The Angels Take Manhattan

"Together, or not at all."

The departure of a companion hurts.  Even a relatively happy one is a painful goodbye.  The final story for Amy and Rory is bittersweet, and rightly so.  Not so tragic as to suck out all the fun, not as happy as we'd like.  It's both sad and happy, and while The Angels Take Manhattan isn't perfect, it's emotionally charged enough to move the heart of a statue.

Stephen Moffat puts tremendous thought and passion into Amy's departure.  It truly is a beautiful story, and while the execution is imperfect, the idea is wonderful.  The girl who met the Doctor as a child and grew to become his companion.  It's implied that several years passed since Power of Three, meaning she traveled with him for over a decade.  But when she leaves, it's because she is forced to choose between a life with the Doctor and with Rory, and she chooses the love of her life.  She chose him in Amy's Choice, of course, but as the reason for her final farewell, it's a beautiful idea.  And then learning she went on to live a full and happy life with Rory makes it the best kind of bittersweet.  She gets two farewell scenes with the Doctor, both of which Karen Gillan and Matt Smith act to the rafters, both deeply affecting.


But somewhere along the way, Moffat forgets to give Rory a good farewell.  This entire season has been a disappointing send-off for such fantastic companions, but at least Amy had a few good emotional moments.  Rory has barely had a moment of heroism or cool.  And Rory is such a great character.  Even in The Eleventh Hour, he was the only person on-the-ball enough to notice the coma patients, and that level of observation never faltered - he's about the only human to be unimpressed by the TARDIS because he was actually expecting that.

And beneath his quiet exterior, he's too cool for words.  The Lone Centurian, guarding his love for 2000 years; a man who makes demands of an army of Cybermen; the guy who stuffed Hitler in a closet.  When was the last time his cool was actually unleashed?  His centerpiece moment in Wedding of River Song was essentially stolen by Amy.  Was it The God Complex that last gave him his due?  He's been wasted this entire season, even in The Power of Three, which is actually about why Amy and Rory stay with the Doctor, and Angels doesn't rectify it.  Outside of one scene, all he does here is get taken by the Angels three times, which is a bit much for one episode.

The one scene he does get is a brilliant one.  He figures out how to defeat the Angels - by making his death itself a paradox, meaning he caused all those times he died and came back. (Awesome!) His conversation with Amy on the roof is one of the most intensely powerful scenes in the history of the show.  Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill have been fantastic from the very beginning, but they absolutely surpass themselves here.

But he doesn't get to say goodbye.  The Doctor doesn't even seem to acknowledge him.  He's been forgotten for so long that he just slips away.

Which makes it a little harder to forgive the uneven execution of Amy's departure.  The reasons the Doctor never gets to see her again are convoluted, arbitrary, and contradicted by a wealth of previous stories.  Which it might have gotten away with if it had been well-presented, but Moffat is so rushed for time that he basically has the Doctor spend most of his last scene with Amy garbling an explanation of what's happening.  I mean, compare that to Rose's departure in Doomsday.  By the time the climactic moment comes, we're briefed well enough on all the rules that we don't need a single word explaining what's happening to Rose, what saves her, and why she can never see the Doctor again.  Here, the Doctor spends seemingly all his screentime clumsily explaining what and why and still hasn't satisfactorily finished even when it all actually happens.

And while that scene on the roof is tremendous, the follow-up in the graveyard feels a bit clumsy and artificial.  The second farewell scene doesn't give Rory a better goodbye (or even a good word) and just repeats the same dilemma Amy had on the rooftop, and since we know her decision, it would be incredibly difficult to build the tension up a second time.  It's probably doable (RTD and Graeme Harper probably could have pulled it off), but Moffat and Nick Hurran don't smooth it over.

Stepping away from the goodbyes a moment, River is as wasted as her father.  Despite their familial connection, there's no sense of a family, even an awkward one, between them.  She barely gets a word across to either of them, and does nothing when Rory is thrown to the Cherubs.  Kingston is terrific, as always, and her underplayed emotions in the last scene are painful, but River seems to have been tacked on at the last minute.  It's not clear whether or not she knows anything about what's happening or why she's there in the first place.  In yet another badly overstuffed episode, her presence unfortunately takes time away from the important parts.

The complex, highly emotional, untrustworthy conception of the Doctor by Moffat and Smith is in full swing here, and there's real dramatic power, but from a plot standpoint, the Doctor is fairly useless.  He cries and dumps exposition, both things Smith does brilliantly, but there's no time for him to actually do anything clever.  Still, watching the characters get all teary usually has a way of lessening the dramatic impact of a scene, especially when done often, but Smith has that same unbelievable gift Sarah Michelle Geller showed on Buffy of being able to be sad a thousand different ways and make it hurt every time.

