#It's sad to see how relatively little attention this subject has gotten compared to others | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

serenlyss · 6 years ago

Text

For the Sake of a Smile Chapter One

Rating: G Relationships: Teru/Shigeo, Ritsu&Shigeo, Teru&Reigen, Shigeo&Reigen Summary: Hanazawa Teruki is seven years old when his parents leave him to wait on a fallen log in the middle of a lavender field for them to return. He’s seven years old when a boy his age saves him from drowning and reminds him that there’s still light left in the world. Hanazawa Teruki is sixteen years old when he leaves home for the first time in search of a boy whose appearance he can’t quite remember and whose name he never learned, a nine-year-old promise yet to be fulfilled. Now, as he sets his sights on the bustling Seasoning City, he’s determined to do things right this time around. Chapter Summery: "Cooking is at once child’s play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love." - Craig Claiborne The prologue chapter, basically. Crossposted to AO3: Chapter One

Chapter Two (coming soon!)

Hello all! I've had this idea on my mind for a while and now that I'm out of school for the rest of summer I decided I can finally post the first chapter! As the tags state this is an AU taking place in the Kitchen Princess universe, but will not include any characters or settings from Kitchen Princess, so you don't need to know anything about it to read this. Basically it's a cute and very cheesy romance manga I read when like 8 or 9 years ago in middle school that I've gone back to over time.

As far as updates go, I don't plan to follow any specific schedule for this fic. The chapters are going to be relatively short (around 2-3k words for the most part, which is short compared to my 5-6k normal chapter length lol) and will update as I write and edit them.

Anyway, that's enough notes for now! I hope you all enjoy this fic, if you do be sure to leave me your thoughts in a dm or reblog this to let me know you're interested in reading more.

---

“Teruki, sweetheart, wait for us here, alright? We’ll be back soon.”

Mother ruffles his hair, long and blond and curly around his ears. Her touch is static and her words drip with honey as she speaks empty reassurances to him. He’s seven years old, old enough to use the little knives in the kitchen drawer to make himself a sandwich without calling for help, old enough to recognize that something is wrong, very wrong.

“Where are you going?” he asks. “When will you come back?”

“Mommy and Daddy have some work to do,” Mother responds, and neither of his questions are answered. “I know you’ll do just fine, you’re so responsible.”

The praise would normally make him smile, make him puff out his chest with pride, but now it just serves to make his heart fall further into his stomach.

“We need to hurry,” Father reminds Mother, holding his watch out for her to look at. “At this rate, we’ll miss it and have to wait even longer.”

“Miss what?” he asks, desperation seeping into his voice. He can’t wrap his head around what’s happening. Mother looks away, distracted, and her face lights up in melodramatic surprise when she sees how late the hour is.

“Oh, dear, you’re right!” she exclaims, straightening up from where she’s kneeling beside him. “We can’t let that happen, can we?” She doesn’t answer his question, doesn’t elaborate on what they might miss if they don’t hurry. Father doesn’t even spare him a glance as he turns on his heel and begins to walk. Mother follows him, waving and calling her goodbyes over her shoulder.

He stays sitting on the little fallen log, because that’s where Mother told him to wait. They won’t be long, he tells himself, and then they would all catch their train back home and he’ll pretend the discomfort and apprehension weighing him down were never felt at all. Mother will praise him for being so patient and Father might even smile at him when he sees how obedient he’s been. Those thoughts keep him firmly rooted. He can’t disappoint Mother and Father.

Hours pass. Mother and Father don’t return. The sun starts to go down, and he knows they’ve long missed their train home. He sits and sits and sits until his backside is numb and his stomach starts to growl from not having eaten.

The sun is nearly setting when a stranger finally happens across his path. She’s a few years old than him, maybe twelve, with badly-cut black hair that nearly falls into her eyes and a sharp gaze that seems to know more than she lets on. She introduces herself as Tome and takes him by the hand, and her touch is much softer and more tender than Mother’s had ever been. She leads him to her house, which is filled with kids of many ages whose parents are all dead or forgotten. “I don’t belong here,” he tells them, “my parents told me they’d be right back.”

The sun has long set by the time it sinks into his seven-year-old brain that his parents won’t be coming back for him after all. He lays on his side on an old futon in a bedroom that is too crowded with other children his age and cries into the early hours of the morning.

---

Teru hardly eats or sleep for days after he’s officially accepted into the orphanage Tome lives at. It takes a week of him insisting that his parents will come back and get him, that they must have gotten stranded or held back by something important, before he finally stops trying to defend them. He’s known all along that his parents don’t care for him enough to look for him too hard, but the thought still sickens him enough that his sour stomach won’t take more than the bare minimum. He knows that the sisters who run the orphanage, good women who always treat him with kindness and an infuriating amount of caution, are worried about his health, but he doesn’t care.

He leaves the run-down little house for hours at a time without telling anyone where he’s going. Sometimes the sisters send Tome to find him and bring him back, and sometimes he goes back all on his own, if he’s feeling particularly welcoming.

He doesn’t dislike the orphanage. His caretakers are kind and attentive, and the other children treat him nicely enough. He doesn’t know most of their names, but at least Tome doesn’t treat him like he might shatter if they don’t watch their words around him. Everyone knows he’s been abandoned, and while Tome knows the subject is forbidden, it doesn’t stop her from teasing him and sticking up for him and playing games with him as though she’s his own sister. It doesn’t make him want to stay in the house any more, but he appreciates it nonetheless.

One warm afternoon, Teru leaves the house like he always does, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pants. His jeans are cheap and the dye is faded, handed down from an older kid who’d grown out of them. They’re not at all like the expensive ones his parents had once bought for him, but somehow he can’t bring himself to care. It’s a particularly bad day, one of the ones that catches him staring at the seams where two walls meet for minutes on end without blinking, the kind where Tome has to ask him three times in half an hour if he’s doing okay, if he needs a nap, if he’s hungry. He’s hardly eaten anything all morning, and his stomach grumbles incessantly, but he ignores the pangs in favor of walking down to the river.

It’s calming here, usually, listening to the rush of water as it rumbles past the rocky, muddy banks. He slips off his shoes and rolls up his pant legs, taking a few steps into the shallows and letting his feet sink into the soft clay of the bank. His hands fall out of his pockets and lay limp at his sides as he just stares down into the water, gaze half lidded and a perpetual frown on his face. He wades in a bit deeper, until he’s up to his knees. The water laps at the edges of his rolled-up pants, dampening their edges with its biting cold. He wonders, briefly, what would happen if he decides to walk out the front door of the orphanage one day and never go back. If he walks far enough, even Tome won’t be able to find him. He has no idea what he would do, though, or where he would go, so instead he just wades deeper into the water, letting the cold sap away the feeling in his legs for just a moment. His feet sink into the clay so far now that it’s hard to keep his footing, the mud slippery between his toes. His pant legs are soaked up to his mid-thigh.

He takes another step, crossing an invisible threshold, and the strong current in the center of the river pulls his legs out from under him. He doesn’t even have time to scream before he’s completely submerged, the icy water soaking through his thin shirt in an instant and sapping the heat away from his skin. He flails, scrambles for purchase, but his child’s legs are too short to find the slippery river’s bottom anymore and he can no longer tell which way is up or which way is down. Water rushes up his nose painfully and steals the breath from his lungs, which leaves his mouth in bubbles that float up uselessly and leave his lungs burning. For a frightful moment, he’s certain that he’ll die here, alone and unloved.

A hand closes around his wrist and pulls, hard. His head breaks the surface and his feet find solid ground again. He’s heaved onto the muddy shore, where he collapses onto his hands and knees and coughs river water into the grass. It dribbles out of his nose, which he sniffs loudly and rubs at with the back of his hand as he replaces the water in his lungs with air.

“Are you okay?” A quavering voice sounds near his ear, and he feels a small hand rest against his back. Teru manages a dumb nod and turns his head to finally get a look at the person who’d just saved his life.

It’s another boy. He can’t be much older than Teru is, and his wide, dark eyes are filled to the brim with worry and concern.

Teru opens his mouth to reply, but finds himself speechless. Tears come to the corners of his eyes and he hugs his knees to his chest, hiding his face as he begins to quietly sob. Part of him is glad to be alive, really glad, but the other, smaller part of him wishes he’d just drowned after all so he won’t have to face the sad reality of what his life has become anymore.

The hand stays on his back, rubbing soothing circles between his shoulder blades. Teru doesn’t look up until he feels the boy press something into his hand. When he does lay eyes on it, he sees that it’s a flan, carefully chilled in a pristine glass cup. There’s a tiny dessert spoon stuck into the top of it, one with an intricately engraved handle that depicts an emblem Teru’s never seen before.

