James Bond: From Russia With Love

First appearance of half-naked women dancing through the credits. Desmond Llewellyn (Q, although he's still credited as "Boothroyd") makes his debut here, and brings with him the attache case (see Goldfinger) and the sniper rifle (see OHMSS). First time the film has a unique theme tune, and first time said unique theme tune has lyrics (although only over the closing credits). First time the film's title song appears as diegetic sound (meaning the characters can hear it). First appearance of the alternate "007" theme (see Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds are Forever, and Moonraker), and the suggestion that a character (Major Klebb) is homosexual. For the only time in the series, a female character that Bond definitely had sex with makes a return appearance; this is the second and last appearance of Sylvia Trench. Despite the title, while this is the first film to venture beyond the Iron Curtain, it doesn't actually ever get to Russia. First appearance of a Nemesis - a character as smart and as strong as James Bond, played by an actor who could have been Bond himself (in this case it's Robert Shaw as "Red" Grant, setting a bar for this character type so high that only Sean Bean in GoldenEye has ever come close). First time the Bond Girl is Russian, and, if you squint hard enough while she's getting into Bond's bed, first time you can see a naked breast in a Bond film. In less perverted fields, it's the first time the Bond Girl saves Bond's life. First appearance of Blofeld, and of Blofeld's cat. Here, Blofeld has hair and sounds suspiciously like an older Sean Connery trying to hide his accent (no, it's not him, but once you've heard it you can't un-hear it). We never see his face. First time the villains explicitly try to lure James Bond into a trap, and also the first time they use him as a pawn in their scheme. First time the Bond Girl is used as little more than a pawn in a scheme (it's worth noting that The Living Daylights basically copies this film's "Get out of the USSR" plot, but with the added twist that Bond is manipulating the girl every bit as much as the villain is). First time the film persists in continuing on after it appears to be over.

James Bond: Dr. No

Well, it's the first one, obviously. So it's the first time we see the gun barrel sequence (that's a stuntman, not Sean Connery), the first time someone introduces themselves using the "Last name, first name last name" formula (it's Sylvia Trench), the first time someone uses the words "shaken, not stirred" (it's the film's villain). First gimmicky henchmen, the "Three Blind Mice." We have the first appearance of, obviously, Bernard Lee's M, Lois Maxwell's Moneypenny, and Sean Connery's Bond. First appearance of Felix Leiter, and the only time he's played by Jack Lord. First Bond One-Liner: after an informant commits suicide, Bond leaves him in the backseat of a car, and tells the valet to "make sure he doesn't go anywhere." (Later, and with a shorter time lapse, after the Three Blind Mice drive a hearse over a cliff and explode: "I think they were on their way to a funeral.") Surprisingly early in the series, we have an evil female character - in fact we have two, but Bond only sleeps with one, and even James Bond's magic lovemaking abilities are not enough to make her defect to the forces of good (cf. Goldfinger). Neither die; the photographer just disappears after failing to take Bond's picture twice, and the evil secretary Miss Taro is arrested. Miss Taro is, incidentally, Bond's first non-European conquest. First silly name for a Bond Girl: Honey Ryder. First staple of the 60s and 70s Bond flicks, the Villain With a Disability: Dr. No has mechanical hands. First truly bad special effect (not counting the shoddy rear-screen that the series will suffer from up through at least The Spy Who Loved Me): it's impossible to watch the tarantula sequence without noticing that there's a pane of glass separating Connery from the spider. First time a black person has a significant role: Quarrel is (mostly) brave and resourceful (though both he and Honey are presented as being superstitious enough to believe there's a dragon on Dr. No's island), but this being 1962, Bond tells him to "fetch my shoes" at one point. For the first and last time, James Bond sings. Only appearance of Peter Burton as "Major Boothroyd," the armorer.

Right, one of the worst mistakes of 2013 was Doctor Who's 50th anniversary

Or so say the folks at io9, in between implying someone should be blacklisted just because they share the same political views the President of the United States professed to hold back when he was running for office.

Truthfully, the "futurists" (Marxist-progressives) at io9 are just upset that the Doctor hasn't turned into a woman yet.

Time of the Doctor: Tasha Lem? Why?

Or to be more accurate, why was this "mature woman" with a perverse interest in seeing the Doctor naked not River Song? The answer is because Moffat needed to pad the plot out for another two minutes.

Expanding on "Time of the Doctor", part 1 of X

In this post I explicitly want to limit myself to just the regeneration, and discuss both the 13-life limit and the "farewell tour."

