a chicken and egg scenario

Books Here is the story of Philaster. Look away now if you don’t want to know the result. The titular young Sicilian prince has usurped from the throne by “the king of Calabria” but continues to abide in court where he resists the urge to retake the crown. Arethusa is in love with him, and a page acts as a go-between, but Philaster through misunderstanding and distrust decides she’s being unfaithful with the page and stabs the both of them. But this being a tragicomedy, they both live and it’s revealed that the page was a girl all along and marriage and geographical recovery ensue.

I can’t believe it’s not Shakespeare, which it isn’t. It’s John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, writing at the same time as the Bard and it’s suspected giving the crowd what they want in the Jacobian period when the master’s work flow had slowed to a couple of plays a year. The blurb on the back of this Arden Early Modern Drama suggests this is a “Hamlet rewrite” but as its editor Suzanne Gossett identified, “the play is built from plot elements familiar from Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Pericles” as well as a number of plays by the same authors.

A modern comparison would be Miami Rhapsody or Far From Heaven which attempt to mimic the film-making styles of Woody Allen and Douglas Sirk respectively. But the approach is also positively post-modern even at the level of speeches, some of which are so suggestive of Cymbeline that there’s been some chatter over the years of which play influenced which, a chicken and egg scenario which can never be entirely resolved. Nevertheless it’s another work which ignorance has left sorely neglected, despite the participation of a Shakespeare collaborator.

Gossett employs a four pronged attack in attempting to rescue the play from obscurity. First there’s the usual contextual business and this case parallels with the politics of King James’s court. James’s rule over England and Scotland is paralleled in the Calbrian King and though the writers are generally thought of as royalists, it’s impossible not to see them suggesting that their new king was something of the usurper. Another strand of Philaster shows the king attempting to find strategic marriages for his children and that also reflects James seeking a union and so alliance in Spain.

Next there’s a short investigation into the form and style of the play. Fletcher claimed that tragicomedy “wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie”, which is a fair description of some of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, especially Measure for Measure, which should also demonstrate the difficult of keeping within that tone. In Philaster, that’s communicated through pathos and melancholy, that life’s too short (even shorter then) and that happiness is relative.

This (too) soon this gives way to the usual production history, the transformation of Philaster into a ladies play during the restoration period due to the unusual number of female roles (making the page’s role a twist in plain sight), its three adaptations undertook at a time when these authors were better thought of than Shakespeare and most interestingly its single broadcast performance in the US as part of a public radio series created by directors and writers blacklisted by UnAmerican Activities Committee of the House of Representatives.

The final sections deal with the play's wayward textual history. Ironically, like Hamlet, the play has a substantially corrupted Q1 and more substantial Q2 (which forms the basis of this edition) and a Folio (although that was printed fifty years after the play was written) and debate rages about how the first printed quite got into that state (censors? rewrites?) and yet why it contains better stage directions than Q2 (readers copy?). Side by side passages of both are included in the appendices so we can to make up our own minds. Or at least have a go.

Philaster (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Suzanne Gossett. Methuen Drama. 2010. RRP: £11.99. ISBN: 978-1904271734. Review copy supplied.

On another: 'Tales of the Unexpected'.

TV As you can see, this is where the rot really began to take hold in regards to Torchwood's season one. There would be a few semi-positive reviews to come, including, unbelievably, Cyberwoman, but this was the moment when I realised the show's potential to go off the rails leading to this evisceration during that year's annual review on this blog.

As I said then: "it's possible to suggest that this format simply doesn't satisfy because predominantly the secondary goal is far less interesting than the proposed original. In Ghost Machine the alien dongle's power is explained in the opening ten minutes as is the initial mystery of who is in Gwen's vision and the secondary goals of where it came from and Owen wanting to avenge the rapist are not strong enough to carry the rest of the episode"

But it's true.  I did watch the thing.  Then watch it again shortly afterwards.  I was deranged.


Last night I did something that I've never done before.