Compressing a ninety-minute story into forty-five was a minor problem in the RTD era, but for the most part, he chose his two-parters well and understood their value.  Doctor Who is a mad show where every story takes place in a different time and place, and you need time to build all that properly along with a plot and new characters... and if you're writing a highly emotional story - and Moffat's stories are all emotions and ideas - you need time to set it all up properly.  Moffat doesn't do that, and hasn't all season.  Except for A Town Called Mercy, every story this season should have been a two-parter.  And there should have been an episode between Power of Three and Angels to get across how much time has passed between stories.  A couple vague lines here about Amy's crow's feet has a lot less impact than actually showing us some or at least one of those adventures.

But enough of this.  Ultimately, aside from the usual problem of too much crammed into a single episode when a two-parter is clearly the way to go, it's a good episode in and of itself.  Director Nick Hurran creates an enjoyable Noirish atmosphere right from the delightfully tense opening, and keeps the tension up throughout.  Moffat's dialogue remains as peppered as ever with his endless wit.


The Angels are scary.  The Angels are always scary, of course, and Moffat comes up with plenty of new creepy things.  The giggling Cherubs are wonderfully creepy, and the Statue of Liberty Angel is awesome, even if nothing really comes of it and it just sits there.  As convoluted as the explanation is, the Angels' actual plan to gain power is pretty cool.

And that's largely what carries Angels.  Its ambitions and underlying ideas carry it though a lot more rough patches that it would seem an episode could whether.  It's the kind of memorable and sometimes brilliant yarn that digs in your mind and sticks with you.  It's the sort of uniquely imaginative yarn only Doctor Who could spin, and worth celebrating for its wonder and power.  And any work of art with a moment as breathtaking as the conversation between Amy and Rory on the rooftop can't be unworthy of our passion.  I just hope the cracks tearing through Moffat's era don't absorb its ability to ascend to that brightest heaven of invention it can and sometimes has soared to.

Even if their farewell isn't perfect, the fact that it's so frustrating is just another reminder of what magnificent companions Amy and Rory were, and how badly I'll miss them.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go rewatch Season 5 again and pretend everything ends like The Big Bang and is wonderful forever.



RATING:

* * *

 

NOTES FROM THE FUTURE: Moffat crafts this farewell as a Greek tragedy, where the tragic flaw of the heroes is hubris - the belief that they can defy the fate decreed by the gods. And here, even a god of sorts finds himself impotent against the tide. The raging against death - against endings - that can sometime be sidestepped, but never avoided. It's infuriating for the very precise reason that it's true.

Where I was wrong before was that Rory doesn't go out with glory here - after all, he is the one who save the day, who finds the way to destroy the Quay from ever existing, and who has the heart to do it. This is a great final Rory story; I wanted more because, like the Doctor, I selfishly couldn't bear for it to end, but couldn't do anything about it. In a way, this entire final run of five stories was a gift; they could have left at the end of Series 6, technically happy but not bringing us to an ending of meaning or catharsis. Here, we get meaning punching us straight in the gut, catharsis ripped from our tear ducts, and are still left with Amy and Rory living long, full, happy lives.

It also, now, feels less rushed when I'm not living in the frustration of this ending. There are certainly episodes, especially in the run from the back half of Series 6 through Series 7 that feel too compressed, as Moffat finds ways to run right through a bunch of plot connective tissue that genuinely isn't needed, but there was a time right around here when a bit too much was missing sometimes. But I don't think that's true here. This is a simple story, with just enough clever interludes to give richness to the edges, crashing enough genres into each other to be a whole world unto itself -- Noir, Lovecraft, and Moffat's own Angels wrapped in Greek Tragedy -- but leaving all the emotions and laughs to breath as they need to. If it feels too fast, it's only because endings in life are fast, cruel, and sometimes offscreen.

 

In Doctor Who, every few years, the greatest show in the world is canceled, and replaced by the greatest show in the world. Living in the dying days hurts, and I couldn't hide the damage. When I wrote the review, I didn't need the pain or the balm for it. 12 years later, there are parts of me that did.

Add half a star from the future. Maybe a full one. This silly show about a silly man with a silly box can be a beautiful work of art that means the world. Quantifying that is a fool's errand. (Says a fool who loves running errands.)

The Power of Three

One of the greatest elements of Steven Moffat's era as showrunner has been how deeply the show has delved into the nature of the Doctor/companion relationship.  In The Eleventh Hour, Moffat carefully set it up as a charming fairy tale, then has spent the last two and a half seasons undermining it - and exploring it - by colliding the childlike charm with the maturity of the adults involved.  By The Big Bang, it had essentially resolved as a fairy tale, but Season Six brought it back with a vengeance, building to the Doctor breaking Amy's childlike faith in him in The God Complex.

