Where To Start

Watching Doctor Who sounds daunting.  789 episodes tell 229 individual stories across 33 seasons over 50 years, encompassing all of time and space.  It holds the record for most episodes of a science fiction television show, ever.  More than all six series of Star Trek put together.  And for some reason right in the middle there's a tall guy with curly hair and a twelve-foot scarf offering you a Jelly Baby, which is a problem if you’re American because we don’t know what a jelly baby is.

If you’re new to the show (or have only watched New Who), choosing where to start seems difficult.  If you’re particularly ambitious, you can start at the beginning and keep skipping around to a relative minimum to get the maximum effect of revelations and story arcs.  And then go back and fill in the gaps until you've watched every one. That's what I did.

But there are easier, less time-consuming ways of enjoying the show.  Many of you have lives, which I hear are a thing.  This is a guide for people interested in watching this show but not sure where to begin.

If you're familiar with the new show and ready to dive into the Classic series, or just want to start there, here's my guide to Classic Who.

Here's what you need to know:

The Short Musical Version, courtesy Craig Ferguson

Doctor Who follows the adventures of an alien known only as The Doctor.  His ship, the TARDIS, travels anywhere in time and space.  On the outside, it looks like 1960s police box...

... but it's bigger on the inside.

He travels with Companions, usually human women for reasons best left to subtext, and together, they travel everywhere and everywhen, fighting monsters and turning worlds upside-down before falling out of that world and into the next.

It's the greatest premise a TV show could possibly have - it can go anywhere, be anything.  Its stories range from whimsical comedy to powerful drama to horror to anything else, and often all of them at once.  Its realm is all of imagination and storytelling.

The Doctor sometimes changes his form in a "regeneration", which you might be best to discover yourself.  Consequently, the Doctor has been played by 11 different actors.

"Classic Who" refers to the original program (1963 - 1989, covering the first 7 Doctors); it was followed by a 1996 TV movie with the 8th Doctor, and "New Who" starting in 2005, covering Doctors 9 through 11.


Sample Episodes

Not sure if the show is for you?  Just want to sample a few episodes?  Try one of these:

Blink (Series 3)
The Eleventh Hour (Series 5)
The Impossible Astronaut (Series 6)

They're all available on Netflix Instant, and that friend who's always trying to rope you into the show definitely has at least one of those on hand.


So, where do you begin?

Although it's a continuous show, it's a show that constantly reinvents itself, so there are many good starting places.  Personally, I began with the original episodes from 1963 and moved on more or less in order, skipping to episodes that sounded interesting based on their Wikipedia description.  However, as the old series was incredibly low budget and had more old-fashioned pacing, it may not be the best place to begin for most people.


Starting With New Who

Generally, the best place to start is with the first season or series of New Who, generally referred to as Series One.

The first five episodes are a bit rough, but stick through them - it pays off in a big way.  Despite the uneven start, the season is an absolutely brilliant introduction to Doctor Who.

Once you're into Season 2 and you're getting comfortable with things, it's probably worth checking out a few classic episodes; at least some of them will definitely be worth your while.  My Classic Who guide gives some suggestions.

If you're in a hurry to catch up to the episodes currently airing, the current Doctor started at the beginning of Series 5.

His first episode, The Eleventh Hour, is a brilliant introduction.  That said, there are several episodes that will work much better dramatically (and will make more sense) if you're already familiar with a few concepts and characters.  So even if you do start with The Eleventh Hour, after watching the second episode of the series, The Beast Below, it's worth going back and watching these episodes of New Who to catch up on a few important points:

SERIES ONE
Dalek
The Empty Child
The Doctor Dances
Bad Wolf
The Parting of the Ways

SERIES TWO
The Christmas Invasion

SERIES THREE
Blink

SERIES FOUR
Silence In the Library
Forest of the Dead

Sit back and have fun!

And finally, here's a link to my guide to watching Classic Who.