After watching The Ghost Machine, I sat down to write a review and as usual checked Outpost Gallifrey [which is now called Gallifrey Base -- future Stu] just to see what the general fan reaction had been, especially since I'd the closing minutes with my head hidden under a pillow trying to block out all sound and vision. I clicked across to the ratings forum and began to read overwhelmingly positive reviews. Third time lucky, some said, better late than never said others. The little bar charts were showing high ratings and I began to wonder what I'd missed. I turned off my computer, and watched the episode again. And although I could see the second time around that there were things to admire it was still a fundamentally disappointing experience.

Tonight I sat down for the fourth time trying and write a review and found myself looking at the screen, and the little curser blinking in and out. As the minutes passed by, something dawned on me. I didn't know what to write. I actually have writers block. I'm so indifferent about the episode that I simply can't craft that indifference into words. I actually wrote down some notes on viewing the episode the second time around and considered simply posting them, but they're really not that interesting. On one line I've written enigmatically 'director Colin Teague'. Yes, and? On another: 'Tales of the Unexpected'. And finally Jack's closing dialogue: 'A million shadows of human emotion - we've just got to live with them...' which looks good on paper but didn't quite work on screen.

The search for Bernie worked quite well. And I continue to enjoy the performances and some of the writing was very good indeed. But eventually I realised that this was the most exciting moment....



And there's not much more you can say about that really ...

PS ... other than that Jack's line was the worse piece of dialogue on television that year ...

"other people's thinking"

That Day

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Thanks Steve. For everything. Now I know what to do.

"was never displayed in a single English tube station"

Commerce The Awl has a massive post charting the copyright snarl up surrounding "Keep Calm and Carry On". That's all worth reading, but in typical style they've also included a section explaining the origin of the original poster:

"The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was designed and produced by the British government in 1939 in advance of the war, but it was never displayed in a single English tube station or tobacconists or newsagents. Not one ordinary citizen ever saw it in the street before or during the war.

Of the 2.5 million posters originally printed, only a handful survived the war; all the rest were pulped. Exactly two copies are known to have made it into private hands. One of these is owned by Wartime Posters of Warrington, Cheshire. The other is Stuart Manley's."

The examples on the post of posters that were actually utilised demonstrates that sometimes someone can create something and not see its potential value.

exhausted children and their squalid living conditions

Fashion This afternoon I visited the International Slavery Museum at the Albert Dock for their new exhibition, White Gold: the true cost of cotton, which investigates the "abuse of labour rights in the cotton industry, primarily in Uzbekistan, one of the largest cotton exporters in the world".  As the exhibition partner Environmental Justice Foundation explains on their website, the country achieves its industriousness by making cotton picking a compulsory activity, with a third of the country's population indentured into farming the crop.  That includes children who from a young age are brought into the fields by teachers to work long hours with little food and essentially no pay. These are very much the conditions Dickens was highlighting a century ago in this country, still existing elsewhere in the modern world.

The exhibition itself is brief, filling just a small display area at the back of the museum and mostly consists of giant photographs of the children at work and an award winning film (which is embedded above for anyone who isn't in the area).  But nothing else is required.  The shots of empty classrooms, exhausted children and their squalid living conditions are more than enough for me to question the very clothes I'm walking around in, wondering where the cotton in my t-shirt has been sourced.  The problem is, as a flow diagram in the exhibition demonstrates, although the country of origin is still on the cotton when it is being traded, the yarn spinners source from a range of countries so by the time it reaches the shops and then us it is almost impossible for us to find out.

"And no one said something."

Film Sometimes, just sometimes. Kirsten Dunst gives an unexpectedly unvarnished interview about the Cannes incident in which she registers her surprise at the reaction of her fellow cast members:

"The way she sees it, the incident was a perfect storm of unstable elements, with her caught haplessly in the middle. She blames the journalist, the British film critic Kate Muir, who opened the floodgate – and the floodgate itself for opening so readily ("Lars always likes to stir things up"). But she also seems narked with her other cast members, who simply sat by. "That's what I don't understand. There were a lot of us sitting there. There was Stellan [Skarsgård], John [Hurt], Charlotte [Gainsbourg]. And no one said something. No one wanted to help. I was the only one to lean in to Lars and get him to stop." She rolls her eyes. "And, of course, I'm the one person that people would love to rope into that situation. They'd love to mess with me."

