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.

Other Doctor Lives: Black Mirror: Season 7, Episode 4 – “Plaything” (2025)

*Episode premise spoilers*

As it happens, the only other episode of Black Mirror I’ve watched was also an Other Doctor Lives project, with Jodie Whittaker as a guest star. This time around, we’ve got an episode with a major role for Peter Capaldi.

When Cameron Walker tries to steal a bottle of liquor, a police DNA scan flags him in connection with an old unsolved murder. He’s brought in for questioning, but Cameron is less interested in discussing the murder itself than telling the psych evaluator about the “formative” experiences that led to it. The eccentric man spins a tale from the ‘90s involving a reclusive tech genius and the development of the first digital lifeforms in existence.

I know Black Mirror stories often involve near-future technology and its impact on society, so it’s interesting that this story, while set in the near future, is largely focused on the near past. While the older Cameron sits in the police station telling his story, most of the action occurs in the past. That’s in part because, in this instance, the technology we’re examining needed time to “grow” and develop.

Young Cameron, a reviewer for a gaming magazine, is invited to a private meeting with Colin Ritman, a tech prodigy who’s only recently returned to the scene after a breakdown. Cameron thinks he’s there to preview Colin’s new game, but Colin has much bigger things in mind. The “game” is merely a ruse to get funding: in actuality, he’s created the Thronglets, sentient lifeforms built from code. He pushes back on Cameron’s early misunderstandings—there’s not an objective, the Thronglets don’t exist for the user to make them do things, there doesn’t need to be a “point” to make them worthwhile. “We have to create software that elevates us, improves us as human beings,” Colin urges, “or else what is the fucking point of the tools at our disposal?”

Despite his initial confusion and skepticism, Cameron becomes increasingly enthralled by the Thronglets, spending more and more of his days caring for them and trying to understand their unique method of communication. It takes quite a while to get to the circumstances of the murder, which is tied up in Cameron’s obsession with the Thronglets and the victim’s inability to recognize their significance. It’s an interesting little yarn. Cameron’s characterization hits the “unstable loner” button pretty hard, but it also explores what can happen if someone vulnerable begins to see their computer as their only friend (after all, we’re currently living in an age of ChatGPT psychosis.)

Since most of the story’s action is taking place in the past, we spend a lot of the episode in flashbacks, where Cameron is played by Lewis Gribben. Colin, by the way, is played by Will Poulter—I’ve since gotten to know him through other things, of course, but Eustace Scrubb will always be the first character that comes to mind when I see him. With Peter Capaldi playing the older Cameron, that means we only see him in the present-day scenes in the police station, along with his narration over the flashbacks.

This is an interesting performance. The older Cameron is awkward and eccentric but fairly outgoing. During the police interview, he manages to control the flow of the conversation pretty well, all but ignoring the detective in favor of talking to the psych evaluator. His main focus is on the Thronglets, and he throws in other random details about his troubled past. He describes his dad as “an unpredictable violent giant who could never be appeased,” which is a hell of a line.

Cameron honestly could not care less that he’s been picked up in connection with a murder. He’s perfectly content where he is, and Capaldi has some fun with that in his performance. He waggles his fingers at the security camera, calling, “Hey, peekaboo!”, and he dismissively refers to the detective as “the chief…detective thingamabobby.”

Accent Watch

Scottish.

Recommend?

In General – Maybe. The two episodes I’ve seen of Black Mirror haven’t seen me running to watch more, but I’ve enjoyed both of them.

Peter Capaldi – I think so. The flashback structure means Capaldi’s role is smaller than Gribbens’s, but he does well with it.

Warnings

Violence, language, drug use, and strong thematic elements.