Flesh and Stone and... wtf?!

[jencat]

Heh.  Sure I was watching Who tonight with all my usual avid squeeing but now... I'm kinda finding it a little hard to remember great chunks of the ep after it ended like that.

 

So the whole kiss thing was obviously spoiled completely by the papers already today, but even they were speculating Amy was, like, possessed/not herself like the whole Rose/Cassandra thing back in 'New Earth'.  No-one was really considering Amy was acting just.. Amy.   Just a little reminder: we don't really know the girl just yet.  We've only just worked out who the hell she's supposed to be marrying 'tomorrow' (oh hey, jumping another guy the night before: not generally a good omen.  But we knew that). 

Also, she's now apparently really, really important.  Like, end of the world/time itself Important.  Not sure how the Doc figured that out exactly, but hey, we're used to taking his word for this kinda stuff.

I was quite loving the whole random 'I don't remember the Daleks!' thing cos, honestly, the show has been losing a certain quality since its present day 'real world' diverged quite so utterly from the real real world.  If you're trying to preserve the Doctor's alien-ness against the normality of the supporting characters, then it doesn't really add anything when everyone and their mother is all "oh yeah, remember the Daleks? And the Cybermen? And the world nearly ending for the 57billionth time?".  To borrow from The Incredibles.. if everyone is special, then nobody is.  And we really do need the Doctor to be pretty damn special... the alien in the mundane world. 

And now we.. maybe kinda getting the chance for that all to go back and be re-set? Possibly.  Certainly they used the time field thing to freaky effect tonight, "Who's Crispin/Philip/Pedro?" and the Clerics heading to their certain doom like camo-clad moths with big guns...

And poor Amy.. eyes wide shut and being left all alone in the woods.  There was something else going on there, I got the impression, from the Doc's behaviour just before he left her behind, but I'm not entirely sure... (and, hello, what with all the hair-nuzzling and forehead kissing and hugs from him that've been going on, you can kinda see why Amy might get the wrong(?) idea. Just saying..). River, certainly, had her bluff called by soldier boy - before he got slowly throttled to death by a random Angel, he had to go and tell the Doc they freed her from the highly-impressive-sounding StormCage prison to... do some kind of job for them? More relevant, River had been locked up for killing someone important; 'a very good man'.  Hell, even River sounds pretty cut up about the fact he's dead.  We, the clueless audience, are still obviously without clue, as per usual.

Although... the dialogue clues were all there; the usual fabulous rhythms and phrases being used over and again (I didn't realise River's line "some days, everybody lives" from 'Silence in the Library' was also something Nine said in 'The Doctor Dances'. Seriously?! Confidential's little Moffatt-ep retrospective was v enlightening...!).  The obvious implied meaning here is... Hell if I know.  I'm guessing the Doctor himself doesn't fit as her potential murder victim, seeing as neither of them seem to be far enough along the timeline.  Although I would have thought she was referring to some future version of him with the whole banter about who taught her to drive the Tardis, and the hints were all there...  Gah. No idea.  But certainly killing her mystery victim has made River important; there was lots of "if he finds out who you are!" from soldier boy.

The only really jarring thing... Amy and the Angels in the forest.  Seriously, don't set the rules up one way and make a big thing about it, then break them completely the next minute just because it makes a cool scene.  We've been told over and again that on a quantum level, the Angels can only move when nobody is looking.  This implies they can tell when somebody is looking. Therefore, 'pretending' you can see them really doesn't count.  If closing her eyes is enough to keep the 'image' Angel at bay, then surely it has an impact upon the bloody actual Angels.. as in, it's one long sodding blink..!! Ok, so they were distracted, but still... rules are rules.

Also, the whole thing of a red haired girl, blind and in a forest with a monster right behind her... I kept thinking it was a nice little homage to The Village :o)

So.. Confidential also handily reminded us what happened last time when River 'died': she told him she knew his true name, Ten went all wibbly and gasped something about "there's only one circumstance i would tell anyone my true name!!" (I'm gonna guess it's not actually when he's being murdered, lol!) and everybody got a little bit tearful...

Ok, next time we get Rory back (ack), and also vampire-things in Venice... Hmm, those vamps do seem to have awfully similar teeth to Prisoner Zero... I wonder!