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TV | Fixing Doctor Who (Season Five)
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Fixing Doctor Who – Season Five Edition

Seth Mlawski

UPDATE: The comments section is now open.  Sorry for inconvenience.  Overthink away, Overthinkers!

[ATTENTION AMERICANS: This article covers all of season five of Doctor Who.  That means there be SPOILERS.  Come back in two weeks and read this after you see “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang.”  We’ll leave the comment thread open so you can praise/complain about Moffat as you see fit.]

“Nobody does themes. It’s a lie. Who have your heard say ‘I’ve thought of a good theme?’ They happen accidentally. You repeat yourself once too often and so it becomes a theme. We tell stories – that’s what people talk about, not themes.”
–Steven Moffat

Yeah, yeah, I know.  Themes suck.  If you want to send I message, write a pamphlet, or send a telegram.  I know.  I know.

Except I love themes.  I was an English major.  I write for OverthinkingIt.com.  My list of favorite books include 1984 and The Grapes of Wrath.  Give me an allegory or a good, obvious satire and let me sink my teeth into that baby.  Mmm.  Anvilicious!

Many modern folk disagree.  Why should art have themes?  In this postmodern age, all art is considered equal.  Who’s to say that The Wire, with its well-developed, honest themes, is any better than Transformers, which features Megan Fox in short-shorts?  No one, that’s who.  The Wire and Transformers are both diverting entertainments, so they must be equal.

I used to agree with this critical relativism.  Nowadays, I’m a snob.  My snobbery comes down to this belief: All things being equal, a work of art that speaks to the way real human beings live—or, even better, a work of art that changes the way someone lives—is always better than a work of art that simply entertains. In other words, art with coherent, human themes is better than art without such themes.

Feel free to disagree with me.  You’re wrong, of course.  Look, I love Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade as much as any of you, but it’s no Ikiru.  Ikiru, in a little way, changed my life.  Indiana Jones?  Did not.  Breaking Bad is objectively better than Burn Notice.  You guys know how much I love Burn Notice.  Even if every episode of Burn Notice had Michael Westen blowing up a floor safe with a toaster, Breaking Bad would still be better.  Objectively.

So.  Back to Doctor Who.

Say what you will about Russell T. Davies.  Mention what he did to Donna in the end.  Bring up “Love & Monsters.”  (Actually, don’t.  I love “Love & Monsters.”)  Talk about “angst,” or the “wangst,” or, yes, “emo-ness.”  Bring up the farting aliens, if you must.

But, dear lord, the man knew how to do some themes.  Each of his seasons had clear thematic, plot, and character arcs.  They were about something.  And that shit moved me.  It really did.

Series five?  It was okay.  I like Matt Smith, especially when he’s in the shower.  I laughed at “The Lodger.”  “Vincent & the Doctor,” for all of its mawkishness and manipulation, made me mist up in the eyeballs.  Also, I like Matt Smith in the shower.

But overall, this season was missing something, and that something was thematic coherence.  Notice what I didn’t say.  I didn’t say series five lacked themes.  As Moffat himself admitted in the quotation at the top of this page, themes come out in literature whether the writer puts them there consciously or not.  If Moffat was being honest when he spouted that quotation, then he went out of his way not to include themes in this season of Doctor Who.  That’s a problem.  It seems to me, that, by not focusing on themes, he accidentally wrote something thematically incoherent and, to be honest, a little bit sexist.

Let me break down the season, episode-by-episode, so you see what I mean.

The Thematic Incoherence of Doctor Who’s Season Five

Even though Moffat is apparently anti-theme, you can see certain themes being brought up in this season, only to be tossed aside, only to be picked up yet again, only to be tossed aside once more.  Even io9’s Charlie Jane Anders, who loved this season of Who, admitted that the supposedly anti-theme Moffat compulsively harps on the same themes (and plot points, and character types) over and over again.  To wit:

Okay, so in this season we have at least eight repeated themes:

Some of these themes are related: “Childhood vs. Adulthood” and “Stasis vs. Change” are similar enough, and “Images Becoming Real” and “Identity” could work nicely together.  Others seem to have nothing to do with one another.  Does the big theme of “Memory and Forgetting” have anything to with the big theme of “Women Are Shrews Who Need to Get Married”?  Does the theme of “Orphaned Children” really have anything to do with the issue of robot love?

My problem isn’t only that there were too many themes but also that these themes were completely separate from the emotional arcs of the main characters.  Consider the theme of “Identity & Disguise.”  Great!  I love that theme.  It seems Moffat and co. love that one, too, because about half the episodes this season made use of perception filters, shapeshifters, or robots disguised as humans.  Good.  Identity & Disguise.  I like it.

