• This is a Massive, “Everything including the kitchen sink” episode that takes a ton of disparate elements – Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, An Egyptian queen, A big Game Hunter, Rory’s Dad, The Indian Space Agency, multiple big name guest stars (Mark Williams, David Bradley, Mitchell and Webb, Rupert Graves) – and throws them into 45 minutes of television. To its credit, it makes these elements work together in an impressively condensed piece of storytelling.
• The approach to the episode isn’t without its faults, however. There is an uncomfortable edge to the story, that I suspect comes from the way disparate elements – Doctor being friends with a game hunter isn’t something I particularly like– yes, Riddel’s profession is questioned by Amy, but he’s mostly played as a charming jerk and why is the Doctor friends with him in the first place? More significantly, the episode’s villain is a greedy, money loving trader with a Jewish name – who also happens to be disabled (although this is hardly the first Doctor Who story to code disability as evil). And then there are moments like Solomon threatening to rape Nefertiti which is less problematic (although it does, as critics have pointed out, further code Solomon as a Jewish stereotype and push the anti-Semitic thread of the episode further by having his threats be directed at an Egyptian queen), as depiction does not equal endorsement, and the episode makes space to give Nefertiti agency in her capture and her rescue, and is more a case of pushing the wild swings in tone – which mostly work for the episode – a little too far.
• This does lead us to the aspects that are meant to be uncomfortable, and do, in their own way, work. Solomon’s genuinely loathesome nature, seen in moments like his casual description of his callous massacre of the Silurians, or the moment where he orders the Robots to hurt Brian, is carefully built into his initial confrontation with the Doctor (some of Matt Smith’s best acting), and steadily escalates to point where the Doctor killing Solomon in cold blood feeling like a natural culmination of the episode’s storyline. It’s a wonderfully perverse take on the “wacky romp” genre of Doctor Who.
• Once again, Chibnall does an excellent job with the TARDIS team. Rory gets a storyline where he learns to connect with his father, Amy gets to have her own go at being Doctor-like with flirting companions (and Karen Gillan is visibly having a ton of fun with her material in this episode), fangirl over Nefertiti, and confront the Doctor about the gaps between his visits, and the Doctor sways between the most eccentric and the darkest sides of his nature in a very natural way. In his last script, Chibnall wrote good material for all the regulars, but it felt like there were gaps in that, such as Amy’s extended period of being captured in “The Hungry Earth”. Here, he balances their material out with aplomb, such that no one is lacking a good scene for long.
• Also significant is the way Chibnall continues to mediate the return of the everyday aesthetic to Doctor Who, bringing in the tension between Amy and Rory’s Domestic life and their Doctor life, which will come to the fore in his next script. This tension is explored first through this exchange between the Doctor and Amy:
“AMY: What are you doing?
DOCTOR: Mixing my messages. How's the job?
AMY: We're about to be hit by missiles and you're asking me that?
DOCTOR: I work best when I'm multitasking. Keep talking. How's the job?
AMY: I gave it up.
DOCTOR: You gave the last one up.
AMY: Yeah, well, I can't settle. Every minute I'm listening out for that stupid Tardis sound.
DOCTOR: Right, so it's my fault now, is it?
AMY: I can't not wait for you, even now. And they're getting longer, you know, the gaps between your visits. I think you're weaning us off you.
DOCTOR: I'm not, I promise. Really promise. The others, yeah, but not you. Rory and you, you have lives, have each other. I thought that's what we agreed.
AMY: I know. I just worry there'll come a time when you never turn up. That something will have happened to you and I'll still be waiting, never knowing.”
Complaints about Amy’s job changing throughout series seven being a sign of the show not paying attention to Amy’s characterisation do seem to miss the point of Amy’s job changing, a point that is addressed directly in text, right here. She’s struggling to settle in her home life because of her continued ties to her Doctor life, and resolving the tension between the two lives will be key to the rest of her character arc.
• But perhaps the biggest representative of the domestic in Series 7A is Brian. It’s worth unpacking why this is the case, from a thematic perspective instead of the more obvious Doylist reason: the production team saw a chance to have Mark Williams play Rory’s Dad, a perfect piece of casting that wasn’t feasible for a longer period of time due to Williams’ busy schedule, so he was brought in to play the role late on in Amy and Rory’s time on the show. But why bring him in so late on, instead of bringing back, say, Amy’s parents? It’s worth considering what role Brian plays in Amy and Rory's story, and comparing that to Amy’s parents. Amy’s lost parents were symbolic of the trauma represented by the crack in her wall, and their restoration was representative of her healing and restoration from that trauma. In Series five, Rory was representative of the domestic side of Amy’s life, but that is less simplistically the case now, as Rory is a settled part of the TARDIS crew who also enjoys adventures in Space and Time. But as the discussion between Amy and the Doctor addresses, there is still a tension between the domestic and fairy tale aspects of Amy’s life. Enter Brian, whose basic character description is “Rory, but less adaptable to Doctor Who’s narrative”. His role in the script is to embody “real life”. And the script visibly sympathises with and values the life Brian represents: this is not a simplistic “Doctor life frees companions from the drudgery of real life” narrative. And Brian isn’t simplistically hostile to what the Doctor’s world represents: he embraces the adventure provided after the initial culture shock provided by spaceships and teleports, being exhilarated riding round a spaceship on a triceratops, and choosing to go and see the world at the end of the episode. This episode is not suggesting that real life and Doctor life are antithetical to one another, but is establishing the season as being about negotiating the tensions between these two worlds.
• By the end of the episode, the most striking thing is its sheer bizarreness, as we switch between tones with an impressive rapidity, even for Doctor Who. We thrill at dinosaurs on a spaceship, then grieve for the death of an adorable triceratops, are disgusted by Solomon, but feel unnerved by the Doctor’s response to him, and are then moved by the image of Brian drinking a cup of tea while looking at Earth from afar as his legs dangle over the edge of the TARDIS. It is to the episode’s credit that all these elements carry such potency, and that most of these switches in tone work effectively, cohering to create an episode that has a lot going on for an “early season romp”.
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