A Good Man Goes To War: Ranking - 120

   A Good Man Goes To War

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 4/6/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Peter Hoar) 

Rank: 120

  'You know what my name is in Ice Warrior? Drip Jingle. But I keep that quiet' or 'Ring Ring...' 'Whose that? Little girl? What are you doing phoning and interrupting the bathtime of the 27th president of the United States? I didn't even know there was a phone in here - dagnabbit new contraption, it just gets in the way of the important things in life. Like sleeping and eating. I'll see what I can do to help you though or my name's not William Howard Taft and I...hello? Hello? Where'dyou go?'

Back in 1963 and the second ever story, when the Doctor first met The Daleks and their hippie chums the Thals, he was appalled to find out that they were from a pacifist society that refused to fight back. Figuring there must be some breaking point somewhere the 1st Doctor and Ian conspired to kidnap one of their women (the only Thal woman seen on screen…she must be exhausted) only for the schoolteacher to receive a hefty whack in the face for his audacity. ‘Oho’ Team Tardis cried ‘So there is something that you will fight for!’ It’s a typical product of its time, written by a man (Terry Nation) who’d grown up in war-torn Britain and fully expected there to be another soon because that’s the way the world seemed to work: WW1 is followed by WW2 and Russia and America are fierce allies so…Only the children who grew up watching Dr Who thought differently. Within five years, just long enough for the Doctor to regenerate into Patrick Troughton, there they are protesting wars in Vietnam and Korea and nuclear missiles and soon the Doctor will have changed again into Jon Pertwee, a figure who only wants peace and is there to sort out squabbles and protect humanity defensively. By the time he turns into Tom Baker the Doctor can’t bring himself to kill the Daleks even when that’s what his entire mission has been, putting generations in danger because he refuses to kill in cold blood, even when it’s the biggest fiercest most awful race in the universe, while preventing the savage companion from the Sevateem from killing even when people are in danger. By the time 2011 rolls around fans know the score: the Doctor is a committed pacifist who would only fight in self defence and even then use every trick in the book to avoid fighting at all. The trouble with that stance, though, is that it doesn’t prevent people fighting in your name and down the years the Doctor has befriended and saved many armies, warrior races and tribes who have grown up on tales of his miraculous defeats of their immortal enemies. And, as the Thals discovered, being a pacifist is all very well until an eyepatch lady steals your best friend and her baby, replacing her with a ganger substitute that isn’t real. It’s the same debate as in 1963, of what would make a pacifist turn and fight, only this time it’s the Doctor whose on the aside of the angels (not weeping ones), his hand forced into a showdown at Demon’s Run. 

 ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ is unique in Dr Who of all eras. It’s one big battle, fought between good and evil, with the Doctor calling in favours from his friends to get Amy and her baby Melody back as they face down a military army. You can tell they used a real military hangar (but one in Cardiff, not in space – or so we’re told anyway...‘part MASH part Battlestar Galactica’ as the script describes it) one giant set plus a couple of flashbacks and a few smaller rooms off it, the scene of one great last skirmish of the sort you get a lot in American scifi shows (which tend to be more military-based than British ones, think ‘Stargate’ or ‘Time Tunnel’) but hardly in ever Dr Who. This is a character whose happiest when he’s saving the universe anonymously, doing good then taking off again before people notice he’s gone: he’ll topple tyrants in one great short sharp shock then leave other people to fill in the vacuum. But this fight is different – this fight is personal - and the Doctor is angry enough to do things differently this time. Oh he still keeps to the shadows – there’s a great scene where he’s hiding in plain sight dressed as a monk (because there’s no way he’d be a soldier), sneaking round the eye-patched Madame Kovarian as a decoy while Rory can get on with the proper business of rescuing his wife before making the baddies surrender. Make no bones about it though: for the first time in multiple lifetimes the Doctor has actively tracked down his enemy spoiling for a fight and he gets one. It’s a huge moment in his development as a character as we see him pushed to an extreme we’ve never seen before and watch him pay the price for being a soldier, albeit a reluctant one. Because, in true Dr Who moral style, there’s always a price with every fight you have: the question is whether the fight you have is worth it. By the end, with (spoilers) his plan foiled, his friends dying and kind strangers who would normally get to live in Dr Who stories dead and the person he was saving turning on him for getting things wrong, the Doctor learns just how high that price is. You suspect it will be a very long time before he ever tries to fight like this again and before we have an episode quite as gung or indeed gun-ho as this one. 

