An Hour of Who a Day

June 8: "The Girl Who Waited"

It's a fairly simple idea at the heart of "The Girl Who Waited", that of two different time streams running at the same time, with one person trapped in one stream, away from the others, and yet from this Tom MacRae has created something beautiful and astonishing.

I have to confess, I'm not familiar with Tom MacRae's work beyond the Cybermen two-parter he wrote for David Tennant back in series 2, and that's not exactly a story to sing the praises of. Based on that I wouldn't have thought he had something like "The Girl Who Waited" in him, but this is unabashedly one of the best episodes of this series. As I said, it's a simple idea, but the way it plays out on screen is gorgeous -- touching and tragic and the sort of thing that feels both right at home on Doctor Who and boldly going to places the show only occasionally flirts with.

It certainly helps that everyone's contributing to the finished product. MacRae reportedly specified lots of all-white rooms to save on production costs, but it's still a striking image, nicely antiseptic and perfectly suited for a TV screen -- but the other locations on Apalapucia (the gardens, the "engine room") are also lovely to look at. Meanwhile, director Nick Hurran makes a superb Doctor Who debut, keeping the camera moving but also providing some marvelous superimposed shots as well. The two Amys looking at each other through the time glass is impressive enough, but the scenes of the older Amy and Rory, separated by the TARDIS door but blended together in the same shot, are really something else.

But the best thing about this are the actors. This is essentially a three-hander, as there are no other major guest appearances and the Doctor is restricted to the TARDIS (this being the "Doctor-lite" episode) -- and two of those hands are Karen Gillan. The makeup department has done a fantastic job aging Amy, but what's also impressive is Gillan. She's a marvel in the role, brittle yet strong and full of bitterness for being abandoned. "Why are we still here?" the younger Amy asks the older one through the time glass. "Because they leave you," the older one replies. "Because they get in their TARDIS and they fly away." That's what the older Amy feels: abandoned and angry. And because she doesn't want these past thirty-six years to be meaningless, she doesn't want to help Rory rescue her younger self -- initially at all, and then not without taking her too. Not to travel with the Doctor, as she now says she hates him, but just so that she can continue to live her life without being trapped. "Two Amys together. Can that work?" Rory wonders. "Maybe," the Doctor lies, spewing some technobabble to cover himself.

The two Amys appear in the same time stream. ("The Girl Who
Waited") ©BBC

And that's really the biggest tearjerker moment of the episode. The Doctor deliberately lies to get Amy to help her younger self, knowing that there's no way to sustain the paradox of Amy leaving in the TARDIS and being trapped in Twostreams at the same time. The older Amy helps bring her younger self into this time stream and then helps fight their way to the TARDIS, only for the Doctor to shut the door in her face. "She's not real," the Doctor insists. "Look, we take this Amy, we leave ours. Only one Amy in the TARDIS. Which one do you want? It's your choice." "This isn't fair," Rory says bitterly. "You're turning me into you." "Your choice, Rory," the Doctor repeats. But it's not his choice. Amy and Rory are separated by the TARDIS door, having a wretched conversation that is clearly wrecking both of them, but it's Amy who makes the decision. "If you love me, don't let me in," she tells him. "Open that door, I will, I'll come in. I don't want to die. ... Tell Amy, your Amy, I'm giving her the days. The days with you. The days to come. ... The days I can't have. Take them, please. I'm giving you my days." And so Amy is saved, and thus never spent those 36 years alone, but that seems to be small comfort to Rory. And the Doctor is hardly unaffected, either: the last shot, after "our" Amy wakes up and asks, "Where is she?", is a guilty, uncomfortable look from the Doctor.

"The Girl Who Waited" is a gorgeous tale about love and loss and betrayal, and while it unabashedly goes for the gut it does so with considerable style. I don't know that I'd want many more episodes like this -- I'm not sure I could handle it -- but this is a beautiful tragedy with a melancholy ending that ultimately tells us that the most important thing in the universe can be just two people.

June 7: "The Gathering" (TW)

It's been two months since the last episode, and the world has gone to hell since then. Which begs a larger question for Doctor Who -- how is it that we never hear about these events outside of Miracle Day itself? Even allowing that there seems to be about a year's gap between "The Big Bang" and "The Impossible Astronaut", the Miracle lasts for something like three months starting in March 2011 (Rex's bank transfer text in "Rendition" is dated 22-MAR-11), with the Western world collapsing and China closing its borders and things generally going to hell -- and yet in the midst of this, on 22 April 2011, Amy and Rory meet the Doctor at Lake Silencio in Utah. And not once do we see them mention this to the Doctor, or wonder how he could be dead in the midst of the Miracle, or anything like this. At least in the past, there were token efforts to keep all the spin-offs more or less lined up (even allowing for things like no one mentioning to the Doctor that a giant devil materialized over Cardiff for an hour or so) -- but now that Torchwood and Doctor Who don't really share a production office (even if much of the UK crew still overlaps), it seems the same efforts aren't being made.

