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More on Doctor Who 6x07
All in all, I found this episode very "meh" for a pre-hiatus cliffhanger.
There was stuff I liked! I loved Amy's little speech at the beginning to Melody, how you start off thinking that she's talking about the Doctor and then it turns out that when the chips are down, her knight in shining armor is Rory. D'awwww. ♥ And I am ridiculously fond of Rory running around in the centurion armor (even if the "last centurion" thing makes NO SENSE AT ALL) and getting to go all hero-mode -- I love Rory for similar reasons to why I loved Mickey in the first couple of seasons of New Who, and I think his character arc is rather similar. In general, I am desperately fond of reluctant heroes who discover their inner hero-ness. And the lizard lady and her maid are too awesome, really, though it wasn't until the Doctor mentioned her avenging her sisters that I realized where we'd seen her before.
I am awfully fond of doomed last stands, too, so I loved that bit -- though I wish it had been set up better, and that it hadn't come about because everyone just stood around dithering for ages after finding out they'd been led into a trap, rather than retreating to the TARDIS Iike sensible people (and like I'd been loudly informing them for several minutes that they SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING, but no one on TV ever listens to me).
And there were lots of little character-focused bits and pieces sprinkled throughout that I really liked. The Doctor asking Rory if he's okay with the Amy-hugging was a bit that made me squee in particular. I think he still doesn't understand Amy and Rory's relationship (I loved all the bits where he's embarrassed and/or confused about human sexual reproduction/courtship rituals; personally I don't need the Doctor to be asexual, necessarily, though I prefer him that way, but I loved the hat tip to the fact that, even if he looks human, he's not, and he's still going to be confused by some of the things humans do), but even if he doesn't quite get it, I loved that he acknowledges that it's important, that it matters to them -- to both of them -- and that he's willing to tread a little more lightly than usual to accommodate it.
But the rest of the episode, well ...
It just felt like they tried to stuff in too many things, and for having had the entire season to set it up, it just didn't feel very well set up at all. This episode felt to me like a whole lot of random stuff all thrown together, spending way too much time on bits that turned out to be extraneous to the plot, like the entire character of the female Marine who got killed at the end -- I liked her, but I think in terms of the episode as a whole that it would have been much better served by spending less time with her (a random OC who dies at the end) and more time on the main characters setting up the rescue. The jerky stop-and-start time-jumps and frequent scene changes made me feel like they really needed to have spread this out over two or three episodes rather than shoehorned into one. Many of my problems with this episode are similar to problems I had with the second half of the two-parter at the beginning of the season. Moffat is really good at the tightly focused horror and character stuff, where he takes a single creepy or character-centric idea and spins it out over an episode, but I don't feel like he does "epic" nearly as well -- his "epic" episodes tend to feel like he's trying to write the same kind of ep that he normally does (small-scale, taking-place-in-your-living-room kind of episodes) but set against a sweeping backdrop of interstellar war and it just doesn't work. For me, anyway. This episode felt draggy and disjointed and like it was in need of either a really good edit (trimming the extra characters' scenes; giving us more setup for everything that happened) or a couple more episodes to spread out the interactions of all the characters and let the action scenes breathe a bit.
RTD was not by any means perfect, but he was much better at balancing the character vs. the epic in his larger-scale episodes, I think. This episode felt like the result of someone who really doesn't think in terms of big-picture, splashy space battles trying to write one, and kinda falling down at it.
And then there's the River revelation, which ... I am still figuring out how I feel about that. I'd actually guessed all the way back in episode 2 that the little girl regenerating in the alley was River ( ... which makes me wonder why she didn't regenerate when she died in the Library episodes?) and I guessed as soon as "Melody's" name was mentioned that she'd turn out to be River in the end, as she did. I don't know if I'm happy with how the setup was written for that, either -- I am just about 100% sure that they didn't plan it before this season and even in this season, I never, ever got the sort of vibe from Amy and Rory's interactions with her that would have laid the groundwork for this. (Though I do need to rewatch River's earlier episodes to be sure about that.)