“When you eat something good, you smile,” the boy says, and then offers him a small, shy grin as if to illustrate his point. “Go on, try it!”

Teru’s first instinct is to refuse - it’s not his food, after all - but the boy’s smile is incredibly soft and sincere, and his stomach aches from going too long without eating. He takes the spoon between his shaky fingers and lifts it to his lips, taking a bite of the flan. It’s sweet, with a subtle flavor that melts in his mouth and leaves him feeling lighter. It really is delicious.

The boy looks at him expectantly, eager to hear his thoughts. “It’s good,” he murmurs, and the corners of his mouth tug upward into a ghost of a grateful smile.

The boy’s grin broadens at this, relieved, but before he can say anything else, there’s a call from down the riverbank. Teru looks up, and sees another kid in the distance, waving his arms. He doesn’t quite catch the kid’s words in his distraction, but the hand on his back disappears as the boy who’d saved his life stands up abruptly. “Ah, I have to go!” he says, nearly tripping on the rocky riverbank in his haste.

Teru doesn’t even have time to call out to him, to remind him that he’d left behind his snack, to thank him for pulling him out of the river, to do anything. He disappears into the trees surrounding the river bank and leaves Teru, dripping, in the grass. He cradles the cold flan in his hands and stares down at the fancy-looking emblem carved into the spoon’s shining surface, and vows that someday he’ll make the boy the best dessert he’s ever tasted.

---

Years pass in a blur. Teru’s parents never come for him, but eventually Teru stops waiting for them, stops thinking about them much at all. He turns fifteen and discovers that the spoon he now carries with him at all times comes from a prestigious private academy in Seasoning City, the kind with a sprawling campus that accommodates kids from kindergarten to high school.

The image of the boy who’d saved his life all those years ago fades from his memory over the years until he can’t quite remember the color of his eyes or the shape of his hair or exactly how his voice had sounded. He does remember his words though, remembers his concern and his unwithheld kindness. He calls the forgotten spoon his good luck charm as he studies to take the transfer exam that will let him enroll in Salt private academy.

He learns to cook, too, through a combination of lessons from the sisters who take care of him and his own personal experiments. The sisters call him gifted, say his sensitivity to taste and flavor is beyond anyone they’ve ever seen, and Teru lets it go to his head, just a little. Cooking makes him feel confident, like he has a place in the world at last. He makes treats for the younger members of the orphanage, kids who have grown to become somewhat of a nontraditional family to him, while Tome steals spoonfuls of batter from his bowls when she thinks he isn’t watching. It’s gratifying, the way the younger kids light up when he announces he’s decided to spontaneously bake cookies, and whenever they do the words of the child who had saved him nine years ago flash in his mind: When you eat something good, you smile.

It takes a few months for Teru’s acceptance letter to arrive in the mail, but when it does he has to stop himself from crying out in excitement. He spends the next few weeks preparing for the move, packing everything he owns into a single suitcase and carry-on. Salt graciously pays for his plane ticket and transportation as part of his scholarship, and assigns him to the “special class”. Teru’s not quite sure what that entails, but he isn’t about to argue when he’s finally getting the chance to follow through on his vow.

Tome makes him promise to keep in touch three times over, and she double-checks that her phone number is in his contact list before she lets him leave for the airport. Teru just rolls his eyes at her and reassures her that just because he’s moving doesn’t mean he’s going to forget about her, and finally gets her to stop hounding him by promising to call at least once a week. He pretends not to notice the way she holds back her tears as he climbs into the taxi and leaves behind his childhood home, giving one last wave goodbye as the taxi pulls away from the curb and the long drive begins.

#mob psycho 100 #mp100 #terumob #hanazawa teruki #kageyama shigeo #kurata tome #kitchen princess au #fluff and angst #mostly fluff #eventual romance #child abandonment #implied child neglect #food as a metaphor for love #serendipitousfics

10 notes · View notes

rilenerocks · 5 years ago

Text

I’ve been thinking along several seemingly disparate pathways the past couple of days. I’ve always been like that. The other day, I met a friend to help her sort through a harsh diagnosis her partner had recently received. After a lifetime of dealing with medical issues, starting with my mom’s lifetime health problems which frightened me when I was just a little girl, to the ones that appeared throughout the decades in other family and friends, and eventually the five year cancer trip with Michael, I’ve gotten pretty good at wading into the morass of illness. My mom always said, “I’m sorry you were exposed to all my physical troubles, but look how smart you got?” Thanks, mom.

This friend of mine I met with is a fellow swimmer. Perversely, we met outside our empty pool where we’d swim next to each other for years while swapping life stories. Outside of the summer months, we’d rarely get together. Up until last Tuesday, aside from our summer swimming, we’d had lunch together exactly twice in three years. She is an artist and photographer. I’ve purchased a few of her pieces which are unique and especially marvelous because she repurposes a lot of throwaway stuff that would otherwise be landfilled. Last year she came to my house to take pictures of me and my yard, which were to be featured in a show about women and their gardens. That show was cancelled because of the virus quarantine. Maybe someday? Who knows?

Anyway, what frequently comes up in our conversations is how I always go off on tangents in what appear to be significant digressions from the topic at hand. But in my circuitous way, I always wind up back on the subject. That’s what this blog is going to be like on this mild, sunny day, as I sit in my backyard with my feet kicking away in my kiddie pool. I’m watching butterflies feed while looking at and listening to birds. I’m learning a lot out here. I’m trying not to worry about Pumpkin, the female cardinal I foolishly attached myself to, despite knowing that’s a bad move with any wild animal. I haven’t seen her in two days. Carmine, her male partner has been omnipresent. And I believe I spotted one of their babies at my bird feeder yesterday, identified by a splotch of that beautiful cream color of its mom.

I can’t hear a damn thing out here except for the birds. My headphones are turned up loud. I’m in my own universe with just the natural world, music, and the always palpable sense of Michael that emanates from this space. Sometimes I catch myself staring at what I can only describe as hologram of him, weeding away in his incredibly meticulous vegetable beds. I can actually see the tendons moving in his legs which were pretty scrawny compared to his muscled upper body. It kind of reminds me of what popped out of R2D2 when Obi-Wan Kenobi retrieved Princess Leia’s message in the first Star Wars film.

The other morning, I was hurrying through kitchen chores when my son showed up in the dining room. He’s staying with me for awhile he works on a postdoc at our local university. I was chattering away at him when he looked at me through bleary eyes and asked, “ what’s up with this intense energy level so early in the day?” Despite my 70th birthday being my next, I still have almost the same high energy that I did when I was young. Apparently that’s hardwired into me. Sometimes I think it’s dissipated over time, but only on a relative scale, I move at a faster pace than most of my family of origin. My mom, despite her ailments, was clearly the progenitor for this trait. My dad spent his time off work lolling on the couch. Everyone in my immediate family also slept more than me. The same was true for the family Michael and I made together. I was always the first one awake, back in the days we were still living as a unit. In addition to the excess energy and the need for less sleep, I have an essentially sunny disposition. I can be sad, go to dark interior places and certainly recognize them, but in me, they don’t last long. After a sad day, I’m always surprised to feel my humor and energy bubble up from somewhere in me. Even in the worst of times, that’s been consistent. Once, a very long time ago, my brother, eight years older than me, told me that the first time he felt real joy was when I was born. I marveled at that statement. My parents also told me that I was such an easy, good baby that they were worried about me. I fell asleep easily with no complaints, which made them put a mirror under my nose to make sure I was still alive. I wasn’t a fussy eater and wasn’t ever colicky. I burbled happily through my days, primarily content and effortlessly pleased.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m certainly not that sweet saccharine type that you might want to punch in the face. I’m just relentlessly not difficult on a daily basis. Michael always said I was a cheap date, easily pleased and satisfied without a lot of effort. In other words, I’m not high maintenance. There’s just a lightness in me, sometimes despite all my efforts to the contrary. I’d like a maudlin wallow that lasted longer than an afternoon. My recovery time is so fast, I always feel like no one ever feels sorry enough for me. Maybe a more dramatic show of angst would get me more attention. Oh well. I think it’s mostly biology that’s running my show, modified by life and experience, but fundamentally locked in. I was twenty when I moved in with Michael and he often told me during our 45 years, that I was the singularly most unchanged person he ever knew. I took that as a compliment. He didn’t mean that I hadn’t evolved during our life together, but rather that my fundamental self was consistent. Since his death, I find that taken together, these essential traits of mine are both beneficial and problematic. My behavior indicates to the outside world that I’ve adapted fairly well to losing my partner. I do a lot of different activities. My brain is still active and I’m perpetually curious. I can have conversations about virtually anything. But inside of me where my intangible substance lives, I feel like I’m just fabricating a life to occupy my time. After all, I’m still alive. My instincts tell me I have to do something. But in my depths, I often think this is all filler, placeholders for what my real life should be, a real life which still feels like my old life with Michael. I don’t know if or what a person is supposed to be in this world. You hear all these quotidian lines – “she’s a born mother,” “he’s a born grandfather,” all these “born” descriptors which seem to define some essential bent that we’re all expected to have. I suppose if that’s true, I’m a born life partner. Except I’m still here being that while my partner is gone. I don’t want another one. I can’t find a shred of evidence in me that would indicate I want to team up with anyone else. So basically, I’m using my essential traits and making up the current me on a daily basis. I don’t much like this. I simply don’t see another choice.

