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Among the 50 narrative tics we've seen before -- the repetitive phrases, the regeneration spazzing, the shouting manifesto and arc words -- there's a neat alien beastie who sneaks out of a crack in the bedroom wall/reality, takes on the form of coma patients' dreams in a spooky way, and best of all: Makes its home in the room of your house that you don't know about. The Doctor saves the day without his TARDIS or screwdriver, and with the aid of a very skeptical Companion, but that's not really the story.
The first Eleven story is really about setting up what could be the most complicated Doctor/Companion relationship since, oh, Turlough? Amy Pond is, to be honest, a rather fucked-up girl. Not like Donna even -- she was just a jerk -- but, like, seriously screwed up: Eleven's post-regeneration dicking around causes an already skeptical, lonely little girl to spend 12 years thinking her imaginary friend is not only gone, but pretty cruel.
(And what's he like? Beautiful, but we knew that. Funny, you can tell he's going to be funny. I don't think that the gravitas or the dry wit of this Doctor was really highly anticipated. He played my favorite character in the Sally Lockhart books, so I was already crushing, but even still. He's otherworldly and compassionate in a new, interesting way. And having made so many mistakes on his first day of life, I think this attitude will be perfect for what comes .)
When he finally comes back -- thinking it's just been five minutes -- she's a grown-ass, lonely, skeptical Kissing Telegram who does for her job what he did to her: Shows up, has a laugh, promises more, leaves forever. Her boyfriend is a nurse and her neighbors are dotty and sexy respectively, but she still lives with her aunt in the haunted house, which has become something of a temple to her dead dreams in the meantime. Amy is likeable in the extreme, and way darker than most of the people we've met in the New Era. She also has very shiny, pretty hair and says "What?" a whole lot. I wouldn't compare her to Reinette, via the Time Traveller's Wife thing, because he was just hopping in and out of what was truly a fabulous life: With Amy, he's so busy regenerating and acting crazy and waiting for the TARDIS to give birth to herself that he just plain overlooks how much damage he's doing her.
Once the alien threat is dispatched -- with a whole lot of running around, a masturbation joke, that lady from Peep Show, some scary little girls, some goo, and a whole "Badass Doctor" montage that's basically like a kitten roaring -- he's off for another "just a minute," before coming back to formally invite Amy to Companionship... On the eve of her wedding, two years later. All in all, a fantastic start to what seems like a low-key but possibly very moving season.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We pick up where we left off, with Eleven in a pickle and hanging from a wildly careening TARDIS, screwdriver between his teeth, music louder than you can possibly imagine, and a lot of green-screen screaming. Almost hitting Big Ben! Finally getting onboard and sighing! Then another crash! More moaning! Weird credits and theme and logo and font! Lots of changes. Lots of shit happening at all times.
I will say upfront that I love Amy and I love Eleven, and I would watch them doing any amount of dumb shit because they are charming. Amy is fucked up and hot, and Eleven is hot and fucked up. And I have enjoyed these regeneration episodes, classically: Nine strolling into Rose's house and playing with his face, those fish on Christmas. And as an introduction for a Companion, this story is tops: What happens when the Doctor's regular amount of flaky is so messed with by the regeneration and a wonky TARDIS that he actually manages to ruin a person's mind?
The problem is that, going back to "Silence In The Library" -- and even "Girl In The Fireplace," which I loved -- these aren't stories so much as burstingly full collections of cool shit. Take a thousand ideas, chuck 'em in a hat, pull out ten or twenty at random, arrange them in no real order on a corkboard, and then apply a lot of genius grease and the Doctor making random connections for us in a pretense that any of this makes sense. The first Doctor Who I ever saw was "The Empty Child"/"Doctor Dances," and it's the only reason I took the assignment: Because it showed what this show was capable of doing. But honestly if you combine those two with "Fireplace," you've seen every trick we're going to get.
And every attempt to recreate that trick -- good feelings, rising music, unending talk about what humanity means and unending repetition of just how high the stakes are this time -- the paler and more desperate it seems. And in this way, my very strong affection for Smith & Pond becomes sort of a negative, because they're the ones that have to pretend this makes sense, and fashion some kind of emotional response to the piles and piles of nonsense they've been handed. It's sentimental kitsch, but it's sentimental kitsch on such a cynical level that it keeps telling you how sentimental and kitschy it is, while distracting you with more and yet more ideas from the Concept Hat.
So keep that in mind, because I am going to try to stay focused on the story and not complain too much. If you liked the Library, you'll love this season. If you liked "Blink," no doubt you will love this season. But in the end, if you can't tell me what the story was about in three or four sentences, then it's not really about anything at all, besides a few pat tacked-on philosophical ideas about the indomitable human spirit. Which is a bummer.
Positive: We meet Amelia in a strangely bleak old house surrounded by creepy kid stuff: A pinwheel whirling in the night, TARDIS song mixed with lullaby tinkles, a ramshackle old swingset. Her front door is blue as a police box, and all the windows are dark, and she's praying to Santa. (Excellent.)
"Dear Santa. Thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you, but honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know it's not, because at night, there's voices. So please, please, could you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman? Or..."