Rex asks Shapiro permission to head to Argentina. ("The
Gathering") ©BBC Worldwide, Limited

And while it's sort of interesting to see how society has begun its slow collapse into a depression, as the Miracle carries on and the overflow camps are reopened ("It's funny, isn't it?" Gwen remarks. "When they first opened the camps, we all protested. Second time we're all too busy looking after ourselves"), it doesn't make for the most thrilling television ever. We see that Rex and Shapiro have spent two months chasing down the Families, only to come up with nothing, while Gwen is trying to keep her father hidden from the authorities -- and Esther and Jack are hiding out in Scotland, doing little better. I suppose we should be thankful they skipped over those two months, but really, other than showing that things have gotten really bad little has changed since last time. Jilly Kitzinger's storyline hasn't even advanced yet.

But the nice thing about "The Gathering" is that we do finally start to get some answers. Torchwood works out where the Blessing is, thanks to a tip-off from Oswald Danes of all people (nice that he's finally being integrated into the story; despite Jack's claims that Oswald needed watching, he hadn't really been relevant to the conspiracy storyline), and we're starting to see people moved into position to deal with it. Plus we finally get to actually see the Blessing, although it's not very clear what it is: some sort of fissure that sucks in stuff and runs all the way through the Earth that makes people feel weird when they look at it, but that's it. We still don't know exactly how it was used to make everyone immortal, or what the hell Phicorp or the Families' endgame actually is, but we're getting closer. Of course there's still Charlotte Wills in the CIA to deal with, along with the fact that it looks like she'll be able to warn the Families that Torchwood has discovered them, in Buenos Aires at least, so we're not out of the woods yet.

I probably could have done without the jump forward in time, but at least "The Gathering" starts to finally bring everything together in a satisfying way. The final episode next time has a lot of questions to answer satisfactorily, but some of those answers start to appear here, rather than simply leaving us hanging until the very end. That said, they still have a long way to go and not much time left...

June 6: "Night Terrors"

We start out in an unpleasant block of flats (where all the color on-screen has been corrected to a dull urine yellow for some reason) as we get a little boy, George, who's terrified of everything -- so terrified, in fact, that his message reaches across the stars to the Doctor's psychic paper somehow.

It seems slightly churlish to criticize "Night Terrors" for not having any sort of follow-up of the events of "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Let's Kill Hitler", as it wasn't initially intended to occupy this slot (although it's not like "The Curse of the Black Spot", the episode that swapped places with this one, is any more cognizant of this), but when you're dealing with a frightened child who turns out to be an adopted one of sorts, it's a difficult problem to just ignore. (And as we'll see, while subsequent episodes deal with some heavy stuff, Amy and Rory losing their infant daughter isn't one of those things.) The problem with the more connected storylines that Moffat wants to introduce is that when the storyline is as deeply personal as the one here, the absence of it in later episodes is noticeable. It might be the intention that, since they know what happened to Melody/River, it's too late to change things -- but this is never stated explicitly, and we never see Amy and Rory ever grieve, so the end result is rather callous.

Sorry, we were discussing "Night Terrors".

This is Mark Gatiss's first script for Doctor Who that doesn't seem to have any overt sources to pastiche. There is a fear of peg dolls that makes its presence felt, but the primary story seems to be about how children can feel afraid and abandoned. It just happens to be the case that George is a much more powerful boy than most, such that he can make his fears a reality. It's certainly not a bad idea, and it's not like anyone's miscast, but there's something lacking in the final result. The fact that so much of the images are tinted a dirty yellow doesn't help, but it's really that the sense of energy that this story needs is missing. It's tempting to blame director Richard Clark, but his previous work on the series (things like "Gridlock" and "The Doctor's Wife") suggest that energy isn't a failing of his.