I guess that focusing on transience is the best coping mechanism I can employ to deal with this piece of time. Like the 18th century Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch, whose still lifes show the influence of the Vanitas movement, which display the inevitability of death and the loss of earthly things, I know that ultimately everything and everyone will disappear, if not completely, then certainly by changing form at the very least. Her painting above shows flowers reaching the end of their prime. I can relate to that.

I’ve now lived in my town for almost 52 years. First I was a student with my life centered mostly around campus. After a time, I moved into the community at large. The places I spent time in over these decades, vary in terms of their continued consistent physical presence, a modified presence or their complete disappearance. I rarely go through the university campus any more.

But the other day, I drove through the heart of what is known as Campustown, very near the main quadrangle where I attended classes in beautiful old buildings, many of which were constructed in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Of course there have been many renovations and updates to those over the years. They are still recognizable. But Campustown is completely changed. High rise buildings dominate the landscape, mostly businesses on the first floors and apartments above. Green space is noticeably absent. Many of the places I frequented have vanished. I have vivid memories of them.

The Record Service where both Michael and I worked, he for 27 years, had several locations in the heart of that place. No trace of it exists. The corner drugstore which sold sundries and the like, but also had a few booths and a kitchen where for a modest price, you could get a hot roast beef or turkey sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes. My friend Fern and I went there a lot. There was the Spudnuts doughnut shop and Follett’s bookstore. The Co-Ed movie theater and McBride’s plus the Art Mart which now exists in a new location far from campus.

There was Mabel’s, the music venue on the second floor of a building on the main drag, with an impossibly steep staircase even when my knees were good. The Deluxe, home of the best fish sandwich I’ve ever eaten. The Cellar, a basement “head” shop, Thimble and Threads, an alternative clothing store, The Leather Shop and Marrakech Clothing Imports. The Campus Florist, The Art Coop and the camera store way before digital cameras existed. Bailey and Himes sporting goods store. Chin’s restaurant and The Brown Jug. All these places and more exist in my mind. I can feel myself in them, feel what I’m doing as I jiggle my favorite pinball machine, Drop-a-Card, a little tipsy from beer which I never liked. I see my view of the stage from the good tables at Mabel’s where you could listen without getting too squished and sweaty and still get up to dance if you were so inclined. I can see my friends and remember conversations there. And of course there is Michael with me. As I drove down that strange but familiar street, I realize that when I’m gone, along with others in my peer group, all that energy from that time will spiral out into the universe somewhere, vanished from sight but yet alive in a context I can’t fathom. I believe that science will one day bear out my feelings about those mystical ideas.

A year or so ago, I had the presence of mind to drive around town to take pictures of every place I lived in before Michael and I bought the house I still currently occupy. Two places were demolished but I found photos of one of them. The other I hope to describe before that memory disappears. In my head, I can still walk through all those houses, turning into the kitchens, the bedrooms, the bathrooms. I can feel the doorknobs in my hands. I navigate the past, parallel to the present. So much has happened in my life already. With the grinding repetitive routine that the coronavirus has required of me, these filler assignments that I concoct to occupy the present vacant time, aren’t as much fun as what’s already behind me, or next to me, or floating around somewhere in these difficult-to-comprehend wavelengths that are the stuff of physics and string theory and other befuddling concepts. I’ll take these scientists at their word while wishing for concepts easier for me to understand.

The other day, my son told me that my daughter didn’t want to sell our house after I die. Actually, she’d already told me that. He doesn’t really want to sell it either. I think I get it. Our home is like their ancestral shrine. People tend to move a lot in this country. When I came here in 1968 I was a 17 year old college freshman. Ten years later, after living with Michael and bumping around for six years, we bought this house, never dreaming we’d live here forever. But that’s how things worked out. I am anchored here, where so much of my adult life happened. My kids were conceived here and stayed until they went off to college. But they came back and brought their friends. We hosted 35 Thanksgiving dinners here with a wide assortment of family and stragglers. People who needed a place to stay intermittently shared our space. My mother lived here in a room that still smells like her. Michael and I did every conceivable activity that passes between friends and lovers here, up to and including his death. I am never uncomfortable or unhappy with our memories in this space. I wondered if I would be but instead it’s my gift and comfort to be here. If I’m lucky, I’d like to die in this place, just like Michael, although no one can predict what awaits us. If I could choose it, though, this is where I’d be.

When we moved in here, there was major reclamation to be done on this structure built in 1893. Daunting work and still it never ends. But the house emitted these wonderful feelings immediately, and we often wondered what good things must’ve happened that lingered in the walls and drifted out, enveloping us in the warmth of home. I imagine we’ve added to that deep resonance of succor which is palpable to me. I’m not surprised that my kids intuitively understand that their history still resides here. Not something they’re likely to quickly cast aside once I’m gone, to hopefully commingle with whatever is Michael, who is out there afloat, still pulling on me daily, while I make up my current daily existence. All these changes I’ve experienced, internally and externally. My, my. I muddle along, creating a space around me that seems to pass for a full life. Maybe filler is too negative a connotation for what I’m doing now. Some days are better than others. I am confident that I still have value in this world and my intellect is fully operative which helps immeasurably. But the draw of my partner still dominates me after three years and change. If that alters, maybe I’ll redefine my current perceptions of this iteration of me.

Filler I’ve been thinking along several seemingly disparate pathways the past couple of days. I’ve always been like that.

0 notes

timeflies1007-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 6, p. 3

Night Terrors: This is an unusual episode, particularly for this season, in that it’s really quite unambitious. It’s pretty unambiguously an episode of a children’s show, more so than most other episodes of the reboot or even much of the classic series. It’s a straightforward, simple little story about a frightened little boy and the monsters in his closet, and overall it’s pretty charming. The concept of how we deal with fear has definitely been done in much more sophisticated ways elsewhere on the show; “Midnight” was a terrifying look at how fear can make us turn on one another, while the later episode “Listen” is a powerful exploration of the ways in which fear moves and inspires us. This story is a much narrower tale of one child’s experience of feeling worried and vulnerable, but it’s a perfectly fine version of that story.

While this episode is relatively unimpressive when compared with stories like “Midnight” and “Listen,” its focus on childhood fears could also invoke comparisons to Season Two’s disastrous “Fear Her,” possibly the only episode of the reboot to be more clearly directed at a child audience than this one is. The show seems to have benefited from the criticism of the former episode, as it avoids most of its mistakes (and retains its one strong point by including a cute animal—the landlord’s droopy bulldog is not tied to quantum humor like Possibly Schrodinger’s Cat, but compensates by looking very huggable.) While the ending remains extremely sentimental, the sentiment is grounded in the primary plot about George and his father rather than centering on nonsense about the Olympic torch. Unlike the offensively demonic portrayal of Chloe, George comes across as frightened but actively trying to keep the monsters at bay through various rituals, like having his mother flick the lights on and off and putting frightening things in the closet. This episode also portrays George’s dad much more sensitively than its predecessor managed with Chloe’s mom, and Daniel Mays’s endearing performance in the role goes a long way toward making this story palatable. It would have been nice to see a little bit more of George’s mother, though, not least because female characters other than Amy don’t get much to do in this episode.

The episode’s visuals vary in quality, with the setting generally faring better than the monsters. The apartment complex has an oddly comforting presence, particularly after the more outlandish settings in recent episodes; to me, it’s the most familiar-looking depiction of contemporary Earth since Davies left the show. The enlarged dollhouse is also enjoyable, and I like the Ponds’ exploration of the odd space, complete with wooden pans painted to look like copper, seemingly anachronistic lighting, and eyeballs in drawers. The dolls themselves are pretty disappointing, though—their appearance is creepy enough, but this portion of the story is just too sleepy and slow-moving to capture my attention. (That said, it does give the Ponds some entertaining dialogue, and I’m amused that Rory is starting to get annoyed at how many times he has “died.”) George’s toys, and the shadows that they cast on his bedroom walls, are more successfully scary; they’re not among the show’s most memorable frights, but I can remember feeling precisely the same kinds of terrors when I was little, so I can empathize with George here.

