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| The Doctor prepares for a showdown at high noon. |
1 episode. Approx. 44 minutes. Written by: Toby Whithouse. Directed by: Saul Metzstein. Produced by: Marcus Wilson.
THE PLOT
The Doctor picks up Amy and Rory again, this time to take them to Mexico for the Day of the Dead festival. The TARDIS being what it is, they instead find themselves outside the town of Mercy in the American West, not long after the Civil War. The Doctor's attention is immediately drawn to the "Keep Out" sign at the town border, to the anachronistic electric lighting, and to the suspicious stares he and his companions draw as they walk through the town. "Did someone have a peek at my Christmas list?" the Doctor exults.
Isaac (Ben Browder), the town's marshall, informs them that the residents have been prisoners for the past three weeks. A mysterious Gunslinger (Andrew Brooke), a cyborg armed with a laser cannon, has threatened to kill anyone attempting to leave until Mercy turns over "the doctor" - an alien named Kahler-Jex (Adrian Scarborough). Jex's spaceship crashed some years earlier, and he was taken in by the townspeople. Ever since, he has worked as their physician.
The Doctor agrees to help. But when he stumbles across Jex's crashed ship and activates its computer systems, he learns that there's far more to the story than had been revealed. Jex is a war criminal, who experimented on subjects to create an army of cyborgs. The Gunslinger is not just a villain - He is also Jex's sole surviving victim, out for revenge at any cost!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: OK, perhaps the Doctor's ruthlessness at the end of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship wasn't just an uncomfortably out-of-character moment. We see another moment of violence here, when he prepares to angrily send Jex to his death. Amy is there to call him on it this time, wondering what has happened to the good man she knew and commenting that he's been traveling alone for too long. This season's Doctor seems perpetually on the brink of crossing a terrible line, much like the line he throws Jex across in sentencing him to die. Amy and Isaac pull him back from the brink this time, and Jex eventually shows genuine honor at the end, but there's no sense that the Doctor's anger issues have been resolved.
Amy: In the last story, she got to act as sort of a Doctor figure herself. Here, she is very much in the companion role - but also very much in the companions' original role, acting as the Doctor's conscience. When the Doctor is ready to simply give Jex over to the Gunslinger, Amy is the one who stops him, reminding him that he is better than this.
Rory: Gets the least to do of the three regulars. He is, not for the first time, the voice of pragmatism. When the Doctor is ready to eject Jex, Rory supports that choice. When Amy asks if they're really going to let the Doctor do this, his response is coldly pragmatic: "Save us all? Yeah, I really am." However, once the decision is made to save Jex and stop the Gunslinger, Rory doesn't question it and is fully on board with assisting.
THOUGHTS
"You're both good men. You just forget it sometimes."
-Isaac, Marshall of the Town of Mercy, of the Doctor and Jex.
A Town Called Mercy is another script by Toby Whithouse, who wrote my second-favorite non-Moffat story of last season, The God Complex. That story was notable for its examination of the Doctor and his view of himself versus his companions' view of him. This story isn't quite as strong, but it does see Whithouse once again tackling the Doctor as he relates to those around him.
This is most clear in the parallels drawn between the Doctor and Jex. Jex taunts the Doctor by observing how similar they are in many ways: Both scientists, both men who have tried to help others but have also witnessed true darkness. That runs right down to them both having done terrible things in order to end wars. Seeing himself in Jex makes it hard for the Doctor to be objective as he considers the implications of what the other man has done.
The Gunslinger is also a parallel to the Doctor: A man who wanted to help secure peace, and instead was turned into a weapon at great personal cost. Like Jex, he does his own penance for his misdeeds, and the bookend narration starts by apparently describing the Doctor and ends by describing the Gunslinger. In all three men, we see the worst and best they have to offer.
The western setting allows Whithouse to have some fun playing with genre conventions. Several stereotypical western moments are recreated. The main plot, with a town cut off by an external threat, is reminiscent of Rio Bravo. The deadline the Gunslinger gives before he will come to town to take Jex over the Doctor's dead body is more than a little like High Noon. There's even a scene in which the Doctor faces down a lynch mob while protecting the prisoner. The pastische goes just far enough to be amusing, but not so far as to descend into self-parody. The show is very self-aware in structuring itself as a western, but never stops being a proper Doctor Who story as well.
A final note that seems to apply to this whole half-season: The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are not traveling together full-time and have not been since The God Complex. Every story this season has been an isolated adventure, with them reunited for one adventure with the Doctor dropping them back at their home at the end. The last story revealed that it had been months between visits, and this story ends with Amy asking the Doctor to give them some time before visiting again. As Amy observed in the last story, it's almost as if the Doctor is weaning the Ponds off him (or vice-versa?). This gradual distancing of the Doctor and his companions is an interesting departure from the usual exit, and I'll be very interested to see its final endpoint.
In, I suppose, two more episodes.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
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