had a very strong feeling of Déjà Vu when reading Unseen Academicals last year, and good though it was I would prefer something more original (getting out of Ankh Morpork, for one, would make a welcome change!).

Ha!

Heh, brilliant.

That was a fun little episode, but I couldn't help but think that it lost a lot of steam once the mystery of who the vampires were was revealed. I think this is partly because I really liked the idea of vampires with piranha-style teeth, rather than the traditional elongated canines, but mainly because the first twenty minutes or so, when The Doctor, Amy and Rory were trying to figure out who the vampires were, were full of nice little character moments and that central mystery was pretty compelling. Once the giant CGI fish started showing up, it lost a lot of that energy for me when the rest of the episode became about finding out what their plan was and thwarting it at the last minute. That part felt really by rote, whilst the rest was pretty interesting and made good use of the characters and their own personal conflicts with each other.

There was some very funny dialogue this week. The Doctor's entrance at the start was really well done, particularly the pre-credits punchline, and I thought that Toby Whithouse seemed to acknowledge the ridiculousness of the enemies with the line "As I said, they're not vampires. Fish from space." It was a nice touch.

And, as ever, Matt and Karen were brilliant.

I think it suffered from the same problems as Whithouse's Being Human, namely the character aspects being much, much stronger than the plot and the mythology/science fiction element. He really nails the central relationships - the interplay between the Doctor and Rory being superb - but it just highlighted how silly and, well, limp the rest of it was with no real sense of threat or momentum. Next week's looks great though, so mustn't grumble.

Definitely my weakest of the series so far. I had a feeling it would be, me not being a Whithouse fan and all.

I agree completely. Admittedly, I love Being Human - both the show and the state of existence - but the character stuff works much better on that show because the stakes are much lower than they are on Doctor Who, and because he usually has multiple episodes in which the explore his themes, letting the plot and mythology creep in over time. He doesn't really seem able to achieve a decent balance on standalone episodes.

I enjoyed it. It wasn't the best episode so far but it was by no means bad.

I'm not saying it's bad, just that it was not as good as I had come to expect from this current run. I still thought it was really enjoyable.

I enjoyed it, not the strongest this series, and some great comic moments, particularly the doctor's entrance and His moments with Rory later

"You kissed her back!"
"No, I kissed her lips!".

Have to say that next week looks creepy and surreal. Toby Jones! I take it that's another Moffat episode?

That was a great little moment. Good line, great delivery.



No, next week's is written by Simon Nye (who apparently wrote the recent series of Reggie Perrin. So...yeah). None of the remaining episodes of the series will be written by Moffat except for the two-part finale. But, being showrunner, he'll have had plenty of input into episodes, even if he didn't write the scripts.

Really, quite different for Nye then.

I imagine Moffat does have a lot of input into the episodes, Russell T Davies changed stories a lot apparently, I read somewhere that the only scripts he left untouched were Moffat's.

Amy LOVES green tea

Fair to middling on Saturday.

Mt main point of intrigue is why does Rory end up with a mullet 5 years in the future?

Unless it's a dream... Or the future? Or a dream.... Or the future?

Should be good.

Toby Jones seemed to be saying in the preview that he is the lord of dreams or somesuch, so it seems like the "future" Rory and Amy might be dream creations, or possibly how Rory and Amy appear when they enter The Doctor's dreams...

Oh oh oh!

If you haven't read Imposter, listen to it here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mt...sents_Imposter/

One of my absolute favourites

You seem to have called the "World knows about aliens" thing too, since the Doctor pointed out that no-one remembers it, and his concerns about Amy not knowing of the Daleks.

The cracks be the method.

I'm interested to know what time being 'unwritten' actually entails.
Surely it can't mean 'being put back to how it was before'.
Because that would still be re-writing time, just re-writing it back to how it was before. Unwritten suggests the same sort of thing as being erased.
The way it went all echoey and stuff at the end of the episode, and the way it's being referred to as the silence, would indicate time is being erased.
How will that work though?
If the Earth being transported to the Medusa Cascade is no longer in the public consciousness, is it because that bit of time is now erased?
Will people not notice that a big chunk of time is missing? Surely Inland Revenue will notice no taxable activity for those months, make requests for supplementary payments to bring peoples NI contributions up to date, and the whole time vanishing thing will be highlighted to the tax paying public at large?
I'll love to know how they're going to get around that potential glaring plot hole.

Maybe the theory m0r bandied around at the start of the series - after noticing the date on Rorys badge - is right (that Ledworth is in some sort of time bubble, caused by the crack).

Next weeks episode looks intriguing, and certainly looks like a change of pace for Simon Nye. Although I would have loved them to have trailed the episode with the phrase 'From the writer of Men Behaving Badly...'

I wonder if Leslie Ash will be in it.

CWOR![/Tony]

Sexy women who then turn out to be fish-creatures? She'd have been perfect!