Firstly, allow me to apologize for the late review of this episode. The Memorial Day holiday weekend threw me off and thus pushed back when I would normally sit down and watch the episode, thus causing this delay. Forgive me? Thank you.
Secondly, holy wow. This episode was a big one, wasn’t it?
In this week’s episode, we continue the story started in “The Hungry Earth.” The Doctor and friends come face to face with the Earth’s true and original inhabitants, who are ready to wage war against the surface. As tensions are high and everyone is ready to slit each other’s throat, it’s up to the Doctor to attempt to change the future and create some sort of peace. But can peace really be created between two races who desperately want control of the surface, and what will be the ultimate cost?
Follow me behind the cut for some thoughts. And, as a note, MASSIVE SPOILERS will be discussed. Like, game changing big. That’s right. If you haven’t watched this episode yet, turn away. But if you have…
I was a huge fan of last week’s episode, “The Hungry Earth.” It had seemed that without Moffat writing, the episodes just weren’t really worth watching. However, Chris Chibnail proved me wrong, as it was an excellent started to a great dual set of episodes. Sometimes watching a first episode in a two-parter can be quiet difficult to deal with due to the wait, but this one worked really well, as both parts were fairly phenomenal. Great story, great writing, great acting, and FANTASTIC make up all around. Seriously – thumbs up to the entire cast and crew.
However, what I want to focus on is the last ten-fifteen minutes that I’m sure everyone wants to talk about: the crack in the wall. See, earlier in my reviews of the show, I had bashed Moffat’s choice to not follow Davies’ routine of only revealing the Big Bad at the very end. The more and more we see the Crack handled though, the more I respect this creative decision. See, now we’ve gone from the Davies’ routine to the Whedon routine: we see snips of it to help build up tension until the final climactic reveal and ultimate battle. It’s something that I doubted at the beginning, but now fully endorse, and the end of this episode is the perfect example of why.
As the episode ends, we get two huge changes to our previous notions with the show. The first is that the Doctor sticks his hand inside the crack and pulls out what is ultimately revealed as a charred piece of the TARDIS. Holy wow! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I got chills when he held up the piece, literally shouting “Oh no!” at the TV. I know that shows like this often spell out certain doom for our heroes, but this was a very cool way for Moffat and co. to insert the future into the season. We’d all been speculating about how the Crack was created and what it means, but now we get our second definitive piece of evidence as to what is going on – a piece of the freakin’ TARDIS! It’s a great way to build up dramatic tension and keep us as the viewer intrigued to the future of the show, especially when the Doctor is keeping this piece of information to himself since obviously Amy can not know.
The second thing, though, was absolutely heartbreaking while at the same time an amazing move by the show – the death and erasing of Rory. Now, I never really liked Rory, but understood his general importance, especially with Amy. We needed him to help keep a weird sort of tension between her and the Doctor, as she obviously has feelings for him and he obviously wants her to not get too lost in his world. But not only did they kill Rory, they erased him from all of reality in a really sad seen as we literally saw Amy lose all of her memories of him. If that didn’t get you at least a little bit, then I’d imagine you probably should stop watching Doctor Who because at this point, if you have no attachment, you probably won’t get it. Me, though? I felt terrible for Amy, but at the same time I think the show set an amazing precedent. There’s a certain unspoken underline to the show that “everything will be OK.” Now, Doctor Who has proven as a show that it’s not afraid to destroy everything. It took the leading female’s reason for staying human away, but to the point where she doesn’t even know it. It’s absolutely tragic, but it sets this notion that really, anything can happen to the characters. It is no longer definite that it will all be ok in the end, and everyone will go home happy. That’s wonderful.
Continued belowWill we see Rory again? Maybe. But if the final moments of this episode compared with the opening moments of last week’s are any indication, the future isn’t as set in stone as we pretend.
Seriously, though – when we look at this and last week’s episode as a whole, we truly have a great story. Matt Smith has once again proven himself as a great Doctor, trying his best to create positive relations between the two species, and Karen Gillan has done a great job as his companion. She really brings a humorous and human element into the show where Smith spends his time running around trying to fix everything. However, as they’re both slowly learning, they can’t do everything perfectly. The supporting cast also did a great job of matching wits with everyone. There was a moment in there when I thought the Doctor might end up with two companions! But alas, it was not so.
And I have to mention it one more time – the make up? Oh man. Fantastic.
All in all, I’m really happy with this episode and the direction the show has taken. I don’t like when everything is peachy squeaky clean, and I also don’t like when we get a lot of filler episodes. So far, this is the first episode (or set of episodes) not written by Moffat that we can really define as non-filler, and they were great. It goes to prove that Doctor Who is the best science fiction program on TV at the moment.