Guide to Watching Classic Who

Okay.  If you're reading this, you're really diving into the deep end.  Don't worry; it's totally worth it.  This truly is an amazing show, and the deeper you go, the more wonders you'll discover.

Classic Who stories all are serials; the episodes are about 25 minutes, and the complete stories are usually 4 episodes.  A single story is generally found on DVD in a collection of all the episodes to that story.  Because they're both older and serialized, the longer ones can feel really slow if you watch all the episodes at once since they're paced as individual episodes, not a 100 minute movie. It can bet helpful to take a break between episodes.

The first six seasons, from 1963-69, are in black-and-white.  Out of the 253 episodes produced in the 1960s, 106 episodes from 27 different serials are missing, destroyed in the '70s to free up storage space before someone realized people might actually want to watch these things again (and home video made it profitable to do so).  The audio from all the missing episodes is intact, meaning these episodes can still be experienced through "reconstructions", which take the surviving audio recordings and set them to on-set photos, telesnaps, and any surviving clips.  However, it's probably worth saving the missing stories until you're really comfortable with all the regulars appearing in them.

If you've been watching the New Series and want to sample the old series, here's a list of 12 essential stories - one story from each Doctor, representing one of their best, as well as an additional few stories that are must-see serials regardless.  There are also a few other suggestion for each Doctor.

William Hartnell - The First Doctor


The First Doctor's early stories play him as a mysterious and often sinister figure; over the course of his first season, he gradually becomes the more heroic figure we know.  Hartnell gave the Doctor an extraordinary gentleness and an almost childish sense of humor and wonder underneath the grouchy old man exterior.  But this little old man could also be terrifying to his enemies when he wanted to be.



The Aztecs

The first season, naturally, struggles to find its feet, but its highlights are fantastic, and The Atzecs represents great Doctor Who early on.  Rich characterizations and dialogue in a tightly plotted and paced adventure as the Doctor's companion, Barbara, tries to save the Aztec culture from destruction by turning them away from human sacrifices.  But the Doctor insists that they cannot change it, and the High Priest will do anything to keep his power from being taken away.


OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rescue, The Time Meddler



Patrick Troughton - The Second Doctor

Troughton's Doctor was funnier and much sillier than Hartnell's, but he used his clownish mood to hide a staggering intelligence and a brilliantly manipulative nature.



The Mind Robber

The Second Doctor and his companions accidentally stumble into Land of Fiction, where all the characters ever created in Fiction are real, but can only say the words their writers gave them.  The TARDIS explodes, leaving them no escape as the Master of the Land of Fiction tries to turn the companions into fiction... and the Doctor into something else entirely.  It's even more insane than it sounds.

The Invasion

The Doctor protects near-future Earth from an alliance between a power-mad owner of a technology company and a familiar alien menace revealed halfway in.  Fast-paced, thrilling story with a fantastic human villain, great supporting characters, and plenty of action.  Two of the eight episodes are missing, but the DVD covers these with surprisingly effective animation.


OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: Tomb of the Cybermen, The War Games


Jon Pertwee - The Third Doctor

Pertwee played the Doctor as a swashbuckling action hero, despite the appearance of a glam, aging dandy.  His early stories found him stranded on Earth by the Time Lords after the events of The War Games.  On Earth, he worked somewhat reluctantly with a military organization, UNIT, to fight off alien invasions.  In his second season, rival Time Lord The Master, was introduced as his arch nemesis.  After The Three Doctors, his ability to travel in time and space was restored, and he resumed his travels.

Carnival of Monsters

The TARDIS lands on what at first appears to be an early 20th century ship, but when they're attacked by a Plesiosaur, and then begin to relive everything in a loop, it's obvious something insane is afoot.  A witty, wildly imaginative yarn driven by colorful characters and highlighted by the Drashigs, one of the greatest classic monsters.


OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: Spearhead From Space, The Ambassadors of Death, Terror of the Autons, The Curse of Peladon, The Three Doctors, The Time Warrior




Tom Baker - The Fourth Doctor

The bohemian, scarf-wearing, Jelly Baby-consuming Fourth Doctor has long been the most popular and beloved of the Classic Doctors.  Numerous American fans began watching his stories on PBS in the 70s and 80s.  He played the Doctor for seven seasons, from 1974 - 1981.  His early stories tend more toward horror, his later ones toward comedy, and his final season toward intellectual sci-fi.

Genesis of the Daleks

One of the great unquestioned classics of Who, a dark, terrifying, and powerful epic that belies its low-budget TV origins to deliver a staggering punch even today.

Pyramids of Mars

The Doctor faces Sutekh, an alien who was once worshipped as an Egyptian god... and who, if released, will unleash his godlike power to destroy all life.  A witty script complements an intelligent, complex horror yarn.  It also serves as a great showcase for Sarah Jane Smith, rightly the most beloved of the companions.


City of Death

What better way to wash down two dark horror epics than one of the funniest episodes of the show, written by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame) and including a cameo by John Cleese?  A delightful comedy built on a genuinely intriguing story you'd best discover yourself.


OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: The Brain of Morbius, The Seeds of Doom, The Deadly Assassin, The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, Full Circle


Peter Davison - The Fifth Doctor


Peter Davison played a thoughtful, patient Doctor, but he was still capable of fighting all manner of monsters and villains.  Davison always gave the role everything he had, despite scripts that ranged from sublime to hideous.  Despite his efforts, his era is a bit uneven, but it's still a very good show more often than not, and occasionally brilliant.

Kinda or The Visitation

Choosing a single episode to perfectly explain the Fifth Doctor's era is difficult, not least because about half of his stories are straightforward and normal, and the other half are crazy and experimental. So which one to start with depends on which kind you like more.

If you prefer Doctor Who at it's maddest, Kinda is a philosophically and thematically rich adventure set in a strange, dreamlike world. It's roughly what you'd expect a David Lynch version of the show to look like.

If, on the other hand, you just want the Doctor fighting off monsters from destroying Earth, The Visitation has the Doctor and his companions facing down aliens in 1666 London. It's not an interesting story, exactly, but it's nicely-paced, witty, and exciting.

The Caves of Androzani 

The Fifth Doctor's last and greatest story - a riveting action yarn that, thanks to tight scripting by Robert Holmes and stunning direction by Graeme Harper, looks and feels like a sci-fi film rather than a little old TV show.  The plotting is deliciously complex, the characterizations and dialogue brilliant, and the ending deeply powerful.  Peter Davison always gave the role his all, but he was never better.


OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: Earthshock, Snakedance, Mawdren Undead, Enlightenment






Colin Baker - The Sixth Doctor

Colin Baker's bombastic, unstable, but oddly funny Sixth Doctor at first embraced violence to fight the horrors of the universe.  Even when he softened, he was always a darker figure than the Doctor had been since the earliest days.  Baker's approach to the Doctor is compelling, but he had an unfortunate scarcity of good stories, and an even more unfortunate costume.  In the midst of his first full season, the series was put on hiatus.  When it returned, it was with a season half the length of earlier seasons.  This season, Trial of a Time Lord, started as the best Baker's Who had been, then nose-dived halfway in to the worst of his era.  The ratings crashed, hard, and Baker had only 11 stories (if you count Trial as four distinct stories), of which fewer than half are good.  It's a difficult era to love, but there are still good stories and great bits in it.

Vengeance On Varos

Baker shines in Varos, one of his best stories.  It's a flawed and nasty but intelligent and compelling satire of television violence, set on an intriguing world.


OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: Revelation of the Daleks, Trial of a Time Lord


Sylvester McCoy - The Seventh Doctor

After a rough but steadily improving first season crawling out of the hole Trial of a Timelord had dug, McCoy's Who rose to the greatest heights the show had ever reached.  The stories were brilliant, his companion, Ace, was the coolest he'd ever had, and at the center, McCoy's Doctor was absolutely fascinating - a master manipulator inside a whimsical clown, pushing the underlying concept of Troughton's Doctor to its limits.  Despite the show's resurgent genius, however, the rating never recovered, and the show was quietly cancelled in 1989.  But McCoy's short second and third seasons stand as some of the finest storytelling in all of Who.