One aspect of it that I love is that she was raised to be a weapon (I love it when we get a plausible in-canon explanation for characters' badassery skills) and, even better, that she was raised to kill the Doctor and ended up befriending him instead. I am really looking forward to seeing how that plays out, especially since she's almost certainly the person in the spacesuit who shoots him at the beginning of the season. (Oh, and now I wonder if River's nausea in the season opener was caused by getting so close to herself, or crossing her own time stream? SPECULATE!)
But I dislike having so much of the mystery around River stripped away in one blow. I loved her as a cipher who kept you guessing, and anything that "explains" who River is ... inevitably is going to be a little bit of a disappointment when the character has been set up as this mysterious adventurer who could be anyone or anything. Not that there isn't some mystery around her still, but I'm unhappy that we've lost that fundamentally cryptic, "why is she helping us?" aspect of her, which I had really loved.
And this episode really did sideline Amy quite badly, reducing her to little more than a damsel in distress. I am always quite fond of one character, gender aside, being saved from a dangerous situation by others who love them, so I'm not necessarily hating the fact that she needed to be rescued at all, but the way she wasn't doing anything to rescue herself bugged me a lot. I loved, at first, the bit where she asks the Marine for her gun, and then it's just a tossed-off joke and not actually an attempt to free herself, which, grrrr. I would have loved that exchange if it had gone along the lines of "Can I do anything to help?" "Yes, help me get out of here!" but it wasn't really that at all, because she's not trying to escape, just waiting passively to be freed. Gnarr.
I don't think this is precisely OOC for Amy -- I've complained earlier about how much it bugs me that Amy does have this passive streak in her character that comes up in particular where the Doctor is concerned. The character had an uphill road with me in the beginning because of the way that she arranged her entire life around him in the first Eleven episode, basically waiting her whole life in a holding pattern for him to come back; I don't think this would've bothered me so much if there'd been some kind of in-text acknowledgment that this was not entirely a good thing, and I think a lot of the later Rory stuff did a lot to fix it in my head (that she wasn't just sitting around taking dead-end jobs and waiting for the Doctor to rescue her, that she did go ahead and fall in love and start to build a life and so forth). But still. It does still come up occasionally (like the way that when the Doctor is supposedly dead in this season's premiere, she just stops trying to find solutions) and it's my least favorite thing about her character by a long shot, so I wasn't happy with the episode handing us a generous helping of wet-dishtowel!Amy, especially when the whole stolen-baby-in-a-lab plot (a trope I hate) was the catalyst for it. Do not want, show; do not want.
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comments.
There was stuff I liked! I loved Amy's little speech at the beginning to Melody, how you start off thinking that she's talking about the Doctor and then it turns out that when the chips are down, her knight in shining armor is Rory. D'awwww. ♥ And I am ridiculously fond of Rory running around in the centurion armor (even if the "last centurion" thing makes NO SENSE AT ALL) and getting to go all hero-mode -- I love Rory for similar reasons to why I loved Mickey in the first couple of seasons of New Who, and I think his character arc is rather similar. In general, I am desperately fond of reluctant heroes who discover their inner hero-ness. And the lizard lady and her maid are too awesome, really, though it wasn't until the Doctor mentioned her avenging her sisters that I realized where we'd seen her before.
I am awfully fond of doomed last stands, too, so I loved that bit -- though I wish it had been set up better, and that it hadn't come about because everyone just stood around dithering for ages after finding out they'd been led into a trap, rather than retreating to the TARDIS Iike sensible people (and like I'd been loudly informing them for several minutes that they SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING, but no one on TV ever listens to me).
And there were lots of little character-focused bits and pieces sprinkled throughout that I really liked. The Doctor asking Rory if he's okay with the Amy-hugging was a bit that made me squee in particular. I think he still doesn't understand Amy and Rory's relationship (I loved all the bits where he's embarrassed and/or confused about human sexual reproduction/courtship rituals; personally I don't need the Doctor to be asexual, necessarily, though I prefer him that way, but I loved the hat tip to the fact that, even if he looks human, he's not, and he's still going to be confused by some of the things humans do), but even if he doesn't quite get it, I loved that he acknowledges that it's important, that it matters to them -- to both of them -- and that he's willing to tread a little more lightly than usual to accommodate it.