But, uh, what does it have to do with the Eleventh Doctor?  Sure, he regenerated—you can say his new body is a “disguise”—but Eleven never mentions his regeneration after the season premiere.  His identity doesn’t change much over the course of the season; the Doctor in “The Eleventh Hour” is basically the same Doctor we see in “The Big Bang.”  And it’s not like the Doctor seems to have any problem with his identity that he needs to get over.  The only time he mentions his identity is when he’s bragging about himself.  That’s not really what you would call a “character arc.”  I don’t get it.  What’s the point of having this theme of “Identity & Disguise” if the Doctor doesn’t actually have an identity crisis?

Same goes for the big theme of  “Memory & Forgetting.”  What does this theme have to do with the Doctor?  Has he forgotten something?  No, not as far as I could tell.  Is he repressing or actively remembering his past?  Only in “Amy’s Choice,” and then that character beat is dropped, never to be seen again.  As for Amy… well, she certainly forgot a lot, but although her forgetting affected the plot of the season, it didn’t seem to affect her character in any meaningful way.  The Amy who forgot her parents and the Amy who remembered her parents were exactly the same person with the same one-note personality.  Likewise, the Amy who forgot the Doctor and the Amy who ultimately remembered the Doctor were the same, personality-wise.  Again, what’s the point of having themes if they don’t have a real effect on the development of the main characters?

Although who needs character development when you can just wear really short skirts?

I’m not the only one having trouble untangling season five’s themes.  OTI fan Josh wrote, “there’s definitely some sort of commentary being made about the fairy tale genre… In the last episode we got Sleeping Beauty and literally a knight in shining armor.  [Amy] grows much less than the other Companions and her narrative isn’t at all about her association with the Doctor bringing out her inner undiscovered strengths and capabilities or balancing him in any way… She only seems to love Rory when he demonstrates totally self-abnegating sacrifice on her behalf, and loves the Doctor because…well, because he’s a rockstar with a magic wand?  Maybe Moffat is saying something interesting about this and not just being a clod?”  And finally: “Please make sense of all this.  It’s a mess.”

I can’t make sense of it.  It IS a mess.  I’ve seen a few articles recently about how season five is all about fairy tales, but that’s clearly not true.  If you look at my above episode breakdown, you’ll see that only four of the thirteen episodes made references to fairy tales or storytelling.  Even in the season finale, it’s unclear what, exactly, Moffat has to say about fairy tales, except that we like them and it’s good to remember them.  As nice as that theme is, I’m not sure it illuminated anything interesting about any of the show’s characters, or if it meshes well with the other seven themes listed above.  (Also, what’s the point of feeding that moral to Doctor Who’s audience?  If we didn’t already appreciate children’s stories, would we be watching this show in the first place?)

Look: I agree with Moffat to a certain extent.  If you’re a writer, you don’t absolutely have to map out them themes before you start writing.  (Although the guys who wrote The Wire did, and look how that turned out.)  As Moffat himself said, themes will out, naturally—but you can’t just have a dozen writers write a bunch of semi-related stories and call it a day.  Not if you want a coherent season of television.  Not if you want Shana Mlawski as a fan.

No, at some point in the editing process, you need read over your work, say, “Oh, apparently I’m interested in these themes today,” and then rewrite the whole season so those themes actually affect and reflect the emotional stories of the main characters.  In short, if you want to have a theme about what the word “identity” means, then your main characters actually have to go through an identity crisis.  It’s kind of like writing 101.  It seems to me that Moffat didn’t take this extra step, which is why series five seems like a first draft to me.  For a first draft, it’s pretty good, but I don’t watch TV to watch first drafts.  We’re living in a post-Sopranos world, people.  I want art!

Luckily, I’m here to help.  Enough complaining and deconstructing.  Let’s  rewrite this season.  Read on, Macduff!

Rewriting Doctor Who

Yep.  We’re going to rewrite a season of television written by the great Steven Moffat.  If Doctor Who has taught me anything, it’s that extreme arrogance will get you anywhere.  (“This pop culture website!  Is!  Protected!”)  (Alternately: “Wait!  Why are you in charge of this rewrite?”  “BECAUSE I’M VERY CLEVER!”)  (Oh, Tennant.  How I miss you and your scenery chewing.)

Here’s how we’re going to do the rewrite.  First, we’re going to pick the best themes of the eight I listed on the previous page.  Then, we’re going to write new character arcs for the Doctor and Amy so our themes actually relate to our characters and their development over the course of the season.  Finally, we’re going to rework the plots of the thirteen episodes so they aren’t so “all over the place” thematically.

OK: Step 1.  Let’s look at the themes.  “Can Robots Love?” is the first on our list.  It’s an inherently silly theme–watch “Victory of the Daleks” again and tell me that it’s not.  Even if it weren’t silly, we’ve seen this theme handled in science-fiction so many times that it’s old hat.  I say chuck it.

“But what about me-e-e?”

“Childhood vs. Adulthood” could be a good theme, but, ehhh, I dunno.  To write a story with such a theme, you’d have to define “childhood” and “adulthood,” and I don’t feel comfortable doing that.  In this season, Moffat and co. defined childhood as “wonder” (“Don’t ever grow up,” Peter Pa—err, The Eleventh Doctor said).  Meanwhile, adulthood was defined as “heterosexual marriage.”  Blah.  Blah, blah, blah.  I throw you away, “Childhood vs. Adulthood” theme!

