Is There a Doctor in the Library?
Actually there are two. THE Doctor meets Dr. Elizabeth Corday Greene, widow of Dr. Mark Greene, who’s previous experience with action was watching the emergency room at County General get shot up every other week. The weeks it wasn’t getting shot up, the doctors were either screwing each other (metaphorically and literally), improperly diagnosing most of their patients, or getting kidnapped. Of course, this isn’t actually the good Dr. Corday. Rather, the lovely Alex Kingston portrays Professor River Song, an archeologist. Not only does Professor Song lack the ten foot pole up her ass that plagues Dr. Daniel Goodman of Bones first season, but she appears more confident and is obviously enjoying herself at least a thousand times more than as Dr. Corday. Kudos to you Ms. Kingston. You go girl!
When viewed as a whole, this is a rather trippy and somewhat sinister episode. After all, this silent library seems to exist in the mind of a young girl. Not just any young girl, but one undergoing therapy. On top of all that her creepy therapist tells her that the nightmares are real and the real world is just a dream. Assuming team Davies/Moffett don’t come up with something lame in part two, this could be interesting. Did The Doctor land inside someone’s head, kind of like his landing inside an electronic device wasy back when during the Perwee adventure “Carnival of Monsters”? Is the little girl actually a sentient security camera? Why am I so sure the explanation will be much lamer than this?
There’s even an attempt at explaining everyone’s fear of the dark. And it’s that apparently microscopic pirannah like things inhabit the shadows ready to strip the flesh off your bones in a microsecond. A functional plot device, even if it poorly rips off the premise of the Jeffrey Combs tour de force “From Beyond”. It does keep everyone on their toes, although the animated corpse repeating the same phrase over and over again (”Hey, who turned out the lights?”) is an obvious recycling of the “Are you my mummy?” child from the first season’s “The Empty Child”. It does give David Tennant his usual chance to display his enormous… energy supply.
Many of the two parters have a great first episode and a fairly big letdown in the conclusion. I’m hoping this doesn’t happen here.