[DW] Ep. S4x09 - "Forest of the Dead"
[I'm backdating this some, since it basically counts as spam at this point.]
God, it sucks not always getting Mondays off work. If I know I get Monday off, I can just not sleep Saturday night and write my episode reactions all up then knowing I'll just come home after work Sunday and crash. There's practically no motivation to do it AFTER Sunday, when everyone's moved on, but I like to be consistent like that.
Plus I should probably get my own thoughts down before I EXPLODE, because all the negative reactions to this episode are getting on my nerves so badly I'm likely to say something I'll regret soon.
Dear Who fandom: CAN YOU FUCKING ENJOY ANYTHING?!? GOD I HATE YOU ALL.
Anyway. "Forest of the Dead."
Yes, Moffat can have unlimited playtime in the sandbox again.
So when we left the Doctor, he was freaking out over Donna's face appearing on a Node while swarm-in-a-suit was closing in. People suggested that said swarm might not be particularly stable, and the Doctor and River's team ought to just start hucking books at it. That did not, however, address the fact that they were trapped in a dead-end, so I figured (although I didn't think of this in time to put it in my last post) that River would use the squareness gun to help them escape. Point for me.
Library!Girl is avidly watching on her television, but she's scared, so she changes the channel, and finds a scene of an ambulance (which, to my eyes, looks odd somehow, almost like a toy) pulling up to a large...is it a house? Some sort of physical rehab center? Something terribly British? I'm clueless. But Donna (you knew it was going to be Donna, right? duh) is lifted out of the ambulance and carried into the building.
And really, more than anything else, I think this scene is the most reassuring in light of what comes afterward. From this point onward, what Donna experiences gets increasingly strange and frightening, but here is the clear evidence of some sympathetic force trying to keep her safe - she arrives in this world in an ambulance.
Although it does start to get creepy almost immediately - Donna is visited by Doctor Moon, who seems able to control her perceptions and memory simply by telling her what she should remember and what she should forget. However, Donna - unlike most other characters we end up seeing in this world - is not entirely fooled all the time. ("You said, 'River,' and suddenly, we're feeding ducks.") I'm not sure if this is because we're seeing this world from Donna's perspective, or if Moffat really means her to be more perceptive than, say, Lee, the guy she meets feeding ducks. ("Oh, just skip to a vowel!")
And as I was typing this, I wondered why it was that Doctor Moon would need to be controlling Donna's memory...and then it occurred to me that the key word may be "memory." We can all guess by now that Donna is being stored in the computer system of the Library; if she is being saved with thousands of others, it makes sense to "compress" her memories to save space.
Anyway, Donna is swept into happily wedded bliss with Lee, whom we only see manage a sentence when he carries her over the threshold. Which, okay, is kind of sweet.
Back in the library, River's team are grilling her on the amount of faith she's placing in the Doctor. She insists that she'd trust him, "to the end of the Universe. And believe me, we've been." Which made me go, Wait, wha? Why would he go back THERE? I'd really like to find somewhere Moffat's expanded on this, because if nothing else, it seems like the Doctor would be risking crossing his own timeline by doing this.
And then for the next minute or so, I have no notes. Because this is the part where River goes and bickers with the Doc (and oh god, lack of subtlety with the "old married couple" line - that's one of very few that I didn't like) and whispers something in the Doctor's ear that she knows will tell him that he can trust her.
And I couldn't write a word after this moment; I had to stop WMP and just sit for a bit.
All I can say here is that, as usual, David Tennant is a fucking amazing actor. The transformation in his face after she whispers to him is absolutely shocking - in the space of a few seconds his face hollows out and becomes gaunt, as if he's just taken a giant step towards death and felt every inch as he went. I mean, was that CGI because WHAT THE FUCK NOBODY SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE THEIR FACE DO THAT IT'S NOT FUCKING POSSIBLE. And when River asks, "Are we good?" he does that tight little, "Yeah," like you do when your throat's closed. It's not even that he did it that gets me, it's that he had about 10 seconds to bring that on with the camera on his face the whole time. HOW THE FUCK.
So River's established that he trusts her, and he throws his game face back on and starts storming around in circles and yelling at people. Also, he gets a bit absurd, saying that practically nothing is strong enough to block the signal of his sonic except, "Well, some hair dryers, but working on that." It's a funny bit, shortly followed by, "Someone, somewhere in the library is alive and communicating with the moon. Or possibly alive and drying their hair." It's really obvious here that part of the Doctor's front is to say eccentric things like that.
So we find out that someone on the planet is communicating with the "doctor moon" i.e. the virus checker. While trying to get his screwdriver to work, the Doctor accidentally finds Donna's signal, causing a data image of her to appear in the room. And then while River and the Doctor are distracted by that, Anita gains a second shadow.
Now, say what you will about Miss Evangelista, but she was a distinguishable character. So now too is Anita, in that when River tells her to keep it together she says, "I'm only crying. I'm about to die, it's not an overreaction." It made me like Anita a lot, but I must point out here that she and Miss Evangelista were the only characters who had anything about their personalities established before they died - both of the Daves ended up going before we could find out anything about them but their names. Which, when you consider how Moffat makes that task easier, really makes them red shirts.
So the Doctor tints the visor of her helmet in order to confuse the Vashta Nerada. Which apparently...works, confirming that either they aren't that bright, or they don't communicate so well.
And a sixth person appears quite conspicuously on the far side of the room, so they all run like hell.