“Identity vs. Disguise.”  Yeah, that’s a good one.  Moffat liked this one a lot–perception filters and so on–so we’re definitely keeping this one.  “Stories Becoming Real”?  If it’s metaliterary, I’m in!  Though this theme didn’t get much play in the middle of this season, it was big in the season finale, so it has to stay put.  Finally: “Memory & Forgetting.”  That’s the theme Moffat harped on the most throughout this season, so that one has to stay, too.  Orphans, stasis, and especially shrewish females get chucked into the Void.

Remember, kids: Crack is whack.

Okay: we have three good thematic topics: Identity, Stories, and Memory.  I like it.  Now let’s figure out what the actual theme of this season is going to be.  Based on “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang,” I’m going to say that the big theme Moffat was going for was something along the lines of, “A person’s identity–a person’s whole Universe–is based on the stories she tells herself—stories based on her memory (or false memories) of past events.”  That’s a neat theme—a really neat theme, actually.  I wish the season as a whole had supported it.

Now that we have an actual, honest-to-goodness theme, let’s figure out how to relate that theme to the emotional arcs of the main characters: Amy and the Doctor.  “But wait!” you say.  “Do characters even need arcs?”  All right, I’ll give.  No, characters don’t always need arcs.  Not always.  Characters in satires are flat, as are characters in old-fashioned Shakespearean comedies and modern-day sitcoms.  But Doctor Who isn’t a satire, and though this season did end with a wedding, it’s not a comedy.  (It’s not a Brechtian epic, either, smartass.)

No, this show is a romance.  It’s a fantasy.  The main characters need to do the quest thing, start in one place and end in another.  Would you like if Luke Skywalker started out as a whiny, unheroic farmboy and ended up as a whiny, unheroic Jedi?  Would you like Batman if the Joker weren’t there to challenge him to kick things up a notch?  And if you want to bring out the old chestnut, “It’s just a children’s show!” (or the new Moffat-era version: “It’s just a fairytale!”) then I bring you this list: Harry Potter.  The Little Mermaid.  Aang.  Beauty and the Beast.  Dorothy.  Taran.  Children don’t like character arcs?  Bah!  Kids should love character arcs more than anyone—they’re changing all the time!

We all know that classic-era Doctor Who didn’t have character arcs, or, if they did, they were much more subtle than what we saw in the RTD era.  Thing is, classic Who was almost completely episodic.  It didn’t really have much in terms of season-long story arcs.  But we’re in the post-RTD era now.  We got used to having a full season story arc each  year, and we got used to having season-long emotional arcs, too.  Once a show goes that route, you can’t really undo it.  It seems like a step in the wrong direction–a step from art back to cartoon.  (Actually, that’s unfair to cartoons, because lots of modern cartoons have good character development. ) You may disagree with me on this, but, in my mind, the characters in Doctor Who need emotional and developmental arcs.

“Quick! Develop me! Develop me!”

So let’s tie our themes to the character arcs.  Remember, our new theme is, “A person’s identity is based on the stories she tells—stories based on her memory (or false memories) of past events.”  That means our main characters should start the season misremembering themselves and end the season by remembering who they really are.  Then they can have their happy ending.

So what’s the Doctor misremembering?  Well, he’s just regenerated, and he had a pretty crappy time at the end of his run as the Tenth Doctor.  In “Amy’s Choice,” he misremembers himself as an asshole pedophile who abandons people whenever he gets the chance.  I’d say, then, that the Eleventh Doctor’s new arc should be this: At the beginning of the season, he’s super-happy, because he’s just shed his Tenth Doctor baggage, and he’s actively trying to forget all the crap he’s just gone through.  As the season goes on, he’s continually reminded of his past, which is sad, because he’s trying really hard to be Happy-Go-Lucky Doctor.  Then (here’s my favorite bit), he actively causes the Cracks in the Universe to form, because then he can, vicariously through Amy, really start over from scratch.  This turns out to be a huge mistake, and they go and fix it.  Then the Doctor remembers the real story of Doctor Who: He’s the hero, and regardless of how many times he screws up, he’s still a good guy.  He can remember this good stuff and play the part of the hero while still accepting the bad stuff in his past, too.

Also, the shower scene stays in.

As for Amy.  I didn’t like Amy this season, because she didn’t seem like a real person to me–more like a cardboard cutout of a sexy, snarky Scot.  However, there were some little rays of hope for her.  First, even though her occupation as a costumed kiss-o-gram came off as slightly sexist, I thought it was a great idea, because it reflects the theme of identity, and it reflects the Doctor.  What is the Doctor if not a person who keeps changing identities in order to be all things for all people?  What’s more, this occupation works on a meta-level, too.  Amy is played by an actress who is playing the part Amelia who is playing the part of Amy who is playing the part of a sexy nurse, a sexy cop, or sexy whatever.  The Doctor is now being played by a new actor who is creating a new character based on an old character who is always changing faces.  This is really interesting stuff!  I wish the show actually referenced it after “The Eleventh Hour.”

