‘Doctor Who’ Season 5 Episode 9 ‘Cold Blood’ Recap
Last week’s first-parter episode was a set-up for this week’s, which in turn ended up being a bit of a paint-by-numbers adventure for the Doctor and his friends. In fact, plot-wise the episode was reminiscent of the first time the Doctor encountered the Silurians back when he was Jon Pertwee. Fortunately, the ending had a bit of a twist that made it interesting. But I’ll go into that after the jump.
When you think about it, it makes sense that there are different types of Silurians (or “Homo Reptilia” which might be their formal name). After all, there are many different races of humans.
I start the spoilerific review with a minor quibble: it seemed somewhat inconsistent with the character for the Silurian scientist Malohkeh to thrill at vivisecting humans in the beginning and then suddenly be among their ardent supporters at the end. I’m just saying.
And what a twist ending that was, eh? The Doctor has lost traveling companions before but never quite in the fashion in which they’re erased from history. Rory was the first companion to go since Adric (or possibly Peri, but that was later retconned by a concerned producer). His erasure does suddenly put that appearance by future Rory and Amy in perspective (which seemed silly taken in the context of the first part episode alone).
Mind you, Arthur Darvill is scheduled to appear in the final two episodes of the season, so it’s obvious that we’re not seeing the full repercussions of getting absorbed by the crack in time. Perhaps absorbed beings get sent to Purgatory, kind of like in ‘Lost.’
And then there was the second piece of the twist ending in which apparently either the TARDIS is responsible for the crack in time or is destroyed as a result of it. Oddly enough, I can’t wait for the Pandorica to open and silence to fall.
It’s nice that the Doctor could act as an arbitrator of peace this time around rather than try to destroy one bellicose species on behalf of another. If only the Daleks or Cybermen were as cooperative. Mind you, then the series would be a bit more boring.
Since when did Amy become a pickpocket? Granted when the Doctor first met her as an adult she was involved in the seedy world of Kiss-O-Grams, but I hate it when suddenly companions get new abilities that don’t make sense for the character (the Doctor, on the other hand, being ever-changing seems to get new abilities all the time).
It was fairly obvious that one of the humans were going to kill Alaya on the surface. Notice that the same actress played her and her sister Restac, leader of the Silurian army?
The celery mention by the Doctor was a nice callback to the Peter Davison Doctor, who wore a stick of celery on his lapel for its supposed restorative properties.
The episode was fun and retro and was an excellent example of how Steven Moffat is trying to forge his own version of ‘Doctor Who’ that is both respectful of history and progressive. What did you think of the episode?
Click here to watch Cold Blood episode online (HD)
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