And we see this again from the perspective of Library!Girl watching her television. Who may be traumatized for life, as HER program doesn't cut away to a not-so-scary bit like this. Really, is this appropriate for someone her age? Evidently she doesn't think it is either, since she changes the channel again.
Not that when we return to Donna it's much better. Actually, it's a hell of a lot worse. I would prefer to see Ten and Co. running away from swarm-in-a-suit to watching Donna interact with her creepy, creepy children. Her daughter gives her a...what is it, Playdough?...doll of herself, but informs her that Donna!doll has no face. My only reaction here is, "It's not human, KILL IT NOW."
A strange woman in a black dress and matching veil leaves Donna a message saying that the world, "is wrong," and I really wish that creepy music would stop, too.
People have complained about Moffat not using the library setting more. I don't necessarily have complaints about that, but I do wonder why Library!Girl is watching this all happen on television as opposed to, say, reading this in the pages of a book. The television isn't terribly connected to the library, except, I suppose, through the computer terminal screens.
Also, nice meta moment with Library!Girl begging Donna not to meet with her mysterious messenger.
Who turns out to be Miss Evangelista, which I probably should have seen coming but didn't. And I got to freak out through this whole section because I was afraid that the wind was going to blow her veil back or something, and there would be a living skeleton beneath it. I actually stopped the episode and went to go read the "Fear Forecast" for parents on the BBC website just to know what I was in for. But nothing terrible seemed to happen right here, so I was reassured, and carried on with the ep. HA. I'M AN IDIOT.
So despite the fact that he'd be attempting to communicate with a swarm in a suit, the Doctor decides to try his, "TELL ME WHO YOU ARE WHY YOU'RE HERE," tactics with the Vashta Nerada. And River leaves the other Dave with him to die to watch over him, because apparently even if you're the love of this section of the Doctor's life, you still don't know that he can take care of himself but has a tendency to get humans snuffed.
The Vashta Nerada inform him via relay that they came, "from here. These are our forests." And I'm KICKING MYSELF, because, "special editions, newly printed," is the one part of the DoctorDonna conversation in "Silence," that I wasn't completely sure was foreshadowing. TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS, DAMN.
And the other Dave snuffs it, of course, because the Doctor is slow on the uptake. And doesn't help things by talking his grey matter through. The Vashta Nerada, I just realized, have their own sorta whoosh-y sound effects which they make when they move around. I'm going to have to listen for that next time I watch this episode, see if I can hear every time they attach to someone.
ALWAYS STAY NEAR THE DOOR. So THAT's the secret. *takes notes*
Also, is it just me, or does David Tennant end up dangling from things a lot? I mean, the shot of him hanging from the beam was incredible, and I don't doubt that Moffat had no ulterior motive for putting that in, otherwise I'd wonder if people keep making him do that so the crew can stare at his butt while he's helpless.
Okay episode, STOP FLASHING US MISS EVANGELISTA'S SKELETON! We get it, Donna's talking to a dead person, it's so not cool,
Miss Evangelista's explaining to Donna that they're all basically just information in a computer, although not in so many words. Donna gets frustrated and rips her veil off, and OH MY FUCKING GOD JESUS FUCK it's not a corpse, it's her face, but it's HORRIBLY, sickly distorted. Library!Girl screams and hides behind a cushion (meta), Donna screams, and I HYPERVENTILATING FUCKING PANIC in a way it takes me an hour to stop crying and come down from so I can watch the episode again.
THANKS A WHOLE FUCKING LOT MOFFAT. Seriously, a corpse would have been better, as it would not have left nearly as much to my DANGEROUS imagination. I just kept imagining the computer trying to automatically upload Miss Evangelista from her neural relay even as her dim little mind is convulsing in the confusion of having been eaten alive and so fast that anything remaining in her mind (including her "residual self-image" to borrow a Matrix reference) is a mangled mess.
Professor River Song is having a rough moment, telling her team how she wishes that HER Doctor were here. And here is where I think this performance gets more fleshed out, because this confirms to me that part of why River has been so annoying from the beginning is that she's feeling lost in the face of a Doctor she doesn't know at all.
And so she describes the Doctor we don't know yet; he sounds much like the Doctor we DO know except maybe that smidgen cockier, and even more alien than before. She says that her Doctor opens his TARDIS with a snap of his fingers, prompting our Doctor - who appears suddenly at the top of a ladder leading into the room - to snap, "Spoilers." He doesn't believe her that anyone can snap open a TARDIS.
And guys, as much as anyone may HATE the idea of the snapping - and I know a lot of people do - Moffat's done something here that I think is rather brilliant, and that's given us a concrete image for the demi-god!Doctor Paul Cornell originally gave us in HN/FoB.
Timothy's speech about who and what the Doctor is - "He burns at the centre of time," etc. - was one of my favourite expositions on the Doctor ever, and still is. (Well, okay, it's one of very few expositions on the Doctor that I've seen. PLZ TO BE IGNORIN MAH LAK OF KLASSIK WHO WATCHIN.) But it's very hard to picture the ideas, and that's the point - the Doctor is an alien, the Doctor is so outside our realm of experience that he might as WELL be a god, the Doctor is unknowable.
And I cursed to myself, because my god, what a pain in the ass for fic authors.
And here, I think Moffat's built a bit of a bridge between Cornell's words and our limited view of the Doctor. Here's an image you can hold in your mind, the fearless swaggering Time Lord snapping his fingers to open his magic box. He can be both things here - he's the unknowable, godlike alien, and yet we're also given a chance to see where he might still be alone and lonely and putting on a desperate act because he hasn't got a choice and it's all habit now anyway, a habit he's just increasingly good at. The interpretation is yours.
