I had a lot of expectations for this episode, partially because I love plays and movies that take place in a single location, and partially because the idea of exploring the ever-growing God Complex of the Doctor is long overdue. I’m not going to say I disliked this episode, because it was fun and interesting, but it definitely fell short in a lot of ways.
This episode was really about the Doctor and his relationships with people, most commonly humans he chooses as companions. Rory’s been talking about this for a while (Vampires of Venice: “You don’t realize how dangerous you make people to themselves when you’re around!”), and we got to see the Doctor reflect briefly on it during Let’s Kill Hitler a few episodes ago (“Guilt! More guilt!”), but this episode is really when the Doctor finally recognizes his own God complex. It was set up beautifully, but unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-climax.
First, the monster. What? A weird, fake-looking minotaur? I mean, people made more convincing looking monsters in the 30s. Geez. I get that the “real” monster in this episode was the Doctor (and his trusty God complex), but still. The minotaur needed some work. And speaking of work, hot diggity was it easy to defeat him. All they had to do was convince Amy that the Doctor was kind of a jerk and everything would be fine.
Speaking of that. The entire time, I couldn’t help but think, Doesn’t Amy realize that by convincing her to lose her faith in him, the Doctor is saving all their lives, thus justifying the same faith he’s trying to take away? And then, after the fact, no one seems worse for the wear. There is no obvious change in Amy’s behavior towards the Doctor at all, it’s like it never even happened.
It was also rather abrupt when the Doctor just dropped them off. I didn’t really see it coming and there wasn’t enough build up to it, it was just sort of random. I don’t know, it just didn’t really work for me as an ending.
My prediction for the rest of the season is that this “God complex” of the Doctor’s will play a huge role in the season finale/ silence will fall arc. It’s kind of been an unspoken theme since Matt Smith started on the show, so now that it’s in the forefront, I assume they’ll run it through.
