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Doctor Who: S7 Ep3 – A Town Called Mercy

By on September 17, 2012

SPOILERS! below the promo pic!

Catch the episode free and legally on ABC-TV iView if you’re in Australia (it won’t be broadcast on free to air until next Saturday). I expect that BBC-UK and BBC-America and various agents elsewhere will have similar arrangements.
A movie-style poster in Wild West fashion for *A Town Called Mercy* - everything is rendered in a dusty overlay. We see a pair of trousered and booted legs in gunfighter wide stance, but the arm hanging beside where we expect to see a gun holster is instead some sort of cyber-cannon. Through the legs we see the Doctor, Amy and Rory staring the gunfighter down.

So the theme for this season now seems more clear: the Doctor has decided that he’s spent centuries making things worse instead of better, and intends to do things differently now.

Today I honor the victims first. His, the Masters, the Daleks, all the people who died because of MY mercy.

There were lots of nods to Wild West genre conventions in this episode that I enjoyed seeing tweaked, the performances from the guest actors were poignantly detailed, the Dark Doctor behaviours seemed more logical than last week too.

If you want to add your own spoilers in comments, please wrap them in our special Hoyden spoiler tags so that they get that nice bright orange stripe down the side? Then readers can flip past them if they want to.

e.g. The banter about the horse named Susan: pitched just right or clunky?

Create your spoilers using this code: <div class="spoiler"> [spoilerific text here] </div>

Related posts:

  1. Doctor Who: S7 Ep5 –The Angels take Manhattan
  2. Doctor Who: S7 Ep4 –The Power of Three
  3. Doctor Who: S7 Ep2 – Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
  4. New Who: S7 Ep1 Asylum of the Daleks
  5. Friday Hoyden: the Eleventh Doctor’s new companion

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tigtog (aka Viv) is the founder of this blog. She lives in Sydney, Australia: husband, 2 kids, cat, house, garden, just enough wine-racks and (sigh) far too few bookshelves.

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4 responses to “Doctor Who: S7 Ep3 – A Town Called Mercy”

  1. YetAnotherMatt
    YetAnotherMatt September 17, 2012 at 2:17 pm |

    When were teabags invented?

  2. ollie
    ollie September 17, 2012 at 7:18 pm |

    I actually wrote myself a little blog post about the horse named Susan, as it’s obviously one of the things that stuck out to me! Check it out.

    I liked this episode a lot more than I thought I would – I’m definitely liking the dark doctor stuff. Interesting to see the Doctor with a gun, for example …
  3. quixote
    quixote September 18, 2012 at 1:04 am |

    Oh fercryinoutloud. What are they doing to Doctor Who? Do they plan on doing a segment updating Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals next? Soon we’ll find out the Master is actually the Doctor’s father. Bah. A murrain on them.

  4. Kristin
    Kristin September 18, 2012 at 6:18 am |

    I’d call this episode a clumsy exploration of the morality of war. Spoilers ahead . . .

    It was interesting that the question of how to behave morally in a wartime situation was answered very differently by not one, not two, but six characters (cyborg, doctor, mayor, Doctor, mob leader, and Amy).

    So what was clumsy? A lot of the dialogue about war and morality. It’s too complex a topic to be answered with one-liners, which mean the one-liner answers were wrong.

    What else was clumsy – the Doctor being “saved” from killing somebody (although a death occurred anyway) in the episode right after he killed somebody. Conflicting messages here.

    I thought this episode was veering away from the “dark Doctor” crap because Amy stopped him. It repeats the theme of the Doctor needing a companion to remain a good guy.

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