Other than her one-dimensional personality, the other thing I really didn’t like about Amy was the whole Rory/marriage plot.  If season five is about Amy learning to accept the story and memory of her childhood and gain a true identity as an adult, why does her end goal have to be marriage?  Is a woman only self-actualized if she’s a shrewish wife?  Honestly, if I were writing this season, I’d leave out the marriage/Rory plot altogether, even if it meant losing the far too clever “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” line.

If Amy’s new character arc is to work, it needs to work as a foil for or reflection of the Doctor’s arc.  Let’s say at the beginning of the season, Amy and the Doctor are in the same place: they both are actively forgetting their pasts, and they both want to be happy and have fun.  Later on, like the Doctor, Amy is continually reminded of the crappy times in her past.  The Doctor can basically deal with this, but Amy cannot.  She gets really screwed up.  Therefore, the Doctor decides that, for Amy’s good (although it’s for his good, too), he’s going to create the Cracks in time and let her forget about all of the bad things she’s seen and been through.  Then things go bad and the Doctor fixes it and everyone earns their happy ending.

Sound good?  Okay.  Let’s do it.

ON THE NEXT PAGE: Our new, improved season five, episode by episode.

Season Five Redux

Behold!  A rewritten version of season five… now enriched with delicious, coherent themes and the omega-3 fatty acid known as character development!  Obviously, the following is not the only way to fix season five; it’s just one way.  It’s AU fan-fiction, is what I’m saying.  Enjoy.

“The Eleventh Hour Redux” – Once upon a time, there was a little immigrant girl named Amelia, and she has no parents.  Some weird bloke with a police box crash lands into her backyard and eats some fish custard.  He tells her he’s traveling alone, and she asks if he’s lonely.  The Doctor says, no, obviously not!  (Lonely god?  That was the old guy!)  No, relationships are overrated–it’s having fun that matters!  Who would want to remember a tragic past when there are galaxies to see?  Mmm, fish custard!

Little Amelia latches on to the Doctor.  The Doctor doesn’t know it yet, but Amelia has no parents because they’re dead.  Not sucked into the Void.  Dead.  In fact, they died only a week ago.  The Doctor inspects the Crack in Amy’s wall, we learn about Prisoner Zero, yadda yadda, and then the Doctor abandons her.  See, his TARDIS keeps disappearing and reappearing in the backyard, so he flies it to the moon to recalibrate it.  In the meantime, Amelia grows up to become a kiss-o-gram, because then she can be something new every day and not have to remember that, on the inside, she’s Amelia, the sad, lonely child.

Now for some major differences.  Instead of growing up to be a snarky shrew, Amelia grows up to become Revised Amy.  Revised Amy made herself in (what she saw as) the Doctor’s image.  She’s wacky and spontaneous and takes nothing, especially relationships, seriously.  She is, essentially, all of the Eleventh Doctor’s good qualities (at least on a superficial level).  This will make her a much more interesting and fun-to-watch character than the jaded snark machine we actually got this season.  Revised Amy also kind of a Doctor super-fan, which makes her a good audience stand-in, and interesting on a meta-level.  Revised Amy and the Doctor save the Earth from Prisoner Zero and the Atraxi, and gung-ho revised Amy rushes into the TARDIS, hoping never to come back.

By the way, Rory’s still in this episode, but he’s now Revised Rory.  As in real season five, he represents what Amy could have been if she actually grew up, but the growing up part doesn’t have to do with settling for a passive, milquetoast Rory and popping out boring babies on a boring farm.  Instead, Rory is a really awesome, likeable guy who Amy clearly wants to be with—but she can’t let herself because she’s afraid of getting hurt.  Therefore, Amy and Rory are not engaged in this version.  Also, in this new version, it was Amelia who wanted to be a nurse when she was a kid, so she could save people (like her dead parents, perhaps?), but she didn’t go through with it after the Doctor came into her life.  Due to little Amelia’s influence, Revised Rory grew up to become a nurse, making him a symbol of what Amy could have been and can still become.  New Rory keeps trying to convince Amy that she’s smart and driven enough to go to nursing school—she’s too good for kiss-o-gramming.  Amy explains to Rory (and the Doctor, and the audience) that she enjoys being a kiss-o-gram because it gives her power.  She can change her identity almost at will, and she can always walk out the door when things get too real.

“The Beast Below Redux” – Because our big theme for this season is about identity, storytelling, and memory, we’re going to use our red pen on the Starwhale and focus on the Protest/Forget buttons.  That was a really, really cool idea that was not developed enough.

In this new “Beast Below,” Revised Amy disembarks the TARDIS legitimately excited to be in the future instead of snarking about like an annoying teenager.  And instead of lecturing Amy like a professor, the Doctor actually has a little bit of fun with her before the plot starts rolling.  He also asks her if she’s afraid.  She asks, “Are you afraid?”  “Never!” he answers. “Well, sometimes.”  “Then I won’t ever be, either!  Or only sometimes.”

