SPOILERS! below the promo pic!
I meant to put this up yesterday as a traditional HaT Whoydensday, but didn’t because of reasons. So it’s a day late.
"The year of the slow invasion."
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). BBC-UK and BBC-America and various agents elsewhere will have similar arrangements.
I also want a bored Doctor to come and live with me and fix all the things that need fixing around the house while he waits for adventure to strike.
Then of course there was all the foreshadowing: unless you’re living under a Whovian rock, you know that next week is the Ponds’ final episode, and from the title of next week’s episode we’ve got a fair idea of who’s going to make it happen. Possibly some heavyhandedness with that trowel there, Moff?
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.
Create your spoilers using this code: <div class="spoiler"> [spoilerific text here] </div>
(I have been living under a whovian rock, as I don’t like Matt Smith’s incarnation much and so haven’t been paying attention.)
I agree with The Amazing Kim. I had to decide that they hadn’t really suffered heart attacks but instead had been held in stasis. I really didn’t want 1/3 of the population suffering from major brain damage due to prolonged lack of oxygen.
Not to mention that defibrillation to restart the doctor’s heart was more likely to shut down the one that was still working then to restart the other. /nitpicking
I spent a great deal of the episode trying to decide what I would have done with the cubes. The idea I liked best was building garden boxes out of them. lol
I am feeling a bit jerked around. The leadup to “Amy and Rory are going to leave the Doctor” turns into “What the heck, let’s keep having adventures” only to turn into “the next episode will be their final one.”
Slow invasion – liked it. Slice of life – fun. Rory’s dad – cool.
The restarting of hearts was silly not only because it would be likely to lead to more heart attacks but also because many minutes had passed and also because they were ordering people to remove all the blocks. But that’s okay. Doctor Who always does require suspension of disbelief. I can believe Eleven impossible things and that was only three.
And I kept waiting for someone to thump the Doctor in the chest the way Martha Jones did in the Shakespeare episode when his heart stopped.
Agreed that this should have been a two-parter. The first 40 minutes were great, and then everything got sorted out in no time at all and in an unedifyingly facile way.
It feels like this is the season where Moff just wanted to play with genres, and screw the character/narrative arcs.
Getting to this late thanks to the ~wonders~ of New Zealand TV, but this episode was really disappointing to me, at the end. Unless the fast-forward button slipped and I missed a heck of a lot of exposition, I was left with no clue who the deformed-face dudes were, no clue why there were people being taken about the alien ship, I had no idea why they’d just leave the little girl-android in the middle of a hallway …
I don’t know, it felt like the modern-DW’s tendency towards “random deus ex machina, Doctor suddenly remembers pertinent detail which he always knew and saves the day” went all the way up to 11 on this one.