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Okay, the episode itself. Again, I felt that Amy was left somewhat adrift in the script, probably because of the return of River Song. We've rushed headlong into the Amy/Doctor relationship and it feels as though not enough groundwork has been done, especially in comparison to the previous companion relationships.
On the whole, I think this episode could have done quite nicely without River's presence. I'm not too sure what she brought to it that other characters couldn't have and her interaction with the Doctor felt off. I was a bit worried before the thing had started, anyway, that the combination of Weeping Angels + River Song = Stephen Moffat's Greatest Hits. It wasn't, thankfully - beyond a couple of crowd-pleasing moments of dialogue repetition from their previous outngs - and the Angels were used brilliantly, but things betweeen River and the Doctor lacked the chemistry that they had last time around.
Kind of stuck as to what else to say. The environments were fantastic - this series' CGI backgrounds have been far superior to any of the previous ones, both in terms of artistry and believable solidity. Smith was more or less back on form after last week's blip.
The cliffhanger was spoiled a bit by going on for roughly three seconds too long, making it fairly obvious what the Doctor's solution is going to be.
Moffat's in danger of tying himself in logical knots, playing with timelines as he is. Apart from introducing an element of Data Syndrome to the series - that is, we've already seen River as old as she's ever going to get, but the actor is never again going to look as young as she did during that first appearance - there's the question of why River didn't know what adventures the Doctor had already experienced with her in Silence in the Library. Given that that was the only time she ever met his tenth incarnation, either the portraits in her book aren't all that good or the two of them are never really going to be all that close to each other.
Also a little confused as to why nobody's tried attacking the Weeping Angels by, y'know, hitting them with a chisel or pushing them off one of the many big drops in the maze. You can't kill stone? No, but smashing it into tiny little pieces is hardly a task.
Being picky, I know. I liked the episode a lot, but the BBC stinkyness has made me focus on the negatives.
One thing that *was* a big problem for it was the way that we've now got the Weeping Angels talking. Entirely unnecessary, removes a huge chunk of the fear they generate - if you can communicate with something, it suddenly becomes a lot less frightening than if its purpose is entirely alien and unknown - and was basically a surprisingly lazy clone of the 'data ghosts' idea from, yep, Silence in the Library.
It was all fairly great as a tea-time version of Aliens, though.
(On which note, that's why the Daleks are now completely shit and boring - series one of New Who did the Alien thing, having humans in a base being terrorised by a single, unreasoning, terrifying slaughter machine, then did Aliens at the end of the series by bringing in an entire army of them. There's nowhere you can go after that - one is no longer a threat and an army is a repeat of what we've already seen. Hence stupid redesigns. Dalek/human hybrid from Daleks in Manhattan? Dog Alien from Alien 3.) |
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