Amy and the Doctor soon realize that the children in this futuristic spaceship society are being treated badly, and they go to investigate together.  The Doctor and Amy are eventually caught and stuck in identical Protest/Forget rooms next to one another.  Amy freaks out at what she sees and immediately pushes the “forget” button, but we don’t see the video just yet.

Then we see the Doctor’s POV.  He hears Amy freaking out and tries to calm her by shouting through the walls: “Push the Protest button!  Whatever you see!  You’re with the Doctor now, and people who travel with the Doctor always protest!”

But then he sees the video.  From this video, we learn that the Earth was made to be inhabitable (maybe by nuclear war or some other Very Bad Thing), and this new spaceship society is run not by a Starwhale but by child slave labor (the slaves being the kids who do badly in school, like in the pre-credits sequence of the original episode).  The Doctor is about to hit the Protest button, but then he sees a bunch of kids that look very similar to some of his old Companions.  One of the child slaves is called “Rose” or “Adric” or something, and the Doctor completely loses his shit and hits the Forget button.

The next part of the episode plays out exactly the same way as the beginning, but faster.  The now-memory wiped Doctor and Amy realize there’s something weird about this society, and they’re caught again.  This time around, the Doctor’s weird alien biology kicks in, and he remembers a little bit of what happened earlier in the episode.  He’s like, “Um, I think we shouldn’t go into these rooms.  There’s a button or something in there.”  So they fight off their captors and end up in the slave labor plant.  Queen Liz is there, and she explains that this slave labor is necessary to the survival of Space-England.  It’s hard for her, too, which is why every so often she presses the Forget button herself.  The Doctor asks, “Don’t their parents care that their kids are being taken away?”  And Liz is like, “Yeah, so they press the Forget button.  Got it?”  The Doctor tries to get the child-slaves to run away, but they’ve forgotten their humanity and freedom.  They’ve been told the story that they suck and are only worthy as slaves.  Amy and the Doctor try to get them to remember who they really are, and who their parents are.  Then the evil robot thingies come and capture Amy, asking the Doctor if he will sacrifice his Companion for the children.

The Doctor angsts for a mo’, but then the now-revolutionary slave children come up behind him and kick the robots’ asses.  The Doctor and Amy convince Liz 10 to help the children find their parents and rebuild their society.  The Doctor replaces their society’s old story with a new one: The human race is ingenious enough to save themselves without the need for child slave labor.  It is a Happy Ending.  Everybody lives.

“Victory of the Daleks Redux” – Doesn’t exist, because I’m not having a Dalek episode in my imaginary season.  It doesn’t fit in with our Big Theme, so it’s getting ex-ta-min-ated.  Instead, we’re going to put “The Lodger” here, because such a fun episode doesn’t belong so late in the season.  (Dear Who writers: Write more episodes like “The Lodger.”  Thanks.)

“Time of the Angels/Flesh & Stone Redux” – This two-parter is going to be reduced to a single episode, because original version was padded up the wazoo.  It was like Moffat had so much time to fill that he was like, “Oh, let’s make it so Angels can move now!  Too short still?  Well, make it so Angels can kill people now!  STILL too short?  Okay, the Angels can also talk through dead bodies and put creepy countdowns in people’s heads.  Wait—what do you mean it’s STILL too short?!”

For me, the best part of this two-parter was the first fifteen minutes of the first part, which were totally sweet.  We’re keeping that.  If we’re going to make up new rules regarding how the Angels work, let’s make only one new rule, and let’s make it one that has to do with our theme.  Therefore, the new rule we’re going to keep is the one learned at the beginning of “Time of the Angels”: The image of an Angel becomes an Angel itself.  This new rule fits our “Stories Becoming Real” theme and our “Identity” theme, and it also allows us to keep Amy’s best moment: the moment when she pauses the Angel tape and thus destroys it.

So, “Time of the Angels Redux” starts the same way the origial version started.  River calls for a pick up, everyone enters the cave, and Amy is attacked by the video-taped Angel.  Amy saves herself, and the Doctor reads the new rule: “The image of an Angel becomes an Angel.”  Father Octavian intones, “Whoever battles Angels should take care not to become an Angel herself.”  In short, if you stare at an Angel for too long, you will become an Angel.  If you even think about (or remember) an Angel for too long, the same may happen.  River directly ties this theme back to the Doctor, telling Amy that a Companion should also be careful not to stare at the Doctor for too long, because who stares at the image of the Doctor may become that image herself.  Amy gets a little uncomfortable at this statement, but she says she’s glad she’s like the Doctor.  River jokes, in sing-song, “The abyss stares back also!”  River insinuates that she is the way she is because someone taught her to be that way.  She flirts, “But I bet you do that to all your Companions.”  The Doctor and Amy are Uncomfortable.

