Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Vampires of Venice" and "Amy's Choice"

Vampires of Venice

•         A solid episode, not a memorable one, but with plenty of good stuff going for it, and this is coming from someone who’s not a huge fan of Toby Whithouse’s episodes. 
•       There's a lovely lush visual texture afforded by the overseas filming, the production for this story is generally very assured: the cast and crew are beginning to consistently hit top form.
•       The Smith era is starting to emerge fully now: the cake scene is pure Smith’s Doctor in a way that very little, apart from “The Eleventh Hour” (particularly the fish custard scene) has been until this point.
•       The start of the departures from the Davies era season structure are becoming increasingly evident here. This time, the subversion is explored through the episode’s use of Rory, and the way the episode responds to Amy coming on to the Doctor at the end of “Flesh and Stone”. Ultimately the episode becomes about Amy making things right with Rory, and Rory being accepted as a member of the TARDIS crew – this could seem crass, a story about the Doctor and Rory deciding what’s right for Amy, but the episode and the rest of the season avoid making it that story, and instead find a better one, about Amy finding a way to integrate her Doctor life and her home life, while Doctor Who as a show starts to treat Rory with respect, and starts to value the domesticity he represents, rather than treat it as a trap, or something stifling. 

Amy’s Choice

•  Let’s start with a quick look at Simon Nye. He’s guest writer of some repute, having created “Men Behaving Badly”, something Moffat brings to the series about once a season throughout his era, getting episodes from Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman, Neil Cross, and Frank Cottrell Boyce. Moffat has even done the same, to a lesser extent, with directors, bringing Ben Wheatley in to direct Capaldi’s first two episodes, Rachel Talalay in to direct his first two finales, and has been teasing the possibility of an episode directed by Peter Jackson for some time. Yet in this instance, it’s hard to escape the sense that this episode has a heavy Steven Moffat influence, in spite of its writer’s reputation.
• That’s not to say Simon Nye didn’t write this episode: many of the jokes, such as Rory feeling conflicted about hitting an alien in the body of a sweet old lady, feel like they’ve come from the creator of “Men Behaving Badly”, and this has a different feel to “Forest of the Dead”, and “Last Christmas”, the Moffat episodes that most explicitly explore dream tropes. But the thematic concerns do have an underlying Steven Moffat feel to them.
• Either way, the mix of Moffat’s themes and Nye’s humour and writing style works nicely, giving us one of the smartest episodes of the season. This episode marks the start of the Moffat era’s critique and subversion of the common Doctor Who trope that suggests marriage and domesticity are antithetical to exciting adventures. The choice between exciting adventures with the Doctor and a peaceful life with Rory is revealed to be a false one: Amy can have both.
• Just an extra note: Toby Jones is a superb villain, playing the dream Lord with aplomb.