The Power Of Three
(Series 7, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 22/9/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Douglas MacKinnon)
Rank: 44
'How that invasion played out across the rest of the DW universe...
'Look Barbara, a cube from outer space. Do you suppose its bigger on the inside?!'
'I don't understand Sgt Benton, there I was halfway up the Amazon when this ruddy great cube fell on top of me and Cliff and nearly sank our boat! I don't suppose the Dr's been in touch at all...Any of them?!'
'Well I've blown myself up seventeen times trying to get this cube open. Good thing I can't die. Well, let's give it a go for an 18th time...'
'Mr Smith I need you...No wait, monitoring these cubes is taking too much power. I'll have Luke do it instead, keep him out of my hair'
'Brave heart Tegan...Especially when so many people's hearts seem to be stopping. I wonder what weird being The Master's dressed up as for this invasion?! It's bound to be him, he's probably compressed somebody hiding inside it!'
'I don't understand Sophie, what do you mean these aren't Stormageddon's building blocks but a load of alien space cubes...Where's the Dr? If he takes my spot on this year's football team too now we've just gone up a league I'll murder him!'
'No class, we will not be leaving English class early. An alien invasion of cubes is no excuse to fail your English lit exam. Although if the arriving alien is dishy I might be persuaded to put leave marking for another night...'
'Typical of my luck - finally get a job as a cleaner at uni and now all the students keep leaving these weird cube things everywhere. There's thousands of them!'
'This is p.c. Yasmin, we've got a pile of cubes that have just materialised out of nowhere, getting reinforcements. Sheffield is over-run with cubes, repeat Sheffield is over-run with cubes...'
And so Dr Who enters its
cubist period, with an alien invasion quite unlike any others seen in the
show’s long history: small black boxes that slowly count down to zero, across
ther space of a year (well, 361 days to be exact). Where other alien invasions
are big and noisy explosive affairs with much shooting and running down
corridors madly this is one of acclimatisation that has space to think, to
breathe, to give proper space to beloved companions Amy and Rory and examine
their complex relationship with The Doctor before their rather rushed farewell
next episode. It’s an episode that could have just been lots of waiting around
with nothing happening, but ends up packing lots of depth into its script, as
the choice Amy has been trying to make between her wonderfully adventurous life
and her wonderfully domestic life comes to a head. It’s a story filled with
lots of lovely sweet moments and lots of laughs, as we see how easily the pair
flit between their two worlds and how much The Doctor struggles in ours. The
basic idea is a Steven Moffat idea (‘an invasion that takes a year and sees The
Doctor getting bored’) but he gave it to Chris Chibnall after seeing how well
the writer nailed Amy and Rory’s characters in ‘Dinosaurs
On A Spaceship’. Not my first thoughts about that episode but credit where
it’s due: this is very much the future showrunner’s masterpiece, a story that
nails absolutely every line (until the ending, for special reasons discussed
below) and really gets under the skin of its three main characters. I had such
high hopes for the Chibnall era based on this story (even if his earlier ones
were a bit iffy): few stories have as much imagination, laugh out loud or
poignant moments as this one, an under-rated modern masterpiece if ever there
was one (it is, indeed, the most recent story in my top fifty, for what that’s
worth).
Why is this story so
special? Well, perhaps a good 90% of the other Dr Who stories are about making
the ordinary extraordinary, of following our human representatives as they
enter the Doctor’s mad world and face alien cultures invading our own world or
other planets that are remarkably like ours but with one scifi thing
particularly out of whack. ‘The Power Of Three’ though has the extraordinary
become ordinary, as the Doctor is trapped in our world for so long that he all
but has a nervous breakdown at trying to live our life along with us, just for
a little bit. We’ve already seen how frustrated the Doctor was at being stuck
on Earth in the UNIT days, living his life in sequence, but at least then he
was lucky (fated?) enough to end up on our planet at the time in our history
when we were being invaded left, right and centre every week so always had a
lot to do (err, whatever period that was). Even the ‘Lodger’/’Closing
Time’ duo from the two previous 11th Dr seasons have a good old-fashioned
alien invasion at their heart somewhere, even if the crux of those stories are
about Matt Smith learning to blend in with humanity. This story goes further
than ever though: before we even met him the Doctor was running away from a
‘normal’ life back on Gallifrey, so terrified of the rigid life waiting for him
that he stole a Tardis and ran away, even when he knew it meant (semi)permanent
exile. How much worse for him, then, that he ends up being stuck on our far
more boring planet waiting for an invasion that arrives only in slow
motion. No wonder he keeps disappearing and encouraging his companions to
run off and have adventures with him – even when they are enjoying the slower
quieter life of living a ‘normal’ life.
