Doctor Who Season 6

He wears a Stetson now. Stetsons are cool.

What We Know So Far

Last season, Moffat brought us hands-down the best Who season we've had yet. Though it certainly wasn't perfect—including, particularly, the death of the real Weeping Angels and their impersonation by an army of weird golems—even when it was bad, it wasn't awful. And Rose Tyler didn't show up at all! (Technically. Amy's worryingly similar, but she's married to Rory Ironheart now, so maybe that'll cut down on her "Take me Doctor, take me right now!" habits.)

What We Found Out

6.00, A Christmas Carol: Professor Dumbledore is Ebenezer Scrooge in a futuristic steampunk world where he controls the cloud layer. Rory and Amy are above it, aboard a failing spaceship, and if Ebenezer Dumbledore doesn't clear the clouds up, they (along with 4,001 lesser mortals) are going to go ka-blooey. Unfortunately, Ebenezer Dumbledore is the most immensely crotchety human ever made, and is 100% against letting the ship land, because it's not landing on his house, so why should he be bothered? So Doc embarks on a time-traveling Christmas Carol gambit to turn Ebenezer into a compassionate fellow, a plan which culminates in a sort of Androcles-meets-the-Flying-Shark-and-falls-in-love-with-the-girl-in-the-icebox plot. Hilarious, heartfelt, and leagues above any Christmas special in living memory. 5/5

6.01, The Impossible Astronaut: Doc returns from a long vacation—leaving at age 908 and returning at 1103. He calls all his pals (Amy, Rory, and River) to the beach of a lake for a picnic, where he is promptly murdered for real by somebody wearing a spacesuit.

So...well, that started off big. Ten minutes into the episode and the main character is already dead. We come to learn that the whole meeting was a vast gambit from Future!Doc, who invited them all...and Past!Doc. On advice from Future!Doc, they ship out to 1969, where Richie Nixon is being menaced by nightly phone calls from a prepubescent girl who talks about an evil spaceman coming to eat her (presumably the same astronaut, everybody assumes). Doc—Present!Doc, but also Past!Doc now because we've met his future—figures out where the calls are coming from, while River and Amy theorize that if they kill the astronaut now, Doc won't die later. Seems legit.

Meanwhile, Amy's being menaced by extremely freaky looking aliens who wear suits and make you forget them as soon as you look away. The episode ends with several big bangs in short succession—Amy confesses she's pregnant, the Doctorcidal Astronaut shows up (and is the little girl) and Amy shoots the Astronaut so that Future!Doc won't be killed. All in all, it's a tight, whiz-bang episode that finally acknowledges the potential stories you can have when your main character travels through time, and raises even more than the usual number of questions for a Who premiere. 5/5

6.02, Day of the Moon: Three months after last episode, Amy, Rory, and River get chased down and killed while Doc is kept imprisoned and bearded. Don't worry, though—it's all a ploy to get the band back together again after some continent-spanning research (although I'm really not sure why that happened the way it did. Possibly so the freaky aliens won't know the Doctor's plan? It's very unclear, although I must admit it's a very cool opening sequence).

Team Doc investigates the freaky aliens, which is very stinking difficult because they can't remember anything they learn; in fact, the only way to keep track of them is by making tally marks on yourself. Slowly it all comes to light: they're called the Silence, and they've been ruling human history "since the wheel and fire." They use posthypnotic suggestion to dominate humans, and to keep us from remembering them. The Doctor turns this against them, getting a recording of a Silent saying, "You should kill us all on sight!" and then playing it during the Moon Landing, which (ostensibly) every human will see at one point in their lives, so this will effectively eradicate the Silence.

Now, on the one hand, props to Doc for thinking, "Oh, no problem, I'll just use their own power against them." Except on the other hand, he needed them to say exactly that or it wouldn't work. Just...just, dang it, come on, Moffat! You can be better than this! There is no need for Deus ex Doctorus here!

Apart from that, though, the Amy-Rory-emotions subplot is quite touching, even though I'm fairly certain Roman Rory Ironheart deserves better than Amy Pond. And the episode ends with a tantalizing clue to the season's mystery of the Impossible Astronaut: the little girl may or may not be Amy Pond's daughter, and she has the Time Lord ability to regenerate. 4/5

6.03, The Curse of the Black Spot: Team Doc (minus River, who went back to her prison cell last episode for the crime we still don't know about) arrive at a becalmed pirate ship where everyone with even a minor injury is captured by a glowing blue siren. Oh, also the ship is captained by none other than Hugh Bonneville, otherwise known as Papa frickin' Downton, who brings all things up a notch just by being in them. Turns out the siren is actually an automated nurse from a stranded spaceship lying across the way in a parallel universe. She's been taking all the injured sailors and putting them in sick bay to heal them. The episode loses points mostly for a lack of memorability or high stakes; there's never a feel as though anybody is really in danger. 3/5

6.04, The Doctor's Wife: Invited by a Time Lord Telegram, the TARDIS crew land on an asteroid in a separate "bubble" universe. Immediately, the Ol' Faithful breaks down, her "matrix" having been forcibly transferred into the body of a young woman on the asteroid. The asteroid is sentient, and its tummy has the rumblies only TARDISes can satisfy. Of course, you can't just eat a TARDIS; you have to take the brain out first, so you don't get indigestion. Amy and Rory end up inside the sentient—and nigh-omnipotent—asteroid as it tries to eat Doc's ride, while Doc and his newly-humaned TARDIS try to rescue them. Despite a weird texture and a slow start, my goodness, this episode ends beautifully. Count on Gaiman to deliver the feels. 5/5

6.05, The Rebel Flesh: A mining crew is using remote-control doppelgänger humans (made of semi-psychic pancake mix, basically) to collect corrosive acid, and a solar storm knocks their remote-controls down. The newly-freed almost-humans are identical to their originals in every single way, from moles to memories, and it seems an awful lot like Who is going to be tackling "What measure is a human?" for its theme. Things get even more complicated when one of the humans shoot one of the 'gangers, escalating the tensions to warlike levels, and Doc's consciousness gets imprinted on the psychic pancake mix, making yet another Doctor. 4/5

6.06, The Almost People: Doc and his Doctorgänger try to arrange a peaceful reconciliation between the humans and the 'gangers and fail so hard that the whole mining building is set to blow sky-high. For some reason, though, all the characters are set on some kind of chaos-pendulum of personality, ricocheting back and forth between warlike and peaceable. Just as bad, the episode entirely dodges the problem of how to integrate perfect copies of people into real society by making sure to kill at least one of every pair. The episode ends with the Big Reveal that Amy is pregnant, but she's one of these doppelgängers. She has been since episode one. Possibly since before episode one, even. The visions of the eyepatch woman were reality—pregnant Amy in a tube—breaking through to the doppelgänger, not-pregnant Amy in the TARDIS.

Now, this is a really cool reveal, sort of. Aside from the Impossible Astronaut macro plot, we've also had a sort of sub-macro plot about the Pregnancy of Amelia Pond. Amy's been seeing visions of a creepy woman with an eyepatch, and for some reason the TARDIS thinks Amy is both pregnant and not-pregnant at the same time. So our question, obviously, is why? What's going on? We've seen Amy kidnapped, but she was seeing visions of this woman before that happened (in "Day of the Moon," about 18 minutes in). So when was she nabbed? Before the first episode? Sometime in the middle? What the deuce?

Compounding the problem, what put Doc on this scent? He states clearly that he came to this particular point in time to learn about "the Flesh," the psychic pancake-mix that can be reshaped into humans. But why? What tipped him off? Amy hasn't even mentioned these visions until this episode!

Ugh. Come on, Moffat! Be better than this! 3/5

6.07, A Good Man Goes to War: After realizing that Amy was a fake, Doc and Rory gather everyone who owes Doc a favor. They're planning to storm the castle, basically, making for what may well be the most full-of-win opening sequence in Who history. Rory is in Roman garb and lousy with gravitas, running around the universe collecting allies and terrifying Cybermen and generally being the magnificent Centurion he is. River can't help, though, because she'd be interfering in something she mustn't interfere with.

Team Doctor—which is now rolling at least eight people deep and is therefore invincible—storms the fortress of Demon's Run, scaring an entire army away and saving Amy and her baby, Melody Pond, all without a drop of blood spilled. Everyone is elated, and everything feels dramatically satisfying, until we realize with a dim shock of horror that the baby Amy is currently holding is another doppelgänger. Eyepatch Lady managed to kidnap Melody and replace her, intending to use the real Melody as a weapon pointed at the Doctor. As Doc is realizing all this, creepy headless monks show up and massacre the pseudo-army he brought with him. (Go with it, it's better than it sounds.)

Finally, River Song arrives. Doc is understandably miffed with her, since she might have been able to prevent his losing Baby Pond, and River takes time out of her day to explain that Doc is steadily making the word "doctor" mean "terrifying charlatan-god who will end you if you cross him." She also then reveals that her name is not River Song. When she was born, her mother named her "Melody Pond."

Oooh, yes, that is very cool. It makes more sense in context—there are all sorts of clues leading up to this that I don't have time to go into here—but my goodness. Has this been the plan since we met River, all the way back in "Silence in the Library"? If that's the case, then bravo. Wow. That is stunning. 5/5

6.08, Let's Kill Hitler: Doc returns from his searches for Melody, who is young River. We know she's going to be all right, because her older self has interacted with the Doctor at numerous points, and so (perhaps in a similar way to the Face of Boe) we know she'll be all right. She's certain to survive. Knowing this, Doc returns to Amy and Rory to hang out, and they are interrupted by Mels, Amy's best friend who happens to be the most extraordinarily delinquent person ever. She coerces Doc into taking her back in time to kill Hitler—hey, why not?—but in the process she gets shot and...regenerates into River Song? OH MY GOODNESS.

The newly-regenerated Melody Pond immediately sets about trying to kill Doc, obeying the brainwashing Mrs. Eyepatch gave her. She manages to poison him, but before making a proper escape, she's captured by time-traveling shapeshifting robot (crewed by miniature people) that seeks out past war criminals, plucks them out of time near the end of their lives, and tortures them for as long as is feasible. They capture River just as Doc is slowly kicking the bucket, and by digging through their records, she discovers that she is fated to be the Doctor's wife. For some reason, this encourages her to kiss Doc and push all her remaining regenerations into his body, healing him from the poison.

The problems I have with this resolution are both fairly minor. Firstly, this turnaround from "flirty murderess" to "repentant savior" happened a bit quick for my taste; it felt a little anesthetized, a little too easy. Secondly, NuWho canon has now erased the "twelve regenerations and stop" rule. Doc has infinite regenerations. River, apparently, is limited to a finite number, probably since she isn't actually a Time Lady. That isn't addressed except to state that she's now run out.

