Tom Salinsky

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 5 "Flesh and Stone"

Right, all that election fuss and bother over with, let’s see if I can marshal some thoughts about Flesh and Stone before Vampires in Venice airs. As usual, beware spoilers!

Basically, this was fantastic. Building on the adventure and derring-do of the first part, moreorless wrapping up the villainy with a denouement that was mostly carefully-set-up-and-then-hidden-from-view-plotting and just a little bit RTD-style-magic-hoover-which-suddenly-appears-and-sucks-all-the-badness-away, then dropping some delicious hints about what the end of the series might hold and then having the companion trying to jump the Doctor on the eve of her wedding! What larks!

Not only that, but Moffat finally gives a major speaking character a proper death. The demise of Iain Glen’s stoic bishop is one of the finest deaths the series has given us, brilliantly freaking out Doctor and viewer alike, incorporating everything that’s wonderfully terrible about the Angels and providing a real, tangible sourness, which perfectly complemented things like the comfy chair gag.

And the much-talked-of fairy tale imagery really went into overdrive here with an extended sequence of Amy, eyes tight shut, wandering through a forest, dressed in red, while frozen monsters lurk behind every tree – how weird that the statues, freaky because we never see them move, become even more freaky when we do some them move!

As unbothered as I am by a companion with an honest libido, I’m equally unbothered by the last five minutes being an extended tease for the next episode – it’s a feature of the fifth series which I enjoy and I can’t think why it wasn’t included at the end of the badly-underrunning Victory of the Daleks. I’m faintly bothered by the previous five minutes largely being a tease for the end of the season, however. Moffat is asking a lot of viewer loyalty here, just as the summer kicks hold and the ratings start to dip. Still, it’s a different show than it was in 2005 and TV is a different thing now than it was in 1989. American shows like Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica and The Wire have proven that an audience will follow a continuous narrative over many weeks, but I still worry that season arcs need to be all-or-nothing and that this piecemeal approach will not garner new viewers, as much as it might please the stalwart ming-mongs. On which subject, just what is happening around 17 minutes in as the Doctor comes back and pleads with Amy to “remember”? If you look closely, there’s a heck of a clue that all is not what it seems in this scene.

Finally, let us note that this is the last Moffat script of series 5 until the two-part finale. RTD was widely criticised for his cavalier rewriting of scripts credited to others, but an analysis of the DWM favourite story poll indicates that these stories are precisely the ones which are likely to be the most popular. RTD’s own scripts may have suffered from not having had that extra pair of eyes to spot flaws, burnish up dialogue and strengthen plotting. Rare scripts not by RTD or Moffat which did not have RTD’s input tended to fall flat, such as Matthew Graham’s widely-derided Fear Her or Helen Raynor’s Daleks in Manhatten (written while RTD was sick). (For a full analysis of this, see here, if you really must.)

We don’t know whether Moffat is rewriting other people’s scripts in the same way, but he’s certainly working very closely with other writers. So far, Gatiss’s script is the only one which has attracted anything other than general praise, either from me or from the Whogosphere in general. We wait with interest to see what Messrs Whithouse, Nye, Chibnall, Curtis and Roberts can conjure from their typewriters as well as to see what will happen on 26.06.2010.