So there's a little adorable girl, very pragmatic, with a mysteriously invisible aunt who needs supernatural home repair. Definitely a fairytale, which makes me more comfortable. And then, right on time, the Doctor shows up. (This is the last time he'll show up on time.) She hears the VWORP and a great crash, hits pause on her prayer -- "Back in a moment" -- and checks out the wreck of the TARDIS in her garden. Thanking Santa, she heads outside in her nightie. It's effectively magical, with yellow light coming out, and then the doors of the TARDIS, on her side, fly open. A rappelling hook comes flying out, burying itself in the ground rather than her cute little head, and a very wet Doctor makes his way out to grin at her.
He asks for an apple, happy about having "cravings" in this incarnation, and climbing awkwardly out. "Just had a fall. All the way down there, right to the library. Hell of a climb back up." They talk about how the swimming pool is in the library, way down there, and she seems to accept this after a few unimpressed looks at his manic self. The dimensional joke -- that with the TARDIS on her side, the direction of "in" goes infinitely back, which is down -- is fun, and one of the brainteaser things I really liked about "Blink." Changing frames of physical reference are a Moffat trademark, and something that takes full advantage of the capability of this show.
They discuss the crack in the wall, he doesn't admit to anything including being a policeman, and the whole time Amelia's trying to get to the point -- this crack in her wall -- he's spazzing out, post-regeneration: "Still cooking," as he says it. In terms of demonstrating how charming this Doctor is, you couldn't do better than staging him as the backyard E.T. to the cutest little girl that ever lives. On the other hand, it's half the episode.
"Does it scare you?" he asks, she thinks, about the regeneration issues -- that gold stuff coming out of his mouth, the sudden hungers and cramps all over -- but he's taken the measure of her enough to know she's pretty unshakable: He means the crack in the wall. Absolutely, she agrees, and she's so serious that it means something to him, which means it means more to us: This little girl doesn't screw around. If she says the crack is an issue, then we'll deal with it. He hops up from his knees and grins with relief: "I'm the Doctor. Do everything I tell you, don't ask stupid questions and don't wander off." Then he walks into a tree.
"If you're a doctor, why does your box say POLICE?" HE is too busy being adorable. He takes a bite out of the apple, spits it at her face, and says that no, he hates apples. How about yogurt? Spits in her face -- "I hate yogurt, it's just stuff with bits in!" -- and explains that he has a new mouth, with new rules. "It's like eating after cleaning your teeth, everything tastes wrong." The music reminds us that this is all very droll and sweet, and he goes, "You're Scottish, fry something." Bacon, he hates, Beans are "evil." Bread and butter gets tossed in the yard, complete with a meowing cat. We're still not done, and the music is getting wilder all the time, and we hate carrots, and it turns out that what the Doctor needs is fish fingers and custard. Wacky!
They sit in the kitchen while he dips his fishsticks and discuss each other. She tells him he's funny -- but in the way a forty-year-old police sergeant might -- and that tickles him. He likes her name, Amelia Pond, because it's like a fairytale. She's Scottish, but moved with her aunt to "rubbish" England for some reason. The Doctor commiserates with her parentless status, pointing out that he doesn't even have an aunt: They agree, childlike, that he's lucky. The Doctor doesn't mention that his family is bullshit and molested his best friend through space and time in order to end the entire universe, because that's not a conversation you can have with a little kid. Not even an absurdly special kid like Amelia could handle the total bummer that is the Time Lords.
So, the aunt. Where is she? "Out." Not a problem, apparently. The Doctor -- in case we didn't notice -- is amazed by her unflappability: "Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of box, man eats fish custard, and look at you, just sitting there. So you know what I think? Must be a hell of a scary crack in your wall."
I like that he's making friends with Amelia at this age -- even though the consequences are disastrous -- because that makes their whole relationship different. It's not precisely like the Reinette/Slow Path Thing, because she had this full life and because she really was in love with him: It's an Imaginary Friend Thing, which is much cooler and makes the eventual weirdness and anger of Amy a lot more fun. I guess I can see the parallels, but when you're dealing with a show entirely about a time-traveler and his relationships to mortals, it seems like this would happen a lot more.
They tromp upstairs, and he quotes himself: "You've had some cowboys in here..." Quickly explains that he doesn't mean actual cowboys, "though that can happen," and Amelia produces a smiling apple from her pocket, handing it over: "I used to hate apples, so my mum put faces on them." He agrees that Amelia's mum sounds awesome, and it is a very Doctor thing to do, and he pops it in his own pocket. It would have made sense to do this in the original conversation about apples, but whatever. So he explains that the crack is a Crack, like, it's a crack in everything and even if you knocked down the wall it would still be there. Which is what I was hoping it was, so that's cool. Also cool: Foreshadowing.
"Everywhere, in everything. It's a split in the skin of the world. Two parts of space and time that should never have touched, pressed together."
