'Doctor Who': A whale of a tale

For our second "Doctor Who" Season 5 outing, another confused mess of cool ideas and manipulative weirdness and dots not connecting and general needless running around.

We really hope this isn't the new style -- we need a little more "Girl In The Fireplace" and a little less "Silence In The Library," we think. Amy and Eleven are marvelous as usual, and the acting is pretty good throughout what with the Oscar nominees and such, but we're already seeing some pretty obnoxious tics coming through.

Amy and the Doctor find themselves on Starship UK, during a time when the sun's gone supernova back on Earth and each nation state has created its own spaceship to fly around in until things settle down. Pretty cool idea number one.

Except the UK ship is powered by something called a Space Whale, which is like the Giving Tree but in space, and the people don't know that, so they keep constantly giving it shocks to the pain centers in order to keep it flying. Pretty dumb, especially when we're told that this is the last Space Whale in existence, so then how did the rest of the globe get free and why is all this necessary?

And by "this" we mean just a horde of things and tricks and oddments and clever little nips. There's these Zoltan Fortune-Telling things with faces that spin around and get madder and madder, called Smilers, that we don't know what they're for.

And there are Winders, which are like cops crossed with monks, but we don't really know what they're for either. There's Liz 10, who trounces around in a jolly big red cloak wearing a mask for no reason and talking about how fucking awesome she is, and we don't really know what she's for except being dorky, which is to be fair something she's excellent at ...


Read the full recap at Television Without Pity.

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Photo credit: BBC America