But the rest of the episode, well ...
It just felt like they tried to stuff in too many things, and for having had the entire season to set it up, it just didn't feel very well set up at all. This episode felt to me like a whole lot of random stuff all thrown together, spending way too much time on bits that turned out to be extraneous to the plot, like the entire character of the female Marine who got killed at the end -- I liked her, but I think in terms of the episode as a whole that it would have been much better served by spending less time with her (a random OC who dies at the end) and more time on the main characters setting up the rescue. The jerky stop-and-start time-jumps and frequent scene changes made me feel like they really needed to have spread this out over two or three episodes rather than shoehorned into one. Many of my problems with this episode are similar to problems I had with the second half of the two-parter at the beginning of the season. Moffat is really good at the tightly focused horror and character stuff, where he takes a single creepy or character-centric idea and spins it out over an episode, but I don't feel like he does "epic" nearly as well -- his "epic" episodes tend to feel like he's trying to write the same kind of ep that he normally does (small-scale, taking-place-in-your-living-room kind of episodes) but set against a sweeping backdrop of interstellar war and it just doesn't work. For me, anyway. This episode felt draggy and disjointed and like it was in need of either a really good edit (trimming the extra characters' scenes; giving us more setup for everything that happened) or a couple more episodes to spread out the interactions of all the characters and let the action scenes breathe a bit.
RTD was not by any means perfect, but he was much better at balancing the character vs. the epic in his larger-scale episodes, I think. This episode felt like the result of someone who really doesn't think in terms of big-picture, splashy space battles trying to write one, and kinda falling down at it.
And then there's the River revelation, which ... I am still figuring out how I feel about that. I'd actually guessed all the way back in episode 2 that the little girl regenerating in the alley was River ( ... which makes me wonder why she didn't regenerate when she died in the Library episodes?) and I guessed as soon as "Melody's" name was mentioned that she'd turn out to be River in the end, as she did. I don't know if I'm happy with how the setup was written for that, either -- I am just about 100% sure that they didn't plan it before this season and even in this season, I never, ever got the sort of vibe from Amy and Rory's interactions with her that would have laid the groundwork for this. (Though I do need to rewatch River's earlier episodes to be sure about that.)
One aspect of it that I love is that she was raised to be a weapon (I love it when we get a plausible in-canon explanation for characters' badassery skills) and, even better, that she was raised to kill the Doctor and ended up befriending him instead. I am really looking forward to seeing how that plays out, especially since she's almost certainly the person in the spacesuit who shoots him at the beginning of the season. (Oh, and now I wonder if River's nausea in the season opener was caused by getting so close to herself, or crossing her own time stream? SPECULATE!)
But I dislike having so much of the mystery around River stripped away in one blow. I loved her as a cipher who kept you guessing, and anything that "explains" who River is ... inevitably is going to be a little bit of a disappointment when the character has been set up as this mysterious adventurer who could be anyone or anything. Not that there isn't some mystery around her still, but I'm unhappy that we've lost that fundamentally cryptic, "why is she helping us?" aspect of her, which I had really loved.
And this episode really did sideline Amy quite badly, reducing her to little more than a damsel in distress. I am always quite fond of one character, gender aside, being saved from a dangerous situation by others who love them, so I'm not necessarily hating the fact that she needed to be rescued at all, but the way she wasn't doing anything to rescue herself bugged me a lot. I loved, at first, the bit where she asks the Marine for her gun, and then it's just a tossed-off joke and not actually an attempt to free herself, which, grrrr. I would have loved that exchange if it had gone along the lines of "Can I do anything to help?" "Yes, help me get out of here!" but it wasn't really that at all, because she's not trying to escape, just waiting passively to be freed. Gnarr.