Anyway, the Angels attack the Doctor, Amy, and the rest.  Amy stares at them but is freaking out because she knows she can’t stare at them for too long.  While the Doctor and River work to defeat the Angels with the gravity balls/Cracks, Father Octavian falls into a Crack.  Amy and River don’t remember him, but the Doctor does because of his weird Time Lord biology.  As the Doctor and River work to defeat the Angels, Amy starts crying sandy tears like in the real episode.  She feels like she’s missing something (and she is: the memory of Father Octavian).  The Angels get sucked into the Crack, and Amy and River forget them, and Amy is cured of her sandy tears.  The Doctor is a little scared by the fact that Amy has just forgotten an entire episode, but he jokes, “If only we could do that with the Daleks!”  What Daleks?  Amy has never heard of the Daleks.  The Doctor is Concerned.

“Vampires of Venice Redux” – Amy wants to have more fun, because she doesn’t remember anything from the previous episode.  The Concerned Doctor takes her home and checks out her town, noticing the duckless duck pond and asking Rory if he’s ever heard of the Daleks.  (He hasn’t.)  Rory tells Amy he picked up some applications for nursing school for her, but Amy drags him and the Doctor into the TARDIS, ‘cause it’ll be more fun adventuring in early 20th century (not Renaissance) Venice than worrying about the future and the past in small town England.  They find some fake vampires, shapeshifters who were forced off their planet by the Time War (the Doctor’s like, “Whoops, my bad”).  These aliens wanted to fit in on Earth, so they read the only Earth book they had—Dracula—and shapeshifted into vampires (of Venice).  The Doctor’s all, “Could you stop being vampires?  The ‘killing people by drinking their blood’ thing isn’t working for me.”  The vampire queen says, “But this is all we remember.  We don’t know how to shapeshift anymore.”

Meanwhile, in the B plot, Amy tries to make Rory have fun in Venice, and he does.  They fight off vampires together, and there’s chemistry like whoa, and they have sex.  (Off-screen, obviously; this is a family show!)  Afterwards, Rory asks Amy why they keep having sex but not actually being boyfriend and girlfriend.  Amy doesn’t know how to answer, so she jokes, “Who would want to be the girlfriend of a nurse?”  Rory tries to get Amy to remember her old childhood dream of becoming a nurse so she could save the lives of people like her parents.  Amy doesn’t want to remember any of this, so she runs off to find the Doctor.  She sees that the Doctor is captured by sexy Vampire Queen, so Amy stakes her in the heart and drags her into the sunlight, killing her and all of her children (because they’re psychically linked or something).  Amy tells the Doctor how to properly bury a vampire.  The Doctor asks, “How are you so knowledgeable about aliens all of a sudden?”  Amy says, “‘Cause I’ve read a lot of vampire books, obviously!”  They leave with Rory.

“Amy’s Choice Redux” – This episode is basically the same as the original “Amy’s Choice,” except that Rory doesn’t die in fake England, because he’s going to die for real soon, and we don’t want to ruin it by killing him off early like the real show did.  Another minor difference is that, in this version, Revised Amy doesn’t believe that either dreamworld is real, instead of her believing that both worlds are equally real.  She turns out to be right, of course.  Oh, and another big change: the episode was not caused by the Doctor and psychotropic drugs.  It was caused by the Valeyard.  The literal Valeyard.  At the end of the episode, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory wake up to find that the Valeyard has taken control of the TARDIS.

This evening the part of the Valeyard will be played by Mr. Toby Jones.

“The Hungry Earth”/“Cold Blood”: Are getting rewritten completely, because I seriously hated “Cold Blood.”  Instead, we’re going to have a much more fun two-parter.

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are trapped in a room on the TARDIS by the freaking Valeyard, because how cool would that be for real!  The Doctor sees through a security camera that the Valeyard has taken over his ship.  The Doctor explains to his Companions that the Valeyard is the Doctor’s twelfth (i.e., next) regeneration, and he’s nutso.  The Doctor, Amy, and Rory have to break out of their prison and get to the TARDIS’s control room, except the Valeyard has locked every room in between.  The Doctor’s easy tricks don’t work—the Valeyard stole his screwdriver, and also he has the Doctor’s memories.  Also, we get to see a lot more of the inside of the TARDIS, which makes me squee.

As the trio works to break out of their TARDIS prison, the Valeyard continues taunting the Doctor about how awful he is and how awful it is that he ruined Amy’s life by crash landing on her doorstep.  (The idea is that Amelia would have grown up normally had the Doctor not landed there, but his visit completely altered her personality in a negative way.)  Plot-wise: The Valeyard explains that he has a device that can rip Cracks in space-time and make things and their memories disappear into the Void.  Amy whispers to the Doctor, “The Cracks!  He made them!  But wait: that means this plan already worked!”  The Doctor whispers, “Well, don’t tell HIM that!”