"The Time of the Doctor" impressions

• Large chunks of the middle were an exercise in marking time. The Doctor sends Clara away, lets her back, sends her away, and lets her back again
• The aging makeup is no better than it was in "The Girl Who Waited"
• Having Smith regenerate twice was stupid, anticlimactic, and annoying
• Bringing back Karen Gillan for the regeneration was a tremendous insult to Jenna Coleman
• Where the hell is the Valeyard?
• "I'm not talking to you," shouted the girl in the middle of the truth-field

Two out of ten.

Well, this hasn't happened to me in a while...

So having slogged my way through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I went and picked up The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I basically finished that novel on a flight from Hartford to Chicago, and didn't need a bloody flowchart to keep track of everything...

...but part of that was because about halfway through, I realized that an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had pretty much cribbed the entire plot.

Buffy: Graduation Day, Part 1

There are three episodes between "Enemies" and this one:

• Earshot: Is supposed to go immediately after "Enemies," but a kid brings a gun to school in it and Columbine happened four days before it was supposed to air. Buffy gets telepathy but can't read Angel's mind (heh) so she has to trust him when he says he wasn't attracted to Faith while he was pretending to be evil.
• Choices: the Scoobies steal something the Mayor needs for his Ascension, but he kidnaps Willow. Faith's in it; she gets a new knife (which would later turn up in Star Trek Nemesis of all things), but loses it in the fight to Buffy. (The episode's subtext is Billow, not Fuffy.)
• The Prom: Angel dumps Buffy and then shows up to be her Prom date anyway. Thanks, buddy.

 And that gets us up to date.

The Class of 1999 is collecting their graduation robes. Xander is convinced he's going to die. Willow and Harmony sign each others' yearbooks and Willow nonchalantly insults her after she walks away. Buffy says she doesn't even get the whole Graduation thing: "you get a piece of paper and nothing changes."  Well, these next two episodes will have to change that.

A Game of Thrones: Catelyn V (Chapter 28): Inn Cognito

Last time on Adventures in Awful Parenting, one father sent his oldest son to the die in some frozen hell, and it looked like Jon Arryn was murdered for finding King Robert's bastard son. We now turn to Catelyn Stark, who tops everyone else by kicking off a chain of events that gets all your favorite characters killed.

A Game of Thrones: Jon IV, Eddard VI (Chapters 26 & 27): Who's A Royal Bastard?

Previously on the Useless Cripple Show, we were inconclusive about at what age a boy becomes a man.  Let's turn to a 14-year-old motherless bastard at the frozen edge of the world and see if he has anything to say on the subject.

A Game of Thrones: Bran IV, Eddard V (Chapters 24 & 25): Bran Flakes

Previously on My Great Summer Vacation by Khaleesi, Viserys was a tool and Frodo, son of Drogo was conceived. We now return to my least favorite POV character in the entire series and his nincompoop father.

A Game of Thrones: Daenerys III (Chapter 23): And Not A Drop To Drink

Previously on Westerosi Weather Is F*cked Up: Tyrion finished up at the Wall and Arya made a new friend. This time...

On a sea that's not a sea

Dany becomes Khaleesi 

and has a teenage pregnancy.

Yeah rhyming is not my strong suite. 

Admin: Buffy review list

Note that episodes marked with a * are not full reviews, but mere recaps of plot- and character- essential happenings. I'll update the list regularly and bump it once a month, same with the Who Review list.

Admin: Who Review List

Update on the episodes of Doctor Who I've reviewed.  I'll put the serials in chronological order.

A Game of Thrones: Tyrion III (Chapter 21), Arya II (Chapter 22): Of Calendars And Kings

Last time on Test Your Political IQ, we were reminded that Varys is a eunuch, often and loudly. Now we're back to Tyrion, whom in case you've forgotten, is a dwarf. This won't be brought up every other page or so...

Weekend song for those who need to get pumped

Happy Hunger Games Finals Week everyone

This is probably my favorite AC/DC song in terms of the way it's composed. Almost the entire song is in B except for the solo that starts at about 2:47. But the transition from B to A for the solo is so subtle you're likely to miss it. You don't miss the transition from A to B at the end of the solo (3:18), though, so it feels like suddenly the singer is singing in a higher key than he was before.

Also, the chords in the outro are blatantly ripped off from Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."