The working title for this
story was, naturally enough, ‘cubed’, but the production team disliked it for
some reason and insisted on changing it, settling on ‘The Power Of Three’ for
having roughly the same meaning, but also the power of The Doctor, Amy and Rory
together and the two plotlines are cleverly woven together. In the episode we
learn that The Doctor has been visiting the Ponds ‘on and off’ for ten years by
now (space enough for all sorts of extra adventures when the actors have run
out of job offers and turn to Big Finish, though you have to say they do both
seem to have done well on the aging stakes as they look just the same as when
we first met them – as adults at least. Not least because you can probably add
a biological year on at least to their ‘Earth age’ what with all the running
round having adventures then getting back home they’d been doing). That’s been
long enough for them to lay down roots, get responsible jobs (though we notably
see much more of Rory’s than Amy’s), to lead real meaningful lives away from The
Doctor. To their horror they find out they secretly like it and realise it’s
for their best, but so addictive and exciting is the Doctor’s way of life that
they have become hooked by it, unwilling to abandon all that wonder and travel.
More than that, they know that if they say no to The Doctor it means leaving
their best friend behind, fearing he would have no reason to see them again.
It’s the age-old tale every viewer of a certain age will identify: the moment
you stop hanging round with your friends you’ve had since school, settle down
with a family and your responsibilities lie elsewhere at home, beyond the
nights on the town, the drinking and the gossip. Usually when companions leave
you wonder how they could ever give up something so wonderful as space and time
travel, but this seems like such a natural end to Amy’s arc, as she steps away
from her raggedy Doctor childhood friend and into her adult life, that you
almost wish they could leave it here.
It feels as if things are
going to come to a head in a big showdown, where Amy is going to have to choose
again; not between The Doctor and Rory (as happened so often in series five)
but between her two lives because she can’t keep running off having adventures
– she’s getting older, she’s losing touch with her Earth life and people are
beginning to notice (which seems odd given that The Tardis is a time machine
but still. Apparently someone (Moffat?) noticed this at the eleventh hour and
removed a candidate for the funniest scene of all, an extended version of Amy
surprising herself by agreeing to become a bridesmaid for her friend Laura
rather than put her off with claims of being busy (‘We didn’t think we could
rely on you to be there because you missed quite a few things this last year or
two’ says Laura accusingly ‘Dave’s wedding, Joseph’s christening…’ ‘Dave’s
married?’ asks Amy in shock. ‘dave’s divorce, Dave’s coming out party…’
continues Laura. ‘You miss everything Amy, you’re never here. You don’t turn up
or even answer your phone’. ‘Our lives are complicated’ confesses Amy.
‘Everybody’s lives are’ scoffs her friend ‘Why are yours so different?’ Cut to
montage of running from weird-looking aliens). In the end the running was part
of another sequence that was dropped: space monkeys with a taste for dynamite!
Another scene was scripted Roundheads and cavaliers in the civil war. Both of
these were dropped for the inevitable budgetary reasons in favour of a much
funnier and cheaper scenes with ‘Henry VIII’ prowling around out of shot while
the trio hide under his bed and the Doctor accidentally sneezes (a Big Finish story
surely waiting to happen!) and the ‘anniversary present’ of a night at the Savoy,
which goes characteristically wrong when it turns out there are Zygon
duplicates running the hotel! Another lesser but much longer and complex scene
was cut too, of new prime minister Stephen Carter assuming the cubes were
something to do with The Doctor and trying to deport him back home (what ship
goes to Gallifrey?), before UNIT step in.
The draft script further
has Amy and Rory agree much earlier that they have to tell The Doctor that they
have to stop and Amy writes NTAM (‘No Travelling Any More’) on her ‘mood board’
every time she comes back from the Tardis until one day The Doctor sees it and
asks what it means and they lie, because they don’t want to hurt his feelings.