Regardless, a solid episode. 4/5

6.09, Night Terrors: The TARDISers get hailed by a frightened boy and are trapped in his closet, where he has been sending everything that terrifies him. He's actually an alien with massive psychic powers, making all his fears real. Everything is solved via parental affirmation, which makes for at least a satisfying conclusion, despite a less-than-memorable episode. Worth noting, though, is the similarity this episode shares to "Fear Her" back in Season 2. This is the same concept—a prepubescent child is granted terrifying psychic powers that menace the local populace—except carried out rather well, instead of being embarrassingly awful. 3/5

6.10, The Girl Who Waited: Amy gets stuck in a time-bubble quarantine zone on a planet infected with a disease that would kill Doc. To save her, he sends in Rory as his eyes and ears. Unfortunately, due to the time bubble stuff, Rory shows up late—thirty-seven years late. Amy has turned into a hard-eyed, samurai-sword-swinging warrior just to survive, since the medicine from the automated nurses would kill her. She's extremely bitter, having waited all this time for Doc and Rory. (I'd like to point out that she's being a bit rich. I mean, Rory waited 2,000 years for her. In fairness, she's significantly more extroverted than he is and she got stuck in solitary rather than as a kick-butt Roman centurion. But still.)

Doc realizes he can cheat the time-streams and save Amy on the day she arrived, rather than thirty-seven years afterward, but he needs Old!Amy's help to do it. Old!Amy flatly refuses, because saving her younger self would effectively kill her and she doesn't like that option. Using some timey-wimey cheat codes, Rory arranges for both versions of Amy to have a chat. Young!Amy convinces Old!Amy to save her—not for herself, but for Rory. Old!Amy agrees on the condition that Doc save both of them, which would cause a paradox. Pressed for time, Doc agrees.

Rory and his wives race to the TARDIS. Young!Amy gets stunned, and Rory carries her aboard while Old!Amy hews through robots to keep them safe. And Doc, staring right at the companion he failed to save, shuts the door in her face. Rory demands that they save Old!Amy, too, but they can't; having multiple Amy's aboard the TARDIS would have awfully big consequences. Rory weeps at the choice, but there's nothing he can do except rail at Doc for "turning [Rory] into him" and for utterly failing as a time traveler, since he never bothers to pick up a history book. All I can say in response is that Rory just got promoted from "Most Admirable Male" to "Best Humanoid in the Whoniverse." 5/5

6.11, God Complex: Our heroes are stranded in a genuinely creepy hotel that manifests deep fears into physical form. The fears drive them to worship an alien minotaur, which feeds off their faith in it. It mows down three of the episode's four extras, until finally coming to Amy Pond, who is vulnerable to it because of her faith in the Doctor. To survive, she's forced to confront the fact that Doc is a mad, capricious man with a box. When they finally escape, Doc leaves Amy and Rory at home. "Why?" Amy asks. "Because you're still alive," Doc says. Good on ya, Doc. Better this than being locked in another universe, emotionally toyed with, or memory-wiped. 5/5

6.12, Closing Time: Doc visits dear, bumbling Craig again, on the eve of his own death at Lake Silencio (the event that kicked off the season). During his stay, he gives Craig a swift kick up the butt, demanding that he be a better father. In the background, some Cybermen are trying to be relevant villains, until Craig kills them all with paternal affection. Despite a premise worthy of a Davies Christmas special, this episode manages to ride the line of awful without descending into hopeless self-parody. 4/5

6.13, The Wedding of River Song: Doc's death day arrives, and we're suddenly thrust into a world where all of history is happening at once. Winston Churchill is Holy Roman Emperor, Charles Dickens is a bestselling contemporary author, and Bearded!Doc is an imprisoned soothsayer who tells Emperor Churchill the story of how time started running together. It all started, he says, "with a woman." Cue flashback!

Recognizing that he will soon die, Doc determines to find out why the Silence wants to kill him. He chases down the Teselecta (the robot avenger crewed by miniature people, which we met in "Let's Kill Hitler"), which leads him to a Silence agent, which leads him to the fat blue guy who got beheaded in "A Good Man Goes to War." Finally, he learns the whole truth: he knows a secret, the answer to the oldest question in the universe, and he is destined to speak this secret "on the fields of Trenzalore at the fall of the Eleventh." The Silence can never allow him to do this, and figured that the shortest distance between a talking Doctor and a quiet Doctor is a tailor-made child-of-the-TARDIS psychopath wearing a tricked-out spacesuit, placed at a "still point in time" (which can more easily be made into a fixed point) so that she can shoot the Doctor dead.

Pause.

What?

Let's review the Silence plan of action here, shall we?

Step 1: Kidnap Amelia Pond sometime after she's been impregnated while aboard the TARDIS. (Complexity penalty: how do the Silence know she's preggers? Further, how do the Silence know she got knocked up while in the Time Vortex? Further, when did they kidnap her? She's been seeing the visions of Mrs. Eyepatch since the second episode—notably before the creepy Silence aliens kidnapped her.)

Step 2: Replace Amelia Pond with a flesh avatar, allowing them to keep the real Amy hidden away while they await her baby. But why so soon? I suppose, on the one hand, they couldn't guarantee they'd be able to kidnap her later. But the flesh avatar indicates some kind of foreknowledge and intricate planning on their part.

Step 3: Wait nine months, all the while transmitting a signal that transcends space-time (which I cannot imagine is a cheap endeavor, as it needs to send a signal everywhere and everywhen. Presumably they're using something a little more sophisticated than radio waves).

Step 4: Kidnap Baby Pond, replace with flesh avatar for giggles, and raise the baby with intensive kill-the-Doctor training. (Complexity penalty: why this particular child? Wouldn't any old bum do? Granted, Doc seems invincible. But he isn't. Apart from the regeneration thing, he's just as squishy and killable as anybody, provided you double tap. And it's not as if they need a TARDISed child to make a still point into a fixed point; those happen automatically whenever the Doctor is involved, because the only thing Doc can't interfere with is his own timeline or history books he actually bothered to read.)

Step 5: Get prepubescent Melody Pond into the space suit, circa 1969. (Complexity penalty: why? This doesn't...there's no...why? They don't need her in the suit yet! Perhaps to calibrate it to her, but why in 1969? Why not just wait until later?)

Step 6: Once Melody has escaped the spacesuit, arrange for her to end up, somehow, in England circa 1996, where she'll be ideally placed to hang around Amelia Pond, eventually allowing her to meet the Doctor in order to kill him. (Complexity penalty: how are they doing this? Are they using vortex manipulators? Are they using something similar to the Teselecta? How do they keep bouncing around in time?)

As convoluted plans go, they're rivaling Light Yagami. As unnecessarily convoluted plans go, they've officially eclipsed the Dark Knight's Joker. And how does this all relate to last season's "the TARDIS is going to explode" plot, which ended with the creepy voice whispering "Silence will fall"? Is somebody else manipulating all of this? Is there some omnicidal maniac running about, arranging for these degenerative universes to come about in hopes of destroying All Of The Things? Is that maniac's name, perhaps, Steven Moffat?

That's the only explanation that makes sense to me at this point: there's another villain operating behind all of this who wants the universe destroyed. The Silence are trying to preserve time as much as they can by destroying the Doctor; this unseen, practically-godlike villain is trying to destroy time by setting everything up to fall apart. It's responsible for the explosion of the TARDIS, it arranged for River Song to fall in love with Doc so she wouldn't shoot him, and it's determined to destroy everything through the Doctor. If this were a Russell T. Davies plot, it would be the Daleks. I can only hope Moffat has something at least slightly more threatening up his sleeves for the end of everything.

Anyway, Doc arrives at Lake Silencio to die. He's ready to go. River, however, screws everything up by failing to shoot him this time, which causes time to split wide open. Instantly, time stops, creating the new time-is-homogenous universe. Everything is degenerating, and the only way to fix it is for Doc and River to touch (since they're the opposite poles of the time mixup). This will bring them back to the original world, allowing River to kill Doc properly this time.

River, of course, is more than a little against this plan. To convince her, Doc weds her and whispers a secret in her ear. Finally convinced, she kisses him, returns to the original timeline, and shoots him dead.

In the aftermath, Amy Pond is getting a bit of a buzz. She's quite depressed, since she no longer has Doc and because she murdered Mrs. Eyepatch in the aborted timeline. River assures her that Doc isn't dead, which we knew, because Doc is always one step ahead of everyone and come on, don't you remember that the Teselecta can take on any shape necessary?

In a plot twist that may shock up to five people, Doc hopped aboard the Teselecta and used it as a proxy for his death. Everything has been averted, folks! No need to worry here! Doc cannot be killed as long as there are doppelgängers aplenty!

In the final seconds of the episode, Doc returns Dorium (fat-blue-beheaded) to his home. Dorium is very worked up that Doc didn't die like he was supposed to. After all, he knows what the Question is, and if he stays alive, he will inevitably answer it. What's the Question, you ask? The oldest, most important question in the universe? "Doctor who?" 3/5

What's Good?

In much the same tradition as last season, Season 6 moves quality straight up the ladder. Almost every one of the episodes stands strong on its own, and only one or two are less-than-magnificent. So on a micro scale, this season is glorious. Rory becomes a hero in his own right, Amy has at least two moments of real unselfishness, and Doc comes face-to-face with the fact that he's become what he hates the most: a domineering, shortsighted warmonger who lets nothing go unpunished. That's the real plot of this season, after all—Doc's slow recognition that he's an undying terror to many, many, many people. That plot point alone is enough to get me applauding. Moffat's Doctor continues to be humanized and humbled, over and over again, in ways that Davies' Doctors never were.

What's Bad?

For all that, though, this season trips over itself in a big way. The Silence's assassination plot is obscenely complicated, and we're given no reason for it to be so complex. They could have accomplished all of the same things without needing to go to these lengths. And we still don't know how they trapped Amy Pond, or who caused the TARDIS explosion last season. If it was the Silence, they're very bad at their job, since they literally caused the universe to end. But if, as I am suspecting more and more, it was another, unseen operator, then there's still a chance this can be justified. That's the real problem with this season: it needs more explanation. It's not independently viable. As mistakes go, it's not the worst thing—LOST made it for 6 seasons without telling us what was going on. But the mysteries are piling up fast, and I'm not confident Moffat has enough answers hidden in his vortex.

So, then...

Quality? On the whole, yes.