The Doctor asks the Valeyard why he hasn’t completed his plan yet—on the viewscreen, it looks like the Valeyard is looking for something in the control room and can’t find it.  He’s looking for the TARDIS self-destruct key, which will create a Big Bang that will spread the Cracks throughout space and time.  (He also explains he was the one who tried to build the TARDIS-type thing we saw in “The Lodger,” because, hey, maybe that should be explained?)  After a while, the Valeyard gives up trying to find the self-destruct key; he knows where to get another one.  The Doctor et al break into the control room, but it’s too late.  The Valeyard has already landed the TARDIS in River Song’s time so he can get her TARDIS key (which the Doctor has given her in the future).

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory follow the Valeyard, who has tracked down River.  He says, “Hello, sweetie,” and takes her hostage.  The Valeyard takes her self-destruct key and starts marching back to the TARDIS with River in tow.  The Doctor blocks his way, so the Valeyard takes one of River’s guns and aims it at him: “I think it’s time you regenerated.”  But Rory jumps in the way and totally bites it.  He doesn’t fall into a Crack or anything.  He actually, literally dies.  While the Valeyard is cackling over his dead body, River grabs his gun and kills the Valeyard.  The Doctor is shocked but is like, “Well, she did highly imply earlier this season that she was going to kill me.”  Amy is sobbing over Rory, and River tells the stunned Doctor to take her away from here.  The Doctor drags Amy back to the TARDIS, and she tantrums at him, “This isn’t part of the story!  You’re the Doctor!  You save people!  You go off on adventures and have fun!  People don’t die!  Everybody lives, right?!  Right?!”  (And the audience is like, “Um, honey, have you ever seen this show?”)

The Doctor tries to console her, but she is inconsolable.  He stares at the self-destruct key.  Amy says, “The Valeyard told me I wasn’t the first person you’ve traveled with.  Is that true?  Those others you traveled with: What happened to them?”  The Doctor won’t answer.  Amy asks, “Are they dead?  Are they dead like Rory?”  The Doctor’s all, “Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”  Amy says that’s not true.  She takes his hand and puts the self-destruct key in the TARDIS for him.  “We can make it all go away.  All those bad things.  They’ll never have happened.  We can start over.”  “A true regeneration,” he says.  And he knows he already did it, because no one remembers the Daleks.  He sets a course for all of the things he doesn’t want to have existed: Skaro, Rory’s corpse, lots of things from earlier episodes that would best be forgotten by everyone.  (The point is to prevent some of his Companions from ever meeting him.)  The last course set is for Amelia’s room, where her parents were standing the day before they died.

They turn the key.  The TARDIS explodes.

“Vincent & the Doctor Redux” – The Doctor wakes up near Amelia’s house in the 1990s.  Amy is unconscious next to him.  The Doctor marvels that he and Amy are alive.  He guesses that the TARDIS exploded and spat them out the last place it was.  The Doctor wakes Amy up and asks her about Rory and her parents.  She doesn’t remember them.  The Doctor is happy.  He sees his TARDIS crash land in Amelia’s backyard, a la “The Eleventh Hour.”  While past-Doctor is inside eating fish custard with Amelia, present-Doctor steals his own TARDIS, which is why it had disappeared momentarily in “The Eleventh Hour Redux.”  He’ll bring it back later.  He asks Amy where she wants to go.  She doesn’t know.  She’s acting strange.  More subdued than usual.  She says she wants to see Van Gogh.  She’s always loved Van Gogh.

From this point, everything goes the same way it did in the original “Vincent & the Doctor”—Amy crying but not knowing why; everyone fighting invisible monsters; the big speech at the end about happy art being made by sad people; etc.—except that Amy’s personality has clearly changed due to her not remembering her dead parents or Rory.  If we want to be really obvious about our themes, we can even have Amy say something like, “Do you think if Van Gogh had been happy he would have made these paintings?”  And the Doctor muses, “Would Van Gogh be Van Gogh?”  Too on-the-nose?  Maybe.  But it’s better than being so subtle with your themes that no one gets it.

The Doctor and Amy take Vincent back to his time, but they don’t notice that there’s a Crack near him, and it’s getting larger.  They take the TARDIS back to the present-time museum, and instead of Amy seeing a painting of sunflowers with her name on it, they find that Van Gogh’s paintings aren’t in the museum at all.  The Doctor asks the curator, but the curator hasn’t ever heard of Vincent Van Gogh.  Amy hasn’t either.  She starts crying in the museum but she has no idea why.  She’s in great pain–like there’s something missing inside her.  Something is definitely wrong.  The Doctor GOBs, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

“The Pandorica Opens Redux” – Is basically the same as it was in he original version, with the Rory-bot, and River looking at Amy’s Roman history book, etc., etc.  Differences: The monsters that trap the Doctor don’t include the monsters the Doctor erased from history (i.e., the Daleks), and Rory-bot doesn’t kill Amy, because seriously that’s ridiculous.  Why do that if you’re just going to bring her back to life two seconds later?  C’mon!

