Doctor Who 6.03

[kivrin]

Amy in tricorn hat wielding a cutlass is awesome. That's... kind of the most worthwhile thing in the episode. The "sufficiently advanced medicine is indistinguishable from demonic activity" plot was a lot, a lot, a lot better when Nine had it, and as Rory died twice last season I think he should have a no-death clause this time around. Or at least he shouldn't die in obvious filler episodes in which obviously nothing serious will change.

sahiya mentioned that the author of this episode is the same one who wrote ep 2 of "Sherlock" (The Racefaily One) and looking back at "Curse of the Black Spot" with that knowledge helps me put a finger on why Eleven seemed out of character here. He was acting more like Sherlock and less like the Doctor. The gratuitous "oh you stupid fragile humans" stuff was something Nine might have said, but Nine would have at least held off for there to be a little more provocation.

This could have been a perfectly pleasant cracktastic-funtimes episode if the script had settled down a bit more. I guess the writer was going for "twisty" but ended up with "wandering and full of holes." If consumptive!kid thought his dad was a naval officer how did he find him on a pirate ship? (If you're going to work the Noble Kid trope, go all the way and give the kid TB, don't fob him off with a disease that doesn't have the spurious spiritual associations.) If Siren-Doctor Drusilla was created by space velociraptors, why does she look like Juliet Landau? If Siren-Doctor Drusilla can whip alien-to-her life forms into stasis for every hangnail, why couldn't she do that when the crew of her ship were getting sick with earth diseases? They could have done the reveal a lot earlier and had a much more interesting and fun story about seventeenth-century pirates becoming space pirates.

This episode being blah raises the already-high bar on the next episode into the stratosphere. Good thing high expectations haven't frozen Neil Gaiman yet.