In the second half of Steven Moffat’s two parter we finally got a full on tour de force of the kind of psychological horror he’s famous for but which was sadly lacking in last week’s episode. I have to say this episode left me feeling disturbed in ways that his previous stories haven’t and this time I loved every minute of it.
So here we go again, spoilers beyond the cut.
So, the Avada Cadaver…sorry wrong franchise, the Vashta Nerada. I was rather disappointed with them in this episode as I had been led to believe we were facing our fear of the dark and shadows, only to have it explained that they are merely flesh eating swarms of creatures that move in the shadows/look like shadows/something to this effect. Now granted they had their moments, we had a repeat of the “Who turned out the lights?” moment with the Vashta animating the corpse of Anita so that she appeared to be still alive, however beyond that they were nothing more than yet another bad guy who aren’t really the bad guys. The revelation that they breed in trees and thus actually come from the Library planet and grew within the books created from said trees was a good one but I was left wondering why I was able to figure that out the moment the Doctor mentioned their origins, yet it took him an age. I’ve had this happen once or twice before this series and it really confuses me, normally the Doctor is shown as highly intelligent and ahead of the viewers even when we don’t realise it.
So why did the Vashta Nerada just choose to give him time and then vanish. What exactly happened to them? I mean the books weren’t magically converted back into trees when all the survivors were recovered so we can assume the Vashta were just as angry as at the beginning of the show, yet we were told absolutely nothing of what became of them.
For me what was truly scary was Donna’s virtual world. While it was clearly set up for her by CAL and the security system in the computer to try to help her integrate, it did leave a rather nasty taste in the mouth which I’m assuming was the general idea. I thought Catherine Tate’s performance was superb this time round, managing to handle the portrayal of her two realities crashing together perfectly. Both distrust at the world she knows is a lie while at the same time being completely unable to let go of her ‘family’ so easily.
My only real problem with the episode aside from the Vashta Nerada was the fact that I had it all laid out before the episode even started. I left last episode feeling confused as to what was actually happening, only to find at the end of this episode that all my random theories were in fact true. The little girl was the computer, as was Doctor Moon and all the people in the Library were saved onto a big computer. There were no real surprises aside from one;
Who was River Song?
We never did have confirmation that she will eventually be the Doctor’s wife, just that they will be romantically involved (a theme I’m getting bored of with New Who…the Doctor had never had a romance with a companion before Rose, that romance could have been the perfect plot line to highlight his loneliness) and that she will be his companion. I did want to know exactly what the Doctor meant when he told River that there was only one time when he could tell anyone his name. Not ‘would’ which would have suggested a desire to tell the secret but ‘could’, which suggests he is bound by something which bans him from using it. This could tie in with the prophecy in The Fires of Pompeii that told us his name ‘burns’ at the heart of the Medusa Cascade. Could his true name be a key?
Finally, we had what I think was another of the many tiny references to how this series could play out. As River is telling her ‘children’ the story of the Doctor from her diary, she mentions that if he were no longer with us the stars themselves would go out.
Tags: doctor who, donna, medusa cascade
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