Thankfully the final draft leaves alone the great moment where Amy finally
admits this to The Doctor. It’s been built up into such a big moment you think
he’s going to be furious (after all, River Song told them both the previous
year how much he ‘hates endings’). But in a sweet little scene instead of
yelling at her as we all expect he gives her a cuddle and says that he knows,
that he keeps coming back not to disrupt their lives but because he knows
they’ll be leaving him soon and he doesn’t want them to go. It’s a brilliant
emotionally charged scene, not least when you come back to it after knowing
what happens in next story ‘Angels Take Manhattan’ ), an episode that wouldn’t
hit anywhere near as hard had we not seen what Amy and Rory lose out on in this
adventure. Instead the closest to an awkward
moment is where Rory tells The Doctor: ‘What we do with you isn’t all there is,
you know’, the crux of the entire story (and rare for it to be Rory who speaks
up: in sadly another of this episode’s excellent cut lines someone at the
hospital tells Brian ‘everyone loves Rory – even on Dani on reception and she
hates everyone!’) The Doctor knows it isn’t too, but he can’t see why anyone
would want to put down roots in one tiny part of the universe when there is so
much to explore, like that friend of yours who’s taken a hundred gap years and
travelled the world while you’ve been in the same job. The script is clever in
showing the wonders of both sides and how choosing one over the other isn’t an
easy situation, especially when priorities change and what once drove you is no
longer the thing that calls to you. Age catches up with all of us, even time
travellers, in the end and no series knows that change is inevitable quite like
a series where the lead actor gets to regenerate himself every few years. Yet
in another way it’s like leaving home: Amy is safe now and happy, she doesn’t
need the protection of The Doctor and no longer needs to live in a fairytale
world, because she’s found her happy ending on Earth with Rory. As for The
Doctor he continues to run away from any such ties or responsibilities, but as
he puts it in perhaps Chibnall’s greatest speech of all he isn’t running away
from things but towards others, seeing them before they collapse and die,
because they offer more than a life stuck in one place ever could (we see how
distraught he is at even four days stuck on Earth). It’s a clever debate that
makes you ask what you would do: live the boring but safe life or one of
adventure where you might get hurt? It’s a problem that many people have even
without access to a time machine.
Speaking of which, few
scenes in Who are as funny as the ones of The Doctor stuck taking the ‘slow
lane’ in our world and they’re perfectly written for the 11th Doctor,
written by Chibnall from memories of the 1942 film ‘The Man Who Came To Dinner’
(where an eccentric radio personality has a bad fall on a patch of ice and
moves in with his serious relatives, their two very different worlds colliding
in a story where you kinda relate to them both). Of all the actors to have
played the Dr Matt Smith is surely the best at physical comedy, with a body
that makes him seem like a centuries-old alien in a young human frame that
hasn’t properly learned how to walk yet and he’s at his best in this story
which gives him plenty of leg-room to indulge in that humour. The scenes of him
moving in with Amy and Rory are hilarious as he fills his time with being busy
to the point of ridiculousness, exploring our world at top speed because to
live through the drudgery day by day the way we have to is too much to bear:
his pained expression, at having re-painted the Ponds’ fences, mown the lawn at
high speed, hoovered, spruced up the family car and played keepie-uppie for
five million shots (Chibnall, who’s best writing often comes in his stage
directions, reads ‘good luck Matt!’ at this point), only to find a mere hour of
time has passed, is one of my favourite Who scenes of them all. Closely
followed by the shot of the alien cubes finally kicking into life just as he’s
playing ‘Tardis tennis’ on the Wii (surely the ‘Who’?!) the way we all used to
fill in time between episodes over at the Dr Who website (where it was easily
the best of the online BBC games, however little it actually had to do with Who).
Even the Dr’s not bored enough for twitter though, in a line improvised by Matt
Smith, whose famously allergic to social media (which seemed odd in 2013 when
it was the best place to make Whovian friends around the world, far kinder than
most social apps in the days when it wasn’t owned by a malfunctioning robot
with the charisma and charm of a Vervoid). As brilliant as ‘The Lodger’ was
(and kudos to that story for doing it first) back then we still saw some of the
wonder of the Doctor as we saw him through Craig’s eyes; here, though, Amy and Rory
have spent so much time round the Doctor that he’s gone from super-timelord
with impossible gifts to someone they treat more like a pet, getting on with
their ordinary lives as they have to, while trying to house-train him as best
they can, vainly hoping he won’t cause too much damage to their furniture (a
cut line in the last big scene has Rory at the end asking his dad why he’s
urged them to go on their travels when a few days ago he was telling Rory he
wanted to have grandkids - ‘I’d be a
great Grandad!’ – when he replies with a smile that The Doctor is already their
‘adopted baby’!)