A Game of Thrones: Eddard IV: Small Council, Big Plans

There's actually a creepy little dance going on with the chapter numbers between chapters 16 and 27. It goes (taking out the character's name), 3, 4, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4.

Course evaluations are a f*cking joke

Let me tell you a story. This literally happened in my Business Associations class.

"The statutory supplement is the only thing you're allowed to use on the exam because the statutory supplement is the only thing you'll need."

Asks accounting question worth 1/6th of the entire exam.

Did the statutory supplement include anything on accounting? Am I going to law school because I'm good at math? Hell f*cking no.

You cannot properly evaluate a class until you see what complete and utter bullshit the professor puts on an exam.

And that is why course evaluations are a joke. Because they're due before the exam.

"Oh," you say, "the little brats who think they did poorly on the exam will give the professor a bad mark." Hey guess what, genius, that's the f*cking point. Most of us are taking out crippling loans on top of our crippling loans to pay for bullshit like a bad mark because the professor outright lied about what was going to be on the exam. We're not frat boy slackers here. None of us have football scholarships. We're here so that three years hence we can be stormtroopers for The Man and drive around in expensive convertibles.

So, what's my opinion of course evaluations due before exams?

When I joked about not wanting to draw parallels between Jon Nathan-Turner and Steven Moffat, some part of my brain went ping

• They both cast the youngest actor to play the Doctor to date the first chance they got to re-cast the role (Peter Davison and Matt Smith)
• They both oversaw an anniversary special that was somewhat marred by the fact that a recent Doctor (Tom Baker/Christopher Eccleston) couldn't be convinced to come back
• They both revisited old and forgotten enemies during the run-up to that anniversary special
• They both wouldn't leave the title sequence and theme tune alone
• They both tried to do really complicated seasonal arcs with limited success
• They both cast someone who had appeared on the show before (Colin Baker/Peter Capaldi) as a "darker" Doctor the second chance they got to re-cast the role
• If you consider John Hurt a "re-cast" rather than a special guest star, you can change "the second chance..." to "after killing off two Doctors" (because Tom Baker did one season under JNT)

Doctor Who fake titles

generated here
and here

(Incidentally, they both eventually generated "The Massacre," which is the official title of a Season 3 serial.)

Here are some of the ones that could be Doctor Who episode titles

• The Mercy of a Doctor
• The Brain of the Cybermen
• Just don't be "Spock's Brain"
• Massacre of the Lazarus Planet
• Attack of the Lazarus Planet
• The Ultimate Infinity
• Hey, they did a serial called The Deadly Assassin
• The Mind Dominators of Empty Daleks
• The Android of Death
• So close
• The Future Robbers
•  Children of Time
• Deep Space 9 beat you to it
• The Time Mists
• Time of Horror
• A Day in the Ice
• In which four Ice Warriors form a band that one of their girlfriends breaks up
• The False God
• Spoiler: it's the Doctor
• The Fear of the Angel
• Vengeance of the Keeper
• If not Doctor Who then Mass Effect
• An Abominable Light
• Hey, we already did shadows...

Catching Fire impressions

in lieu of an actual review (which I really can't do until it comes out on DVD, because that's not my style)

• Catching Fire is, in my opinion, the weakest book in the trilogy (although the third quarter of Mockingjay is basically nonstop running-and-gunning with no end in sight and really starts to drag), so the film starts off at a disadvantage
• Jennifer Lawrence's cheekbones were incredibly distracting
• the scene were President Snow announces the third Quarter Quell was very obviously (and therefore poorly) edited down from a larger scene, probably where he explained what the previous two Quells entailed
• The scene where Katniss and Gale are talking about leaving... did they accidentally burn all the good takes? Because I know Lawrence can act a lot better than that
• When Snow visits Katniss at the beginning he shows her a hologram of, um, something. Apparently it was her and Gale kissing, but I could not for the life of me tell what it was
• The end was horribly rushed and confusing
• I'm getting really sick of the Crucified Hero Shot, as well as Clean Pretty Reliable CPR
• It's seriously too long. The source material doesn't help - you have the victory tour taking up something like half an hour before the Quarter Quell is even introduced

 To end on a positive note (and don't let the rest of this post fool you; I did like it)...

• Johanna went from being my least favorite character in the book to possibly my favorite character in the film

I don't like the Series 7b credit sequence

First of all, recoloring the "Doctor Who" title every time is the sort of stupid cheap (I'm inclined to say "naff" but that might result in me failing British 101) gimmick that reminds me far too much of the JNT era.

