Tom Salinsky

Hugo is not exactly a typical Scorsese movie, but then it’s hardly a typical anything. At first glance it appears to be a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie by way of Pixar featuring a cast of mo-cap characters in the Tintin mode. Why is Hit Girl from Kick Ass talking like a character from E Nesbitt? What’s Borat doing there? Is that Dracula? What the hell is going on?

What’s going on is that Scorsese is making a movie which kids could watch without being scarred for life. It’s his first stereoscopic movie (it isn’t 3D), and although as usual with this technique, objects don’t appear to have any real roundness and form, appearing more often as flat cut-outs which move away and toward the viewer, the illusion of depth is often very well used.

It’s easy to right-off movies which are visually dazzling as all style and no substance, but that’s not an entirely fair criticism here. First of all, it really does dazzle. The production design by Dante Ferretti is absolutely eye-popping throughout and Scorsese’s camera swoops and glides through it, and seamless CGI augmentations of it, as if the director is channelling David Fincher. The story is admittedly slender, but it doesn’t grind to a halt so we can admire the execution. The spectacle of it all is part of the point.

Because this is the story of the rediscovery of the works of Georges Méliès, by way of a clockwork robot which recreates one of his designs, when Hugo finally completes the restoration job. Méliès was a pioneer of cinema in an age when spectacle was the principal attraction of the medium. While on the one hand this legitimises Scorsese’s sudden indulgence in every pixel-pumping trick in his new digital handbook, it also creates a narrative distance. The ostensible hero is Asa Butterfield as the titular Hugo Cabret – all saucer-eyed stoicism and fierce introversion. But his function in the plot is to reveal and elevate Ben Kingsley, restrained and dignified as Méliès. As uninterested as Scorsese is Hugo, he isn’t that interested in Méliès either – this is really a love letter from a filmmaker to the medium as a whole.

Still, as gossamer-thin as this is, it is still a lot of fun, populated largely by cartoon characters, to be sure, but handsomely drawn ones, with any number of top British actors given ninety seconds each to make an impact. Richard Griffiths, looking rather like Billy Bunter in his 70s, and Frances de la Tour, who put me in mind of the drawings of James Thurber, briefly flirt through the medium of pets. Emily Mortimer looks doe-eyed at evil Borat, who in his impossibly bright blue uniform and with his gammy leg and black-gloved hand, comes off like a demented blend of Doctor Strangelove, the Child Catcher and the Conductor in the Polar Express. I’m still not entirely sure that was Sascha Baron Cohen and not Andy Serkis in a body stocking. Jude Law and Ray Winstone get one fairly brief scene each. Ray Winstone!!

Standing out are Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) who doles out great lumps of exposition with a twinkly stillness which is totally arresting, and luminous Chloë Grace Moretz, who handles the cut-glass English accent with aplomb. (Why is it that Scorsese requires English accents from every cast member – does that say “Paris” to the inhabitants of Boise Idaho?)

What’s frustrating is how sanitised this all is – not just that it’s kid-friendly – but how limited in scope and ambition this is. There’s no real pain, no cost to anything, preciously little jeopardy – even the runaway train looks too pretty to carry any actual threat. Disney killed Bambi’s mother but the man who brought us Goodfellas and Taxi Driver can’t summon up any grit at all, any lemon juice to add a bit of sharpness to this sometimes cloying chocolate box of a movie.

All of which would be fine – I don’t think Scorsese has failed in his intentions, I think he’s made precisely the movie he wanted to – if it weren’t for the fact that this is the most nominated film at this year’s Academy Awards. Has Hollywood forgotten how to make truly epic films about emotions and relationships, or has the Academy just stop noticing them?

As I feared, it’s looking like a thin year. So far we’ve had one self-regarding doodle, one joyful bit of fluff, a piece of confectionary in movie form and a slice of superior soap opera which is currently the best of the bunch. The King’s Speech might have been a bit cosy, but at least it was about something.

Four down, five to go.

It’s Oscar time again – the nominations were announced on 24 January and I must say the list of Best Picture Nominees was a bit surprising. No longer locked-in to ten movies, the Academy has found only nine to nominate this year. As regular readers will know, in the past by this stage I’d already seen about half of the nominees, but this year I’ve only seen one (Midnight in Paris – not good except by the standards of other recent Woody Allen offerings). I’d like to think that this is because it’s such a thin year and not because my cinema-going has been more than usually philistine.

Here are my preconceptions of the remaining eight…

• The Artist – black-and-white, silent, French and many critics’ film of the year. Also featuring tap-dancing (yay!).
• The Descendants – from the director of Sideways, starring George Clooney in a tee-shirt.
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ­– from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a boy who on 9/11 loses his father but finds a key.
• The Help – being a black maid in the American South in the 1960s wasn’t entirely awesome, apparently.
• Hugo – Martin Scorsese in 3D
• Moneyball ­– don’t worry, it’s not all baseball. It’s also maths.
• The Tree of Life – Sean Penn ponders his life. In other news, the universe is created.
• War Horse – this time with real horses. Probably not an improvement.

Now, since the Oscars ceremony will be on 26 February, I’ve not got long if I want to see all nine, and so I’ve got cracking straight away with a double-bill this weekend. First, here are a few more quick thoughts about Midnight in Paris which I saw on a plane.

What the hell ever happened to Woody Allen? The hilarious clown prince of angst who segued beautifully from broad scattergun gagfests like Sleeper and Love and Death to the delightful but richer Annie Hall and then a wide array of splendid movies in a variety of genres (my personal favourites being The Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanours and Bullets Over Broadway) seemed to fatally lose his way from about 1995 onward. The 17 films which he’s made since then (and that’s more than many directors make in their entire career) have varied from the inessential (Small Time Crooks) to the tedious (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) to the insultingly incompetent (Match Point – of which my beloved Deborah so memorably said “I don’t think I would have been interested if that had been my life”).

And yet he still grinds out a movie a year – whether he has a good idea or not. The best that can be said of Midnight in Paris is that it isn’t as bad as Match Point, or actually as bad as Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Whatever Works (“why can’t everyone be a New York intellectual – it’s so much more fulfilling that anything you might think is making you happy right now”). That should be enough for at least one critic to trumpet it as a “return to form” – a line which it seems at least one critic is mandated to trot out as each new Allen movie makes its debut.

But is it good, as in Oscar-worthy? As in from the director of Annie Hall? No, let’s get real. It’s incredibly slender, a doodle in the margins of a life in which a man who has pretty much everything he could possibly want, is granted a no-strings vacation into the past to have his ego stroked by the great and the good of the 1920s. Owen Wilson is charming enough, and the various celebrity impersonations are all decent, and there’s one (count it, one) stand-out gag involving a private detective very near the end, but the rest of it is predictable, pointless and clunky with various characters endlessly stating and restating the conclusions which we cannot be trusted to find ourselves.

And there’s the issue of the relative fame of various of these characters. It’s treacherous for a person who has simply failed to connect with a piece of work to denounce it as “pretentious”. Just because my cultural intake so far hasn’t overlapped with the assumptions made by the artist does not mean that the art is worthless, and as delightful as crowing “the emperor has no clothes” can be, it’s actually a fairly feeble criticism. But it’s dramatically weak to have our novelist hero transplanted back to the very period he reveres in the first place, and I can’t help but feel alienated when he instantly recognises not just superstars like Picasso and Hemmingway, but the comparatively obscure Man Ray and Luis Bunuel instead. Wilson is Allen’s surrogate so it is impossible for him to ever be made vulnerable by not recognising someone he should – and all this despite the presence of the (typically amusing) Michael Sheen as the pseudo-intellectual poseur in the modern sections.

