Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Doctor Who - ''Curse of the Black Spot''

Spoiler Level: High 

The new season continues to be lots of fun. I can enjoy pirate stories more than, say, zombies or vampire stories, but when I saw the preview for this episode and saw that this was going to be a pirate story, I wasn't really excited.  I thought the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were okay, but after seeing them once I never cared if I saw them again.  To be honest, the only reason I saw them at all was because my daughter wanted to see them, and I was doing the responsible parent thing of monitoring what my kid watches.  But really I just didn't care.  You know what I'm going to say by now... not enough spaceships in them.

So, leave it to Doctor Who to have a pirate story... with a spaceship in it!  That was awesome!  That closing shot of Captain Avery and Toby watching the stars fly past them, as the crew all walked in and lined up behind them for the hero shot... now THAT'S what more pirate movies need! Spaceships!!!

I'm not kidding about this, by the way.

It's nice to see the Doctor having to keep revising his theories on what's going on.  I like it when the Doctor's the one who understands what's Really Going On, but that makes it all the more fun when he realizes he was wrong. When Rich and I were discussing the episode after it ended, we both agreed that the two most out-of-place moments were when the Doctor abandoned the TARDIS and when he did a 180 and decided that everyone wasn't being killed, they were probably being taken somewhere instead. At the time I said to Rich "It's probably one of those things that would have been better explained if this had been a 90-minute story."  And now that the episode has a day or two to percolate in my brain, I think I understand what changed the Doctor's mind in both cases.

Now usually when the Doctor says "I have no idea where the TARDIS is going to land!" it means he needs to stay with the ship, or risk losing it forever.  But in this case he (literally) says "Abandon ship!"  Why? Well, I got to thinking about how he told Amy "It's been towed" as opposed to "It ran away." He could tell there was something wrong with the dimensional planes when he tried to take off; maybe that was the key moment that caused him to start revising his theory again. So if the TARDIS was sliding into this parallel plane, then maybe the people were being taken as well.  Again, following the Doctor's train of thought might have been easier if this story had taken more time to be fleshed out.  But then again, the 11th Doctor tends to ramble on quite quickly and then throw in a "completely disregard what I just said," which can make following his train of thought difficult at the best of times.

And even though Rory's got full companion status now, I was still afraid he really might die. (Again.) Some nice little teases about the overall arc, as well. Nothing new on the pregnancy/future Doctor/glowing-little-girl front, but the return of Amy's dreamworld woman with the silver eyepatch.  Hmmm....


No comments: