Doctor Who: The Power of Three Review

It's a metaphor, you see.

Spoilers Follow.

The Ponds are on their way out the door, and this episode was the set-up for that; so, as Amy and Rory are beginning to question whether or not they should keep going on these random trips with the Doctor whenever he feels like popping in, billions of small black cubes fall from the sky and do... nothing. At first, anyway. Over the course of the year, as the mystery begins to unfold, we start to see just what kind of impact the Doctor has on his friends lives.

So, how was this episode? Mostly good. Don't get the wrong idea from that, though; the cube mystery was cool, and I thought the episode did a great job of showing just what people would actually do in this situation: panic, test them, take them home, take them for granted, and then forget all about them. And I gotta say, as an alien invasion strategy, it's actually sort of brilliant. UNIT's return was more then welcomed this week as the people who are trying to figure out what the hell's going on with all this, especially the head of operations once you find out she's the Brigadier's daughter. That's right, a little Lethbridge-Stewart. (They never do actually say "Brigadier", though).

For the most part, though, this was an emotional episode, and it strikes a real chord with that. We see how the Ponds keep trying to move on with their lives, but it just never works. We see how they've grown as people, and we see the Doctor finally explain that he's not running away from anything, he's running towards everything. It was heart-wrenching, and we weren't even supposed to get that until next week. On lighter notes, my theories that the Doctor has a cosmic case of ADHD are finally confirmed, and Brian becomes the best companion the Doctor never had, waiting in the TARDIS console staring at cubes for 4 straight days without so much as a bathroom break. He does what the Doctor tells him to, and lets face it, not many companions can really make that claim.

As far as negatives this week went, the biggest one was the big reveal behind the invasion. The villain, who looked suspiciously like Darth Vader with his helmet off, was pretty undercooked, and you just weren't very effected by him. That's probably a result of the episode being a bit rushed in places. There were other little things too (what was up with the nurses, bit disjointed in places), but that was the big one.

On a totally unrelated not, the vortex in the intro keeps getting darker. Could that be a way of showing that the Doctor is going all dark again, which he kind of is?

Final Rating: 84%