The starfield itself actually reminds me more of Star Trek than 80s Who.

This could be because Tom Baker is My Doctor(c) and thus any opening sequence that's not the time tunnel is a hideous sacrilege.

The point is, if I were Moffat, I'd be doing everything in my power to avoid drawing similarities between my era and JNT's. (Hey, maybe that's why Doctors Five through Seven had nothing to do with the 50th anniversary.)

Who Review: Cold War

In November of 1984, shortly before Gorbachev came to power, a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand Banks.
It then sank in deep water, apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
But according to repeated statements by both Soviet and American governments, nothing of what you are about to see...

ever happened.

 

Wait, sorry, where was I? Oh, right, Davos Seaworth is a Soviet submarine captain, Edmure Tully is his political officer, and Chancellor Gorkon is some random scientist who likes listening to degenerate imperialist music. Oh, and he's dug up an Ice Warrior.

Gee, first the Great Intelligence and now the Ice Warriors. Hey, 2013 wouldn't happen to be, say, an anniversary year, would it? What's next? The Black Guardian? Yartek, leader of the alien Voord? Sutekh? Magnus Greel? (Downside to nuking Gallifrey: traditional anniversary villain Omega has to be a no-show, although he did get a shoutout in The Day of the Doctor.)

So it turns into Alien on a submarine, and the weirdest thing about the cast isn't the fact that the three main guest stars are extremely recognizable, but that they don't do frickin' Russian accents. But then, neither did Sean Connery, but then, Sean Connery was James Bond.

I'm going to review The Aztecs soon, and I was going to hold off on mentioning it until then, but it comes up in this episode: in very early Classic Who, before the Doctor was really a hero (remember, in the very first serial of the show, he was all set to bash a caveman's head in with a rock in order to get back to his ship*), every serial had to come up with some sort of contrivance to keep the Doctor and company from leaving before the plot was resolved. They'd be captured by cavemen, captured by Daleks, captured by Marco Polo, locked out of the TARDIS by a telepathic forcefield, lose the TARDIS in some Indiana Jones-style tomb, etc. So here as soon as the Doctor and Clara hop aboard the Red Onion, the TARDIS activates its emergency displacement system and jumps away to the south pole. (In 1983. Not sure how time works, but if I were the TARDIS, I wouldn't go to the place where my owner was destined to die for the first time three years hence. Wouldn't that leave a wound in time or something?)

*Yes, One called it "the Ship" far more often than he called it "the TARDIS."

The Ice Warrior gets loose and everything goes to hell. Edmure Tully turns out to be just as much a screwup in this universe as in Game of Thrones and gets himself offed, but eventually the Doctor and Clara are able to make the Ice Warrior understand this thing called mercy, so when his ship comes to get him he refrains from using the sub's nukes to start Operation Planetary Eradication. (OPE - yup, that's a Doctor Strangelove reference thrown in among my Hunt for Red October references.) In the process, the Doctor once again rehashes the whole Time War Thing And How It Relates To This Episode, just in case we'd all forgotten in the long gap since "A Town Called Mercy."

Let's get the obvious comparison out of the way. It takes place in XX83, during a cold war, underwater, with a returning foe, and has some sketchy effects. It is, basically, Warriors of the Deep done "right." (I confess, while the rest of Warriors was a mess, I liked the way it ended: with everyone dead. The Doctor's moral high ground can't save everyone if one side has no interest in salvation.) I disagree with the idea of doing the Ice Warrior's head in shockingly obvious CGI, especially when his hands were animatronics. We're twenty years on from Jurassic Park, which flipped between the two flawlessly, and yet you can still tell the difference on a TV budget. 

It is Doctor Who's most blatant attempt to do Alien ever, which is a) a good thing, because I was really afraid it was going to be "Dalek on a submarine" and b) quite amusing when you consider the following things:

• Ridley Scott was this close to being the production designer for Doctor Who's second serial ever. You know, The Daleks.
• Doctor Who did a serial in 1974, five years before Alien, with basically the exact same premise (minus Alien's most famous scene)
• Speaking of Alien's most famous scene, John Hurt shows up at the end of this season.

This is a tough episode for me to grade because I like The Hunt for Red October and I like Game of Thrones and there's plenty of appeal for me in it. But as I hinted above, the Doctor basically gets to do the exact same thing he did in "A Town Called Mercy." There's more for the companion to do this time (and Jenna Coleman looks damn fine in a military jacket), but... something just doesn't quite click.