I do think that last sentence will bite us in the ass, around twelve episodes from now. Just as the Doctor intuits that there are probably voices coming out of that crack sometimes -- and empties a glass of water with one of the cutest gestures I've ever seen a grown man pull, to listen -- a voice comes out of the crack: "Prisoner Zero has escaped!" Amelia's heard about this before, from the crack; the Doctor explains helpfully that there's a prison on the other side of the crack, and somebody's gotten out. "Do you know what that means? You need a better wall." Word. But then he goes all Doctor and says that the only way to close the breach is to "open it all the way." Very Doctor: "The forces will invert, and it'll snap itself shut." Or another thing, which he doesn't say, but is a very bad thing:
"You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better? 'Everything's going to be fine.'" So he clears the wall and Amelia gapes at him, and he's so excited about whatever happens that he's breathing super hard. He is excellent when getting into trouble. So he sonics the crack and it opens wide, and tries to talk to the voice, but a giant eyeball appears and stares at them through the crack, and then shoots a laser at the Doctor's nuts.
The crack closes, and the psychic paper explains, once again, that Prisoner Zero has escaped. Meaning that Zero is in the house. So the Doctor runs around the house for awhile with ADD, and then -- this part is filmed in such a way that it makes no sense at this time -- realizes that there's an extra door in the house that leads to an extra room in the house, that you can't see except for the corner of your eye. (So now we've got three things that could/should just be their own episode. There will be many, many more.) Before the Doctor can explain the explanation above, the Cloister Bell starts ringing, and he screams and runs outside to check on the TARDIS.
She's not doing so well. Science things are happening to her, as a result of the sudden explosions at the end of the New Years episode, and she's recreating herself inside to accommodate the budget cuts, and so he's got to get in there and stabilize her with a "five-minute hop into the future." Sort of, I guess, like driving about once you've gotten a jump from a helpful stranger. Amelia's stuck on how it's a time machine, which is awesome, but she immediately hands us the part of the episode: He says he's only going to be gone five minutes, but this is patently -- and, in her case -- empirically untrue. People leave, and they don't come back. He swears he'll be back immediately -- "I'm not people, do I even look like people?" -- but Amelia knows people better than this newborn: They come into your life for a moment, give you a little kiss, and then go away again.
With a (very annoying) "Geronimo!" and a splash, he's gone. She dimples up real good and watches the TARDIS vanish, then runs through her abandoned fairytale-looking garden, upstairs to her bedroom, past the hidden door which is now hanging open, grabs a tiny sad suitcase and pops it on the bed -- this would be where I started crying and probably fell in love with Amy Pond forever, because you know what's -- and out in her cutest hat and winter coat, to sit on her suitcase near the demolished shed and wait for his return. And in the house, Zero makes itself at home.
Tick tock, and the Doctor comes out of the smoking TARDIS, screaming for his little friend, sonicking the back door in a panic, screaming that Zero's in the house, trying desperately to sonic the hidden room before getting unceremoniously konked on the head with an oar, or a cricket bat, or something even more British.
Over in the Leadworth hospital, cutish but very British Nurse Rory is trying to explain to a doctor that all the coma patients have started calling for her -- meaning, of course, the Doctor. (Why?) She's not having it, but then one of them, a stocky bloke, followed by all of them (including awesome Olivia Colman from Peep Show), and then there's a bunch of staring at the coma patients.
Fade over on the last echoing moan to the Doctor, who's woozy in the Pond house. His eyes roll around and he is adorable. The camera goes up, up the sexy legs of a Scottish redhead dressed in a pervert's idea of a police costume, calling for backup on a white male, mid-20s, who has broken and entered. He whines about the cricket bat upside the head, and there's a cute moment where he admits that a cricket bat konk was exactly the thing to finish off his regeneration and get him back to rights. I like that. He stares at her and they talk about how she's police, and has backup coming. She's sharp and funny and a little bit mean -- until he asks about Amelia.
"Little Scottish girl, where is she? I promised her five minutes but the engines were phasing. I suppose I must have gone a bit far. Has something happened to her?" The woman stares at him, intrigued and already getting angry, and explains that Amelia Pond hasn't lived here in a long time: Six months. He's nearly got tears in his eyes, shouting about her: "No, no, no! I can't be six months late! I said five minutes. I promised! What happened to her?" The woman turns away so he can't see her face, and radios her sergeant again. "What happened to Amelia Pond?" What happened to Amelia Pond indeed.
The stocky unshaven bloke in the coma ward has pictures of his beloved black dog everywhere near his bedside, to keep him company. Rory can't seem to get a break from the doctor lady, whom even though she just heard them all yowling doesn't really think that Rory's obviously correct suspicions that something iffy is going on should be respected. Which I mean, this is a weird thing and I suppose she's within her fictional rights to blow it off altogether rather than running off into an adventure with this twitchy nurse -- he's got Frodo eyes -- so she tells him to go home and sleep off the crazy. "Why are you giving me your phone?" she interrupts herself, because he wants to give her proof that the talking coma people have also been wandering the village. Before he can show her the pics, her beeper goes off and she sends him home for the day. The shorthand for the bureaucratic frustration we're meant to be singing is him stuttering a lot of but-but-but, but it's effective enough.
The redhead continues to observe the Doctor -- who is chained to a radiator just opposite the mysterious hidden door concept to which we still haven't been properly introduced -- in her miniskirt and tiny bowler hat. (I must admit I was confused, although not as much as some.) She tells him that he's speaking to the person who lives in the house, that she's both the tenant and the police, and he asks her then how many rooms there are. Why? "Because it will change your life." He says things like this constantly, with only hotness and dramatic skill making it anything less than embarrassing.