As Amy and Rory are mostly tied to the dollhouse plot, it’s not a great episode for them. On the one hand, this episode fits really nicely into their overall arc this season. It’s yet another iteration of the “parents save the world by loving their children and refusing to be separated from them” narrative that happens a lot in Season Six, and my heart goes out to Amy and Rory every time this works for everybody except them. On the other hand, the episode was controversial for not having them directly comment on how close to home this situation is for them. This has been explained in part by the fact that the episode was initially slated for the first half of the season, when it would have preceded their loss of Melody, and then later moved to the second half. This actually winds up working out well for Amy, I think; the second half of this season is very focused on how much she is bottling up her feelings, and the next two episodes are going to go into the psychological impact of that to such a degree that I think it would be a mistake to have her abandon that mentality and actually talk about or even visibly react to her own loss here. While the season as a whole provides lots of reasons for Amy’s occasional underreactions, it never quite manages to do the same for Rory, and so while it’s totally believable to me that Amy would be pushing herself to keep a stiff upper lip, it would have made sense to get more of a reaction from him.

A lot people hate this episode, but while I think you could skip it without missing anything integral to the season, I honestly find most of it extremely pleasant. There are so many large-scale episodes this season that it’s sort of nice to have a more low-key one here, and there’s enough angst both before and, especially, after this episode that a sweet story about the monsters in a child’s closet is a welcome change of pace. B-

The Girl Who Waited: I almost never cry in reaction to TV. There are a few rare occasions in which I’ve gotten slightly teary, but for the most part, my default emotional reaction is to get very tense and forget to breathe. (Temporarily, of course.) The first time I watched the end of this episode, I started sobbing. When I rewatched it a couple of months later, I had exactly the same reaction. I have never had a reaction quite this dramatic to any other television episode, and it took me some time to figure out quite what was producing this response, in large part because this episode is more complicated than it looks. On the surface, this looks like an episode about Amy’s love for Rory, which is sweet but is already very well established and so isn’t great subject matter for a story. In truth, though, Amy’s relationship with Rory is the least important one in this storyline, serving as the constant in an exploration of Amy’s much more volatile relationships with the Doctor and with her own mental state. (The title, which references Amy’s history with the Doctor, is a pretty good clue that this episode isn’t really going to be about Rory.) This episode is dark in a way that this show can only manage every once in a long while, but as bleak as it can be, there is something beautiful about how much it tells us about Amy.

This is the first intentional trip that the three have taken since the events of “Let’s Kill Hitler,” as “Night Terrors” involved a detour in response to George’s message, and they are pretty clearly on a mission to comfort Amy. Appalappachia (what a great name!) is supposedly one of the nicest planets out there, which would have been a nice respite after the draining events they’ve been through if it hadn’t turned out to be under quarantine for the one-day plague. Instead of a nice vacation, Amy gets a fairly sterilized medical facility, where she is constantly being offered “kindness” that would kill her and where she is mostly cut off from communication with Rory and the Doctor. Her aloneness, her inability to talk to even those closest to her, and the total uselessness of attempts at kindness, are not the subtlest pieces of subtext the show has ever done, but the episode generally does a good job of using the sci-fi plot to showcase Amy’s pain and sense of isolation without sledgehammering “This is a symbol of Amy’s grief over losing her child!!!”

The plot, in which Amy hits the wrong button when entering Appalappachia and winds up in a different time stream from the one that Rory and the Doctor are in, is simple enough, allowing the episode to focus on the emotions of the characters. Even the Appalappachian facility is pretty straightforward, although the grounds look beautiful and the harsh white light is distinctive; there aren’t a lot of nuances to this planet, and the robots play a minimal role, so the world informs the experiences of the characters without really distracting attention from them. It’s a dark episode for the Doctor, who has to lie to Older Amy in order to bring about Young Amy’s rescue. It’s chilling when he slams the door on Older Amy’s face at the end, but the episode manages to work with this dark side of the Doctor without engaging in outright character assassination. He’s in a terrible position, knowing that his best friend will have to endure 38 years—most of her adult life—of complete solitude if he brings Older Amy on the TARDIS with him. I don’t really know what I think the right choice is here, and that lets us look at the Doctor’s tendencies toward manipulation without making him look like a monster. Rory is also in a harrowing position, especially since he sort of has to grieve for the loss of the wife he knew while interacting with the person she has become. I’m glad that Older Amy makes the decision for him at the end, because it really should be her call, but watching him wrestle with which version of Amy to take with him is horribly sad, and completely justifies his furious claim to the Doctor that “You’re turning me into you.”

As interesting as the Doctor and Rory are here, though, it’s the Amy Pond show, and Gillan is absolutely magnificent as the version of herself who has been alone for nearly four decades. We can see remnants of Amy’s personality in her sense of humor, but she’s thoroughly changed by her time on her own. For one thing, she’s gotten extremely good at surviving—without any help from the Doctor or Rory, she has managed to fend off the robots and make a life for herself. The nature of that life is difficult to imagine; not only does she have to deal with complete solitude, she has to contend with not knowing whether she’ll ever be rescued. Every day could be the day that the Doctor and Rory finally reach her, and having that hope frustrated over and over again for 38 years is probably the most difficult part of this scenario. It also means that this Amy has had time to process what the Doctor has meant to her life and how his behavior has affected her, and after 38 years, all that’s left is anger. It’s not the first time that he’s accidentally shown up at the wrong moment—their very first encounter featured him turning up twelve years later than promised. Amy’s abandonment takes the concept of “Aw, tiny Amelia waited for her Doctor all night with a little suitcase” and transforms it into something deeply horrifying—all the more so because we know that the Doctor’s sometimes irresponsible behavior has caused Amy irreparable harm already this season. She insists that the device she’s made is a sonic probe, not a screwdriver, because she’s “not on a romp.” The implication that the Doctor is just out playing and being whimsical while other people suffer the consequences makes sense from someone who has endured nearly four decades of solitude because of him, and she’s not kidding when she declares that she hates the Doctor.

She still loves Rory, though, and the scene in which young Amy uses that love to convince her older self to help her escape is extremely moving. Her words about Rory becoming beautiful as she got to know him are appropriate to the relationship that she has with Rory, which was pretty clearly not love at first sight, but rather a gradual growth toward an understanding of Rory’s importance to her. The scene allows her a beautiful articulation of exactly what Rory means to her, and it’s the kind of connection that seems plausible as something that would still be resonant 38 years later. The following scene, in which she sort of awkwardly does the Macarena to remind herself of her first kiss with Rory, is the one part of this episode that falls a bit flat for me, but its setup, in which she declares “I’m going to pull time apart for you,” is a perfectly-rendered moment: Gillan’s performance and the soundtrack combine to create an absolutely stunning sense of her determination and resolve.

It’s leading up to something impossible, though; there can’t be two Amys, and in convincing Older Amy to save her younger self, Young Amy is unwittingly causing the older version to unwrite herself. “Time can be rewritten” is Amy’s favorite phrase, only here she’s what’s being rewritten, which is even sadder when considered in light of recent events in Amy’s life. There are two Amys now, one who is still clinging to faith and hope, the other who has acknowledged the destructive impact that the Doctor had on her and who is fully willing to express her anger and sense of betrayal. She’s the embodiment of all of the feelings that Young Amy isn’t expressing, but in the end, she erases herself from existence because Rory and Amy will be happier together without her. Until the final seconds, this is portrayed as noble, generous and heroic. “Tell Amy, I’m giving her my days,” she says to Rory, as she speaks to him from outside the TARDIS, only her outstretched hand visible from his point of view. She goes out bravely, willingly turning away from the TARDIS and facing the robots armed with kindness. Her last seconds, as she asks the Interface to show her Earth, are astonishingly effective, and the script invests so fully in Older Amy’s perspective that it takes a while to grasp the fundamental wrongness of the situation. It’s not until the very end of the episode, when Young Amy awakes and asks where her older self is, followed by an ominous chord and a shot of the Doctor looking conflicted, that we get an overpowering sense of “Something very not good is going to come of this.”