Here it again in case you missed it. Just keep watching her face. I think we've all been in that moment when you're desperate to say something to a friend as their mouth is engaging more than their brain but know that it would just make matters worse.  We all just sit there smiling but in way that attempts to be supportive without looking as though we're actually agreeing with whatever nonsense they're spewing ...



She's right when she says "So then I become the story. It becomes, 'Oooh, look at Kirsten's reaction!'"

belter on the Bannerman

TV Deep breath. The final three stories, final six episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures were always going to be a difficult watch simply because it’s impossible to quite believe that the vital, vibrant star running about on screen, still saving a fictional universe, can’t any more. A perfect tribute, they’re gifted to us through a quirk of budget and scheduling and should have been part of a typical length season and would have done if Lis hadn’t been taken from the real universe so soon.

Phil Ford’s Sky is doubly melancholic because it's pinioned around the introduction of its titular tweenager to the gang, a sign of the production team realising that with the show entering its sixth year and its young cast ageing, the bottom end of its target audience is starting to lack a character to identify with.  To that end, Sky is well thought through, an alien child who, like Luke way back when, and like the clever children watching, only has a superficial understanding of the world and a questioning nature.

Parents will no doubt smile at just how many questions Sky asks. Everything is new to her, even pizza, which also makes her the cunning new addition to Sarah Jane’s gang who’re now somewhat versed in the kinds of excitement that can fall to Earth. She’s excellent companion material because her entire existence built on the five Ws, an exposition sponge who genuinely doesn’t know anything rather than seeming so for the benefit of the audience (even though that’s exactly what she’s for).

Sinead Michael is very good as Sky, catching the wild-eyed innocence of someone who's burst up to the age of twelve within the space of a couple of hours. She's very reminiscent of similar figures in all the kids dramas I grew up with in the 80s, even with a hint of the Why Don't Yous during the Davies era of that show. Some have already signalled their annoyance which seems a bit heartless given her limited screen time. Her rawness is part of her charm, surely?

It would have been nice to see how Sky might developed over the longer term with the Ranipedia as her big sister. When Trojan companion Katarina was fatefully brought in as a successor to Vicki and Susan on 60s Who as a change from those two futuristic girls it rapidly became apparent that because she was so lacking in understanding of the basic essentials of modern life that she was impossible to realistically write for. Everything had to be explained to her. Hopefully Sky will be a faster learner.

Sky's introductory story was a superior example of SJA, with pantomime villains, massive wars occurring elsewhere in the galaxy and the Chandras representing Earth’s bewildered if very human reaction. In my experience of having worked in a local authority call centre, there do seem two types of people. Those who’ll phone at the first hint of trouble and those who simply put everything down to being just one of those things, or that someone else has phoned already or just assume the council won’t do anything anyway.  Or is that four types?

Aptly, given Sarah Jane’s address, Sky was like a free jazz cover version of Delta and the Bannermen, but with a baby bio whose nature was to die and destroy a civilisation rather than save her own people simply by living. There’s also an inadvertent similarity with Melody Pond who was equally bred to kill and also aged through a comparable burst of energy which also saved poor Sinead from being covered in green splatter or some such.

Of the two episodes, the first was perhaps the more enjoyable simply because of the reactions of the regulars to the baby. For all the spin-off fiction written about Sarah Jane, only a single short story (Lily in this anthology) even hints that she might have a grandchild and so otherwise this is the first time we’ve seen Ms. Smith with a baby and quite rightly she’s not sure how to handle it. As I think has already been said, before Luke came along she’d not thought of having a family; now she’s fostering another one.

Ford’s writing of Clyde and Daniel Anthony neatly observed the difficulty of keep a baby happy, especially a baby you’ve suddenly been given the mission of keeping occupied and who you don’t really know. We always resort to humour though in my case it never works, so intimidating are my unfortunate features. Fortunately his mime routine was hilarious, even if jokes went over the poor little thing’s head. We all thought it was funny though. Russell. Ha!