 That makes ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ hard to review. For me it’s the weakest of the sort of-ish five parter that ebbs and flows throughout series six. It’s a hugely clever piece of writing by Steven Moffat, one that wraps up so many plot arcs (before, inevitably, re-starting some others) with lots of big emotional set pieces and some lovely acting from the whole cast (but especially Matt Smith who gets some of the best range within a single episode of any Doctor, called on to act flippant and cocky, then smug, then sombre, then heartbroken). There are four great new characters (two of which are killed off, one of which is resurrected by next time we see him), a chance for the usual comedic foil Rory to be dashing, a chance for the usually dashing Amy to be stern and tough and an array of dazzling effects and group shots of mass extras the show usually can’t afford. As a climax before the series went off air for a few months (unprecedented at the time, though they try it again a series later before dropping the idea) it’s a whacking big spectacle to pull viewers in and shout ‘look at what we can do!’ . If I was giving marks solely for how a story turned out on screen this one would be a top ten for sure: practically every frame is beautiful, the massed hordes of extras impressive, the amount of returning friends as regulars or in cameo delightful, extending on the idea of ‘Journey’s End’ of just how many friends this loner timelord has and how many people are more than willing to give their lives to help him after all he’s done for them. But the problem with doing an episode about the Doctor and companions pushed past their comfort zone like never before and being reminded of why Dr Who is never usually like this is that it doesn’t feel like Dr Who. It doesn’t even feel like the other four parts of this vague multi-parter: the other episodes are all parts of the same jigsaw, tricky multi-layered puzzles that act like a cryptic crossword that can only be understood if you know the clues; this one is a big one dimensional battle then a two dimensional emotional discourse and only then, in its closing few minutes, does it go back to being a puzzle. It’s as if the cerebral Sudoku grid you were playing on suddenly turned into a giant game of battleships. Plus the battle turned out to be all for nothing in terms of plot points (except for getting Amy back of course): we still don’t know who Madame Korvarian is or why she has it in for Amy and Rory’s baby (although Amy herself is back with her friends again at least). I still can’t work out what I think about this story: do I hate it for being so un Dr Who, or praise it for doing something different and being a story that’s about why stories like this won’t work in Dr Who? 

 At the time it was infuriating I remember. There was no mention of the mysterious astronaut who’d taken pot-shots at the Doctor, no reference to his death in the future (the others still haven’t told him yet) and as things turn out the moon landing aspect of the plot will be dropped for good, to be never mentioned again. Only at the end do we get any further on in the plot, with a revelation that’s genuinely clever and yet only really makes sense when you’ve seen the rest of the year (while being, as is true for a lot of Moffat stories, never quite as satisfying on re-watching when you do have all the answers). The problem with having so many interlinked episodes interspersed with other ones is that, by the time we reached the middle of series six, fans were getting impatient for the answers to the riddle that had been raised in episodes one and two and apparently forgotten for a full month. In retrospect the mood swing to the high camp of ‘Curse Of The Black Spot’ (never intended as episode three) was a bad move for a storyline that seemed so promising and more casual viewers had forgotten all about River Song, while those of us who cared wanted to know a lot more than this episode could ever have given us. But then that isn’t the Steven Moffat way: I suspect he’ll still be teasing us with snippets of continuity when he’s in the old folks home for retired writers. 