One of the hardest things about psychological crisis is that acts of self-erasure feel so temptingly right. At my lowest point, I had a brief breakdown just once, when I came home from a party after having a little bit too much to drink and stood in front of my bathroom mirror and screamed at my reflection while gasping for breath. Other than that, in the eight months or so when I was experiencing my usual mental health issues to a much more serious extent than is usually the case, I didn’t cry, I didn’t raise my voice, and I didn’t let anyone know how much pain I was in. This wasn’t so much fear of anyone’s reaction as it was a persistent sense that there was something else to do; I constantly felt like I ought to do something about my mental state, but I really needed to finish a conference paper, and a couple of my students needed a lot of help or they were going to fail the next assignment, and even though I believed very strongly in the need to acknowledge and work carefully through mental health problems, this belief always came with an attached “…but not yet.” We tend to think about a crisis as a time of emotional intensity, but mine mostly involved waiting—I knew that a lot of difficult feelings were there, and I had every intention of dealing with them…later, when there was more time. It felt powerful, sometimes, when I managed to accomplish things in spite of the fact that I was spending significant portions of most days practically unable to move. Look at me, I thought to myself, heroically finishing a dissertation chapter and grading lots of student work and going to multiple social events in one week in spite of feeling like this. These are fairly small victories, but they felt enormous to me because of the state that I was in, and the pride that I felt from getting my work done and keeping my composure every day was enough of a rush that I couldn’t shake that sense that I needed to keep holding off on acknowledging how much of a crisis I was in. I need to deal with how I’m feeling, I’d think, but I really needed to get a lot done today, and I did it without falling apart, and I stuck with that mentality, week after week, month after month, until finally I had a flash of recognition that if I had let myself step a little bit closer to falling apart that might have been better for me. Over time, though, things get buried, and if you repress your feelings for long enough, it can be difficult to get them back when you figure out that you need to express them. By the time I got to the point of wanting to acknowledge what I’d gone through, I felt detached from some of those feelings, as if there had been another woman who had felt anger and grief and betrayal and fear, but I’d stopped her from surfacing by replacing her with the smiling, professional, emotionally stable person that I’d performed for so long. Trying to get back some of those feelings was difficult, because they had grown confused from lack of use, and while I knew that that other me had existed and had been real, I was mostly left wondering, like Amy, “Where is she?”

I hadn’t quite put some of this into words, until I watched this episode and was so emotionally overpowered by it that I started thinking about why it made me feel so strongly. It took me a couple of times to quite get what was going on in this episode, and even longer to connect it fully to myself, but I can’t think of another episode of television that has looked so much like how that psychological low point felt. As much as this episode made me think about myself a lot, it leaves us with a frightening sense of what is yet to come for Amy. She has been through a lot this season, and she’s struggled to put her feelings into words. She’s finally met the embodiment of her anger, grief, and loneliness, but that body has literally vanished, made to have never existed, and for someone in a crisis, it’s hard to think of a more concerning image. This is an intriguing story, and the use of off-kilter time streams is fascinating in itself, but what’s truly memorable about this one is how much it lets us into how lonely it is to be the girl who waited. A+

The God Complex: This episode isn’t quite as brilliant or as emotionally captivating as the previous one, but while the previous episode remained quite serious and fairly heavy throughout, this one is frequently silly and whimsical, and so the fact that it gets pretty close to the emotional heights of its predecessor is even more impressive. “The Girl Who Waited” is one of several episodes that is memorable as a departure from the show’s usual tone—“Midnight” and “Heaven Sent” are similar in this respect. This episode is exactly what regular Doctor Who should be like: fun, enjoyable, and creative, with a great deal to laugh at but a surprising amount of insight at the same time.

The fake eighties hotel is an absolutely brilliant setting: it looks so convincingly mundane and ordinary that it throws all of the insanity unfolding within it into sharper relief. Having a separate room for each fear is a solid device, and the shifting corridors mean that this Minotaur-centric episode has managed to turn the hotel into a sort of labyrinth, which is a lovely touch that completely escaped me the first time I watched the episode. The Minotaur itself is fabulous; I generally enjoy the big, clompy monsters, but even apart from that the makeup department did a great job with it. (In spite of the repeated exclamations of “Praise him!” the Doctor generally refers to the Minotaur as “it,” so I’m going to take that as the correct pronoun.) It’s definitely an intimidating presence, and is made even more so by how long it takes us to get a proper look at it, but its appearance also manages to evoke sympathy, in part because when we get closeups of its face it looks surprisingly like ET. Its final scene, in which it gratefully dies after the Doctor cuts off his food source, is a lot more moving than you would expect the death of a character who has just wandered around growling to be, and the Doctor’s translation of his last words show him to have a hugely effective sense of empathy. (He also gets the Doctor to make a brief reference to Classic Who’s utterly ridiculous but generally entertaining “The Horns of Nimon,” which is a nice callback.) What the Minotaur does to its victims—invoking their worst fears in order to prey upon their most deeply-held beliefs—is among the most horrifying things we’ve seen this season, but it emerges from the episode looking more like a victim of the system that links Gods and worshippers than an intentionally evil figure.

The “minotaur in a labyrinth” narrative isn’t the only traditional story at work here, as this is also an iteration of the time-honored “fears coming to life” episode. This has appeared in plenty of sci-fi and fantasy shows (“Nightmares” and “Fear Itself” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are both good examples.) There are some terrific individual fears here: “that brutal gorilla” is awesome, and the wall of fears is both terrifying and darkly funny; I wouldn’t want my last memorial to be my photo on a wall with “Other people’s socks” captioned beneath it. The story is so interesting, and the Minotaur is such a great monster, that the episode could have gotten away with uninteresting minor characters, but in this regard it remains mostly sublime. Even the initial exchange between the Doctor/Ponds and our new characters for this episode is an absolute delight: Amy mocks Rory for responding to their new acquaintances by yelling “It’s okay, we’re nice!” while the Doctor realizes that this is, in fact, not the first time that someone has threatened him with a chair leg. Howie looks for a while like a sort of mean-spirited depiction of a nerd, but there’s a nice moment after his death in which Rory notes with admiration that he had just gotten over a stammer through speech therapy, and I really appreciate the inclusion of this positive information about a character who might have otherwise come across as a one-note joke. Gibbis is our first glimpse of the Tivolian species, and the bits of information that we get about this constantly-surrendering planet are hilarious. Between their anthem (“Glory to Insert Name Here”), Gibbis’s school motto (“Resistance is Exhausting”), and his job (planting trees so that invading armies can march in the shade), Tivoli sounds amazing; it might be too nonsensical to support an actual storyline, but hearing occasional facts about it works extremely well. As funny as the character is, David Walliams also does a great job of conveying the aggressive, controlling aspects of the character’s cowardice.

If I could pick one single-story character in the entirety of the reboot to serve as a major companion, I would probably pick Rita, the Muslim doctor (or medical student? I don’t think this is clarified) who believes the hotel is Jahannam. Amara Karan’s performance is splendid, allowing Rita to join characters like Rose and Bill in feeling like a believable, well-rounded character even before anything much happens with her. She’s extraordinarily likeable: clearly concerned about what is happening, but composed enough to formulate and find comfort in a theory and even, awesomely, to find out where the hotel keeps its tea. While a parent’s disappointment about a low grade is awfully clichéd as an Asian woman’s worst nightmare, she otherwise gets some really interesting material, and I would include her death scene in that category. It can get irritating when the show brings on a great new female character, only to kill her off immediately, and I do wish that we could have gotten at least a few episodes for this character, especially since the episode ends with the Ponds getting a vacation from the Doctor. Unlike Lorna Bucket a few episodes ago, though, Rita’s death scene really feels like an occurrence that has significance beyond the Doctor’s resulting sense of guilt. The Minotaur’s actions take away most of her ability to think for herself, but she insists on preserving what little autonomy she can retain, asking the Doctor to turn the screen off and let her be robbed of her faith in private. It’s such a beautifully-written moment that I react to it in the way that I reacted to the Hostess’s death in “Midnight” and Bishop Octavian’s death in “Flesh and Stone,” in that I’m just so fascinated by the depiction of the dying character’s final moments that it doesn’t occur to me to think about the death in terms of how it might move forward the narrative or other character arcs. Not having Rita as a long-term companion is the biggest missed opportunity of this season, but even in death she’s compelling and memorable.

This is also the one episode this season in which I’m completely satisfied with the depiction of Rory. There’s been a lot of vagueness regarding his reaction to the events surrounding Melody Pond, but in this story, we can see just how troubled he is. The Minotaur has so little interest in him that he’s constantly seeing ways out of the hotel, and once we find out what the Minotaur is actually interested in, this means that Rory just doesn’t have any faith. Not in the Doctor, not in his relationship with Amy—just no faith at all. As the hotel seems to take the concept of faith extremely broadly, well beyond religion, it’s a sad indication of his current mindset that the Minotaur can’t find any belief to latch onto. He also, in his conversation with the Doctor, speaks of his travels with the Doctor in the past tense, suggesting that he is basically done with the kind of life he and Amy have had on the TARDIS. I still think that this season could do more to explain Rory’s feelings, but this episode gives us far more depth for him than any other.