Incidental pleasures also included Floella Benjamin giving her best performance as the familialy named Professor Rivers, now mildly channelling Lee Evans in Ford's co-written Planet of the Dead and Peter-Hugo Daly as the fan of The Archers turning what could have been a one note character into a tour-de-force, a Pigbin Josh for a new generation. That’s something I will miss about The Sarah Jane Adventures, the layering it often gives to characters that other kids series might otherwise bland out or stereotype.

Then we have the sub-Rani (the other one) majesty of Miss Myers, another in SJA’s list of arch-milfers along with Mrs. Wormwood and Ruby White. As is usually the case with these villainesses, Christine Stephen-Daly gave it some real shoulder pad and was entirely in the spirit of the piece even if hers was not the kind of character for whom its entirely possible to communicate emotional depth, just one moment of vulnerability hinted at a motherly connection.

Researching that paragraph, I was astonished to learn that before appearing in most of the UK’s sort of soap operas like The Bill, Holby, Cutting It and Casualty, Stephen-Daly was in one of my favourite films, indeed the film about film school students which was one of the reasons I studied my post-grad in film, Love and Other Catastophes along with Radha Mitchell. That information’s by-the-by but it does give me a reason to watch that again, if only so I can try and spot her.

The climax was pure Classic Who, companions shutting down nuclear reactors without any technical knowledge whatsoever (I’d be worried if colour coded fuel rods really how it works especially given the lack of interest from other government authorities) and a stand off between the Sarah Jane and the villain. Notice that Sky has the choice as to whether she should fulfil her utility made for her. Before that moment hadn’t she decided to become a suicide bomber?

Whatever weighty themes that might suggest are probably unintentional but with The Sarah Jane Adventures we can never be sure.  What we can be sure of is that the final scene offered another example of the show looking to the future with a reappearance of The Shopkeeper, hinting perhaps at an arc plot that's now another loose end that may never be resolved.  In my imagination he's a renegade from The Trickster's lot in the same way the Doctor ran away from the Time Lords.  But now we'll never know. Sniff.

This was a strong opening for this short series and a great introduction to a new character.  Writer Phil Ford's work on the series has gone from strength to strength and his script for next week's episode looks like another belter on the Bannerman too (sorry) (I’ve been trying to work that since the start of writing this).  Just one more story after that and it's gone.  But we'll always be fond memories, which Sky has now added to.

“motif complexes” and “free floating narrative elements”

Books The Arden Shakespeare third series edition of The Taming of the Shrew offers two plays for the price of one. As well as the text printed in the First Folio edited to Arden’s usual standards, Appendix 3 features an unedited facsimile of The Taming of a Shrew, the anonymous play, often mentioned in critical studies but rarely published. It’s the ur-Hamlet or Hamlet Q1 of Shrew, a work which simultaneously aids and infuriates our understanding of the Folio text, and a prop which has recently helped the play’s feminist credentials as it eases into the modern world.

Perhaps recognising the weight of feminist criticism which already exists in relation to the play, Hodgson instead spends much the pagination investigating both plays as part of a tradition of Shrew narratives. Jan Harold Brunvand recently carried out a study of these tales (similar to Vladimir Propp’s classification of fairy tales) listing a wide range of “motif complexes” and “free floating narrative elements” of which The Shrew matches at least eleven, suggesting Shakespeare was calcifying a story which already had a strong oral tradition.

Like the Hamlet texts, critics have become very exercised over the years as to whether one is a rewrite of the other, the extent of Shakespeare’s involvement in A Shrew and the implications that in terms of attribution in contemporary written records. The mention in Henslow’s diary could relate to either play, which has implications when dating The Shrew whose writing has variously been put somewhere across over two decades, only recently having settled somewhere in the late 1880s thanks to textual similarities with the earlier histories.

As is often the case in this Arden third series, editor Barbara Hodgdon is reluctant to make sweeping decisions simply there isn’t enough evidence either way. The easy option is that it’s an earlier play, which a young Shakespeare still learning the ropes as a kind of script doctor gutted, improved and readied for his new company. There’s certainly enough textual similarities to suggest that. Another suggestion is that it’s an early play by Shakespeare which he later extensively rewrote. The rather more murkier idea is that it’s a memorial reconstruction.

