Doctor Who 7x06: The Snowmen

[laurashapiro]

While I am fully willing to concede that as MOTW-style storytelling, this episode had little in the way of plot, it was fannish catnip for me. The narrative force was driven by character and relationship, and I like that just fine.

The thing I'm happiest about is that Clara is Oswin. I loved Oswin so much when we met her in "Asylum of the Daleks," and I really grieved her death in what was for me the most gripping and moving episode so far this year (I was upset more by Oswin's departure than the Ponds'). I had been spoiled about the actor coming back, but I kept reading about a character named Clara, and I had little hope of seeing Oswin again. I could not be more pleased!

Clara is everything I look for in a companion: smart, competent, funny, brave, and full of surprises. Her sexual attraction to the Doctor I could normally do without, but it seems to me on first viewing that her feelings are quite definitely returned. That equalizes things nicely.

It's interesting to see Eleven respond to her here, and see how different he is not just from Ten, but from the Eleven we've seen before. The episode sets him up as solitary and cold, but he's warmer with Clara than he ever is with River (with whom there's always the tension created by her superior knowledge of their relationship -- and of him), and his response to Clara's kiss is less surprised and bumbling than his reaction to Amy's or River's. I've felt for years that Eleven was the easiest of all the Doctors to imagine in a physical relationship with a companion, because he seems somehow more physically approachable than other recent incarnations. Most of the time he lacks the prickliness and sniffy superiority of Nine, the weirdly cold manic energy of Ten. Eleven just seems more touchable, somehow, and you really see that here -- he warms right up to Clara. Boy howdy.

(Yes, I already ship them. Shut up.)

Naturally I loved seeing Vashta and Jenny again, and having their relationship made explicit. Having them be married was an excellent touch, especially as it's Vashta's greenness that freaks people out, not her gayness. It felt very RTD-era to me, having these characters be so awesome and having their relationship just be one more fact about them. I was less amused by the notion that they were the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and Watson; that's a little too on-the-nose for me, to say nothing of the Doctor swanning around in a deerstalker. Yes, thank you, Steven, we all know about your other project.

I can't decide what I think about the Doctor's relationship with Strax. I don't love Strax being his servant. I can kinda see how a Sontaran, with their hierarchical social structure, would find it reasonable, but I'm not sure I see the Doctor going there. Strax calls him "Sir"! That seems wrong to me. OTOH, their dialogue was funny as hell.

I could watch the scene of Clara discovering the TARDIS forever. The TARDIS' location in the cloud layer, with the invisible ladder and the naked winding stairway, was such a gorgeous visual concept, a great metaphor for the Doctor's remoteness. Getting there would be scary and wonderful and breathtaking -- all the things life with the Doctor would be. I love how even when you reach the top of the stairs and you can see the TARDIS, you can't see where to put your feet. That must be what being a companion feels like.