For Midnight in Paris to be nominated for Best Picture is certainly surprising. For it to get four nominations is unlikely and for it to be Allen’s most commercially successful movie in the USA ever is just wrong. For completists only, who will hate themselves afterwards.

Now – on with some better news. We took in The Artist and The Descendants as a rather eccentric double-bill this afternoon. Both movies look far more at home on the list of Best Picture nominees, and The Artist is the clear favourite to win with ten nominations (beaten only by Hugo with 11). The Artist is a nostalgic hymn to a Hollywood past. Set between 1927 and 1932, it charts the rise of young star Peppy Miller as the talkies sweep through movieland, and the simultaneous decline in fortune of silent movie megastar George Valentin. It is (almost) entirely silent, shot in black-and-white in the 4:3 Academy ratio and is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, who star as Valentin and Miller (and who both seem equipped with a preposterous quantity of teeth) are both irrepressibly charming and are given handy support by a splendid John Goodman, who can express more with one twitch of his jowls than many actors can in five paragraphs of dialogue. James Cromwell is stiffly subservient as Valentin’s manservant but Penelope Ann Miller and especially Missi Pyle are criminally underused as his wife and co-star respectively. Malcolm McDowell also has a bizarrely irrelevant one-shot cameo but this is Dujardin and Bejo’s show, ably assisted by Uggie the dog.

Any film which depicts a silent movie superstar at the coming of the talkies is bound to evoke comparisons with Singin’ in the Rain, and The Artist just goes ahead and essentially recreates much of that film’s first act during its opening scenes – the quarrelling stars meeting their public at the first preview, the ingénue meeting the star without quite knowing who he is and not to mention the tap-dancing! And yet, despite the nostalgia which leaks out of every frame, this movie feels entirely fresh and original.

Only daring occasionally to push the limits of the silent movie form (rather as Spielberg allowed himself one red coat in Schindler’s List), director Michel Hazanavicius is in total control throughout, plunging us into genuine despair before finally allowing the star pair to express their joyous contentment. You have to admire the cheek of a movie which depicts a silent movie star witnessing an early test of talking pictures, without even giving us a sound effect to represent the recorded speech which is about to end his career.

The Artist is genuinely lovely, albeit entirely unthreatening, and will almost certainly take the Best Picture Oscar this year.

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants really couldn’t be more different. George Clooney stars as Matt King, a wealthy lawyer in Hawaii whose wife is comatose in a local hospital following a boating accident, while he tries to reconnect with his two young daughters. As he attempts to deal with this horrible situation, Payne and his fellow screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, working from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, consistently make his life credibly but dramatically more conflicted, complicated and confusing.

Entirely Clooney’s movie (we only get to see his wife’s father at her bedside because King peeks around the hospital door), he is magnificent, fighting to keep a public image in place as a ghastly set of circumstances is ranged against him. Again and again, Payne pitiless camera trains its implacable gaze on Clooney’s face as a fascinating web of emotions flickers across it.

A beautifully on-theme sub-plot is not overplayed and there is strong support from Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as his two children. For me, the only bum note was the elder daughter’s slacker boyfriend, played by Nick Krause. Both in the writing and the playing, this was a little too broad, in a screenplay which manages tone so expertly everywhere else. Consistently mining little nuggets of ironic humour which prevent the film as a whole from becoming unremittingly bleak, this is a clever, brutal, complex, grown-up story which is sentimental in all the best ways.

The Artist, for all its freshness and vigour, essentially tells us that no problem is so difficult that it can’t be solved by a really good tap-dance. The Descendants tells us that life provides plenty of problems that just never go away, and that sometimes you just get punished more for doing the right thing. Which is both why it should win and why it won’t!

Yes, I know, I’ve left it weeks and by now you can probably barely even remember it was on. But on it was and I feel I should say something. Part of the reason that this review is so late, other than simple disorganisation on my part, is that I generally try and watch each episode at least twice before committing my opinions to Her Majesty’s Internet, and I just haven’t felt like re-watching this one. That already says a fair bit about it, doesn’t it?

Not that it was bad exactly. We’re spoiled these days, us Doctor Who fans. The programme has reached a consistent level of quality in almost all areas which we would have killed for back in the 80s. The production design, lighting design, camera work and FX are all absolutely first rate, as usual. Matt Smith knows exactly what he’s doing in the leading role, and the show can now attract guest stars that would be the envy of pretty much any other show on British TV.

So each week we tune in, hoping not that the sets and the monsters will be up to the vision of the scriptwriter (I’ve just been watching Barry Letts and Paddy Russell talk about Invasion of the Dinosaurs – poor old things) but conversely that the script will be worth all the time, talent and money which will be lavished on it.

And was it? Well, there was certainly some good stuff in it. The delightful feint of Claire Skinner picking the lock of a real police box was tremendously funny, the portal into a Christmas world of snow and trees was delightful, the inevitable reunion with Alexander Armstrong (never has a piece of casting given away a supposed plot-twist more clearly!) was suitably moving and the genuinely surprising reappearance of Amy and Rory was a lovely little Christmas present for the regular viewers.

But what on earth was the point of it all?

There are two basic approaches one can take to long-form storytelling. One is the classic three acts. Set up your problem, make your hero suffer, resolve the problem. See Blink, Midnight, The Empty Child, or actually – most successful stories. All of the events are connected to the main problem in some way.The other approach is to use the narrative just as an excuse for a lot of fun and games of a different kind. See most musicals, Marx Brothers movies, James Bond and so on. In these stories, the resolution of one problem creates another one, and so a more episodic feel is created. Splitting the difference, creating a series of related set-pieces, runs the risk of feeling episodic. I took Moffat to task for this with The Eleventh Hour which seemed to me to scarcely know what it was about despite being a lot of fun – but this is worse by far.

It’s about the Doctor’s relationship with Madge. No, about it’s the Doctor’s Christmas treat for her children (which, as the episode goes on, looks more and more like a sinister trap for whichever proves to be the most curious of her brood). No, it’s about those funny tree things. Oh look, it’s Arabella Weir. Hey, now Claire Skinner’s gone all magic.

To be blunt, this was a fucking mess. There are some delightful ingredients in the mix, but the artful constructionist of A Scandal in Belgravia has apparently assembled them using a blender. Of particular note is Claire Skinner’s blithe acceptance of pretty much all the batshit-craziness which visits her Christmas. It’s rather charming and funny until you realise how unbelievable it is and what a narrative short-cut it represents.

So, I’m starting to have deep misgivings about Steven Moffat’s reign at the head of the Whoniverse. While he’s undoubtedly capable of writing magnificent stories, I feel he sold us down the river twice last year – once by not noticing how distraught Amy Pond would be to have her infant daughter irrevocably ripped from her, and again by entirely failing to provide a coherent explanation for the Doctor’s death on the shores of Lake Silencio. If I’m dazzled by how clever everything is, then I may not notice that the characters are thinly drawn. If the emotions are big and important enough, then I may not notice that the plot doesn’t quite work. But you can’t fail at both and expect no-one to notice. This would have been a good moment to bounce back and prove that running both Doctor Who and Sherlock isn’t spreading Steven Moffat too thinly. So, far it looks like Sherlock’s gain is Doctor Who’s loss.