Aaand Anita apparently still has two shadows. Really? I thought she'd have shook off the Vashta Nerada when they started running. How exactly does a swarm hold onto you, anyway?
In the middle of talking to Anita though, the Doctor has the brainwave we've been waiting for, and realizes that all of the people in the Library who have been "saved" have literally been saved to the computer's hard drive.
Miss Evangelista explains the same thing to Donna (saying her face and obviously increased intelligence are the result of "transcription errors"), and points out that all of the children in the world are exactly the same - one boy and one girl, copied over and over. Clearly to save space on the hard drive. She tells Donna that she has the two qualities needed to see the absolute truth: "I am brilliant and unloved."
(I thought those were just the two qualities necessary to be cynical and bitter, but hey. That could just be me.)
Donna's furious at the implication that her children are not real, and she takes them and storms off.
And Library!Girl is having a meltdown at her television screen screaming, "No! You'll spoil everything!" Beyond keeping people safe, this is her story, her Simms game. She turns off her father - sweet, I need to know how to do that. Dr. Moon tries to comfort and calm her and she turns him off and curls on the floor sobbing.
The Doctor is trying to work at a computer terminal in the Library, but complains that the computer is "sleeping" and he can't wake it up. (Which translates into dozens of noise-making toys surrounding Library!Girl banging, squeaking and dinging at top volume, which is pretty cute on Moffat's part.) So Doctor and Co. take a gravity platform down to the core of the planet where they can access the hard drive directly, and it's seriously the coolest thing ever. I love the Doctor riding the platform down with his hands casually placed in his pockets and his suit whipping in the wind generated by their movement.
And Donna is having a moment with her creepy, creepy children. She's clutching them to her on their couch, fearfully watching the sky outside turning terrorist-alert red. The kids remind her that it's their bedtime, and poof, they're in the bedroom, reminding Donna sharply that this world doesn't really exist. She tries to convince them that they had a normal bedtime and everything will be fine, but her copypasta kids are having none of it, telling her that they don't exist when she isn't there. "Even when you close your eyes, we just - stop." They aren't even looking at her as they speak.
And when the inevitable moment comes and the children disappear - yes, I can recognize that CT did an amazing job here conveying that horror, but unlike most people, this didn't move me. Mainly because I was so relieved those creepy, creepy children were finally gone.
And when we return to the Doctor, we get the reveal of "CAL" - the ultimate outcome of grieving relatives who simply can't let a child die. A child's mind integrated with the core of the computer, and given all the bedtime stories in the universe to read to herself - alone. Out of all the plotlines in this two-parter, I think this one may be the saddest.
The Doctor apparently realizes there's a way to pull all the "saved" people from the computer, but it doesn't have enough memory left over to spare for the cache necessary to complete the process. So the Doctor proposes to hook his own noggin up and offer up his own memory space. Seems dangerous, considering he was complaining just a few hours ago that his head's stuffed full. WOULD YOU LIKE TO OVERWRITE THESE FILES, Y/N?
River protests that he'll kill himself, he tells her to sod off ("I'm right, this'll work, shut up!"), she's terrified for him ("Anita, if he dies, I'll kill him!"). Anita, I notice vaguely, has only one shadow again.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who noticed. In the midst of a conversation about how he's going to make the Vashta Nerada an offer, the Doctor stops and accuses them of eating her. And apparently he's right - they must be getting better at using those relays to communicate. They threaten him and the others, stating, "These are our forests. They are our meat."
And we get one of the Doctor's trademark, "I'm the Doctor," statements. "You're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up." The Vashta Nerada do (erm, how, exactly?), and are apparently cowed, since they retreat and tell the Doctor he has one day.
And I'm loling because DAMN, one of these days the Doctor is going to run into some flesh-eating monster that isn't intimidated by his pufferfish act and then is he ever going to be in trouble.
River comes back just as the Vashta Nerada vacate the premises and Anita's suit and skeleton collapse. She's focused though, and carries out what she came to do - namely, punch the Doctor's lights out and handcuff him. Wow, I think I suddenly like her a LOT more than I did.
(And really, seriously, Moffat can name my first-born child - assuming I'm ever in a position to see children born, which is unlikely, but whatever - for the exchange they have when the Doctor wakes. "Why do you even have handcuffs?" "Spoilers." Oh dear lord, Moffat just made the Doctor a submissive bitch boy IN CANON. Not explicitly of course, but you KNOW that's what he intended.)
I'm sure most viewers over the age of 12 or so realized that this two-parter has been building to River's death. It's hardly shocking when the Doctor wakes and finds himself watching River take his usual self-sacrificial role. Personally though, I'm not too hot with the timey-wimey stuff, and I didn't quite predict what happens here. I've been wondering if River and the Doctor aren't quite flirting with a paradox, i.e. if she dies before he's supposed to meet her, does this end up erasing their entire timeline together? Do they never end up together at all?
But Moffat's known for being pretty good with the timey-wimey - certainly better than me. Because I missed the clue he gave us with the TARDIS!diary: that River and the Doctor are typically not on the same timeline. The Library has always been the first time the Doctor met River - and their relationship would never have been without this meeting, because (as River makes clear) he would have died in the Library and the rest would never have occurred.
River tells him, "This means you've known all along how I was going to die." And while I may never have warmed much to this character, the heartbreak in this moment is undeniable. Not only has the Doctor been aware, in every moment she's spent with him and all the moments in between, of how her end, their end, will come; but he knew this all along and River never knew he did. Even this woman finds him a stranger in the end, and that, guys, is truly tragic. River tells him how he took her to the singing towers on their last date, and how he cried.