She counts the rooms -- five -- and he directs her to the sixth, just behind her: "Exactly where you don't want to look. Where you never want to look." (Jacob crack, as we all know by now, but without the follow-through of it being anything but a narrative bridge to symbolic nowhere.) She finally glimpses it, out of the corner of her eye, and he explains the sixth door carries a "perception filter" (was it the Preachers that used those?) that makes the eye slide away. The woman is grossed out! "But that's a whole room! That's a whole room I've never even noticed!" Right, because of the filter. Zero's got himself a room to rent.
The Doctor demands that the woman uncuff him, and she admits she's lost the key. He's confused, because he still thinks that she's a policewoman, and then terrified as she makes her way toward the secret door without even pausing to worry about it. He screams and screams at her, and she totally ignores him, to the point where he's as scared as he is annoyed, and he realizes that the screwdriver's probably close to the door, where she knocked him out. It's not there, just like there's nothing there, and he reminds her that if she couldn't see the door, why would she be able to see the terrible thing, and begs her to get out of the mysterious room immediately.
She finds the screwdriver on a dusty table -- Zero is not a good housekeeper at all -- and the Doctor continues to scream at her from the hallway, struggling against the radiator like a little kid at bedtime, as she gets more and more intrigued and less and less worried.
Of course, there's the thing right behind her: A silly sort of snake thing reared up behind her with a million teeth. Like the Weeping Angels, or their opposite, she's safe as long as she doesn't look at it. But because she's Amy Pond, knowing thus just makes her look at it. It's awful, she screams, it tries to strike, and she comes running back out into the hallway. She hands the screwdriver over to the Doctor while Zero hangs out in the secret door for no real reason, and he sonics himself out. The doorway starts glowing while he rubs his screwdriver, and then she admits that she's not got backup coming, because she's not a real policewoman: She's a kissogram.
Which is when -- as she whipped off that bowler hat and swished her hair around like a shampoo ad -- the internet exploded. Now, the camera has been devouring her since we got here, and there's confusion as to how exploitative (or, in hysterical-speak, how close to being a stripper) this job is, and the Doctor is certainly unimpressed, but there are a few things that make this not an issue for me. One, feminism has been ruined by the internet and no longer means much more than a competitive listing of grievances from the comfort of our armchairs. Two, we are talking about a country that for a hundred years has been watching Benny Hill and giggling about boobies on Page Three. Just today I saw a picture of the Companion Jo Whoever totally naked wrapped around a Dalek, and it was disgusting, and the most interesting thing about British sexuality is still the obsession with little boys being spanked. I write the whole island off generally, because they're better at feminism and somehow worse at sexual maturity than we are, which makes transatlantic understanding this stuff really hard sometimes. But most of all: This is the absolute best clue we have to what Amy is.
Amy does for her job what the Doctor did to her. She shows up, she promises the world -- and more importantly intimacy -- and then disappears forever. It's like Donna being a temp, but incredibly personal. The Doctor failed her, and she had nobody else. She's a hard shell around a groovy angry center, and as any of the ecdysiasts of my acquaintance can tell you, the best revenge is being hot and then leaving at the end of your shift. It's power, and a damn sight more valuable feminism than complaining about Uma's Photoshopped thighs. The only people who pay in that scenario are the men, and complaining about sex work in this way is an incredibly sheltered attempt at making grown women's choices for them, which is gross.
And even if she were a stripper, that would still be awesome, because the show has to accomplish a lot in making her character work, and telling us straight up that she prefers to be vacant from her life -- from Rory, from the thing at the end of this episode -- while simultaneously taking a ferocious bite out of it, because of who she is, is accomplished quite easily here. If your knee stops jerking for a second, you'll see how: Amy professes, and fails, at the same relationship -- with Earth, and humanity -- that the Doctor professes and fails to have with same.
The secret door pops open, and a stocky unshaven bloke with a big black dog comes out. The dog is growling, Amy thinks at first, but soon realizes they're both growling and barking: One creature, taking the form of two creatures. (Brilliant. I love this bit. Could have been its own episode, but no.) "Clever old Multiform," the Doctor chuckles, and makes fun of him screwing up the voice. "Where did you get the pattern from? You'd need a psychic link, a live feed. How did you fix that?" Coma patients, clearly.
The snarls echo all over the place, and the Doctor tells him to "stay," and there's a bunch of back and forth about how they have backup coming, but they don't really -- "That was a clever lie to save our lives," he hisses -- so then he changes tack and says there's no backup, which is now why they're safe, because they're not a threat. Whenever anything happens, Amy goes, "What?" It's sort of funny, but this episode is catchphrase central so it's also sort of obnoxious and coked-up first-drafty. This goes on a while, and then the voice from the crack echoes through the sky: "Attention, Prisoner Zero. The human residence is surrounded..." Backup. The Doctor explains that they do have backup after all, and that's why they're safe. "Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated."
They run! Bad guy stares out of the window over the back door with a seriously angry face, and they hang out outside. His clothes are all kinds of messed up, since for him this episode has been even shorter than it was for us so far. In addition to the screwed up screwdriver, the TARDIS is also screwed up, so no help there. While running around and yelling -- and the voice of the prison guard echoing, and the bloke growling -- they discuss how her options, post-cricket batting, were to dress up like policewoman or a French maid, and they review the whole plot to this point just in case you were bored to death.
The Doctor sees the rebuilt shed, and gets confused: Where did it come from, and why is it ten -- he sniffs, it's actually twelve -- years old? Because he's twelve years late. He asks over and over again why she said it had only been six months, and finally she screams in his face, "Why did you say five minutes?" It's very sad, and she's very angry, and that's the first time that you realize she is impressively fucked up.
Him too. "What?" he asks, again and again, as she pulls him all through the village Leadworth, away from the house. She's angry, she hit him with a cricket bat, she lost twelve years to him, she went through four psychiatrists, biting each and every one. And why, besides her total awesomeness, did she do this? "They said you weren't real."
The warning is coming now out of everything -- ice cream truck speaker, people's radios -- and the Doctor and Amy run around at length before busting in on some old lady's house. She's going through every channel on her TV, but every channel is just that eyeball talking about Prisoner Zero. The Doctor spins some bizarre lie that isn't important, and the woman remarks on how Amy keeps changing jobs -- sexy nurse, sexy policewoman, sexy nun -- and the Doctor starts to figure out what kissogramming entails, and what's happened: "Who's Amy? You were Amelia." The name he loved. "Bit fairy tale," she snarks, and he gets sad.
The old woman recognizes him, somehow, which embarrasses Amy for reasons we don't know yet, and the Doctor asks her exactly WTF a kissogram is. "I go to parties and I kiss people. With outfits. It's a laugh." He's horrified in a particularly hilarious way -- "You were a little girl five minutes ago!" -- and she tells him he's worse than Aunt Sharon. He's got, this Smith kid, he's got a really nice, sparkly young-old thing going on. He can go from four to forty with one wiggle of his rubber face: "I'm the Doctor, I'm worse than everybody's aunt," he shouts, appalled, and rethinks: "And that is... Not how I'm introducing myself."
On the radio, they're talking about Zero in French and German, meaning they're sending the message to the whole world -- which the Doctor realizes is "the human residence" in question, and that we're all going to die in about twenty minutes. Of course, it's hard to listen to the annoying amount of nothing that he's saying to explain all of this, because a tall sexy drink of water just walked in carrying a laptop -- Jeff, the grandson of the old lady who's house we've decided to hang out in -- and Eleven is all over that shit. Jeff is shocked, but not so much by the hot/alien invasion of his personal space: He recognizes the Doctor too, by name. Which is impossible.
"Are you the Doctor? He is, isn't he? He's the Doctor! The Raggedy Doctor. All those cartoons you did, when you were little. The Raggedy Doctor, it's him!" Amy gets more and more embarrassed, finally screaming at Jeff to shut up, but the old lady finally gets it too: The Raggedy Doctor. Who is explaining that the planet is about to be destroyed, by a million giant eyeball Christmas stars far above the clouds, if Prisoner Zero doesn't vacate "the human residence."
He leads Amy through the city, tottering on her pins, trying to come up with a solution. "What is this place? Where am I?" Leadworth, a half-hour's drive out of Gloucester, too tiny for an airport or even "a little" nuclear power station. All he's got is a post office, which is closed right now, and not even a car. There's a duckpond, which catches his eye just like Amelia Pond did twelve years ago. "Why aren't there any ducks?" There never have been. And so then what makes it a duckpond? She asks why any of this matters, and he reminds her that he's still not done cooking and he's not ready to save the world this time. You feel for him. I thought this season was going to be about the Time Lords, like, cute boy Doctor and cute girl Companion v. mean old men, but there's a whiff of that here, this cute boy Doctor on his first time out wishing he had more time and more toys to use. His very real panic, as his body continues to thwart him.
The sun goes away, because they've sealed off the atmosphere, and now they're going to roast the planet inside. The Doctor takes a moment to bitch about cell phones -- people taking pictures of an anomaly in the sky that they don't understand is apparently offensive -- and the whole time Amy just refuses to believe that any of this is happening. He reminds her that she believed about the time machine, once, and she says she grew up, and he spins some gaylord Robin Williams bullshit about how you should never grow up, or whatever bullshit old men are always cramming down your throat about believing in the stars and dreams coming true. I mean, Amy is fucked up, but not because she "grew up" and therefore needs to un-grow up: She needs to believe that dreams can come true only insofar as her own vast ability to make them come true, not her ability to just sit there dreaming and managing to somehow become more innocent. So dumb.
Because it's been a million years and the Doctor has yet to finish a single sentence or do more than dangle the tantalizing beginnings of sentences in front of us, he does that some more but with slapping himself in the head. Then there's some special effect where he mentally remembers everything that was just happening on the village green. It takes a while, not what you would call an instant, and realizes one of the things was Nurse Rory, taking video of the stocky unshaven bloke. This gets it done in his head, not that he's going to tell us shit about it, and when he summons her to action -- "Twenty minutes, the planet burns. Run to your loved ones and say goodbye, or stay and help me!" -- you can't blame her for telling him to go fuck himself. Maybe if you actually said one thing that made sense and wasn't just a bunch of scriptwriter tomfoolery, she'd trust you.