Which has formed a fascinating story in the last several episodes, as Amy and Rory struggle to get used to Real Life but never quite can because a madman keeps falling out of the sky and taking them on adventures.  And that conflict is the heart of The Power of Three, as the two finally realize they have to decide which life they truly want.

And thankfully, this conflict is played out with both tremendous humor and well-played emotion.  I tend to be wary of Chris Chibnall scripts, given how disastrous they sometimes turn out, but he hasn't been hired so often because he's an untalented hack.  He seems to be an eternal wellspring of great ideas who can also do great character work when he's correctly focused.  Here, he balances character and story nicely and does both very well.

Rory's dad felt like a great character tacked-on after the fact in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, but here, Chibnall sets him up his calm, meticulous nature in contrast to the Doctor's mercurial and somewhat childish nature.  The Doctor goes utterly mad waiting patiently for the cubes to open in a matter of hours, while Rory's dad is perfectly content to observe them for over a year.  It's a funny subplot that makes good use of him.  He also gets a cutting dramatic moment where he asks the Doctor what happened to his previous companions.

Chibnall also finally solves the problem that the New Who UNIT stories have struggled with - the lack of the Brigadier.  The best thing about the old UNIT stories was Nicholas Courtney's fantastic presence, and New Who has never come up with a satisfying replacement.  None of the commanders since have been memorable enough to even return.  Jemma Redgrave's Kate Stewart is exactly what these stories have needed - an engaging actor playing a nicely-written character.  It's left to be seen what's done with her in a story where she's particularly important, but it's still a good introduction.

While Amy and Rory don't have a lot to do plot-wise, they're given a wealth of both humorous and emotional material to work with, and Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are as wonderful as ever.  It's difficult to think of them ever leaving the show, and their departure is going to be deeply painful.  Amy and Rory have become my favorite New Who companions far and away and among my five favorites all around.  This is a good showcase for just how much fun they are.

Seriously, you two, don't ever leave.

The plot is (rightly) in the background, but it's a clever story that builds suspense superbly.  The actual explanation of who dropped the cubes is interesting enough to warrant a lot more screen time than it gets, but maybe the Shakri will show up again.

Matt Smith's Doctor is magnificent.  Smith is as deft as ever at both whimsy and drama, and his conversations with Amy are genuinely moving.

The actual resolution, while adequate, is disappointing - the Doctor basically walks in, listens to a recording, and then flips his Sonic on for twenty seconds and solves the plot.  It's a bit of a let-down.  But the scene following it, as Rory's dad pushes the companions to join the Doctor, is a terrific and satisfying conclusion, even with the somewhat clumsy final narration.

All in all, Power of Three is an absolute delight, 45 minutes of pure mirth and deep heart in a suspenseful structure.  And it's yet another fascinating exploration of what, exactly, it really means to be one of the Doctor's companions.

RATING:

* * * 1/2


SIDENOTES

• There is actually a pretty significant flaw with the episode I alluded to earlier, but since it's a flaw that just leaves it "really good" instead of "one of the best ever", I'm leaving it down here.
  
  That problem is the same thing universally present in Chibnall scripts - a certain sloppiness of not actually thinking all the details through.  Chibnall is a terrific ideas guy, but he seems to just write all those ideas down without taking the time to get them working properly.  Power of Three gets away with it, but it does hold it back from greatness.
  
  Although the episode's heart is the conflict in Amy and Rory and its resolution is their decision that their passion lies with adventuring with the Doctor and not normal life, they don't actually do anything to solve the plot.  In fact, the Doctor basically solves the plot without the help of Amy, Rory, Rory's Dad, or UNIT.  He waits until everything gets bad, then whips out his Sonic and solves every problem with that on his own. 
  
  Rory's dad gets that wonderful plot about his intense observation of the cubes, but everyone notices them go wonky at the same time.  It's a funny joke, but it takes away one of the only two things he does in the plot.  The other thing he does is get captured, which could have lead somewhere, since Rory followed the aliens.  However, Rory ended up just as captured.
  
  ... which was the only thing he actually contributed to solving the plot, except that it did nothing.  If he had left some kind of trail or clue that he had gone to the elevator, he would have lead the Doctor and Amy to rescue him, but the Doctor just found it with the Sonic.  And Amy was just the Doctor's charming sidekick, getting the plot explained to her and having plenty of fun scenes, but not doing anything in the story.
  
  Mostly, it comes down to just how simple the plot has to be to fit as the B-story in a 45-minute episode.  There's not much room for the companions to be clever or do anything if the emotional stuff is going to get enough time to work.  And since Moffat's approach is always emotion over logic or continuity, the emotions have to stick.  So it's good that the emotion is left to the A-story.  But the resolution would be much more powerful if the emotional threads had been tied to the plot threads, and both had actually climaxed together.  From a plot perspective, there was no need for anyone other than the Doctor, and him not until the last five minutes.
  