But like the various iterations of Hamlet, the theatrical history of The Shrew is intertwined with A Shrew, because of the implications it has on the famous final scene in which the shrew, Katherina, apparently does an unheralded about face and falls in line withthe tamer, Petruccio. For some feminists that makes the play as misogynistic as The Merchant of Venice is anti-semetic and for decades has created fundamental issues for some directors and actors on how to portray that speech as part of the character’s logical trajectory.

Which is where A Shrew comes in. The Shrew’s folio edition already includes an “induction” in which a drunk, Christopher Sly is tricked into believing himself nobility and The Shrew becomes a theatrical fantasy being performed for him after his indiscretions with a hostess. A Shrew extends Sly’s contribution across the play, the drunk and attendant lords commenting on the action, the final scene giving way to a coda that concludes this parallel narrative, the Pyramus and Thisbe conceit from A Midsummer Night’s Dream spread across a whole play.

These framing scenes are now often included in modern productions, in effect of nullifying Katherina’s about face as the fantasies of Sly or at least the slightly nefarious writer of this play within a play. This has the effect of, as Guardian critic Michael Billington suggests, transforming “(a brutally sexist polemic) totally offensive to our age and society” into “just a play”. You could also argue that it ruins the verisimilitude of the characters but since Shakespeare’s characters perennially address the audience, that’s less of a concern than it might be.

But in illuminating these issues, Hodgdon underlines that Shakespeare’s plays, far from being static entities, become transformed through interpretation and that even The Shrew which has received acres of negative criticism across the years, can become a feminist symbol and even critical of the male psyche depending on the staging. What Shakespeare himself was implying we’ll never know, but considering his facility with writing strong female roles (including Katherina for the most part), thanks to the induction, it seems to be men who are the butt of this joke.

The Taming of the Shrew (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Barbara Hodgdon. Methuen Drama. 2010. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 978-1903436936. Review copy supplied.

“Go on, tell me your theory!”

“Do we think next week's big reveal will be that the Doctor was a ganger all along? I confess I'd be a tad disappointed if so as I thought that from the beginning and I'd like to be proved wrong.”
“God I bloody hope not. That would be weak. Only Miracle Day would be worse. I do have a theory about all the eye-patches ....”
“Go on, tell me your theory!”
“The eye patches are way for people to see The Silents somehow.”
“Oh now that /is/ good. Eye patches to see the Silents. Definitely I can get behind that.”

TV  Looks like Moffat got behind it too. Hello. That’s an exchange from some emails I’ve been swapping with a friend this past couple of weeks (I know! Emails! Like it’s the early noughies!). She’s speaking (typing?) first above and was somewhat correct about it being some sort of shape-changer that explains the Doctor’s lack of mortality, but the metal option instead of the Flesh. The eye-patches were my guess after seeing the front cover of the Radio Times and the Doctor with his Andrew Ridgeley hair wearing one. Unless he’d gone evil, i thought, it had to be a handy device of some sort. That and cunning tribute to dear Nicholas Courtney.

The Brig is dead. Long live the Brig. Moffat’s killed the Brig. Everyone dies, of course, and within the story it is Alistair helping his friend one last time, from beyond the grave, reminding him of his own potential mortality. It’s a sweet scene, beautifully acted by Matt in one of those moments when we can see the weight of the Time Lord’s years on his shoulders. Lived too long and all that.  This being Doctor Who, what's to stop Eleventh skipping back to before his friend died and having a chat?  He knows Churchill died.  He's still friends with him.  The Brig is dead. Long live the Brig.

As the past three and a half stand-alone episodes flew by, two elements of the pre-publicity indicated that Steven Moffat had something of a challenge ahead. Firstly, the first forty-five minute timeslot for a finale. Secondly, the photography of the beardy Doctor and Churchill. Not only was the man going to have to tie-up all of those loose ends, he was apparently creating a whole bunch of others. How was he going to cope? Firstly, by not explaining everything. Secondly, by once again packing in so much detail, that there was barely a moment for us to stop and think. This is where the budget for the past four episodes went.