The revelations about River Song are by far the best aspect of this story. Despite being the Doctor’s future wife and greatest companion she’s missing for most of the episode, refusing Rory’s request for help, conspicuous by her absence. You’re meant to think, on first viewing, that she doesn’t turn up because she doesn’t want the Doctor to die – but no (mega huge spoilers because, seriously, the story will never be the same once you know this!), she didn’t turn up because she was already there. The revelation that she is Amy and Rory’s baby that everyone has been trying to save, who only turns up once the risk of a ‘Blinovitch limitation effect’ is over (a hole in the space-time continuum caused by the same person meeting themselves at two different ages, mentioned often in the series but best explained when it happens to an amnesiac Brigadier in ‘Mawdryn Undead’), is one of those all-time great ‘what the?’ revelations. Sure some fans saw it coming (I even read that theory on a couple of fan forums or as comments on youtube videos before the episode went out) but that was just one theory against so many thousands and it seemed so unlikely and incredible. But then why not? Like all great magicians Moffat has been hiding what seems so obvious in retrospect in plain sight, confusing us with so many plot threads that could be true that we don’t see the obvious, that River Song has been a mystery since her arrival. What’s more it was a moment the production team managed to keep quite until the day of broadcast: a true rarity in an era of leaks (Alex Kingston was the only person who knew before the rehearsals, so she could itch her performance in episodes one and two accordingly; Matt, Karen and Arthur were given dummy scripts at the big script read through only found out the true script afterwards, when they were invited into a tiny office to read the ‘real’ script on Moffat’s laptop. Most of the other actors didn’t know and learned who River was then and there, their reactions real). It’s so clever: the quilt the soldier with the sweet but unlikely name Lorna Bucket (presumably that sounds more natural in timelordese), gives to a captive Amy for her baby with the chosen name in the alphabet of her planet Gamma translated by the Tardis circuits to English: they don’t have an equivalent for the English word ‘Melody’ so they go with ‘Song’ and they don’t have a word for ‘Pond’ so instead they go for ‘River’, making up the name…Drip Jingle (wait, no, sorry, that’s a glitch from the Ice Warrior edition of this book where they don’t have the words for either). What’s so good about this moment is that we’ve been well and truly led down the garden path with so many red herrings in this particular ‘pond’, not least the fact that the baby is part timelord: for the longest time we’re led to believe that the father is the Doctor, whether by his knowledge/consent (finally explaining that rather odd moment when Amy is all over him the night before her wedding in series five: it was to make us think that it could have happened at this point) or from a more spacey wacey timey wimey reason (after the Doctor’s denial). The truth is rather sweet: the Doctor is so innocent he’s never even considered his companions might have sex on the Tardis while in flight in the space-time vortex despite it being the night after their wedding. There are so many great little moments in the closing few minutes as the viewer struggles to take it all in: the Doctor’s realisation that the baby is a decoy ganger, Amy’s anger so silent and cold, River’s guilt that she couldn’t be there at the scene of the Doctor’s biggest battle (because she couldn’t cross her own timelines and knew from her diary that she wasn’t there as an adult), the poignancy of Lorna’s death, The Doctor’s face as he ‘gets’ it before Amy Rory or we at home do before running off with glee, the cot the Doctor still has lying round the Tardis from his own childhood days (because of course he has – he’s the ultimate hoarder and has a spaceship that’s infinitely bigger on the inside). It’s all such clever complex but very real and emotional writing and the storyline about who and what River really is will only get better (after a time of being even more confusing). 

