Doctor Who: Series 5, Episode 6 – “The Vampires of Venice” (2010)

*Spoilers for “Flesh and Stone”*

This episode is a mixed bag for me. I always enjoy when Who puts a sci-fi spin on classic horror characters, and the late Helen McCrory’s guest appearance is worth the price of admission on its own, but anytime Moffat toys with the idea of a Doctor-Amy-Rory love triangle, it tends to get awkward, and this episode is no exception.

After her terrifying near-death experience with the Weeping Angels in the previous episode, Amy decided to seize the day by doing her darndest to jump the Eleventh Doctor’s bones. He was not on board with that, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that Amy had just admitted to him that she’s getting married in the morning. The Doctor decides the best way to deal with this is to pick up Rory and take him and Amy both on a “wedding present” trip, so they can share in the adventure together. The TARDIS brings them to 16th century Venice, where a mysterious aristocrat named Rosanna runs a school for a select group of girls. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are enlisted to help a man who worries for his daughter’s safety after she was accepted to the school.

The episode’s take on vampires is a lot of fun. I enjoy the alien explanations it gives for the various bits of vampire mythology: the fangs, the aversion to sunlight, not appearing in mirrors. Also, I adore the Doctor and Amy’s giddy excitement to be facing off against vampires, while Rory is standing here going, “Okay, but dangerous, though?!?” And Rosanna is simply a splendid baddie—intelligent, otherworldly, and elegant. Helen McCrory gives excellent vampire in the role, and I love the scene where she and the Doctor get a measure of one another. My first time watching series 5, I remember being struck by how Matt Smith really made you feel the weight of the Doctor’s years in their interactions.

There’s all kinds of other good stuff here too. I get a kick out of the Doctor crashing Rory’s stag night—in the most Doctor way possible—to take Rory away in the TARDIS. I’m tickled by the Doctor accidentally flashing his library card (with One’s picture on it!) to the vampires. And Rory has a terrific speech where he lays out why he thinks the Doctor is so dangerous. “It's not that you make people take risks, it's that you make them want to impress you,” he says. “You make it so they don't want to let you down.”

However, the climax is pretty goofy, and while the show is capable of doing the Doctor-Amy-Rory stuff well, they can also belabor it way too much. This is from the end of “Flesh and Stone,” but it’s never clear why a near-death experience makes Amy so determined to cheat on her fiancee the night before her wedding. The Doctor is firmly of the opinion that he doesn’t want anything to do with any love triangle business—when Amy inevitably suggests she infiltrates Rosanna’s school, the Doctor suggests he come along and pose as her father, with Amy reminding him, “You look about nine.” But unfortunately, Rory just can’t seem to get that part. To be fair, it’s the night before his wedding and he found out his fiancee was kissing her childhood “imaginary friend,” but by and large, he’s the one making it into a competition with the Doctor, who’s not trying to do any of that. Rory gets squirrelly at the thought of Amy and the Doctor fighting alien vampires together, and there’s a dick-measuring metaphor using flashlights. And personally, I don’t like having dick-measuring metaphors in Doctor Who. 

So boo for that. Still, it’s a pretty enjoyable episode overall, and while the aggravating elements bring it down for me, they’re not enough to spoil it.

Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” (2009)

*Episode premise spoilers*

This has always been my favorite of the 2009 Tenth Doctor specials, even though it really freaks me out (any type of “the infected” narrative invariably gets to me.) Gripping story, I’m invested in the oneshot characters, and it’s a fascinating scenario to put the Doctor in.

As the Tenth Doctor runs from his own destiny, he encounters a human colony on Mars. But not just any colony, the first—it’s 2059, and this is Bowie Base One. Their future is history for the Doctor, and although the details are a mystery, he knows that their mission is doomed to end in death and destruction. Knowing that this is a fixed point and he can’t interfere, the Doctor tries to best to just get out, but the end has already begun.

We’ve seen the Doctor run into fixed points in time before. It’s always agonizing for them to let people suffer as history takes its course. But “The Waters of Mars” does something interesting, because this isn’t history from the audience’s perspective. This is our future, and yet the Doctor knows the inevitable course it has to take, just like he knows the course of Pompeii or the French Revolution. I really like the scene where he discovers where/when he is and he realizes who everyone on the base is, calling each of them by name and citing their role in the mission.

