(Between the first time I saw this and the time I sat down to write this review, I got around to seeing Inception, which I do not believe was out yet when this episode first aired in Britain. I will try to keep that in mind.)
So, there are two scenarios. In one, the Doctor and company are freezing to death on a paralyzed TARDIS. In the other, it's five years later and Amy is pregnant, while meanwhile a bunch of seniors with aliens in their throats want to kill everyone. The Doctor and friends fall asleep in one scenario and wake up in the other, ad nauseam. The Dream Lord emerges and tells them to figure out which one is reality and which one is fiction. The Doctor pulls out a little golden top and... oh wait, wrong dream-story from 2010.
(Hey, remember in The Deadly Assassin, when they had the title crawl six months before Star Wars and the Matrix 22 years before... The Matrix?)
It's worth pointing out that right after this episode, we go into a 2-parter that 1) kills Rory again, and 2) doesn't really do new fans any favors when it comes to re-introducing the Silurians. So when we eventually learn that the Dream Lord is the dark side of the Doctor's subconscious - his Mal, if you will/must - it's still not unreasonable for us older fans to think that hey, this might be the Valeyard. Moff doesn't seem to be the sort of person to force the whole "tortured Doctor" on us (compare Tennant's perpetual anguish about the destruction of Gallifrey to Smith's "there was a bad day"), but it is an interesting concept; here's the dark side of the Doctor that he's deliberately trying to keep under wraps, knowing full well he's only one more regeneration away from having to face the thing full-on.
(Of course, I was hoping the Dream Lord turned out to be either the Monk - which doesn't seem so likely in retrospect - or the Master of the Land of Fiction. Because Troughton's clearly the Doctor Smith is taking cues from, and The Mind Robber is one of my all-time favorite serials.)
So the Doctor is convinced that the TARDIS is real and Rory is convinced that Upper Leadworth is real, and it's up to Amy to decide. Meanwhile the Dream Lord does the whole "you can't go around with him forever" thing that Rose had to deal with back in "School Reunion," and that scene between him and her in the TARDIS takes on an extra creep factor once you know what the Dream Lord is. Of course, Amy's treating time-travel like her bachelorette party (complete with trying to jump in bed with the Doctor a few weeks previously), and is almost certainly not going to be as clingy as Rose was when it's time to go.
Eventually, Rory gets killed (for the first of three* times and counting) in Upper Leadworth, and Amy decides that that has to be a dream because she doesn't want to live without him. Yay, love.
*Did he die when the Doctor reset the Universe in "The Big Bang?" He's suddenly not Plastic Man anymore, so I assume some transformation took place.
They crash a van to kill themselves (this is strange to re-watch after the mini-episodes "Space" and "Time"), but then the Doctor decides to blow up the TARDIS as well, because the Dream Lord can't have power over anything that's not a dream.
He's right, and they wake up in reality. The Doctor explains that they all got affected by some psychic pollen (astonishingly, this is not the worst piece of technobabble in Who history) and that all is well, but then right before the episode ends he sees the Dream Lord's reflection in the console.
...and that distracts him from seeing whether or not his top fell over.
Okay, no seriously, how does he know he's out of the dream now? He could be in a dream within a dream...
And, hey, the Doctor clearly knows how to blow up the TARDIS. Which means the Dream Lord knows how to blow up the TARDIS. And the episode's "or is it?" ending leaves the door open for its return...
But a caveat about that. The ending to "Normal Again," the only good episode from Season 6 of Buffy that didn't feature a music demon, suggests that everything we know and love about the show is just the deranged thoughts of a seriously mentally disturbed girl. Deep Space Nine was originally going to end with the revelation that the 50's science-fiction writers in "Far Beyond the Stars" were real, and everything in the entire show just took place in Benny Russell's head. So will we see the Dream Lord again? I don't know, but my money's on him popping up again in Season Six...
Anyway, this was inventive and original, even if it got eclipsed by Inception about a month later. KAREN GILLAN'S LEGS looks good even when she's lugging a giant balloon around under her shirt, and Toby Jones is great as the Dream Lord. This was around the time that I started finally warming to Rory as well, though I must say that I didn't fully like him until after he was already dead. For the second time.
8 out of 10.
Now wake up and go back to the Who Review page.
No comments:
Post a Comment