An update on the future of this little site of ours – if indeed it’s going to have one – will be forthcoming, but for now, let’s carry on with the broadcast discussions, because a few of you seem to enjoy them. And I have a feeling that, despite some people’s disappointment with the way that the arc stuff has gone this year… the finale is going to be FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Christ, swimming in the pollution of the Thames really didn’t agree with David Walliams, did it?

An ep that already seems to have divided people, but I thought it was BLOODY GREAT, so there. Tom MacRae therefore joins Gareth Roberts in the ranks of people who’ve written REALLY CRAP episodes but then managed to later do REALLY GOOD ones. So, well done him.

Yes, yes, we’ve still got a review to catch up on – once any of us can actually put together some coherent thoughts on the all-over-the-placeness of “Let’s Kill Hitler”. In the meantime… it’s the Gatiss episode! It’s got to be better than “The Idiot’s Lantern”, eh?

Who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler?
If you think we’re on the run…
We are the boys who will stop your little game!
We are the boys who will make you think again!
‘Cause, who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler
If you think old England’s done?
Mr Brown goes off to town on the 8:21,
But he comes home each evening and he’s ready with his gun.
So who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler
If you think old England’s done?

“Well, let’s ‘review’ the situation, shall we, Mr Capps?”

“Urrrgggggghhhhhhhhh…”

“Before I left the country for a period, I was assured that URP!’s review of A Good Man Goes To War would be posted in ‘two shakes of a lambkin’s tail’. My words, admittedly, but your sentiments. Instead, on my return from a literal and metaphorical holiday, I find no review, despite the episode reaction thread receiving more comments than any other this year.”

“Buh ah did… review…. it!”

“Yes, but the words ‘It was teh bit gOOd, sorT of’ on the site’s back-end CMS aren’t really the sort of rigorous critical commentary that we’re looking for. Let’s start with the positives, shall we? Firstly, the visuals. What did you make of the episode’s aesthetics?”

“Err… ‘Nice’?”

“Lucky guess. There’s clearly been some wise spending of money here. The Demon’s Run base is a clear triumph, with some of the best CG we’ve seen in a while, but what really impresses is the attention to detail in the less-used settings which we glimpse. The Victorian drawing room and the like only briefly feature, but there’s a commendable willingness to use multiple rooms where only one would have done. When the TARDIS comes to pick up the Doctor’s debtors, the fact that the ship lands in a differing place to that were we’ve been introduced to them considerably adds to the scale of the story, and is a welcome contrast to the moments in Series Five when the show started to feel a little confined. All those squads of Clerics wouldn’t have been cheap, either.”

“Darvish…”

“Bang on the money again, lad. Arthur Darvill’s performance as Rory is the other great strength of the episode. Right from the start, he brilliantly gives the impression that the new macho Mr Pond is a deliberately assumed identity, and that he’s not comfortable in the skin which circumstances are forcing him to wear. With Amy a far less interesting character (as we’ll discuss in a minute), it’s very much Rory’s episode. In view of the Doctor’s disowning his own virtuousness, it’s probable that the story’s title refers to him. When it comes to the crunch, it’s always the reluctant companion who says what the audience is thinking, particularly during the second half of the episode. Despite all the dramatics at the close of the story, the most heartbreaking moment is clearly Rory’s line ‘I was going to be cool’. There’s some excellent work from Matt Smith, and Danny Sapani gives a convincing military presence, but it’s Darvill who takes to the limelight like a fish to water. Speaking of which, what did you make of the cliff-hanger?”

“…”

“Oh dear, and you were doing so well. The most interesting thing about the keystone of Rover Song’s identity is not how out-of-the-blue it has come to causal viewers, but how inevitable it feels to fans. It’s easy to forget that the idea of Amy Pond having a child was only introduced to the series a few weeks ago, given how seamlessly River’s origin has been rooted through recent events. The idea of exposure to the time vortex is a little fan-ish, but as Steven Moffat remarked at the start of the series, it’s time that the programme stopped pretending that people don’t watch it. What should be an outlandish cheat feels like a logical progression, and gives River’s existence the slightly incestuous feel which we’ve somehow been lead to expect through her intimate knowledge of the Doctor. On the other hand, mind, it does lead us to one of the main problems with the episode, in the form of its slightly grating gender politics.”