Daring? Another yes—and this one is very interesting. Moffat is exploring new territory with the intricacies behind the River Song plot. It might even be said that Season 6 dares too much.

Family-friendly? Less so this time around. Thematic content gets noticeably notched upward. 12+

Rating? 8.3/10

Bowties are cool.

Doctor Who Season 5

That's the Moffat vortex. It sucks you in and then murders characters you care about. It has no soul.

What We Know So Far

Season Four was a disappointing return to the bad habits of Season One. We had lots and lots of Christmas specials, lots of Russell T. Davies melodrama, and the return of The One of Whom We Do Not Speak. In short, it was a season of hairpulling, facepalming, and gnashing of teeth.

There were high points—"Silence in the Library" and its follow-up, "Forest of the Dead," were excellent, and I have an inexplicable fondness for Donna Noble as a companion. That's most of the list, though.

Fortunate news, weary souls! Season Five will mark the Davies departure, and Steven Moffat—the man responsible for most of the series' best episodes—is taking over as showrunner. The only question now, then, is whether he can pull off the same magic as the head writer instead of just an episode-by-episode basis. Because make no mistake: the head writer job is rough. There's way more pressure and way less mercy, and there's no "let someone else write it." Doctor Who runs thirteen episodes a season. If your writing stable only produces nine episodes, that's four episodes that need to be constructed from the ground up, even if you have no good ideas.

So how many good ideas does Moffat have?

What We Found Out

Lots. Here we go, Moffat. Spoilers.

5.01, The Eleventh Hour: We've got a new title sequence! So that's interesting. The new Doc meets Amy Pond (who starts as an adorable little girl named Amelia and grows up to be a knockout redhead who dresses in costumes and kisses people at parties), encounters a crack in space-time (which seems an awful lot like it'll be the season's overarching arc), gets a brand new revamped TARDIS, and terrifies a race of eyeballs-with-armor into never nearing planet Earth again. So, in general, pretty standard Who fare, although the production quality has been visibly ramped up. I should point out, though, that this episode leaves several questions unanswered, among them: why did the TARDIS crash? How does Prisoner Zero know about "the Pandorica"? And, finally, why is Doc able to get up and walk around immediately after regeneration? Last time, he was on his butt for nearly a full episode before he could walk again, although that recuperation time would have been truncated by getting him some tea, if I remember right. Doc Eleven doesn't need the reboot time, apparently. Not that I'm complaining—though it's a transgression against past canon, it's not the show's worst by a long shot, and I won't whine about it too much if it means we get to skip another episode of those stupid Santas-with-flamethrowers. 4/5

5.02, The Beast Below: Doc and Amy arrive on the Starship UK, which is the entire nation of Britain soaring through space. The weird thing, though, is that the starship doesn't vibrate like it ought to, being, you know, a spaceship. Also, it's a police state where adults consciously ignore crying children. Doc notices this and starts investigating. Along the way, he meets Liz 10—that is to say, Elizabeth X, the current queen of the United Kingdom who is very suspicious of the way things are being run in her nation. Turns out that Starship UK is actually riding on the back of a star whale, one of a race of long-lived, gargantuan creatures who fly through space. This one came close enough to Great Britain for them to catch it and stick a big old spaceship on its back—a saddle on a horse, essentially, complete with a whip to keep the thing moving. Every citizen, upon adulthood, is told about the situation so they can vote properly: they choose whether to disapprove of the system, or agree tacitly by having their memories of it removed. Liz 10 is one of them: every few years, she rediscovers her country's dirty little secret, and has to choose between forgetting it and "abdicating," a short term for letting the star whale go free, killing all the people riding it. The system's been active for centuries.

(Because that's what humanity does when confronted with a benevolent space creature willing to save them from their dying planet: enslave it, torture it, and quietly forget about it. This is a wonderful break from Who's normal format. In fact, it's one of exactly three episodes*, by my count, wherein the driving conflict comes from humans being horrid to aliens.)

Doc thinks he needs to choose between freeing the whale—killing all the humans on its back—and turning the ancient, beautiful creature into a vegetable so it will no longer feel its torture. Amy, though, realizes the whale didn't arrive on Earth by accident; it volunteered to save the humans because it could hear their children screaming. Having realized this, she frees it. 4/5

5.03, Victory of the Daleks: In the midst of the Blitz in 1940s London, Winston Churchill has begun using Daleks as a weapon against the Germans. Doc discovers them and wigs out, certain they have a plan to cause trouble, despite Churchill's repeated protestations they're the invention of one of his underlings. Doc loses his temper and screams, "I am the Doctor and you are the Daleks!" which was exactly what the Daleks wanted, apparently, because their mystical Progenitor wouldn't let them make more Daleks without proof they were actually Daleks. (The general shape and the plunger for an arm didn't do it, apparently.) Because of Doc's testimony, they're able to make five new Daleks (now in color!). Doc immediately sets about trying to destroy them, until they force him to back off because the man who pretended to be their inventor is actually a robot, who is actually a bomb orders of magnitude more destructive than a nuke. (Just...just go with it.) Doc has to let the Daleks escape in order to save Earth.

Despite a cool overall feel and a story that finally made the Daleks something other than a repeatedly trounced "threat," the episode breaks down under scrutiny. What do I mean by this? I mean that WWII-era planes fly in space. And the Daleks enact a scheme that depends utterly on Doc saying exactly those words. And, most devastating of all, the Daleks built a robot.

The Daleks. Built. A robot.

The Daleks—who look like this—built. a. robot. A robot who looks exactly like a human.

In case this isn't coming across clearly enough, let's think: what are the prerequisites for building things? Maybe...I don't know...hands? 2/5

5.04, The Time of Angels: Doc and Amy get a time-delayed message from River Song (time travel is cool again!). They meet her and a team of SWAT priests (go with it) for a daring expedition into an alien mausoleum to chase a Weeping Angel. You heard right: they're looking for one of the terrifying stone monsters from "Blink," and they're doing it in a castle where the tombs are statues. Upon reaching the crashed ship with the Angel, Doc and River realize abruptly that the aliens who built this mausoleum were two-headed...but all the statues have only one head. They've walked into an army of Weeping Angels. 4/5

Callow note: a friend pointed out to me that this army of Weeping Angels is a canon transgression, because in the Angels look at each other. And they don't freeze. Oh, Moffat. How could you do this? This is Davies-level tomfoolery! Pick a rule and stick with it!

5.05, Flesh and Stone: Doc, River, Amy and their SWAT priests play an intense game of cat and mouse with at least 500 Weeping Angels. The Angels are in search of a power source so their army can be revived and storm the universe. The power source in question is a crack in time, precisely like the one Amy saw in her bedroom when she was a little girl, except this one is huge and everyone it swallows doesn't just cease to exist: they never existed at all (a mechanic we learn about by sacrificing every one of the SWAT priests to it). Meanwhile, Amy has been infected by a Weeping Angel because she looked one in the eye (a distinct breach of pre-established canon, by the way—dangerous move, Moffat) and the only way to keep it from consuming her entirely is for her to keep her eyes closed at all times. This forces her to move around the Weeping Angels—who only stop moving when you look at them, in a perverse game of red-light-green-light where you die as soon as you blink—with her eyes closed the whole time.

When the three major characters are finally safe, Doc moves to his next significant problem: closing the crack in time. Left open, it'll consume all the things, a situation he would rather avoid, being quite attached to the universe. The only way he can think of to close it is for it to consume him. He's the most complicated space-time event they have to hand—it would, he says, take every single one of the Weeping Angels to equal him in that particular quirk. Sure enough, come climax time, every Weeping Angel gets vacuumed into the crack. The episode closes with some ominous foreshadowing about River Song, and a just-happy-to-be-alive Amy trying to make out with the Doctor. This wouldn't be a problem, except she's supposed to be getting married the next morning. 5/5

5.06, The Vampires of Venice: In an urgent attempt to repair Amy's relationship with her endearingly bumbling fiancé, Rory, Doc takes the pair to 18th Century Venice for a pre-nuptial date. Everything is ruined when Amy gets kidnapped to serve as a vampire bride to a race of alien fish-people, who were displaced from their planet by another crack in time and are trying to turn Venice into their new home—by flooding it and converting all its females to their own race. Doc takes issue with their tactics and stops them, while Rory stumbles around trying with all his might to be as heroic as Doc. 2/5

5.07, Amy's Choice: Amy, Rory, and Doc find themselves caught in an Inception dilemma: they're dreaming, but they can't tell which scenario is a dream and which is real. In one, they're in the TARDIS, flying toward a freezing sun. In the other, they're five years in the future, Amy's pregnant,  Rory has a ponytail, and a bunch of geriatrics have been possessed by aliens. It's all a complicated revenge scenario for a fellow calling himself the Dream Lord, who pops in and out to taunt our heroes, promising them that if they can figure out which world is the dream, he'll leave them alone. In the course of the conflict, Rory dies in the Five-Years-Forward timeline, forcing Amy to decide that that one must be the dream world. If it isn't, she doesn't care, because a world without Rory isn't one she wants. (Aww! Although...golly, those are some unfortunate implications.)

It seems that the Five-Years-Forward scenario was, in fact, the dream scenario, and the Dream Lord leaves. Doc quickly deduces, though, that it was all a double bluff: the TARDIS-is-flying-into-an-ice-star scenario was a dream, too. The Dream Lord is a projection of the Doctor's subconscious (more unfortunate implications), caused by some agitated alien spores. 4/5

5.08, The Hungry Earth: Some ten years in the future, humans are drilling where they have no business drilling, and it's causing the earth to swallow them up. It's already swallowed one man, and when Doc, Amy, and Rory arrive, it gulps Amy down, too. Doc discovers that it's not just pulling people down, though; someone else is coming up. They've only got twelve minutes to prepare, and somehow wire up their entire area with cameras in those twelve minutes, which...okay, whatever, I would struggle just to find a camera in twelve minutes, but I guess this works, too. The things that come up are lizard-people, part of homo reptilia, the race who possessed Earth before humans took over. Doc captures one of them, a female named Alaya who really really really wants a war between humans and lizards (and inexplicably speaks English—we can't even blame the TARDIS for this one, because a bunch of non-TARDIS users can understand her). Doc decides to mount a hostage exchange: all the people the lizard-folk took for their warrior. All he needs is for the rest of the drill team to keep Alaya not dead while he takes the TARDIS down for a talk with the lizard-people. 3/5

5.09, Cold Blood: Left alone, it takes about twenty minutes for one of the drill team to straight-up murder their hostage. Good ole' humans. Meanwhile, Doc, Amy, and a small group of humans try to negotiate with an ambassador of the lizard-people for a shared Earth. It seems to be going well until the lizard-people find out about Alaya dying, at which point everything goes down the toilet. To keep the races from all-out war, the lizard ambassador activates his city's security precautions (a massive, toxic fumigation), forcing all the hostile reptiles into hibernation. The humans, meanwhile, are in a great hurry to get back to the surface via the TARDIS.