“The Big Bang Redux” – The Doctor stays in the box.  Really, if you trap a Doctor in a box during a cliffhanger, you can’t free him in the first five minutes of the next episode, especially if he frees himself due to timey-wimey timeline crossing.  That’s against the rules.  We’re not playing Calvinball here.  The rules are sacrosanct.

Instead, the Doctor remains trapped in the Pandorica, and the aliens are going to throw him into a Crack (because, as we learned from the “Angels” episodes, a space-time event as complex as the Doctor would sew up the Cracks for good).  Amy, however, doesn’t want to forget the Doctor.  She already forgot Rory, and she doesn’t want to forget things again.  They have to save him.

So, Amy becomes all heroic and takes Rory and River via TARDIS to gather an army.  She goes back to all of the settings of the previous episodes and brings along a bunch of people whose lives have been touched by the Doctor.  She even goes to pick up her younger self while she’s waiting in the backyard for the Doctor to return.  (We can even get some old Companions like Sarah Jane and Martha Jones in on this lovefest.  Nice time for some cameos, why not?)

Amy’s army goes back to the aliens who are about to chuck the Pandorica in the Crack, and her army argues that the Doctor is a hero, not a villain.  The aliens, at first, are not convinced, but then Amy (with the help of little Amelia) retells the story of Pandora’s Box, saying it has all of the bad things in the world in it, yes, but it also has hope, too.  If you want to really destroy the Cracks for good, you need to let out the hope (i.e., the Doctor).

The Roman robot guards holding the Pandorica are swayed by these myth-based arguments, put down the Pandorica, and free the Doctor.  The Doctor is overcome; he’s heard everything everyone’s said, and now he’s ready to be a Happy-Go-Lucky hero again.  Aww.

The Doctor has an idea.  He takes the TARDIS back in his own timeline to when the Valeyard took over his ship.  The Valeyard’s like, “This is against the rules!  You can’t cross your own timeline!”  And Past!Doctor is like, “Yeah, future me!  Don’t cross your own timeline!  You’ll cause a paradox!”  And present!Doctor says, “Yes, and a paradox is a complex temporal event–exactly the thing we need to destroy the Cracks in space-time!”  And Past!Doctor is like, “Oh, future me!  You’re so clever, and you look so good in a football jersey!’  Present!Doctor’s all, “You’re not so bad yourself.  I’ve seen you in the shower.”  And both Amys say, “Get on with it already!”

So present!Doctor totally pushes his past!TARDIS (with Past!Valeyard, Past!Doctor, Past!Amy, Past!River, and Past!Rory in it) into one of the time Cracks.  The Cracks get sewn up, Rory lives, and everything goes back to how it was before the Valeyard took over the TARDIS.  Hooray!  Everybody lives!  Happily ever after.

Or is it?  Amy asks, “So if everything’s reset, does that mean the Valeyard’s still out there?”  And the Doctor’s like, “Yes.  Yes, he is.”  DUN!  DUN!  DUUNNN!

But back to our happy ending.  The Doctor, River, Amy, and Rory are on the TARDIS, and the Doctor says, “Where to next?”  Amy’s deep in thought about something Amelia said earlier in the episode.  Amelia met her older self and said, “So, did you become a nurse like I wanted to?”  And Amy said, “No, not exactly.”  So Amelia said, “Why not?”  And Amy couldn’t answer.

In the present, the Doctor says, “How about we go to Space Florida?”  And Amy says, great idea, but there’s something I have to do first.  She has the Doctor drop her and Rory off at home in 2010, and then she writes a note, hands it to the Doctor and says, “Wait five seconds, then meet me here.”

After Amy and Rory leave, the Doctor reads the note, smiles, sets the course in the TARDIS, and meets her several years in the future, at her nursing school graduation.  Rory is there, and the Doctor notices he’s wearing an engagement ring.  Amy tosses her cap into the air, and the Doctor catches it.  He says, “You’re a nurse now.  Sure you still want to travel in space-time with me?”  And Amy’s like, “Hells yeah!  You’ll need someone to fix up all the people you accidentally injure!  And Rory gets to come, too.”  The Doctor relents, and they go off in the TARDIS to have new adventures in season six.

THE END.

It’s not perfect, I’ll admit, but I wrote this thing in two hours.  For two hours’ work, it’s pretty decent, wouldn’t you say?

As for you, Mr. Moffat–Steve–can I call you Steve?  I’m still a fan.  Really.  The other day I watched “The Doctor Dances” with some friends, and I fell in love with you all over again.  That shit is beautiful, man.  Absolutely beautiful.  So I’m asking you, when you write season six, could you write more “Doctor Dances” and less “Blink”?  I know everyone likes “Blink” better, but they’re wrong.  To non-writers, that timey-wimey stuff looks really hard to write.  It’s not.  It’s really easy–too easy.  It’s all smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand.  Character development, well-handled themes, emotion that feels earned, plots that make sense and that follow the rules you’ve already established: those are hard.  “The Doctor Dances” is better than “Blink.”  Objectively-speaking.

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