The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
May. 12th, 2011 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI'm rather torn about this pair of episodes. I found a great deal to like here. The Silence were an original monster and allowed for some genuinely scary pieces of television, as the editing played around with individual viewpoints. I like this TARDIS crew, and while I might wish for Amy to have a little more self-awarenes and Rory a touch more backbone, I appreciate that there are constraints here which demand fairly broad-brush characterisation. Even Alex Kingston's River Song, who I often find a little forced, was mostly fun to watch though I still find the performance oddly grating in places. I even liked the implicit trust in the audience displayed by the temporal jump forward between the two episodes (for all the Doctor's apparent plan at this point seems unnecessarily convoluted). The Doctor's solution to the Silence problem was ruthlessly unpleasant in a way that seemed far more genuine than Davies' lonely god characterisation (though I shall be disappointed if that ruthlessness isn't acknowledged at some point). Canton Delaware was also a good secondary character who I enjoyed for himself, though I wasn't sure the story really needed to add a fourth pseudo-companion into the mix.
On the other hand so much of the plot in these two episodes was clearly part of the season arc, and not the immediate story that I was left oddly dissatisfied. I like to think I can cope with an arc plot but there were many aspects of this pair of episodes which will be good if resolved properly and rather poor if ignored. For instance, I couldn't decide whether we were supposedly to unambiguously accept the Doctor's judgement that the Silence were a bad thing or whether we were supposed to think that matters looked a lot more complicated than that, rendering his solution even more unpleasant. You don't just remove a race that has apparently been living in intimate symbiosis with the human race for millenia without consequence. If that's picked up and re-examined I will be pleased, but if it isn't then I'll be disappointed. Similarly whole sequences of the story, e.g. much of the Children's home stuff, really play no part in the story in hand. I thought that segment was, atmospherically speaking, extremely effective but it is a little frustrating (certainly when writing a review) to have so little idea at this point where it was leading and to an extent my appreciation of such sequences depends on the execution of the pay-off which we haven't had yet. The same goes for the lead-in and a good half of the first episode which really had very little to do with the story of The Silence and their defeat and far more to do with the little girl and her strange space suit.
Given how much set-up for the rest of the season these episodes were doing, I thought they did extremely well to be as entertaining as their were in their own right. Structurally I think this was very ambitious, however I feel the need to reserve final judgment until all the dots have been joined together.
On the other hand so much of the plot in these two episodes was clearly part of the season arc, and not the immediate story that I was left oddly dissatisfied. I like to think I can cope with an arc plot but there were many aspects of this pair of episodes which will be good if resolved properly and rather poor if ignored. For instance, I couldn't decide whether we were supposedly to unambiguously accept the Doctor's judgement that the Silence were a bad thing or whether we were supposed to think that matters looked a lot more complicated than that, rendering his solution even more unpleasant. You don't just remove a race that has apparently been living in intimate symbiosis with the human race for millenia without consequence. If that's picked up and re-examined I will be pleased, but if it isn't then I'll be disappointed. Similarly whole sequences of the story, e.g. much of the Children's home stuff, really play no part in the story in hand. I thought that segment was, atmospherically speaking, extremely effective but it is a little frustrating (certainly when writing a review) to have so little idea at this point where it was leading and to an extent my appreciation of such sequences depends on the execution of the pay-off which we haven't had yet. The same goes for the lead-in and a good half of the first episode which really had very little to do with the story of The Silence and their defeat and far more to do with the little girl and her strange space suit.
Given how much set-up for the rest of the season these episodes were doing, I thought they did extremely well to be as entertaining as their were in their own right. Structurally I think this was very ambitious, however I feel the need to reserve final judgment until all the dots have been joined together.