The Doctor is desperate to convince her not to do this, but she refuses to let him rewrite their future. "You whispered my name," he says, which undoubtedly made all of fandom sit bolt upright. The Doctor's real name! The biggest mystery in canon! I imagine many people are pissed off by this moment - in particular those who were holding to the theory that the Doctor's name is unvoiceable. But Moffat DOES give us another layer of mystery here, by implying that there is only One Situation in which the Doctor would ever reveal his true name - but doesn't give away what that situation would be.
(Of course, all of this mystery will really be shattered if Rusty uses the Doctor's name somehow in the finale. Which he's not above doing. But I digress.)
There's a blinding light, the Doctor looks away...
Donna is sitting on the steps of her not-house, and Lee comes home. She clutches on to him, telling him that nothing in this world as real, and then they are torn apart. She calls, "I'll find you!" Poor Donna; it's a pretty big universe to search.
And Mr. Lux suddenly discovers that he's not alone in the Library lobby anymore. Suddenly, it's full of people. (Oddly, in the biggest library in the universe, they all appear to be human. And as many - if not all - are in black, they also look like they could possibly be backstage crew in a theatre production. This is one moment I feel looked just a bit lazy.) Mr Lux goes and starts touching people, exclaiming over the fact that they are really there, they're real. People are looking at each other, amazed.
...And the Doctor is left chained in the basement, staring at the empty chair that River had been sitting in, and the expression on his face can't really be put into words. Man, does his life ever suck.
We jump ahead - the Doctor's been freed and located Donna (or perhaps it was the reverse, and she located him), who is searching the crowd for Lee. She asks the Doctor if she made him up, which leads to the first bit of the usual DoctorDonna in nearly an hour (and a week), which actually hurts to hear because it feels like so long since they've spoken like this:
Donna: I made up the perfect man. Gorgeous. Adores me. Can't hardly ever speak a word. What's that say about me?
Doctor: Everything.
Donna: *gives him a look*
Doctor: Sorry, did I say, "everything?" I meant to say, "nothing," I was aiming for, "nothing," I apparently said, "everything."
And then this, which makes it hurt a little less:
Donna: What about you? You alright?
Doctor: I'm always alright.
Donna: Is "alright" special Time Lord code for, "really not alright at all?"
Doctor: Why?
Donna: 'Cause I'm alright too.
But then it's ruined because the Doctor takes her hand and leads her around the corner...and there's Lee, getting onto a teleport platform. He sees her and tries to shout out in relief - AND CAN'T. I FUCKING SCREAMED. If he doesn't show up again by the end of series 4, I will truly hate Moffat a bit for that.
The Doctor leads Donna back to the platform where they started out from. She asks him about River not recognizing her, and he points out that he's holding her diary and could look her up. And Donna has the last repetition of the word, "Spoilers."
They walk away ("C'mon. Next chapter's this way,") to some really pretty music and River gets the best voice-over:
When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it will never end. But no matter how hard you try, you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepted.
The Doctor doesn't get far.
He runs back to obsess over the screwdriver he left sitting with the diary. ("Thing is, future me had all those years to think of a way to save her. What he did was give her a screwdriver. Why? WHY WOULD I DO THAT?!") Turns out the screwdriver has a neural relay hidden in it. (Did her own not last long enough? Did she have one?) The Doctor runs like holy hell, flies down the gravity platform like he's channeling Superman, and plugs River into the computer.
And here is where fandom and I start to seriously part ways.
Because oddly enough, it seems popular to hate this conclusion. So yes, River appears in a white dress. It IS essentially an afterlife here. People are saying it's "creepy" that the Doctor can't let River go. Let me say: River was WILLING to die to save the Doctor and keep their future from being rewritten. That doesn't mean she wanted to die. This is a woman who was always ready to see something new, and while she can no longer do that in reality, the Doctor's left her with some friends and every book, every story in the universe to explore.
(And yes, she was taking care of the children there at the end. Who says she can't indulge CAL's desire to be a normal little girl, now that River's in a place where she can anywhere she wants just by wishing for it? I'm guessing the 8-bit children are actually around to be CAL's friends more than River's children. Notice CAL in the one bed there, finally getting someone to read a bedtime story TO her?)
It is a goddamned HAPPY ENDING.
The Doctor goes back to the TARDIS and slowly comes to a stop several feet from the door. His apprehension here is palpable; is he or isn't he River's Doctor? (The music here, incidentally, is perfect.) He lifts his hand...and snaps his fingers.
And the TARDIS doors open, the reflected light sparkling in his eyes.
GOD I LOVE THIS MOMENT. It's another one that fandom has pointlessly trashed - even my own mother hates it. She says it's like when men snap impatiently at waitresses in restaurants.
The Doctor and the TARDIS are not like that. He rescued her when she was about to be junked; even when there were newer TARDIS models around, he paid her love and respect. She was there for him in the Time War. She's been with him longer than anyone; she'll probably be there to see his end. They are the truest pairing in this canon. *OTPs*
This exchange wasn't the Doctor snapping his fingers AT her. It was a conversation. It was the Doctor saying, May I? And the TARDIS replying, Yes, you may. It was the Doctor saying, But am I worthy? And the TARDIS telling him, Yes, you are.
If people can't see the love in this moment, I think that's their own issue. Me, I think this was one of the most beautiful moments of New Who.
