Damn you Moffat is a tag now.

[tencrush]

Damn you Moffat, no, I just can't accept the decision "oh, Night Terrors was too dark, so let's just switch it with Black Spot and be on our merry way, we just need to bung on that Lake Silencio pic at the end and we'll be sorted." THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.

For a start, the hugely forgettable Curse of the Black Spot was quite fun, but as far as people remembering the whole mirror/reflection/parallel worlds premise, I think you've screwed yourself and I'm getting the vague feeling that that premise might be important to us later on, yes? You can only show us so many people looking in so many mirrors before it becomes a bit of a giveaway. It would have been nice to have both the technobabble involved and the parallel world concept itself a little bit fresher in our minds by the time the end of the series rolls around. Not that I'm saying anything about how the series ends, obviously. No. (Also, the whole stowaway child in a barrel thing, that whole "I'm here now, you can't send me back" stuff, the captain staying with his child in a parallel world rather than go back to his "real" world without his son, all of that stuff would have worked a lot better here and you know it. Plus, we wouldn't have had to shoehorn captain Avery into A Good Man, when he was allegedly unable to leave the ship with his kid.)

BUT Night Terrors gives us way worse in the total absence of any emotional impact made on two of the three main characters when they are caught up in a story about a frightened young child who thinks he's being abandoned by his parents, the denoument of which involves his father accepting his child and declaring that he would never dream of abandoning him, even though he's a bit timey-wimey alien. And nobody bats an eyelid. Not Amy, not Rory, no-one. I'm one of the biggest Moffat fans around, but this was a SERIOUS lapse in judgement right here, dude. I hate it anyway when filler episodes seemingly forget about the plot arc that's been going on around them (Black Spot wouldn't have fared much beter in that respect, and Amy romping around in pirate gear when her kid is still more or less missing would probably have been equally jarring), but when the episode directly mirrors the plot arc and nobody notices? GAH!

DAMN YOU MOFFAT.

Apart from that I have very little to say about Night Terrors, it was A Bit Scary, the fix was way too sudden and large bits of it made very little sense, but Rory and the Doctor had some cracking lines and that makes up for so much in the way of shite on other levels. Apart maybe from that bit where we sideline the mother for the entire episode in order to indulge Gatiss' daddy-son issues yet again without Gatiss actually having to write, like, a yucky woman part. And I'll just pretend I didn't hear that "in the flesh" thing at the end. You could have dubbed over that one, dudes, the camera was on everyone's back. Oh well.

Comments

[meleth.livejournal.com]

My prediction: Rory will refuse to decide between the Amys, possibly even squeezing his eyes shut really hard to escape the Sophie's Choice, and then all of the Amys will merge back into one Amy, who conveniently manages to be the young hot one.

[tencrush]

In a roundabout way, I think you're right. It seems to involve Rory having to choose which timeline Amy should live out. But, like you say, much like Amy's Choice, I don't think it matters, essentially, which one he chooses, the outcome will be the same. I think whatever timey-wimey explanation this involves will be a setup for the finale and River's fate. The more I think about it, the more I suspect that River lives out two possible timelines, and the one where she is raised to kill the Doctor is the one where she ends up marrying the Doctor, whereas the one where she is returned to Amy and Rory is possibly the one where she ends up killing the Doctor? I don't know, this is starting to seem likely to me somehow, but it's probably rubbish.