5 out of 10.

Yes, Matt Smith is the 11th Doctor. Yes, he's also on his 13th and final life. It is not complicated

and if Steven Moffat is making it complicated then that's sad.

Look. A Time Lord can regenerate 12 times for a total of 13 lives. The first time the Doctor regenerated was when he changed from the First Doctor to the Second...

Regeneration - Actor - Doctor - Life

     0.  William Hartnell - 1st Doctor - 1st life

1. Patrick Troughton - 2nd Doctor - 2nd life
2. Jon Pertwee - 3rd Doctor - 3rd life
3. Tom Baker - 4th Doctor - 4th life
4. Peter Davison - 5th Doctor - 5th life
5. Colin Baker - 6th Doctor - 6th life
6. Sylvester McCoy - 7th Doctor - 7th life
7. Paul McGann - 8th Doctor - 8th life
8. John Hurt - War Doctor - 9th life
9. Christopher Eccleston - 9th Doctor - 10th life
10. David Tennant - 10th Doctor - 11th life
11. Meta-crisis ("Journey's End")/David Tennant - 12th life
12. Matt Smith - 11th Doctor - 13th life

No, the events of "The Impossible Astronaut" aren't a problem because it was a shapeshifting robot duplicate. And the Doctor using regeneration energy to heal River's wrist in "The Angels Take Manhattan" just has to be residual energy from the time she burned up all her regenerations saving his life in "Let's Kill Hitler." (Because the alternative is that Moffat invented the War Doctor after Season 7a.)

When Showrunners Write for Shows

I was reading About Time Volume 7, and it was explaining that part of the reason why the characterization (of everyone, but especially Rose and Mickey) went to hell in Season Two is because RTD was too busy working on his own scripts to actually do the script-supervising job.

And it occurred to me that Steven Moffat has the same problem. After all, the guy was a beast under RTD, but the only thing he's written since taking over the show that comes close to being as good as "Blink" was "A Christmas Carol." And this makes a certain amount of sense; prior to Doctor Who getting shoved around the calendar year, it's safe to assume that Moffat had more time to work on the Christmas specials than he did on regular episodes.  (I'd also like to note that the absolutely Santa-awful "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" was dumped on us immediately after the schedule hijinks began, and that only five episodes aired between that and the following Christmas special, "The Snowmen," which was something of a return to form.)

Going back and looking at periods in which the script editor wrote for the show, one notes that the only person who could pull this off without wrecking the rest of the season was Robert Holmes (unsurprisingly) in Season 14 (and probably in Season 12, given what people have said about Terry Nation's script for Genesis of the Daleks). Terrance Dicks wrote "Robot" at the end of the subpar Season 11. Douglas Adams sunk his entire creative talent into "City of Death," the only thing worth watching from Season 17. (Eric Saward got the job because of "Earthshock," so we can't blame him for the rest of Season 19.) (And it's possible that the black & white script editors like Tosh or Spooner pulled it off, but with so many episodes missing from the archive I really can't make that call.)

Curiously, Nu Who's American counterpart and most obvious inspiration, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had the exact opposite problem. When Joss Whedon took a vacation to write Season Six's "Once More With Feeling," he left the show in less capable hands and the rest is history. (And I'd like to point out that Buffy aired almost twice as many minutes per year as Doctor Who does, which makes me incredibly skeptical whenever somebody tries to defend the recent scheduling shenanigans.)

I'm not really going anywhere in particular with this. 

Who Review: "The Angels Take Manhattan"

I've started off a few of my more recent reviews with something along the lines of "Steven Moffat has a problem," and I'm going to start this one off by wondering whether Moffat knows why the Angels were such a creepy, scary threat to begin with. So I wanted to preface this by saying that Moffat's easy prey right now since he's the showrunner, but that's not why I keep criticizing him. See, after "Blink" aired, I wrote a list of Doctor Who episodes I owned and a brief synopsis of each one, and at the end of the "Blink" synopsis I said something along the lines of "Moffat should be the next showrunner." Seriously, the first three years the show was back, Moffat consistently wrote the best episodes each season. He rightfully snatched a Hugo for "The Empty Child," beating out Battlestar Galactica's "Pegasus," and then his "Girl in the Fireplace" stole a Hugo from BSG's "Downloaded."

