Vincent van Gogh gingerly flirts with Amy Pond while Doc is chased by the space chicken in his godmother's rearview mirror
The madman with a box loses his box and gains a bitey mad lady
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Responding to a Time Lord distress call in a psychic container, The Doctor, Amy and Rory take the TARDIS through a cosmic crack to a plughole junkyard just outside of the universe.
Inhabiting the junkyard are Auntie, Uncle, Nephew and Idris, a humanoid milk bottle into which the rich creamy soul of the TARDIS is poured.
The junkyard itself, known as House, is alive and feasting on gullible Time Lord heroes, but with none more left it kidnaps the Ponds and TARDISes away, leaving Doc and Idris behind with barely a few minutes until absolute zero hits.
Here we have a 2nd TARDIS centric episode (after The Edge of Destruction & before Journey To The Centre of The TARDIS)
The Doctor can finally talk to his “sexy” wife in person & we see the return of an Ood “love an Ood”
The Amy & Rory/House subplot is boring & drags on, it should have been fully about the TARDIS.
We also get to see a previous Console Room (which I was VERY happy about & possibly one of my favourite Console Rooms) and a new Console (designed by a Blue Peter winner)
Hint: (which we all know & probably did at the time) “The only water in the forest is the river” which alludes to… MELODY, I mean RIVER.
Auntie & Uncle are utter boring and should have been cut from the script.
I like The Doctor’s Wife, Suranne Jones is fantastic & Matt Smith is great!
I give it a 5!
Welcome to Listener-Mini Land, Thomas! Great to have you aboard. Keep’em coming! :-)
I think many people wished the TARDIS was a woman. I think it was a brilliant move to have this episode, and I really enjoyed it.
Neil Gaiman, writer of books such as Coraline, wrote this episode. Like Coraline, this episode is a little darker and plays around with so many cool ideas.
If you’ve seen Coraline, then you’ll get that the darker entity known as House is represented by this green light when he’s transferred into the TARDIS. The Other Mother from Coraline has this bright world but as the plot goes on things become this sickly green color as the web unwinds.
Speaking of House, he is voiced to perfection by Michael Sheen. I would compare his performance to Gabriel Woolf’s performance as the voice of The Beast in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit and even Sutekh from Pyramids of Mars. Like Sutekh, House is chilling and enjoys what he does. I think it was so wonderful.
That scene between Amy and Rory continually being seperated was really dark for this show. I mean, that bit still creeps me out to this day just thinking about it. So unsettling.
Probably the best thing about this episode is that the TARDIS is finally able to talk with the Doctor. The dynamic between the two is amazing and it’s almost like they are a married couple. I loved every second of it and I really think in the end we knew a little more about the Doctor’s relationship with his TARDIS.
Overall, this was a wonderful episode and a highlight of Series 6 for me. While many of the episodes ranged from being mediocre to decent over the course of this series, I think this is the best of the bunch. For such a unique idea and perfect execution, this episode gets a 4.20/5!
I love how we all have these confusing feelings about this episode.
Jeez, where to start…well, I know, WHOBACKWHEN HAS THE BEST DOCPASTS! (see Drew, it’s not just Ponken who likes it)
I’m probably in the minority here.
First of all, I found the Amy and Rory subplot pretty boring. once I realized that they were running through the Tardis I got excited to see more of it but was pretty disappointed to see the same 20 feet of corridor endlessly repeated. I understand that there were budgetary constraints, but once it was clear that we weren’t going to see any other rooms I felt disappointed.
(and given that the other control room was only shown in very dim, green light would it really have cost that much to do an approximation of a different control room? The wood paneled secondary control room from the Tom Baker era seems like it would have been easy enough to do)
But the thing that really bothered me was the personification of the Tardis. To me it was like the Midichlorians in The Phantom Menace – a way to concretely quantify something mystical that doesn’t need to be quantified in concrete terms. Or to quote my roommate that “making subtext into text is often a mistake”.
I liked last week’s better, despite it recycling (for the third time!) the idea of a machine that blindly heals those who don’t want to be healed.
But never mind: it takes all sorts, and it seems that this episode made a lot of people happy.