For a while, Amy seems like a minor presence in this episode. The version of herself who feels actual rage and disillusionment toward the Doctor having been erased from existence in Appalappachia, she is now the embodiment of firmly-committed belief in the Doctor. The previous episode’s events were a severe test, but she has gotten through it, clinging to her belief in the Doctor by the skin of her teeth. She’s fully prepared to trust him here, which is why she’s in so much danger. She’s fought for the faith that so endangers her here, maintaining her hope in him even when he abandoned her as a child, believing “for twenty minutes” when he asked her to in “The Eleventh Hour,” trusting in him enough to walk past the Angels with eyes closed in “Flesh and Stone,” keeping hold of that faith even when he was gone from the universe in “The Big Bang,” insisting, in the midst of grief and loss besetting her throughout Season Six, that “time can be rewritten.” She’s gotten through all of that without losing her grip on her faith, but in order to survive the Minotaur, she’s got to destroy it. She even has to destroy this belief voluntarily—it’s not taken forcibly from her, so she has to deliberately choose to set aside her trust in him. After so many years of insisting on that belief, she essentially has to relearn how to see the world, and she has to do so in a moment characterized by precisely the kind of fear that would generally call forth her reliance on the Doctor. Gillan’s face here is just perfection, showing not so much grief as confusion, as if she is wondering, “how do I learn to think like this?” The knowledge that her worst fear is her disappointed but still hopeful younger self makes this even sadder. (I wasn’t sure, when I first watched this scene, whether the room was Amy’s or the Doctor’s, but on rewatch, it’s clear that it’s hers, because the door that falls on Rory has a 7 on it, which is established earlier in the episode as Amy’s room.) My heart just breaks for Amy, but I’m impressed that she has the strength to go through with what she does here, even if she does have the Doctor walking her through it. It’s not easy to let go of the beliefs that sustain you, especially when you’ve been having a rough time, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be for her to have to shift a fundamental sense of how she perceives the world within seconds.

This makes the ending something of a relief. I have varying opinions on the moments in which the Doctor sends companions away for their own good; I’m perfectly fine with it in “The Parting of the Ways,” for instance, but much less so in “Journey’s End.” This is one of the times in which it seems justified—after what the Ponds have been through this season, and especially after what we’ve seen of Amy’s mental state, they really do need some time away from the Doctor. I love that he gives them a house with a little blue door, and that he remembered exactly what Rory’s ideal car looked like. (In general, I’m just really happy that the Doctor got something specifically for Rory here, because sometimes he treats Amy like she’s his companion and Rory is just along for the ride, so I’m glad that he put some thought into his temporary departure from both of the Ponds.) He makes it clear that he’s not saying goodbye for good, but this is a huge transitional point for them; after this, they start to gravitate back toward their normal lives, and act as much more temporary companions. Everything is different after this episode, and it’s not because anyone died, or had their memory wiped, or jumped into a timeline, or got trapped somewhere, it’s just because the Doctor and Amy thought about what they meant to each other, and realized what needed to change. A+/A

Closing Time: This sequel of sorts to “The Lodger” captures some of the fun of that earlier episode, but overall doesn’t live up to it. James Corden continues to be delightful as Craig, and young Stormageddon is enjoyable, but the episode doesn’t quite manage the exuberance that made “The Lodger” such a success. I do like seeing the Doctor hanging out in Craig’s house again, and the shop generally works well as a setting, particularly because it gives us an opportunity to watch the Doctor play with toys. (I agree with him that Yappy the Robot Dog is nowhere near as good as K-9.) While there are plenty of fun moments here, much of the humor seems much cheaper than it was in Craig’s first episode. While “The Lodger” grounded most of its comedy in the absurdity of the Doctor functioning in an ordinary human space, this episode takes as the premise for many of its jokes the notion that the Doctor and Craig are acting sort of like a couple. There are multiple scenes that play the possibility of a Doctor/Craig relationship for comedic effect, most notably Val assuming that the Doctor and Craig are involved and the Doctor declaring his love for Craig in an effort to distract him from the spaceship. Gareth Roberts, who wrote the episode, is gay himself, but even coming from a gay writer this kind of humor seems mean-spirited to me. There’s also a brief bit of “comedy” about the Doctor walking into a changing room while a woman is changing, as well as a scene about Craig freaking out a female employee working in the lingerie section. There are plenty of moments of humor that do work, but it’s aggravating that we have to wade through these ill-advised jokes in between.

As a Cyberman story, this is a pretty mixed bag. I really like Cybermats, so having them running about is nice, and there are moments in which the Cybermen are used to very good effect: the solitary one that greets Shona from a changing room in the beginning is especially creepy. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough of an effort here to figure out how to resolve the Cyber threat, so we get a silly resolution that fits nicely into the seasonal arc but doesn’t work very well on its own. Throughout the Moffat era, the Cybermen are used to challenge ideas about what constitutes humanity and how emotion fits into that picture. It’s an endeavor that functions much more interestingly in later seasons, when Moffat begins to shift into an understanding of the fundamentally human qualities that are not immediately reliant on emotion. For now, though, we’re stuck with Craig’s love for his child overcoming the cyberprogramming, and it comes across as an arbitrary and underwhelming way of fending off the threat. (Also, the Doctor specifically calls attention to the idea that love was the solution—if you’ve got a somewhat lazy ending to your story, it’s probably best to avoid having the Doctor directly mention it.) We conclude with a couple of scenes that lead into the finale: first, there are some voiceovers from people who saw the Doctor in his final moments before going to Lake Silencio, and then we move to River being sent on her mission to kill the Doctor. The latter is at least a decent way of building anticipation, but the first is deeply annoying and utterly unnecessary.

I do find this episode more interesting in terms of its contribution to the more personal dimensions of the seasonal arc. Amy and Rory are very close to not being in this episode, but it’s still highly concerned with their feelings. The most obvious approach that this episode takes to the Ponds is the final installment of the “everyone saves the world through a refusal to be separated from their children, except for Amy and Rory” subplot. Craig’s love for his son is so powerful that it can offset Cyber technology; meanwhile, Amy and Rory have a brief, basically meaningless exchange with a little girl looking for an autograph. Every time this season juxtaposes triumphs of parental love with their own loss of Melody, it’s very effective, and this is the moment at which the contrast is at its strongest. The subtler approach to the Ponds’ emotional state comes in the form of a tiny echo of language from earlier in the season. Amy is now a model, appearing in posters for “Petrichor,” a perfume. We were first introduced to this term in “The Doctor’s Wife,” when the TARDIS defined it as “the smell of dust after rain.” I guess this isn’t completely implausible as a perfume scent, as there is a quite nice aroma to dust in this state, but it’s just unusual enough that it draws attention to the words. If you google “Dust after rain,” one of the first things that comes up is “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” a book that appears to be focused on our difficulties with properly expressing and experiencing grief. I don’t think that the show is referencing this particular book, but I mention it because it confirms for me that there’s a basis for my association between these images and the notion of grief that has been somehow blocked. Rain is naturally suggestive of tears, but the idea of dust in the wake of rain conjures up the image of the dull, messy feelings that ensue when the first shock of grief is over. We see basically nothing of the Ponds’ feelings here, but we persist in the sense, set up in the previous two episodes, that something is very badly wrong.

These implications about the Ponds’ emotional state give the episode a little bit of the emotional weight it would otherwise lack, and Corden and Smith work together so well that the episode is more successful than the script really merits. The cheap humor and the weak ending to the Cyberman plot are enough, though, to make this a fairly weak episode. C+

The Wedding of River Song: “Sometimes you don’t look hard enough,” the Doctor tells Amy, in a season finale that necessitates extremely careful observation. This episode definitely has its flaws, but in between them, it’s absolutely magical. Like much of this season, it is not really an episode for casual enjoyment, as appreciating its nuances requires a lot of commitment and effort, and I can understand the mentality that this episode is just too much work. In spite of the ambition, though, it’s absolutely delightful, full of tiny pieces of brilliance that mostly counterbalance the moments in which it goes slightly off the rails.

The story is aided by a terrific setting, replete with “don’t feed the pterodactyls” signs, Charles Dickens on the news, and Emperor Winston Churchill returning home on his own personal mammoth. (I really, really want there to be a mammoth on this show. I’m sad that we didn’t get to see Churchill’s mammoth here, but even just the mention really made me laugh—there’s something about the solemnity with which the newscaster delivers the line that makes it hysterically funny.) It’s chaos, but it’s wonderfully satisfying chaos, the kind that works because it’s silly but also very carefully planned. I wish we had five episodes in which to play around in this universe, but I guess that giving us a glimpse of it without dwelling too long lets us enjoy how thrilling it is without getting tired of it. Even the bits that we see of the regular universe are wonderfully done: there are CHESS GLADIATORS and Dorium’s severed head enjoying the free wi-fi in a crypt, and a bad guy being devoured by skulls, and everything is just so thrilling and imaginative and I love it.