  This is actually a gigantic structural flaw.  Again, the emotion of both the companion's story and the suspense of the plot are strong enough that it mostly gets away with it.  But when Amy talks about the "power of three" in the final voiceover, it's not actually clear from the story itself what she's talking about - the story was about the power of the Doctor's pocket Deus ex Machina.

• I'm not sure whether I prefer David Tennant's version of losing one of his hearts or Matt Smith's,  though I'm leaning toward Tennant.  But I definitely prefer Smith's version of getting his second heart working again.
• Given Chibnall's love of not-so-subtle symbolism (not that there's anything wrong with that), I'm surprised he used cubes instead of three-sided pyramids.  It's a bit less awkward than the way he tries to shoehorn "cubed" into that last monologue.
• The Doctor, Amy, and Rory sitting around eating fish fingers and custard is just the greatest thing ever.  That is all.

A Town Called Mercy

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer, doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The Doctor's heaviest guilt comes from that question of whether, sometimes, perhaps he should have shown mercy... and, others, he should have enforced a justice that otherwise would never have been upheld.  So many times, he has let the most horrific villains escape death.  Was his mercy in allowing the Master to live all those times worth the price of the billions (or perhaps trillions) who died in Logopolis?  Or his mercy with the Daleks in Genesis worth the untold numbers murdered by their deathrays?  Should he have dispensed his own justice against them instead, or was he in the right?

And what of those times when he did destroy his adversaries?  Was he right to eradicate both the Time Lords and the Daleks at the end of the time war, even if it did seem the only way to save every other life?  Or, more recently, what of his cold killing of Solomon?  Well, okay, Solomon killed that Triceratops for no reason.  He deserved to die.  But even so, the Doctor's attitude was a bit more ruthless than usual even when he has killed.

A Town Called Mercy forces the Doctor to face this by pitting him against Kahler Jax, another Doctor who fell out of the sky and dedicated his life to helping others.  He's also another Doctor who did horrible things in a war in order to end it - in his case, experimenting on others and turning them into horrific cyborgs without their consent.  His defense is that it ended a seven-year war in a week.  But now, after making a peaceful life for himself on another planet (ours, naturally), the last of his experiments has hunted him down across the stars.

Both the Doctor and Jax truly want to make the Universe a better place.  And both, essentially, dropped the Atomic bomb in order to save the millions who would have perished otherwise.  Jax in some ways went further by intentionally torturing innocents, but it isn't far from what the Doctor did - after all, the Doctor committed double-genocide to save the Universe.

The Doctor, on realizing who he's facing, does that rarest of moves and pulls a gun.  Amy tries to talk him down, but as the Doctor says, he honestly doesn't know what he's going to do.  It's a terrifying, powerful scene.  In this centerpiece scene, A Town Called Mercy is brilliant.

It doesn't quite sustain that brilliance, but it definitely flirts with greatness.  The first half, building to that showdown, is terrific - engaging mysteries, good humor, strong characterizations, perfect Western atmosphere, and an exciting story that quite delightfully drops the Terminator (more or less) into the Old West.  The Cyborg makeup is superb, visceral enough to make the story compelling but not so much that it would give nightmares to kids watching.  The acting, unsurprisingly, is top-notch right down the line.  Smith is, yet again, extraordinary, bouncing wildly from the silliest comedy to the darkest drama without it ever feeling forced or jarring.  And the first half of the episode builds to that masterful scene.

The second half, alas, doesn't quite pay off.  The townspeople, understandably, form a lynch mob, but the Doctor talks them down.  Unfortunately, the Doctor's speech is a not-terribly-compelling sermon, and the tension evaporates.  And honestly, the Doctor should have done something more clever than just reiterated a moral concept.  The townpeople had clearly made up their minds, and it would take a better speech than that to pull it off. 

(The scene might still have finessed it on the sheer shoulders of Matt Smith's acting, but Murray Gold's otherwise effective score flattens it.  Gold does a Firefly/Serenity-style mix of Western motifs with more techy instrumentation and percussion, which generally works.  But there, it's just a distraction in a scene that would be much better with either no music or a minimal dramatic underscore.  Still, that's more the fault of the director than Gold.)

The Doctor's plan is a minor let-down.  It's a bit clever, and his use of the Sonic in the duel is nice (although you'd think that would do more damage to the townspeople's ears than the Cyborg's), but it's not really a ruse worthy of him, nor as exciting a scene as it should be.  Jax's final decision and the Cyborg's fate both make for a good enough ending to redeem the limp climax, but it's still a bit disappointing.

