The Power of Three

It has to be said—even for someone who is a huge fan of “Doctor Who,” the old stuff with endless padded episodes of meaningless running through corridors—this was an exercise in treading water. Cool water maybe, but still, we were treading in it.

Ever since the Doctor deemed last year that his life was too risky for the Ponds, whom he cares a lot about, we have had this tension between their “normal” life and his endless excuses to take them on another adventure. In this episode we get a long, drawn-out telling of the year that they decided to start traveling with him again. (Just in time for them to quit for good, if rumors are true.)

The thing is that this show is clever enough to trick us into thinking we are seeing something. It is only after it is all over that we realize it was an exercise in non-story telling. There were Zygons, but we never saw them. There were cubes that spent 12 months doing… nothing. Once they did, they opened and were empty. After a year of “studying” humanity they ended up being about 33% successful in electrocuting them. When we see who is “controlling” the extermination, they aren’t really there at all. They show us the daughter of a beloved character from the old days. Yeah! She doesn’t do anything. Wha?

Oh well. It is still better than a lot of television. The character moments between Amy and the Doctor are beautiful and will make next week’s episode even harder to take, whatever happens.