The adventure continues.
March 12, 2011, 9.56 am. Having tired myself out with incessant Doctor Who and a lot of gin, I’d gone to bed after The Vampires of Venice, but woke up fresh the next day to continue the marathon in the morning. Now I think on it, I’d done a mid-season break before Steven Moffat had! Thankfully, many of the usual suspects were still online to keep the chat going…
NB – as before, if your name or image is on these screenshots and you’d rather it wasn’t, PM me on Facebook and I’ll edit the image. Thanks!
Next up, the first iteration of one of Steven Moffat’s better ideas – getting established, big-name authors new to the show itself to write Who. First out of the gate was Men Behaving Badly scribe Simon Nye, giving us a most atypical episode that was one of the wittiest – and most meta – of the season:
Season 5, Episode 7: Amy’s Choice
I got up, yawned, stretched and had a cup of tea (9.56 am being a little early for gin):
Somehow, Amy and Rory are back in Leadworth village, and the Doctor’s popped in for a visit. It makes a nice change after Russell’s era for the Earth people not to live in a grimy London housing estate:
The Doctor’s having trouble with the TARDIS, but he’s ‘misplaced’ the Haynes manual:
Surprisingly to everyone, the impish Toby Jones pops up wearing a suspiciously familiar costume. His first act is to utterly demolish the tropes that make up the Doctor’s character:
Trapped in what might (or might not) be a fake reality, the Doctor and co are chased by a marauding army of the elderly, angrier even than when George Osborne froze their pension increases:
The script continues to play with and subvert the tropes of the show in both ‘realities’:
And then, shockingly, the first appearance of a new trope that would become all too familiar over the next couple of years. The bemulleted Rory is unexpectedly turned to dust, disintegrating in Amy’s arms, the first of many, many deaths:
By the end of the episode, it’s become clear that neither ‘reality’ was real, and neither was the Dream Lord. I remembered having heard gripes about the mechanism that allowed all this to happen, when the method was so much less important than the psychological exploration it caused:
And the conclusion:
Yes, the intervening hours of sleep had at this point lessened the number of friends chiming in on the comments. But like sand people, they’d soon be back, and in greater numbers…
Simon’s Incoherent Blog 