coalescent

So close, and yet so far. Given Steven Moffatt's pedigree, it wasn't hard to predict that at some point he'd succumb to the lure of a non-linear time travel plot. Given his pedigree, it should have been wonderful. Given the toys he gave himself to work with--clockwork robots, a time-traveler's courtesan who is destined to be Seria Mau--it should have been spectacular. And yet ...

The good: the vertiginous "3000 years later", and the fact they were two-and-a-half galaxies away from Earth. "What's pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Have some perspective, Mickey", and "Didn't want to say 'magic door'" and a lot of the rest of the dialogue. The pacing, which managed to make the Doctor/Reinette relationship believeable in a single episode. The aforementioned clockwork robots and the cyborg spaceship. Leaving space in the script to show us Rose's reactions to what the Doctor was doing.

The bad: the direction. The music. the logic. Or rather, the lack thereof, particularly at the end of the episode. The last five minutes or so are a triumph of convenience and character over the integrity of the story, and what makes it worse is that from the second the Doctor's horse crashes through that mirror you know exactly what's going to happen. You know that there'll be a touching scene between the two of them in which the Doctor explains he is resigned to his fate, you know he'll end up going back through the fireplace, and you know the fireplace will conveniently skip forward more years than it has in a comparable time for the rest of the episode, just to lay the tragedy on a bit thicker. (While I'm at it: of all the portals on the ship, the fireplace is the one which they shouldn't have been able to have conversations across.) And once you're snapped out of the moment, you start to notice the ways in which the episode draws attention to the problems with the way Doctor Who handles time travel. To be blunt: he has a time machine, and the hand-waving is not convincing enough to justify its non-use. (I was also hoping he'd make more use of the fact that Reinette was able to go through the portals to the future, but alas.)

The verdict: frustrating, because this time the problems are not conceptual, they're in the execution. Moffatt is probably still the most interesting writer the show has, but this just felt like it needed another draft.

Next week: zeppelins. I would say that there's no way this can suck, but I said that about a spaceship crashing into Big Ben last year, and look what happened.

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