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

So then -- because no, we're not done with concepts yet -- whenever you're sixteen you get a look at a video that tells you about this bullshit with the Space Whale, and you choose to Forget about it or else blah-blah political action now. But also, Liz 10 is Elizabeth the Tenth, naturally, and is stuck in a ten-year cycle of forgetting that she made all of these robots and videos and buttons and whoozits and hownows for no real reason whatsoever, and has basically been V For Vendettaing her own regime and annoying all of her aides and helpers and half-Smiler/half-Winder whatevers.

Oh, and I totally left out the vomit. There's about thirty minutes in the middle where it's just vomit.

So Amy, being a citizen of the UK even if it was over a thousand years ago, gets a look at the video, and realizes that she can't let the Doctor find out about this, because he'll have to choose between the Space Whale and the people who are brutalizing it, so she wipes her own memory and makes a needlessly foreboding message for herself about getting him off the ship. This doesn't sit right with him, and he threatens to take her home after he's done solving this one, but then Amy pushes a button that makes everything all right again -- literally, this happens -- and she says that he's just like the Space Whale, because he's alien but also old and nice.

Apparently thinking he can't hear her, Amy explains this parallel six more times in a row, almost verbatim, and he hugs her I guess to shut her up, and then Churchill calls them on the phone because what we need is some fucking Daleks. But given the way this season is going, the Daleks will probably be a carnival family with a secret having to do with their shadows being alive and there will be a mysterious message about them from the future sent to the past on a haunted VCR and the point won't even be the Daleks or the War or anything because there doesn't seem to be a point to anything right now, just childish retarded bullshit happening and then the show screaming THIS IS VERY MEANINGFUL right in your face.