Remembrance of the Daleks

As the Daleks converge on 1963 London for some nefarious purpose, the Doctor decides to take the sort of drastic action he usually avoids, to spectacular results.  Exciting, fast-paced yarn with wonderful characters and an awesome showing for Ace, the Doctor's final classic companion... and one of the most complex portraits of the Doctor himself at the center of it.
 

OTHER STORIES TO WATCH: The Greatest Show In the Galaxy, The Curse of Fenric, Survival

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:

* * *

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.

They Keep Killing Suzie

Season one of Torchwood has been playing with a weighty running theme of death and resurrection.  They Keep Killing Suzie tackles this straight on, and comes to an interesting conclusion (and effectively hints at where the season is going).  There’s a gaping hole revealed in the final moments that unravels everything, leading to a laughable conclusion. Until then, this is good enough that I’m tempted to give it a good rating. Alas, the last three minutes go all to the blazes anyway. But still, almost is in the upper echelon of this season.

For one thing, it’s great to have the characters written and performed with some semblance of personality. (twice in a row, no less!) All of them seem a little bit more like actual people, and even somewhat likable. Ianto even comes across fairly well, so long as you forget everything he did in every previous episode.  It's especially important in Gwen's case, of course, since most of the story concerns her taken hostage and forced to chauffeur a resurrected Suzie. With solid characterizations, the clever, twisty story is gripping without needing much in the way of outright violence.

But did Suzie seriously have a backup plan in case of her death? One that relied so totally on things going exactly her way? I mean, the plan itself is clever, but that goes beyond a stretch. That’s just ridiculous.  Still, this would be at least somewhat forgivable, but she goes on and on about how she just had to get away from “the darkness.” It’s basically her primary motivation for coming back. Except she planned it all out before she died.  Philosophically, the concept is interesting - there is life after death, but it's just emptiness only interrupted by some Lovecraftian horror.  But wrapping it in such a contradictory story sucks a lot of the power out of the concept.

And the last few minutes are an awful conclusion. Early, Jack makes it very clear that Gwen has just gotten herself completely fired. After saving her, a slow-motion montage to a lousy (and obvious) song where he smiles at her, back at the job. It’s not quite as bad as Ianto still existing after Cyberwoman, but still, it suggests that nothing would get Jack to fire anyone... and gets at a larger problem with this season: there aren't any consequences.  The rest of the season will push that idea to the limit, and then break that limit.

Speaking of which, we finally learn why Jack keeps Ianto around. It’s not exactly a shock (actually, pretty obvious), but still, now it’s explicitly stated. And makes no sense whatsoever. Before this episode, Ianto has failed to accomplish a single thing for Torchwood besides 1) nearly getting them all killed; 2) getting two innocent civilians brutally murdered; 3) making coffee; and 4) ceaselessly whining about whatever comes to mind. (Admittedly, both the coffee and the whine were pretty good as those things go.) So the idea that Jack has even the slightest interest is… well, it’s sort of believable, given that it is Jack, after all, but it’s not credible that Ianto stays in Torchwood for it. Plus, the dialogue? Is that seriously supposed to be innuendo-laced banter? Did Chibnol write the epilogue? He did, didn’t he? That would explain so much.

Nonetheless, it’s yet another episode that gets within spitting distance of being pretty good. There’s a good show hiding in here, if the lead writer would just get out of the way...

RATING:

* * 1/2

Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts

Ooh, I kind of like this episode. Mind you, it falls to pieces on examination, but like Peter J. Hammond from Small Worlds, Toby Whithouse actually seems to have an idea of what to do with this show. You know, with aliens and humor and character development and stuff. Granted, he’s ultimately defeated by the show itself – most of the characters are pretty unsympathetic, even if he does a much better job writing them than most. This means that it takes a good while to get into the story, but once it does, it’s actually entertaining. Like Hammond, he’s definitely on the right track.

