The gang goes to The States where Nixon's a pretty nice guy and there are creepy Men in Black in the Ladies’ Room.
The Centurion returns, River Song drops a massive spoiler and bowties are infinitely preferable to monastic neckties.
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Picking up where we left off in The Almost People, The Doctor has been calling in favours and recruiting allies from every corner of time and space it wasn’t worth us seeing before.
Their objective, to rescue Amy and her newborn time baby from the clutches of Madame Eyepatch Kovarian.
Kovarian has an army or two of her own, though, and this is destined to lead up to a mid-season cliffhanger, so things are about to get wobbly!
Would you like me to repeat the BSCOW?
A Good Man Goes to War
The Good Stuff:
• Vastra! Jenny! Strax! (And his “magnificent quantities of lactic fluid”).
• Parker from Thunderbirds! (Hey, what happened to ‘Thunderbirds are go…ing to be reviewed’!?)
• Headless Sith monks!
• Gloopy baby (this season is seriously dark).
• “Where the hell were you today!”
• A damn fine twist.
• Next Episode title!
Prime cuts of Beef:
• Cybermen smackdown! It’s scenes like this that have made the Cybermen look like total fuckwitts. The Cybermen of the 7th Doctor would have ripped out • Rory’s spleen and said “Excellent” (whilst clenching the spleen in their fists!).
• Why are the Silurians suddenly the Doctor’s allies? And how do they get dispatched so easily by the monks? Another potentially good baddie made into total idiots.
• The unnecessary encore for Curse of the Black Spot. Arrrrgh!
Summary: good battles, emotional hits, swerving twists, and good characters. What more can you ask for! (Answer: 7th Doctor cameo).
4.2/5 dollops of clone-baby-Melody gloop.
I love this episode! It’s full of my favorite characters: River, Madame Vastra, Jenny, Lorna. It has lines I really like too: “Anger is always the shortest distance to a mistake,” (ooh, how very Jedi of Vastra!) “They don’t put up a balloon or anything,” and Rory’s, “Would you like me to repeat the question?”
It takes a page from Star Wars right at the beginning, with explosions making noise in space, and carries right into fake lightsabers that look rather like Kylo Ren’s!
When Amy describes Rory as “the last of his kind,” is she talking about being a Centurion? A plastic man? A plastic man who’s perhaps no longer plastic except when plot needs it? Or did something happen to Amy & Rory’s boring little village that left the Ponds the only survivors?!
The second question seems a little mundane after that. What keeps the Headless Monk’s hoods puffed out? Do they starch them, to make them stand up and not just flatten? Are there tiny fans in the neck ties to poof the hood up with air for the sole purpose of looking foreboding? What happens if one runs out of battery, and everyone realizes what’s not under there, and accidentally stumbles into heresy?!
The best part of this episode was the “attack prayer” that monks without mouths were singing.
I love River’s reveal, and the Doctor’s reaction. My Rating? An episode I’m always happy to rewatch. I just enjoy the hell out of it, every time.
This is where I stopped watching originally.
A Good Man Goes To War (cool concepts but all the interesting characters were really underdeveloped, eye-patch lady was a poorly executed villain and the ending twist was both predictable and, dare I say, irrelevant)
There was a war against the Doctor (that the Doctor didn’t know about – he just wanted to rescue Amy) and the Doctor goes in all guns blazing fighting a war that he could not have know for sure was going to happen. Why didn’t he just do what he normally does?
Its taking the fun out of Doctor Who – The Doctor has become hugely demystified now and the stories just aren’t nearly as suspenseful as they could be.
I mean, let’s be honest: if the Doctor is always going to be the galaxy-renowned figure that all monsters know to fear, then what’s the point in watching an omnipotent god hit the “I win!” button every other week?
What confuses me is that River acts like that’s what he does all the time, especially as the later- library version. River acts pleased at the idea of ‘her’ version of the Doctor that makes armies run, while here it was like she was telling him off .
River has a great gimmick on her own, she’s this archaeologist who’s meeting the Doctor in different timeline, she’s the grown-up daughter of the Doctor’s current companions, it’s all timey-wimey and it’s great fun.
But then she also has to be:
> some sort of trained killing machine
> raised to kill him
> working under the main bad guy’s boss
> all mysterious with this past of killing people which is why she’s in prison
> his wife
It’s too much.
1.6/5