Doctor Who Series 6: Bigger, Better, Timey-Wimier

[Never has there been a more appropriate time to say this on this blog but...SPOILERS!!!]

I've been promising to do this blog post since the series finished in October and now that I'm finally putting fingertips to plastic in front of my computer screen at 10:24 at night (shortly before Charlie Brooker's 2011wipe starts on BBC 4), I can't think of anything to say. If you couldn't tell from the title, I didn't think Series 6 was bad. In fact, I believe it's probably the best Series since the start of the 2005 revival. There have been a few dud episodes but the overall series arc, along with a few select one-offs, was fantastic enough to paint over any significant flaw.

This lengthy post will basically be a run through of all the episodes in the series, from 'The Impossible Astronaut' to 'The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe'. Not quite a review, just a personal recap with my thoughts. When the Doctor returned to our screens with a Moffat penned two-parter, I assumed we'd be in for a treat. We'd seen preview clips of armed secret agents chasing Karen Gillan to a cliff, The Doctor in the White House, sinister looking aliens in suits and Crowley the Demon ('Supernatural' reference, keep up!). It should've been an amazing opener, so why was it so...mediocre?
It kicks off with the Doctor gathering Amy, Rory & River in America. Lake Silencio, to be precise (wonder what that means). There, an astronaut rises from the river and kills the Doctor until he's dead. So far, pretty intriguing stuff. Eventually, a Doctor from the past is found by the gang and they soon find themselves in the middle of an investigation involving aliens that can erase themselves from your memory and the moon landing. The first episode of the two was largely build-up for the second episode and series arc. Quite a lot had to be planted and I guess Moffat wanted to move the series at high speed, resulting in more than a few of the weaker viewers losing track of the timeline.
As for the fans with the ability to remember characters and events from previous episodes/little kids, it all seemed fairly straightforward. If I had to pick one golden moment from a disappointing episode, it'd be River's conversation with Rory about how she knows that one day the Doctor won't recognise her. The word 'clever' just doesn't quite cut it. Even 'genius' isn't strong enough to describe the comparison between lovers on different timelines and relationships where one partner starts to develop mental health problems that Moffat nailed so perfectly.

The episode ended with Amy telling the Doctor she was pregnant (which kind of reminded me of the delivery of the "I've got cancer" line in 'The Room') before shooting a child in a space suit. This was a big problem for me. Not the fact that it seemed strangely out of place for an episode of Doctor Who or that it was too "edgy" or "dark" or any of that wank. It was that it didn't end. It just stopped. It was literally as if there was another 5 minutes or so to leave things on a suitable cliffhanger or conclusion but somebody in charge went "Shit, we're out of time. ROLL CREDITS!".
The second part only confirmed this theory by kicking off about 3 months after the events of the last episode, with only a few flashbacks to show how they started to get from A to J. A great point made by somebody on Twitter was that saying "3 months later..." is all well and good if 3 months of progress has actually happened. All things considered, the crew were still pretty much as in the dark as we were. Then we had scenes that meant sweet jack. Crowley and his men tracking down the companions having arrested the Doctor, what was that all about?
I'm willing to accept that I may have missed important info (since I've only seen all of these episodes once, I'm going by memory alone here). However, it seems Moffat made another familiar mistake with The Silence. Yes, they're scary. They look freaky, they have a power that's pretty creepy...why are they a threat? They've been on this planet for so long that stopping them then and there seems like hassle. They're not trying to take over the planet (because, apparently, they already have), they made the moon landing just to create a suit and yet they only killed one woman who had no importance to anyone.

I don't know. To me, it was all sparkle and no substance. What should've been a great plot fell flat because it was brought out too early. Instead of a single episode refreshing our minds of the characters/events of the last series (remember that "SILENCE WILL FALL!" bit in the TARDIS? The fuck was that?), we were pushed into a new arc. However, knowing where it eventually leads, I'm not as annoyed about it as I was after I'd finished watching. Moving onto the filler episodes now, we have pirates and a siren/nurse who is somehow in a different universe but in the same universe but in a spaceship on a pirate ship but...yeah, we have pirates.
A fun episode at first and a decent effort overall but nothing that really stands out. It's just an episode of Doctor Who with pirates, what you're promised is what you get so long as nobody promises you a classic episode or one that leaves you feeling 100% satisfied. Next up, we had the Neil Gaiman one. The one that had sci-fi fans creaming themselves before a plot was even released. The plot largely involved the Doctor travelling outside the universe to a location where he believed more Time Lords were alive and, wouldn't you know it, it turned out to be a trap to capture his TARDIS by a monster living inside the planet.
We had the TARDIS "soul" inhabiting a human, we had a few classic Who references and we had a good story with a few amusing moments. Again, alright TV. Following this episode, we had another two-parter involving clones of factory workers malfunctioning and sharing the conscious of the workers they came from. What started off as an interesting concept involving the Gangers gradually started to become something more...at least, I thought it would. A subplot involving Rory's interest in one of the female Gangers led me to assume the series would be leading to Amy & Rory's marriage/relationship disintegrating.