Purcell the landlord turns into a peg doll while Amy and Rory
watch. ("Night Terrors") ©BBC

No, it seems to be a scripting issue. The idea of putting people in a dollhouse is a nice one, but it makes things strange rather than scary, and Amy and Rory spend too much time wandering around without anything really chasing them to really build the suspense (the shadows just aren't quite enough). And while the peg dolls are suitably creepy -- and the transformation of people into them is really nicely done -- the second person we see transformed into a doll is Amy, which inadvertently neuters them of any threat; we know Amy will be OK, so therefore it's likely everyone else will be fine too.

The other problem regards the resolution. Jamie Oram as George is really only called upon to be a frightened boy, which is perfectly fine (and shows they've learned their lesson after "Fear Her"), but it does mean that the ending of the story isn't about George finally standing up and facing his fears like you might expect, but rather about his dad Alex fully accepting him and vowing not to ever send him away. Which isn't a terrible ending, but it's also not the one they seemed to building towards (note in particular the way George finally gets off his bed and slowly approaches the cupboard full of his fears).

I dunno; it's not a bad episode, but there's a bit too much time spent in the dollhouse without a genuine threat, and that threat doesn't end up as potent as it should have been. Meanwhile, the scenes with the Doctor are wonderful (Matt Smith really is astonishingly good with children), but the lack of a clear threat does mean that these moments overwhelm the other parts of the story. The whole thing feels a bit lackluster as a result. Maybe "Night Terrors" works better for other people, but it just doesn't do much for me.

June 5: "End of the Road" (TW)

It's odd; on the one hand there's a sense of finally getting somewhere with the storyline, as we learn about the Families and the Blessing, but on the other hand I'm not sure we actually learn much of anything new by the end of the episode. Well, I mean we've learned a lot of things -- Angelo had been watching Jack from afar all this time, those three men forming a partnership for control of Jack maintained their relationship as the Families, Angelo's worked out a way to die, Charlotte Wills is working for the Families -- but there's little here in the way of major revelations. Or, to put it in Doctor Who terms, we're eight episodes in and we're still basically in part two of a four-part story.

There are some nice moments here -- the picture of Jack with a moustache is particularly great, and I like the way CIA official Allen Shapiro (John de Lancie, probably still best known as Q from various Star Trek series -- so yes, another well-known genre actor) immediately takes charge from the second he appears. This is a man who will brook no nonsense and doesn't care who knows it -- the way he has Gwen deported just to get what he wants, without a second thought, is a perfect example of this. And it really is special how Jack slowly comes to the realization that no, Angelo really is dying from old age, in defiance of everything we know about this new death-free world.

Esther and Rex listen to Jack as he operates the null field
panel. ("End of the Road") ©BBC Worldwide, Limited

Of course, this leads to the big moment at the end. Halfway way through the episode, it finally looked like Torchwood would have to stop running, as Shapiro seemed willing to listen without locking them up or killing them. (Well, except for the "deporting Gwen" thing, but that was to gain leverage against Jack.) But then they discover the null field generator panel thing -- "I knew this stuff the second I saw it," Jack tells Rex and Esther. "Yes, it's alien technology. The only examples of it on Earth were in the Torchwood hub. They were buried in the ruins. ... [Angelo] must have salvaged it, knowing the Miracle was coming" -- and Jack knows he has to head out on the run with the piece that makes the generator work, lest it fall into the wrong hands, as the generator could give people "control over life and death, and we've seen that that doesn't work." So it's back to being a fugitive for Jack and Esther -- although Jack's been shot while trying to escape, so that might go badly in the next episode.

But despite things like this, we don't actually learn much. We confirm that those three men making the agreement are behind the Miracle and that they're known as the Families, and we learn that their last names are Ablemarch, Costerdane, and Frines (and that they've been incredibly good at erasing those names from all records), and that the Miracle is tied to something called the Blessing -- which might be related to Jack but isn't actually his blood. And that's really about it. It's an entertaining episode, and it does feel like they're finally getting this story back on track, but those hoping to learn what's really going on will have to wait.

June 4: "Let's Kill Hitler" Prequel / "Let's Kill Hitler"

And so after a brief hiatus we're back with the second half of series 6, which begins with possibly the best prequel they've had yet. It's a simple, straightforward one -- shots of the TARDIS console room, while Amy talks over the Doctor's answerphone, asking if he's found Melody yet and to please call back -- but the final reveal, that the Doctor's been listening to the message and simply can't bring himself to talk to Amy, is quite touching, addressing the question of the infant Melody Pond far more than the actual episode does.