 Also strong are the debates about whether the Doctor caused all this or not. That’s clearly what River thinks and Alex Kingston is never better than rounding on her husband, but in a nuanced way: she doesn’t want to break his hearts but she wants to tell him cold hard truths, that people were so afraid of him that they formed an entire army to defeat him. The Doctor knows he’s gone too far and has switched out of smug mode into humble, lessons learnt, but you so feel for him: of all the Doctors this is the one that’s most childlike. He hates learning the lessons that his predecessors War, 9 and 10 did: he just wants to play, but life keeps interrupting him and turning this pacifist into a warrior all over again when all he wants is peace. The title is clever too: the fake Moffat saying ‘Demons run when angels go to war’ sounds like a genuine olde worlde saying (perhaps from the Bible or Greek myths), but while we all assumed before broadcast it was referring to the Doctor (and that River would shoot him this episode given that she was in prison for shooting a ‘good man’ as long as ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’) it turns out that it was Rory. Or at least that’s how she greets him when Rory turns up to rescue her and the baby (while by the end of the episode the Doctor is seriously doubting if he is a good man or not. Besides, technically he’s not a ‘man’ at all but a non-binary timelord). There’s a great moment when Lorna reveals that to her people the word ‘doctor’ means warrior and that, desperate to meet him again after the Doctor saved her as a child, she joined the army. There’s a moment that speaks volumes, the Doctor comforting a dying stranger by pretending he remembered her and how they ran (because it’s a pretty safe bet they were running) before admitting to his friends that he’s lived so long he doesn’t remember her at all (while it could be because he hasn’t met her yet this feels more like the weary celebrity ashamed that he doesn’t remember everyone he ever met but also aware that he lives such a separate life its hard to remember what to him are tiny details even when meeting him is such a big deal to everyone else). I wish to goodness Moffat had made more of an idea that he’d been talking about as early as a Dr Who forum in 1995: his theory that we on Earth and on all other planets get our name for ‘Doctor’ meaning ‘healer’ all because of this Doctor and that here, today, the Doctor betrayed that ideal (something picked up on in ‘The Day Of The Doctor’ but alas the part about the name meaning different things to different people is never referred to again). 

 Steven Moffat has the reputation amongst fans for being too clever by half and that’s true more often than its not to be honest, but here, with a revelation years in the making that’s had to survive years of fans debating back and forth online while still seeming like a ‘moment’, is sheer poetry. I’d love to know how early he came up with the idea: Moffat, apparently, had the idea ‘for ever so long’ but not quite from River’s first appearance in ‘Silence In the Library’; I’m guessing he had it after inventing Rory as technically the baby would be named melody Williams (something the showrunner gets round by having the Doctor always refer to his companions as ‘the Ponds’ after they’re married, in apparent ignorance of Earth wedding traditions). Even so he had an inkling for this story arc from pretty near the beginning which makes this the single most impressive cases of patience for an idea to pay off in a series full of them. Forget ‘Bad Wolf’ or ‘missing bees’ this is how you do story arcs: everything we thought we knew we didn’t, the revelation changes everything for every member of the Tardis crew we’ve come to care so much for and the story that seemed to have run its course has a whole new avenue to run off in. That’s very Dr Who that is.

 The trouble is that revelation comes after the rest of the story which isn’t like Dr Who at all, one which just does the sort of things ‘other’ scifi series do all the time but still feels ‘wrong’. It’s the first time, in many ways the only time, that the Doctor starts a war rather than solves it and its so out of character: Steven Moffat’s starting point was wondering what would force a pacifist to turn to war and decided that kidnapping Amy would be enough to do it. I’m not sure I agree though: while the Doctor has been encouraging others to fight for themselves our Doctor would never ask anyone to risk life or limb for him or his friends – indeed – he has enough sleepless nights already when his companions risk theirs for big fights when necessary. Following the time war (fought by Drs 8 through War in a burden carried so heavily by 9 and 10) a war is the last thing this particular Doctor would risk, even for Amy and it feels odd indeed to hear people talking about the more childish and playful 11th Doctor as this vicious warmonger, despite all the flashes of this we’ve seen in his character. We’ve certainly never seen him gloat the way he does when telling Colonel Manton (a man whose only obeying orders) that he not only wants him to stand his troops down but tell them to ‘run away’ so he can be jeered at by children for the rest of his natural days. Only in the ‘New Adventures’ books (and ‘Human Nature’ itself based on a ‘New Adventures book) is he ever this cruel or indeed cowardly. Even though the Doctor fights by stealth and uses every trick in the book not to fight at all this is still the closest new-Who ever came to repeating the one-off ‘Dominators’ story that equated pacifists with cowardice. Besides, it’s an idea that’s already been done just a few episodes earlier in ‘The Big Bang’ in reverse, where the Doctor was trapped by all his enemies working together and again ‘Journey’s End’ did something similar with friends albeit on a much smaller scale. To give him his due, though, Matt Smith is a lot more comfortable with anger in this episode than we’ve seen from him before and his taunting of the soldiers (who are also religious clerics, this being a Moffat script) and scaring all the soldiers not with threats but with his confidence is a delight in the ‘old’ playful Doctor vein. 