And so we end on one of Moffat's favourite notes:
EVERYBODY LIVES!
The End.
God, it sucks not always getting Mondays off work. If I know I get Monday off, I can just not sleep Saturday night and write my episode reactions all up then knowing I'll just come home after work Sunday and crash. There's practically no motivation to do it AFTER Sunday, when everyone's moved on, but I like to be consistent like that.
Plus I should probably get my own thoughts down before I EXPLODE, because all the negative reactions to this episode are getting on my nerves so badly I'm likely to say something I'll regret soon.
Dear Who fandom: CAN YOU FUCKING ENJOY ANYTHING?!? GOD I HATE YOU ALL.
Anyway. "Forest of the Dead."
Yes, Moffat can have unlimited playtime in the sandbox again.
So when we left the Doctor, he was freaking out over Donna's face appearing on a Node while swarm-in-a-suit was closing in. People suggested that said swarm might not be particularly stable, and the Doctor and River's team ought to just start hucking books at it. That did not, however, address the fact that they were trapped in a dead-end, so I figured (although I didn't think of this in time to put it in my last post) that River would use the squareness gun to help them escape. Point for me.
Library!Girl is avidly watching on her television, but she's scared, so she changes the channel, and finds a scene of an ambulance (which, to my eyes, looks odd somehow, almost like a toy) pulling up to a large...is it a house? Some sort of physical rehab center? Something terribly British? I'm clueless. But Donna (you knew it was going to be Donna, right? duh) is lifted out of the ambulance and carried into the building.
And really, more than anything else, I think this scene is the most reassuring in light of what comes afterward. From this point onward, what Donna experiences gets increasingly strange and frightening, but here is the clear evidence of some sympathetic force trying to keep her safe - she arrives in this world in an ambulance.
Although it does start to get creepy almost immediately - Donna is visited by Doctor Moon, who seems able to control her perceptions and memory simply by telling her what she should remember and what she should forget. However, Donna - unlike most other characters we end up seeing in this world - is not entirely fooled all the time. ("You said, 'River,' and suddenly, we're feeding ducks.") I'm not sure if this is because we're seeing this world from Donna's perspective, or if Moffat really means her to be more perceptive than, say, Lee, the guy she meets feeding ducks. ("Oh, just skip to a vowel!")
And as I was typing this, I wondered why it was that Doctor Moon would need to be controlling Donna's memory...and then it occurred to me that the key word may be "memory." We can all guess by now that Donna is being stored in the computer system of the Library; if she is being saved with thousands of others, it makes sense to "compress" her memories to save space.
Anyway, Donna is swept into happily wedded bliss with Lee, whom we only see manage a sentence when he carries her over the threshold. Which, okay, is kind of sweet.
Back in the library, River's team are grilling her on the amount of faith she's placing in the Doctor. She insists that she'd trust him, "to the end of the Universe. And believe me, we've been." Which made me go, Wait, wha? Why would he go back THERE? I'd really like to find somewhere Moffat's expanded on this, because if nothing else, it seems like the Doctor would be risking crossing his own timeline by doing this.
And then for the next minute or so, I have no notes. Because this is the part where River goes and bickers with the Doc (and oh god, lack of subtlety with the "old married couple" line - that's one of very few that I didn't like) and whispers something in the Doctor's ear that she knows will tell him that he can trust her.
And I couldn't write a word after this moment; I had to stop WMP and just sit for a bit.
All I can say here is that, as usual, David Tennant is a fucking amazing actor. The transformation in his face after she whispers to him is absolutely shocking - in the space of a few seconds his face hollows out and becomes gaunt, as if he's just taken a giant step towards death and felt every inch as he went. I mean, was that CGI because WHAT THE FUCK NOBODY SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE THEIR FACE DO THAT IT'S NOT FUCKING POSSIBLE. And when River asks, "Are we good?" he does that tight little, "Yeah," like you do when your throat's closed. It's not even that he did it that gets me, it's that he had about 10 seconds to bring that on with the camera on his face the whole time. HOW THE FUCK.
So River's established that he trusts her, and he throws his game face back on and starts storming around in circles and yelling at people. Also, he gets a bit absurd, saying that practically nothing is strong enough to block the signal of his sonic except, "Well, some hair dryers, but working on that." It's a funny bit, shortly followed by, "Someone, somewhere in the library is alive and communicating with the moon. Or possibly alive and drying their hair." It's really obvious here that part of the Doctor's front is to say eccentric things like that.
So we find out that someone on the planet is communicating with the "doctor moon" i.e. the virus checker. While trying to get his screwdriver to work, the Doctor accidentally finds Donna's signal, causing a data image of her to appear in the room. And then while River and the Doctor are distracted by that, Anita gains a second shadow.
Now, say what you will about Miss Evangelista, but she was a distinguishable character. So now too is Anita, in that when River tells her to keep it together she says, "I'm only crying. I'm about to die, it's not an overreaction." It made me like Anita a lot, but I must point out here that she and Miss Evangelista were the only characters who had anything about their personalities established before they died - both of the Daves ended up going before we could find out anything about them but their names. Which, when you consider how Moffat makes that task easier, really makes them red shirts.
So the Doctor tints the visor of her helmet in order to confuse the Vashta Nerada. Which apparently...works, confirming that either they aren't that bright, or they don't communicate so well.
And a sixth person appears quite conspicuously on the far side of the room, so they all run like hell.
And we see this again from the perspective of Library!Girl watching her television. Who may be traumatized for life, as HER program doesn't cut away to a not-so-scary bit like this. Really, is this appropriate for someone her age? Evidently she doesn't think it is either, since she changes the channel again.