Apart from everything considered below (seriously, your screen is about to be drenched in over-analysis) (find an umbrella), this was one of the best directed of the season, with Jeremy Webb matching Toby Haynes's lustrous work from the opening few episodes. The final push in through the Testicle's eye to the Doctor dancing recalls the magic of silent cinema and if some of the green screen work doesn't quite convince (around Lake Silencio and at the top of the pyramid) thanks to the magic of high definition television, it's that HD which makes this approximate something made on a vast Hollywood budget.

It’s customary now for Moffat to reveals the new status quo and then explain how the Doctor and his friends got into what’s usually a fine mess. The time imprinting on itself is one of the wildest and even if it is more interested in the visuals than anything approaching logical progression, my assumption being that whatever is left of the web of time is, similar to the survivors in The Waters of Mars, consolidating what is there so that it made sense (unlike Torchwood's End of Days when such time intrusions were incongruous). Not sure why you’d need clocks if there’s no such things as time, though, other than because the narrative required it.

As we wait to see which other authors than Dickens might fall down BBC Breakfast's plug hole (Timelash’s HG Wells would have been apt) we're confronted by another of Moffat’s flashback structures, as The Wedding of River Song becomes a clip show full of scenes we haven’t seen yet. This could have created problems up front because although the change in history was exciting and well executed and all of that, it means that the episode becomes pinioned on exposition rather than an emotional journey. The Doctor is telling us and Ian McNiece (who’s given up pretensions to properly mimicking Churchill) about stuff which has already happened.

Moffat counteracts that by creating tension in between by having the pair chased by The Silents, and mimicking the audiences reaction to the Doctor’s filling in of the narrative gaps by showing them experiencing similar. He also sends the Doctor on another one of his quests around the universe filled with brief encounters with unusual people, references to companions of the recent past that sound weird coming out of this later Doctor’s mouth, poignant death and inserting as many jokes as possible at the expense of poor Dorium’s severed head. Some people create whole planets seeking questions. Others ask craniums in boxes.

During all of this, I couldn’t help but watch the counter on my PVR counting upwards, time slipping away. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and all the while we’re still not anywhere near the character whose name is in the title and we’re still catching up with whatever the Doctor’s been doing between episodes and the events leading up to the trip to America. That was, distracting, clearly, and my own fault and I’m sure stopped me from becoming as involved in the episode as I should.  That's the problem with series with complex mythology.  A lot of waiting involved.  We're the fans who waited.

"Isn’t he rushing this?" I wondered. There’s a two episode version of The Wedding of River Song, with the Doctor’s quest in the first half and the frozen time in the second, a two episode version which might have mimicked The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang rather too much but would at least have given us a moment’s breather. But why should we have those anyway when the thing’s designed to be watched and watched again allowing us to savour every moment? As Moffat himself says, the first broadcast of anything is merely a publication date these days.

Luckily Amy in a business suit wearing an eye-patch broke the reverie which admittedly set me off in a whole other direction which I don’t think we need to go into here. The episode turns from being the Doctor dragging us through his adventure to the Doctor being dragged through the adventure by Amy. A business suited Amy wearing an eye-patch. “Hello Amy.” “Hello.” “I like your business suit.” “Thank you Stuart. Do you like my eyepatch?” “Is it made of metal?” “It has electronics.” “I like electronics.” “What else do you like?” “I …” I’m sorry, what was I saying? Oh yes, exposition, no emotional journey. We’re back on the emotional journey.

How old are the Ponds supposed to be now and where does this version fit in with the pair we saw last week, Amy a cosmetics model?  Never mind River Song, their linearity is all over the place now too.  There have been plenty of references to the three having travelled for "so long" so unlike the Davies years, they're no longer adhering to calender years.  But their reunions are always special and like The God Complex harked back to The Eleventh Hour with Amy drawing her memories.  Nothing of her family though it seems.  Remember how tethered Terran families used to be in nuWho?  This is quite a change.