Talking of Kate, this is
her first ‘official’ appearance in the series and, indeed, UNIT’s first
appearance in the Moffat years (they were last spotted briefly in ‘The End Of Time’). By coincidence Chibnall
created the character, as The Brigadier’s un-named daughter, after memories of
watching The brig in ‘Battlefield’ and figuring that if a couple had a house
that big they must have had children at some point and wondering where she was
(maybe off at university?) So Chibnall wrote her into his first draft as a
tribute to Nicholas Courtney who’d died in 2011 (figuring enough older viewers
would remember him and the younger ones would probably have seen him in ‘The
Sarah Jane Adventures’ episode ‘Enemy Of the Bane’). Only he couldn’t decide on
a name; he got talking to Ben Cook, then the editor of Dr Who Magazine, who
mentioned that the Brigadier already had a daughter, Kate, in two of the
semi-official Who spinoffs from the ‘wilderness years’ ‘Downtime’ and ‘Daemos
Rising’. Getting one of the Redgrave acting dynasty (Jemma) was a real coup
too: perhaps the last time Dr Who got a big name for a small part (it helped
that she had seen the UNIT days as a child and liked the Brigadier, pleased to
be playing a relative of a character she admired). So they became morphed into
the same person. Though I have problems with all her future appearances (where
she’s just a pale copy of the Brig without the moustache) she’s at her best
here, as the no-nonsense unruffled head of the army. Talking of Chibnall stage
references just check out this gem: ‘She walks in, at odds
with the soldiers, more charming, wittier. Like she puts up with them’. As time goes by Kate will get less and less to do
and will become a caricature of English unruffledness (much the way her dad
did, but over a much longer seven year period of time – Kate ends up there
inside less than seven stories) but here she’s at her best: her best scene is
where she recognises The Doctor simply from his dress sense (cut line:
‘Thankyou for the compliment’ ‘That wasn’t a compliment!’); one of his best is
when repays the compliment and guesses her links to the Brigadier without
learning of her family background (‘Who else would it be?’) The affectionate
kiss on the cheek between the head of UNIT and their scientific advisor is also
about as close as ‘lash fiction writers’ are going to get to a full romance
between the 3rd Doctor and the Brig to boot!
It’s not all fun and
games though: this is still an alien invasion and a scary one at that, as a
one-off race called The Shakri are behind the cubes and are one of the few
alien species that plan to wipe out humanity altogether in one go, rather than
enslaving us or invading us one base at a time. I love the idea of an alien
species that’s doing its homework, using the cubes to monitor what we’re like
rather than invading us and noisily stomping around, the way modern warfare
with Humans seem to be going (the Shakri are modern Russia or China, sending up air balloons and monitoring our
internet: hello any future Shakri types reading this!) Chibnall got the idea
after watching a container ship crash-land into rocks on the shore near to his
house in 2007; shocked at so many opportunistic people plundering it for ‘free
stuff’ he began thinking about what would happen if an alien ever did the same
(figuring it would probably be the same result, however alien or weird), while
surprised at just how many weeks it took before everything was gone. In the
story it takes The Shakri 361 days (why that number? Did they get our year
orbit wrong? Or is that how many days there are on the Shakri planet?) before they’ve
learned enough about us for one last push: monitoring our biology and recording
our behaviour patterns, learning where best to strike, taking our genetics
(poor Amy!), a check of our defences with a laser battle (poor Doctor!) and a
test of our patience (mostly poor whoever it was that got the ‘birdie song’ on
a loop!) I have a sneaky suspicion that if the Earth is ever invaded by aliens
this is the closest to how they’ll do it, by stealth, with humanity adjusting
to it so slowly that the very method of their destruction is treated as just
another everyday item after a few years, with some nice throwbacks to the
Russell T era with all the cameos of famous names featuring the cubes on their
shows with cameos by Alan Sugar and Brian Cox (revenge perhaps for the latter’s
wretched cash=-in programme ‘The Science Of Doctor Who’ that was wrong on so
many levels, fact and fiction), a planned suggestion by BBC bigwigs, to plug
their ‘other’ current Saturday night hit ‘The Voice’, was planned but dropped
when neither side could quite synchronise their schedules. Director Brian
McKinnon cameos as the hapless ‘Craig’ fired by Alan Sugar, by the way, his
back to the camera). By now the Shakri know everything about humanity and can
take them over, without a drop of blood being spilt (well, only Amy’s. Ouch!)They’re
not empty threats though: the idea of an invisible gas that causes cardiac
arrests at random so we don’t know who will be hit (with some more epic
physical comedy from Matt Smith as one of his hearts stops) is another new
invasion technique we’ve not seen before that seems worryingly plausible for an
alien race with sophisticated technology beyond ours. The cubes themselves are
such a clever idea: they’re the ‘Trojan horse’ from ‘The Myth Makers’ in miniature (The
