I liked this episode okay, but wasn’t as blown away as some of you. I thought the getting lost in the corridors thing didn’t really work very well, and that the tears when Idris disappears were unearned.
But the banter, and the SF concepts, were all done well, and the art direction was astoundingly impressive.
Holy shit that was amazing! I wasn’t sure if I would like it at first with the whole “let’s go outside the universe!” thing. (I thought crossing into another universe was a Really Bad Thing that could never happen again or else the whole world would implode. Or something. I didn’t really like that apparently it’s no big deal.)
But that aside, the rest of the episode was complete awesomeness! That corridor was frickin’ creepy. The shot of Amy finding Rory’s decayed body with “Kill Amy” scrawled on the walls? Jesus Christ! That was pretty disturbing!
I loved seeing them in the old console room! Aww, I forgot how much I missed that one.
This episode is now tied as my favorite of the Matt Smith years (along with “Vincent & the Doctor” from last year.)
“She’s a woman. And she’s the TARDIS.”
“Did you wish *really *hard?”
Well, it’s not as if he were crying for Idris, since he never met her. He was crying because he’s loved the TARDIS for 700 years, and just found out she loved him, and she’s saved his bacon for the umpty-umpth time, and now he can’t talk to her anymore and didn’t really have much of a chance to talk to her at all. That’s worth a tear or two.
I agree, with everyone else, great episode, and lovely banter.
"But they’re beds :- with STAIRS. How cool is that ? "
I’d say it was a very good episode, but didn’t completely blow me away.
Aside the great concept of the TARDIS becoming “alive”, the bits I liked about it were -
Things I was iffy about -
Some stray observations / questions -
“The only water in the forest is the river.” Which I would assume will have something to do with River Song.
I like to think that too, but it’s been disproven (e.g., Romana, Rassilon, and several others).
I don’t know how well established that really is. The Doctor’s said that it’s nearly impossible, but that’s never really stopped him. In fact, he first said that when he visited the alternate universe with Cybus Industries by accident, so it can’t be that hard. In fact, they eventually started doing it so often it was causing damage! And this isn’t even a completely separate universe, more like an appendage to this one.
Yeah, that would have been nice, but they’d have had to build it from scratch, whereas they had that one. They apparently saved that set this whole time, so it would have been hard to justify building a whole new one! Besides, parts of the new console looked like they might have been from the classic series.
I don’t know how formidable they’ve really been in the past. The Doctor was able to steal the TARDIS and evade them for a long time, though arguably they weren’t looking for him. The Mad Monk never seemed all that formidable a foe, and I don’t think any of them had nearly as much experience as the Doctor at dealing with things like House. The Master probably would have outsmarted it, but not your average Time Lord. The Doctor’s always been shown to have been exceptionally smart even by Time Lord standards. And as he pointed out, he killed all of them, so if House had only managed to kill a few, he really wouldn’t have been much of an adversary, would he?
It’s established by The War Games that the Doctor is in fact being searched for by the Time Lords. They didn’t send out agents to actively hunt him because they had a law against interfering with other races (one of the crimes they charged the Doctor with in the last Troughton episode). However, they had sensors watching for evidence of his whereabouts.
Interestingly, those sensors could not detect a Tardis in use. The Doctor was traced because he contacted them.
I can easily imagine Rory’s frustration. He was killed once and wiped from memory. 2000 years spent protecting Amy while she’s in the Pandorica. After all that I think Rory was hoping for a quiet life in a cottage raising kids. Instead they are with the Doctor and facing more danger than last season.
I’d hope Rory doesn’t really hate Amy. It would take a lot to push him to that extreme.
There is a disturbing pattern of Rory almost dying. It’s like he’s not supposed to be alive. I got a bad feeling he will be the first murdered companion. I’m still hoping the show won’t go that dark and bleak.
There was a theme that was very “The Horse and his Boy” about the new backstory - the TARDIS and her Doctor.
I do think that what we’ve learned in this episode will be significant to the little girl plot, and thus to the Doctor being shot, though I’m not sure in what way. A bit like how the information about the Chameleon arch in ‘Family of Blood’ turned out to be foreshadowing for “Utopia”, back in season 3. If the TARDIS’ soul got stuck in a little girl somehow, Amy might have ‘adopted’ her in a way, though I’m not sure the TARDIS would let ‘The Orange one’ tell her what to do. (And how disturbing would it be to have a little girl say that her name is ‘Sexy’?)
Speaking of how the TARDIS perceived companions, I love that she thinks of Rory as ‘the pretty one.’ I wonder what her nicknames were for Rose, Mickey, Martha, Captain Jack, Donna, and Sarah Jane.
Now, obviously all of Rory’s suffering wasn’t real, since the scene with his dried-up corpse doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the true Rory’s timeline. I’m wondering if from the first time they were separated by a door, they weren’t truly talking to each other, but House was creating illusions and duplicates of one to the other. If so, we only really saw Amy’s side of it - what was House doing to mess with Rory’s head?