Before Doc, Amy, and Rory can get in, though, they stumble upon another Crack in Time. Doc investigates it, determined to learn what's causing it, but a vengeful lizard-woman attacks and kills Rory.

Wait, what?

WHAT.

WHAT.

RORY DOES NOT DIE. THIS ISN'T EVEN A MOFFAT EPISODE.

Yes. Rory dies. There's a sudden onslaught of feels for which I was not in any way prepared, because Rory's corpse is swallowed by the time-crack, and Amy Pond forgets him. It's like an entirely different episode—one that mattered—intruded on this other, entirely forgettable one.

Guys, why is Rory dead? That's not...that's not even fair. 3/5 for the unremarkable Lizards Want Our Planet episode, but the five minutes of intrusion from the overarching plot is at least a 4/5

5.10, Vincent and the Doctor: Doc, trying desperately to heal the emotional wound Amy doesn't know she has, takes her on a tour of nice places, one of which is the Musée d'Orsay, where they see an alien in one of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. They skip back to 1890, where the meet Mr. Van Gogh himself. His village is being menaced by a monster invisible to the naked eye—except, for some reason, Vincent's, perhaps because he has synesthesia. They track down the monster and Vincent slays it accidentally. Peril solved, Doc takes Vincent Van Gogh for a visit to the Musée d'Orsay to see his own exhibit and hear how he's influenced the history of art. It's this clip, and if you never watch an episode of Who, watch this clip. 5/5

5.11, The Lodger: The TARDIS drops Doc unceremoniously and alone in Essex, jumping away with Amy still inside. Something in Essex is keeping it from landing, and Doc sets out to find out what. To do so, he moves in as a lodger downstairs from the source of the disturbance. He quickly establishes himself as the most Alpha of Alpha Males, up to and including being an outstanding football player despite never playing before. Which...is a bit annoying, really. Doc's superpower is his brain. He's not a prime physical specimen. Or, at least, he oughtn't be. Weaknesses, not superpowers, make characters interesting. It certainly irritates his new roommate, Craig, an overweight, shy, depressed fellow who's in love with his best friend...who is now starry-eyed over the Doctor.

Anyway, the Menacing Thing Upstairs is a broken time machine trying to launch itself. It's been kidnapping humans to function as pilots, but unfortunately they can't handle the psychic stress and all die. So Doc sics Sedentary Craig upon it, causing the time machine's circuits to lose their will to move. (It's not as bad as it sounds. He actually crashes the circuits by being in love.) This one rates a surprising 4/5

5.12, The Pandorica Opens: River Song invites Doc to Stonehenge, circa the age of the Roman Empire. There they find the Pandorica, the prison of the most terrifying unnamed monster in the history of the universe. It's opening, and every single villain Doc ever beat is coming to Earth, intending to control whatever is inside. Doc enlists the Romans to help defend the Pandorica, and one of them is...Rory? What?

River rides the TARDIS to Amy's house in Leadworth, where she realizes that everything Doc is doing is being simulated, somehow. The Romans—including Roman Rory—are all plastic replicas imbued with fake consciousnesses stolen from Amy's memories. The plastic!Romans' programming gets activated, and they capture Doc (while plastic!Rory tries to resist, and ends up shooting Amy) and bring him to the Pandorica. There, the entire Villain's Gallery arrives and explains they've formed an alliance to keep the Doctor from destroying the universe. Since the time-cracks are caused by the TARDIS exploding, and only the Doctor can pilot the TARDIS, the obvious solution is to keep him away from it. Thus, it will not explode and the universe will not be destroyed.

But wait! River Song is already in the TARDIS, and she's landed on the date of its explosion, and—

5/5

5.13, The Big Bang: Using the vortex manipulator—cheap and nasty time travel for the stranded Time Lord—Doc runs a time-travel gambit to get himself out of the Pandorica. I can't figure out if I want to cry foul on this one, because it seems an awful lot like cheating. Admittedly, it's a very traditional time-traveler strategy, but it's been clearly ousted for the Doctor because he can't interfere in his own timeline. Even if the universe just got significantly smaller, and even if the rules on Doctor Who have the consistency of chunky pudding, these are some clear shenanigans.

After being released from the Pandorica, Doc puts Amy inside it, because it is "the perfect prison." It'll keep her in a state of suspended animation until they can get some of her living DNA onto it, so that it can restore her. As much as I'm attached to Amy Pond, this is a really handwavy explanation. Why is the Pandorica engineered to keep its prisoner preserved? The Villain's Gallery from last episode built it to contain Doc, didn't they? (Scratch that. Apparently, no, they didn't. Who built the Pandorica, then? And why did they build it this way?) For whatever reason, all Doc and Rory need to do is put her in the box, skip forward to when Amelia, her seven-year-old self, can visit it, and then release her. Doc primes his vortex manipulator and plastic!Rory flatly refuses to leave his girl.

But you'll be here for 2000 years, Doc says.

Yes, says Rory.

Oh, Rory Williams. You win. You win forever. It's a shame you'll always be in Doc's shadow, but regardless, you just took top spot for Most Admirable Males on this show.

Two thousand years later, Doc arrives and lures Amelia Pond to the museum exhibit of the Pandorica. She touches it, releasing Amy and reviving a Dalek. They run, hook up with Doc, and are about to be toasted by the Dalek lasers when plastic!Rory shows up and paralyzes it. They escape, barely, and run into future!Doc, who appears and drops dead after whispering something to present!Doc. Apparently he's got twelve minutes to live. He uses those minutes to find River Song, who was trapped in the TARDIS, which is currently exploding in every moment of the universe. He quickly explains that the Pandorica currently contains a sort of "memory" of the universe-as-it-was. If they can amplify it, they can reboot the whole universe—a second Big Bang. "How are we gonna do that?" ask the team. "Well," says Doc, and gets shot by the Dalek. He timejumps twelve minutes backward, and River Song kills the Dalek. TIMELY RESPONSE, RIVER. COULDN'T HAVE SHOT IT A FEW MINUTES AGO.

Just kidding, Doc isn't dead. He lied. With his twelve new minutes, he gets back to the Pandorica and wires it up to the vortex manipulator. He's going to pilot the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, effectively apportioning the universe memory everywhere. Only one hitch: Doc has to go with it.

He says a tearful farewell to Amy and River—Rory doesn't warrant quite as many tears, because he has a Y chromosome—and tells Amy that when she wakes up, her parents will be with her. They were among the first to have been swallowed by the crack in her wall; that's why she grew up in a big, empty house. As long as she remembers them, the Second Big Bang will bring them back. Doc then flies into the explosion, hitting hard reset on the universe.

For Doc, it plays out a bit like rewinding through his life. He sees Amy—and even visits her in a scene we recognize from "Flesh and Stone," the importance of which we didn't realize until just now—and says more gut-wrenching farewells. His final moments take him back to the night he first met Amelia Pond. She's fallen asleep waiting for the Doctor to come back, so he carries her up to her room and speaks to her while she sleeps about how he came by the TARDIS, a thing simultaneously both old and new—he was just going to borrow it, really. But it's such a lovely blue.

And then Doc Eleven fades quietly into never-existence.

We move to the wedding day of Rory Williams and Amelia Pond. Amy has her parents back, and her wedding is wonderful, but there's something nagging at her. Something she's forgotten. When Rory gives her a blue journal—a present from River Song—Amy experiences it even more strongly. Finally, Rory mentions "that old wedding tradition" and everything clicks. Amy shouts to the nonexistent Doctor, "I remember you and you are late for my wedding!" And then she recites that old wedding tradition, and never has it sounded cooler: "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue."

Amy's magical memory brings Doc back from never existing, and he arrives just in time to dance. 4/5

What's Good?

Oh, so much.

This season takes a noticeable uptick in quality from the last several seasons. Yes, there are still issues. But there are so few it's easy to overlook.

We'll start with the basics. Amy Pond is, in a sense, a Moffat-ized reboot of Rose Tyler: she's sassy, rebellious, and her primary motivating factor is "I want to be with the Doctor!" Also, really good-looking. The thing is, though, that this version of Rose Tyler is so much better. Yes, her primary motivator is to be with the Doctor, and yes, there's some squicky romantic tension there that I could really do without since Amy is, oh, I don't know, engaged to be married. But it's not her only driving force. The problem with Rose was that she didn't exist except as an extension to the Doctor; she was shallow, one-dimensional, and obnoxious. Worst of all, Doc loved her.

Amy's different. Though she shares all sorts of character traits, she's motivated by more than her love for Doc, and she's terrifically complicated. She has trusts issues out the wazoo (this whole season is, arguably, the story of her learning to trust the Doctor), but she works through them.

Next is Rory—the Moffat-ized version of Mickey. He's bumbling, undeserving, and pales in comparison to the Doctor. But he's just better than Mickey ever was. He's a likable guy, he means well, and clearly he was doing something right if he managed to get Amy to say yes to him. Thing is, he's not worthy of her when we start out; by the end of the season, he's one of the worthiest human beings in the history of the world. Heck, it's not that he doesn't deserve Amy by the end of the season. I'm forced to wonder if Amy deserves him.

Finally, we have the Doctor himself. Unlike past iterations, Matt Smith has very little nonsense to overcome when interacting with his character. He fills the shoes almost instantly. There's no friction when he slides into the Doctor's signature offbeat style. Added to that, this version of the Doctor is even more palatable than his last iterations. He doesn't always have the answers. He's not always the ace. (Alright, most of the time he's the ace, but it's less often this time around.) He screws up—there are whole plotlines that happen just because the Doctor wasn't paying attention, or let his emotions get the best of him, or didn't have all the information. In short, folks, Doc is more human now.

What's Bad?

So very, very little. I'll confess that the show still slides into melodrama sometimes. And there're still shades of Deus ex Doctorus slithering around here, making things slightly less edible.

The major problem with this season is the Deus. Admittedly, this time around, it's not ex Doctorus. But we must acknowledge that at the end of it all, all the problems are solved very easily, and it's because the universe revolves around Amy Pond's memory. Sure, there are hints. There's buildup. But the solution to this season's myth arc still evades consequences.

Added to that is that Amy Pond is kind of a reprehensible human being sometimes. I get that the Doctor's all kinds of sexy, but she flings herself at him on multiple occasions. She invites him to kiss her (mild spoiler) at her wedding.