 The other trouble is with so many balls to juggle there’s no time for much else: no subplots, not much characterisation, no colour to go with the soldier khaki. Amy, too, is not herself though: while she’s had a really bad day (she ‘s suddenly had to come to terms with being a mum and then losing her baby again in quick succession) she’s a peril monkey in this story in a way she never was before and since, not even trying to make a break for it (even with baby in tow it would be more in character to be considering it). She’s snipey and bitter to the people around her even when they’re nice, sarcastically telling Lorna that she hopes she dies so that she can no longer hear her talking and pointing out that the Doctor came back for her so she must be ‘special’: we’ve seen her like this before waiting for the Doctor and Rory to rescue her (‘The Girl Who waited’) but she’s jumped there too quick: she hasn’t had time to lose hope yet. Rory, too, is oddly hard: admittedly we’ve never seen him in these circumstances either but the only lines of his that ring true for the old Rory are when he starts bawling just as he was trying to act all cool. It almost feels as if Moffat’s forgotten how to write for his main characters in his attempts to push them past their limits; all very worthy, but in an episode so different to anything the series had done before, and in the context of a plot that relies heavily on our emotional investment in them and the outcome of the story, it’s a rare bad move to make them quite this different.

 The Paternoster Row Gang, the highlights of many an 11th and 12th Dr Who script to come, seemed odd at the time though. The idea of a Silurian, Human and Sontaron sharing a house together sounds like Moffat trying to cash in on fellow Who writer Toby Whithouse’s vampire, werewolf and ghost series ‘Being Human’ series without properly setting up how they know the Doctor. All we hear about is snippets, plus a quite lengthy bit of the Doctor saving Strax. Once we get to know them either Madame Vastra nor Jenny seem as if they would approve of such a big attack and while Strax would always be keen to fight anybody and anything he isn’t quite himself yet. He still gets the best lines though, saying as he leaves his nursing duties on the battlefield (apparently in the future though everyone is dressed for the Crimean War): ‘I hope someday to meet you in the glory of battle where I will crush the life from your worthless human form. Try and get some rest’. Along with ‘I have often dreamed of dying in combat – yet I am not enjoying it as much as I had hoped’. How very Moffat: even while comedy relief Rory has turned hard and the Doctor has lost his lightness of touch the funny moments all come from a warrior race and you can see why Strax, for one, was so popular he was brought back. Otherwise Moffat’s lost his lightness of touch though: we’re asked to care about these characters awfully quickly, with some occasionally torturous dialogue (the gag about blind singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder performing on the ice of the frozen Thames is in uncharacteristically poor taste: if anyone could have coped with being told he’d been taken back through time and space its Stevie: he was always ahead of his time as it is). The corny narration voiceovers isn’t any better written by Moffat and performed by Karen Gillan than it was with Russell T and Billie Piper and it feels so out of place; as for the poem about demon’s run let’s just say that I can see why Moffat became a writer of prose not poetry (there’s an entire lost verse cut for timing reasons: ‘The fight goes on but what is it for? when a good man goes to war, now rise the sun now dawn the day, when good men run and women stay, when battle’s done when nothing’s won, it’s a woman’s work to say well then soldier how goes the day?’ (which does at least explain why River uses that last rather odd phrase when meeting up with an angry Doctor). 