There are also some pretty glaring issues here, the first of which is that the timeline of events in the main, ordinary universe just completely confuses me. I can just about buy that Amy would be able to access some of her memories from the real world in the time-collapsed universe, although even that requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. What I can’t really follow is what her experience is of the real timeline. At what point does she remember what happened in the alternate timeline? When does she become aware that the Doctor has died? I can understand the sequence of events within each universe, but the interaction between them just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

The other main problem is the depiction of River’s avoidance of the main timeline. In spite of being in the title, it’s not really a great episode for River, in part because her declaration of how much she will suffer if she has to kill the Doctor is just so overwrought. Kingston is usually fantastic, but she can’t quite make the heavy-handed scene work, and so her wedding doesn’t have quite the lead-in that I want it to. I do rather like the actual wedding ceremony, which is pleasingly simple and sweet, but I would have liked this entire development better if River’s emotions had been worded more clearly, or in ways that didn’t make her look massively selfish. (I mean, she thinks having to kill the Doctor is worse than the deaths of billions of people? Really?)

The gaping plot holes with regard to the relationship between universes and the poor writing for River definitely weaken the episode, but there are a lot of compensations. The Doctor is very charming in both universes, in spite of being stuck with possibly the worst haircut ever seen on this show while he’s in the alternate world. I like his early-episode exuberance, followed by the sobering news about the Brigadier’s death—if this had been the last we’d heard of the Brigadier, I’d be a little sad that he didn’t get more of a moment, but the end of Season Eight takes care of that, and the Doctor’s grief is nicely played here. He is also sort of adorably invested in the Ponds’ relationship, even if he thinks that dating basically just involves “texting and scones.” I really appreciate that the season ends with his decision to play dead for a while, on the grounds that he has gotten “too big.” We haven’t spent a lot of time exploring his actual reaction to the accusations that River made at the end of “A Good Man Goes to War,” but his actions here suggest that he’s actually thought about some of his flaws and is trying to correct them, so that’s nice. Moffat’s insistence on incorporating the show’s title into the plot might be wading a little bit too far in a meta direction, but I honestly really do enjoy it, and so I like the decision to end the episode with Dorium repeating “Doctor Who?”

While there’s a lot of spectacle at work here, the heart of the episode is still Amy’s attempt to recover from the events that have happened to her this season. “The God Complex” was a pivotal moment in her arc, but giving up on the intensity that had characterized her faith in the Doctor to that point isn’t an endpoint but rather the creation of a new set of problems. As I said before, the nature of her memories of the real world is a bit confusing, but she does seem to have at least some access to the memories that occurred this season, which means that she’s reacting to the loss of Melody and to the choice that she made to cut off her faith in the Doctor. This has had a number of effects—for one, now that she isn’t relying so heavily on the Doctor to fix things, she’s doing more herself. Her efforts to join River in summoning all of the Doctor’s friends to come to his aid don’t have much of a narrative payoff—there isn’t much they can do about this scenario, so they’re mostly irrelevant. It’s a nice reversal, though, of the previous season’s finale, in which all of his enemies joined forces to defeat him, and I like that Amy and River have been working together on such a large-scale project. This universe also exists in such an extreme state—everything is happening at once! Time is falling apart!—that it creates a sort of perpetually high-stakes environment, and that seems to draw more reaction from her than anything else has this season. Not long ago, she was engaged in pretty destructive self-erasure, and some of her behavior here seems like an endeavor to un-erase her life. She literally has to draw things, to commit them to paper in order to prevent them from escaping her, and the attempt to create physical memories of things that threaten to vanish from her mind is an interesting psychological step for her.

She also directly articulates her feelings about the loss of her baby, in an incredibly dark scene that ends with her leaving Madame Kovarian to die. This is preceded by a moment in which she shoots down a lot of the Silence with a machine gun in order to protect Rory, immediately before finally articulating her anger about the loss of her baby. Having Amy destroy the Silence immediately before breaking her own silence about her feelings is not going to win Moffat any Subtlety of the Year awards, but I like it. If this were the end of a conventional action movie, killing Madame Kovarian would be the natural endpoint—she’s a force of considerable destruction, whose actions have not only hurt Amy and those close to her but have also sometimes threatened all of existence. Amy hasn’t exactly gone evil here, but she has rejected the kind of ethics that the Doctor usually employs. Her words to Madame Kovarian are partly a statement of vengeance toward the woman who stole her baby, but they seem just as motivated by her thoughts about the Doctor. The Doctor told young Amelia that he would be five minutes and then didn’t return for twelve years, he told her that he’d pick her up in Appalappachia and then he showed up 38 years late, he has at multiple points wandered off without telling her when he would return, and her whole relationship with the Doctor has featured the persistent uncertainty about whether or not he would be there when he said he would. When she tells Madame Kovarian, “You know what else the Doctor is? Not here,” it’s partly an expression of her willingness to break the Doctor’s rules in his absence, but in part an expression of anger at the abandonment she has suffered over and over again on this show. I do think that this scene lurks fairly close to linking trauma with violence, but it generally avoids suggesting anything too damaging. Earlier in the season, I mentioned that the Doctor had sort of gone off of the usual Doctor Who ethos and into more of a Star Wars approach, and Amy is essentially embracing here the notion of “striking down the villain is the natural goal of an adventure.” It’s a mentality that the Doctor usually rejects (although not without exception), but she’s turned into Luke Skywalker, not Darth Vader, and that removes most of the harm that this might otherwise do.

Her position of rejection toward the Doctor’s approach to violence is not the end of the story, though, because we eventually return to the usual world, unburdened by the collapse of time. Amy is sad, but when River turns up she’s more willing to communicate than she has been for much of the season. She starts to tell River everything, from her grief about the Doctor to her guilt about Madame Kovarian. (I really appreciate that the script makes time for her to directly acknowledge that this is still real to her; River tries to give her a pass by saying that this happened in another universe that has now gone out of existence, but Amy rightfully dismisses this with the brief statement that “I remember it, so it happened, so I did it.”) I’m happy whenever there’s interaction between Amy and River, but it’s especially nice to watch Amy so determined to face reality and express her feelings. This kind of emotional awareness and directness has been eluding her the whole season, and so this conversation feels like a huge triumph for her, even though it is an expression of some very troubled feelings.

It’s not a gloomy ending, though, because Moffat gives Amy a moment of tremendous joy to cap off a season that has been mostly sadness for her. We don’t hear exactly what River tells Amy about how the Doctor escaped death—it’s fitting, given the themes of the season, that the most important words are silent to us. We know the substance of what has happened, though, and can piece together something of what those words must have expressed. At Lake Silencio, when she watched the Doctor die, she immediately said that maybe it was a clone or a doppelganger, because she’s Amy Pond, the woman who believes, the one who acts with constant faith in the idea that time can be rewritten. You can’t rely on that, not all of the time, not even with a time machine and a brilliant alien best friend, and Amy let herself get so wrapped up in the idea that things will right themselves, that a miracle will happen and all will turn out for the best, that her faith has sometimes led her astray. This kind of faith isn’t an entirely bad thing, though, at least not when it’s directed toward something good, and what River’s off-screen words reveal to her is that her sometimes excessive hopefulness might be damaging at times, but it’s not always going to be wrong. We don’t hear the words, whatever they are, just the scream of pure happiness that gives way to adorable awkward dancing. It’s not the same kind of joy that we got at the end of last season, when the Doctor rebooted the universe and everyone ran off jubilantly after a beautiful wedding. After all of the holes that this season has poked in Amy’s approach to belief, though, having that quality actually validated for once is such a lovely way to resolve this season that I wind up happier about this than I did about the more obviously joyful conclusion to Season Five.

