Who Review: "Closing Time"

Ugh. So this episode is going to hinge on whether you liked "The Lodger" or thought it was pointless, boring filler because they couldn't get Neil Gaiman's episode up in time.

Going back to my review of "The Lodger," I find that I didn't even give it a score out of ten. Maybe that was because I didn't really think it was a Doctor Who episode so much as an episode of a suspiciously similar television show, wherein Matt Smith plays a benevolent alien bent on saving mankind, only here he has no understanding whatsoever of Earth customs.

Once again, the Doctor teams up with his comedic fat bloke friend, Craig, to save the day, and once again his social IQ gets cut in half for the sake of comedy. The Cybermats appear for the first time in the new series. (Remember those? They were the embarassing robot caterpillars from Tomb of the Cybermen that did frak-all.) The Doctor makes a fart joke and talks to babies.

The Cybermen are back, they try to take over, they're foiled. This time they're foiled because Craig loves his son so much that he resists Cyber-conversion and punches the hell out of a bunch of machines.

So basically everybody in Moffat's version of Who is superpowered. Amy can undo time-paradoxes. Rory can die a gazillion times and still keep coming back. Craig can resist Cyber-conversion just cuz.

Like "The Lodger," I'm not going to score this one. It's probably better than I'm willing to give it credit for, but I just don't like it when the show tries to be too comedic.

And then at the end of the episode, we find that River has been researching the Doctor and that the diary he'd left her has been written in. Then Eyepatch-lady shows up with the Silence and sticks River in the spacesuit so she can hide out at the bottom of Lake Silencio and kill the Doctor. There are so many things wrong with this scene that I want to spend the bulk of the review on it.

1) River has been studying the Doctor. Presumably now she knows his entire history, seeing as she's still in the future. That would mean that she knows about him defeating the Silence in 1969. That would mean that she probably saw a clip of the moon landing. That would mean that she's been brainwashed to kill the Silence on sight. But she does not.

2) The diary. I'd assumed it was brand-new when the Doctor left it on her bedside back in "Let's Kill Hitler," and that she'd been using it to chronicle his life in reverse. Now it kind of looks like he'd already written everything in it...? If not, who wrote the appointment at Lake Silencio in there?

3) Isn't River's compulsion to kill the Doctor magically gone as of "Let's Kill Hitler?" If not, why did she save his life in that episode?

4) Is older-River aware of what she'd done? She's in prison because she killed a good man, and it's strongly implied that she knows who it was. So when she shoots at the Astronaut in "The Impossible Astronaut," I would assume that she's aware that she's shooting at her younger self, and that she'll do massive epic damage to the timeline if she actually scores a hit.

All of these questions had better be answered next week.

One last thing: the nursery rhyme keeps trying to use "rock" and variations thereof to rhyme with "Doctor." The only one that's been acceptable so far is the absolutely epic double entendre "he cradled her and he rocked her."