June 20: "The Power of Three"

This week, a time vortex recolored in shades of blue and magenta, with lots of little cubes in the Doctor Who logo...

So yes, the big reveal of the purpose of the cubes is rather vague, and there's a sense of things being unresolved at the end (as the Doctor has stopped the cubes, but not the Shakri themselves), but that's not really the point of "The Power of Three".  No, this story is explicitly about the relationships between the characters, what it's like for Amy and Rory to essentially have two lives, and what's it like for the Doctor to hang around for a while.  And unlike other episodes that have examined some of these questions, "The Power of Three" is emphatically determined to have fun along the way.  As such, the alien plot is almost secondary.

Admittedly, it's that "alien invasion?" angle that motivates much of what we get here, as a huge number of small black cubes suddenly appear one day all over the planet, leading the Doctor to wonder what's going on, but this is much more interested in the effect on our heroes.  Amy and Rory have become used to having these two lives -- "real life and Doctor life", as Rory puts it -- but it's fascinating watching the Doctor try to adapt to "real life", because he's rubbish at it.  Well, it's more that he can't stand the waiting, but either way, it gives us an insight into the Doctor's mind, how he'd much rather charge around than just sit back.  Meanwhile Amy and Rory are trying to live their lives ("What?  You've got a job?" the Doctor asks Rory, somewhat incredulously.  "Of course, I've got a job," Rory replies.  "What do you think we do when we're not with you?"  "I imagined mostly kissing," the Doctor says), while trying to handle the Doctor and the cubes at the same time.  It's presented humorously, with a deft touch, and so it never strays too far one way or the other.

Plus we get introduced to a new character, Kate Stewart²⁴¹, who now seems to be the head of UNIT.  It doesn't come as any great surprise to learn that she is in fact Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's daughter (she dropped the "Lethbridge" because she "didn't want any favours"), but it is slightly surprising, given her father, that she's of a scientific bent.  It's good that she seems to have repositioned UNIT as more of a force for good again (as opposed to the UNIT we'd heard about in earlier stories and particularly in Torchwood), and Jemma Redgrave plays Kate with a slightly sardonic wit, as if she's only tolerating much of UNIT's goings-on and still hasn't completely gotten them to where she wants them (her opening speech points at this), and it's really all rather wonderful.  "I like her," Amy remarks, and I have to agree.

After 361 days, Brian sees one of the cubes move. ("The Power of
Three") ©BBC

And of course we also see the return of Rory's dad Brian (who's thus the only Pond/Williams family member to make a return appearance -- they go to all that trouble of giving Amy a mother and father in "The Big Bang" and then we never hear from them again), who's surprisingly willing to help the Doctor out -- maybe all that traveling he did (as we learned at the end of "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship") made him grateful to the Doctor.  In any event, Brian is presented as loyal and persistent and unwilling to give up -- note how he goes through almost a year of his video log about the cubes, presumably without fail -- but also concerned about his family.  "What happened to the other people who travelled with you?" Brian asks the Doctor, after he notices that Amy and Rory have been gone in the middle of their anniversary party (an excursion that apparently included an adventure in 1890 with Zygons -- something of a tease at the time, as Zygons were high up on many people's wish list for returning aliens).  "Some left me.  Some got left behind.  And some -- not many, but -- some died," the Doctor replies.  It in fact seems to be this conversation that convinces the Doctor to stay behind, to try and experience life through his friends' eyes, rather than have them experience life through his eyes.  And happily, Brian is willing to see the other side of things -- unlike, say, Jackie Tyler or Francine Jones -- as he says at the end, "It's you they can't give up, Doctor.  And I don't think they should.  Go with him.  Go save every world you can find.  Who else has that chance?  Life will still be here."

Of course, this is a bittersweet moment, because we know Amy and Rory are leaving in the next episode, so Brian's command to the Doctor ("Just bring them back safe") is loaded with more irony than it otherwise would have been.  And while the stuff with the cubes is actually quite entertaining, there's still that Shakri problem left dangling.  (Did blowing the ships up solve everything?  Or will they be back to wipe out humanity?)  But as a celebration of Amy and Rory, showing them happy and content and comfortable, as we get us an episode viewed primarily through their eyes, "The Power of Three" provides us with a lovely time before the end.

Mind you, that last line is pretty terrible.







²⁴¹ Kate Stewart actually began life in a semi-official video called Downtime (there played by Beverly Cressman), which featured the return of an awful lot of people but especially Victoria Waterfield and the Great Intelligence -- she cropped up a few more times in novels and such before reappearing in "The Power of Three", but she seems to be intended to be the same character, making her one of the few to successfully transition from non-televised Who to the main show.