I don't think this is precisely OOC for Amy -- I've complained earlier about how much it bugs me that Amy does have this passive streak in her character that comes up in particular where the Doctor is concerned. The character had an uphill road with me in the beginning because of the way that she arranged her entire life around him in the first Eleven episode, basically waiting her whole life in a holding pattern for him to come back; I don't think this would've bothered me so much if there'd been some kind of in-text acknowledgment that this was not entirely a good thing, and I think a lot of the later Rory stuff did a lot to fix it in my head (that she wasn't just sitting around taking dead-end jobs and waiting for the Doctor to rescue her, that she did go ahead and fall in love and start to build a life and so forth). But still. It does still come up occasionally (like the way that when the Doctor is supposedly dead in this season's premiere, she just stops trying to find solutions) and it's my least favorite thing about her character by a long shot, so I wasn't happy with the episode handing us a generous helping of wet-dishtowel!Amy, especially when the whole stolen-baby-in-a-lab plot (a trope I hate) was the catalyst for it. Do not want, show; do not want.
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Yeah...I kind of feel this. I think they're better than some (SPN has a similar small-scope/huge-story problem and handles it much worse) and they're not entirely unsuccessful for me, but I spend a lot of Moffat's epic eps asking WHY???? and then don't get answers, and it frustrates (in the opening 2-parter, wanted to know how they all ended up running about in different places; in this one I spent the whole ep wondering who the bad guys were and why they hated the Doctor and even by the end I still wasn't sure; eye-patch woman I don't think we're supposed to know but the soldiers and their secret base felt like it could've used more set-up. While as with earlier seasons there were often big gaps in the timeline but I never felt so confused by what was happening.)
I did think this ep did a better job than a lot of Moffat's previous of introducing a diverse cast of chars who were mostly lovable from the moment of their introduction (even if he cheated a bit, because how can you not love Victorian interspecies lesbians with swords?! ^^ and the Sontaran nurse was both funny and caring, which combination is pretty irresistible.)
...Though the female soldier kind of irritated me just because I am getting a bit weary of the young-girl-meets-the-Doctor-and-then-grows-up-with-her-whole-life-based-around-that-fateful-encounter scenario which Moffat can't get enough of. If he'd even vary it a little (a young boy meets him! a non-human girl meets him! heck a non-white girl meeting him would be a change!) I wouldn't mind it as much, because it is an interesting concept--but the consistency with which it appears in his stories is starting to enter fetish territory...
(wait, the Christmas Carol story was with a young boy. Though for some reason with him it went backwards, with the Doctor doing it deliberately after meeting his un-Doctor-encountered future self. Still...can we get another plot? eventually?)
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Yeah, this, exactly. He skips big chunks of the "how" and the "why", and while this is something that a lot of TV shows do (in order to get to the good bits and stuff it all into 42 minutes), Moffat is really bad at papering over the gaps! You're left going "wait, what?" and trying to figure out how we got from point A to point M without seeing any of the intervening steps. I wouldn't be surprised if we never get a better explanation for eyepatch-lady and how she found out about the TARDIS baby and got her hands on Amy (though I wouldn't mind being wrong, if they do go back and explain it in the rest of the season -- I'm just not holding my breath). As much as I adored all of the bit players in this episode, from the Sontaran nurse (he was adorable ^^) to the gay Marines, I wish the episode had EITHER cut down the guest cast and focused more on the main characters, or spread it out over two episodes and given the guest cast a bigger role and a better reason to be there; as it was, the episode felt so unfocused that it made it hard for me to get emotionally engaged.
And, yeah, I'm getting pretty tired of the "young girl meets Doctor, bases whole life on Doctor" concept. RTD did it too, to some extent, but the way he tended to handle it, meeting the Doctor kick-started people into being better, more adventuresome people (like Sarah Jane, who goes off to be a superhero on her own). In RTD's Who, meeting the Doctor was a life-changing experience for people, but in an inspirational kind of way -- it made them want to go out and be the Doctors of their own lives. Whereas Moffat's characters get stuck, because meeting the Doctor becomes the high point of their life, and then they either spend their whole lives wanting to get back to him, or being wistful and nostalgic about it.