Finally, it cannot be denied that a handful of these episodes are intensely forgettable. That's a small number, though, and even when this season is bad, it's not that bad.

So, then...

Is it quality? Finally, I can say this without reservation: yes.
Is it family-friendly? Often. Mild cursing, medium-to-moderate thematic content, but very tame, generally. 10+
Is it daring? Yes and no. This season vacillates a bit between exploring new frontiers and re-treading old ground—specifically in the case of Amy Pond. Where it treads old ground, though, it does so in new and exciting ways.
What's the rating? 7.5/10.

In short, this season almost functions like a reboot of the reboot. Everything is new and yet familiar: the TARDIS is remodeled, Doc has a new face, and he picks up a companion who's sassy, contrary, and already romantically involved (but still into him). It even plays something of the same tune of Season One, with a climax revolving around the hints and clues of the season—all of which lead up to the companion being central to the ticking of the universe. And yet, it doesn't suck. How about that, Moffat.

Geronimo.

*Those three episodes being this one, "Planet of the Ood," and "42."

Mistborn Trilogy (Brandon Sanderson)

Yes, yes, I know. Standard fantasy cover featuring deadly waif. It's better than that.

The Details

The Mistborn Trilogy (comprising The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages) is a fantasy series by Brandon Sanderson. It follows the adventures of Vin, a brave, clever orphan waif-girl who happens to have magical powers. She falls in with a crew of thieves, led by the charming, clever, terrifyingly determined Kelsier, a man who shares her magical abilities. He's planning the biggest heist ever: he and his crew are going to rob the invincible god-king blind.

But that's just the first book. The second and third deal with Vin's ongoing journey as a burgeoning leader and magician (or, in this series' terminology, "allomancer"). Through creativity, luck, and pure bravado, she survives the ending of a kingdom, the ending of a war, and...well, other things. Things that are big and extraordinary and life-threatening and I will not spoil them because this is a series built on awesome surprises.

The Twist

I'll admit this sounds like pretty standard fantasy fare. Let's take a look at our familiar sci-fi/fantasy tropes:

• Orphan waif with magical powers is accepted into group of people with magical powers
• Evil overlord who seems impossible to kill
• Guile hero with a grudge and too many secret plans for anyone else to keep track of
• Prophecies about the Chosen One
• A feudal culture wherein the peasants are mercilessly ground down, while nobles can get away with anything

You get the idea. This series is playing riffs on all sorts of familiar things, and it does it really, really well.

First of all, these books are the best example of Functional Magic I've ever seen. I've mentioned Sanderson's First and Second Laws on here before; this is the same guy. In those essays, he mentions that fantasy has a bad reputation for making up magic on the fly to solve all the plot problems. Simply put, he doesn't do that. His magic system works like science: it is testable, measurable, and predictable. (Fun fact: at the end of the series, there is still a significant portion of the magic system unrevealed. The Internet figured out the rest of it. It is that consistent.) It rests on the idea of consuming and then "burning" particular metals, which then grant the allomancer superpowers ranging from emotional influence to telekinesis to heightened senses. It's a fascinating, intuitive system, and one of the coolest things I've ever read.

Second, Sanderson is content to use all those familiar tropes to his distinct advantage. He glories in deconstructing all the things we expect from fantasy, from the Evil Overlord to the Prophecy of the Chosen One. No trope is sacred.

The Good

As I mentioned above, the magic system is this series' main selling point. Allomancy and its sibling magic systems, Feruchemy and Hemalurgy, are intricate and intriguing. They function more like sharply defined superpowers than the nebulous, instant-solution-just-add-wizard magic some fantasy stories delight in.

Apart from that, though, this story is incredibly smartly written. Sanderson is a master of bait-and-switch twists, none of which are forced and every single one of which he has planned out from the word "go." (The final surprise—the twist in the last chapter of the last book—is foreshadowed on the first page of the first book. He's that good, guys.) The pacing is breakneck almost all the time. Most of the characters are three-dimensional, well-developed, and dynamic, with clear desires and sharp personalities. 

And I cannot stress enough how cool the plot is. If anyone spoils Mistborn for you, he is not your friend. Never see him again.

The Bad

Though the macro story of Mistborn is extraordinary, Sanderson's writing style may not appeal to everyone. It's short and punchy most of the time, focusing on getting the action across as quickly and as clearly as possible, which is not bad. But there are a few sections where Sanderson lapses into attempts at prettier prose, which can get irritating.

In addition, there is at least one instance of Deus ex Machina in the first book. It's revealed not to be in later books, but may irritate readers who want self-contained stories in each book, or who break out in hives whenever a character succeeds via the hand of God.

The Ugly Review

Is it quality? YES. I can't stress that enough. I recommend these books to every fantasy reader I know. Also to anyone who reads. Also to people who hate reading.

Is it family-friendly? Recommended for age 13+. The books deal with some heavy themes, and can get pretty violent, but Sanderson's Mormon sensibilities prevent him from descending into anything too blue.

Is it daring? Yes. Mistborn plays around with storytelling style in a way rarely seen. 

What's the rating? 9/10: would recommend.

There's always another secret.

*

Any thoughts on Mistborn? What did you like? What did you hate? Did anyone spoil it for you (and if they did, did you kill them)? Also, feel free to check out these reviews of the same stuff: Forbes and Ryan Dennison. They say most of the same things, but they said them before I did, so show them some love.

Doctor Who Season 4.8ish

Aaaall byyyyy myyyyseeeeeeelf....

What We Know Going In

Doc is on his own, having left Donna Noble behind on Earth so her brain won't explode, and is now convinced that taking companions is a bad idea; seeing them all rally to explode Daleks made him queasy. So he's traveling solo.

This section of Season Four is basically all holiday specials, from what I can tell beforehand. Also, every single one is written—at least in part—by Russell T. Davies.

What We Found Out

Let the ranting commence. Note #1: these reviews are mostly liveblogged, so they're pretty reactionary. Note #2: spoilers. Note #3: if you do end up watching Who, take note that "The Planet of the Dead" is not available on Netflix for reasons unknown to God or man.


4.15, The Next Doctor: Oh, please, no. Please. Not another Christmas special. You can't do this to us!

Doc lands in 1851, at Christmas, so at least they tell us at once that the episode is going to be crap. As soon as he lands, someone starts screaming his name, so he takes off running. He's being hailed by a Londoner. Her name is Rosita (yes, just like Rose), she's black (yes, just like Martha), and she has a foul accent coupled with obnoxiousness (yes, just like Donna). So we've got all three of our companions wrapped up together! In 1851! I'm trying to be excited but all I can do is retch at the thought of The Hated One being intermingled with Martha and Donna. If anything could ruin them....

Then the Doctor shows up! Except this is another person who calls himself The Doctor. He's a different person, and his sonic screwdriver is just a screwdriver, and his TARDIS is a hot-air balloon. Original!Doc at first suspects he must be a future regeneration of his, and suffering amnesia. (Which settles the unanswered question of whether Doc can interact with past and future versions of himself. So huzzah for that little bit of lore, although of course it's Doctor Who, so whether it'll still be true two episodes from now is up for bets.)

Doc quickly realizes, though, that his suspicion isn't correct: Other!Doc is actually Jackson Lake, a totally normal man who lost his family when they ran afoul of the Cybermen who got dumped in 1851 because of...something, probably all the craziness going on for the last three episodes. In the event, Jackson picked up one of their souped-up thumb drives, which by all indications beamed every season of Doctor Who—yes, even the really old ones—into his head and convinced him he's a Time Lord.

What, is Russell T. Davies saying that someone who sees all the seasons and obsesses about them might eventually have a break with reality and start fantasizing about themselves being a lord of space and time? Golly. Really took a shot right at the jugular, eh?

Meanwhile, a creepy lady in red organizes the displaced Cybermen into kidnapping children as slaves to do menial labor.

Yes, you read that right. Robots kidnap children so they can power an engine. Robots—machines made to do repetitive, uncomplicated work—kidnap children off the streets so they can churn engines.

So...fer teh evulz, I guess. I mean, if I had to pick between children and robots to get the Industrial Revolution going, I'd pick kids every time.

Creepy Red Lady gets wired up to a giant mecha and uses the Power of Feminist Thinking to take over all the Cybermen. She then tries to take over the world, only for Doc to stop her about five steps in.

Just so we can note this, yes: a strong and independent woman, embittered by years of men stifling her, is made ruler of an army of mindless drones, whom she controls simply by being Too Darn Independent, and attempts to take over the world.

Ho, ho, subtlety!

In the closer, Jackson asks Doc why he doesn't have a companion anymore, to which Doc says "They leave. Or they find someone else. And eventually they forget about me. In the end, they break my heart."

WHAT.

WHAT.

NO. NO THEY DON'T.

Rose got flung into another dimension and then Doc left her with an updated/more Batmanized version of himself. Martha—okay, yes, Martha did leave and find someone else, but I'm struggling to understand why I should feel sorry for the man whose heart was broken when he was the one stringing her along. And he ditched Donna because he had to for her safety. Full stop.

GAH. WHO WRITES THIS MELODRAMATIC TRIPE?

Whoops, sorry. Never mind. 1/5

4.16, The Planet of the Dead: Doc and an unfortunate bunch of bus passengers—including an art thief, whom the Doctor fancies, and a psychic, whom he doesn't—get wormholed from London to Tatooine San Helios. They're not the only ones: a bunch of bug-people have been stranded there, too. They've all been the accidental victims of a race of mantis-like aliens who devour planets like über-locusts, and use wormholes to get around the universe. Doc manages to get his fellow double-decker passengers off San Helios (by turning it into a flying bus) and gets to snog his hot art-thief companion for his trouble. In addition, the psychic (whose powers got boosted by the alien sun) tells Doc that someone "will knock four times," and then Doc will die.

Despite a general lack of "big" moments or even the most rudimentary suspense, the episode keeps its feet well beneath it, brushing against some of the more serious Who themes without dipping too deeply into melodrama. And, for all that I wanted to hate him, the irritating über-geek helping Doc from the London side of the wormhole actually grew on me. 3/5

4.17, The Waters of Mars: Doc lands on Mars. Just for giggles, apparently—he seems to be there just for the scenery, and is genuinely surprised when he runs into humans. They're on Mars as the first off-Earth colonists ever, which makes them awesome.

