Who Review: Cold Blood

The first half of "Cold Blood" was an excellent exercise in contrasting valiant optimism with an increasing sense of dread. I thought the narration at the beginning gave the game away just a bit, but no - the Silurians (still not calling them homo-reptilia, sorry) don't emerge now, they do so in 1,000 years. This has the wonderful advantage of not screwing up much of the series' timeline. (Although Frontier In Space needs to happen before 3020, or else the Humans will have two different sets of cold-war-parable-reptiles on their hands at once.) ("The Beast Below" takes place in the 29th century and shows that Humankind has evacuated the planet, so the Silurians aren't exactly going to have to share... more on this in a moment.)

Complaints in the first half: it was so obvious the moment the scientist told the Doctor to go on ahead, he'd catch up, that he wasn't going to live to see the credits. Mo seems awfully comfortable talking to Malokeh considering the latter dissected him a bit earlier. Eldane seems perfectly happy to share the planet with "Apes," which is not an opinion that any previous Silurian has ever held without first being persuaded by the Doctor- it makes pretty much everything feel contrived. Still, I absolutely loved the first half of this episode, and felt that it was everything that part two of a two-parter should be.

Then, er... in the space of about 5 minutes, we get two Humans deciding to stay below ground (and Eldane is perfectly happy with this, as he is to murder some of his own people), the bloody "cracks in time" show up again, the Doctor does something incredibly stupid, like stop running from an upcoming explosion to stick his hand in an even more dangerous one, and oh yeah, a companion freakin' dies. He dies so dead he gets erased from time and doesn't reappear at the end alongside future-Amy, which nicely explains the scene at the beginning. It's pretty clear that Steven Moffat has a different idea of how time works than, say Russell T Davies, but then again, Rusty had a different idea than, say, Barry Letts (cf. Day of the Daleks and compare that with how the Doctor screws up Harriet Jones' New Golden Age in "The Christmas Invasion"). That said, er, how can his engagement ring still be in the TARDIS? And doesn't the TARDIS have a state of temporal grace? (Funny how the last time it clearly didn't have that temporal grace thingy was, er, Earthshock, which was the last time a companion died... and stayed dead. No amount of techno-hocus-pocus is going to explain the ending of The One I Don't Want to Think About.)

I praised Sherlock Holmes the most when I thought they'd killed off Watson, and likewise I congratulate the showrunners here for killing a companion for the first time in 28 years (again, no, neither Peri nor Grace counts). The series could have gone somewhere fascinatingly different if Rory hadn't been instantly consumed by the Crack of Reset-Button, but expecting Doctor Who to live up to my expectations is pretty much the same thing as anyone with a basic understanding of mechanical physics steadfastly believing that Santa Claus visits every single home in the world in a 24-hour period.

Also: "We'll give you our technology in exchange for a place to live?" It's amazing they didn't give Restac a chance to yell about appeasement.

Let's talk about fixed points in time. It's been 47 years since William Hartnell insisted that you can't even change one single line of history, and it's been 42 years since Jon Pertwee proved him wrong by blowing up a house full of Daleks.

But even ignoring all this, the Doctor's clearly changed history at some point. After all, The Daleks' Master Plan took place in the year 4000, and there's no indication there that Earth was ever evacuated a thousand years previously. Far more recently, we've had "The Long Game," set in 200,000, and "The Parting of the Ways" one hundred years after that, and we saw the planet there. Clearly, when the script editors aren't blatantly ignoring what came before (and let's face it, we don't really want a rematch with Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord, do we?), they're implying that the Doctor has changed history. Just, you know, never in the past. Except "Fires of Pompeii," where he made the present. So in that case we see the changed future before he changed it, but pretty much everwhere else, especially in this story, history changes as, er, the Doctor changes it.

Anyway, Moffat's really, really got enough rope to hang himself with now. This crack-in-time thing had better be pretty damned impressive, considering that it's intruded on the ending to both this season's two-parters so far.