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Well, considering right now she has River!baby, I'm hoping they do get back to her? But, yeah...not entirely confident.
(extra spoiled after reading One Piece, where you can be confident that as long as Oda-sensei doesn't die, we are going to get answers to pretty much everything. Damn few series that's true for, and it makes the speculation more satisfying to know that there really are details to be uncovered, rather than just us reading more into things than the author bothered with...!)
Whereas Moffat's characters get stuck, because meeting the Doctor becomes the high point of their life, and then they either spend their whole lives wanting to get back to him, or being wistful and nostalgic about it.
Yeah...RTD had a bunch of people who met the Doctor and were changed by it, but I can't remember the specific case of meeting the Doctor as a young girl and then meeting him again as an adult, years later for their timeline but not nearly so long for him (could be misremembering, though?)
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Yeah, you know ... I hadn't really thought about it until this conversation, but I definitely see this pattern in Moffat's Who, and I don't like it!
Because, yeah, meeting the Doctor and being changed/affected by meeting the Doctor ... that's an ongoing theme of DW, going all the way back to the very first episodes. In a lot of ways, that's what the show is about -- not just the Doctor as a character, but the way that he affects people, the way he affects whole societies. He comes and touches their lives and moves on, and he leaves behind people who have had their eyes opened to all the wondrous possibilities of the universe.
I think perhaps one reason why the Rory-as-Companion thing works so much better for me than the Amy-as-Companion relationship is because Rory is more that kind of Companion. He's becoming better and stronger and bolder through his time in the TARDIS, but he's still who he is: a nurse and husband and father and so forth. I can see Rory leaving the TARDIS and going and having a good life, having been made better by all the things he's seen and done. Whereas Amy ... well, we know what happens when she's separated from the Doctor: she either falls apart or spends all her time trying to get back to him.
This was something that bothered me about Rose, too, though I didn't get that feeling about Rose in season one, and I think that's one reason why I was so very frustrated by her in season two -- season one Rose was clearly in it for the adventure AND the Doctor, and in subsequent seasons she was more and more all about the Doctor, and I didn't think it did wonders for her as a character. Amy, though, was introduced that way; the only way for her storyline to progress is for her to become less dependent on the Doctor and more of a person in her own right, and while I do feel like she's doing this in some ways (especially since it's come to seem that she values Rory at least as much as the Doctor in her life) she's still defining herself in terms of other people, still sitting and waiting for rescue to come. That's not the way I want her story to progress.
But it seems like Moffat really likes that story -- the story of the little girl (as you pointed out, it's almost always a little girl) who, upon meeting the Doctor, is so captured with wonder that she spends her whole life trying to get back to that moment. Even River ... I love River as an individual, but as part of the rather troubling pattern, my God, if there ever was a character whose life was defined by the Doctor ...! I mean, she even talks about herself that way -- her entire timeline is defined in terms of when she meets him along the way, from childhood to death, and all her highest and lowest points pivot around him.
I want to see characters be inspired by the Doctor and aspire to higher heights, rather than get drawn into his orbit and never get out. Basically, I think Moffat's having trouble with the difference between being inspired by the Doctor to be LIKE him, vs. having one's highest aspiration be to travel with him as his Companion and be near him, or to be saved by him. And these are very different things ...
no subject
Part of that is that all the Companions of previous New Who had ties to Earth, families they were leaving behind, while Amy and Rory and River don't - Amy didn't even have parents for her first season, and they haven't been mentioned at all in this one. And nothing's been said of Rory's family or mates or whatever. I think that might be why they seem so co-dependent on the Doctor, because he seems to be all they really have, other than each other; they have nothing else to lose. And River's relationship to them now makes their group even more insular...
Even River ... I love River as an individual, but as part of the rather troubling pattern, my God, if there ever was a character whose life was defined by the Doctor ...!
