ANDREW'S
DOCTOR WHO REVIEWS 
This is one of those Doctor Who stories you either love or
loathe. I can see it has some issues, but I generally enjoy it – if nothing
else for the magnificent interplay between Matt Smith and Suranne Jones as
Idris. Once again, the weak link is Amy and Rory, sidelined in the TARDIS and
Rory dying yet again.
The TARDIS receives a distress call from an old Time Lord
friend of the Doctor called the Corsair. It is coming from an asteroid outside
of the known universe. The Doctor doesn’t find the Corsair, but an Ood known as
Nephew (Paul Casey), an odd bickering couple Uncle (Adrian Schiller) and Auntie
(Elizabeth Berrington). As soon as the TARDIS arrives its matrix shuts down and
is placed into a woman called Idris (Suranne Jones). The asteroid is a sentient
being known as House (voiced by Michael Sheen) who has been luring Time Lords
here for centuries and absorbing them and using spare parts to build Auntie and
Uncle. The Doctor tells House that he is the last Time Lord, so House transfers
its consciousness into the TARDIS and disappears from the asteroid with Amy and
Rory onboard.
The Doctor learns that Idris has the TARDIS’ personality
inside her and together they use House’s scrapyard of broken TARDIS parts to
build a time machine to follow the Doctor’s TARDIS back into the Universe.
Aboard the TARDIS House has been playing mind games with Amy and Rory, trying
to get full control of the ship.
When the Doctor and Idris arrive she begins to die and releases
the TARDIS’ matrix back into its rightful place which kills House. Before her
body disappears Idris, as the TARDIS, tells the Doctor she will no longer be
able to talk to him, but she will always be there for him.
This is one of those stories that lives or dies on the
acting of the main characters and all involved perform brilliantly. It is a
really off-kilter and strange – Auntie and Uncle are the sort of creations that
Robert Holmes would have been proud of – and Suranne Jones is crazy,
magnificent and in the end rather sad as Idris, the woman instilled with the
essence of the TARDIS.
It does, at times, stray into mawkishness (especially at the end), and is one of the
first occasions where we see Matt Smith’s hang-dog expression is pushed into
outright misery which we will see a little too often over the coming seasons.
Matt Smith is fully-fledged now as the Doctor, confident in
his own performance and carving out his own niche and fan base. David Tennant
was always going to be a hard act to follow but by this point Matt was making
his mark in no uncertain terms.
However, all the best bits of this story are the ones that
don’t feature Amy and Rory, Doctor Who’s oddest couple who seem to hate each
other apart from when one or the other is dying when they suddenly become the
ultimate clingy couple. They just feel odd to me, but I know others love them,
so it’s all down to personal taste I guess.
All in all, a weird but generally enjoyable story that has
the ability to divide fandom to this day.
NEXT UP: THE REBEL FLESH / THE ALMOST PEOPLE
© Text copyright - Raving Loony
Productions and
Andrew J. Müller,
Roy Barton
and Shaun Runham
© Photos and Artwork - Andrew J. Müller
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2022