Two stars.

Oh, that Steven Moffat can write a Doctor Who season finale, can’t he? A weird vision of Earth – all familiar elements but jumbled up in delightful ways, a storyline which jumps back and forth in time, revisiting events from earlier episodes and seeing them from a new angle, set ups from the very first episode of the season now being paid off, old friends and enemies popping back for a visit, a quick appearance of a Dalek just for fun, Rory nobly in uniform bravely protecting Amy who has forgotten who he is. Some of it was a bit of cheat, sure, and I’m not quite sure I understood what the Doctor did at the end there, but it came with such a huge emotional wallop I really didn’t care. Four stars.

Unfortunately, that’s last year’s season finale I’m talking about. And this year’s slavish emulation of last year’s is the least of its problems.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. As irrelevant and idiotic as it was, the vision of the 5:02 universe was bracing and superbly well-realised – what a pleasure to see Simon Callow back as Charles Dickens. The Doctor with a beard is a fun image and the Silents are as effective as ever, albeit rather under-used. Amy’s office-on-a-train is all sorts of awesome and her execution of Madame Kovarian finally gives some heft to the baby-kidnapping plot which has been treated in such an off-hand manner since the series returned. The punch-line with The Doctor (like James Bond at the beginning of You Only Live Twice) believed dead by his enemies is a good way of modestly rebooting a series which was rapidly disappearing up its own probic vent. The tribute to Nicholas Courtney is touching and appropriate.

Okay, now the minor niggles.

The whole story requires the Doctor to be constantly talking to other people about how clever he is being, which is dramatically weak, despite Moffat’s best efforts to ramp up the tension by having Churchill’s palace progressively invaded by Silents. When Churchill is abandoned, a not-very-convincingly decapitated Dorium Maldovar takes over the role. The last thing we need at the end of this Moebius Pretzel of a series is the set-up for another arc, let alone one derived from Silver Nemesis of all things. Could we not have even a little bit of closure for once?

My need for a good, hissable villain and some genuinely malevolent monsters is fed by the reappearance of Madame Kovarian and her army of Silents, but her reappearance doesn’t achieve anything (except her satisfying death at Amy’s hands, as noted) and it’s not at all clear to me what, if any, role the Silents played in her plan to turn Rory and Amy’s offspring into a custom-made Doctor-killer, nor really how the events of The Impossible Astronaut and A Good Man Goes To War are even remotely connected.

Simon Fisher-Becker needed to keep his head a lot stiller in that box to avoid looking like he was wearing it on his shoulders (which of course, he was). And on the subject of dodgy effects, the sight of Mark Gattiss (for it was he) being chewed up by those skulls was just embarrassing.

Right.

Since 23 April 2011 – 161 days ago, 23 weeks, over five months – we’ve been told that the Doctor dies at Lake Silencio. Canton Everett Delaware III intones “that most certainly is the Doctor and he most certainly is dead.” Now, shortly before the series finale, news reached us that filming on the Christmas Special with Matt Smith had begun, so if even a scintilla of doubt remained that the Doctor would in fact survive this encounter, those doubts were swept away. We all knew, sitting down on 1 October – as in fact we know every week – that this was not the end of Our Hero. The question was not “whether?” but “how?”

And after this much build-up, after cranking up the stakes this high, after making us wait nearly half a year and then making the Doctor increasingly pessimistic, resigned, fatalistic and gloomy as his certain death approaches, the answer that was provided needed to clear a pretty high bar. To be clear, it needed to be…

• Surprising. If it’s predictable, what’s the point?
• Set up. The solution needs to be hiding in plain sight (to coin a phrase), not some magic new whoosit we’ve never seen before. Note that these first two are in apparent conflict, and yet Moffat has proved himself a master at this kind of sleight-of-narrative in the past.
• Not a cheat. It must not contradict anything we’ve already heard, or rely on anything brand new. Agatha Christie rules. It’s only satisfying if we have enough information to work it out ourselves. It must be consistent.
• Come at a cost. If it’s too glib, too easy, then who cares? The apotheosis of this is the Doctor’s despatch of the Daleks into the Void in Doomsday. The solution is apparently a little too easy, but the cost of carrying out this plan, turns out to be heartbreakingly mighty. As noted in paragraph one, The Big Bang rescues the glib nonsense of its ending with the emotional punch of the Doctor’s goodbyes and Amy’s resurrection of the TARDIS using the wedding rhyme – something old, something new…

In my view, the resolution of the death of the Doctor in The Wedding of River Song fails in every one these. Let’s take them in order.

Was it surprising? No, not really. As I noted in my review of Let’s Kill Hitler, we now have not one but two sources of Doctor-Dopplegangers to take that supposedly fatal blast by the shore of Lake Silencio. This in itself is poor plotting. Just as The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People ought not to have needed two different crucibles of magic goo serving different purposes, Series Six ought not to have need two different magic people-copying technologies. If the surprise is just a matter of guessing which of them is needed to accomplish the switch, then it’s hardly a surprise at all. In fact, the heavy favouring of the Tesselecta in the “previously” gives the game away almost completely.

Now actually, for me this is the least important of the four. It will never be a total surprise anyway, because we know the Doctor won’t die, but making the resolution so totally predictable puts even more pressure on the other elements. Unfortunately, they all fail too.

Set up. Well, insofar as we have seen the Tesselecta before, I suppose this is set up – at the cost of surprise as noted above. But when we consider point three – is it a cheat? – we begin to see just how poorly set up it is. Almost nothing about what the Tesselecta is required to do is set up in its earlier appearance in Let’s Kill Hitler. Although able to mimic humans, clothing and even motorbikes (although not glasses, bizarrely), it nevertheless renders them rather stiffly and bloodlessly. It carries a human(oid) crew which can react, albeit not very quickly, to fresh stimuli and all of whom are apparently necessary for its operation.

However, the Doctor we see at Lake Silencio is not stiff and awkward, he’s not slow to react, he’s just as quicksilver, lithe and supple as ever. When the astronaut zaps him (with what weaponry, by the way?) he then appears to regenerate, despite the Tesselecta having shown no ability to regenerate and no known ability to simulate the appearance of such a thing. Steven Moffat’s slightly grumpy Twitter reply to a fan who raised this – very fair – point is as follows: “If it can simulate a human being to the last detail, a light show is nothing. We can do that NOW – ask the Mill.” Sadly, all three of these points are wrong. It has been set up as being unable to simulate a human being to the last detail, it’s simulations have always been depicted as flawed and imperfect up till now. But even if it had been depicted as able to replicate humans perfectly, it does not follow that it perforce has the ability to simulate a uniquely Time Lord attribute. It’s like rebutting a complaint that a hero had shown no previous ability to hold his breath for ten minutes by pointing out that he is very good at skiing, so holding his breath for a superhuman length of time would probably be easy – no? Finally, The Mill may be able to overlay a flat image of a regeneration effect on a flat image on a TV screen, at a modest resolution and given sufficient rendering time. Neither they nor anyone else can make such a thing appear, in three dimensions, visible from all angles, in real-time, around a moving human.