Doc quickly realizes he's landed on the day they all die. Since it's in a history book, he thinks it's a fixed point in time.  (Or at least, it's a history book Doc bothered to read in detail. Ever notice how every other time he talks about "history" he's wrong? If I encounter another plotline about how the Fourth Great Human Empire isn't quite Great—or Human—or an Empire—I'm going to track Davies down and sacrifice him to Quetzalcoatl.) Also, suddenly the fixed-point thing becomes just a theory, instead of being something a Time Lord just "knows" the way it was in "The Fires of Pompeii." (Yeah, I know, I was shocked when I heard Doctor Who was playing merry nonsense with its canonical rules, too.)

Things go pancake-shaped when crew members start getting infected with an elemental-themed virus that gives them a hive mind, weird powers, and a nasty desire to kill stuff. (Does this remind you of anything?) This time it's water, as you may have guessed from the episode title. The infected people are terrifically creepy-looking, so props to the makeup department on that one. Apart from that, though, they really shouldn't be too frightening, since the base can be locked down and the villains' only move is water gun, for heaven's sake. Even so, Doc keeps repeating that "water always wins" because "water is patient."

Well, yeah, that's really useful for breaking down a steel door over the course of, like, centuries. So there's not a lot of urgency to it, right? Right?

Oh, you. You've forgotten that we're watching a Davies episode. What in heaven's name are you doing, bringing your "logic" and your "common sense" in here?

Unfettered by the fact that water takes millennia to get through anything, everyone gets abundantly worked up as they try to evade the devil-water and its minions so they can get on a shuttle back to Earth. Unfortunately, everything gets compromised by devil-water, prompting the dutiful Captain Adelaide to blow the whole thing up (because Doc told her her death spurred the human race on its journey to the stars). For a second, it looks like Doc will bow to the laws of time and let them all die. Then he decides "Screw the rules, I'm the last of the Time Lords so I decide who lives," and saves everyone who wasn't infected.

This is Bad, and Captain Adelaide recognizes it's Bad, and calls Doc out on it. Good for her, although this is one of the most interesting turns for the Doctor: he's finally let his determination to save everyone override the wisdom that not everyone can be saved. Also, after 900 years of do-goodery, he's finally dipping into the temptation of being a god. About stinking time.

Despite the ending, though, this episode can't quite wrestle its way free of some nagging lameness, particularly the illogical villains and the signature Davies melodrama. 4/5

4.18, The End of Time, Part 1: The Master is coming back. Hopefully his whole scheme doesn't get retconned into meaninglessness again. Oh, and also we have a narrator this episode, which is just...horrid. Voiceover narration is the lazy man's suspense device. It's an incredibly hackneyed technique and it doesn't speak well of the episodes to come.

Doc returns to the Ood, who have called him because they're having bad dreams portending the return of the Master. Things have gotten very out of hand because Doc "delayed."

(Delayed? What? He's...but he...he drives a time machine! He cannot be late to anything! That is how a time machine works! He doesn't even need to hurry! He can arrive whenever he wants to. That is the whole function of time travel! There doesn't need to be any urgency! There doesn't even need to be a timetable! The TARDIS is above timetables! How can the writers of a show based on time travel so grossly misunderstand the concept?)

Whatever. The Master's Secret Club of Disciples resurrect him using a totally out-of-the-blue pseudo-magical ritual. Immediately upon his return, he develops superpowers, and sets about chewing hamburgers (and the scenery). It's...really bad. I can't tell anymore if the Master is supposed to be frightening or if he's supposed to be some kind of deconstruction of the genocidal maniac, because he is so incredibly bad at being scary. He's like an extremely cheap Joker knockoff, with immortality and magic for seasoning.

Doc encounters the Master, who knocks four times (oh noes!), but Doc gets sidetracked by Donna's grandpa and a bus full of old people. We get a glimpse of Donna, who is marrying again, and a brief but deep glimpse into the Doctor's desperate loneliness. Oh, and Donna's grandpa—much like Donna—is for some mad reason a lynchpin of the universe. Maybe. I think. Possibly.

The Master gets captured by a filthy rich man who's procured souped-up alien medical technology. He wants the Master to complete it, since right now it can only heal wounds, and he wants an immortality machine. The Master fixes it up, but it turns out the device isn't designed to fix single bodies: it fixes whole planets. The Master flips it on, gets inside, turns the entire world into himself, and then laughs himself silly. All I can say to this is...meh. None of this will have happened as of next episode, will it? Everything will be conveniently explained away so it never occurred?

Meanwhile, our narrator turns out to be an orator speaking to a crowd...of Time Lords.

They're back! The Time Lords are back! And James Bond is their King! This is...well...hrm...this really came out of nowhere, didn't it?

Also, wow, that's what passes for a Time Lord speech? It was literally a narration of the episode's events. An overwritten, inflated, prosaic, pretentious narration of what happened/is going to happen on an insignificant planet.

Melodramarrific, packed full of transgressions of common sense, and the return of the Master, who used to be a villain and is now just kind of a weird homeless guy. Blech. 2/5

4.19, The End of Time, Part 2: Turns out the Time Lords haven't "returned," per se. The last day of the Time War happens to coincide with this day in human history, or something like that. King Time, or whatever, has charisma to spare (a welcome change from the desperately ham-fisted Master) and is convinced Earth has the key to preventing his death—oh, and the destruction of his species—at the hands of...the Doctor? Turns out Past!Doc is prophesied to use "the moment" to end the Time War wholesale. Daleks, Time Lords: they're all gonna die. (This is a fascinating detail, by the way, and explains a lot about the Doctor's allergy to lethal force if it turns out he was the one who murdered his entire species.)

To prevent the destruction, King Time sends a signal backward in time to implant a constant, irrepressible drumbeat into the Master's head (which has now driven him stark-raving mad). He also flings a Gallifrey diamond onto Earth so he and his council can follow it out of the time-lock, presumably a side effect having to do with the Time War.

Meanwhile, Doc and Grandpa Noble escape the Master's clutches onto a salvage ship with cactus-aliens who don't matter much. They hear the Master realize the Time Lords are coming, which sends Doc into a trembling frenzy somewhere between terror and murderous rage. He takes a gun.

He takes a gun.

The Doctor is meeting his race, and he takes a gun. That detail alone speaks volumes about how threatening a villain they are. (We finally got a threatening villain!)

King Time, armed with his Gauntlet of Instadeath, lands on Earth with his council. They drag the planet of Gallifrey in their wake, setting it on a collision course with Earth. Remarkably, this doesn't immediately cause vast earthquakes, tsunamis, or general mayhem (though it does produce lasting migraines for anyone who knows any basic astronomy or physics or, you know, how gravity actually works).

Anyway, Doc confronts King Time and the Master with a gun, threatening to kill either one of them, since this will magically send the whole threat back where it came from. That's quite a cheap way to get rid of them, but at least it forces Doc to choose between whom he must kill, so I suppose I'm at peace with it. He'll shoot either King Time—who is unrepentantly evil, let's remember—or the Master—who is evil, but almost entirely as a result of the madness King Time cursed him with.  Your choice, Doc: omnicidal maniac or pathetic madman?

Nope, sorry, just kidding, Doc takes a third option. He shoots a machine and sends everyone back. King Time tries to kill him, only for the Master to stop him with his force-lightning powers.

Ugh. Well, there you go, folks. Yet another cheap, quick, diseased climax from Russell T. Davies.

But wait! It gets worse!

In all the confusion, Grandpa Noble got locked in a glass box connected to the Super Healing Machine from last episode. It's gone haywire and it's going to flood the glass box with 50,000 rads, and for some reason (cough cough cheap melodrama cough) the only way to let someone out of the box is to send someone else in. So Doc has to take Grandpa Noble's place. That's okay, though, right? We established in "Smith and Jones" that Doc can just expel radiation out of his foot. It's tough on the soles, sure, but no muss no fuss apart from melted rubber. Right? Right? Right?

Just kidding again! Everyone knows that such rules are only viable in-episode. Even the regeneration mechanic is up for editing if they feel like it.

Doc takes Grandpa Noble's place, gets pumped full of radiation, and has just enough time to appear to every member of Team Doc, as a sort of vague farewell, before he must regenerate. First he visits Martha and Mickey, who are fighting Sontarans and are also married. (I feel as though I should hate this pairing, but I really don't. I think they work well together. Although I do wonder what happened to her last fiancé.) Next he sees Sarah Jane Smith and her son (whom he saves from being run over), Cap'n Jack (on whom he bestows a tip that will help him get laid), Donna Noble and family (to whom he gives a winning lottery ticket, hooray for time travel), and...wait for it...you knew this was coming...it just had to, Davies just couldn't let this one go...he visits Rose in 2005. She's remarkably not annoying, so three cheers for that.

Despite that terrifically stupid climax and all the cheesy melodrama, this episode is easily the strongest of the lot. Tennant bleeds pathos, and seeing him give his silent farewell to all his companions is a straight shot to the feels. Farewell, Tennant. Like Eccleston before you, you were the only reliably good thing throughout this season. Even when everything sucked—even when all you had to work with were Russell T. Davies and Rose Tyler—you pulled through like the camp-champ you are. Matt Smith has big Converse sneakers to fill. 4.5/5

What's Good?

At least this is a quick answer: Tennant. Tennant, Tennant, Tennant. The end of his tenure as the Doctor is something he finds very stirring, and he uses the passion to draw us in. He owns every single scene, even when those scenes were clearly written by someone drunk.

In addition, Doc as a character finally got some really meaty development and is seeing significant challenges—namely his impending death and his choice between breaking the laws of time or letting people die. So in that sense, these specials are almost worth watching. Unfortunately...

What's Bad?

Russell T. Davies writes every one of these episodes, and he's wildly erratic. Though some of Doc's character development is powerful, most of the time, this miniseries feels like exactly what it is: a set of Christmas specials. Everything—everything everything everything—is solved by Deus ex Doctorus. Even when it seems like he could solve things by being clever, or by utilizing skills he has, or by manipulating things, he still solves stuff without having to do any real work. The solution always drops neatly into his lap, resolving all of the tension without any need for, y'know, tension.

Also, apparently Davies heard the term "suspense" while he was writing these last episodes, and thought he'd give it a whirl. Unfortunately, he was unaware that "prophecy" is in its death throes as a suspense device. It ranks right up there with "overdramatized narration," which also features heavily into his swan song episodes. 

And, finally, we have the endemic problem of Doctor Who: rules which change to fit the drama. The only constant laws in the Whoniverse are "The Doctor wins" and "It's dramatic." Generally speaking, this is okay. That's something to be expected in any story universe: gravity and cause-effect and atomic structure are often part of the universe, but "protagonist wins" and "drama always increases" are perfectly valid additions to the story physics. 