It’s in this section that Moffat reveals how much faith he has in his audience and how often we deny him. How many times have you read online these past few weeks that the writer had lost it because Amy seemed to accept the loss of her baby too readily? Her revenge demonstrated that the Doctor’s influence doesn’t always halt a character’s moral ambiguity (as we’ve also seen with Captain Jack). Will this become an issue of the Ponds reappear or will it simply be put down to the alternative Amy having developed a slightly different personality, albeit with all the same memories? The closing scene keeps that question hanging.

Neat reference to the many deaths of Rory, though as Moffat I think pointed out in an interview he's only really properly died once in cold blood in Cold Blood.  Another parallel with The Pandorica Opens but with Rory unable to remember Amy this time, rather than the other way around.  This Radio Times interview also reminds us that he's never had an action figure, which is odd considering last season Rory was briefly made of plastic and dressed a Roman Centurian which should have made him a prime candidate.  He's had his face scanned.  I second his campaign.  Centurian Rory limited edition by next Christmas please.

There’s also his daughter’s hasty marriage, another example, like River’s parentage, of Moffat deliberately not flouting our expectations and carrying on with whatever he’d been hinting, marrying and then killing the good man (almost). In these scenes Alex Kingston neatly captures a River in transition, still experiencing some of Melody’s psychosis but also utterly in love with Doctor. Not quite matured and contrasted nicely by the older version who pops in at that climax to see Amy, now well versed with the none-linearity of their family ties (explaining also why River paused in A Good Man Goes To War, remembering to say Rory, instead of simply, Dad).

Yet the character still doesn’t feel parked. Her diary is filled with pages covered with adventures, and although we know who she is now, it's unlikely this will be the last we see of her. She’s the Brigadier, Iris Wildthyme and indeed Captain Jack of the Moffat era, popping into the Doctor’s story when he needs a hand or simply being infuriated. We still don’t know the details of her incarceration. If she’s so good with that lipstick she can run a train through the pyramids with the agreement of Cleopatra, how and why did she let herself be captured? To suit causality? Her attempt to save the Doctor leading to the destruction of the time having taught her a valuable lesson?

She’ll be back even if we’ll never really know what goes on in the evenings. The climax resembles The Parting of the Ways, a kiss saving a companion (at least on an personal level) and the universe, also continuing the love conquers all theme of this series becoming literally all. Is employ the Testicle a cop out after all that build up? I’m not sure. In the vein of so much else in this past couple of series, when we rewatch episodes again, it’ll be with a different understanding of events and it’ll certainly lessen the impact of watching the Doctor being shot in The Impossible Astronaut and make Amy’s cries seem all the more cruel.

But it isn’t a deus ex machina, it is the Doctor taking advantage of what’s available to cheat death, or at the very least give the web of time (and in that moment The Silents etc) what it craves. It is also another example of the Moffat time paradox formula, of the Doctor utilising iinformation about his own future, in order to create that future. But that’s the brilliance of Moffat’s scripts. It prompts these questions, as in Let’s Kill Hitler, about narrative construction and plausibility.  Nevertheless, it’d be nice to see something new in the next series, for the story arc not to be about that.

As with last year, questions are left hanging, and in this case the one question which has been so fundamental to the series, it’s in the title and again, not shocking anyone in its content. I don’t think. Doctor who? Spin-off writers have offered their own answers, with talks of looms and The Other and whatnot even producing alternative origins when required, but Moffat’s having none of that. Time can be rewritten and he has become a good man going to war against the Cartmel Masterplan. Dare he really offer the answer, the ultimate answer? Given that the next series begins next autumn and may finish in 2013, the Doctor’s 50th, he might just. Ooh.

Season Six has been another vintage year and another which  has taken risks with the format. The gap in the middle was a brave move but one which, thanks to the experimental nature of this back six has paid off. The Doctor’s Wife was the stand out episode, with the Curse of the Black Spot the disappointment, but none of them have been awful, even that had Amy dressed as a pirate. “Hello Amy. I like your sword … I …” Sorry, again. It’s going to be hellish long Who free year through to next autumn (barring Christmas) with no more Sarah Jane and Torchwood looking doubtful. I might have to resort to watching K9. Checks Amazon. How much?