The pirate episode had Rory calling the Siren beautiful (a point that Amy is noticably upset about), the Gaiman episode had Amy in the TARDIS with an aged fake Rory trying to kill her and now this episode had Amy giving Rory looks of disbelief as he lets another woman cry on his shoulder. I believed this would tie into her pregnancy revealed in the first episode and ultimately lead to the characters going their separate ways after a bit of drama...but nope, I was wrong. Those were just unrelated moments in different episodes that had no meaning beyond the 45 minutes in which they took place.
The Gangers two-parter started off alright and had a passable second part. Not the finest the show has ever come out with, particularly around the part when one of the Gangers went full retard and turned into The Thing. The episode ended with the reveal that Amy was a Ganger and she was actually in the depths of space giving birth to a baby with Time Lord DNA. This led to the fantastic Series 6 Part 1 finale involving The Doctor & Rory getting the band back together across all of time & space in order to save the girl instead of the world.
Aside from the prophecy that the Doctor would fall further than he's ever fallen being a bit tame, it was a brilliant episode. We had the reveal of River's identity, the promise of further adventure and a short clip after the credits of a skeleton with a sonic screwdriver that went absolutely nowhere over the next 6 episodes. I enjoyed the first half of this Series, despite a dodgy start, and I definitely wanted to see more. Flash forward a few months and I was given a chance to watch the next episode at a preview event two weeks before it aired on TV. Lucky me.

Kicking the series back into action in a way infinitely superior to "The Impossible Astronaut", we had Hitler in a closet, River's regeneration, the Numbskulls from 'The Beano', Moffat humour, Moffat drama, Moffat sci-fi and a hell of a way to bring in Series 6 Part 2. I loved the episode (although probably just because I saw it at an awesome event) and it definitely signalled a strong batch of episodes to come. Filmed with the first half of the series, the Mark Gatiss spooktacular one was...well, a typical Gatiss episode. Excellent scary monster (apart from the Dalek one), good sounding plot and a naff ending.
If I had to pick a favourite creature/enemy of the series, I'd go with the living dolls in this episode. Not only do they look terrifying but they also posed a threat. If they touch you, you fucking turned into one. I guess this was also the first major flaw with the episode. Knowing Karen Gillan had filmed the rest of the series & Amy wasn't destined to die in Episode 8 scrubs over a scene with her mutating into a living doll because we know she'll be OK, as will the rest of the characters who suffered the same fate. It's like watching a Horror film where people die and then one character finds a way of just bringing the dead back to life with no consequences...or 'The Mummy Returns'.
Some regard the next episode as one of the best (and darkest) the show has possibly ever done. I enjoyed it despite having a shit TV signal that day and it certainly handled the dangers of time travel very well, asking the What If question the show had touched upon but rarely every settled down with. What if somebody gets left behind? What if somebody is forced to live out the rest of their life because of time travel gone wrong? We also saw a twisted version of Amy. She'd waited before but after nearly 40 years of living in a hospital full of robots who want to "help" her, she was ever so slightly pissed off.