[The blond man looks almost to be on the point of uttering the words 'Your stupid degree', but a movement of the cricket bat somehow dissuades him.]

“Motherhood seems to have sadly robbed Amy Pond of the gumption which has always defined the character, leaving her a sadly passive presence in the narrative. Given the magnitude of what’s been done to her, you might expect revenge to be on her mind, but she seems strangely reliant on others to deliver retribution to Madame Korvian. Can you REALLY imagine Rory as the avenging warrior she’s describing? She’s also still dressed only in pyjamas a month after giving birth, for no other reason than to endow her with an aura of vulnerability.

“A more serious issue is raised by the character of Lorna Bucket, easily the most unconvincing solider to appear in the programme since Battlefield. It isn’t just that she manages to remain completely spotless despite living in a grimy space station, but that it’s virtually impossible to imagine her in combat. Bucket’s main contribution to the story, a bit of plot-aiding needlework aside, is to make us feel sad at her demise, and that’s not a good place for the show to be. It’s as if Moffat was so focussed on crafting the fall of the Doctor that he wasn’t able to pay any attention to the cumulative impression of story elements which are in support of this. We could have coped with a passive Amy or a feeble guest character, but not even the literally man-eating Madame Vastra can block out the rather unpleasant cumulative aftertaste that results from a combination of the two.”

“Fall… of the… Doc-ah?”

“I’m coming to that. It’s striking how perception of the episode changes on a second viewing. Where I originally thought that the comedy of the first half of the episode overshadowed the tragedy that follows, a re-watch has to opposite effect, making the opening ring distinctly hollow in light of what follows and the magnitude of the Doctor’s failure.

“What’s unexpected is that Moffat doesn’t just post the question of what happens when the Doctor loses his self-control, but also answers it; he makes mistakes. With every other character imploring him to stop underestimating Madame Korvian and her cranium-challenged forces, the Doctor’s refusal to believe the obvious in young Melody’s medical details is the most striking part of his failure. That said, it’s a shame that we only get half the picture. We get that the Doctor has straight-forwardly failed, but for this episode to really work, we would have needed more to go on in terms of why the Clerics have taken a stand against the Doctor. Doubtless Korivan’s motivation will be explained at a date in the future (if that missing eye of hers turns out not to have been the Doctor’s doing, I’ll be surprised), but the moral dimension of the Doctor’s position, and the reason why River is so strident in her criticism of him, is left so understated to evade the viewer.”

“So…was rubbish?”

“By no means. What’s probably Moffat’s weakest script to date is still a perfectly good Doctor Who story, which achieves its two main objectives of showing the Doctor misjudging a situation in anger and explaining River Song’s origins. There are both laughs and heartbreak here, but it is a pity that some of the potential hasn’t been realised.”

WHO is River Song? WHY is Rory dressed like a Roman again? WHO is Amy’s baby? WHY are the Cybermen involved? WHO is Madame Kovarian? WHERE do the Clerics come into all of this? WHY did the Doctor die in episode one? WHO was the regenerating girl? WILL we even find out the answers to all of these questions tonight? WHAT will the intensely frustrating cliffhanger that will keep us all guessing and on edge until September be? HOW fucking excited are we about this episode?

And besides which, let’s be honest – that closing couple of minutes made it difficult to want to think about the preceding forty, because they made us all entirely obsessed and preoccupied with thinking about “A Good Man Goes To War” instead, didn’t they?

So, the short version is: we won’t be reviewing “The Almost People” (although there’s a vague consensus that it was “pretty good”, depending on whether you liked the first). But feel free to continue yammering about it in the broadcast discussion thread, or if you want to yammer here about your thoughts/theories/speculation regarding the mid-series finale, you can do that as well. And we’ll be back on Saturday, natch.

Part One was QUITE GOOD. Will Part Two be QUITE GOOD as well? Time to find out. It’s got a cracking title, anyway.

Oh, and apparently there’s a BIG CLIFFHANGER at the end, or something.

The upside is that I’m going into each episode of the show with no preconceptions or expectations, although “The Rebel Flesh” works fairly quickly to instill some preconceptions during the first ten minutes. It’s an episode that fits a familiar mould – the Doctor shows up in base where people are doing something they shouldn’t be and things go tits up. Only just when it looks like it might defy the expectations you didn’t know you had and pull the rug out from under your feet, it stops tugging and, like a Mortal Kombat player who’s forgotten how to do a Fatality, just kicks you in the shins instead.

Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Our heroes arrive on the scene, yesterday.

It’s a promising set-up. It’s a wonderful set-up, truth be told. The pre-title sequence is simple and to-the-point, and rather nicely outlines exactly what the crux of the episode is about. Then the Doctor arrives, seemingly with some foreknowledge of the events taking place in the acid factory, but he’s not sharing.  Not atypical of the Doctor, but it is atypical of the type of story we’re being told, offering some much-needed variety. That said, it does feel odd that the Doctor would keep such important information from his companions given that lives are at stake. Again, it’s not strictly speaking out of character, but I do wonder how that’s going to pay off in “The Almost People”.

Once the storm reaches the factory and the power goes down, the story slows to a snail’s pace. This is proper old-school Doctor Who pacing, the sort that makes “Genesis of the Daleks” unwatchable for much of the New Who audience, and it’s made all the more frustrating by the predictable nature of the plot progression from this point onwards. Even after things picked up again, I spent a good deal of the episode waiting for the characters to catch up with what I’d already worked out.

Then there’s the conflict, the murder, and things start moving again. Stupid people doing stupid things because they’re human – some more than others – and at that point the story gets back on track, albeit predictably so. The Gangers’ decision to turn on the humans is sudden, almost gratuitous. Yes, alright, an idiot killed one of them, and it’d be expected that at least one of them would be slightly pissed off about that, but they almost unanimously make the decision to go after the humans without much of a debate. The Gangers’ conversation may well have gone, “Look, we’re nearly at the end of the episode and we’re not particularly menacing at the moment. We should probably fix that.”

"Now, from this point on, things get a little bit confusing."

And then there’s the Ganger Doctor. From the moment the Doctor put his hand on the surface of the Flesh vat I knew what the cliffhanger would be, and yet I can’t help but wonder how it’s going to play out in the next the episode. I even wondered briefly whether the older Doctor we saw killed all the way back in “The Impossible Astronaut” could perhaps have been the Ganger Doctor, but it’s such a mind-numbingly obvious solution to that predicament (not to mention an incredibly lazy one) that I don’t see it happening.

A lot of people seem to have taken issue with Rory’s willingness to help the Ganger Jennifer, but I don’t really have much of a problem with it. It’s not difficult to see how a bloke could want to help someone who very clearly thinks highly of them. I mean, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? A girl says you have pretty eyes or that you’re “such a sweetheart”, and you can’t help but want to keep them close. It’s a psychological thing, isn’t it? We all like feeling wanted or needed in some way. Having said that, I expect Rory’s motivations run a little deeper than that – he was a plastic copy of himself for 2,000 years, after all. There may well be an affinity there.

Besides which, we’re now five episodes into the series and apart from some conspiratorial conversations between Amy and Rory and the Doctor occasionally running a sly pregnancy check on Amy to reveal that, yes, she’s still pregnant/not pregnant/pregnant/not pregnant, we haven’t really come back to the threads left dangling by “TIA”/”DotM”. That being said, I also complained this time last year when the Weeping Angels were sidelined in “Flesh and Stone” by the crack, which felt decidedly lazy at broadcast but made much more sense in the bigger picture of the series as a whole. It’s entirely possible that the Doctor’s disinterest in addressing the events of the opening story will fit into the series in a much grander manner, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but it’s not a jigsaw, and there aren’t any pieces. Forget the jigsaw.

Obligatory "Ganger Doctor" screencap.

I’m complaining a lot about this episode, but there are some great ideas in there. The supporting characters are interesting if a little lacking in depth – the decision to make ‘em Northerners certainly adds a little variety considering most Who characters these days are either Welsh or from London. And certainly I’m eagerly anticipating “The Almost People” to find out how it’s all going to play out. Right now, though, it just feels wobbly.

I half-wonder whether Amy and Rory themselves may also be Gangers, with the real Amy and Rory having been stashed away somewhere. They woke up together not too far from the Flesh vats, although they haven’t experienced any of the characteristic facial gubbins that the other Gangers have there’s every possibility that they simply don’t know that they’re not the real deal. It might go some way to explaining where that lost hour went. Or maybe it doesn’t and I’m grasping at straws.

I applaud writer Matthew Graham for attempting to do something different with a well-worn Doctor Who formula, even if it doesn’t quite work.