New Who 6.11, The God Complex
I should have posted this review nearly two weeks ago now, but was feeling very sluggish at the time, thanks to what ms_siobhan calls 'the ladygrims', and just didn't have the surplus brain-power while also greeting new students and finishing articles. I seem to be back to normal now, but still had to prioritise my article until I knew I had managed to meet the deadline for it. Still, any time before the season finale counts, right?
Anyway, this story was pretty damned good for me, and certainly one of the stronger episodes of the season, but I felt it didn't quite have the same emotional weight as The Girl Who Waited. Part of that, of course, is because the emotional weight of the previous story should still have been hanging pretty heavily on Rory at least, if not Amy and the Doctor as well, in this one. I mean, doesn't the younger Amy have questions about exactly how she was rescued, and what happened to the older Amy afterwards? But apart from a brief comment about Rory speaking of his time in the TARDIS in the past tense, the last episode might as well not have happened for him or Amy - and nor, indeed, might any of their experiences from earlier in the season. The more this happens, the more the interactions between the characters feel hollow to me, and I think that is a real pity. I'm not only person to be feeling increasingly dissatisfied about this, either - see e.g. Andrew Hickey in the penultimate paragraph of this post for a good expression of the problem.
In fairness, obviously one of this episode's major jobs was to address the Doctor's role as an arbitrary god-figure claiming control over his companions' lives, draw out the parallels between him and a traditional monster-figure (the nearly-Nimon), and bring it all to a head by making him decide to take Amy and Rory back to a safe life on Earth. So on paper at least we are starting to see some acknowledgement of the traumas which they have all been through together. But even that trajectory felt somewhat empty to me. I mean, we've had much the same thing with the Tenth Doctor very recently, and in any case of course we know as the Doctor says goodbye to Amy and Rory that this isn't really the end, so it's hard to whip up the appropriate emotional engagement with the scene.
Oh well. Meanwhile, I did like the realisation of The God Complex. Obviously I particularly loved the re-imagining of the labyrinth with the minotaur at its heart, and in some ways felt sorry for Toby Whithouse that Doctor Who has used that idea before, especially since The Horns of Nimon just isn't in the same league as this story. But I'm also glad that the Nimons got an explicit shout-out, because for all the heavy-handed hokiness of the story which featured them, I absolutely love them as monsters! I also liked the attention drawn to the fake '80s setting of the hotel, starting with the cassette tape and carrying right on through the cheese plant and the Rubik's cube. It meant that the characters were operating in a metaphorical film-set again, while the running up and down corridors made the reference more specific - it's an archetypal Doctor Who set-up, acknowledged as a pretence.
Mirrors have been rather prominent throughout this season, as appropriate given the doppelgangers and parallel universes which have also been scattered throughout it, and I wasn't at all surprised to see them cropping up in this story too - particularly in the Pasiphae Spa, where the Doctor first confronts the nearly-Nimon, surrounded by mirrors and water-features.
I was also particularly struck by this image very early on in the story:
It's not quite as obvious from the screencap as it seemed in live action, but on the wall behind the Doctor's head are a pair of bull's horns, and the angle of the shot makes him appear to be wearing them, nicely fore-shadowing the parallel with the nearly-Nimon - whose name, too, later turns out to be lost, just like the Doctor's (as we were carefully reminded the following week). The apple he's eating is surely Significant as well. Not only does it recall the story of Adam and Eve, and thus give us a Doctor who is apparently casually and maybe even hubristically unperturbed by any higher power, but it also recalls his first meeting with Amelia / Amy, and the role which the apple with the smiley face carved into it played in the process of winning her trust in the first place.
The opposite end of that process comes in this story as well, with Amy's faith in the Doctor now explicitly acknowledged as misplaced, an active danger to her, and in need of breaking to save them all. I knew as I watched it that I had seen that basic story-arc playing out in Doctor Who before, and am very grateful to parrot_knight for saving me from having to scroll through endless episode synopses to work out where: Seven and Ace's The Curse of Fenric, which is of course also from this story's theme-world of the 1980s.
Meanwhile, I liked the basic cabin-fever set-up, and especially Rita, the Muslim woman who gets to be the 'clever one', and even outlives two out of the three male guest characters. On the whole I felt that her character was presented with a great deal of positivity and dignity, but I did feel some disquiet when we got to the point where the Doctor explained that the nearly-Nimon had been sucking people into his prison because of their faith, so that he could feed on it. This means that in the end, when Rita (like the other characters with their own equivalents) dies for being generally religious, she is unfortunately also dying specifically for being a Muslim. I think the problem here was equivalent to the fundamental problem with the Drahvins in Galaxy Four - that what the production team were trying to do was present a strong and clever and interesting female Muslim character, but that meanwhile they hadn't quite picked up on the fact that the particular situation which they put her into meant that she effectively ended up dying because she is a Muslim. The comparison with the Drahvins is rather unfair, because overall, her character is portrayed almost infinitely more positively than theirs. It's a very near miss. But it still went a bit awry there at the end.
