11.32: A Town Called Mercy

In which things get a little bit too didactic.

Broadcast: September 2012

Watched: January 2022

“Anachronistic electricity, ‘Keep Out’ signs, aggressive stares. Has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”

Beautifully shot, thoughtful, some good lines... This half season isn’t one I’ve thought about in ages but it continues to deliver.

[Writer Toby] Whithouse as ever makes sure to give everyone good material, and it’s a measure of how good at character he is that Isaac’s death comes after we’ve known him 20 minutes and feels significant. Real shame he’s not on the show any more. 

I like that the story works through all the western cliches: the bar falling silent, high noon, the undertaker measuring for the Doctor for a coffin, the mildly sinister preacher, the barmaid in a corset. I was going to say that the fact it’s about a moral dilemma involving mercy and forgiveness, and not wanting to punish guilt without hurting the innocent, feels like an unusual choice for a western... but I haven’t seen many so who knows, maybe this is what they’re all like. 

The central dilemma is a bit *too* Brechtian, I think. People keep making speeches accompanied by neon flashing lights reading “THIS IS A THEME”. (“It’d be so much easier if I was just one thing wouldn’t it...”)

I quite like the way the thing that pushes the Doctor into coming down on the side of vengeance rather than mercy is Kahler-Jex calling him too pussy to be a proper war criminal. With the Dalek nanogenes and killing Soloman and this, it feels like this run is building to a sort of Dark Doctor storyline that never actually comes. 

But obviously my main thought about this episode is that, thanks to its combination of killer cyborgs and westerns, it has inevitably merged in my mind with that seminal text, Red Dwarf: Gunmen of the Apocalypse.

Other things:

• This starts and ends with another slightly baffling voiceover from a woman, who turns out to be the great granddaughter of a little girl on screen. Someone on Twitter suggested that this might be because, otherwise, Amy would be the only female speaking character in it.

• The fake out opening (“There is one more... the doctor”, which turns out not to mean the Doctor) is mildly annoying. The Kahler’s face markings are depressingly Star Trek. What’s more, the Kahler’s combination of species name + one syllable feels ... limiting. Do they really use the same word for their planet, species AND as a title? Also, their ship is a tic tac. Stupid Kahler.

• Having gone home at the end of the previous episode, the companions are back in the TARDIS without explanation. Then at the end they ask to go home again.

• The war only ended five years back, which makes this around 1870. You don’t tend to imagine westerns happening that close to the arrival of electricity, do you? Well, I don’t

• Lovely to have an entire scene where the Doctor is riding and making conversation with a horse. Although not sure you’d do the “I speak horse. He’s called Susan, and he wants you to respect his life choices” joke now.

• “You’re a mother, aren’t you? There’s kindness in your eyes” – oh, f*ck off. Luckily Adrian Scarborough is one of those actors who’s just incredibly watchable.

• Abraxas Security Software is a very low rent space name. Moffat does love his space X-es, doesn’t he? The Atraxi, the Bank of Karabraxos, etc.

• It’s *sort of* a magic suicide ending? The dilemma is ultimately resolved by Kahler-Jex taking his own life, so nobody else has to make any difficult decisions. 

• I’ve written down “You could help with the reconstruction” though I can’t work out why I thought that was interesting. Maybe because it sounded like a very on-the-nose comment about the world after the US civil war? I dunno.