Finally, the Tesseledoctor “dies” and is burned. So all the exquisite machinery which drives this phenomenal robot is burned up and at no time is anything resembling a mechanism revealed. Everyone who witnesses the pyre continues to see burning flesh and bones, and not the charred remains of circuits, gantries control panels – oh, and while I’m at it – the burned and useless remains of the machinery required to return the Doctor back to his regular size. And presumably the rest of the crew, all willingly risking their lives too. Or does the ship only require one operator now?

Now, no doubt it’s possible to invent explanations for all of these apparent contradictions, but that’s not my fucking job. It’s the writer’s job, and when the writer fails, it’s the show-runners.

Finally, what’s the cost of all of this? Absolutely nothing! And who is it for exactly? Either time – all-powerful, all-knowing TIME – requires and insists that the Doctor meet his death at Lake Silencio or it will be 5:02 forever, or the universe will end, or some fucking thing. OR time merely requires that four random individuals witness something which looks a bit like the Doctor being murdered and the Doctor knows that and so can cheerfully stage a fraudulent version of the supposed event whenever he wishes with a minimum of soul-searching and companion-torturing. But not fucking both. If he could have sent a Flesh avatar or a robot double in his place at any time, why didn’t he just do that and get on with it? Quite how these four eye-witnesses turn into the entire universe knowing of the Doctor’s death is also not remotely apparent.

By the time River was switching between “I can’t stop myself” and “hello sweetie” for no apparent reason at all, I was ready to abandon the whole enterprise. Consider what we are being asked to swallow here – a robot double of the Doctor from 200 years in the future, controlled by a miniaturised Doctor, summons Rory, Canton, a Flesh avatar of Amy and one version of River Song to watch another version of River Song dressed in a spacesuit for no reason, hiding in a lake for no reason, to pretend to execute him and then burn the robot body because a nursery rhyme told him to. For fuck’s sake.

So, that was Series Six. I can’t give the finale more than one star. It’s worth at least two, maybe even two-and-a-half. Technical standards are high, performances are faultless, lots of good jokes. But the one thing it had to accomplish was to pay off all the set-ups and after this much waiting, it just wasn’t good enough. This is a particular shame, since Series Six has been in general a huge improvement over the vertiginously variable Series Five. Whereas last year gave me disappointment after disappointment in the form of mis-fires like Victory of the Daleks, Vampires of Venice and Vincent and the Doctor (yes I know you liked it, fair enough), and a competent but unremarkable piece like the Silurian two-parter seemed magical in comparison, this year we’ve had a much higher average, with even minor disappointments like The God Complex and Closing Time still seeming fresher and more confident than much of the previous year, and the best this year was some of the best the series has ever done. I suppose what I’m saying is that a creative team that can come up with The Doctor’s Wife, A Good Man Goes To War and The Girl Who Waited is surely capable of a better season finale than this. Apparently not.

Final ratings…

• The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon – The Silents are a brilliant creation, and this is vibrant, funny, challenging stuff. Four stars.
• Curse of the Black Spot – Soggy. Two stars.
• The Doctor’s Wife – perfection. Five stars.
• The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People – didn’t quite deliver everything it promised. Just scrapes four stars, largely for the Doctor/Doctor double act and the shattering ending.
• A Good Man Goes To War – propulsive, kinetic stuff. Some of Moffat’s very best writing with Strax and Colonel Runaway. Five stars.
• Let’s Kill Hitler – Again, this is so structurally awkward that I want to downgrade it to three stars but it’s just so winning. I think the finale has tarnished it a little. Three-and-a-half stars.
• Night Terrors – not the very best of the best, but everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Especially if you ignore the series arc, four stars.
• The Girl Who Waited – outstanding stuff. Proper science-fiction, proper acting and proper tear-jerking. Five stars.
• The God Complex – a better start than Curse of the Black Spot, but exactly the same damned low-stakes, who cares, ending. Three stars.
• Closing Time – amusing but uneventful. Two-and-a-half stars.
• The Wedding of River Song – colourful but entirely vacuous. I feel rather betrayed. One star.

I like Gareth Roberts’ stuff enormously as a rule, and although I felt some of the humour in The Lodger was over-done, I liked the Craig character very much and was genuinely invested in his relationship with Sophie, so I was perfectly happy to see them return. As it happens, the splendid Daisy Haggard is bundled out of the door with unseemly haste, so we can explore the relationship between The Doctor, Craig and of course Stormaggeddon.

I’m really not sure what this episode was about. One of the issues I had with The Lodger was the way in which the Doctor, purportedly desperate to discover what was happening in the flat above Craig’s, was perfectly happy cooking omelettes and playing football for the most part. Likewise here, while I’m pleased to see Cybermats again, and pleased that they still fly through the air as unconvincingly as ever when on the attack, I don’t have any real sense of who these Cybermen were, what they were doing there or what they wanted, or what the Doctor was doing there.

There’s plenty of fun and funny lines along the way. The play on the word “companion” is delightful, exploiting always-amusing male homosexual anxiety without being too On The Buses about it. Matt Smith excels at making the Doctor’s bizarre behaviour result in having people who have never met him instantly like and trust him, and Craig’s fumbling attempts to recreate Time Lord charisma makes for a fun set-piece.

But surely nobody believes even for a second that when that dodgy-digital Cyberskull closes around Craig’s chubby head that he will never be seen again, or even be affected in the least by his encounter, so the climax has no real suspense or power or energy at all. Worse, after the Farpointing of last week’s minotaur, Craig’s demolition of the Cybership is only a millimetre away from the horrendous Star Trek cliché of confusing a computer to death (not that Doctor Who has always successfully avoided this trope either). Hanging a lantern on this by having Craig make fun of it doesn’t make it go away either.

In what has been a remarkably strong run of episodes, navigating the mid-season bridge very effectively, this penultimate instalment unfortunately feels cheap, second-hand, uninspired and not at all thought-through. Presumably Moffat was too busy making sure that episode 13 was going to be a total barnstormer. Again, the most effective part of the episode is the coda, which has nothing whatever to do with the episode-of-the-week plot, but is sowing (and reaping) seeds for the season arc, confirming that – yes indeed – it was River Song herself in that sub-aqua spacesuit. And providing the welcome return of the genuinely villainous Frances Barber complete with her Travis-style eyepatch. Now, if she turns out to be a misunderstood automated medical program, I really am going to be pissed off.

Apparently I gave The Soggy Pirate Rubbish three stars when I first reviewed it. This is an obvious error. That story goes down to two stars, which gives me room to give Closing Time two-and-a-half.

Bring on Lake Silencio!

First of all, I’m aware how horribly late this is. It might be a bit briefer than normal, as I try and crank out this and some thoughts about Closing Time before the finale starts.

To begin with, I’m not a huge Toby Whithouse fan. School Reunion was lovely whenever it was about Sarah Jane and K9, but I detect the jolly Welsh hand of Russell T Davies in much of that material, and I honestly couldn’t have cared less about the standard-issue and barely coherent science-fiction plot it was grafted on to. Did those silly bat things want to eat the children or harness their brains? What was the Skasis Paradigm anyway? Why do I care?

Vampires of Venice was one of a number of stories from series five which I thought suffered badly from being composed largely of left-over-bits and pieces of other (generally better) stories, and so I wasn’t really looking forward to this one much. However, once it began, my wariness began to evaporate. I always enjoy stories confined to a single location – I appreciate the economy and the look forward to seeing the results of a creative constraint. The direction is particularly stylish and energised, with text flashed up on the screen to dramatise poor Lucy’s collapsing mental state.

