Half-Mooning: The Woman Who Lived
If immortality is outlawed, then only outlaws will have immortality.
Well, this episode was definitely a sight better than last week's, although last week's didn't exactly set the bar very high.
It opens with a very girly-looking highway robber with a deep voice stopping a carriage and demanding their loot. At the same time, the Doctor appears, also tracking loot. He gets in the way of the robbery and the carriage escapes, where the male-voiced highway robber reveals himself to be a girl. Not only that, but she's the Viking girl from the previous episode.
She's become immortal, as suspected, and has decided she has nothing better to do than be a robber. She's taken on the name "Me", because when you live for hundreds of years, I guess there comes a point where Dad Jokes actually become poignant. "I am me!" "Hi, Me, I'm Dad!"
Me is happy the Doctor finally came back for her to take her with him, but he admits he hadn't been looking for her, it was just coincidence. She takes him back to her residence and admits that living for hundreds of years while maintaining a human's memory capacity means that she eventually starts to forget things, like her original name or circumstances. She's done all sorts of things and been a part of a lot of points in history, and even got so good at a bow that she could fire six arrows a minute.
While I'm sure she meant "six arrows a second"... how was this error not caught? Did the script writer write it wrong? Did the actress mess up her line and the director never caught it? Did the editor use the wrong take? Because with this one, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that someone along the line in production dropped the ball on this one, because I refuse to believe the "did not do the research" levels of this show are THAT bad.
The Doctor and Me join grammatically-questionable forces and go looking for the treasure that they'd both been after before, which was apparently an alien artifact. They sneak into the house and act way more stealthily than it seems like they'd need to for a house full of people who can be standing in the middle of a foyer and not notice giant double-doors closing because the people closing the doors are out of their sight.
They escape the house and then run into another thief in the woods. Me for some reason has given up using her man voice and continues to just be female, and no one really seems to notice. Probably because the thief is inept. What is he here for, again?
Me and the Doctor go back home, where the Beast from the 1987 "Beauty and the Beast" TV series shows up. Either that or the writers have just mixed up their "Robin Hood" renditions and ended up with one of the characters being a lion man. Me tells the Doctor that if the Doctor won't take her with him, she'll just get herself some pussy instead. They're going to use the alien artifact to open a portal and escape to another dimension, but they need someone to die to activate it. ... So, are we really going with the whole 90's-era Dragon Ball censorship where death was "another dimension"?
That random thief guy from earlier is getting executed, so hey, he has some use after all. Me and her lion go to harness his other-dimensional energy to open the portal, but it turns out the portal was to bring an invasion of lions to earth. Me suddenly decides she gives a damn about what happens to the earth because it's where she keeps all her stuff, and she and the Doctor figure out that the thief guy dying is what opened the dimensional portal, so they make a wish on the Dragon Balls to bring him back to this dimension. The portal closes and the lion guy just kind of vanishes because he didn't need to be in the story anymore. Out like a lamb.
The Doctor tells Me that he can't take her with him because being immortal means you lose perspective, and it's counterproductive to keep company with people who are similarly perspective-less. He needs mortals to keep him grounded.
THANK YOU FOR SOMEONE FINALLY GETTING THIS.
Anyway, they comment that the thief guy is probably immortal now, too, but, meh, no one cares about him. The Doctor mentions Jack (?!) and tells Me to look him up in a few centuries.
The Doctor goes and picks up Clara, who is now back on the clock because writing two female characters at a time is too hard.
Next time, Osgood isn't dead because of course she isn't.
This episode definitely had better focus than last week's, but it suffered mostly because last week's episode characterized the Viking girl so poorly that all comments in this episode of "I know what you used to be like!" kind of fell flat because she didn't really used to "be like" anything. She was just kinda there. But I did appreciate it delving into the consequences of immortality and what it can do to a person, although somewhat clunkily due to the aforementioned lack of a decent "before" when looking at the "after". And finally someone acknowledges why the Doctor has companions, and not in the Moffat-like way of making an assertion and then everyone's actions blatantly contradicting it, but showing the consequences of it, too.
