0
Who is River Song? Both your guesses are correct. Who is the Doctor? Amy's pet. Who is Amy? The main character of the show, according to the new show opening. What's so bad about crossing your own timeline? Nothing, because it's done all the time. What's a plot hole? Moffat knows not.
Where to begin? The Silence are stupid. Anyone who likes them as a new monster race is an idiot, and I'll explain why. The Doctor has a fondness for human beings. This is (as far as I can tell) old continuity reinforced in new continuity via Eccleston and Tennant. The Doctor loves humanity for its rashness, boldness, for what it is capable of achieving (despite what it is capable of doing). Humanity has bothgreat promise and terrible danger, but its heights are higher than its lows, in balance. The Doctor loves this. It's what attracted him to humans and why he has defended the planet so vigorously in past seasons. In fact, he has traveled to various points in humanity's timeline to see these very traits.
The introduction of The Silence erases all of this. It turns out the Silence have been manipulating humans for....well, forever. Everything is a product of the Silence. So all that stuff about the Doctor liking humanity for its tremendous promise? Everything that gave the show and its titular character a heart? Everything that made this odd, alien man so human? "Nope, just kidding, it was all an illusion," says Moffat via his plot hook.
That's unforgivable. It's one thing to build on an existing universe of continuity--even change bits in order to move the plot forward. It's quite another to stamp them out with your boot heel.
Amy's voice over opening, "When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend..." is shocking. This is no longer a show about the Doctor, it's about Amy. Why? To bring in new viewers? People only want to see the hot girl? Will the next Doctor and companion be even younger? Will future seasons only hire underwear models? Doctor Who Kids, where the Doctor reincarnates as a freshman in high school (or whatever the British equivalent is)? Doctor Who Babies, with Travolta for a Look Who's Talking reboot? Doctor Who crossed with Twilight? No more sci-fi elements, only melodrama? Fuck me.
The Amy/Rory/Doctor love triangle could've had some promise, but that gets wrapped up early. Rory is still a flat character, but he's likable and it's hard not to root for him. The fact that he keeps dying and coming back is amusing. Abruptly, the Doctor kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis joy ride super adventure. Amy leaving was so anticlimactic. Even now, I don't even know if she'll be back or not. The 'proper' place to have left Amy was the end of Season 5. That was a good point to end it. I felt no emotional connection to her leaving here at all, possibly due to how lackluster this entire season has been.
The penultimate episode was a below average one-off. Giant plot holes, which have become characteristic of Moffat's run, were more pronounced than usual. Nothing made sense. The rewriting of how people are assimilated into cybermen was typical sloppy writing by Moffat. In the larger scheme of the season, this episode was supposed to be the doctor's last dash before The End. Comparing this to Tennant's last visit to his old friends (which I think is a fair comparison) reveals how thin Moffat's doctor is. Tennant's doctor had friends all over the place (well, England). Going around to see them all one last time was a chore in itself. It had a huge emotional payoff after 3.5 years. Moffat's doctor is an unknown. He's defined mostly as Amy's fashion accessory. His only friend outside of Amy is a tubby dude in a flat. And the tubby dude exists only to be pathetic--the Doctor needs a foil with this lowly level of patheticness in order to look cool. Because (speaking of this season only) the Doctor only existed in Amy's shadow. Outside of Amy's motivating force, he's lame. And for lame to look cool, he's got to be juxtaposed next to someone lamer: tubby dude in a flat. This is the Doctor on what he believes is his last night. Tennant doing something mundane on his last night (going around to see his friends) was something that spoke to the elevation of his character. Moffat's Doctor doing something mundane on his last night (seeing his one friend, Tubby dude in a flat AND ignoring Amy/Rory) was pathetic.
The finale...whatever. More gaping plot holes. One completely unnecessary wedding. Doctor and River try to change Time by not killing the Doctor, and it doesn't work. Then the Doctor uses a robot to change Time by not killing the Doctor, and it...works? We're talking Time with a capital 'T'. Fixed point in Time. Old continuity. Deleted, again, by Moffat. By parity of reasoning, for consistency's sake, those two attempts should either both work or both not work. Using a robot can trick Time? You can't fool Time.
Moffat without Davies to pull back on the reins is bad. He had one good season in him, several good eps in the Davies years, and that's it.
Positive things?
- A reprieve from Dalek-heavy plots was refreshing. Needed a break from them.
- The Tardis not being a big facet of the stories was also somewhat refreshing. It's more special when you don't have every episode telling you how special it is.
- Having said that, however, the best episode of the season featured the Tardis in a starring role: The Doctor's Wife.
- Most everything else was drek.
