Doctor Who XXXI.5: Flesh and Stone

Amy Pond is lovely and mad and redhaired and bonkers and... hold that last thought.

This was one of the most tense viewing experiences I have had. The tension crept up on me; I was reflecting on how I expected to feel, how the production team wanted me to feel, and didn't notice that they were doing their worst until my nose was practically pressed up against the screen. The idea of a race to the death where the most lethal group of participants travel at a significantly distinct perception of time to the other is a tempting subject for Doctor Who. The idea of making the Angels threatened as well was an appealing shift in the game plan; the appearance of the crack in time pointed the way to the fall of the Angels (literally in this case) but before that added an extra layer of uncertainty to the chase narrative.

River's story develops enticingly. It's very obvious whom we are to assume she has murdered. Her fears that the Doctor will reject her - and Octavian's assumption that the Doctor will do so - suggest that this is a trauma; River is not a cold-blooded killer, and demonstrates remorse.

It is, I suppose, likely that given the Angels being creatures of thought that their belief in someone being able to see them paralyzes them as much as someone actually seeing them. It's somehow appropriate that a woman on the eve of her wedding, an eve which she is protracting in the apprehension that she is making a serious mistake, should be threatened by fear becoming tangible, that fear being an Angel to which she will as good as give birth before it rips her apart or sends her back in time; which from the Angels' point of view is as good as the same thing.

It's not clear how far the Doctor was already aware that Amy might be contaminated by the crack in time, which I'd assumed was the case from his view of the TARDIS scanner at the end of The Eleventh Hour; but he knows now. The reference back to The Next Doctor was a surprise; the Cyber-King is a concept which I do not dwell upon and the idea of it falling out of time altogether through the crack is not unappealing. Cheap shots at one of the less successful elements of the 2008 Christmas special aside, how much of what we have known of the Doctor Who universe have we lost, and how much can be restored? There has been much speculation that the Time War has confused the Doctor's time stream, Paul Cornell even suggesting on his blog a few years ago that a core Doctor Who text such as The Deadly Assassin has from the point of view of the 2005 series never happened. The pursuing crack in time, seizing on conscious beings and removing them from time and space with so little disruption that no-one notices, adds an extra layer of creative destruction.

Amy is volatile. She is resourceful and brave but deeply, deeply scared. She's been opened a way into a childhood magic which she was told repeatedly and forcefully was at best a dream, at worst a lie; and given her anxiety about her wedding, and the way in which her life has been changed by the interventions of the Doctor, her attempted seduction of him is entirely explicable. It's not the sex which she is desperate for, but the consolation of knowing that the Doctor is there. Amy's suggestive hints on her bed engendered a sense of apprehension as overwhelming as anything the threat of being dispatched by an Angel could achieve. The Doctor copes admirably; I'd venture that he's more comfortable with sexuality now than he was when he looked like David Tennant. viala_who , I think, had a word for the tenth Doctor's dysfunctionality as a romantic partner. The eleventh seems more sure of himself in the bedroom, and a one night stand with Amy would have damaging consequences for both of them. It appears that on the basis of this encounter the Doctor will appoint himself relationship counsellor.

While production techniques were modern - the oxygen factory was well-executed, the integration of tree fibres and fibreoptics made poetic sense and the forest conveyed a sense of depth even though the set was probably very small - there were many touches which seemed old-fashioned. This series of Doctor Who has a determinedly retro feel in parts; some elements of the set have the cardboard functionality of a lot of 1970s Doctor Who spaceships and outer space bases, but it would be difficult to have achieved that brief, powerful glimpse of the tableau of Angels, frozen as the gate opens, in the days of video cameras and CSO. Much of Murray Gold's score for this episode reminded me of the stock music used in The Tomb of the Cybermen. Not only does this accentuate Matt Smith's Doctor's oft-cited Troughtonness - though his brutal treatment of Amy's anxiety is reminiscent of Tom Baker's Doctor in his early years - it complements the romantic gothicism of the Angels and conveys a feeling of a claustrophobic space being torn by talons.

Not, perhaps, the greatest Doctor Who story of all, but certainly the strongest so far. Next week we get the mid-season relaunch episode, and a different personality gets exposed to TARDIS travel and learns to see time and space differently. Oh, and lots of sharp teeth.