DOCTOR WHO-THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT

 

DOCTOR WHO-THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT

 

“Let’s see if anyone tries to kill us and work backwards.”

 

Okay, WT serious F? In a montage of incredible rambling images we see, well, all that. Amy and Rory are NOT traveling with the Doctor but in domestic…unbliss while the Doctor’s having adventures that are silly and stupid? Tower of London? Hiding under a dress? Naked? Or shirtless? Not a season that’s off to a great start. In fact, for me, this is the worst season of Doctor Who of all time. We even get a misplaced Doctor WHO? Joke. C’mon. This is NOT the way to do DOCTOR WHO. It’s not funny or cute. Then, the Doctor is in a Laurel and Hardy movie waving. It’s the stupidest start to any story ever anywhere. If it were Abbott and Costello I might forgive it but really? It’s as if Moffat can’t tell a good story so he just tells moments, all on top of each other and hope we’ll be laughing so hard (oh, so hard…NOT!) that we’ll forget he’s not telling us anything of any merit or value but a series of gimmicks and bad jokes. AND I get the temptation to write your companions home having a real life but the truth is if they’re not with the Doctor…it says some things that aren’t good about them and about the Doctor. The show is about the Doctor and friends traveling together having adventures. The best times of the entire series was when it felt as if the Doctor and say, Sarah, were off on sort of interconnected stories from planet to planet to time zone of the past to time zone of the future and then back to Earth. Not this POS.

 

Frankly, from what I remember about this “story” was that it and the next episode, when first seen and aired, were not too bad. NOTHING was explained but that could wait until, Moffat style, later. I did and the explanation retroactively made these first two stories as bad as all the rest of this season (other than the stand out 10/10 story THE DOCTOR’S WIFE). What happens this season is almost literal garbage—all of it, even the stand alone episodes don’t make much sense.

 

Okay, so it all looks nice. And the music is nice, again. Visually stunning. BUT as per a fan on you tube’s complaints, among many, one is that Moffat wastes a lot of time telling us things that RTD did in minutes of dialog with one or two lines. Moffat takes 15 minutes to get things going when less would have been more. And despite what many fans think, the River stuff and the invitations are not funny or interesting. I can’t see the Doctor taking time to send invites to his companions rather than never dropping them off in the first place. As for River: she’s ALL wrong in this “story.”

 

Uh and a school bus takes Rory and Amy to the middle of the desert? I don’t think so.

 

I have stated before that Moffat’s ideas are actually mostly good ones. The first of about six collide in this season. One good idea: River and the Doctor are both time travelers and never meet in the right order. That’s a story in itself but not the focus of this mess. The two try to sync their diaries with Jim the Fish who is still building his dam and the statues on Easter Island (they worshipped the Doctor there). Again, the fan who said that Moffat’s characters do not believe in their own worlds or take them seriously make me not want to believe in them, take this seriously, or even care or watch. Against RTD’s time where four time travelers just act like real friends, here, we get unconvincing performances from Alex and Matt and no surprise, Karen. NONE of their conversation feels like it matters or is real and worse, the actors don’t believe what they are saying. Again, Moffat’s ideas are often good to great but the execution just doesn’t go well and the ideas when combined together badly (often) just don’t sync.

 

Hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

The American Amy opening is unnecessary and dull.

 

An astronaut comes out of the water during a picnic the Doctor is on with the Ponds and River. (it’s really River inside?). An old man (who later tells them he is Canton Everett Delaware the Third and who is a former friend from the White House?) appears and waves. None of this makes sense, of course. This Doctor is 1103 years old and he is killed by the astronaut. Does the River on the picnic know it’s her doing that? Amy hopes, “Maybe he’s a clone or duplicate or something.” He is something. She’s also already seen another good idea go bad: the creature that is one of the Silence or something? Is the Silence the group that hires River and then manipulates her to kill the Doctor? Or are they the alien looking monsters in Men In Black suits? Not ten minutes in and this is already  a mess but no one who hasn’t seen the entire season knows that. Canton, the old one, helps them by giving them gasoline. I think it’s interesting Rory sets the Doctor’s body on fire. River tells them whole empires would fight to get one cell of a Time Lord’s body so they had to burn it.

