Aha! Now I know what that means!
Nobody else thought the “Dream Lord” is the Master? “Nobody else hates the Doctor as much”? A shot of him reclining, dressed all in black, looking like the Master from the Baker years?
Really liked this episode, in that the dialogue was just delightful and the plot was really fun.
I’m going on the record saying I think the Dream Lord IS The Master. He’s imprinted himself into The Doctor’s mind. The pollen was either a lie on The Doctor’s part to put his companions at ease, or something that allowed The Master to manifest his presence.
I’m leaning towards the lie – and I’m thinking the fact that Doc lied to Amy about this as having something to do with the “you need to trust me” scene from Angels Part 2.
I caught up with Doctor Who today.
The second part of angels was a little disappointing. It’s bad when the antagonist gets upstaged by a bigger problem. The angels became a irritating distraction when the crack began wiping people from existence.
Vampire in Venice had potential. They should have left the goofy fish cgi on the cutting room floor. The chicks in nightgowns and fangs were cool. I wanted more scenes with them. The guy turning into a fish (cockroach? whatever it was) while fighting Rory was stupid and fake looking.
Amys Choice. One of the best this season. I liked seeing a more contained story that required the Doctor to think and reason. At his core, the Doctor’s intelligence is what makes him special.
Amy’s choice has me a little worried. I was hoping we’d finally get a companion that would stay for three seasons. I’ve grown tired of the one season companions. We barely got to know Martha and Donna. It’s beginning to look like Amy won’t stick around beyond this season. They’ve already got Rory waiting to marry her and make babies.
I’m a little annoyed by a small thing. Why isn’t Arthur Darvill in the opening credits? Rory is travelling with the Doctor, but he doesn’t seem to count as a companion?
Hell, he’s more a companion than any of the one-offs like Astrid Peth or the guest-stars last year were.
In fairness I don’t think they added the actor who played Mickey’s name to the opening credits when he had his very brief stint with the Doctor either (in circumstances that were almost exactly like Amy and Rory’s, come to think of it).
No, no, that was me. Some things just look a bit odd out of context.
I’d take that as a sign that his companionship is short-lived. Where actors are billed in the cast of a show is very dependent on what their contract looks like, and if he’s only contracted to do a handful of episodes, or occasional episodes, that wouldn’t get him into regular cast billing.
No way was that the Master. Number one, it’s too obvious, but more importantly, he had the wrong vibe. The Master isn’t playful like that. Yes, he likes children’s shows, but his attacks are almost always more direct than that. He’s more egomaniacal than the Dream Lord. He’s also more dramatic and grandiose. The Master changes with each regeneration, but like the Doctor, his essential character remains the same, and grandiosity is as basic to the Master as evil is.
Besides, the Master does NOT hate the Doctor. He enjoys battling with him too much to truly hate him.
The Dream Lord is clearly different. Although the Doctor is probably hiding something from Amy and Rory, I think he was telling the truth about who the Dream Lord is. The image of the Dream Lord in the console was a confirmation of this. It makes the line about no one else hating the Doctor as much rather poignant. The Dream Lord had insight into the Doctor and his relationship with the companions that the Master wouldn’t have. And it’s not like this shadow-Doctor has appeared out of nowhere. In some ways they’ve been building to it for a long time.
At first, I thought the Dream Lord might be the Celestial Toymaker or the Trickster or even the Black Guardian, but as soon as it was revealed that he is the Doctor himself, it clicked as true. (My first thought was that he was an avatar of the writer or the producers, especially given River’s earlier comment about them all being fairy tales!) So what is the Doctor hiding from Amy and Rory? The reflection of the Dream Lord was not just a confirmation of his identity, but a sign that he is still there and will be back. If nothing else, I think the psychic pollen woke something in the Doctor and gave him a sort of quasi-independent existence. He’s going to find a way to manifest himself again.
All of this, of course, ties in very neatly with another old Who villain: the Valeyard. I won’t be surprised if they never mention him by name, but I don’t think there can be any doubt that they at least had the Valeyard in mind in creating the Dream Lord.
The Valeyard was my first though too after the reveal.
Not a bad episode, but not great either, but certainly better than some others so far.