The trouble, though, happens when those two laws become more fundamental than any other law. Laws like "The Doctor must regenerate into a new body" or "A fixed point in time is an actual phenomenon which Time Lords can sense" or "Creating a paradox causes problems" or "The sonic screwdriver can open anything unless it is deadlocked" or "The Doctor can expel radiation out through his foot."

Every single one of the laws above has been broken in the last four seasons, and every time it happens I tear out more of my hair. If I had a beard, it would be patchwork because of all the ripping I was doing to it.

Perhaps I'm biased. I'll admit freely that I subscribe to Sanderson's First Law, which states simply that "your ability to solve plot problems with a magic system [where "magic system" = "any kind of extraordinary mechanic nonexistent in the real world"] is directly proportional to how well your audience understands the rules therein." Sanderson's Second Law, which is similar, says basically that "magic" is made more interesting when it's sharply limited.

This is my problem with Davies' Who. There are no limits to his magic; he just does whatever happens to need doing. There aren't any mechanics to speak of, just problems and solutions tailored to them. The story is robbed of all tension before it even gets off the ground because we, the audience, know that Doc will just solve this thing like he always does: by punching some buttons in the TARDIS and cranking out a potion (or a gun, or a tracking device, or whatever) that will solve everything. It's disappointing, and it cheats us, the audience, out of really getting involved with the story. We don't need to worry about anything. Everything is going to be okay.

So, then...

Is it quality? No. 

Is it family-friendly? I mentioned in my review of the first season that it ought to be criminal to subject young minds (or any minds) to the scripts of Russell T. Davies. When I saw "Gridlock," I revised my opinion: maybe Davies could write something good. I have now landed back where I started, and concluded that even blinds pigs will find truffles at some point.

Is it daring? Surprisingly, yes. Doc's character growth explores heretofore-unseen territory, which is fascinating.

What's the rating? 5.7/10.

Farewell, Tennant; you will be missed, and smitten ladies everywhere will cite you as the one true Doctor forever and always.

Davies...well, you're gone, so there's that.

Avanti!

Doctor Who Season 4

Donna Noble: the only companion in history who doesn't want to sleep with the Doctor. Yes, including Captain Jack.

What We Know Going In

The third season of Who was the best one yet, featuring mature, hyper-competent companion Martha Jones and a whole lot of smart, engaging stories. If the pattern holds true, this season will be even more impressive. Also, fun fact: Season Four is the only one for which I had no foreknowledge. I knew about the Bad Wolf and the Mr. Saxon reveals because of the Internet, and I saw "Doomsday" long before I started watching Who in order. But Season Four's content is a mystery to me, so I'm liveblogging it properly: every episode recap was written during or shortly after viewing it, so there's no reflection happening. Allons-y!

What We Found Out

Here we go (warning: spoilers).

4.00, Voyage of the Damned: Doc lands on a spaceship named The Titanic, and it goes just as well as can be expected. Lots of named characters die for no reason at all (some of them die when there's a perfectly valid, totally accessible escape route inches away).

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm judging the Christmas specials by the wrong measure. Are they supposed to be...like...fanfiction? Published fanfiction? They don't compare to the quality of the series. They're all written by Russell T. Davies. In general they are filled to brimming with facepalm moments, cheap melodrama, and Deus Ex Doctorus. I wish to everything that is holy they were just extraneous little stories that didn't affect canon, but they aren't. They're inescapable. 1/5

4.01, Partners in Crime: Doc investigates Adipose Industries and runs into Donna Noble (from the Christmas special last season), who has been investigating Adipose but only because she thinks the Doctor will show up. As motivations go, it's not really admirable, and also depressingly Rose Tyler-ish. Call me biased, but a primary motivation of "find the Doctor and hang out with him" just doesn't work for me. It's one-dimensional, selfish, and uninteresting. Martha Jones (who I will hold up as a shining example forever and always) would have been investigating Adipose just because she wanted to help people, but Donna's doing it because she wants to escape her life.

Anyway, Adipose is giving people a pill that turns their fat into teeny-tiny creatures, also called Adiposes. Doc solves the problem in the last second, as always, although this time he does it because Donna just happens to have exactly what he needs—once again, succeeding by luck, although at least this time the Deus is ex Machina rather than ex Doctorus. In the final scene, Donna heads off to worlds unknown, leaving her car behind for her mother and asking a random passerby to help her mother find it. Unfortunately for Donna, that random passerby is Rose Tyler (NOOOOOOOOOOO!) and she proves just as useful to Donna as she was to Doc, walking away and just sort of...disappearing. But if she can disappear, she can reappear, and if Rose Tyler has an opportunity to screw things up, you can bet she'll act on it. Just...ugh. This does not bode well. 2/5

4.02, The Fires of Pompeii: Doc and Donna visit Pompeii, where all of the soothsayers are always right. Donna wants to save everyone from Vesuvius (yeah! Go Donna!) but Doc states that Pompeii is a "fixed point in time," meaning that he cannot (or must not) change it. It's an interesting addition to the lore, although I'm pretty sure it boils down to "if it's in a British history book, it's unchangeable." Unfortunately for Doc, he's not quite right when he calls it a fixed point, because Vesuvius has been infiltrated by aliens called Pyroviles who plan to use it to conquer the world. Doc is forced to choose between detonating Vesuvius and letting the Pyroviles take over Earth, making for a climax full of real pathos. 3/5

4.03, Planet of the Ood: Doc and Donna travel to the 42nd century, where humans are served by the Ood, a slave race introduced in "The Impossible Planet" two seasons ago. (The season-so-far is brimming with callbacks, references, and in-jokes, by the way.) The Ood are developing a bad habit of killing folks, though, as sentient races often do when they've been enslaved. It comes to light that the company selling Ood has been lobotomizing them in order to make better slaves. The resolution actually doesn't involve the Doctor much at all—he's only there to observe and report rather than fix everything. I quite like it that way once in a while, and it sure could happen more often than it does. With this style, the story isn't so much a Who story as it is a really, really good sci-fi story: it's all about human interaction with alien species, and whether we can even handle that. 4/5

4.04, The Sontaran Stratagem: MARTHA JONES IS BACK. Oh, and she's engaged, because Martha Jones is a strong, independent black woman who don't need no Doctor. (She's marrying a doctor who travels a lot. How about that?) Meanwhile, a boy genius has been popularizing hardware called Atmos, which claims to fix the carbon monoxide problem of cars but has a nasty side effect of pulling an "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" and driving pesky humans into rivers. Of course, it's all a big scheme by aliens, in this case a proud warrior race called the Sontarans. Everything comes to a head as the Sontarans initiate their plan to conquer Earth by making 4 million cars emit poisonous gas, which doesn't really seem like a proud warrior race thing to do. 3/5

4.05, The Poison Sky: Continuing from last episode, Doc runs three complex gambits at once in order to stop the poison gas from turning all the humans into Sontarans. The boy genius (who is a jerk in the order of Draco Malfoy) gets humiliated, vilified, and then redeemed in the final seconds, and the gaspocalypse is averted. The denouement is a bit convenient, but boy genius's character arc is powerful enough to drag this episode out of Deus Ex Doctorus. Before Martha can get back to her life—because she is a strong independent black woman who don't need no TARDIS—the TARDIS gets abruptly very excited, locks her in, and jumps forward in time. 3/5

4.06, The Doctor's Daughter: Doc, Donna, and MARTHA JONES land on Messaline, where humans are fighting a devastating war with the Hath, who are fish-people. Thirty seconds into the episode, the humans grab a sample from Doc and extrapolate it into...the Doctor's daughter, who is Georgia Moffett (otherwise known as David Tennant's wife and the IRL daughter of the Fifth Doctor). She's a lot like Doc, in that she's charming, vivacious, and all manner of gorgeous. She's got a knack for rendering Doc speechless, too, which just makes us fall in love with her more. Martha Jones gets kidnapped and immediately turns it to her advantage (because she is MARTHA JONES, the most capable companion who has ever set foot in the TARDIS), while Donna proves herself useful by deducing the terrible truth that the human-Hath war has only been going for seven days. They have technology that mimics parthenogenesis, which is how Doc became a father all on his own. Unfortunately, it also accelerates their aging, and the war accelerates their dying, so—despite the war only starting seven days ago—they've been fighting for so many generations they can't remember how it started. 

Doc discovers that they're fighting over control of a terraforming machine, and activates it, declaring the war over. Unfortunately, not everyone is on board, and one of them tries to shoot Doc; Doc's daughter leaps in to save him, sacrificing herself. Doc realizes she's not Time-Lordy enough to  regenerate, and leaves—but it turns out she's just taking her time about it, and as soon as he's gone, she wakes up and heads out among the stars. Despite an extremely rushed opening scene, the episode pulls together and nails almost all the right notes. 4/5

4.07, The Unicorn and the Wasp: Donna and Doc meet Agatha Christie and a host of the usual suspects when a dinner party turns deadly. Things get stereotypical fast, and just after getting stereotypical, they get distinctly weird. Everyone is being menaced by a huge alien wasp-thing, who turns out to be someone's child. Which means that at some point one of these characters got very romantic with a huge alien wasp-thing. Squick. For all that, though, this one is honest and earnest about the stereotypes it's playing to, and it gains points back for shamelessness. 3/5

4.08, Silence in the Library: Doc and Donna land on a planet that is a library (the very thought of which nearly sends me into gleeful catatonia, by the way). Doc opens with a thoughtful statement about how death "makes us big," and if it weren't for death "life would be all comedies."

Oh, crap. It's a Moffat episode, isn't it? It is a Moffat episode. Everyone's going to die.

The library-planet's totally lifeless due to an infestation of shadow-piranhas called Vashta Nerada. Doc and Donna run into a crew of archeologists, one of whom greets Doc as "sweetie" and introduces herself as River Song and has a sonic screwdriver and a journal that looks just like the TARDIS. That is to say, she is a walking, talking Chekhov's Gun and she is clearly Very Very Important. We find out gradually that there's some kind of time traveler romance going on here—this is Doc's first time meeting River, but River already knows him like a book. (Ha, get it? Because...because a library? Do you g—oh, never mind.)

As tends to happen with Moffat episodes, things escalate rapidly into the genuinely terrifying. Oh, and lots of people die. 5/5

4.09, Forest of the Dead: "Silence in the Library" continues with Doc, River Song, and the archeology crew sprinting away from shadow-piranhas (the details of which I'm still unsure about, but whatever). Meanwhile, Donna's been transported to some kind of fantasy world, where she gets married and has kids in dream-time, meaning about twenty minutes even though it feels like years to her. Despite being a grand total of 15 seconds long, her interplay with her imaginary husband is just adorable. +10 Companion points to Donna Noble. Rose Tyler was never this adorable.