The real flaw, though, is that after that showdown halfway through, it never really engages with the ideas at its core.  Amy simply says that they can't be like Jax, and that's the end of the argument.  But it really is a complex question - after all, they can't be certain Jax won't end up doing other horrible things, and that's precisely the sort of consequences they fear.  There's a reason the Doctor does sometimes kill.  And it should be a more difficult conflict.

And Amy has quite a dark streak of her own, which should have been acknowledged, too.  In the end, Toby Whithouse compelling crafts a difficult question, then answers it too simplistically.  That said, it's possible the rest of the season will deal with this.


Regardless of its somewhat weaker second half, A Town Called Mercy is a solid, compelling, and highly entertaining yarn.  Can't complain too much about that.

RATING:

* * *

• Rory has some fun moments in this, but it's the second episode in a row where he's mostly sidelined.  Given how short his time on the show apparently is, it's a bit disappointing that he hasn't been getting more to work with.  Regardless, full points to Arthur Darvill's ability to create a complete and awesome performance purely with his face.  His ability to feel like a much bigger part of the script than he really is reminds me here of Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven, where McQueen gets less than a dozen lines and has to share the screen with Yul Brynner almost constantly, yet still almost feels like the star of the film.
  
  Yeah.  Darvill makes Rory so awesome he's comparable to Steve McQueen.

Dinosaurs On A Spaceship

I wanted to love this episode.  I really, seriously did.  Dinosaurs on a spaceship is the most perfect concept you could put in this show.  But the execution is just awful, and I'm finding myself very sadly having a much more Hobbesian view of things when I wanted desperately to be as awed by the ideas as Calvin.

Okay, so here's what happens in this episode: in 1334 BC, the Doctor saves Ancient Egypt from destruction, and then impulsively brings Queen Nefertiti along with him.  Meanwhile, a space ark launched by the Silurians millions of years ago is boarded by a pirate in 2367 AD who ruthlessly murders all the Silurians with his cheap robots, then finds he can't pilot the ship and it's returning to Earth. The ISA, presumably the India Space Agency but in practice the 24th century equivalent to UNIT, calls the Doctor in to solve the problem before they're forced to destroy it with missiles.  After getting instructions from the ISA, he then picks up Edwardian hunter Riddell for some reason.  Then he picks up Amy and Rory... along with Rory's dad by accident.

So, to sum up, this episode includes the following:

• Dinosuars on a spaceship
• A Silurian space ark
• A psychotic space pirate who commits genocide against said Silurians
• A pair of Douglas Adams-ish robots
• A successor to UNIT
• Queen Nefertiti
• A Great White Hunter
• Amy and Rory getting picked up again since they aren't regularly traveling with the Doctor.
• Rory's dad.

That's too many concepts for 90 minutes.  In 45, nothing works properly.

Well, except the dinosaurs on a spaceship.  It would have been nice if more had been done with that, but they work well enough.

Let's start with Nefertiti, since that's the one that really irks me.  She's all flirty, first with the Doctor, then with Riddell.  That, actually, is pretty much her entire characterization.  She's flirty and she's a Queen, so she has a power thing going.  She barely has any lines in the story, and has no function whatsoever until the climax, at which point she is captured by the villain for the final crisis.  She then waits around until the Doctor arrives to save her, then finally decides to save herself.  At the end, she goes off to be with Riddell for some reason.

It's a sloppily-detailed, half-formed characterization for a character who, frankly, could have been cut from the story entirely.  That would be bad enough without the moral problem, but this is a family show.  See, she clearly identifies herself as the wife of Amunhotep.  It's part of how she defines herself.  However, she tries to seduce the Doctor, then goes off to be with another guy at the end.  But that's okay, see, because she thinks her husband is boring.  I know they're much cheekier these days, but playing off infidelity as nothing more than a joke is just offensive.

But then there's the fact that she's Nefertiti.  One of the great historical icons.  And Chibnall gets nothing right.  The few details we do get about her are completely wrong.  This is one of the most fascinating figures of ancient history, and Chibnall can't get the three things he does say about her right.

Nefertiti and her husband, Amunhotep IV, led the Aten cult, a group of Egyptians who believed there was only one god, Aten, the disk of the sun.  In 1348 (give or take a year), Amunhotep changed his named to Akhenaten, still the name he's most commonly known by.  He and Nefertiti reformed the entire Egyptian culture, changing the Pantheon, the Capital city, even the style of art.  And they created the first monotheistic state religion, and were members of one of the first two monotheistic religions to ever exist, alongside Judaism.

