The old woman recognizes him, somehow, which embarrasses Amy for reasons we don't know yet, and the Doctor asks her exactly WTF a kissogram is. "I go to parties and I kiss people. With outfits. It's a laugh." He's horrified in a particularly hilarious way -- "You were a little girl five minutes ago!" -- and she tells him he's worse than Aunt Sharon. He's got, this Smith kid, he's got a really nice, sparkly young-old thing going on. He can go from four to forty with one wiggle of his rubber face: "I'm the Doctor, I'm worse than everybody's aunt," he shouts, appalled, and rethinks: "And that is... Not how I'm introducing myself."
On the radio, they're talking about Zero in French and German, meaning they're sending the message to the whole world -- which the Doctor realizes is "the human residence" in question, and that we're all going to die in about twenty minutes. Of course, it's hard to listen to the annoying amount of nothing that he's saying to explain all of this, because a tall sexy drink of water just walked in carrying a laptop -- Jeff, the grandson of the old lady who's house we've decided to hang out in -- and Eleven is all over that shit. Jeff is shocked, but not so much by the hot/alien invasion of his personal space: He recognizes the Doctor too, by name. Which is impossible.
"Are you the Doctor? He is, isn't he? He's the Doctor! The Raggedy Doctor. All those cartoons you did, when you were little. The Raggedy Doctor, it's him!" Amy gets more and more embarrassed, finally screaming at Jeff to shut up, but the old lady finally gets it too: The Raggedy Doctor. Who is explaining that the planet is about to be destroyed, by a million giant eyeball Christmas stars far above the clouds, if Prisoner Zero doesn't vacate "the human residence."
He leads Amy through the city, tottering on her pins, trying to come up with a solution. "What is this place? Where am I?" Leadworth, a half-hour's drive out of Gloucester, too tiny for an airport or even "a little" nuclear power station. All he's got is a post office, which is closed right now, and not even a car. There's a duckpond, which catches his eye just like Amelia Pond did twelve years ago. "Why aren't there any ducks?" There never have been. And so then what makes it a duckpond? She asks why any of this matters, and he reminds her that he's still not done cooking and he's not ready to save the world this time. You feel for him. I thought this season was going to be about the Time Lords, like, cute boy Doctor and cute girl Companion v. mean old men, but there's a whiff of that here, this cute boy Doctor on his first time out wishing he had more time and more toys to use. His very real panic, as his body continues to thwart him.













Comments