 

When the 903 year old Doctor comes out of the restroom (?) in the diner, it IS funny and weird to have him just have died and then here he is again. One thing DW didn’t do often was time anomalies and this has it in spades. And again, great ideas. The reactions of his trio of friends is spot on, for once and well acted, again, for once.  River slaps him. Rory later mentions they are not all going to die and then arrange their own funeral with invites.

 

1482 full of glitches. Space 1969 is where they have to go. The Doctor’s rambling goes way too far. He says that Sundays and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are all boring times. Saturdays are big tipping points. He wants to go to 1911 for a bi plane or knitting, wants the couple to go home and wants River to go back to prison.

 

Okay, all I have time for and all I can stomach for now. Not too bad yet but still…

 

When I first watched this I didn’t question the idiocy of the following scenes with Canton, Nixon, a dopey posturing Doctor, a dopey Doctor who doesn’t know what he’s doing and literally runs into the invisible TARDIS and knocks himself down, first making the TARDIS invisible to reach the Oval Office, then yelling for River to “make her blue again.” But honestly, these scenes are all crap. Total crap. Even Amy asking the Doctor to trust her as if he wouldn’t or didn’t in the past. The Doctor acts like a sociopath in the TARDIS with his friends and totally stupid in the White House. How do people like this?

 

Also: the reliance of humor on the Doc asking for a fez and jammy dodjers in the White House isn’t funny and the idea that all Americans just want to shoot is offensive. Amy seems to have the first signs she’s pregnant.

 

Amy finds Joy in the bathroom in the White House. Sorry, it’s not what you think. So what was the point of all of that? Why did the Silence monster in a suit kill Joy? What did Amy have to tell the Doctor what he  must know and what he must not know? Does that make sense? No, really IF you know leave a comment below. I mean WTF? It seems to me that Moffat allows a really cool scene to have no drive and no real reason to exist. If they can do this, why not just kill the Doctor?

 

This is just another example of poor writing from Moffat and the show’s poor direction where nothing seemed to matter much, if at all. Joy comes out of a WHITE HOUSE bathroom and sees the Silence, an alien in a suit and tie. She laughs it off, despite Amy warning her several times (for that matter why isn’t Amy running out of the bathroom immediately and screaming for bloody help?), and THEN Joy asks, “Is this a STAR TREK thing?” What? This woman apparently works in the White House (though with Moffat assume nothing makes ANY sense) and sees a full fledged alien and asks that? I mean why would a Star Trek “Thing” be going on in a White House Bathroom? Why would see think or ask this? Who did she think was dressing up as a sci fi character? Ignoring Amy, she’s blasted to cinders floating in the air. Cool looking? Sure. But that’s only part of the problem with Moffat. If it’s cool, it’s passable because it’s only DOCTOR WHO. And it’s shit, really. Poorly written is poorly written and this is poorly written DOCTOR WHO despite some great ideas.

 

Two of the trio of Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton fancied the Doctor as he brags to River (rather see that “adventure” than this one). So…the child we find out much later IS River? Huh?

 

The Doctor says, “Brave heart, Canton,” but hasn’t the gravity to carry it off like Peter Davison.

 

Spoiler 1? River’s quite the screamer.

 

I do LOVE that Rory has to keep the Doctor grounded telling him what Canton really is interested in, the alien incursion. WHAT are those alien residue things all over? I also like that Rory is asked by the Doctor to go with River the second time she goes down the …manhole cover entrance? Rory seems to me to be the best part of the Moffat era until possibly Clara’s four Sarah Jane like performances in season 8 or possibly 9 (both seasons suck) or until Bill comes along and/or Nardole fun turns in some of season 10. Rory is a companion too good for both the Doctor and Amy.