The Doctor and co. arrive and meet a fairly standard-issue gaggle of cannon-fodder types who explain the horrible secret of this hotel with its shifting walls. I say standard issue, but actually they’re for the most part clearly differentiated, written with wit and played with style. David Walliams as eager-to-surrender Gibbis is terribly funny and Amara Karan makes a huge impact as never-was companion Rita. The large ensemble cast sidelines Rory and Amy a little but the central conceit of the rooms which hold your worst fears is a lovely one.

However, not all of the characters are as fresh or as interesting. Joe is well-played by Daniel Pirrie, but just serves as Basil Exposition. Howie is a tedious cliché, and among a lot of rather uninteresting “worst fears” (PE teachers, spouting hand-me-down lines about “doing it in your pants”, old monster costumes pressed into service, shouty parents who feel disappointed) his is the least interesting by far. An awkward teenage boy afraid of girls. What a waste. A brilliant mechanism for probing each of these characters’ deepest, darkest fears and we get this miserable shop-worn collection. We don’t even get to see what the Doctor’s was, which might have seemed sly and smart if everyone else’s was gangbusters, but here it just seems like a lack of imagination.

And then, as mysteries are replaced by answers, the whole thing completely falls apart. The scene of the Doctor talking to the minotaur is shot splendidly – I imagine there was deep concern here that the thing looked immobile, awkward and not a little ridiculous and consistently shooting it through other semi-transparent objects is a wonderful solution, but what on earth did the explanation mean?

Two new clichés of twenty-first century Doctor Who are pressed into service here. I mentioned Encounter At Farpoint when writing about The Soggy Pirate Rubbish which has basically the same dénouement as this episode. Star Trek, in most of its recent incarnations has suffered a bit by “Farpointing” all of its best enemies. Not content with putting a Klingon on the bridge, DS9 we had jolly Ferengi and in Voyager we had to put up with a friendly Borg. But the best movies – Wrath of Khan, First Contact – are the ones with genuinely evil villains who have to be destroyed. It might be more sensitive and new-age to make your villains well-rounded and understandable, but it’s much, much harder to bring your adventure story to a thrilling conclusion if all your bad-guy wants is a hug.

Then we have the other dominant cliché of modern Doctor Who – say it with me – The Automated System Run Amok. Not only do we have this for the arguably fifth time this year, here it doesn’t even make any sense. As with the leathery Anthony Head things in School Reunion, I’ve absolutely no idea who gains from having this demented prison operate in this bizarre way, nor why the minotaur was so powerless to stop it, not what the Doctor did to bring about its end. It reminded me a little of the Cylons in the (generally excellent) rebooted Battlestar Galactica, whose plan – as it was revealed – appeared more and more to be designed less to bring about what the Cylons claimed to want, but instead to be designed to create maximally dramatic psychological suffering for a small handful of humans. It’s fun for viewers to watch people face their worst fears (or it would have been if they had been more interesting) but what purpose does it solve?

Possibly the best scene in the whole episode was the Doctor ruthlessly dismantling his companion’s faith in order to allow his plan to work. This however, is a near-identical replication of a scene from 1989’s The Curse of Fenric, which uses the neat idea that vampires may be warded off by crosses, not it’s not the object itself that matters but the faith of the person carrying it.

A very frustrating watch – lots of wit, invention and energy, especially in some of the supporting cast, but a central idea which is poorly exploited and a resolution which fatally lacks energy or coherence and – despite Nick Hurran’s extremely accomplished direction – a very ropey looking monster. And then – that coda.

Rather like the Flesh two-parter, a rather run-of-the-mill script, redeemed by some excellent direction, is suddenly elevated by a single stunning scene which ties the events of the preceding story into the fabric of the season as a whole. The Doctor dropping Amy and Rory off in suburban luxury is not shocking in the way that Amy’s milky disintegration was, but it still calls the whole nature of the Doctor/Companion relationship into question in a profound way. I don’t think the Doctor has flung anyone out of the TARDIS since he locked the doors on Susan in until-recently-Dalek-occupied London. Yet, I imagine we’ll see Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill’s names in the credits next week, and I know they will be on the shores of Lake Silencio, so just what is happening here? Is this a genuine departure, with just a few loose ends to tie up, or is it a feint? Is this Adric on the bridge of the freighter his presence in the Radio Times listings for Time Flight notwithstanding, or is it Tegan at the end of that same story, apparently left behind, but picked up again before the next story is over?

In any case, The God Complex earns three, rather generous, stars.

I always rather liked The Rise of The Cybermen / The Age of Steel. Not a perfect two-parter by any means, but with a lot of very good stuff in it, so as opposed to the unease with which I greeted a fourth script from Mark Gatiss last week (sort-of), I was looking forward to a return effort from Tom MacRae.

The early parts of the episode are strong. Some cheerful banter between the regulars (still no mention of their family tragedy this week, but hey-ho) and then a very nice arrival into a Mind Robber-esque void which contrives to separate Mr and Mrs Pond. Time streams running at different rates is not a wholly new science fiction idea. Mr Moffat has played with it more than once (notably in The Girl in the Fireplace) and I think but can’t be bothered to check that it also comes up in Red Dwarf and Star Trek The Next Generation. Hell, it’s in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe.

The exact mechanism is a little hard to follow if I’m honest. If this disease kills you in a day, is time sped up for you or slowed down for you? In either case, why aren’t you hungry? How does Amy know she’s been there for a week? Just how does that spy-glass work anyway? Oh it doesn’t really matter – it’s such a nice science-fairy-fiction-story touch isn’t it?

In fact, from the moment that Rory confronts 50-plus-year-old Amy, none of this matters. Two weeks ago I compared the glib treatment of Amy’s baby to the reality of Rose’s disappearance. This episode is the good bits of Aliens of London all over again, with so much depth and thought and care it’s almost unbelievable. Having someone turn back up to “rescue” you after you’ve been fending for yourself, with no human company, for 36 years is a preposterous idea. But Tom McRae, director Nick Hurran, some spiffy make-up and blessed, saintly, astonishing Karen Gillan made me believe every single ridiculous second of it and to care desperately how it turned out.

In a very neat twist, it’s the Doctor who is trapped in the TARDIS, having to pilot Rory by remote control and some familiar-looking spectacles through the arcade game of Kill The Robots and Save The Girl. But the girl turns out to be a hardened, obstreperous, embittered version of sprightly Amy who has become so determined to hang on to life that she won’t lift a finger to prevent the younger version of herself from going through her decades of lonely hell.

When she eventually relents, the deal she strikes is quite extraordinary and again it’s a testament to the care and attention to detail of everybody involved that I was perfectly prepared to believe that the TARDIS might be home to two different versions of Amy Pond, at least temporarily. But the eventual inevitability of the elder Pond’s sacrifice, when it dawns, had the agony of a classic tragedy rather than the listless predictability of a reset button. Helping the power and emotion of this scene is the Doctor’s cold insistence that this is Rory’s decision, and the cut-away when young Amy comes around, expecting to see her elder self there is entirely appropriate – but I do hope the Doctor’s lies will be at least mentioned again next week, and given the way this series picks up and drops ongoing storylines whenever it feels like it, that’s not a given.