Oh my God! They killed Rory!
You bastards!
(I’m actually waiting for Rory to come out in an orange hoodie at some point.)
I’ll be generous and give it a very “meh” 1.1/5
I feel rather torn about this episode. On the one hand, I absolutely love the premise of the Tardis taking on a human form, on the other, I’m royally squicked by the stitched together people, even the third time watching it.
That final scene where the Tardis kicks House’s ass? Loved that bit. So much. And I really enjoy how she has archives of the things the Doctor hasn’t done yet, and how she calls him her Thief.
I am a bit puzzled about the Ood. For all the Doctor’s cheeriness over how wonderful the Ood are, the only times I can recall an Ood being on screen is when one is going bezerk and trying to kill people, and the Doctor seems surprised every time. Where are all the really awesome Ood? Granted, I haven’t seen every episode of New Who, so perhaps I just missed the ones where we actually see these oodles of wonderful Ood. Also each time he says it, my brain has to go, “Oh, right. Not a Quarren.” Because we have people who look like that in Star Wars. They just don’t have glowing balls. (Stop giggling, this instant.)
2.0. Because I really, really didn’t enjoy the patchwork people.
The only water in the forest is the river…
Hello all!
You’ve likely been asking yourselves “Selves, where has that literary rapscallion Kyle J Rath, aka the sinistersuperspy, been, lo these last few NuWho reviews?”.
Well, to put it mildly, nowhere special. Just, you know, generally, sort of around. So dry those tears, Drew, because it’s time for another mediocre mini.
So – the Doctor has a wife. She is the TARDIS, and she looks a lot like Suranne Jones. Michael Sheen puts on his best villain voice, one leg at a time, and Rory and Amy go along for the ride. Again.
I actually really like this first Neil Gaiman offering in the Whoniverse. It’s a cool concept that is fairly well executed, and aside from the blatant Ood-centric bigotry that permeates Doctor Who, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable romp that adds a new layer to thebackstory of Timelords in general.
Some nice callbacks, excellent performances from Smith and Jones, and an interesting visual landscape for the background.
4.2/5. #OodLivesMatter #Drewlovesme #Hereallyreallylovesme #Poundsign
Ok, let’s jump into this classic.
Idris has her soul and mind drained from her body by an uncaring Aunt and Uncle. (We don’t know it yet, but they are long-term abuse victims of The House and probably cannot be blamed for their actions and total lack of empathy.) The shell of Idris is used as a receptacle for the TARDIS’s soul. Enter Doc and co, who cannot recognize the TARDIS in this form.
As Doc talks excitedly of encountering still living Time Lords, Amy astutely guesses he’s hoping for their forgiveness and he openly admits it. But she’s forced too much honesty from him and he relegates her to theTARDIS. Only it turns out, Doc has been played; there are no Time Lords and Amy and Rory are in danger.
Inside the TARDIS Rory buys time by convincing House not to kill them quickly. House, however, uses that time to mess with their heads. Amy sees her guilt about Rory manifested as his love turning to hatred at the thought she hasn’t suffered while he did. One can only imagine what Rory saw.
Idris is the scene stealer here. From her trouble with tenses to calling for “my thief!” to the constant references to things that have not yet happened. The lines are so rich with meaning and emotion trying desperately to express itself accurately through words.
In the end the Doc is clever and defeats House, and Sexy the TARDIS fades away.
Rating: Crimson eleven delight petrichor
I love the extreme diversity in the quality of Doctor Who episodes. We get Curse of the Black Spots alongside mini-masterpieces. This is the case throughout Doctor Who’s history (with the exception of the 7th Doctor’s perfect episode-on-episode run).
This episode is totes’ wonderful. A Creepy Tardis junkyard, one sick puppy baddie, game-changing Time Lord lore, and killer dialogue. I Loved old Rory going Jack Nicolson Shinning on Amy.
Notable also for a leak from the production team to Private Eye about cost saving skimpiness by BBC execs: apparently there was supposed to be a new monster but an Ood was dusted off to save cash. At least we got the best line: “another Ood I failed to save”.
In summary. This is a fine beefless pie. 4.5/5 disembodied Time Lords sewn together.