Doctor’s own idea don’t forget!) as humans become blasé to them through
familiarity, shocked at first but treating them as just another object after
nearly a year of them just being there. Around 100-150 of them were made, the
rest being added in ‘bulk’ scenes with CGI (all the post-production tech
wizards had to do this episode, one of the lowest budget of the modern series
all in all). A lot of the threat comes because, for once, the Dr is as clueless
about this alien threat as the rest of us – we learn at roughly the same speed
he does and Chibnall raises the tension brilliantly by adding the idea of a
‘countdown’ timer on each cube, with no idea what will happen when the cube
reaches zero. But hopes that they’re some sort of cosmic present are dashed
when they finally open, the episodes teasing us of something big happening –
only it isn’t that sort of an invasion at all.
Well, not much. It’s a moment that could have been anticlimactic but
ends up being very clever. It’s a very clever idea and very different to
anything the series had ever done before.
At least until the last
quarter. Alas, what prevents ‘The Power Of Three’ from being amongst the very
top tier of Dr Who stories is that third act, when everything resorts to being
just another run-of-the-mill alien invasion. Though I suspect this part would
always have been the weakest aspect of the story anyway, despite how it might
appear from future similarly botched stories where Chibnall has trouble sticking
the ending, this very much wasn’t Chibnall’s fault. The making of this story
was fraught with problems, up there with the broken bus on ‘Planet Of The Dead’ and the hurried
creation of ‘Edge Of Destruction’ for things
going wrong, to the point where it’s a wonder it didn’t become a modern ‘Shada’
abandoned partway through (and as the last story of the season to be filmed
there was no time left to re-mount anything; these are the last scenes Karen
Gillan and Arthur Darvill ever shot for the series; even so they did nobly come
back, out of contract, for two brief scenes and a voiceover to help make sense
of things). Only this time the problems came down not to a strike or an
accident but a shocking bit of unprofessionalism that meant the final scenes
weren’t finished (or so the rumours and hints from the cats and director have
it: the closest official source the excellent if pricey ‘The Complete History’,
for instance, records it as this: ‘For various reasons it was decided to shift
the emphasis on the Ponds and abbreviate the alien involvement in the climax’).
Being an unofficial publication we don’t have to tow the line so much though so
here’s what we know from eye-witnesses: experienced actor Steven Berkoff, one
time Bond villain and famous stage actor, played the only Shakri we see on
screen under what can best be referred to as duress. Not needed till two days
of filming at the end of the shoot he appears to have hated every second,
clashing with the actors and director (despite being friends: Berkof and
Mckinnon had worked together quite happily on the 2006 film ‘The Flying
Scotsman’) and rubbishing the script, refusing to say lines as written (and
improvising ones that made no sense) and deliberately disrupting those of other
actors in other scenes that made them unusable. To be fair this is all
unverified and pieces together by other sources that were there (though there
are a lot of them saying more or less the same thing), while to be fair to him
it wasn’t an easy shoot: Berkoff felt out of it having not been involved in the
rest of filming, mist have spent an eternity in the makeup chair and his first
precious day of filming happened to also be the day of a series ‘soft launch’,
so filming was interrupted by various scifi magazines, newspapers and journals
going ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ at the filming. Even shots of him walking had to be
cobbled together from between-shot bits of the actor walking on to the set, as
he deliberately walked so stupidly they couldn’t be used, before reading his
lines deliberately badly. To be fair, too, Chibnall’s lines both as used and as
intended are pretty poor compared to the rest of his sterling work on the
episode and the Shakri really is just another generic monster (who speaks very
like Tim Shaw from ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’, Chibnall’s first script as
showrunner). Even if finished as intended it would have been a lousy ending
(Amy and Rory attack him with syringes while the Doctor ‘sonics his eyes’; even
so what we get is worse, a rather desperate re-edit cutting down the scene to a
bare minimum and having The Doctor effectively threaten the Shakri who snarls,
boasts – then disappears. The Doctor is then treated by Kate Stewart as a hero,
despite not really doing very much at all (would a monster really disappear so
soon after nearly one whole year of preparation, just because of a
Human-looking man in a bowtie told them to go home? It’s hinted the Shakri
scanned the internet enough to learn who The Doctor was and get scared, but
surely if they’d scanned enough of it they’d know and would have cut their
losses rather than meeting him in the first place?) Even the un-changed scenes,
of the Shakri abducting people from the very hospital Rory happens to working
in (with his dad choosing that of all days to come along for the ride) feels
like stretching credulity to breaking point.