 Poor Lorna gets the short straw by not even getting that amount of characterisation: her death ought to feel like a big turning point, a good person who ends up another casualty of war despite secretly being on the ‘right’ side, but it doesn’t feel quite earned: it’s the difference between being told about someone good and brave dying and knowing they were good and brave for yourself. Really they could have shrunk ten minutes of the Doctor gloating and being heroic in favour for a bigger character point like this. I wish, too, that we’d seen more of the baddies: all we get is a bit of cyber-plotting in yet another of their half-appearances in this series (see ‘Closing Time’): you’d think everyone would be queuing up to take revenge on the Doctor and might have made up for the all-too-brief shots we got of a similar idea in ‘The Pandorica Opens/Big Bang’. The headless monks and Dorium (the blue guy) are rather wasted too: they’re a means for a neat bit of Doctor camouflage and then the script forgets about them when it no longer needs them. You’d think the Doctor would have more friends than this willing to help him out too: a quick cameo from Captain Avery (from ‘Black Spot’) led me to think that we were going to get snippets of every person the Doctor has helped this year, but nope. There was one old friend who was in the draft script to help out: Captain Jack. Always one for a fight in a good cause, it would have been the only time he ever met the 11th Doctor and mirrored the similarly tense and hopeless finale to ‘Parting Of The Ways’. The idea was dropped for practical reasons: John Barrowman was busy shooting the 5th series of Torchwood (which turned out to be the final one) ‘Miracle Day’ in America and the schedule simply wouldn’t allow them to delay it. For a while it was even him that sacrificed his life for the Doctor, though of course being unable to die he would have been beheaded instead just like the monks (explaining how he ended up as the Face of Boe and a big ol’ head in a jar, something still not explained in the Whoniverse). Moffat said that while he was really disappointed at the time he was pleased in retrospect as it would have made the episode more of a class reunion than the tense gritty drama he was trying to write; even so Captain Jack is conspicuous by his absence. Jack was replaced for a while by an Ood, allegedly Ood Sigma from ‘The End Of Time’, left in the script until so late in the day the end credits still mention Russell T as their creator, but in the end they were removed too (they are, after all, the last people I’d want in an army, at any rate when not possessed). You’d think UNIT would have gladly sent along a few troops too (and that the ‘black archive’ would have given them enough warning to be ready for it). 

 It’s not as if this episode skimped on anything else after all: in many ways this is the most impressive Dr Who has ever looked on screen, the equal of any big budget American series. Having a whole hangar to play with and filling it with props and extras and characters galore means you never quite know where to look, the old days of one unconvincing rubber monster banished forever. You have to ask, though, whether ultimately the cost was worth it: 2011 was the year after the credit crunch, when the Conservatives and Lid Dems came into power on the back of an amoral lie that they would cut down Britain’s national debt by trimming fat that needed to go in the name of austerity, all while adding to the national debt at a greater rate than ever before in history thanks to the money being splashed out to keep businesses sweet (businesses that provided them with cushy jobs when they retired). As well as such essential things as schools, hospitals and libraries one of the beautiful things they pruned back so they could get paid a fortune for an hour job once a year and order expensive breakfasts on taxpayer’s money was the money that went to fund the BBC. This was not the time to be putting on an episode this big and bold and allegedly Moffat’s co-producers told him so. For now Moffat gets his way, although the rumour has long been that the reason series 6 is broken in two like this is for budgetary rather than aesthetic reasons, despite all the ‘we want to leave people with a big cliffhanger in the middle to make them tune back in’ fuss in all the promotional material, with ‘Dr Who Confidential’ axed after four popular years to make way for it. It’s notable that producers Beth Willis and Piers Wenger jump ship at the end of the year, though things really hot up when their ‘replacement’ Caroline Skinner quits suddenly midway through series seven. Was it all worth it just for a slightly bigger crowd of extras in a slightly bigger room compared to normal? As great as it all looks, probably not really.

