11.5: Flesh and Stone

In which things start to crack.

Broadcast: May 2010

Watched: October 2021

AMY: Okay. so we’ve basically run up the inside of a chimney, yeah? So what if the gravity fails?

DOCTOR: I’ve thought about that.

AMY: And?

DOCTOR: And we’ll all plunge to our deaths. See? I’ve thought about it. 

Interesting cliffhanger, that last one – it doesn’t end on the crisis, it actually ends at the precise moment the Doctor fixes it, we just don’t know how yet. 

Not quite as note-perfect as part one, but still extremely good. The staging, with the shifts in the direction of gravity, the spaceship, etc. is great. The treeborg bit has a proper sense of wonder to it. Both the Doctor’s “a forest in a bottle on a spaceship in a maze, have I impressed you yet Amy Pond?” and River’s “They need to breathe” are amazing line deliveries.

Other good bits... Octavian’s death scene is brilliant. It’s not clear whether or not he likes the Doctor, it changes from scene to scene, but in a way that feels like complexity and character rather than inconsistency. The way the crack terrifies the angels ups the stakes; the bit with people vanishing from history is weirdly, existentially terrifying, in the same sort of way the angels sending people back in time was (which is odd, as it isn’t them doing it).

And that ending, where it’s gravity that finally does it – the end contained in the beginning – is terrific.

Bits that are, not bad exactly, but a bit hmm. Amy counting down is quite cool, but “walk like you can see” doesn’t fit the idea that the angels are quantum locked at all. (Presumably Moff knows that and decided he’d rather have the cool sequence, which, fair enough.)

Octavian’s behaviour, pre-death, doesn’t make that much sense either. He threatens to blow River’s cover, even though that’ll only distract the Doctor and get them all killed? What? Why? Also, he does tell the Doctor River kills him, which she later confirms, and then both pretend they’re being cryptic.

But this is whining over nothing, really. For the big dumb action one this is absolutely brilliant.

Other things:

• The second (eleventh) Doctor with the jacket, suddenly being much gentler towards Amy, is a neat trick... though it did mean I was convinced for ages that the fact Amy’s house has wrong number of storeys was a plot point, not a continuity error. (Honestly, it has stairs up from the landing, yet there clearly aren’t that many floors in the house. This plus The Lodger made me *certain* it was deliberate.)

• River announces she’s a complex time space event – which actually fits with what’s to come.

• The last scene, where Amy jumps the Doctor... It’s weird how incredibly creepy this is, given it’s clearly meant to desexualise the Doctor? (It is very obvious that at this point 11 doesn’t really understand sex; this won’t last.) Maybe, like the kissogram thing, it’s because it’s not appropriate for the show – or at least, the very child-focused version Moffat is writing – rather than not appropriate for the characters?

• The “next time” for Vampires goes on forever.