I suppose two mentions are in order here. Well done to Karen Gillan for playing Amy with different emotions whilst retaining enough of the similar characteristics to remind audiences that it is the same person, just warped by years of being alone. Also well done to whoever decided against getting another actor to play the older Amy (think that may have been Karen as well). 'Supernatural' had an episode involving an older version of a main character who was played by an actor that a) sounded nothing like the guy and b) looked nothing like the guy. It takes you away from the events of the episode and reminds you that you're watching nothing more than a TV show with actors.
So yes, a highlight of the series if you're into the more emotional episodes that ask difficult questions and give you answers you might not like to hear. It's a lot better than an alternate draft that probably had Amy about a decade into a mental breakdown shaving off all her hair and drinking her own piss. Next we had an episode involving a Minotaur, a hotel, David Walliams in a role that wasn't just popular "Little Britain" characters rolled into one (something Catherine Tate failed to achieve), a mystery for future episodes and a pause in the adventures of Pond and Williams.
It was around about this point in the second half of the Series that I realised a lot of episodes seemed to be relying on emotions or remembering something to save the day. This episode had the Doctor trying to destroy Amy's faith in him (not unlike an episode from the classic series where the Doctor did exactly the same thing with companions involving Haemavores. Go ahead, look it up), the previous one had two Amy's thinking about a certain event, the episode before that had some bullshit about a father's love, even the Hitler one had the Doctor being saved by a hologram of Amelia Pond.

This episode was also another good'un if only for the concept of a hotel where every room has somebody's fear. Even if you don't like the science behind it or reason explained in the show, you'll still enjoy the ride if the writing is good enough. Episode 12 had the return of James Corden as chubby sidekick, Craig. A filler episode if ever I saw one but still entertaining and exactly what the Series needed after a couple of heavy eps. The plot involved Cybermen underground a shopping centre siphoning leccy to revive an army but they were destroyed by the power of a father's love (add that to the list above).
It ended on River waiting at the bottom of Lake Silencio* in the astronaut suit shown towards the start of the first episode, a twist most viewers will have clocked shortly after the reveal that River shoots a "good man" and the astronaut shoots the Doctor. The final episode of the Series probably would've made for a fun two-parter but it was perfectly fine as a single episode. River breaks time by wasting her ammo at Lake Silencio, condemning Earth to live out the same day with all of history taking place at once.
We have a few questions answered, namely the importance of The Silent/Silence, the function of the iPatches, the way the Doctor managed to cheat death and, most importantly, the question that was teased in "Let's Kill Hitler". The oldest question that's been staring us in the face. Now, I know I have no way of proving this and I know it sounds like I'm boasting about something that isn't important but as soon as the idea of this question was revealed by the Tessellector, I knew exactly what it was. Doctor Who? I honestly thought it was pretty obvious after "staring you in the face" but, at the same time, also very clever of Moffat. Unfortunately now it seems like he's snookered himself.

The idea is that this question should never be answered, that the Doctor's name should not be revealed...but we know River will end up finding it out (her death scene in "Forest Of The Dead", another Moffat episode) so we probably will too. More to the point, we have to ask ourselves why it can't be revealed. Why don't the Silence want people to know the Doctor's name? It could be anything from Gabriel to Feelgood and yet, for some reason, nobody can know of it. How's Moffat going to write a decent solution to that? What name could possibly be so destructive when applied to the Doctor that it may never be shared?

Jesus Christ?

If that's the road Moffat is forced to go down, he'll have to tread lighter than a human landmine tracker. The final episode of the series (that I'm counting) was the recent Christmas special involving the mum from 'Outnumbered', the funnier half of Armstrong and Miller (also the voice of MR. SMITH in 'The Sarah Jane Adventures'), self proclaimed troll Bill Bailey and a woman whose name/importance in the episode I've forgotten about. In keeping with Christmas special tradition, Moffat wrote a comic episode involving the Doctor inadvertently abducting a child having placed one in mortal danger.
We also had Moffat Monsters that looked creepy but did fuck all, a scene with a mum somehow piloting a gigantic robot (shortly before toppling it and walking through acid rain without a single piece of burnt flesh), more of the series "clap-if-you-believe-magic" solutions and a happy reunion with the Ponds...although no "Coming Soon..." preview. I would've been satisfied with Moffat sitting in a chair for 30 seconds just talking about plans into the camera. "We've got one involving gangsters, one set in a future where the Doctor has a fan convention, uhhhhh...MORE RIVER, yeah she's back...hmmmm...let's seeeeee...Weeping Angels?"
Bottom line is the series ended on a very low note when you look at the majority of episodes over the last year. It also started on one as well but, reminding you of one of my first points, the bulk of Series 6 is so fantastic that you can forgive the crummier moments. Besides, every show has the odd flop. Even 'Firefly' had that episode towards the end with the companions in that house. I definitely think this is the strongest Series since it came back in 2005 and even though my favourite episodes probably lie elsewhere, this one definitely had a few top picks. Hopefully next year will bring in another rich crop, even if it is gonna take us over half a year to find out.


* It ended on River in a Lake. Wut.