Everything comes together when Doc realizes that the enormous computer in the planet-core has saved everyone as bits and bytes (because it has that level of computing capacity), and Donna is now one of them. To pull everyone out, he prepares to offer himself as a sacrifice—only for River Song to bash him on the head, cuff him to a pipe, and take his place.

Now, don't get me wrong when I say this, because this nearly made me weep, but YES. YES. YES. FINALLY HE FOUND A STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER AND HE FELL IN LOVE WITH HER PROPERLY AND THEY'RE FINALLY DOING REAL ROMANCE INSTEAD OF HAVING HIM PINE OVER THAT OBNOXIOUS TEENAGE GIRL.

Moffat, you brilliant fiend. Now you've shown us what can really be done with the Doctor, romantically speaking, just to taunt us, while at the same time Rose Tyler is popping up everywhere. How can they let this happen? How can Moffat tease us with a gut-wrenching love story between two mature, capable characters while the other writers dangle the possibility of reintroducing The Hated One into this story?!

Right. Anyway. Everyone the computer was holding in stasis is saved (including the man Donna married in her dream world). Doc almost leaves before...no. No, I'm not going to spoil this bit. This bit is too good. 6/5

4.10, Midnight: On the planet Midnight, Doc and Donna visit a leisure resort. Donna takes to sunbathing (under 15-foot-thick glass, since the planet's radiation is instantly deadly otherwise) while Doc gets into a shuttle with a bunch of strangers for a four-hour trip. Shocking no one, the trip steers right for catastrophe. An alien life form somehow gets onboard and possesses a passenger—and then the Doctor.

Despite a creepy premise, solid performances, and a feels-churning denouement, the episode falls flat because of a lack of real thematic commitment. I can't tell if the story's meant to delve into how depraved humans get when they're frightened, or how depraved humans get when they're infected by a psychic alien. Oh, and Rose Tyler cameos for about three seconds, so minus 100 points to Hufflepuff for that little bit of tomfoolery. 3/5

4.11, Turn Left: Donna Noble finds out It's A Wonderful Life when a pseudo-Chinese pseudo-psychic and a demonic chronovorous beetle force her to change her own past so she never meets the Doctor. Things get off-rail fast. The Doctor dies in his fight with the Racnoss (in that truly awful Christmas special from two seasons ago) because he doesn't have Donna there to calm him down. With the Doctor gone, Martha Jones' hospital has no one to save it from the Judoon, leaving both Sarah Jane Smith and Martha Jones dead. London gets destroyed by a falling spaceship modeled after the Titanic, everyone in America dissolves into Adipose creatures, Atmos nearly chokes the entire population of Earth, and England restarts the Holocaust.

But worst of all, Rose Tyler will not stop popping up.

(And she has the most inane musical cue that is just screaming "SHE IS IMPORTANT, LISTEN TO HER." And she just keeps on being Rose Tyler.)

(Also I'm going to point out that even though this is clearly a dream-storyline with literally nothing at stake because it'll all be completely reset by the end of the episode, hearing about the deaths of Martha Jones and Sarah Jane Smith both hit me way harder than watching Rose Tyler get locked in another universe. Oh, and while I'm on the topic, at least Rose is consistent: as soon as she hears Doc is dead, her immediate response is "But I came so far." Self-absorbed as ever, Rosie. How we missed you.)

When the stars start winking out, Donna finally lets Rose tell her what's going on. Something bad is coming, and it's even worse because of Donna never meeting the Doctor. In the ancient and honorable traditions of time-traveler stories everywhere, Donna needs to stop her past self from making the wrong decision, and does so by traveling into the past and leaping in front of a car. The alternate reality breaks down, Donna returns to the Doctor, and she delivers Rose Tyler's message: "Bad Wolf."

From the resurgence of Rose Tyler to the totally tension-less plot, this episode just does not work. All it serves to do is fabricate suspense for the big reveal next episode, and drop in some arbitrary information about Donna Noble. 2/5

4.12, The Stolen Earth: It's exactly what it says on the tin: somebody steals the Earth. There's about thirty seconds worth of uncertainty as we wonder who could possibly be responsible, and then we remember there hasn't been a Dalek episode this season, and this is a Russell T. Davies episode.

So they've brought back possibly the most unthreatening villain since those stupid mannequins. But that's not all they're bringing back: Martha Jones, Cap'n Jack (and his new Torchwood friends), Sarah Jane Smith (and her son, and their supercomputer), and Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister. Seriously, there's a metric crap-ton of backstory and spinoff tie-ins in this finale. On the one hand, this is kind of impressive and speaks to the Doctor's knack for inspiring loyalty. On the other, it sort of cheats viewers who don't watch Torchwood or The Sarah Jane Chronicles.

Right, the recap. Doc tries to chase down the Earth, but fails. Fortunately, Team Doc—comprised of Harriet Jones, Cap'n Jack and Torchwood, Sarah Jane Smith and her son and their supercomputer, and Martha Jones (but distinctly not Rose Tyler, who whines about it to no end)—brainstorms a way to contact him, bringing him to Earth. There, he TARDISkypes Team Doc, only for the transmission to be intercepted by Davros, the creator of the Daleks. He's used his body to create an entire new race of Daleks (since the best way to make something nonthreatening into something threatening is to balloon the numbers). Doc gets characteristically flippant and lands on Earth, where, at long last, Rose finds him. Cue dramatic running scene, and the worldwide groans. But wait! A Dalek arrives! Will it shoot Rose, ridding us of her forever?

Nope, no such luck. The random Dalek snipes Doc, forcing him to start regenerating. 3/5

3.13, Journey's End: Just kidding! Tennant's here to stay for a while longer. He siphons his regeneration energy into his hand (the one that got cut off in that miserable Christmas Special in Season 2). He and most of Team Doc are captured, while Donna escapes in the TARDIS and somehow manages to turn the super-magicked hand into another iteration of Doc, except he has only one heart and says "Oi!" a lot.

Davros monologues about the evil Dalek plan: they're going to use a bomb balanced by the weight of the planets they've been stealing to destroy the entire known universe. Team Doc, upon realizing this, threatens to explode lots of things so the Daleks won't be able to explode all the things. Davros gleefully points out the irony to Doc: the man who won't carry a gun has turned his followers into weapons of mass destruction.

Just as the Daleks are going to detonate the Reality Bomb, Beta!Doc and Donna arrive with pseudo-science, intending to backfire the Reality Bomb on the Daleks. Instead, they both get zapped. Beta!Doc gets captured, but Donna bounces back up. The shock has triggered something inside her brain, giving her the personality and skills of...the Doctor. She proceeds to trounce the entire Dalek race using her newfound knowledge of technical systems and...erm...her typing speed of 100 WPM.

Here I thought this was going to be an exciting finale, and what do I get? Three concurrent iterations of the Doctor and a climax where Donna solves everything by being the Doctor with a better typing speed.

Having subdued the Daleks, Beta!Doc decides they pose too great a threat to be allowed to live and blows them all up. The team returns Earth to its proper position, and everyone is sent back to their daily lives. Doc drags Rose back to her alternate dimension and explains in detail that Beta!Doc is human enough for her. (Even though we know this is not enough for Rose. She wants the original Doctor. Well, she wants both of them. Well, she wants both of them and a TARDIS.) He's only got one heart, he'll grow old and die properly, and he needs some serious reforming for his unforgivable act of blowing up the race of murderous psychopaths who were literally planning to destroy the universe entirely.

(Russel T. Davies, you're an idiot, and so is this limp-wristed version of the Doctor you keep thrusting at us. Season Five cannot come fast enough.)

Finally, Doc returns Donna to her home. She absorbed a Time Lord brain, he explains, which is way too much for her puny human cranium. He wipes her memory to keep her from melting down. She can never be allowed to remember, otherwise she'd die. This...this is actually genuinely sad. We'll miss you, Donna Noble, even though your importance to the plot apparently boiled down to "touched Doc's hand-in-a-jar." 3/5

What's Good?

Donna Noble is a great character and a great companion. She stands out as the first companion in this reboot who legitimately didn't want the Doctor to kiss her. There was no sexual tension, which came as a welcome change. The Doctor-Donna dynamic is delightful to watch because it's the first time we've seen Doc with a companion who is, first and foremost, his friend. Rose was...Rose, and a romantic interest from day one for no apparent reason. Jack was...well, you know, he was Jack. The Doctor was a walking life form, ergo, Jack wanted him. And Martha, dear Martha, could never have been his friend because she was too hung up on him. So Donna—who treats the Doctor like a twin brother, rather than a god, a celebrity, or a husband—is a delightful change from all that.

And a number of these episodes really were fantastic. "Silence in the Library" and its counterpart, "Forest of the Dead," are both exceptional. "Planet of the Ood" and "The Doctor's Daughter" are both very strong. "The Unicorn and the Wasp" and "Midnight" are both fairly tolerable.

What's Bad?

If that last paragraph sounded like it damned the season with faint praise, that's because it was supposed to. Season Four really, really wanted to be great. It incorporated all the elements people loved about Who in the last three seasons, and it explored new territory as well. As in Season Three, the companion was strong and independent. The alien races were fascinating and their dynamic with the human race brought up real questions about our species as a whole, a la the best parts of Season Two. And the finale tied together threads from the whole season, as Season One's Bad Wolf fiasco tried so hard to do.

But they're not enough.

Despite all the good intentions, despite Donna Noble, despite David Tennant, and despite three whole years of practice at this, Season Four just couldn't cut it. When it's good, it's the best it's ever been. But when it's bad...when it's bad, it's like watching the first season again, except worse, because now we've seen what Who can do when it's not laboring under the burden of Russell T. Davies and his pet monster, Rose Tyler. And it's bad a lot. This season averaged out at 3.5.

So, then...

Is it quality? (Sigh.) Yes, sometimes. Like I said, when it's good, it's great. But it's also pretty bad.

Is it family friendly? Much more so this season than the last few. Relatively little actual violence.

Is it daring? No, not as a whole. This season explored a few new things—and dangled the wonderfully tantalizing story of the Doctor and River Song—but for the most part, it was playing old tunes, particularly in the finale, in which it plays only oldies.

What's the rating? 6.9/10. Rough stuff, Doc, rough stuff.

Callow Note: Netflix tells me there are four more episodes of Tennant left. I'll review those next Wednesday. After that, it's Matt Smith and Steven Moffat, so here's hoping we're looking forward to something that is

Molto Bene!