 

Even I will admit that the idea of the Doctor living backward to a friend and ally of his is really, really cool. A neat idea but does the River thing do that idea justice? I don’t really think it does. I mean does it make sense the way it is presented? River talks to Rory about how every time they meet, she knows him more and he knows her less. She talks about how he dropped into her life and knew her. Do we see that? Is that what happens in LET’S KILL HITLER? It’s more than a bit confusing. When River first met the Doctor he was in his tenth persona and it was the end of her natural, human life (that we know of). He didn’t know her at all. They are meeting out of order or rather in order backwards from each other. It IS a very cool idea but not sure Moffat is up to the challenge and task of making it work in a story and not one that is FULL of other ideas, all of them not bad but all of them together not good and all of them working against each other really.

 

Again, if anyone can explain the River thing and her entire time line, feel free to comment. I get it…almost but how it works here in this episode is a puzzle.

 

Amy telling Canton that she had something to tell the Doctor but stuff always gets in the way channels the worst aspects of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION where they strung us along for a Bev/Picard romance that never happens in the future of the series. She also claims she hasn’t seen the Doctor for a while and there are hints that she thinks of him as more than a friend, which sort of shits on Rory, maybe. Again, if the characters can come and go from each other, their relationships don’t really feel cemented or even well done and while yes, it might be a great kind of free lance escapism where they can have their cake and eat it too, having great time and space adventures while having a life on Earth in real time in the real world, it’s not a good thing. I prefer the Doctor and Rose or the Doctor and anybody together throughout a string of adventures that sometimes feel as if they happen one after the other and they haven’t had time away from each other or even if it is implied they had unseen adventures, that would be better IMO. I don’t like this, he drops them off to live their lives and then drops back into their lives again and again and again. Once, maybe, More than that, it sort of seems forced and ruins the aspect of DW that I like.

 

The cliffhanger has Amy shooting the astronaut revealed as a little girl after revealing to a non-responding Doctor who yells at her not to. It’s more than difficult to get worked up or energized by a cliffhanger that you have no idea what’s happening and even after knowing what it IS about it’s a lame cliffhanger anyway (sort of know what it’s about and it makes little sense). The scenes to NEXT TIME tell us the girl is alive and Amy tells the girl she is sorry she shot her and we see a bearded chained up Doctor…so more timey whimey nonsense. It also goes over what the Silence (if that is what they are called, no one here calls them that in this episode) can do, but not what they are or why they were suit and tie.

 

In short order, this is a terrible first episode and even as a two parter as we will shortly see, it doesn’t work. The pay off for most sci fi shows, heck, most TV shows is the climax and this resoundingly lacks any such thing as it’s part of a larger “story” which reeks. It’s a mystery here and on first viewing I was willing to suspend judgement (wonder if I still have that review) as the fifth season wasn’t all that bad other than the first three episodes and the last one and A CHRISTMAS CAROL was fun and superior. THIS however, in hindsight, is POOR. All of it other than Rory and perhaps Canton.

 

Beautifully mounted and filmed, wonderfully edited (unlike the horrid season 12), carefully put together, excitingly scored, and colorfully lit, this episode fails due to many things: the writing by Moffat; the plotting by Moffat; the illogic by Moffat; the over convoluted collision of some good ideas, executed badly; and the slap happy “it’s DW WEEEEEEEEE” tone.

 

I can’t really blame this for the slow start of the slide to mediocrity and downright boredom and inconsequential stories, whole seasons of nonsense (this sixth season), and silly awful stories (CRIMSON HORROR, NIGHTMARE IN SILVER) BUT I’d love to. That falls to Season Five, while not as bad as I first felt still had BEAST BELOW, VICTORY OF THE DALEKS, and worst of all, BIG BANG, not to mention TWO resolutions to good first parters that were just SO-SO. The death of quality started there but it received a HUGE push in season six, which had, by my previous estimation ONE good story.