Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Curse of the Black Spot" and "The Doctor's Wife"

The Curse of the Black Spot

• ·      Well, all good runs have to end sometime. This episode is visibly weak in a way the previous seven episodes, all of which range from very good to outright classics, simply aren’t. It’s probably the weakest episode of the Moffat Era so far.
• ·      Let’s be nice, too: there are some moments (mostly in the first five minutes) where the episode has fun with the concept of “Doctor Who meets pirates”, and we get some of the swashbuckling fun this should imply, with the Doctor making fun of the genre appropriate pirate laughs as he walks the plank, and Amy gets to have fun with a pirate costume and sword. But mostly “The Doctor and his companion(s) have fun in a story openly designed to be a storybook historical romp” is done better in later stories, like “Robot of Sherwood”.
• ·      Also lovely is the scene where the Doctor and Avery are on deck together, and the Doctor talks to Avery about the value of finding someone to share adventures with: it’s a scene that isn’t often mentioned, but achieves genuine emotional nuance and subtlety, and would give a lot more weight to a better structured and produced episode.
• ·      So, now the obvious review stuff’s out of the way, let’s dig into themes.
• ·      The central themes of the story revolve around mirrors and reflection, which ties into the Moffat era’s exploration of sight and perception, and can be linked to the Doctor’s “ignore all my previous theories” riff that runs throughout the story. He keeps missing things he should see over the course of the episode, but the constant revising of his theories, the willingness to theorise and make mistakes, is what leads to the Doctor understanding the true nature of the Siren and the story.
• ·      These themes are also interestingly explored when we reach the parallel dimension ship: a genuinely neat and inventive concept, albeit one that could have worked a lot better than it actually does. The parallel dimension ship is a mirror to the pirate ship, an abandoned wreck, drifting aimlessly, becalmed. And the Siren is a Doctor, trying to heal her patients, which makes her, on some level, a mirror to the Doctor. There’s little more I can get out of this, but there are probably some interesting thoughts to found about the symbols, images and concepts that this story offers, even if they’re a difficult mess to unpack, due to the fact that this is, ultimately, a weak episode.

The Doctor’s Wife

• ·      This is brilliant. We all know this episode is brilliant. A welcome and rapid turn back to brilliance after the disappointment of “Curse of the Black Spot”.
• ·      Once again, we get a big name writer writing for the Moffat era: this time, someone who, Unlike Nye and Curtis, is a big fan of Doctor Who. The concept is basically “Doctor Who meets a Neil Gaiman story”: all the big ideas unashamedly come from the kind of “patchwork steampunk” aesthetic that defines all Neil Gaiman stories, “Neil Gaiman stories” practically being a genre in and of themselves. 
• ·      Before we get to the most talked about part of the episode, let’s look at Amy and Rory’s storyline, which makes great use of their characters, and provides us with some of their best character development. Rory being a nurse is well integrated into the story here, as he gets some scenes tht show him caring for the dying Idris, and him acknowledging the way this affects him at the end of the story, while Amy’s natural intuition is well employed when she figures out how to use the TARDIS telepathic circuits to get into the RTD era console room: both characters get individual moments to sign that suit them specifically. Most significantly, their relationship is also well explored, with the scenes of House playing with their minds as they run through the TARDIS corridors exploting the underlying tension of Rory waiting 2000 years for Amy in “The Big Bang”, as we are given a twisted-mirror version of this, where Amy sees Rory being lost and alone without her for thousands of years, until he ages to death. It’s a parallel to “The Big Bang” that shows the fairytale relationship and life these two characters share going horribly wrong, a theme that will continue to unfold over the course of the season.
• ·      And I love that the episode’s main selling point is “A feminist twist on the Doctor/ TARDIS relationship”, quietly but brilliantly reinventing the origin story of the Doctor and the TARDIS in a way that gives the female TARDIS just as much agency and autonomy as the Doctor in their adventures in time and space, neatly altering the way we understand the series.
• ·      This is best explored in the exchange the Doctor and the TARDIS have after Amy and Rory are kidnapped by House: “You stole me. And I stole you.”/ “I borrowed you”/ “Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?”. The line “I always took you where you needed to go” is a wonderful moment, and probably the most commonly quoted scene in the episode, but the former quote is my favourite of the Doctor/ TARDIS interactions in the episode, and neatly sums up the subversion at the heart of its portrayal of the relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS. “You stole me. And I stole you” is a statement that places the TARDIS as the Doctor’s equal, his partner. “Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken” carries a lovely double meaning, refuting the Doctor’s claim that he didn’t steal the TARDIS, while also misdirecting, leading the Doctor and the audience to assume she is talking about his act of theft, when in fact she is talking about her own. The final sentence confirms this, completing the subversion of expectations and bringing the brief exchange full circle. They are partners, equals in their wanderlust-filled adventures throughout the universe. He stole her. She stole him.