Some people have griped that the TARDIS being unable to sustain the paradox of multiple Amys is hardly consistent with earlier episodes such as Mawdryn Unead, The Five Doctors, or even – if you really want - Space and Time, but the reality is that these episodes are also entirely inconsistent with each other, so what really counts is whether this story works, and for my money it really, really does. It reminded me less of Mawdryn than the Doctor’s agonised inability to save Section Leader Shaw and the Brigade Leader as the Inferno project turns the Earth inside out. The only problem I have with multiple Amys is that – as with Let’s Kill Hitler – a series which needs us to believe that there is just one Doctor who is shot to death in Utah is giving us another doppleganger to contend with.

Ultimately though, this was absolutely tremendous stuff – funny, complicated, startling, moving and as a stand-alone episode only bettered this year by The Doctor’s Wife. And I’m beginning to think both of those episodes are better than anything we had last year. If I’m going to have one more tiny gripe (and I think I am) it’s just to mention that yet again, we have an implacable automated system whose benevolent (often medical) intentions turn out to have awful or fatal consequences (nanogenes, clockwork soldiers, Lily Cole) often while chanting catch-phrases in even tones (“Are you my mummy?”, “Who turned out the lights”, “Donna Noble has been saved”, “You will experience a tingling sensation and then death”). It’s not that this is a bad idea. It’s not even that it’s a worse idea than power-mad psychopaths hoping to take over the universe (we can do without a re-run of Logopolis). It’s that anything becomes boring if you repeat it often enough, and it’s especially annoying when it’s meant to be a revelation, like all those seventies stories called something like Here Come The Daleks Again which spend the first 24 minutes of episode building up to the stunning revelation that the bad-guys hiding in the shadows are… the Daleks!!

Maybe we should view all of these Doctor-vs-automated systems stories as more like all of those Troughton base-under-siege stories? So the question ought not to be “have we seen a set-up like this before?” but rather “is this The Moonbase or is this The Ice Warriors?” And it doesn’t hurt The Ice Warriors at all that everything in it has been done before, because here it’s done better. And that’s The Girl Who Waited. Not entirely novel, but breathtakingly well done. Five stars.

Firstly, sorry this review is so late. I’ve been running around the country and the planet and suffering from a cold. Admittedly on September 11, this seems like very little to complain of, but there it is.

Back in 2005 a script from Mark Gatiss (long “a”) seemed like a splendid idea. I’d been following his career since “Quatermass and the Hat” at the Edinburgh Fringe circa 1991 and when buying Virgin’s New Adventures every month had thoroughly enjoyed his efforts including “Nightshade”, featuring the star of a beloved BBC TV science-fiction series plagued by fictional characters come to life. I always enjoyed The League of Gentlemen too and so when the series was revived, he seemed an obvious choice to contribute a story, but The Unquiet Dead was the one which proved to Russell T Davies that if getting the scripts up-to-scratch in time meant doing huge rewrites himself then so be it. Dickens-vs-ghosts-in-Victorian-London seemed to be much more about Russell’s vision of Who than Gatiss’s.

The Idiot’s Lantern, part of David Tennant’s first season, was a lesser effort, with no real sense of jeopardy, despite a pleasingly bonkers performance from national treasure Maureen Lipman and the Sapphire And Steel-esque vision of people with stolen faces. Last year, his script for Victory of the Daleks easily walked away with the wooden spoon in a series which was almost comically uneven and incoherent. It was with a certain amount of caution that I approached Night Terrors therefore.

But, it’s also worth noting that Mark Gatiss is one of the most prolific non-show-runners to have written for the programme so far. Only Moffat has written for every series since the show came back, although Rusty currently holds the record for the most scripts by some margin (credited with 31 episodes as writer or co-writer – Moffat can rack up only 18). When Closing Time goes out, Gareth Roberts will overtake Gatiss with five scripts. Next is Helen Raynor with four scripts over two stories. No-one else can get past three. So, he must have something going for him. Mustn’t he…?

The early part of the episode left me a little cold. The frightened little boy seemed so rote, so much a heavy-handed articulation of Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who as behind-the-sofa TV, and the “house call” a quite unnecessary gag which added nothing. As with The Soggy Pirate Rubbish earlier this year, I’m heavily invested in the series-arc plot and I need something really special to make me forget it. And this hand-me-down London estate, bringing back awful memories of Fear Her (aka The Scribbly Olympics Rubbish) didn’t look like it was going to be enough. Even the Doctor’s relationship with Alex started to bring back not-entirely happy memories of The Lodger’s over-done humour.

But as the episode unfolded, I became more and more invested in George’s plight and more and more keen to know what these creepy dolls were up to. The interior dolls house was wonderfully realised by director Richard Clark and Amy and Rory bounced off each other beautifully. The revelation that Claire, George’s mother, can’t conceive was well-handled and George himself was portrayed with laser-like sincerity by little Jamie Oram.

Finally, it all came together with modern Doctor Who doing what it does best – finding the human heart in a science-fiction idea without compromising either. George and Alex’s reunion is genuinely touching and the Doctor’s intervention manages to balance the twin forces of making this Alex’s story while reminding us that Matt Smith is the star (and what a star!).

So, ultimately this is nothing terribly special, but it is a strong, classy, well-realised slab of business-as-usual Doctor Who in 2011. And that’s a good thing, maybe a precious thing. As Tat Wood points out in volume 6 of the preposterously comprehensive review of Doctor Who stories “About Time”, making bread-and-butter episodes of the programme is what Doctor Who pretty much forgot how to do sometime in the mid-eighties and it proved to be the death of the show, killed by Michael Grade, Coronation Street, and – yes – its own fans.

What issues I do have with this episode are all to do with the unfolding arc story. Not only are we expected simply to suspend our interest in the Doctor’s impending death, the continuing complexity of River Song’s life history and the machinations of the evil Madame Eyepatch, but we are obliged to forget about them altogether. If we remember, even for a second, the events of the previous two episodes, then the Doctor’s actions in this episode seem pointlessly, disgusting, heartlessly cruel. Is it supposed to some kind of demented therapy to take two young parents who have just a child ripped away from them, and who now have to live with the knowledge that they will never be able to nurture and protect that child, and stage a parable for them about how parental love is the most powerful and precious force in the universe. What a cunt!

That aside, four stars.

Back after its mid-season break, but the Moffat-Masterplan shows little sign of letting up. Within the first twenty minutes, Moffat has ret-conned an entirely new character as part of Amelia Pond’s childhood in Leadworth, revealed her to be an earlier incarnation of River Song, killed the Doctor (again!) and locked Hitler in a cupboard. And that’s before we even begin to tackle the robot Amy Pond operated by tiny self-appointed kangaroo court judges (shades of Father Ted – “I won’t be able to relax, Dougal, until the last rabbit round here is the one inside your head, working the controls”).

Despite Moffat’s insistence on giving us everything all at once, let’s try and take things one at a time.

Mels / Melody / River Song
There seems to be some controversy on the Internet about whether Mels’ identity was childishly obvious or a brilliant reveal. Obviously, if something is set up as a surprise and it fails to surprise you, then you are likely to have a low opinion of the plotting (this flawed study notwithstanding). For the record, it did surprise me, and it’s fun and it’s neat and it makes sense (knowing of the connection between Amy Pond and The Doctor, it make perfect sense for a brainwashed Doctor-killing psychopath is inveigle herself into the life of young Ms Pond) and the Leadworth scenes are fun – but it does seem a shame that among all the Leadworth supporting cast members introduced in The Eleventh Hour and never heard of again, Mels was not among them. Or is that asking too much?