The Valeyard was my first thought. I dismissed the Master for many of the same reasons as you. The Black Guardian never acted directly. I’d forgotten about the Toymaker. I also considered the Meddling Monk.
Yeah, the Valeyard.
I really liked the episode in spite of the psychic pollen. It was weird, slightly creepy, and played with my mind. And I enjoyed hating Rory’s ponytail. I did find dream-Amy’s agreeing to marry a man without ever telling him she loved him appalling.
I felt it was too early for an episode like this - I don’t know Amy and this doctor well enough to really care about them yet, I’m not emotionally invested in them … for the first time this series I missed David Tennant’s doctor - I did worry about him.
That’s an interesting comment. I DO care about the Doctor because he’s still the Doctor to me. Of course, I’ve been watching Doctor Who since Tom Baker was on PBS here in the states. I also thought this provided a lot of insight into the Doctor making him more sympathetic and making me care more about him (while emphasising how alien he really is).
It’s true I didn’t ever feel like the Doctor was really in danger, but the Doctor is almost never really in danger. Part of the role of the companion is to be put in peril so that here is some dramatic tension despite having an effectively immortal hero.
Amy, I did feel was in danger, and I really thought they killed off Rory for a moment, so the companions worked well in that regard. But you’re right, I don’t care about Amy, or even like her all that much, despite her undeniable hotness. It’s not that it’s too early, though. I should care about Amy by now. That I don’t is my one criticism of the series so far, and I hadn’t really noticed it until you pointed it out.
Someone pointed out in a review of this episode, and I realised I agree with it too, is that there’s absolutely no chemistry between Amy and Rory. The actors themselves are great, and the stories are great, but we have nothing invested in them as a couple, as they have been swept up in madcap adventures, and their banter seems to be mostly at cross purposes.
Otherwise I still like them both.
Care to enlighten the rest of us? I figured it had something to do with the “psychic beans” in the previous post.
In the Doctor Who Confidential (behind the scenes) it’s how Karen Gillan describes the fake breasts in her pregnancy suit.
One of Amy’s lines struck me as very odd: “I loved Rory and I never told him… and now he’s gone.”
They’re getting married in a day, but she never told him that she loved him? WTF?
Did she necessarily mean she didn’t tell him she loved him? Maybe it’s something about the Doctor she never told Rory. Or something about Rory she never told the Doctor. Him can be a bit ambiguous.
I think Amy and Rory are convincing as a couple and her affection for him comes across clearly. There may have been no sparks between Amy and Rory, and that’s quite deliberate. Amy has sparks with the Doctor; Rory has been her safe stand-by man. He’s always been there for her and probably always will be, but he’s dull. The Doctor is exciting and unpredictable but he’ll never really be able to love Amy completely. That’s really what Amy’s choice comes down to. She realizes the Doctor, for all his amazingness, was something less than she had built him up to be in her imagination and Rory, while sometimes boring and annoying, was something more.
Maybe I’m just a softy, but I found the scenes in the nursery very touching, even with a little laugh at Rory’s Gift of the Magi moment and the jarring image of the Doctor knocking an old lady off the roof. Even though it was obviously going to turn out to be just a dream, I could buy that for Amy and Rory the experience was real.
I also found “I never told him I loved him” jarring enough to snap me out of the moment, and perhaps it would have made more sense if she had said “I never realized how much I loved him, and now I can’t tell him because he’s gone.” But her way is shorter and pithier and could mean the same thing. There is a difference between saying the words “I love you” and actually communicating how deeply you feel for someone. I can also believe that in Amy’s dream, her guilt over taking Rory for granted could manifest as “I never told him I loved him,” even if that wasn’t strictly true.
Maybe it’s just too obvious to mention, but has anyone else pondered that the Doctor said he knew both scenarios were dreams as soon as he figured out what the Dream Lord was, and that he told the Dream Lord he knew who he was before things got really dire, and therefore he should have been able to end both dreams before Amy and Rory endured the Attack of the Oldsters and the Icebox of Death? That would explain why he seems content to leave the decisions up to his companions and why he’s relatively calm when he gets into the passenger seat of the camper van. He knows their lives aren’t at stake, but he allows Amy to think they are in order to force her into a decision. Isn’t that like something the Seventh Doctor would have done?