This is finally Tosh’s episode, and at last, we get a bit of character development beyond the “Asian, therefore computer person, therefore nerd” sterotype she’s been stuck in on the rare occasions her existence was acknowledged. Whithouse is a bit constricted by it, but at least he does it well, digging into her loneliness and emotional fragility with real depth and feeling. Even though her character has been a total blank this entire series until now, Naoko Mori has given consistently good performances, however weak her material. With some good writing, she nails it.

For a show about an organization that hunts aliens, it’s strange that up until now, the seventh episode, there’s only really been one actual alien (that sex-crazed gas in Day One). Now, finally, there’s a good alien. Daniela Denby-Ashe is a lovely actress, and the effects crew seem determined to make the alien version of her every bit as beautiful, and they pretty much succeed.

Whithouse does a great job with Jack. He doesn’t give us any real revelations, but he goes over the ground very nicely. Ianto still does little but wallow in despair, but at least it’s kept to a minimum. Whithouse can’t undo the affair between Gwen and Owen, but again, he pulls it off with wit and depth. Owen finally comes across as a competent guy in his own areas, and someone who might actually be useful to Torchwood. Whithouse also tempers his douchebaggery with a sort of rougishness that at least makes it vaguely plausible that Gwen would fall for him.

There is, of course, the expected smut, as Tosh and the alien have their own affair, but even though Whithouse can’t raise the material above smut, he at least makes it entertaining.  That's a lot of the problem with the series under Chibnall: on the one hand, he wants to make an ambitious and compelling story, and on the other hand, he turns to bawdy sexploitation at every turn - and immature, PG-13 sexploitation, at that.  The smuttiness tends to undermine the drama - it takes the tremendously steady hand of a Paul Verhoeven or a Jess Fink to do both simultaneously - and the self-serious, highly emotional tone sucks all the fun out of the tendency for all the characters to have sex with each other or whatever cropped up this episode. (or, at the very least, wear a metal bikini for no reason)

The plot itself isn’t terribly original, but it’s not bad. The whole “reading people’s thoughts can be depressing” theme is pretty ordinary, but it is an improvement on what we’ve been getting so far. The climax is nicely done, too, with a good little bit of Jack darkness.

That said, while some of the dialogue is good, it feels like Chibnall got his hands on the script and upped the soap opera dialogue. There are times when the dialogue is genuinely good, which is why the occasional flashes of the usual sort of dialogue ring even more false than usual. And it is a bit slow to draw you in and get going, though again, Withouse is constrained by what the show itself has been doing so far.

In the end, it isn’t great, but it’s decent and fairly entertaining, if not quite compelling. Like Small Worlds, it shows that there’s a good show hiding in here. And unlike that one, at least this isn’t going to be followed by (shudder) another Chibnoll-written episode.  We're actually getting to very watchable episodes in a row.  Normally, I'd still probably stick this with the dreaded "not actually bad, but not good, either" two-and-a-half stars, but after realizing I'm pretty much the only person who found the weak plotting and characterization of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship to overwhelm the sheer whimsy and joy of the overload of concepts, I'm feeling generous.

Besides, I like Tosh.  We need more Tosh episodes.  Heck, if they somehow managed to make a Torchwood Season 5 starring Tosh, I really could care less about the infinite continuity horror it would create.

RATING:

* * *

• Much as I like Tosh and the episode, it's worth noting that it's Tosh's fault that this gets out of control.  That fact that it's actually handled really well for once makes me want to ignore it, but they really do go to the well of the team screwing up and causing the plot a little too often. I suspect this was entirely unintentional, but by the end of the season it gets hilariously out of hand.
• Number of plots caused by the incompetence of the Torchwood team: 5/7.