The result is a story that’s brilliant in many ways with many strong messages and bits of characterisation that nevertheless is less than the sum of its parts. Coming to it now, without the shock of the ending, the Doctor’s relative failure and the truth of who River Song is, the story doesn’t glimmer quite so brightly: it comes across as a little too stagey, without Moffat’s usual stock in trade of dialogue and characters. As we keep saying, its biggest sin is that it doesn’t seem anything like Dr Who: it sticks out like a Judoon on a Goblin planet in the context of modern Who in general and at the heart of series 5 in particular. However wrong it seemed then and now, though, I have to admit I was gripped the first time round and still love watching the faces of my more casul Who fans when I watch this episode with them for the first time and see them work out what’s going on (even the friends who usually guess how a story is going to end as soon as the opening credits never guess this one!) Seeing this the first time round was an event and it’s not really this story’s fault that, now we know how the battle turns out, we can’t enjoy it as much in peacetime. In other words ‘A Good Man’ is a blooming brilliant bit of television, with its sombre mood and high budget and it works brilliantly as a mid-series climax, but that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying it’s a brilliant bit of Dr Who. Nominated for the 2012 HUGO science fiction award it lost to ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ – an episode with far lower stakes and a budget a fraction the size that nevertheless feels much more like Who than ‘A Good Man Goes To war’ does. 

 POSITIVES + That very final twist and turn, right when you think they can’t possibly do any more: it was all a matter of misdirection from the baddies. Amy’s baby isn’t real but a ganger and disappears in her mother’s arms just when everyone has given so much to save her. Needless to say, mum is not happy. Surrounded by deaths and sacrifices for nothing, this is one of the few times the Doctor truly, un-debatedly, categorically, definitively loses and looks ashamed. Rory’s look of panic, the Doctor’s guilt and Amy’s unadulterated anger at the person who promised to save her and failed are all brilliantly delivered. Forget what I said earlier: while American scifi shows would do battle episodes none would end it like this, with the goodies so defeated and demoralised. 

 NEGATIVES - Over on the baddy side of the base Madame Kovarian is hopeless though, not the match for the Doctor the script seems to think she is. Frances Barber is from the hammier side of the Dr Who acting school and doesn’t get much to do except gloat in any case. Her plan for Amy is unclear too: it’s a trap for the Doctor of course, but what made her think of setting it here? Frustratingly there is no great showdown between her and the Doctor where all is revealed – for that we have to wait another few months and even then we never get it quite the way you expect from the start of this episode. BEST QUOTE: ‘Please, point a gun at me if it helps you relax – you’re only human’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: This was the third of five stories in series six to have its own prequel (officially titled, umm, ‘Prequel’) released on the Dr Who website a few days before broadcast as a sort of cross between a bonus trailer for the series and a deleted scene. A hundred seconds long, it features more of Dorium talking to a hooded figure (that is revealed in the episode itself to be The Doctor). The Doctor is giving payment for something we can’t see – sentient payment this being Dr Who (‘Oh I do love it when it wriggles!’) – and ends with Dorium’s plea to be careful in snatching ‘the child’ because ‘God have mercy on us all if you’ve made him angry!’ A nice bit of scene setting but you haven’t missed out on much if you haven’t seen it. 

 Ever wondered how Strax got revived before making his second appearance in ‘The Snowmen’? That’s explained by the webcast ‘The Battle Of Demon’s Run: Two Days Later’ as part of the publicity in the build-up to series seven. Vastra and Jenny use Silurian technology to heal his wounds, not realising what a terrible thing it is for a Sontaron to have been revived at a point of glorious death. Strax is most angry, but softens when Demon’s Run is evacuated and he realises he has nowhere else to go and meekly takes up their offer to follow them to their home in Victorian London. Not sure this short piece was worth paying for (which was how you originally bought it from Amazon or i-tunes) but it fills in a gap in the storyline and more of the paternoster Row gang is always a good thing. 

 ‘Lorna’s Escape’ is a rare short story from a Dr Who annual (the 2013 one) that closely links to a televised story, telling the tale of how the soldier first met the Doctor in the Gamma Forests. A large scaly alien crash-lands their ship into Lorna’s home planet and goes on the rampage, killing the local inhabitants for food. Lorna is out in the forests with her best friend Stefan when they are cornered by the creature and think they are about to die, before the 11th Doctor rushes in, grabs them by the hand and tells them to run. The Doctor does something impossibly clever with his sonic screwdriver and banishes the creature from the forests in a ‘blinding flash’, hailed as a God by the village he’s just saved. It’s a neat piece of continuity with the TV story, but doesn’t fill in much you couldn’t have guessed for yourselves. 

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