Neil Gaiman made his Doctor Who debut this evening with an episode called “The Doctor’s Wife.”
It had plenty of Neil Gaiman hallmarks, but it also had the great distinction of being one of the better episodes of Doctor Who since its relaunch. At least in my humble opinion. When the Doctor and his companions, Amy and Rory, intercept a distress call from what could be a living Timelord, they go to investigate at top speed. It doesn’t matter that the distress call came from outside the known universe.
They land in a junkyard, the stopping drain of the galaxy, where an unknown entity has sucked the soul out of the TARDIS and put it inside the body of a woman.
Perhaps some of the best interactions in this entire episode, maybe even the season so far, are between The Doctor and the human female form of the TARDIS (who is named Sexy, apparently.) They are so revealing of the Doctor and his past (not just his recent past, but his origins from the beginning) that I was a little shocked to hear what I was hearing. Gaiman and Moffat managed to reveal new dimensions to the Doctor’s origin that I didn’t think were possible. It really makes you wonder. He also talked at length about his killing of the Timelords and his desire to seek out any of those that were potentially living that might be on the side of good.
This episode also lays to rest once and for all (until something else catches our eye) the idea that Paul McGann will be returning as the Eighth Doctor this season. I really loved the theory that our own Shaz-Bot came up with, and I would love to see something with the most recent incarnations of the Doctor coming together, but sadly I doubt it. Seriously though, could you imagine a team up between Doctor’s 8 through 11? That would be a crisis of epic proportions that would need to be solved.
This episode also gave us a couple of tantalizing teases into the future of the show, the most notable being the reference to a River in the forest (River Song? Most likely, but would they give us something so obvious?)
It was also really great to see an Ood back on the show. I’ve missed them and this one was no less or more creepy than the others featured in the series to date. And am I the only one who thinks that since the transition to Matt Smith the references to the past seasons have been less and less? In any case, I’m glad to see an Ood back.
What it all boils down to is that Neil Gaiman should be writing more episodes, Moffat is a very capable showrunner for Doctor Who, and something tells me that I’m going to be extremely pissed during the mid-season break after the cliffhanger we’re going to be left with.
And you all really need to be telling your friends to be watching this show. This is some of the best science fiction on television, not just now, but some of the best that I’ve ever seen.