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| The Trio: Doctor, Amy, and Rory |
1 episode. Approx. 41 minutes. Written by: Chris Chibnall. Directed by: Douglas MacKinnon. Produced by: Marcus Wilson.
THE PLOT
The Doctor is lured back into Amy and Rory's lives when billions of tiny black cubes appear all over the surface of Earth. Along with Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), daughter of the Doctor's old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor exposes them to multiple tests - all of which yield no result. After days of inactivity, the cubes are declared "provisionally safe" and the Doctor gets bored and leaves, promising to continue monitoring the situation.
A year passes, and the cubes become an accepted part of daily life. People take them into their homes and offices, use them as paperweights and toys. They are simply objects, and become accepted as such. Which leaves humanity vulnerable. Because while the cubes may be dormant, they are far from dead - and "the slow invasion" is about to begin!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: In a private moment with Amy, he admits that the reason he keeps coming back is that hers was the first face he saw after his regeneration. Her face was "seared onto (his) hearts," and he's enjoying as much time with her and Rory as possible before they finally decide to stop. That isn't enough to keep him with them when nothing is happening, and it takes less than a week of inactivity for him to become so horribly bored that he simply must do something. He insists to Amy that he isn't running away from life in his travels - He is running as fast as he can in order to try to see everything before it's gone. His explanation rings half-true... but only half-true, as is hinted by the note of desperation that never seems far away from this Doctor's voice.
Amy: I loved both Karen Gillan and Amy pretty much instantly as far back as The Eleventh Hour, and Gillan has gotten better as an actress since. There's a lovely maturity to Amy as she talks with the Doctor about how life with him and life with Rory pull at each other. As the conversation progresses, it starts to feel as if she's the adult talking to the precocious child that is the Doctor. Then the old enthusiasm of early Season Five Amy shines through as she and the Doctor go to rescue Rory. I love the brief, magical grin that crosses Amy's face just before they go through an interdimensional portal, an expression of childlike glee that is all the more freeing for the contrast with the serious young woman we saw just a few scenes earlier.
Rory: As early as Vampires of Venice, Rory was willing to be absolutely blunt about the Doctor. In that episode, he rebuked the Doctor for the danger his lifestyle created for those around him. In The Girl Who Waited, he raged about the Doctor's carelessness. Here, he lays out for the Doctor that his work and life are important to him, and tells Amy that they will ultimately need to choose between "real life and Doctor life." He does agree with Amy that he's not ready to choose quite yet, but it seems fairly certain which life he will choose when the moment comes... and Amy increasingly moving to his side.
THOUGHTS
"Did real life just get started?"
The Power of Three is a very good episode that falls just short of being a great one. It has a clever premise, with the slow invasion that relies on the cubes sitting dormant long enough to become accepted and even mundane. This is one of the most inventive "alien attack" premises Doctor Who has presented in its fifty years: What if an item was brought into everyone's homes only to eventually be revealed as malignant?
Unfortunately, writer Chris Chibnall's script can't match that premise with an equally clever resolution. The plot progression is enormously clever, and the cubes become quite sinister as we keep cutting back to them to see them more and more ignored by people. But with any such script, there comes a point where All Must Be Revealed. The explanation for the cubes is weak, and the way in which the Doctor saves the day feels so absurd that he might as well be using magic to bring the dead back to life - It wouldn't be any less believable than the PseudoScience used here.
That weakness stops this from being the classic it might have been - but it doesn't hurt the overall show as much as you'd think, because the joys of this installment have very little to do with the story. This is a character episode first, an examination of the Ponds and their lives that have been split between "real world and Doctor world." Judged strictly as a character episode, it soars. Amy and Rory's dilemma is presented in a way that feels completely convincing. The Doctor is also given an extra layer of scrutiny, from his admission to Amy about why he keeps coming back to her and Rory to his scene with Rory's father, Brian (Mark Williams), in which he discusses the ways his past companions have left him.
The splendid character scenes, the long period covered by the episode (which takes place over the course of a full year), and the cleverness of the invasion premise all make The Power of Three a success. If the ending was as strong as the rest of it, this would be the best episode thus far in Series Seven. As it stands, it still manages to be a respectable second-best.
Overall Rating: 8/10.
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