Meh, there's probably other stuff I would have said about this episode if I'd got round to writing it up earlier. It was clever and gripping, made good use of its characters, and dropped in plenty of interesting symbolism and continuity references for geeky types like me to chew over. But I think that will do for now. Here's looking forward to the season finale, and hopefully a few resolutions, tomorrow evening. :-)
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
Anyway, this story was pretty damned good for me, and certainly one of the stronger episodes of the season, but I felt it didn't quite have the same emotional weight as The Girl Who Waited. Part of that, of course, is because the emotional weight of the previous story should still have been hanging pretty heavily on Rory at least, if not Amy and the Doctor as well, in this one. I mean, doesn't the younger Amy have questions about exactly how she was rescued, and what happened to the older Amy afterwards? But apart from a brief comment about Rory speaking of his time in the TARDIS in the past tense, the last episode might as well not have happened for him or Amy - and nor, indeed, might any of their experiences from earlier in the season. The more this happens, the more the interactions between the characters feel hollow to me, and I think that is a real pity. I'm not only person to be feeling increasingly dissatisfied about this, either - see e.g. Andrew Hickey in the penultimate paragraph of this post for a good expression of the problem.
In fairness, obviously one of this episode's major jobs was to address the Doctor's role as an arbitrary god-figure claiming control over his companions' lives, draw out the parallels between him and a traditional monster-figure (the nearly-Nimon), and bring it all to a head by making him decide to take Amy and Rory back to a safe life on Earth. So on paper at least we are starting to see some acknowledgement of the traumas which they have all been through together. But even that trajectory felt somewhat empty to me. I mean, we've had much the same thing with the Tenth Doctor very recently, and in any case of course we know as the Doctor says goodbye to Amy and Rory that this isn't really the end, so it's hard to whip up the appropriate emotional engagement with the scene.
Oh well. Meanwhile, I did like the realisation of The God Complex. Obviously I particularly loved the re-imagining of the labyrinth with the minotaur at its heart, and in some ways felt sorry for Toby Whithouse that Doctor Who has used that idea before, especially since The Horns of Nimon just isn't in the same league as this story. But I'm also glad that the Nimons got an explicit shout-out, because for all the heavy-handed hokiness of the story which featured them, I absolutely love them as monsters! I also liked the attention drawn to the fake '80s setting of the hotel, starting with the cassette tape and carrying right on through the cheese plant and the Rubik's cube. It meant that the characters were operating in a metaphorical film-set again, while the running up and down corridors made the reference more specific - it's an archetypal Doctor Who set-up, acknowledged as a pretence.
Mirrors have been rather prominent throughout this season, as appropriate given the doppelgangers and parallel universes which have also been scattered throughout it, and I wasn't at all surprised to see them cropping up in this story too - particularly in the Pasiphae Spa, where the Doctor first confronts the nearly-Nimon, surrounded by mirrors and water-features.
I was also particularly struck by this image very early on in the story:
It's not quite as obvious from the screencap as it seemed in live action, but on the wall behind the Doctor's head are a pair of bull's horns, and the angle of the shot makes him appear to be wearing them, nicely fore-shadowing the parallel with the nearly-Nimon - whose name, too, later turns out to be lost, just like the Doctor's (as we were carefully reminded the following week). The apple he's eating is surely Significant as well. Not only does it recall the story of Adam and Eve, and thus give us a Doctor who is apparently casually and maybe even hubristically unperturbed by any higher power, but it also recalls his first meeting with Amelia / Amy, and the role which the apple with the smiley face carved into it played in the process of winning her trust in the first place.
The opposite end of that process comes in this story as well, with Amy's faith in the Doctor now explicitly acknowledged as misplaced, an active danger to her, and in need of breaking to save them all. I knew as I watched it that I had seen that basic story-arc playing out in Doctor Who before, and am very grateful to parrot_knight for saving me from having to scroll through endless episode synopses to work out where: Seven and Ace's The Curse of Fenric, which is of course also from this story's theme-world of the 1980s.
Meanwhile, I liked the basic cabin-fever set-up, and especially Rita, the Muslim woman who gets to be the 'clever one', and even outlives two out of the three male guest characters. On the whole I felt that her character was presented with a great deal of positivity and dignity, but I did feel some disquiet when we got to the point where the Doctor explained that the nearly-Nimon had been sucking people into his prison because of their faith, so that he could feed on it. This means that in the end, when Rita (like the other characters with their own equivalents) dies for being generally religious, she is unfortunately also dying specifically for being a Muslim. I think the problem here was equivalent to the fundamental problem with the Drahvins in Galaxy Four - that what the production team were trying to do was present a strong and clever and interesting female Muslim character, but that meanwhile they hadn't quite picked up on the fact that the particular situation which they put her into meant that she effectively ended up dying because she is a Muslim. The comparison with the Drahvins is rather unfair, because overall, her character is portrayed almost infinitely more positively than theirs. It's a very near miss. But it still went a bit awry there at the end.
Meh, there's probably other stuff I would have said about this episode if I'd got round to writing it up earlier. It was clever and gripping, made good use of its characters, and dropped in plenty of interesting symbolism and continuity references for geeky types like me to chew over. But I think that will do for now. Here's looking forward to the season finale, and hopefully a few resolutions, tomorrow evening. :-)
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.