Nefertiti had an unprecedented level of power for a queen, being nearly a co-regent with her husband.   She also deeply loved Akhenaten.  Then, in the 12th year of his reign, 1340(ish), she simply disappears.  After this, things get fuzzy, but at about the same time, a mysterious figure named Smenkhare appears and becomes Akhenaten's coregent, then Pharaoh after his death a few years later.  There may also have been a Queen named Neferneferuaten somewhere in there.  Those two may have been Nefertiti herself under different names, or maybe just the second one was.  Or maybe neither, and she died in 1340.  But the idea that she was both is the popular theory amongst amateurs like me.

Changing the state religion, unfortunately, drew the ire of the old priests, who had lost much of their power.  They took advantage of Akhenaten's preoccupation with his religion, and ensured that the Egyptian kingdom fell apart.  There was lots of intrigue and power struggling.

Eventually, the priests quietly managed to get back their power, and once Akhenaten's son (probably his, anyway) Tutankhaten, later Tutankamun, popularly King "Tut", came to power as a kid, they got him to return the throne to the old capital and restore the old gods.  Two pharaohs further down the line, orders were given to have the entire period erased from history so nothing like it could ever happen again.  Bits of the period resurface, but details are sketchy.  What we do have, however, is one of the most dramatic periods of ancient Egyptian history, and at the center, Nefertiti.

So if you're going to put her in your story, you should probably put her in a story that actually has enough time to give her some dues.  But even if you're not, you could at least get something right.  The Doctor picks her up in 1334, at which point Akhenaten was either dead or dying.  If she was alive, she was about to become sole ruler of Egypt (or already was).  Also, she had at least two living daughters (who later became Tutankhamun's wife) and possibly four.  So leaving her to abandon her post and her children with no motivation whatsoever is hard to take.

And she's bored with her husband?  The guy who tried to turn his world upside-down?  The guy she clearly loved deeply from every depiction we have of them?  And above all, she calls him Amunhotep.  13 years after he changed his name.  I mean, that one's just weird.  Anyone who's heard of him knows he's Akhenaten.  Even the 15 seconds of research required to come up with the right century and her husband's name would have turned that up.

Akhenaten and Nefertiti play with their daughters.

This is largely nit-picking, but it's an example of how sloppy the whole thing is.  Nefertiti is jammed into the story, but she's done so utterly wrong she fails as a representation of the real person (actually a bit of an insult, really, to one of the great women of ancient history).  That would be totally forgivable if it was a memorable characterization, but it's a pretty lousy one.  And even then, there might be something to be said for her mere presence and name if she actually accomplished something in the story, but her only actual purpose is to get captured by the villain for the sake of the climax.

This sloppiness pervades the entire script.  Like the way the Doctor mentions that they can't use the transports at one point because they shorted out, but they inexplicably work (multiple times) for the climax.

The sexual politics are just obnoxious.  Look, I have nothing against feminism.  I'm about as feminist as a male American conservative gets.  One of the things I love so much about this show is the presence of characters like Barbara Wright and Sarah Jane Smith being strong, independent, powerful women long before it was popular.  But the presentation here is terrible.  Riddell and Solomon are totally sexist, and Nefertiti and Amy are constantly putting their equality in their faces.  Riddell and Solomon become strawmen sexists, and frankly, Nefertiti and Amy come off like the sorts of characters Kate Beaton was satirizing in her Strong Female Characters comic.  Every time it comes up, it's cringe-inducing.

And there's Rory's dad.  Mark Williams is perfect, and the character gets a couple of nice moments, but when you bring in a previously-unseen relative, you should really make their relationship the emotional center of the story, or at least have a decent emotional arc.  He's a credible depiction of what you'd expect Rory's dad to be like, but he has nothing really to do.  Like Nefertiti, he's just sort of grafted on without any real thought to how he impacts the story (or doesn't).  It's a waste of a nice performance.

Riddell works better than the other two on the sheer fact that the Great White Hunter is such a brilliant trope it's almost impossible to screw up, and such a simple one you can just let it play in the background.  Even in otherwise weak adventures, that character adds tremendous fun to a story.  Think Connery's Allan Quartermain in the otherwise lame League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or (my favorite variation of the trope) Ernie Hudson as "your Great White Hunter... who happens to be black" in the extremely uneven Congo.  And Rupert Graves certainly plays it with all the charisma you'd expect.  He's got a particularly great moment where he calmly insists he can take down an ankylosaur with his pocketknife.  But far too much of his screentime is spent belittling the women long after they've proven their competence - not to mention long after the joke wears thin.

With so many things fighting for screen time (and losing), it's not much surprise that the actual story, which isn't bad (if a bit cliche), doesn't have time to actually develop.  To be honest, it feels like we missed all the good parts and just stumbled into some of the less interesting parts of the ending.