In the Cybus/Cybermen crossover, didn’t crossing the universe divide drain the TARDIS power cells, which kept them stuck in that universe, unable even to refuel? I guess this pocket universe has to be different in that respect, or it would have broken several pieces of the plot. I was wondering if that was part of the symptoms that turned out to be the TARDIS’ soul being stolen.
I loved the sense that the bad guy was essentially a ghost who had posessed the body of the TARDIS - and the Doctor’s cleverness in the end: He pretended to believe in House’s word, providing information that he knew House would take advantage of to try and get what he wanted and kill them all in the process, but the Doctor knew that the TARDIS failsafes would block that murder attempt and get Sexy back where she needed to be before her body failed.
River and not Pond, was the implication for me. No theories about what it could actually mean, though. Something timey-wimey, I expect.
No idea, I am waiting for the entire series to be finished so I can watch it in one huge marathon [I am DVRing the episodes]
But I do know that The Doctor’s Wife is my all time favorite episode …
Mr. Lissar just had a thought about why House could mess with Amy’s head and not Rory’s- Auntie touched Amy and said, “House loves you.”. Telepathic connection?
Anyway, great episode. We watched it with two kids crawling over us and will need to rewatch it later.
What makes you think that it couldn’t? Would Rory have understood what was going on with Amy so easily if he hadn’t gone through something of the sort - or said ‘messing with us’ instead of ‘messing with us’? Well, maybe, since he’s sweet and understanding about Amy.
But I rather prefer the interpretation that House was indeed messing with Rory, but we didn’t see in what way.
I liked this episode a lot. Great acting by everyone and wonderful art direction. It had been a while since last we saw the TARDIS’ corridors.
Personally I dislike the concept of an intelligent and conscious TARDIS although I understand it’s been done before in the novels, with which I am not familiar. I also very much disliked the Doctor bragging about his destruction of the Time Lords and his cheering the TARDIS on as she killed House. Doctor Who is becoming more violent every year. At the beginning of this season he arranged for the genocide of the Silence, which no other Doctor would have done.
As to the ease with which House killed Time Lords… The Time Lords have never been a very impressive bunch individually. Everybody who likes Doctor Who should watch The Deadly Assassin. It’s one of the best stories the show’s ever done and is set entirely in Gallifrey. There we learn that Time Lords look very much like boring bureaucrats and are not impressive in the least.
IIRC, in “Rise of the Cybermen” the Doctor said that jumping into a parrallel universe ought to be impossible now that the Time Lords are gone. (or something like that.) I think the Time Lords had the technology to traverse universes, but a single TARDIS shouldn’t be able to make the jump. Any anyway, I know this wasn’t specifically mentioned, but I always took it for granted that the TARDIS landing in the “Cybus” universe was indirectly caused by the London Torchwood’s experiments with the Dalek Void Ship, which caused a crack in the universal barriers - which the TARDIS just happened to stumble into. (It was stated by the Cybermen that the traversed the dimensional barriers by ‘piggybacking’ on the Void Ship - thereby implying that the Daleks had visited that universe.)
[QUOTE=MHaye]
It’s established by The War Games that the Doctor is in fact being searched for by the Time Lords. They didn’t send out agents to actively hunt him because they had a law against interfering with other races (one of the crimes they charged the Doctor with in the last Troughton episode). However, they had sensors watching for evidence of his whereabouts.
Interestingly, those sensors could not detect a Tardis in use. The Doctor was traced because he contacted them.
[/QUOTE]
I can easily imagine that the Time Lords haughtily expected that the Doctor would eventually grow bored with the rest of the universe, start to miss “the good life” back on Gallifrey and come crawling back home, begging for forgiveness.
Uh, the Doctor has personally committed genocide several times. The Daleks, the Arachnos, the Timelords, the Vervoids (spelling may be wrong), the new Cybermen. The whatchamacallits in The Fires of Pompeii. How about the meaness of the punishments in Family of Blood?
Also- lets not forget is name is ‘destroyer of worlds’ 
Yeah… but that’s my point! Most of these are recent examples. Tom Baker decided it would be wrong to commit genocide in Genesis of the Daleks when he has the chance to kill the first Daleks before they get a chance to develop. 15 years later Sylvester McCoy manipulates the Daleks into destroying themselves. Colin Baker (the most violent Doctor there had been up to that point) kills 4 Vervoids.
All the other examples come from the new series (including multiple instances of Dalek genocide). What’s more, the Doctor isn’t even allowing his adversaries chances of surrendering anymore. Recently the Doctor passes judgment and executes the sentence.
That’s a good point. On the other hand, I think that the Doctor might have been scared of the Silence more than he’s ever been scared of anything else that he’s come up against, simply because the Silence powers overwhelm his strong point, his brain.
With any other enemy, even the Daleks, the Doctor is confident enough to steer clear of genocide because he believes that he’s smart enough to figure out a better way. With the Silence, even if they’re not a direct threat, the Doctor doesn’t have that option. I think that believably, it was genocide, or submit to being dominated by the Silence, and domination could lead to his death if the Silence decided that he was too unpredictable to let live.