In this way, it’s also a celebrity historical about the future, since the Doctor is thoroughly taken with the captain, Adelaide Brooke. It’s easy for him to slip into his fanboy tendencies with her, even though she’s severe and by-the-book and has no time for nonsense from him. And the Doctor comes by his adoration honestly—she proves herself shrewd and observant, recognizing how much more the Doctor knows than he tries to let on.

In addition to Lindsay Duncan, who brings a steely intelligence to Adelaide, the crew of Bowie Base One offers up a few familiar faces of the “before I knew them” variety. There’s Gemma Chan, who went on to play Astrid in Crazy Rich Asians, as Mia, and Joplin Sibtain (a.k.a. my beloved Brasso from Andor) plays Tarak. Both are relatively small roles, and we now know they can both do much more than that, but it’s still fun to see them!

The story is very well done. There’s a strong emotional core here, and even though it’s not my absolute favorite base-under-siege story, it still does a good job of making me feel for the characters. The Flood are super creepy baddies—they look really unsettling, and as I said, any type of infection angle always gets to me. And the connection between water and zombies is apt:

ADELAIDE: “We're safe. It's hermetically sealed. They can't get in.”

DOCTOR: “Water is patient, Adelaide. Water just waits. It wears down the clifftops, the mountains, the whole of the world. Water always wins.”

It’s quite the episode for the Doctor. There are points where, for me, it gets a little too deep into the Ten angst, but I do understand where it’s coming from on that score. The Doctor has been traveling alone ever since what happened with Donna at the end of series 4, he’s been avoiding portents for the end of this life, and although he’s just run into one of his heroes, the laws of time demand that he stand by and watch her meet her doom. He’s going through a lot. One of David Tennant’s talents in his performance as Ten is how quickly he can shift from silly to scary, and he makes good use of that here.

Doctor Who: Series 21, Episodes 13-16 – “Planet of Fire” (1984)

Series 21 is kind of hit-or-miss for me, but I think this is one of the better serials. It’s certainly packed—a companion’s backstory, a new companion introduction, the Master getting up to shenanigans, a rare Kamelion appearance, etc.—and while I don’t know that all of it necessarily works, I enjoy it.

Investigating an alien signal on Lanzarote, the Fifth Doctor and Turlough discover a piece of technology from Turlough’s home planet of Trion. As they trace the signal to the volcanic planet Sarn and both of them run into some unwelcome peers, they unwittingly bring along an American student named Peri.

Right from his introduction, Turlough’s situation was interesting to me: an alien already living on Earth at the time he meets the Doctor. From there, things quickly pivot to the Black Guardian arc and we don’t really follow up on where Turlough comes from, so it’s good to return to his story here. I appreciate filling in some of these gaps, as well as meeting other Trions and seeing how Turlough interacts with them.

I like a good ol’ classic Who companion stowaway/accidental absconding. And Peri is thrown even more into the deep end than someone like Zoe or Sarah Jane—she’s unconscious when Turlough brings her aboard after he rescues her from drowning, so when she wakes up in the TARDIS, she doesn’t know about the whole “bigger on the inside” thing. Not to mention, once they get to Sarn, she’s separated from both the Doctor and Turlough for much of the episode.

Instead, she’s dealing with Kamelion, the most unfortunate robot in the Whoniverse. Barely featured on the show because of how tricky he was to operate, Kamelion makes his second and final appearance on the show after a lengthy hiatus. Just like “The King’s Demons,” Kamelion’s incredibly prone to psychic tampering, and with the Master around, that spells trouble. So Peri’s introduction to TARDIS life involves being terrorized by a possessed robot who’s being controlled by a renegade Time Lord in quite the entertaining predicament. Not an ideal situation for her first adventure.

And look: I complain about overuse sometimes and there can be diminishing returns on occasion, but for the most part, I usually enjoy a good Doctor-Master standoff. This episode is no exception! Even if Three and the Delgado Master are my favorite classic Who combo, Five and the Ainley Master are pretty great together too, and this is a good story for them.