The episode itself begins with a suitably action-packed opening (as Amy and Rory's childhood friend and frequent troublemaker Mels hijacks the Doctor and TARDIS at gunpoint, leading to the TARDIS crashing into Hitler's office in 1938 Berlin -- thanks to Mels testing the Doctor's "temporal grace" story and revealing it to be simply a lie (thus answering that long-standing question)) that then gives way to something far more character-driven.

Steven Moffat must have taken a perverse pleasure in naming an episode something as provoking as "Let's Kill Hitler" (still to date the least Who-ish episode title ever -- although that may partly be because time and familiarity have robbed us of the impact of names like "Small Prophet, Quick Return") and then limiting Adolf Hitler's screentime to something like five minutes, before Rory locks him in a cupboard, not to be seen for the rest of the episode. Instead we focus on the character of Mels, who is accidentally shot and starts to regenerate -- revealing that she is in fact Melody Pond. "I named my daughter after her," Amy says about Mels. "You named your daughter... after your daughter," the Doctor replies. And so Mels regenerates into River Song -- but at this point River has been brainwashed into being a weapon designed to kill the Doctor; this is not the River that we know.

The Doctor fights to save Amy and Rory while the Teselecta
and River look on. ("Let's Kill Hitler") ©BBC

And so what follows is driven by two characters, the Doctor and River, as the Doctor tries to fight for survival against River's poison, while River starts to see how much the Doctor cares about others. Stuck in the middle of all this is a shape-shifting robot piloted by miniaturized people who travel through time bringing criminals to justice. "I have got to admit, I didn't see [that] coming," the Doctor remarks. The Doctor has some interesting moments, such as when he tries to find an appropriate visual interface for the TARDIS and dismisses each of the tenth Doctor's companions that are offered with cries of "guilt" and "more guilt" -- which is both funny and telling. We also see him try desperately to save both the life of River -- who, it should be remembered, has recently poisoned him -- and the lives of Amy and Rory, trapped inside the Teselecta. It's these acts that seem to cause River to begin to warm to the man she's been instructed to kill, and after the Doctor whispers a message for his friend "River Song" to her (since she doesn't think of herself as River yet), and then she sees who River Song is (thanks to the Teselecta), she's willing to give up her remaining regenerative energy to save the Doctor's life. "Just tell me. The Doctor, is he worth it?" River asks her mother. "Yes! Yes he is!" Amy replies. (And lest anyone think that the Doctor is being incredibly manipulative here, he at least has the decency to protest: "River. No. What are you doing?" Unless you want to see that as more manipulation -- but the 11th Doctor is hardly the 7th.)

It's a surprisingly intimate episode, and despite the big title and the showy beginning, this is a story about how River came to be and what happened to Melody Pond after her regeneration in 1969.²³⁴ It doesn't really feel like a story in its own right so much as part of the continuing storyline of series 6, and that does harm it a bit -- it's not the sort of episode you're likely to watch out of sequence, like you can do with so many others. But it is filled with charm and honesty and care, and for that, if nothing else, it's worth your time.

²³⁴ Except that Mels is shown to be a little girl at the same time as Amy and Rory (i.e., 1996 and later), which leaves a rather large gap in which Mels either didn't age at all (which seems to be a thing she can do, based on River's comments about taking "the age down a little, just gradually" -- and yes, this is clearly meant to be an explanation for why she looks younger in "Silence of the Library" / "Forest of the Dead", but we can still use it) or she regenerated back into a little girl after having grown up for a while. Or possibly she did a bit of time travel. Regardless, it's a gap that's left unexplained.

June 3: "Immortal Sins" (TW)

So the last episode ended with Gwen's family being held hostage until she delivers Jack to a certain location. This episode sees Gwen tying Jack up and taking him to the arranged place. But that's just a small part of "Immortal Sins" -- the main part is an extended flashback, showing Jack in New York in 1927 and what he got up to. It's a bit of an odd flashback, however, in that it's for the benefit of the audience, rather than Jack remembering -- he still doesn't know what he did "so long ago" that led to the Miracle.

The flashback is kind of interesting -- Jack befriends an Italian immigrant named Angelo Colasanto (played by Daniele Favilli) and then quickly takes him as a lover, before getting him involved in Jack's life of strange happenings. They're rather sweet scenes and nicely character-driven, even if they are a tad slow-moving -- but then, this flashback isn't about the story, it's about the relationship between the two men. It seems to be going well for a while -- Jack even contemplates taking Angelo along as his "companion", much like the Doctor does (and hey, our first explicit mention of the Doctor in Miracle Day), and even shows him an alien lifeform that's going to be used by "the Trickster's brigade" (so not just a Doctor Who reference, but a Sarah Jane Adventures one too) that Angelo copes remarkably well with. So of course it goes wrong when Jack is shot in the head by the police in front of Angelo, who's taken away to prison for a year.