In any other story of the
season they would have simply re-cast and slotted it in somewhere, but with
deadlines so tight there was simply no other choice. Nobody is quite sure why:
Berkoff has a very long and distinguished acting career including parts in
other long-running franchises (he’s General Orlov in James Bond film
‘Octopussy’) and he isn’t known for being a ‘difficult’ actor – quite the
contrary in fact. Maybe it was revenge for being considered for roles early on
in his career in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’
and ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ and
being turned down for both (though he got off with a lucky escape with the
first one, a production where everything in the production except the acting
went wrong). It’s a real shame because the threat that we’ve spent forty
minutes waiting for seems to be over really quickly (with a wave of the sonic
screwdriver) and after such a build up we need to feel that this is an alien
that can do anything, that we only just escaped by a whisker. For all that,
though, what we do see of the Shakri is strong: the makeup makes him look both
impossibly old and alien, like the
other-worldly delegates from ‘The
Dalek’s Masterplan’, while his back story as a ‘pest controller’ who viewed
humanity as vermin, known to timelords with access to incredible technology,
makes him a worthy foe different to anyone else. The ending, though, couldn’t
be used as filmed so led a few weeks later, after an emergency meeting, to Matt
Smith being forced back into the sound booth for some last minute tweaks to the
scene and Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill being called back off holiday a few
weeks after shooting what they thought was their last scene (the final one of
the story, when all three walk towards the Tardis: according to Karen they hugged
and cried for a long time before finally coming out) for two new ones: the
rather sweet ones in the garden and in their bedroom (in a real house that
didn’t match ‘their’ old one) discussing their double lives and what to do
about it that work really well and a slightly dodgy voiceover from Amy, setting
up more drama and chaos than the story
delivers, which doesn’t (had they learned nothing from when Rose did it in
‘Doomsday’? Once again the question remains: who is Amy saying this to and why?
Are we seeing her memory of this episode? It’s a belated attempt to add extra
drama to a story that works perfectly fine without it; Brian’s ominous plea to
the Doctor to take Amy and Rory on ‘one last journey’ but to ‘bring them back
safe’ is enough).
Even so, the ending
doesn’t spoilt this story as badly as many fans have it: at the time of
broadcast, before it had been leaked what had happened, it just seemed as if
the story had set itself up so well that the ending was always going to seem
like a let-down, rather than an obvious catastrophe. In a way maybe it helped:
this sort of static invasion needs a static invader (even if it wasn’t the
original intention to make the Shakri a ‘hologram’ that barely moved) and the
hasty re-writes led to more of the scenes that make the story so memorable and
moved the spotlight back to Amy and Rory, the way it should have been. Even
with the problems I would still take ‘The Power Of Three’ over almost any other
11th Doctor story: like all the best Dr Who tales its unique to this particular
regeneration (the year long span was by far the longest in a story that didn’t
jump between timelines until ‘Hell
Bent’ smashed it a few years later, condensing a thousand years plus into
fifty minutes) and does something very very imaginative and new that doesn’t
betray the format. It’s also hilariously funny with so many of my best scenes –
crowned by The Doctor doing what fans have been doing for generations and
hiding from a flying cube by…diving behind the sofa! I really really hoped we’d
get more stories like this in the Chibnall era that balance comedy and drama so
well with three-dimensional characters who feel so real, rather than re-hashes
of the breathlessness and incomprehensibility of ‘42’
and the ordinariness of ‘Dinos On A Spaceship’,
that without the production problems Chibnall could rise to the but alas not
all things a long time coming are worth waiting for, a lesson learned from this
very story. Even so it’s a triumph of a quality that few other Who writers ever
match and all the more impressive given what a hurry ti was written in, hot on
the heels of ‘Dinosaurs’ (which took far longer to write but seemed a good bit
more rushed). Mostly, though, ‘The Power
Of Three’ is a treat: if ever a story thought outside the box it’s this one
(which is ironic when you think about it!), a new way of telling old stories
that still feels like proper Dr Who rather than just an ‘experiment’ and one
that makes great use of the cast, one last chance to spend time with one of the
most beloved Doctor-companion teams of them all.
