eve11 | Doctor Who 7x05 (Reply)

I liked this episode more than I thought I would. Mainly because River was back to being Fucking Awesome in this story. And because of the notion of endings being relative, when Time is involved. So a few paragraphs on that first, because that's what's spilling from my head right now. I like the representation of the Doctor's life as normal to time, by which I mean the mathematical definition: orthogonal, a co-set, infinite in a completely different direction.

The Doctor's life relative to others is an infinite library of books all crammed aleph-null-like into a single instant, and all of those books are open, and as much as he can manage, all of them are missing the last page. Every page in a book is numbered, but if you have hit the last page, you know what number it is. You can skip around the pages as much as you like, but you know the number and you're always counting down. That is what happens when everything including endings occurs out of order. That's River's book, and now it's the Ponds' book as well. Moffat has liked lives as books for a long time; just look back to the Girl in the Fireplace: "There is a vessel in your world where the days of my life are pressed together like the chapters of a book so that he may step from one to the other without increase of age, while I, weary traveller, must always take the slower path."

Given that the Doctor knows the end, I imagine it would take a while, as Amelia guessed in her afterward, to brave the strength to find another page in the middle. "I think, once we're gone, you might not be coming back here for a while," she said. She did NOT say, "I'm sorry we never saw you again." So I think the Doctor was being overdramatic when he said the fixed point meant he could never see the Ponds again. Amelia called him on it in her Afterward, and but for the ending the Ponds' lives are still open books. Plus, as Moffat suggested multiple times within this episode, this whole strange family is very good at lying. Also, fair's fair: let Amy and Rory let the Doctor contemplate their being dead this time, instead of Lake Silencio and the other way round.

For the Doctor, knowing the ending is bounding the infinite; a book with an end is finite and has to be closed--maybe not now--but some time. Closure; the mathematical definition is apt here, is it not? (And yes, that is why I named that story last week as I did). The limit points of every infinite sequence in the set, exists also in the set. What is left in this bounded space but smaller and smaller fractal steps?

Parceling out pages, making them last as long as you can. When Amy says "it may be a while" she means a while for the Doctor, not necessarily for her and Rory. Of course, she's not going to write that one way or the other, now is she?

A few other things:

Overall, I think the themes of this story worked better than the execution of them. "Yowza" as well as silly lines like "Husband, Run" and "Husband, shut up!" make up for the things that I as a biased viewer, tend to have difficulty with (EMO scenes! OLD AGE MAKEUP OMG I HATE IT). Melody Malone, a book that is being written and read and don't read ahead, the Weeping Angels going a bit soft and slow in light of their little Industrial Revolution (and why the heck not I guess?), but still back to being creepy.

- How is it that I have known forever that the title of this ep was "The Angels Take Manhattan" and yet I never ever once considered that the Statue of Liberty would be a Weeping Angel? I would think that in the city that never sleeps, someone's always got an eye on the Statue of Liberty. When ever would she be able to move?

- Also, yay for Mike McShane so that we don't have to have non-Americans trying to do New York accents. I loved him on Whose Line back in the day. He was also the therapist who died at the beginning of Office Space. He's a great character actor and did sinister gangster really well. I think River was a little blase' about her dad getting thrown into a basement with creepy cherubs though.

- I HATE OLD AGE MAKEUP. Arg. Hate it.

"You think you're just gonna come back?"
"When don't I?" LOL

- Stop blinking, Rory! These angels, they don't move so fast as the ones in the house with Sally Sparrow. People are 'not looking' at angels all the freaking time in this story, and the angels aren't getting to them and zapping them back in time.

- WHY DO YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT GRAVESTONES! Also I don't believe Rory would be that thick that he would think it was the grave of somebody with the same name as him. Really. That last scene...poor Doctor, but River is absolutely right that Amy's best chance of getting to Rory is to get zapped back in time then and there.

- I want them to say somewhere, that they landed forty years late in the graveyard, thus when Amy and Rory get zapped back in time, they do not have to live out their lives in the past, but just get zapped back to their contemporary 2012. In fact I think they were hinting at that in the promo pics, with the whole "Detroit Lions win the Superbowl" thing. But hey, as I said, the Ponds' life is still an open, if finite (and of course it is, it ALWAYS was, but not for the Doctor) book; If River can send Amy a book for publishing, she can also send Amy a Vortex manipulator and take Amy and Rory back to their house in Leadworth.

So, River and the Doctor having fights and shenanigans and timey-wimey married adventures, hooray! And an ending that is nothing more than a last page on a book that hasn't really been read yet. I like this. Yes. I didn't cry, but I didn't imagine I would. Looking forward to the Amazing Lives of Ponds, and no matter what Moffat or the Doctor may say, to the next page on which their paths cross.