I'm very firmly in the 'no pre-season spoilers please' corner, and I'd only vaguely caught part of the trailer on TV once prior to yesterday evening's broadcast. So, apart from knowing from the end of Pond Life that all wasn't well between Amy and Rory I went into last night's episode as naively as I could.
Wow. Just that. Wow.
From the moment we see the massive Dalek statue on Skaro it's clear we're in for something special. And Skaro again? Wow! The Dalek sleeper agents were impressive, but the cadavers coming to life and converting was very much the stuff of nightmares and it's good to see that the series can still produce iconic scary or unsettling moments.
When Jenna Louise Coleman appeared I thought 'that looks like - no, it can't be, she's not supposed to appear until Christmas!'. I checked with my good lady who was equally confused. It's impressive that secrets like this can be kept back, despite pre-season screenings. I recall with the start of series 4 that RTD had a separate pre-screening version made of Partners In Crime to avoid giving away that Rose was returning. Maybe The Moff trusts the press and the fortunate public more..? Regardless, JLC was brilliant - very confident and natural on screen. I don't know if she'll be coming back as Oswin as the companion (nor do I want to - spoilers!), but either way I'm looking forward to her joining the programme permanently, based on this performance.
It's an oddball concept, the Daleks asking for the Doctor's help, and it might have been scarier if they'd already tried sending someone else down to the asylum and they'd failed. But any criticism is really only me clutching at straws, essentially, because fundamentally there was nothing wrong with this episode at all and it's easily the strongest series opener since the show returned in 2005.
Dusty, broken and insane Daleks are definitely more unnerving than a gleaming massed army. Thankfully the fairground ride-style Paradigm Daleks from Mark Gatiss' 2010 episode Victory of The Daleks took a back seat and much of the action involved the bronzed 'armoured tanks' of the RTD era. It's possibly a shame that so much publicity was issued before about all the Classic Series Daleks being lined up for this episode, because the viewers didn't see much of them at all and it seemed they were only there for background set dressing and not getting involved in the main action.
Particular delights for me were the Doctor's putdown 'you're just a tricycle with a roof' to an unarmed Dalek. Also the control room throb when Rory accidentally reawakened the first Dalek, and the doors from Power of The Daleks! I'm assuming the nude Dalek in the glass jar at the Parliament was a nod or homage to David Whittaker's novelisation of the first TV Dalek story back in the mid-60's (Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with The Daleks) which had a glass / crystal-cased Dalek leader. I thought at first it was Dalek Cahn back again, but presumably he'd be in the asylum if he was still around, the tentacled little nutjob!
Whilst I loved the twist at the end I loved even more the anticipation as the camera slowly panned round to show what the Doctor could see. I was half-expecting Oswin to be a kind of female Davros, slowly being Dalek-ised in a base unit. Maybe that would have been too horrible for the timeslot? The reanimated cadavers earlier were probably already pushing it a bit. I felt something was up early on, though, when Oswin was hacking into the Dalek systems so easily. I'm glad it turned out not to be just a convenience for moving the story along.
Patience is a virtue, and Moffat was reminding us of that in this episode. I was annoyed at first that suddenly Amy & Rory's marriage had broken down when it's been clear all along that they both deeply love each other. The longer the episode went on without addressing this the more frustrated I was getting, but when it happened blimey was it ever an emotional moment. Pure dramatic highpoint. Historically, drama has been filled with situations where one character makes a decision which they feel is in the best interest of an other, which then creates a 'situation' to address. One frank conversation early on would probably prematurely end nearly all of Shakespeare's plays for example! Moffat rehashes that scenario here. We get the feeling a conversation about how important children are should have been had a long time ago between Amy and Rory. And does Amy have an objection to adopting?
The episode has an interesting premise, if not necessarily a deep story to tell. It's a platform for mending Amy & Rory's relationship, for introducing the talents of Jenna Louise Coleman, for spooky-ing up the Daleks properly for the first time since 2005's Dalek, and for re-setting the Doctor / Dalek mythology by having them completely forget him. It's refreshing to think that they have to learn about him all over again. I wonder what will happen if Davros ever shows up again though..?
As ever with the new series it could be argued it was too convenient that the Doctor could transmat himself and the Ponds back into the TARDIS at the end and not need a struggle with a saucer full of Daleks, but it does fit and it's not that much of a short cut in the grand scheme of things. I do wonder if the Doctor's made to be a little too good at times, because things have to be wrapped up on time.
I also wonder who's idea it was to get JLC to give a cheesy glance to camera at the end when she says 'remember me'?! We will, of course, and I'll forgive the schmaltz because I've loved everything else so much up to that point.
Next time, Dinosaurs On A Spaceship. I wonder what the hell that can be about?! And I'll be missing it 'live' because we'll be at Hyde Park enjoying Terry Wogan, Kylie and 'Prom In The Park'!
Excellent stuff
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