Well, this episode was definitely a sight better than last week's, although last week's didn't exactly set the bar very high.
It opens with a very girly-looking highway robber with a deep voice stopping a carriage and demanding their loot. At the same time, the Doctor appears, also tracking loot. He gets in the way of the robbery and the carriage escapes, where the male-voiced highway robber reveals himself to be a girl. Not only that, but she's the Viking girl from the previous episode.
She's become immortal, as suspected, and has decided she has nothing better to do than be a robber. She's taken on the name "Me", because when you live for hundreds of years, I guess there comes a point where Dad Jokes actually become poignant. "I am me!" "Hi, Me, I'm Dad!"
Me is happy the Doctor finally came back for her to take her with him, but he admits he hadn't been looking for her, it was just coincidence. She takes him back to her residence and admits that living for hundreds of years while maintaining a human's memory capacity means that she eventually starts to forget things, like her original name or circumstances. She's done all sorts of things and been a part of a lot of points in history, and even got so good at a bow that she could fire six arrows a minute.
While I'm sure she meant "six arrows a second"... how was this error not caught? Did the script writer write it wrong? Did the actress mess up her line and the director never caught it? Did the editor use the wrong take? Because with this one, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that someone along the line in production dropped the ball on this one, because I refuse to believe the "did not do the research" levels of this show are THAT bad.
The Doctor and Me join grammatically-questionable forces and go looking for the treasure that they'd both been after before, which was apparently an alien artifact. They sneak into the house and act way more stealthily than it seems like they'd need to for a house full of people who can be standing in the middle of a foyer and not notice giant double-doors closing because the people closing the doors are out of their sight.
They escape the house and then run into another thief in the woods. Me for some reason has given up using her man voice and continues to just be female, and no one really seems to notice. Probably because the thief is inept. What is he here for, again?
Me and the Doctor go back home, where the Beast from the 1987 "Beauty and the Beast" TV series shows up. Either that or the writers have just mixed up their "Robin Hood" renditions and ended up with one of the characters being a lion man. Me tells the Doctor that if the Doctor won't take her with him, she'll just get herself some pussy instead. They're going to use the alien artifact to open a portal and escape to another dimension, but they need someone to die to activate it. ... So, are we really going with the whole 90's-era Dragon Ball censorship where death was "another dimension"?
That random thief guy from earlier is getting executed, so hey, he has some use after all. Me and her lion go to harness his other-dimensional energy to open the portal, but it turns out the portal was to bring an invasion of lions to earth. Me suddenly decides she gives a damn about what happens to the earth because it's where she keeps all her stuff, and she and the Doctor figure out that the thief guy dying is what opened the dimensional portal, so they make a wish on the Dragon Balls to bring him back to this dimension. The portal closes and the lion guy just kind of vanishes because he didn't need to be in the story anymore. Out like a lamb.
The Doctor tells Me that he can't take her with him because being immortal means you lose perspective, and it's counterproductive to keep company with people who are similarly perspective-less. He needs mortals to keep him grounded.
THANK YOU FOR SOMEONE FINALLY GETTING THIS.
Anyway, they comment that the thief guy is probably immortal now, too, but, meh, no one cares about him. The Doctor mentions Jack (?!) and tells Me to look him up in a few centuries.
The Doctor goes and picks up Clara, who is now back on the clock because writing two female characters at a time is too hard.
Next time, Osgood isn't dead because of course she isn't.
This episode definitely had better focus than last week's, but it suffered mostly because last week's episode characterized the Viking girl so poorly that all comments in this episode of "I know what you used to be like!" kind of fell flat because she didn't really used to "be like" anything. She was just kinda there. But I did appreciate it delving into the consequences of immortality and what it can do to a person, although somewhat clunkily due to the aforementioned lack of a decent "before" when looking at the "after". And finally someone acknowledges why the Doctor has companions, and not in the Moffat-like way of making an assertion and then everyone's actions blatantly contradicting it, but showing the consequences of it, too.