The bit with the guns at the end is particularly poor.  Riddell has the villain dead to rights, but he's stopped because he's using a gun.  A stun gun.  It seems like it's just the usual New Who anti-gun thing, but here's the thing: not only is it non-fatal, but it would solve the problem.  Immediately.  There is literally no reason in the Time-Space continuum not to just shoot him with the tranq gun.  There's nothing stopping him.  He's a Great White Hunter, villain in his sights, at point blank range.  Well, okay, there's the robots.  But so far as I can tell, they won't do anything that the villain doesn't tell them to do.  Once he's dead, do they do anything?  It's just a poorly thought-through showdown.

And it's not like the Doctor has a problem killing the guy.  He's pretty cold-blooded about it, actually.  So what's with the big anti-gun thing?

Speaking of which, though, the robots are great.  In the Douglas Adams tradition, they're the lower-quality models, meaning instead of being great kill bots, they're barely adequate kill bots who spend all their time bickering with each other and their victims.  It's a delightful bit that tragically lacks a punchline, but still represents one of the few things in the story that actually works.

As for the Doctor, he's... fine.  Matt Smith is great as ever, but Chibnall seriously overdoes the quirks.  The running joke about the Doctor being parts of music recordings is really tiresome by now.  His interference in creating minor parts of history is charming in small doses, but gets annoying after a while.  Note to Chibnall: quirks are charming.  QUIRKS are incredibly off-putting.

Amy spends too much time bickering with Riddell, but otherwise, she's good.  It's fun to see how well she handles the situations she's handed.  She really is a pro at this stuff.  She also gets a short but effective conversation with the Doctor about the way he picks them up and then disappears for months at a time, and how she can't stand to have to hold down a job in the meantime.  Rory is similarly fine but unspectacular.  All of his lines and scenes are good, but he's not around much.

There are moments where it comes together and works.

Rory: "Where are we?"
The Doctor: [sticks his tongue out] "Well, it's not Earth.  Doesn't taste right.  Too metallic."

 But on the whole, it's a typical Chibnall story: good ideas, not-so-good execution.

RATING:

* * 

SIDENOTES

•  Why didn't Rory's dad meet the Doctor at his son's wedding?  Was he not there?  Shouldn't this have been addressed?
• The implication with the ICS is that India is the dominant world superpower in the 24th century.  Yet another good concept that's completely trampled by its brevity.  I totally missed that until a commenter mentioned the agency's name.
• So, given the presence of the Ankylosaurs, Triceratops, T-Rex, and overgrown Velocoraptors, the Silurians must have launched their ship in the late Cretaceous.  This is extremely strange, as every prior appearance suggested they came from other time periods. 
• In The Silurians, they went in hibernation when they thought the Earth capturing the moon would cause massive geologic upheavals.  We can set aside that the current scientific consensus is that the moon formed from a collision between the earth a Mars-sized object (a theory with massive problems of its own that will probably be replaced by a better one, as such holey theories generally are), which is forgivable since I believe the capture theory was the consensus in 1970.  The point is, if that was the case, they would have existed around 4.5 billion years ago, which is problematic for reasons I probably don't need to mention.

But here's a pretty picture of it by the great Chesley Bonestall.

•  However, the title of the story suggests they existed around 430 million years ago.  This doesn't work since terrestrial life was limited to coastal plant life.  At any rate, the Doctor later claims the name is a misnomer...
• ... in The Sea Devils, where he says they should more rightly be called Eocenes.  This comes much closer to making sense given who the Silurians are, placing them between 56 and 34 million years old.  If they truly ruled the world, that would be about the time period that fits best.
• But dinosaurs had been extinct since 65 million years ago.  It's possible a small number survived the K-T extinction event, but not by that long.  And on the other hand, the Silurians are said to have ruled the Earth, which is unlikely in the Mesozoic because, you know, dinosuars.
• All of which is to say, I dare someone to come up with a coherent, unified theory of the existence of the Silurians.  Give it your best shot!

Asylum of the Daleks

The Moffat era has one systemic flaw that just won't go away: it won't expand its episodes worthy of 90 minutes into that length, instead making its stories abrupt and cramped to make way for all those filler episodes.  Which, in the case of Asylum, is really too bad, because at 90 minutes, this would be up there with Genesis, Remembrance, Power, Master Plan, Parting of the Ways, and Doomsday as among the all-time great Dalek stories and one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, period.

Of course, even with that, it's still damn good.

It opens with the Doctor walking into a Dalek trap on Skaro, which... why... does Skaro exist?  The Doctor blew it up four regenerations ago.  It's not like this is some obscure point of arcana; this is one of the centerpiece stories of the series.  I guess if you go to the novels, there was some way Skaro came back, but then I think (I could be wrong; I've only read a couple of the novels) it was destroyed again, and I'm pretty sure it was destroyed a third time in the Time War.  I'm pretty sure it's more destroyed than the Earth at the end of Mostly Harmless.

Admittedly, it looks cool.

