lizbee | Doctor Who: "Vampires of Venice" (Reply)

VAMPIRES! VENICE! AMY AND RORY! THE DOCTOR HAVING UST WITH A FISH LADY! Overall I liked this, but there were niggles. Namely:

- killing off all your characters of colour is neither big nor clever. Granted, this is one of those weeks where everybody dies, but still, coming in the wake of the Angels thing, it's a bit fail. Get on that, Team Cardiff.
- I'm sorry, when I'm noticing your bad science, your science is really bad.
- those sure were some clean canals!
- I remain faintly outraged that DW went so far as to film in Croatia, and did not bother to cast Mira Furlan as anything.
- yes, that last one is of less consequence than everything else

Those niggles aside, and only the CoC deaths actually spoiled my enjoyment in any way, that was AWESOME. From the hilarity of the Doctor's invasion of the stag party -- and Eleven seems to be extra specially bad at traditionally masculine activities -- to the cracktasticness coupled with real tension in the plot, I enjoyed it. When I saw the "jumping up and down and being excited about vampires" clip, I was afraid this meant we were in for "Tooth and Claw" redux, and that I was going to wind up loathing Eleven and Amy as much as I hated Ten and Rose in that story. But in the end, I thought the crack, lulz and tragedy were well-balanced. I do wish that there had been more time given to mourning for Guido, but we don't know that they left Venice as soon as Roseanna had fed herself to her children, so I choose to believe they helped clean up and took some time.

In short, this review is wrongity wrong wrong.

I really loved the relationship between Eleven and Rory, where one is being completely breezy and all EVERYTHING IS NORMAL HERE, OKAY? while the other is HANG ON, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THAT THING WHERE MY FIANCEE KISSED YOU AND I DON'T WANT HER TO BE HURT, AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO GET US KILLED, AND YES, THIS IS SORT OF AWESOME AND ALL, BUT SERIOUSLY YOU NEED TO MAYBE THINK ABOUT SOME NORMALITY.

"You kissed her back!"
"No, I kissed her mouth."

I did not so much like the bit where Eleven was all, "The Doctor gives the orders and the companion does what she's told and waits in the TARDIS," especially as a response to Rory's fears. It reminded me a lot of Nine and Mickey play-acting so that Mickey could save face without having to turn down a trip in the TARDIS: it makes sense, character-wise and emotionally, but I dislike the sense that the men are teaming up to deceive the girl.

That aside, I really do love Rory. He's a bit of a drongo, but he's also well-outside of his comfort zone, so I guess we'll see how he goes once he's a bit more settled. The gender dynamic, where Amy is adventuresome, confident and a bit callous, while Rory is sensitive, emotional and needs rescuing, is a nice twist; it so far doesn't have the ugly subtext that came with the superficially similar Rose/Mickey relationship.

What really, really, really made me love this episode were all the scenes with Roseanna. It's become a New Who trope, the Older Alien Woman Who Gets The Doctor On A Level The Companions Aren't Privy To. They had sparking chemistry, so now we know the Doctor is a bit fishladysexual. I was terribly sad when she died, even though it had been well-foreshadowed, and she certainly deserved it, since her plan involved taking human girls and forcing them to become fishwives (see what I did there?), even before she started sinking Venice. I hope this doesn't mean that Moff is going to adopt RTD's plan of Killing All The Older Women, but we still have River and Liz X, so I'm reserving judgment.

IN SHORT: Toby Whithouse has somewhat redeemed himself, after all the sexist and OOC bits in "School Reunion," although I'm not quite willing to pronounce him forgiven yet.