The God Complex
Sep. 18th, 2011 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve11- Holy crap, that opening scene is the first time Doctor Who has really seriously creeped me out, since that dude became a gas mask zombie before our eyes. *shudders*
- Apples are rubbish. He hates apples. Also (later) Rubik's cubes. Is this some subtle clue that the Doctor is not quite himself? Or is it just the hotel trying to make him cross?
- "You see, Earth is on a collision course with this other planet." HA omg Howie knows about Mondas???
- LOL I totally think that the PE teacher was Rory's room. "I had a PE teacher once who was JUST LIKE YOU!" he told House back in episode 4. And did you see the look on Rory's face? Yeah, he totally didn't cop to it at the end either.
- The Minotaur is a really cool monster. Coolest one yet. And the Doctor: "I have to see what it is. I have to." Creature of instinct.
- "No one else dies today. Right? Brilliant." Oh, Doctor.
- "It's as I thought, it feeds on fear." Hooked me, too. The faith twist was one I didn't see coming at all. I am however, known to be rather thick.
- More mops. Three episodes in the series now? This ep, dollhouse ep, Big Bang. Oh wait that was last series.
- tailor made hell, just for them. So the monster latches on to the faith of the people and then twists it into belief in him? That is freaky. Ah yes, as the Doctor's trying to figure out: "Replace? Replace what, fear?" No, it replaces faith.
- Oh, Howie. The difference between this episode and the last "towering inferno" episode, eg the one where everyone gets picked off one by one, are staggering. I'm thinking of Voyage of the Damned, where I didn't really care at all for the minor characters. I can't remember how they died, but it was probably in throwing themselves in front of the Doctor. In this one, I think a lot of my trepidation and fear came from the idea that no, I really didn't want these characters to die. Of course for them, but for the way it affects the Doctor too...Eleven's reactions, his disquiet and his plain genuine heartache, his temper aimed not at people but at himself for not being good enough to save them; it's not at all the same as Ten's Big Emo Eyes and indignation. Forget what was behind door number 11; I think that whole damn hotel was the Doctor's room. (I also had a fleeting thought that it might be a TARDIS. But no, not quite).
- The minotaur goes on instinct. If a food source comes he can't help but gravitate to it and gobble it up. And we see that same exact thing happening in the way the Doctor talks to Rita. It's actually really, really a dark comparison. Where the last time we got the embodiment of the Doctor in an alien it was the Star Whale--very old, very kind--well, this comparison is just not nice at all. But how did the Nimon know about the Doctor's past?
- Cloister bell. Of course, of course. Is that his worst fear? Losing the TARDIS? Stopping? Failing someone? But he says "Who else?" So maybe he's afraid of, I dunno, River Song stark naked and "Hello Sweetie"-ing him seductively on the center console? Perhaps, perhaps he's just afraid of an empty TARDIS, and the thing that keeps him going is that faith that he will be able to connect with people, to matter to them without ruining their lives.
- So if a civilization is going to lock their god away like that, why bother equipping the prison with a way to attract a food source? Unless that was a malfunction? Why not just jettison your god and then let him die? Or was the point more to torture him and make him pay for some kind of crime? Man, that God Complex was waaaaaay scarier than the Pandorica, that's for sure.
- When he figures out faith instead of fear, there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of the Rubik's cube in front of him, solved. Then it's gone. Even though the Doctor doesn't like Rubik's cubes. This has meaning, I'm sure of it! Or it's a continuity error.
- Aha, the Fire door; the Doctor explains it so quickly I didn't catch it: "it doesn't want you; that's why it kept showing you a way out. You're not religious--there's no faith to fall back on."
- "What do Time Lords pray to?" I think, perhaps, that was answered in the previous scene. "I'm not a hero. I'm just a mad man in a box, and it's time we saw each other as we really are, Amy Williams." Because if Amy has spent her life believing in the Doctor, he's reciprocated. His faith is Amy Pond; the little girl who grew up in five minutes before his eyes. It's little Amelia's image and fish fingers and custard that keep him going in LKH, but he has to let that go if Amy Pond is going to be Amy Williams, the girl who lived. I don't think it's the Doctor telling Amy that she has to grow up and be all domestic and take her husband's name, what. No, it's the Doctor telling himself that he can't--he just can't hold on to Amelia Pond, without jeapordizing Amy Williams. Oh jeez, the whole ending of this episode was just, like, daggers to the heart.
- Okay, I didn't cry the first time I watched the epilogue, but the second time, I wept like a little girl. Possibly in the context of how Karen Gillan explained it in the confidential, that I didn't see the first time around but that hit me the second. Something like, when the Doctor says, "What's the alternative?" and then they hug and it's like Amy is suddenly becoming the adult, saying, "it's okay, you have to go; I understand."
- Rory doesn't get a good-bye? *sadface*
Overall: This episode is quiet where and RTD episode would have been bombastic and loud. It was unsettling and scary and truthful; like a bizarro-world expose, like the first time you read Grimm's real versions of the fairy tales, or like the TV tropes twisted synopses ("alien abducts young girls to put them in mortal peril"). It nearly works too well; because damn it, I don't want to lose my faith in the Doctor. At the end when he's kneeling in front of Amy, it's like the end of curse of Fenric, I hope. In that, he has to say these things, he has to do it and I hope he doesn't really believe them but, at the end what's said and done is un-alterable. He can't just pat Amy on the back afterward and say, "Oh yes, well, all that, I'd have said anything to keep away the monster." There was enough of a seed of truth in it, that they can't really go back. It really was a true sacrifice. Forget learning River Song's identity. Forget the episode seven cliffhanger that Moffat built up and built up as "lives are changed FOREVER!" That moment, right there at the end of this episode, if this series has any continuity and any sense, changed far more, and far more drastically.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 04:37 am (UTC)Yeah! If you watch their body language and their faces, yeah, Amy's sad, but she's the one comforting him. It's really sweet but also really heartbreaking.
Rory doesn't get a good-bye? *sadface*
I know! I thought that, too. :(
no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 07:49 am (UTC)The main thing that's ringing like a fire bell in my head is that one guy, Gibbis, had no real place there. If that prison snatched up people because of their faith then it should have tried him before Amy since that room with the Weeping Angels was supposedly for him. Which, him even saying that her room was still out there - actually the way he said it and the way he pushed for Howie to be given to the monster in the hopes it would let them go (it was sorta fake feeling) and then releasing the poor kid makes me think that Gibbis was the 'warden' of the prison.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 12:21 pm (UTC)That was some beautiful and powerful story telling.
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Date: 2011-09-20 09:36 am (UTC)It is, in the end, all about responsibility, about the choices you make. So Gibbis is there to remind us that despite the Doctor's flaws, doing nothing is worse still.
(Um, I ramble. Hope you don't mind...)
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 09:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 12:44 pm (UTC)