Doctor Who 5.9: Don’t Stick Your Hand In There, Doctor!

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For the first time since the start of this season, I’m beginning to think that Doctor Who isn’t playing fair. Sure, “Cold Blood” may have been, on one hand, a fairly dull by-the-numbers conclusion of the Silurians two-parter (Humanity’s basest natures, driven by love, prevent a new golden age of man and lizard living in perfect harmony! What a surprise!), but the final few moments of the episode…? Yeah, something was definitely going on there.

I love that both two-parters so far this season have seen their conclusions hi-jacked by the season’s uber-arc, and that both have resulted in the largest jumps forward in that larger story; it’s as if Steven Moffat was worried that audiences would get bored, otherwise, and provided good reason to stick around until the end of the episode. And what an end! The TARDIS destroyed in the blast responsible for the crack in time? Does that mean it was what exploded, or just that it was nearby? And Rory has been eaten by the retcon light (How disturbing, too, to watch Amy go from being distraught and heartbroken to entirely fine in seconds, as the jolt made her forget not to forget the love of her life)? Not only that, but how did the Doctor manage to put his hand into the light that eats history and manage to bring not only it back, but a piece of time shrapnel as well?

So, like I said: I think more is going on that we’ve been led to believe. For one thing, I don’t think the crack really does what we think it does – Not only because the Doctor was able to reach into it and survive, but because I can’t believe that Rory is really dead, if only because that’s so horribly sad in a way that just feels too sad for Doctor Who; I don’t necessarily expect a happy ending and everyone smiling and happy, but certainly I don’t expect a hero to die and then be entirely forgotten about on purpose, either. No, there was something almost purposefully dissonant about the end of “Cold Blood,” a tease to say “Remember we explained everything before? Well, we didn’t, really.”

So where do we go from here? Well, to visit Vincent Van Gogh, apparently, but I’m almost past the point of caring about the individual episodes now – I want to see whether Amy (who is, after all, the center of this whole thing, in some way) remembers Rory, whether River Song (who, as we know, killed a “very good man” at some point) is responsible for blowing up the TARDIS, and why there were two Doctors amongst the Weeping Angels, one of whom wanted Amy to remember what he had said when she was seven years old (If there were two Doctors in the same place at the same time, does that mean time traveling, or actually two Doctors? And if there are two, somehow, does that mean that one of them can be killed in an explosion caused by River that will then result in a crack across all space and time?). Oh, and I want to see Rory come back, as well. I don’t even really care how they make that happen.

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