POSITIVES + There is one
person who views the Doctor with awe, even when Amy and Rory have become so
used to the Doctor they no longer see him as an almighty being. Rory’s dad
Brian (easily Chibnall’s greatest character) shines throughout, with this sadly
the last of his all too-short time in the series and he’s very much the way
Rory was when we first met him; a reliable, practical, down-to-Earth man so
concerned with the tiny details that he often misses the bigger picture. Brian’s
obsessive recording of what the cubes are up to, for nearly a full year long
after the experts have given up and moved on, is a perfect bit of
characterisation for this methodical enthusiastic soul.His response to the cube
invasion is to catalogue it, finding awe in a space invasion even when it’s on
the slow side and his son and daughter-in-law have gotten bored of it all a
long time ago. It’s a cracking bit of writing, Brian’s joy contrasted with
their blasé-ness reminding us just how quickly even the impossible life in the
Tardis can become boring when you’ve become accustomed to it and Brian breathes
new magic into the series again, eagerly embracing even the slowest and most
boring of invasions as the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him
(beyond dinosaurs on a spaceship anyway). Mark Williams is one of those actors
who’ve made a name for himself playing ordinary people in extraordinary
settings so the wonder is that he hadn’t been on Dr Who before (he’s a rather
good eccentric-yet-normal vampire in ‘Being Human’ for instance, although his
most famous role is as 1950s vicar-detective Father Brown). He’s superb as
Rory’s dad, sharing the same goggle-eyed stare and practical tools to hand, but
adding his own endearing innocence and utter joy at being in the middle of all
the action after spending so much of his time Earth-bound with nothing to do
since we last saw him (the Doctor has this effect on so many people and this is
a story all about that effect on Amy and Rory, and what it feels when some of
that shine rubs off). The only pity is that he wasn’t in either of the earlier
two series as well.
NEGATIVES – Clearly it’s
the ending, but we’ve covered that in some detail already. So instead: the
whole ‘bring Amy and Rory back safe’ plotline, setting up season finale ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’, is a bit
overcooked. While its natural Brian should worry about his son and daughter in
law, he never seemed that fussed about the danger before, even when being
slobbered on by a Stegosaurus in an alien spaceship. You just know that
something bad’s going to happen – but then we knew that anyway given that the
half-series finale where Amy and Rory leave is coming up next, its tone just
seems wrong for what’s mostly a jokey comedy kind of a story. Plus, with all
the wonderful characterisation of Brian this story, he’s not even mentioned again
on screen after this - from Brian’s point of view is the last time he ever sees
his family. You would have thought that would have been a big part of the Doctor’s
guilt over the events in the next story, to the point where he’d visit and
mourn (and that his dad would be Rory’s main concern, even over and above the Doctor
– with messages passed on in the same way, via River Song’s book). Thankfully
this is corrected, to an extent, with ‘PS’ a video put together as part of the
‘Dr Who Lockdown’ youtube year in 2020 (and listed under ‘Angels Take Manhattan’ so as to avoid
spoilers here).
BEST QUOTE: ‘I'm
not running away. But this is one corner in one country in one continent in one
planet that's a corner of a galaxy that is a corner of a universe that is
forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining
the same for a single millisecond. And this is so much, SO MUCH, to see, Amy.
Because it goes so fast. I'm not running away from things. I'm running to them,
before they flare and fade forever’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: While The
Doctor is sitting around waiting for the cubes to come to the boil, he has
another adventure, encountering the mysterious time portal he’d experienced in
his 10th form (see ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’). This time in the comic strip ‘The Road To…’
(2018) a disembodied hand turns up while he’s riding the Ponds’ sit-on
lawnmower and going round and round their garden treating it like a car (of
course he is…) However, by the time he’s noticed it, the portal has closed up
again. This story will be picked up again in the 12th Doctor story ‘World Enough
and Time/The Doctor Falls’.
Previous ‘A
Town Called Mercy’ next ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’
No comments:
Post a Comment