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With the rest of Doctor Who Series 6 approaching faster than a dalek on an oil slick, our ‘Revisited’ series wraps up Series Five.
‘The Hungry Earth’/’Cold Blood’ hovered dangerously near the mid-series slump, packed with scenes of human-alien negotiation and democratic conferences in a fight for planet Earth. Even typing about it feels a bit boring. The story painted neither the human characters, nor the underground Silurian species, in a particularly good light, so didn’t exactly make for cheerful watching; a scene that threatened Amy with vivisection was practically Torchwood. But for those Rory-death spotters out there, this was execution number two, with Amy’s fiancé taking a bullet for the Doctor at the end, and then being wiped from history itself. Not a brilliant day for him, either.
Now as everybody knows, when your boyfriend has been sucked into a crack in time, the best way to cheer yourself up is to look at some pretty artwork. The Doctor and Amy take this one step further in ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ by visiting the depressed genius, Vincent Van Gogh (Tony Curran) himself. Richard Curtis was responsible for this episode, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on your opinion: of course Van Gogh fell in love with Amy, and of course, Amy tried to force sunflowers on the depressed artist in a light-hearted rom-com kind of way. The greatest achievement of this episode, however, was to touch upon the issue of mental illness – not building it into a joke, or signposting it with flashing BAFTA arrows – but to subtly expose it to a child audience raised my opinion of the episode considerably higher.
The rom-com theme doesn’t stop at episode eleven with ‘The Lodger.’ There’s something weird going on above James Corden’s - sorry, Craig Owens’ – flat, so the Doctor moves in to investigate. The Doctor must be the best housemate ever, right? Or… maybe not. Owens is, predictably, a loveable underdog who wants the girl (an underused Daisy Haggard) and eventually finds he is competing with the oblivious Doctor at every turn in life. More than anything, this story felt like an excuse to let Matt Smith to show off his football skills on television, but we’ll let him off seeing as he also scared off that big scary alien spaceship hiding on top of Owens’ house.
Trouble is, if you keep hacking off alien races – then brag about it in several climactic speeches – it’ll come back to bite you later. Which is what happens in ‘The Pandorica Opens’: the Doctor is lured to Stonehenge by his enemies and then shoved into a massive box. This is the simple bit. What’s not so easy to grasp is the immense amount of time manipulation jiggery-pokery that occurs in ‘The Big Bang,’ one of those episodes where you have to really really concentrate. Rory lives? Amy dies? The Doctor dies? By the time the whole of history has been rewritten and Rory has been fully conscious for two thousand years without any mental consequences, Amy’s summoning of the TARDIS to her wedding using the ‘Something borrowed, something blue’ line doesn’t seem ludicrous at all. Which is Series Five in a nutshell: barmy, overblown and ridiculous, but somehow, just so good.
Doctor Who returns to BBC One on Saturday, 7.10pm
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