But when Angelo is released, Jack's waiting for him, which leads to the second part of the flashback, as Angelo thinks Jack is the devil, as he can't die. This leads to Jack strung up and tortured by people who want to see what happens to the immortal man -- and it also leads to people collecting his blood and making an agreement to own him (which they make with an odd handshake that looks, from above, like a triangle -- so we're clearly meant to make the connection between them and the mysterious "Families" behind the Miracle). Angelo sets him free, but apparently the fire has gone out of the relationship for Jack. He says it's because he doesn't want to watch Angelo grow old and die (which is an awful lot like the Doctor's comments to Rose in "School Reunion"), but one gets the feeling that it's really because of Angelo's betrayal, even if Angelo feels remorse about what happened. "They said you were the devil, but other people said you were a blessing," he tells Jack (which seemingly ties him into the "Blessing" mentioned last episode by Stuart Owens). But it doesn't matter how Angelo feels; Jack disappears, leaving Angelo alone.

So, given this extended flashback, it's hardly a surprise that the woman who told Gwen to bring Jack (played by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nana Visitor -- boy, they got all the genre actors in this series, didn't they?) is working for Angelo. It's nice how Torchwood regains control of the situation at the end, though; "Next time, just ask for help," Rex chastises Gwen, after having followed her and trained a gun on Jack's would-be kidnappers. "I'm sick of Torchwood acting like amateur clowns."

It's an interesting episode that provides us with some useful background, and it fills in some details and finally gives Jack the opportunity to take center stage (after having spent a number of episodes in the background). If it weren't for the fact that "The Middle Men" also gave us an extended pause, this would be a good break from the action. As it is, while "Immortal Sins" is nice, Miracle Day had better pick the pace back up soon.

June 2: "The Middle Men" (TW)

The big problem with "The Middle Men" is that it has almost nothing new to say. Its most interesting scenes only take up something like five minutes of screen time, and the rest is filled with people being horrible to each other. But we've already seen humanity being awful last time -- this doesn't add anything to our understanding of the bigger picture, and none of the conversations we witness deepen our appreciation for the story.

The best scenes involve Ernie Hudson (probably still best known as Winston Zeddemore from Ghostbusters) as Stuart Owens, the chief operations officer for Phicorp, trying to find out more about the Miracle. He only gets two scenes here -- one at the beginning where he tries to get more information about some property in Shanghai, and one conversation with Jack -- but they're far and away the most interesting thing on display here. He's as much in the dark as Torchwood, but he also wants to know what's going on. "I'm not a bad man, Captain," Stuart says. "I'm not a good one, either. I'm a middle man in every sense of the word. ... You don't believe me. You think I'm the epitome of evil, the devil in a three piece suit." "In my experience, that's how it works," Jack replies. "Your experience must be rather simple," Stuart says. "You have a rather archaic view of good versus evil, don't you?" It's an interesting conversation that moves the story forward more than the rest of this episode's running time. "I'm sorry, Captain, but Phicorp isn't controlling this. Profiting, yes, but this is part of a much larger design way beyond any of us."

The rest of the episode involves the aftereffects of the events of "The Categories of Life": Rex is trying to sneak out of the San Pedro Overflow Camp with the video evidence he's collected, while Gwen is still trying to get her dad out of the Cowbridge Camp in Wales. Gwen is railing against the doctor who's employing the Nuremberg Defense as she marks people for burning, while Rex is caught and handed over to the camp's director, who decides he has to take care of Rex as well, after Rex mentions that he has evidence that Vera was murdered. The San Pedro portion adds nothing to the overall story, other than showing us that Colin Maloney isn't happy about what he did but doesn't want to be caught and having Esther turn Colin into a Category 1 patient -- except we find out that she didn't actually, and it's only the actions of Maloney's attaché Ralph that save Esther. And while it's exciting how Gwen blows up the ovens at Cowbridge, it doesn't really add much to the narrative.

In other words, most of this episode is simply spinning its wheels, content to do little more than reinforce points made more eloquently and subtly (if such a thing can be believed, as "The Categories of Life" was hardly subtle in its approach) in the previous installment. Perhaps the events witnessed here will have a larger impact down the line, but as it stands now, "The Middle Men" is largely redundant.