And it's not even necessary to be there.  It's just... a slap in the face to knock you off-guard for a much, much bigger one: apparently, Amy and Rory are getting divorced.

I've gotta be honest, even with Chris Chibnoll's Pond Life series, that doesn't fly.  There have been undercurrents of tension between them in the past, but for all the complexity in their relationship, they've been happy.  Emotionally, all the last few times we've seen them, they were really happy together.  It's an incredibly jarring way to open the story even without the Up Continuity line. (which I'm convinced Moffat put in for precisely that reason.)

It's a real problem because one of the two emotional cores of the episode is the Amy/Rory relationship.  Their actual scene where they discuss their breakup and get back together is nicely written, and the already brilliant Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill always bring their performances to a whole other level with director Nick Hurran, so it hangs together, but only by its fingernails.  It really needed time at the beginning of the story to properly set up the emotions.  As it is, it isn't unconvincing, but it's nowhere near as moving as it should be.  The six-minute pretitle sequence needed to be about 20 minutes.

The end of that sequence is a knockout, with the Daleks demanding the Doctor "Save us!"  But it would have been an even bigger punch with more build-up.

But enough complaining.  Outside of the Ponds, it's more a minor problem.  Moffat and Hurran could have done more with the concept, but it's an absolutely fantastic concept - the Daleks who are too insane for the regular Daleks.  It would have been nice to see more variations of insane in amidst all the ones who are just low on power, but it's still brilliant.  It's framed in a twisty plot, and there are lots of great set-pieces - Moffat wisely gives Hurran suspense and character pieces rather than action ones, and Hurran knocks those out of the ballpark.

And while Hurran may be a bit clumsy in the few bits of actiony stuff (check out the too-obvious camera and editing tricks for the "rising" platform), he gets sterling performances out of the cast and he might be the greatest visual stylist the series has ever had.  This has some of the most dazzling and iconic imagery in any Doctor Who story - the giant Dalek statue, the cramped Dalek corridors, and Oswin's spacecraft interior. (I'm not certain he's the best - Graeme Harper certainly gives him a run for his money, and if Camfield and Maloney had made anything with modern technology, they might have outshone him.  But that's good company to be in, even in only one category)

The real genius of the episode, though, is the aforementioned Oswin, played by the endlessly charming Jenna-Louise Coleman, who takes Moffat's already witty dialogue and makes it shine like a Blue Star.  The character is a work of art, and the character's climactic moment is a brilliant sequence that packs an  emotional wallop.  The finale is tremendous.

And, of course, there's all the things that are always wonderful about Who these days.  Matt Smith has that extraordinary ability to move from funny to threatening to philosophical, all while being accessible yet delightfully alien.  (Seriously, I think he's from whatever planet Tom Baker beamed down from.  Or at least the same solar system.  That chin is about as human as Baker's ears.)  Moffat's dialogue sparkles with wit and character, his stories are whimsical, scary, deeply dramatic, and dripping with imagination.  The visual effects are as good as TV effects get, and the cinematography is gorgeous.

And Moffat is the best writer the show has ever had at one thing in particular (even better than Robert Holmes): the shows relation between dialogue and action.  See, unlike many sci-fi shows - even really great ones - the dialogue isn't a way of stringing together the action scenes.  The action scenes are a way of stringing together the dialogue.  The great part of Dalek Invasion of Earth isn't where the Doctor destroys the Daleks by creating a volcano in Southern England, it's the part where he tells them they will never be masters of the Earth.  Asylum has all kinds of tense showdowns and a couple of beautiful explosions, but its climactic scene is a quiet, character-driven conversation.  Involving a Dalek.  That shouldn't work.  But it does.  It's one of the best Dalek scenes the show has ever had.

 As I say, at 90 minutes, it's a contender for best Dalek story ever.  And even at 45, it's an absolute blast.

"Rescue me, Chin-Boy, and show me the stars!"

RATING:

* * * ½

• Best Dalek line: "Eg-eg-eg-eg-eg... Eggs....  Eggggggsss..."
   
• Blue stars (O-Class) have the brightest luminosity of any star.  I was going to make a pun about her having "Sirius luminosity", but I realized that A) Sirius is actually an A-class star, and B) I don't make puns.  At any rate, I am so terribly, awfully sorry.
• The advertising made a big deal out of this having every Dalek ever, and I was overjoyed that the Special Weapons Dalek was finally, finally returning... and it shows up in the background of a couple shots.  What a waste, man.  On second thought, I'm actually convinced Moffat hasn't even seen Remembrance of the Daleks, because no one would intentionally waste the Special Weapons Dalek.  Right?

Left of center, between the Centurian and the Dalek actually doing something.

• Seriously, though, what in the Unholy Living Void was Skaro doing still existing?!