So I'm not trying to say that Moffat is the biggest hack on Doctor Who since Terry Nation. That's not what I'm getting at here. Nation was a guy who wrote (and snagged the copyright for) the Daleks, and yet the best-remembered Dalek serials (The Evil of the Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks) weren't written by him (Genesis is credited to him, but the whole concept was outgoing Script Editor Terrance Dicks's idea, and it was heavily re-written by incoming Script Editor Robert Holmes). In contrast, Moffat actually came up with several good monsters, it's just that he went and milked his most famous one far too hard.

Case in point: the climax of "The Angels Take Manhattan" involves the Doctor, River and Amy arguing in a graveyard while a statue points at Amy. The Weeping Angels work in dark rooms with flickering lights, which, admittedly the first half of the episode has in spades. The don't work outside in broad daylight. The tag at the end of "Blink" - showing a bunch of statues outside in broad daylight - worked as kind of a stinger because it didn't require us to think about it too much, and it was an effective capstone on the previous 44 minutes of pure terror.

Also... the decision to treat the Statue of Liberty like the T-rex when up until this point the Angels have been Velociraptors... it doesn't work.  The Angels aren't scary when the camera holds on them for a very long time, which is basically what happens with Lady Liberty in the background of all the rooftop scenes. It's hard to fault the director for not "getting" the Angels because there are parts of this episode that do work as well as the scariest parts of "Blink." In particular, the little kid statues that keep terrorizing Rory went a long way towards making the Angels scary again. (Although, how did those statues get Rory out of the basement and over to their farm? They didn't zap him through time...)

By far the most frustrating thing about this episode is the fact that 1938 is somehow a TARDIS-proof year. Daffy Duck was named, the March of Dimes was established, Hitler assumed control of the German military, and the Munich Agreement was signed. Okay, those are fairly important things. But hang on; back in "The Empty Child," the TARDIS managed to land in 1941. Ah well, different production teams, different rules, ri... oh, wait, "The Empty Child" was written by Moffat. Why couldn't the Doctor have popped back to 1941 and picked up Amy and Rory after three years? Because the plot demanded it?

By far the most ludicrous thing about "The Angels Take Manhattan" (and it's a close tie between this, the Godzilla Lady Liberty, and the Graveyard Scene) sees the Doctor running in slow-motion to recover the last page on the novel he was reading as if it's the key to resolving the episode's crisis and not just a little epilogue on the Ponds.

Still, aside from Martha Jones, Amy probably gets the most dignified companion exit of New Who, and I guess that's saying something.

6 out of 10.

No, you don't need every Doctor to show up in an Anniversary Special

(And other assorted defenses/critiques of Steven Moffat)

The most persistent criticism I've seen of The Day of the Doctor is that, aside from David Tennant and a Tom Baker cameo (and a Hartnell soundalike recording one new line of dialogue to play over stock footage), the other Doctors were present for about ten seconds in the form of stand-ins or stock footage.

Fiddlesticks.

Who Review: The Power of Three

Hey you guys, remember that show Star Trek: Voyager? Remember the "Year of Hell" two-parter?

Oh, you don't? Okay, the quick and dirty is that over the space of a year, Voyager gets the snot beaten out of it, there's actual tension, conflict and character development among the crew (and then the reset button is pushed, naturally).

So when I saw the preview for this episode at the end of "A Town Called Mercy," where Amy described the plot as "the year of the slow invasion... when the Doctor came to stay," I figured it could be something like that.

It's not.

The Doctor gets terminally bored with the slow invasion and wanders off on some other adventures, getting Amy married to Henry VIII in the meantime, before he returns, waves his magic wand at the problem, and makes it go away.

It's supposed to be about, I think, Amy and Rory deciding whether to live at home or keep traveling with the Doctor. You know, that decision they've been putting off ever since "Hotel Labyrinth" "The God Complex." Would you care to guess what they do here? Oh, that's right, they put the decision off again.

Meanwhile, Rory's Dad is back for a repeat performance, because hey why not, and he's knocked unconscious by the alien menace that's trying to kill humanity.  Knocked unconscious, rather than killed, by the alien menace who's trying to kill humanity.

The one thing the episode has going for it is that it finally came up with a role appropriate for the sort of child actors they can afford (as opposed to the ones Game of Thrones can afford, which are much better). Namely, a kid who literally does not speak, does not emote, does not have to do anything except act like a robot.

Three out of ten. I would rather Steven Moffat reduce the number of episodes per year (or, given his strengths and weaknesses, make fewer, longer episodes per year a la Sherlock) than dish out crap like this.