However, as well as showing off Moffat’s dazzling plotting, this strategy also exposes a weakness along his flank. RTD’s take on Doctor Who aimed to make the show far more emotionally resonant and realistic. This approach is described by some as moving, by others as overwrought and still by others as hysterical, but it brought a huge audience back to a programme that (fairly or unfairly) had become a joke by the time it was taken off the air. The moment when I began to see and admire what the new “show-runner” was up to, was early in Aliens of London, an episode now derided by many on the production team as it was the first to go before the cameras and they hadn’t really ironed out the kinks yet. For the first time, the Doctor brought his companion back to her own time and place, just to say hello. And because he can’t pilot the TARDIS properly (hurrah!) he brings her back a year too late.

Bang!

Rose has been missed. People who love her, care about her and are desperately worried for her safety. Her boyfriend stands accused of murdering her. Her mother is out of her mind with anxiety. Posters are still up with her face on them. Of course there are. You can’t rip a young woman (or man) out of her home and not expect her to be missed, despite the fact that that’s exactly what happened to Susan (sort-of), Barbara, Ian, Dodo, Polly, Sarah Jane, Tegan, Peri, Mel and Ace and no-one they left behind ever seemed to notice – or at least it wasn’t anything the programme-makers were interested in.

Suddenly the show had a whole new texture, a whole new reality which I for one greatly appreciated. Where Moffat often scored over Rusty was in his intricate plotting. I found that too many RTD stories ended up with a technobabble rabbit pulled out of a deus-ex-machina hat but in stories like The Empty Child, Blink, The Time of Angels, the solutions are properly bedded-in and I don’t feel cheated. However, here Moffat is asking us to pay a very high price for his narrative invention.

At the end of the last series, Amy and Rory are frantic – every bit as frantic as Jackie in Aliens of London – horribly fearful that they may never see their baby again. The maternal instinct is ferociously strong, and the limp consolation of learning that their baby was also their childhood friend and so they sort-of raised her is unlikely to do anything at all to salve that wound. Moffat punches a hole straight through the emotional fabric weaved by RTD and challenges us not to like it.

Well, it’s lucky that there’s so much else going on in this episode then, isn’t it!

The Teselecta
This is a delightful science-fiction idea, and although not entirely new, it’s new to Doctor Who, so that’s good enough for me. In fact, it’s three ideas – the murderous judge sent through time, the robot doppelganger and the miniaturisation ray (“well, there was a ray – and we were miniaturised”). Of course, this does mean another possible identity for the Doctor on the beach, although I imagine that a fake regeneration effect might be more than the Teselecta can muster. I was disappointed that the transformation effect was so Quantel-y but I suppose they have to save money somewhere.

Nazi Germany
Not even the usual Doctor Who Ladybird Book, the third Reich becomes first a gag and then simply a backdrop against which the ongoing series-drama of the Doctor, his married companions and their psychopathic daughter is played out. They put Hitler in the title, then lock him in a cupboard for the rest of the episode!?

The Doctor’s Resurrection
Again, the solution is bedded in by Moffat, but River’s change-of-heart feels a little rushed. From murderer to suicidal sacrifice in twenty minutes? However, there’s no actual cheating here, and some precedent for this kind of thing in the series mythology (I’m thinking of the promises made by the Time Lords to the Master in The Five Doctors as well as the proposed use of the Doctor’s remaining regenerations in Mawdryn Undead – neither conclusive, but both persuasive). Furthermore, as others have pointed out, this exchange potentially paves the way for the twelve-regenerations  limit to be extended, in the Doctor’s case at least.

Overall
Thoroughly in the new-familiar Moffat style with all of his strengths and weakness on full display. There’s nothing quite as original as Victorian Siluarian and the lactating Sontaran from A Good Man Goes To War, and certainly nothing to match the depth and power of the “Colonel Runaway” scene, but we did get “So I was on my way to this gay Gypsy bar-mitzvah for the disabled, then I thought, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish”, that temporal grace business sorted out once and for all, and the origin of River Song’s diary, so I reckon we’re about even. A good start. Four stars.

Goodbye, for now, Series Six, we hardly knew ye. Younger blog-readers may be perfectly used to a mere thirteen week season, but from 1970 to 1981 we typically got new Doctor Who 26 weeks of the year (40-odd weeks a year in the sixties!). And for Peter Davison’s three years, 1982-1984, we got the same number of episodes, albeit in a twice-weekly schedule. Sure these were 25 minute episodes for the most part, but still – a new episode of Doctor Who 26 times a year!

In the late eighties, the number of episodes was slashed to 14, but still at 25 minutes, so about half the number of new minutes that we get today, and it may therefore seem churlish to grumble, but grumble I will. It’s been less than two months and suddenly my Saturday nights seem empty and grey again. Boo! Splitting the season has the advantage of broadcasting six episodes in the more-traditional autumn months but the wait for September will be agony!

Still, at least Moffat and co gave us plenty to go out on. This was full of incident, character and delightful touches. Beginning with a hugely enjoyable pre-credits sequence with Amy talking up Rory who then proceeds to exceed even her prodigious description of him, by busting into a set of extremely glossy-looking Cybermen and delivering an explosive message from The Doctor while dressed as Roranicus Pondicus and waggling a sword. “Don’t give me those blank looks!” Ha!

Next, Moffat keeps The Doctor off screen for half the episode (shades of The Christmas Invasion) but keeps him firmly in view since he’s pretty much all anyone talks about. Moffat attempted – possibly misguidedly – to top Rusty’s “companion army” in The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End with a “monster army” in The Pandorica Opens, dragging out of storage every serviceable monster costume since 2005 and having them form a slightly absurd and fanwanky alliance to kill The Doctor. This time, he’s done both at once, with a companion army formed of old monsters. But he’s smart enough to give most of them a cheeky twist. So we meet Madame Vastra, a Sherlockian Silurian living in lesbian sin in Victorian London. We encounter Commander Strax, a Sontaran warrior who approaches his new vocation of nursing with exactly the same bombast and bluster that the stumpy clone-warriors generally bring to vanquishing Rutans (“I am capable of producing magnificent quantities of lactic fluid!”). And we get the return of big blue Dorium Maldovar from The Pandorica Opens, now fleshing out both his name and his personality.

Arthur Darvill, as noted, gets to play Rory with considerably more nuts and panache than usual – although he still (delightfully) fumbles his sonic-ing of the door to Amy’s cell. Even Danny Boy – the magic laser-equipped World War Two space flying aces – suddenly seem like a good idea and not blitheringly stupid when deployed out of the blue like this. Only Pirate Captain Boring and his moppety son remain resolutely lacking in any interest whatsoever. What a waste of a classy actor like Hugh Bonneville.

That lapse aside, throughout this episode, Moffat showcases his two great strengths as a writer and as a Doctor Who writer in particular. Much has been made of prolific Who-scribe Robert Holmes’ line in the cast-iron classic The Talons of Weng-Chiang, “I was with the Filipino army at the final advance on Reykjavik”. In this single throw-away from The Doctor in response to the villain’s challenge about how he can know so much, Holmes conjures up a brief glimpse of a whole other world, history and culture. We don’t know all the details, but we strongly suspect that they are all there, and this makes everything feel so much more credible, tangible and complex.