...That's the biggest problem I've had with Moffat for a while. Individually his characters are fun and his stories appealing (and he can write a wicked turn of phrase!), but some of his overall, recurring patterns really bother me, and I have a hard time not seeing them once I've noticed them.
no subject
Yeah. :/ I think some of this -- the lack of family/friend ties outside the TARDIS, for example -- I'd written off in the beginning as growing pains, something that would be rectified as Moffat settled in. Except it hasn't been. And I think, in fact, that this week's episode really played up a LOT of the problems with Moffat's tenure on Who. This is the sort of episode that, under RTD, would've been an opportunity to revisit a bunch of old favorites, a getting-the-band-back-together episode like he often did at the end of the season. Even if the episode itself was kind of meh, it was totally worth it just to see whoever he'd pulled together: Martha, Jack, Jackie & Rose & Mickey -- most of RTD's season enders tended to be a sort of "greatest hits" of the past seasons' recurring characters. But in order to do the same kind of episode, Moffat ended up giving us a band of heroes composed mostly of characters that had been invented on the spot for this episode, and while I enjoyed them, I would've enjoyed them so much more if we'd already had a chance to fall for them before (though bringing back the Silurian lady was a stroke of genius, I must admit). But he doesn't HAVE a stable of recurring characters to draw upon; he hasn't nurtured the network of friends and family members and old Companions that RTD-era Who used to do. And it's starting to look like he doesn't intend to do so. Queen Liz would've made a great ally for this episode, or the FBI guy from the premiere (can't remember his name) but that doesn't really seem to be Moffat's style. It's the same thing SPN does, where it's all about the main characters, and there *are* other characters who show up from time to time, but there isn't really as much of a sense of a whole world back there, half-glimpsed and mostly out of sight. And over time, those shows fall flat for me.
In fact, I think this last episode (this last couple of episodes) brought to a head a lot of the issues that have been simmering below the surface for me with Moffat's Who for awhile, but I hadn't really specifically thought about in much detail: the way he handles female characters, the primacy of romance in his 'verse, the lack of attention to the ensemble -- all of that stuff, which bugged me here and there as the show went along, is really bothering me a lot more now.
... though this discussion is making me want to go back and rewatch the first season of New Who for old times' sake. ^^ I remember how captivated I was by the first few episodes, how I was so totally swept away by its wide-open sense of wonder and possibility.
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And yeah, it's odd that he didn't go back to some chars we've met before - Queen Liz, yes! (bringing back Mark Sheppard's char would've been harder, since I think he's in America nowadays.)
I think some of the isolation is a matter of taste/style - I know that some old-school fans have been preferring Moffat because he's more doing it old-school, when the Companions didn't visit home much, and some fans got annoyed with RTD giving them personal lives. And I didn't really know old school Who at all before; I've only seen eps since I started watching New Who, and from my perspective RTD kept most of what I like in the old show while doing away with things I didn't like; while as Moffat's choices of new-to-old are less to my tastes. So most of it I can't really complain...well, I can, obviously, but it's the sort of "he's not writing for meeeeee!" whining that doesn't really say anything about how good the show is on its own (though some of his issues with female chars I will maintain are objectively problematic.)
... though this discussion is making me want to go back and rewatch the first season of New Who for old times' sake. ^^ I remember how captivated I was by the first few episodes, how I was so totally swept away by its wide-open sense of wonder and possibility.
This is why I loved Gaiman's ep so, because that's exactly what it felt like to me - just brought all the love back. If nothing else I have to enjoy this season for that! <3
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I think you're right, actually. I though she was the one from the Silurian episodes last season who was captured by the humans, but, er, having now looked up the episode on Wikipedia, I forgot that she died. (It's the same actress, though, which might be what confused me.)
I know that some old-school fans have been preferring Moffat because he's more doing it old-school, when the Companions didn't visit home much, and some fans got annoyed with RTD giving them personal lives.