Not that when we return to Donna it's much better. Actually, it's a hell of a lot worse. I would prefer to see Ten and Co. running away from swarm-in-a-suit to watching Donna interact with her creepy, creepy children. Her daughter gives her a...what is it, Playdough?...doll of herself, but informs her that Donna!doll has no face. My only reaction here is, "It's not human, KILL IT NOW."
A strange woman in a black dress and matching veil leaves Donna a message saying that the world, "is wrong," and I really wish that creepy music would stop, too.
People have complained about Moffat not using the library setting more. I don't necessarily have complaints about that, but I do wonder why Library!Girl is watching this all happen on television as opposed to, say, reading this in the pages of a book. The television isn't terribly connected to the library, except, I suppose, through the computer terminal screens.
Also, nice meta moment with Library!Girl begging Donna not to meet with her mysterious messenger.
Who turns out to be Miss Evangelista, which I probably should have seen coming but didn't. And I got to freak out through this whole section because I was afraid that the wind was going to blow her veil back or something, and there would be a living skeleton beneath it. I actually stopped the episode and went to go read the "Fear Forecast" for parents on the BBC website just to know what I was in for. But nothing terrible seemed to happen right here, so I was reassured, and carried on with the ep. HA. I'M AN IDIOT.
So despite the fact that he'd be attempting to communicate with a swarm in a suit, the Doctor decides to try his, "TELL ME WHO YOU ARE WHY YOU'RE HERE," tactics with the Vashta Nerada. And River leaves the other Dave with him to die to watch over him, because apparently even if you're the love of this section of the Doctor's life, you still don't know that he can take care of himself but has a tendency to get humans snuffed.
The Vashta Nerada inform him via relay that they came, "from here. These are our forests." And I'm KICKING MYSELF, because, "special editions, newly printed," is the one part of the DoctorDonna conversation in "Silence," that I wasn't completely sure was foreshadowing. TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS, DAMN.
And the other Dave snuffs it, of course, because the Doctor is slow on the uptake. And doesn't help things by talking his grey matter through. The Vashta Nerada, I just realized, have their own sorta whoosh-y sound effects which they make when they move around. I'm going to have to listen for that next time I watch this episode, see if I can hear every time they attach to someone.
ALWAYS STAY NEAR THE DOOR. So THAT's the secret. *takes notes*
Also, is it just me, or does David Tennant end up dangling from things a lot? I mean, the shot of him hanging from the beam was incredible, and I don't doubt that Moffat had no ulterior motive for putting that in, otherwise I'd wonder if people keep making him do that so the crew can stare at his butt while he's helpless.
Okay episode, STOP FLASHING US MISS EVANGELISTA'S SKELETON! We get it, Donna's talking to a dead person, it's so not cool,
Miss Evangelista's explaining to Donna that they're all basically just information in a computer, although not in so many words. Donna gets frustrated and rips her veil off, and OH MY FUCKING GOD JESUS FUCK it's not a corpse, it's her face, but it's HORRIBLY, sickly distorted. Library!Girl screams and hides behind a cushion (meta), Donna screams, and I HYPERVENTILATING FUCKING PANIC in a way it takes me an hour to stop crying and come down from so I can watch the episode again.
THANKS A WHOLE FUCKING LOT MOFFAT. Seriously, a corpse would have been better, as it would not have left nearly as much to my DANGEROUS imagination. I just kept imagining the computer trying to automatically upload Miss Evangelista from her neural relay even as her dim little mind is convulsing in the confusion of having been eaten alive and so fast that anything remaining in her mind (including her "residual self-image" to borrow a Matrix reference) is a mangled mess.
Professor River Song is having a rough moment, telling her team how she wishes that HER Doctor were here. And here is where I think this performance gets more fleshed out, because this confirms to me that part of why River has been so annoying from the beginning is that she's feeling lost in the face of a Doctor she doesn't know at all.
And so she describes the Doctor we don't know yet; he sounds much like the Doctor we DO know except maybe that smidgen cockier, and even more alien than before. She says that her Doctor opens his TARDIS with a snap of his fingers, prompting our Doctor - who appears suddenly at the top of a ladder leading into the room - to snap, "Spoilers." He doesn't believe her that anyone can snap open a TARDIS.
And guys, as much as anyone may HATE the idea of the snapping - and I know a lot of people do - Moffat's done something here that I think is rather brilliant, and that's given us a concrete image for the demi-god!Doctor Paul Cornell originally gave us in HN/FoB.
Timothy's speech about who and what the Doctor is - "He burns at the centre of time," etc. - was one of my favourite expositions on the Doctor ever, and still is. (Well, okay, it's one of very few expositions on the Doctor that I've seen. PLZ TO BE IGNORIN MAH LAK OF KLASSIK WHO WATCHIN.) But it's very hard to picture the ideas, and that's the point - the Doctor is an alien, the Doctor is so outside our realm of experience that he might as WELL be a god, the Doctor is unknowable.
And I cursed to myself, because my god, what a pain in the ass for fic authors.
And here, I think Moffat's built a bit of a bridge between Cornell's words and our limited view of the Doctor. Here's an image you can hold in your mind, the fearless swaggering Time Lord snapping his fingers to open his magic box. He can be both things here - he's the unknowable, godlike alien, and yet we're also given a chance to see where he might still be alone and lonely and putting on a desperate act because he hasn't got a choice and it's all habit now anyway, a habit he's just increasingly good at. The interpretation is yours.