In the same way, Moffat’s easy and unfussy reuse of the religious army motif from the excellent The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone opens a window into a universe in which worship and warfare are identified (as has generally been the case in human history until very recently, Moffat points out). Casual references to praising costing more, the attack prayer, level one heresies and the papal mainframe herself tell us tantalisingly little but add untold depth and richness to the narrative fabric.

Only partially successful in this context are the headless monks – maybe a case of Moffat’s love for Doctor-Who-as-fairy-tale pushed a little too far? And the narrative seems unsure about whether the contents of their hoods should be a surprise or not. On the one hand, the rest of the marines look thoroughly startled when Colonel Manton dramatically exposes them (revealing a slightly wobbly appliance balancing on a diminutive extra’s head and shoulders). On the other hand, we’ve basically seen what’s under there through the eyes of The Fat One (“we’re the thin fat gay married Anglican marines – why do we need names as well?”) and, well, they’re called The Headless Monks, for fuck’s sake. What else could have been under there? Well, The Doctor obviously and that wasn’t much of a surprise either.

But what happens next is glorious stuff. “Please point a gun at me if it helps you relax,” crows The Doctor, dramatically returned to the centre of the narrative at his most playfully heroic. Colonel Manton is very, very well drawn here. An intelligent, possibly sensitive man, with a clear mission and a moral purpose, who makes the best decisions anyone could under the circumstances and who is still completely and totally outwitted by The Doctor in under four minutes. What follows is the outstanding scene of the episode, possibly the series, as The Doctor dubs him “Colonel Run Away”.

Matt Smith, who has previously been captivating, mercurial, whimsical, moving and enthralling is nothing short of mesmerising in this stunning exchange, surely destined to become a classic. If someone who vaguely remembers the one with the giant maggots asks you what the new series is like, you need do little more than show them this single two-minute scene. “Oh look, I’m angry. That’s new.”

This also brings up The Dark Doctor, a figure which the series has toyed with since day one. Much has been made of the original Doctor’s “crotchety”, “anti-hero” status but series creator Sydney Newman was well aware that a successful long-running series could not be based on this and on viewing the unbroadcast pilot had the Doctor’s performance toned down for the real first episode. “Old man still not funny enough,” he fumed in his notes to producer Verity Lambert and director Waris Hussein. The Doctor quickly became a much more benign figure and this trend increased over the next ten or so years, during which The Doctor quickly became a benevolent uncle instead of a mysterious and aloof outsider. Sure, he had occasional moody or sombre moments, but these were rare and fleeting. The Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, had a few more of these, but under producer Graham Williams, these vanished again, replaced by a lot of rather self-indulgent undergraduate humour, and then with Peter Davison, The Doctor became more straightforwardly heroic than ever before.

But the production team suspected that a darker vein could be mined for dramatic effect. Their first attempt was so hopelessly botched, I can’t even begin to recount it here, but a slightly less crass version was begun with Sylvester McCoy in the last years of the Classic Series, before the show was axed and the experiment terminated – at least on TV. In the original novels which filled the void while the series was off-air, this vision of The Doctor as arch-manipulator, one step ahead of everyone else, and playing companions and villains alike eventually became overwhelming and pretty soon the pendulum swung back the other way with later Seventh Doctor adventures and pretty much all of the Eighth Doctor original novels and Big Finish audio plays depicting a Doctor who just liked careering around the universe fighting monsters because it was fun.

It’s this sense of fun which Russell T Davies first chose to emphasise when the series triumphantly returned in 2005, but by making The Doctor now the Last of the Time Lords, a new darkness was allowed to bleed in as Eccleston’s intense Ninth Doctor struggles with survivor guilt and so the pendulum swings back and forth between The Blithe Adventurer and The Lonely God, depending on the demands of narrative and variety.

Part of this is a new (and welcome) devotion to reality since the series returned in 2005. Issues which were previously ignored are now being addressed and often used as the foundations for new stories. If you uproot young women from their lives and take them on a tour of the universe, they will be missed. If you fight alien invaders on planet Earth they will be noticed. And if you fight every alien menace in the universe and always win, then your reputation will spread. Sure, the series also feels free to ignore these elements when it suits (especially first contact) but the notion that The Doctor is known, famous, feared is certainly interesting and logical. It’s also dealt with much better here than in The Pandorica Opens (sufficiently that I don’t mind the repeated motif of an evil alliance forming to create the perfect trap for the hated Doctor) and in general this is so much better than the way in which the Sixth Doctor was portrayed essentially as a member of a galactic rotary club, a universe in which everyone had heard of Time Lords and was sort of vaguely impressed but regarded them fundamentally as self-important nuisances rather than near-omnipotent and aloof figures of tantalising mystery.

The question is – can the series survive this deconstruction of its lead character? Moffat is smart enough to know there are some conundrums which are only interesting when they are unanswered. Susan, the First Doctor’s granddaughter notwithstanding, The Eleventh Doctor simply answers “no” when asked point-blank whether he has any children. (Notice the Gallifreyan collar notch in the back of his cot?) But equally, he knows that if he never answers any questions, pretty soon we won’t be tantalised so much as lost. Or even worse, Lost.

So, here come the answers – or at least the answer – we’ve been waiting for since Silence in the Library. River Song is Melody Pond, Amy and Rory’s daughter, conceived (“they don’t put up a balloon”) on board the TARDIS in flight. It’s a testament to just how good this episode is that I’ve written nearly 2000 words already without even alluding to this revelation, because really it isn’t the point at all. Point or not, it’s still handled with tremendous skill. This is Moffat’s other key strength as a writer – his ability to hide secrets in plain sight. As with the TARDIS being something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue in The Big Bang last year, he gives us just enough that we kick ourselves when we see the revelation, but not enough for us to be able to work it out ahead of time. Melody = Song. Pond = River. This may not have been planned as far back as 2008 but he certainly had it by the time of The Eleventh Hour.

But many, many questions remain – how does The Doctor suddenly know where Melody is? Where, in fact, is she? Is she – as many assume – the regenerating child who found herself in America in 1969? What will Madame Kovarian do with her next to complete her transformation into a weapon? Is there any connection between her and The Silents? And so we return to my first point – the sheer cruelty of making us wait another three or so months to find out the answers.

These have been a very strong set of episodes, but I remain slightly disquieted by the tension between the fundamental Doctor Who adventure-of-the-week format and Moffat’s new serialised approach. Would he have been happier plotting out a genuine 13 part narrative – 24-style? Watching episodes 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 consecutively there’s a very strong narrative arc that works extremely successfully. What’s confusing and distracting is that the two more-or-less stand-alone episodes are such polar opposites in terms of quality. If the propulsive series-spanning story is going to grind to a halt for a week, then it needs to be for something as magnificent as The Doctor’s Wife. It can’t be for plodding run-of-the-mill stuff like The Soggy Pirate Rubbish or whatever it was called.

A few final quibbles from this episode. I assume The Doctor was joking when he said he could speak baby – god help us all if the TARDIS translation circuits start translating its every half-formed thought. Why are we saying “avatar” now and not “ganger”? Did Moffat not read Matthew Graham’s scripts? What on earth was going on with that here-today-gone-tomorrow forcefield around the TARDIS? Very weak.

And finally… “Let’s Kill Hitler”!?

Over all though – five stars, no question.

Now, I’m going to rewatch Silence in the Library to try and fill in some time until September. Still, there’s always Torchwood I suppose.