Plenty of this episode doesn’t work, but the pieces that do add up to a beautiful resolution of this season’s narrative. The previous Christmas special defined Christmas as being “halfway out of the dark,” and it would have been a reasonable guess to assume that the expression would wind up characterizing the Doctor, who in previous seasons was the only character really to have an extended brush with darkness. At the close of the season, though, it’s Amy who is best described by this phrase. She hasn’t gotten past every dark thing she’s gone through this season—as the start of this scene shows, she’s still dealing with her actions in the other world. If she hasn’t completely emerged from the darkness, though, she looks like she’s about halfway out: after a season of silence, she’s finally speaking, and for a moment at least, she’s so full of joy that it looks like Christmas morning. A-/B+

#doctor who #season 6 #reviews #matt smith #karen gillan #arthur darvill #steven moffat #eleventh doctor #amy pond #rory williams #female doctor

0 notes

coralstarfishtrash-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Lolita

Restricted guides are guides or additional published functions for example documents or has which are forbidden by-law or even to which other means not admittance which. With an increase of than thirty-three trillion publications Jan Brett's award-winning, inprint Newyork Times best-selling books are acknowledged regarding colorful representations of the wide selection of wildlife. All-the Trunchbottoms look out their following pupil might just be like Matilda or up the ante possibly the girl Drew Barrymore enjoyed in The Firestarter edition of Stephen Kings novel. I came up regarding morning which were specially rough with the sit and built everyone experience as large as a feed of mud, until I could after while in the evening were my protect can be composed by me and place my everythingis ok disguise again on. We've to hear her narrative and all study Milliseconds Winter's textbooks... Our pleasure could n't be contained by us. Renee Soldier's Disclaimer, where a person detects a book that reveals her darkest techniques, was picked as being a contender, as was Lisa McInerneyis The Marvelous Heresies Longlisted for the Baileyis women's prize for misinformation a week ago, the latter views the Irish creator inform the history of the Cork female who unintentionally kills somebody with a religious symbol. Paperback textbooks while in the 20th century's advent resulted in an explosion of common publishing. Marketers and merchants stated that developments in technologies have supposed that digital books for children, in a explosive” way in recent weeks, have taken down including photograph publications. We observe black elegance everywhere - we see it in my own relatives and buddies; we seethe intricacy along with the range of dark magnificence in gals Idonot recognize but enjoy, ladies like First Woman Michelle Obama, or perhaps the German-Senegalese celebrity Aissa Maiga, or even the artist SZA, or even the type and activist Bethann Hardison The battle is quite individual. The sixth grader from New-Jersey advised The Huffington Post that she likes to read she scans in university since she's nothing in accordance using them. Im producing articles about games that are online specifically MMO, multiple huge online role and recreation play. Textbooks rolled-out horizontally; one part was filled by the text, and was divided in to copy. A beautiful tale with gorgeous images of intimate Italian Coastlines that built this book and brilliant figures come not dead. In fact, it is a completely new sort of book: one introduced using photos of postcards, records along with other ephemera accompanied by explanatory notes. Numerous prisons only enable guides ahead from an authorized dealer such as for instance a bookstore or company. In terms of characterization and account go, there's very little below that'll shock or problem the viewer...nevertheless the fresh does have charm, lots of it. it is certainly a pleasant method to spend a few hours, although don't expect to get your brain lost. Apologies to retain you-all ready, but let's proceed inside.” Our mother explained and got the tips to open the door out. Appears a gadget that is great but when you explained, updates will be a worry to me, this season specifically using KLP 5.0 arriving. There have been zero hurricanes that is the year that Lolita the fresh was released in United States, although called Lolita that year. Nevertheless Amazon-held competitor Perceptible features a monthly account, it depends on a credit process that gives usage of a specific variety of textbooks per month to consumers depending on the charge. I - can notice reasoning in christmas-gift objects being updated in the Slide, and maybe it truly is bad-luck Skylake is just getting reputable that end of the entire year, but it will seem to be a strategic plan to go solution improvements to that fraction. Many scholarly writers take a fairly extended watch, wanting to gain the unattainable contest obsolescence, and indebtedness where most industry homes submit guides for speedy consumption. This topic can be successfully taken by you since the significant subject-matter for Wuthering heights and you can inter mingle the thought that is before with this particular anyone to include tart if you intend to make it furthermore interesting. At his residence, Ellison knowledgeable a major residence fire in 1967 in Boston, by which he believed 300 pages of his next story manuscript were lost. Okay.” He said and I stepped to the bathroom, I did sonot must request where in actuality the towels are since a holder suitable is once I stroll in. I began the water although it heated up I acquired naked. The engineering BookLamp alows you to discover books that are composed with a comparable sculpt, anxious, viewpoint, motion level, information level and dialogue level. Publications - tips and and the stories grabbed inside them - are section of our societal fabric. Than he needs to he's taking far more risks. And the book additionally demonstrates them coping with his reputation/infamy in a helpful, playful means, as an example articulating the issues of the world wide web/social media using wit and eloquence but then positioning it while in the brain of the figure that is profoundly deranged. Editors hold promote, the sizeable money needed to produce, manufacture, and market publications. A child's initial several publications available doorways to sides that are fresh, and contemplating how children that are enamored will get having mobile phones, e-books really are an excellent mixture of factors digital and literary. The Office Hockey Area of Fame History of Schuster Textbooks and Jackie Robinson.” Simon for Small Viewers, 1990. If you are searching for an engrossing although intellectual concern, choose one of these simple 800+ page books — they truly are worth time investment. So, I was fairly excited to listen to a few weeks before the hottest iBooks update—found in let you view iBooks Author-designed publications in your iPhone. Viewing how I read this book in one single relaxing, we certainly preferred it. It believed not same from the other Beautiful” guides of McGuire. Sloanis novel about a mystical shop that contains a lot more than matches the attention may be worth discovering if your favored spot inside the world is Alley. By 2015's end, Lyft expects to complete almost 13 mil tours. Jess Walter have not observed eyes to vision but after studying Wonderful Ruins, we have certainly kissed and composed. Basically, we may effectively be 'besties'. Mr. Canfieldis additional bestselling books - The Energy of Concentrate, The Aladdin Aspect, and Challenge to Acquire, - have created millions of bookstore and Net sales, and have presented secondary goods including audio programs, movie programs, company education programs and syndicated columns to enthusiastic Company purchasers. Be willing to take suggestions and constructive critique, as this can simply create your medieval-fantasy story that much better. Do your study The amount of study you should do is determined by the fresh you produce. It's splendidly amusing and positively lovely, but Vapor people is likely to be stuck using the lower of the inferior director. I am not likely to propose anyone read this because you will judge me for this long before you fatigue of the tics that are written as well as the recurring use of characters' names that are entire. Stegner was not irresponsible for a boomlet by training her reports at Stanford School in his novels courses and including these in two anthologies of American writers before they inserted her semi-fantastic identity in his prizewinning new. If you're a mug for relationship and puzzle books like us, checkout these bestsellers by Liliana. These books both have a look at file how governmental pros and cons affect people powerless to control their condition, and ordinary household life in a repressive Communist society. it can be deterred, although the cause of Kindle syncing to past page read is so that you could see the same guide on distinct equipment. Attach containers or smaller shelf in which you'll be able to store books at a child- height that is correct. That is one purpose like this are consequently significant that I believe books,; they occur to tell us what mankind are designed for: the nice along with the bad. Shush, I'm worrying it adequate already.” we explained with pretend aggravation, then got. They I would like to proceed chuckled and finally. I suddenly felt cool and miserable without his hands on my back and without so near quarry. Yea ok currently it-all makes sense exactly what a great notion I am not sad you came up with such a normal reason for an element that is underground. The Informal A new of a small-town racked using infighting, sold well-but gotten a mixed reaction from experts although vacancy. Both figures that are key mirror Beatrice and Dante, as well as the commonalities are beautiful. This was and is a reread for me personally, again, one particular publications I just couldn't depart alone. Team Penguin - Club Penguin is among the hottest video game realms for kids, having identical emphasis added to protection and exciting. Finally, in regards to score, I will present a 4.5 as it would-be far better if it had been written from Tyleris POV to this book. I examine this as an elitist university beginner and realized it-all being an allegory. Marketing scholarly publications displays than on promoting and more often than not focuses more heavily to the invisible” resources of direct mail. But, summer is not empty of magical, getaway paradise that is thus shut it can be touched by you. If you've slipped a bit lacking your target to see hundred books this year, todayis a good time to reactivate. It had been the primary book revealed by a dark Caribbean writer in England; Wayne was also the primary Trinidadian author to publish a story that is quick in England, virtually 10 years before Alley arrived. Even though your book takes place in a totally dreamed fantasy world, study in to the real world may be required to make sure that your guide has the level of reality essential to let viewers to postpone notion and truly determine together with figures and your account. Her clear tries so that you can conserve them to curb her romance with Tyler, annoyed myself. We detest that stress variety style in textbooks. Mindset research implies that your capability to sympathize with other-peopleis factors of watch is improved by studying fictional hype, since there is a story psychological simulator of another individual's lifestyle. And same moves on her partner (who is made about the include aswell) but I'd absolutely advise this book because it manufactured the experience reasonable to individuals who don't know the girl on the address. Also, it might be difficult as you would have to take all of the books available to consider the guide covering at the bottom, in case you have plenty of textbooks. http://superfit-blog.com ask-me to advise decreases or even to advise suitable books.

0 notes