Instead, she yanks the Doctor over to a car -- surprising the old man who just got out of it -- and slams the Doctor's tie in the door, to keep him still. So he'll answer her questions, instead of just being annoying. But then you've got the Doctor pointing at the very real blackout overhead, and the evidence of the space snake that is also a dog-and-man, so really the show just made him act annoying so she would do this, which sort of makes her annoying too. She tells the old man to stop whining at her and go get some coffee, and they discuss once again everything that has happened so far in the episode.
He tosses her the carved-face apple, which is still fresh, and gives her some Tinkerbell clap speech about "Just twenty minutes, just believe me for twenty minutes," which is essentially as repetitive and reaching-for-meaning as "Don't blink" or the entirety of obnoxious "Midnight" or any of the other times this shit has been so fake instead of being real. They stare at each other and he says it sixteen more times, and the TARDIS starts singing, and there's a Magical Moment™ In which things go slow-motion -- there's even a psychotically intense lens flare -- so you know that something is unlocking in Amy on a personal level and she'll never be the same and her illusions about being a grown-ass woman are unfounded and based on daddy issues, courtesy the Doctor, that have turned her into a stripper, and it's all beautiful and shit.
So yes, she believes, she's ungrowing, she holds up the keyfob and unlocks the car door, and they run over and grab Rory. Who is her boyfriend. And who has been standing a few yards away the whole time she's been dressed like porn and throwing this hot young Doctor man around the place, but they just didn't notice each other. Now it's Rory's turn to not answer simple goddamn questions, like what's special about the man-and-dog, because he's got to stutter about the Raggedy Doctor for a bit and finally explain that man-and-dog is also in a coma in the hospital... And the Doctor finishes his sentences, because this is the clue.
Rory gets a good line -- "What? There's a Prisoner Zero too?" -- before all kinds of barking and spaceships interrupt the Doctor's faceoff with Zero, and the Doctor realizes that not even being the man-and-dog will hide Zero if he causes a massive electrical/technological disturbance, so he sonics this whole area of town and things go wild: Lampposts exploding, sirens going off, a lady on a Jazzy that goes mad (hilarious, and also seemingly stressful for old Rory to watch) and rushes out into traffic, and so on.
The eyeball ship appears to scan the area, and the Doctor blows up a phone booth, but this somehow destroys his screwdriver, and the eyeball loses interest. The Doctor whines about this, and the man-and-dog vanish and slip down a helpful drain grate. So now we've got no TARDIS, no screwdriver, and seventeen minutes. And they don't even know how crummy it is, because also Zero is now at the hospital being all kinds of menacing.
Amy and the Doctor make a nonverbal agreement to actually use complete sentences, since they have seventeen minutes to chat and fuck about, and he confirms for her that yes, the dog-and-man has been hiding in her house for twelve years, which is a blip to a Multiform like Zero, and that it was the Doctor who led the eyeball ships to Earth today, rather than them showing up when it first escaped, the answer to a question nobody cares about, because of that time the eyeball saw him through the crack. "They're only late because I am," he says, and then goes back to be annoyingly uncommunicative, snatching Rory's phone and doing stuff to it while they talk about the Doctor and how Amy used to make Rory dress up like him (when they were kids, don't be gross) and how these are all coma patients, which we knew. Eight comas, eight disguises for Prisoner Zero -- including a dog this time, because there's a dog in the guy's coma dream. Clearly, what this means is that the Doctor needs a laptop.
Which is fine? Except the only reason he's acting like this is for the emotionally manipulative, dorky moment when we get the punchline to why he demanded the phone, or why he needs a laptop, or who he is, or why we only have twenty minutes, and the whole episode is like that: People acting woefully annoying in order to set up jokes and cynical "WOW!" moments later, and it's obnoxious, because if you could tell a story properly you wouldn't be constantly having to hit us over the head with how amazing and magical every fucking thing is: They would just be amazing. All on their own.
"Your friend, what was his name? Not him, the good-looking one." Rory's offended, and even more offended when he realizes they're talking about Jeff, and the Doctor only remembers him and his hotness because he needs a laptop for whatever reason, so he sends still-confused Rory and up-for-anything Amy off to evacuate the hospital so he can go hit on Jeff some more.
Jeff's busy masturbating when the Doctor gets to Gran's house, so there's a bit of urban fervor before the Doctor can seize his computer and babble some more. "The sun's gone wibbly, so right now, somewhere, there's going to be a big video conference call. All the experts in the world panicking at once, and do you know what they need? Me. Ah, and here they all are. All the big boys. NASA, Jodrell Bank, Tokyo Space Centre, Patrick Moore..." He offers to introduce Gran to this last, who is apparently "a devil" with the ladies, and then decides to annoy the global security community at large.
"I know, you should switch me off. But before you do, watch this! Fermat's Theorem. The proof, and I mean the real one, never seen before. Poor old Fermat, got killed in a duel before he could write it down. My fault, I slept in. Oh, and here's an oldie but a goodie: Why electrons have mass! And a personal favorite of mine, faster-than-light travel, with two diagrams and a joke! Look at your screens: Whoever I am, I'm a genius."