Heh. Yeah, you have a good point! Actually this was one reason why I didn't think I was going to like New Who and it took awhile for me to start watching it, because I do remember that about Old Who. The show in general was too episodic and didn't have enough character continuity for me (admittedly the fact that I was watching random episodes on PBS over several years probably had something to do with that ...). The main draw of Old Who, for me, was the camp/fun/goofball factor, and I was reluctant to tackle New Who because they'd basically done away with that from all appearances -- and then I remember being really surprised, but pleasantly so, that they handled the whole show the way that they did, including the recurring appearances by characters like Jack and Rose's family.
So, yeah, I guess it's become part of how I think of "the way the show ought to be" and I don't like going back to the other way! *grins* I agree with you that a big part of my problems with Moffat-era Who is simply that he's not writing the kind of thing I want to watch, which isn't objectively bad, 'tis true.
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I KNOW. What is up with that? They don't listen to me either.
Overall, I liked it more than you, although there were flaws. I agree that Moffat is best at small scale, character-focused, 'creeping horror' type eps, and that doesn't always translate into the big, epic finale-type episodes. Although on the whole I prefer Moffat's scripts for those eps over RTD's, because while RTD could do some great character stuff, his big plots always felt weak to me -- he could set up stuff brilliantly, but the pay-off was often rushed or very handwavey (sort of, 'look at the shiny things and don't think too hard about what's actually happening!') Where he pulled it off, as in the very first season's 'Bad Wolf' finale with Rose channelling the TARDIS, it was great, but when it didn't it lost me completely. Moffat, I think, tends to be stronger on plotting, although he too often succumbs to the temptation to be too clever about things: not so much, "I will show you the gun in the first act that will be used in the third act" as "a gun will be used in the third act and I will subsequently reveal that it was there all along in the first act because someone travelled back in time to put it there and there was an invisibility force field in place around it".
I also think that what you highlight as an issue with Amy's passivity at times isn't unique to her, it's a problem they've allowed to creep in with virtually all the female companions in New Who: they all, to some extent, end up letting their adventures with the Doctor define them and allowing the rest of their lives to become less important. Martha crushed on the Doctor (and eventually realised she had to walk away for her own emotional health), Donna's experience with him led her to go and search him out and to declare she wanted to keep travelling with him forever, Rose ended up devastated at being separated from him, even though she was in a universe where her father was alive and she was with all the people she cared about. In one way, I think Amy's actually done better than some of her predecessors, because her relationship with Rory is written as being just as important to her as travelling with the Doctor.
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I wonder that this might be deliberate - a theme of RTD's Who seemed to be that the Doctor was wonderful-but-terrible, that it's great fun to travel with him but going with him might not be the best thing to do; and Moffat is offering a counterpoint, that no, look, sometimes it's all right to just go off and have adventures. It's one of the things that, to my mind, makes Moffat's Who a little more kid-aimed; it's a little less emotionally mature/complex. Which I don't think is a bad thing - a story doesn't need to be complex to be compelling, and sometimes just having adventures is cool! But it gets problematic when it intersects with things that are more questionable (such as Amy always relying on the Doctor - and now Rory - to rescue her while doing nothing to save herself - and that I blame on the writer, not the char; being brave and faithful is admirable but he could've shown her trying to do more.)
no subject
*grins* I THINK WE SHOULD COMPLAIN TO THE MANAGEMENT.
... generally, though, yeah, I haven't read a whole lot of episode reactions for this one, but I did see yours and I saw that you'd liked it a great deal more than I had, so I don't want to harsh on your squee! Basically, like
I am definitely never going to hold up RTD as an example of good plotting. *g* Actually, I think the best thing he did was collect a stable of writers who were much better than he was. His scripts were often my least favorite ones, even though I liked what he did with the episodes on a big-picture level (but the execution was often OMFG BAD). Moffat, in fact, was one of my favorite writers from RTD's era on the show, because he was really good at those small-scale horror episodes which were among my favorites from the series. But writing individual episodes is one skill, plotting overall arcs is another, and I think that for me, Moffat's arcs and the characters that he's created for his tenure on the series fall flat compared to RTD's. Which, again, isn't a judgment on either one of them -- just a personal-taste thing.
All in all, I agree with most of