Aaand Anita apparently still has two shadows. Really? I thought she'd have shook off the Vashta Nerada when they started running. How exactly does a swarm hold onto you, anyway?
In the middle of talking to Anita though, the Doctor has the brainwave we've been waiting for, and realizes that all of the people in the Library who have been "saved" have literally been saved to the computer's hard drive.
Miss Evangelista explains the same thing to Donna (saying her face and obviously increased intelligence are the result of "transcription errors"), and points out that all of the children in the world are exactly the same - one boy and one girl, copied over and over. Clearly to save space on the hard drive. She tells Donna that she has the two qualities needed to see the absolute truth: "I am brilliant and unloved."
(I thought those were just the two qualities necessary to be cynical and bitter, but hey. That could just be me.)
Donna's furious at the implication that her children are not real, and she takes them and storms off.
And Library!Girl is having a meltdown at her television screen screaming, "No! You'll spoil everything!" Beyond keeping people safe, this is her story, her Simms game. She turns off her father - sweet, I need to know how to do that. Dr. Moon tries to comfort and calm her and she turns him off and curls on the floor sobbing.
The Doctor is trying to work at a computer terminal in the Library, but complains that the computer is "sleeping" and he can't wake it up. (Which translates into dozens of noise-making toys surrounding Library!Girl banging, squeaking and dinging at top volume, which is pretty cute on Moffat's part.) So Doctor and Co. take a gravity platform down to the core of the planet where they can access the hard drive directly, and it's seriously the coolest thing ever. I love the Doctor riding the platform down with his hands casually placed in his pockets and his suit whipping in the wind generated by their movement.
And Donna is having a moment with her creepy, creepy children. She's clutching them to her on their couch, fearfully watching the sky outside turning terrorist-alert red. The kids remind her that it's their bedtime, and poof, they're in the bedroom, reminding Donna sharply that this world doesn't really exist. She tries to convince them that they had a normal bedtime and everything will be fine, but her copypasta kids are having none of it, telling her that they don't exist when she isn't there. "Even when you close your eyes, we just - stop." They aren't even looking at her as they speak.
And when the inevitable moment comes and the children disappear - yes, I can recognize that CT did an amazing job here conveying that horror, but unlike most people, this didn't move me. Mainly because I was so relieved those creepy, creepy children were finally gone.
And when we return to the Doctor, we get the reveal of "CAL" - the ultimate outcome of grieving relatives who simply can't let a child die. A child's mind integrated with the core of the computer, and given all the bedtime stories in the universe to read to herself - alone. Out of all the plotlines in this two-parter, I think this one may be the saddest.
The Doctor apparently realizes there's a way to pull all the "saved" people from the computer, but it doesn't have enough memory left over to spare for the cache necessary to complete the process. So the Doctor proposes to hook his own noggin up and offer up his own memory space. Seems dangerous, considering he was complaining just a few hours ago that his head's stuffed full. WOULD YOU LIKE TO OVERWRITE THESE FILES, Y/N?
River protests that he'll kill himself, he tells her to sod off ("I'm right, this'll work, shut up!"), she's terrified for him ("Anita, if he dies, I'll kill him!"). Anita, I notice vaguely, has only one shadow again.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who noticed. In the midst of a conversation about how he's going to make the Vashta Nerada an offer, the Doctor stops and accuses them of eating her. And apparently he's right - they must be getting better at using those relays to communicate. They threaten him and the others, stating, "These are our forests. They are our meat."
And we get one of the Doctor's trademark, "I'm the Doctor," statements. "You're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up." The Vashta Nerada do (erm, how, exactly?), and are apparently cowed, since they retreat and tell the Doctor he has one day.
And I'm loling because DAMN, one of these days the Doctor is going to run into some flesh-eating monster that isn't intimidated by his pufferfish act and then is he ever going to be in trouble.
River comes back just as the Vashta Nerada vacate the premises and Anita's suit and skeleton collapse. She's focused though, and carries out what she came to do - namely, punch the Doctor's lights out and handcuff him. Wow, I think I suddenly like her a LOT more than I did.
(And really, seriously, Moffat can name my first-born child - assuming I'm ever in a position to see children born, which is unlikely, but whatever - for the exchange they have when the Doctor wakes. "Why do you even have handcuffs?" "Spoilers." Oh dear lord, Moffat just made the Doctor a submissive bitch boy IN CANON. Not explicitly of course, but you KNOW that's what he intended.)
I'm sure most viewers over the age of 12 or so realized that this two-parter has been building to River's death. It's hardly shocking when the Doctor wakes and finds himself watching River take his usual self-sacrificial role. Personally though, I'm not too hot with the timey-wimey stuff, and I didn't quite predict what happens here. I've been wondering if River and the Doctor aren't quite flirting with a paradox, i.e. if she dies before he's supposed to meet her, does this end up erasing their entire timeline together? Do they never end up together at all?
But Moffat's known for being pretty good with the timey-wimey - certainly better than me. Because I missed the clue he gave us with the TARDIS!diary: that River and the Doctor are typically not on the same timeline. The Library has always been the first time the Doctor met River - and their relationship would never have been without this meeting, because (as River makes clear) he would have died in the Library and the rest would never have occurred.
River tells him, "This means you've known all along how I was going to die." And while I may never have warmed much to this character, the heartbreak in this moment is undeniable. Not only has the Doctor been aware, in every moment she's spent with him and all the moments in between, of how her end, their end, will come; but he knew this all along and River never knew he did. Even this woman finds him a stranger in the end, and that, guys, is truly tragic. River tells him how he took her to the singing towers on their last date, and how he cried.