If you're the sort of person who enjoys it when fictional people tell you how freakin' awesome they are, then you are going to love this season of Doctor Who. (Or should I say, "Basically... It rocks!") But if you find that sort of thing flesh-crawlingly dorky, then I would suggest you avert your eyes if, at any point, the Doctor starts talking. And I'm not being unsympathetic, because I completely understand why geeks find this construction funny ("a, b, c...n, so basically x," where a through n, inclusive, are bullet points in a list and x is an unexpected summation, either comically understated or grammatically surprising, or sarcastic in some way), because it's how their brains work. It's why Monty Python and puns are funny: The subversion of expected outcomes into absurdity. But for the rest of us it's a horribly embarrassing rhetorical theme, and worst of all it's a tic: The Doctor's already done it twice in this episode and I left it out because I don't approve.
So now we follow up with why he needed the phone, which is because he's writing a computer virus, about which a, b, c ... n also equals x, and sending it from the phone for reasons he's not telling us to all of the geniuses onscreen. It's a "reset command" which "gets in the wi-fi" and "resets every counter it can find." Basically, the entire world will begin transmitting ZERO at the same time, making -- another favorite Moffat theme -- the Prisoner and the message the same thing. Then he hands the worlds' leaders over to Jeff, and we get another speech that means nothing but rising music and believe-in-yourself treacle, delivered to someone we couldn't care less about.
"In ten minutes, you're going to be a legend. In ten minutes, everyone is going to be offering you any job you want. But first, you have to be magnificent. You have to make them trust you and get them working. This is it, Jeff. Right here, right now. This is when you fly. Today's the day you save the world."
Barf. Just believe him for twenty minutes, Random Dude. Just twenty minutes.
Running, running, still very tattered and raggedy... These new credits -- they show both Time Vortices on the ad bumpers here on BBCA -- it's funny, and interesting, because the old credits, it was redshift/blueshift according to direction of travel (and golden that time that Rose did that thing). This is like ice, and fire.
Rory and Amy are fussing about outside the hospital blockade and trying to get the Doctor on the phone. There's a neat moment where we don't hear her conversation, and she goes, "Oh," and Rory asks what he said, and he said "Look in the mirror," because of course she's dressed like a stripper policewoman. And while that's a bit dodgy, her laugh when she figures it out is just wonderful. Ha-haa, she says. It's great. She puts her hair back up, and we see the Doctor has stolen a firetruck.
Out into the abandoned hallway comes the Peep Show lady, twins by the hand, and their heads twitching in the same directions, and the voices coming out of all three of them by turns, and Zero figures out he's doing the voices wrong: "So many mouths," she says, and that's scary enough, but then her teeth! Lots of choppy cuts back and forth as the thing chases them through the hospital while the Doctor, still on the phone, tries to get there on time.
"Oh, dear. Little Amelia Pond. I've watched you grow up. Twelve years, and you never even knew I was there." (Ack! Eugh!) "Little Amelia Pond, waiting for her magic Doctor to return. But not this time, Amelia." Of course, the Doctor comes flying through the window that Amy directed him to, and they face off. Zero knows what he is, and explains that if she drops the disguise the Atraxi will find and kill him: "If I am to die: Let there be fire." What a gorgeous line. The Doctor points out that Zero opened the crack, but apparently he's wrong. And again, there's the sense that every second of this episode is important, not because we're so clever but because the show needs us to see how clever it is:
"The cracks in the skin of the universe - don't you know where they came from? You don't, do you? The Doctor in the TARDIS doesn't know... The universe is cracked. The Pandorica will open. Silence will fall."
It's good to know there are more cracks than just this one, because that means the issue is parallel-related, like the Void, and that means timestreams and timebubbles and all sorts of fun things. The Pandorica, that sounds interesting, like Pandora's Box but crossed with a calliope. Silence is probably a proper noun, if my instincts are right. Of course, she could have said "Medusa Cascade" and "Whatever Schism" and "Shadow Proclamation" and we could be in any other season at all. Having had it both ways I must say that I do hate being unspoiled with this show, because in writing about it, it's easier to plaster over the horrible bits and focus on the point when you know what the point is.
Maybe there's more, but right then one of the fifty brilliant plans starts happening, and all of Jeff's team are sending the ZERO message everywhere, and the Atraxi are suddenly alerted. Zero points out that they still can't actually find her, and then something neat: The phone he's using, Rory's phone, contains pictures of all his comatose bodies. I didn't see that one coming. The Doctor congratulates himself -- "Who da man?" -- and immediately thinks better of it. This one time.
They discuss how Zero's out of options, but then suddenly she doesn't need coma people, she can just put Amy into a coma, because they were housemates for so long. So she does that. More creepiness, though: She takes the form of the Doctor, which confuses him until little Amelia steps out from behind him, grinning horribly. She's dreaming of the Doctor, in her coma, just like she's been dreaming her whole life. That's how bad he hurt her. The girl who was pragmatic enough, but still vulnerable enough, to pray to Santa: He's the Crack.
The Doctor says no, and because he's always right I guess he's right, but he thinks that she's dreaming of him because she can hear him talking in the room. (Which, how come that didn't happen with everybody else?) So he starts yelling at Amy to remember the house that time, the secret door, and what she saw when she went in. More flashy-flash memory stuff, and Zero takes the form of Zero. The snake with the teeth. That's pretty brilliant, as well. There's so much going on it's hard to fit in context, but looking back there are lots of neat moments here. So the Atraxi teleport Zero out of the hospital, and she hisses one more time: "Silence, Doctor. Silence will fall."
