May 7: "Vincent and the Doctor"

"You're being so nice to me," Amy says at the beginning.  "Why are you being so nice to me? ... These places you're taking me.  Arcadia, the Trojan Gardens, now this.  I think it's suspicious."  "What? It's not," the Doctor replies defensively.  "There's nothing to be suspicious about."  "Okay, I was joking.  Why aren't you?" Amy asks, but the Doctor has no response.

So here we are in our first post-Rory episode, and it's also a celebrity historical, as we get to meet Vincent van Gogh, thanks to the Doctor spotting an alien in the window of one of van Gogh's paintings.  But what writer Richard Curtis (yes, that Richard Curtis, the one behind things such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, and various Rowan Atkinson projects like Mr. Bean) cleverly does is contrast Vincent van Gogh's moments of depression and insight with the loss Amy has suffered:

AMY: I'm sorry you're so sad.
VINCENT: But I'm not.  Sometimes these moods torture me for weeks, for months.  But I'm good now.  If Amy Pond can soldier on, then so can Vincent Van Gogh.
AMY: I'm not soldiering on.  I'm fine.
VINCENT: Oh, Amy.  I hear the song of your sadness.  You've lost someone, I think.
AMY: I'm not sad.
VINCENT: They why are you crying?  It's all right.  I understand.
AMY: I'm not sure I do.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - Vincent and the Doctor)

But because Amy doesn't remember Rory, this isn't a road they can travel very far down -- yet this means that they have to be far subtler, which works tremendously in this episode's favor.  Because what this does is focus the episode in favor of Vincent van Gogh, presenting us with a character who's incredibly in tune with his surroundings, who sees more than the average person can see but who's also tormented by his own personal demons.  Everything else serves this purpose -- even the presence of the Krafayis, a creature that only Vincent can see unaided, is ultimately there to reinforce the theme of loss and misunderstanding.  The Krafayis isn't inherently evil (despite the Doctor's (oddly prejudiced) comment during the cold open), it's just frightened and confused and alone, a victim of its circumstances.  The episode invites us to make the comparison but, pleasingly, doesn't feel the need to underline it.

Vincent shows the Doctor and Amy the night sky. ("Vincent and
the Doctor") ©BBC

The best moments, however, come after the Krafayis has died, when the three of them are reveling in the feeling of being alive.  Vincent points out how the night sky isn't dark and empty but full of color and light and beauty, and the effects shot, as the night sky is turned into something that looks like van Gogh's The Starry Night but isn't a slavish representation of it, is possibly one of the Mill's finest ever on the show.  It also leads to the most obviously emotional moment, as the Doctor wants to give Vincent a gift in return, and so he takes him to the present day, to see just how highly regarded his works have become.  The entire production is unabashedly going straight for the heartstrings here, as Vincent looks at his works on display, all the paintings he's dismissed as being not very good, and listens to Doctor Black (Bill Nighy, in an uncredited role) describe van Gogh:

To me, van Gogh is the finest painter of them all.  Certainly, the most popular great painter of all time.  The most beloved.  His command of colour, the most magnificent.  He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty.  Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world.  No one had ever done it before.  Perhaps no one ever will again.  To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - Vincent and the Doctor)

It's a beautiful moment, as Vincent sees how his memory lives on, but to my mind the best part is the payoff, where Amy learns that that knowledge wasn't enough to stop him from committing suicide.  It's a touching, bittersweet scene: van Gogh may have learned how much he would be loved, but that wasn't enough to help him through what he was experiencing that moment.  It's a smart and brave decision to end on this note, and it makes perfect sense; just as van Gogh's works display the full gamut of emotions, of sadness tinged with joy and happiness mixed with melancholy, so too does "Vincent and the Doctor".  As the Doctor says, "every life is a pile of good things and bad things.  The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant.  And we definitely added to his pile of good things."

In the end, "Vincent and the Doctor" is a brief look into the life of Vincent van Gogh, with an exquisite performance from Tony Curran and the alien monster almost irrelevant in some ways.  This is instead about beauty and sadness and light and dark and color and loneliness and everything in between, and this is a theme that runs through the entire piece.  It's one of the most gorgeous and emotional episodes of Doctor Who ever, and it's also one of the best.