The Doctor is desperate to convince her not to do this, but she refuses to let him rewrite their future. "You whispered my name," he says, which undoubtedly made all of fandom sit bolt upright. The Doctor's real name! The biggest mystery in canon! I imagine many people are pissed off by this moment - in particular those who were holding to the theory that the Doctor's name is unvoiceable. But Moffat DOES give us another layer of mystery here, by implying that there is only One Situation in which the Doctor would ever reveal his true name - but doesn't give away what that situation would be.
(Of course, all of this mystery will really be shattered if Rusty uses the Doctor's name somehow in the finale. Which he's not above doing. But I digress.)
There's a blinding light, the Doctor looks away...
Donna is sitting on the steps of her not-house, and Lee comes home. She clutches on to him, telling him that nothing in this world as real, and then they are torn apart. She calls, "I'll find you!" Poor Donna; it's a pretty big universe to search.
And Mr. Lux suddenly discovers that he's not alone in the Library lobby anymore. Suddenly, it's full of people. (Oddly, in the biggest library in the universe, they all appear to be human. And as many - if not all - are in black, they also look like they could possibly be backstage crew in a theatre production. This is one moment I feel looked just a bit lazy.) Mr Lux goes and starts touching people, exclaiming over the fact that they are really there, they're real. People are looking at each other, amazed.
...And the Doctor is left chained in the basement, staring at the empty chair that River had been sitting in, and the expression on his face can't really be put into words. Man, does his life ever suck.
We jump ahead - the Doctor's been freed and located Donna (or perhaps it was the reverse, and she located him), who is searching the crowd for Lee. She asks the Doctor if she made him up, which leads to the first bit of the usual DoctorDonna in nearly an hour (and a week), which actually hurts to hear because it feels like so long since they've spoken like this:
Donna: I made up the perfect man. Gorgeous. Adores me. Can't hardly ever speak a word. What's that say about me?
Doctor: Everything.
Donna: *gives him a look*
Doctor: Sorry, did I say, "everything?" I meant to say, "nothing," I was aiming for, "nothing," I apparently said, "everything."
And then this, which makes it hurt a little less:
Donna: What about you? You alright?
Doctor: I'm always alright.
Donna: Is "alright" special Time Lord code for, "really not alright at all?"
Doctor: Why?
Donna: 'Cause I'm alright too.
But then it's ruined because the Doctor takes her hand and leads her around the corner...and there's Lee, getting onto a teleport platform. He sees her and tries to shout out in relief - AND CAN'T. I FUCKING SCREAMED. If he doesn't show up again by the end of series 4, I will truly hate Moffat a bit for that.
The Doctor leads Donna back to the platform where they started out from. She asks him about River not recognizing her, and he points out that he's holding her diary and could look her up. And Donna has the last repetition of the word, "Spoilers."
They walk away ("C'mon. Next chapter's this way,") to some really pretty music and River gets the best voice-over:
When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it will never end. But no matter how hard you try, you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepted.
The Doctor doesn't get far.
He runs back to obsess over the screwdriver he left sitting with the diary. ("Thing is, future me had all those years to think of a way to save her. What he did was give her a screwdriver. Why? WHY WOULD I DO THAT?!") Turns out the screwdriver has a neural relay hidden in it. (Did her own not last long enough? Did she have one?) The Doctor runs like holy hell, flies down the gravity platform like he's channeling Superman, and plugs River into the computer.
And here is where fandom and I start to seriously part ways.
Because oddly enough, it seems popular to hate this conclusion. So yes, River appears in a white dress. It IS essentially an afterlife here. People are saying it's "creepy" that the Doctor can't let River go. Let me say: River was WILLING to die to save the Doctor and keep their future from being rewritten. That doesn't mean she wanted to die. This is a woman who was always ready to see something new, and while she can no longer do that in reality, the Doctor's left her with some friends and every book, every story in the universe to explore.
(And yes, she was taking care of the children there at the end. Who says she can't indulge CAL's desire to be a normal little girl, now that River's in a place where she can anywhere she wants just by wishing for it? I'm guessing the 8-bit children are actually around to be CAL's friends more than River's children. Notice CAL in the one bed there, finally getting someone to read a bedtime story TO her?)
It is a goddamned HAPPY ENDING.
The Doctor goes back to the TARDIS and slowly comes to a stop several feet from the door. His apprehension here is palpable; is he or isn't he River's Doctor? (The music here, incidentally, is perfect.) He lifts his hand...and snaps his fingers.
And the TARDIS doors open, the reflected light sparkling in his eyes.
GOD I LOVE THIS MOMENT. It's another one that fandom has pointlessly trashed - even my own mother hates it. She says it's like when men snap impatiently at waitresses in restaurants.
The Doctor and the TARDIS are not like that. He rescued her when she was about to be junked; even when there were newer TARDIS models around, he paid her love and respect. She was there for him in the Time War. She's been with him longer than anyone; she'll probably be there to see his end. They are the truest pairing in this canon. *OTPs*
This exchange wasn't the Doctor snapping his fingers AT her. It was a conversation. It was the Doctor saying, May I? And the TARDIS replying, Yes, you may. It was the Doctor saying, But am I worthy? And the TARDIS telling him, Yes, you are.
If people can't see the love in this moment, I think that's their own issue. Me, I think this was one of the most beautiful moments of New Who.
And so we end on one of Moffat's favourite notes:
EVERYBODY LIVES!
The End.