Yeah, definitely a person, or a place. "Fall" as in battle, not as in silence. So the atmosphere is okay, and the Atraxi take off, but then the Doctor calls them back -- apologizing to Rory about his cell bill -- and yells at them. "I didn't say you could go! Article 57 of the Shadow Proclamation. This is a fully established, level 5 planet, and you were going to burn it? What, did you think no one was watching? You lot, back here. Now!"
Rory's appalled -- "Did he just save the world from aliens and then bring all the aliens back again?" -- but the Doctor, who is at least a little nervous about this for a second, realizes he needs to dress for their arrival. Amy watches him dress, grinning adorably, even when Rory tells her to turn her back. Can't blame you.
They run out on the roof and a giant eyeball scans him while he gets dressed in his Official Eleven Outfit -- he chats it up about which tie goes with this outfit, the usual -- and runs down the rules: Earth is not a threat, Earth is not guilty. But is this world protected? It thinks and thinks: From the Rachnoss and the Dalek Vault all the way to the rubber monsters of the Sixties... And then all Ten Doctors, in rapid succession, as the Atraxi get more and more terrified, and he asks again: What happened to all those bad guys?
"Hello, I'm the Doctor," he says, looking at the camera. "Basically..." a, b, c...n = x.
Much laughing and hugging and whatever, and then back to the Pond house to reacquaint himself with the TARDIS, who has recreated herself. He grins at her, from the door -- we don't see anything but light -- and shakes his head. "Oh, you sexy thing. Look at you!" They take off, and Amy stares after him, and closes her eyes. Burnt for believing, once again.
Cut to Amelia, out in the sunlight the morning after, hearing the TARDIS and smiling up into the sky... Amy wakes up. It's night. She stares out the window, too afraid to smile, too afraid to break the spell. When she moves, she moves fast, like an animal: Down the stairs, out into the garden in her nightie and slippers, and there he is. Just a few minutes later, in his complete outfit -- brown jacket, bowtie -- grinning like nothing, tapping her door proudly.
She makes fun of his bowtie and he woggles his eyebrows: "Yeah, it's cool. Bowties are cool." She cocks her head at him: "Are you from another planet?" Yes. And speaking of, does she want to go see them? All of them?
"All that stuff, the hospital, the spaceships, Prisoner Zero..."
He nods proudly. "Oh, don't worry. That's just the beginning. There's loads more!"
Not the point. All those amazing things were two years ago, she screams at him, and he jumps out of her swinging radius. So that's fourteen years, she shouts as he realizes: "Fourteen years since fish custard. Amy Pond, the girl who waited, you've waited long enough." She remembers, now that it's real. The swimming pool, the library, the swimming pool in the library. Although it's moved now, probably. She tells him she's not coming, and he reminds her that she wanted to, fourteen years ago.
"I grew up."
He promises to "fix that," still gross, and continues to tempt her -- she won't have to stay in her nightie since the TARDIS has clothes; the swimming pool possibly -- pretending she won't say no, and lets her in. She nearly cries at the new place, seeing it with us for the first time: Glass floors, banisters to places and platforms, glass pumps and typewriters on the console.
"You are so sure that I'm coming." And why? Because he's just like her: The Scottish girl in the English village. And the reason he knows that matters is that she kept her accent. The things she held onto; the real her, under the cracks. He's one of them, and more importantly he has to be, because otherwise he broke her, and that's unacceptable. He has to reverse the damage. The cracks.
"Can you get me back for tomorrow morning?" Going by his track record? She won't tell him why, but it's been two years. She stares up at the ceiling, already convinced as he spins the wheels and pulls the levers, and asks why her (again), because people always have a reason. "Do I look like people?" He didn't, fourteen years ago. He looked like somebody she could trust. Now, does he look like "people"?
Yes.
He promises he only wants her because he's lonely, talking to himself all the time, but I think it's a lie. There's something strange about her, there always was. He chose her the second she gave him that apple with the face on, maybe earlier than that. When she asked if she could come with him, fourteen years ago, he said "Of course." A steampunky screen shows a sine wave oscillation, and across it spreads the Crack. You can barely hear him promise, it's thrumming so loudly. He shuts it off, taps it decisively, and goes lighthearted again. It's a tiny moment, but a scary one: There's something about Amy Pond, and he knows it, and we don't.
He asks if the TARDIS is freaking her out, like they sometimes get, and she says she's just happy he's not "a madman with a box" after all. True. He giggles and assures her that is exactly what he is. Also true. If you plan on going on an epic quest, there are some things to look out for. Like a guy with magic powers who appears out of nowhere, and seems to be a nutter. They take off into space, and time.
Up in Amy's bedroom is her childhood: Plasticine TARDIS, the Raggedy Doctor in blue, Amelia in her nightie; crayon TARDIS; puppets made of paper cups and clothespins. Little dollies of them both, hair grown wild. There is a suitcase full of pictures and poppets, full of dreams. While she lay in bed dreaming of Amelia, and her little red coat, smiling up into the sun, waiting for her Doctor, there in the closet was her wedding dress, waiting for tomorrow morning.
She grew up, like we all do. Broken or not, like we all are: She grew up. But he'll soon fix that.
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