by Catriona Mills

Live-blogging Doctor Who Season Five: "Vampires in Venice"

Posted 23 May 2010 in by Catriona

I wonder what this episode can possibly be about?

And I wonder if I’ll finally remember to use Time and Relative Dimension in Sexiness in this live-blog? Unlikely: I’ve not remembered to use it yet, despite promising to use it in every live-blog this season.

We open in Venice—“Ah, Venizia!” says Nick, who has never been to Europe and can’t spell—in 1580, where a man in his best clothes, who says he’s a boat builder, is offering his daughter to a signora in terribly fancy clothes.

The signora says that she’s touched by his care for his daughter: she believes that caring for the future is a sacred duty.

He tells the signora that his daughter is his world.

“Then we’ll take your world,” she says.

She tells him to take his leave of his daughter, which he does. The signora and her son circle the girl, and she asks Francesco if he likes her. He says he does—and bares his fangs.

Then we’re in Rory’s bachelor party, where he’s leaving a drunk message for Amy, until the Doctor jumps out of a giant cake, and we get this:

DOCTOR: Rory! I thought I’d jumped out of the wrong cake. Again. That reminds me, there’s a girl standing outside in a bikini. Can someone let her in, give her a jumper? Lucy. Lovely girl. Diabetic. Now then, Rory. We need to talk about your fiancee. She tried to kiss me. Tell you what, though: you’re a lucky man. She’s a great kisser. Funny how you can say something in your head, and it sounds fine.

Credits.

The Doctor explains to Amy and Rory that the problem with time travel is that it will create inequality in their relationship. So he wants Rory to travel too, to make sure that their experiences are equal.

DOCTOR: Think of it as a wedding present, because, frankly, it’s this or tokens.

He starts to explain to Rory why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, but Rory’s been reading up on it.

DOCTOR: I like the bit when someone says “It’s bigger on the inside.” I look forward to that bit.

He tells them to pick something marvellous to see and do, but they just gasp a bit, so he picks for them. Venice.

DOCTOR: Casanova doesn’t get born for another 140 years. Don’t want to run into him. I owe him a chicken.
RORY: You owe Casanova a chicken?
DOCTOR: We had a bet.

A man checking their passports explains that the Contessa keeps the city sealed, because outside the city, the plague keeps the streets piled high with corpses.

Rory is more worried that the psychic paper has described him as Amy’s eunuch.

As they look out over the city, they see beautiful, pale women with veils over the faces come out of a large building. The boat builder from earlier comes up to them shouting for “Isabella!”, but his daughter doesn’t recognise him, and the girl who pushes him away shows her fangs.

The Doctor, naturally, pursues the boat builder, and Amy and Rory head off in another direction.

Inside the imposing building, Francesco comes up to Signora Calvierri, who says, “Mummy’s hydrating.” She’s certainly sucking something down, out of an elaborate goblet. Francesco is worried about the slowness of their progress: he says they have enough girls for his brothers. But Signora Calvierri says they follow the plan.

Amy and Rory, wandering the streets, have an awkward conversation about what she’s been doing, which Rory cuts off to ask if she missed him, and then find Francesco feeding off a flower seller. Amy chases him and though he seemingly disappears, we see someone looking up at her from the canal.

At the Calvierri residence, the boat builder distracts the guards, while the Doctor sneaks in through a back gate. He’s caught by five creepy girls with no reflection, and tries to distract them with William Hartnell’s library card.

No, seriously.

He legs it after they refuse to tell him their whole plan (“Some day, that’s going to work,” he says), and bumps into Amy. They reveal they’ve both met vampires, and jump up and down in excitement.

“Come and meet my new friend,” the Doctor says.

In the boat builder’s home, they quickly realise that they need someone inside if they’re going to get in the back route that the boat builder discovered, because there’s a trapdoor you can’t open from the outside.

Amy volunteers to try and attend the school.

DOCTOR: We’ll say you’re my daughter.
RORY: What? No!
AMY: Daughter? You look about nine.
DOCTOR: Brother, then.

Amy says that he can pose as her fiance, which annoys Rory and, as the Doctor points out, it doesn’t help when the boat builder says that he thought Amy was the Doctor’s fiancee.

That’s all right, Amy says: Rory can pretend to be her brother.

In Casa Calvierri, after some awkward banter about how Rory is a gondalier driver, Amy is accepted into the school and makes the acquaintance of Isabella, who is clearly herself but undergoing some kind of odd change.

Outside, Rory, the Doctor, and the boat builder move into location, the boat builder wearing Rory’s cute bachelor party T-shirt, with his and Amy’s portraits on it.

RORY: You said she kissed you!
DOCTOR: Now? You want to do this now?
RORY: I have a right to know! I’m getting married in 430 years.

Amy explores, unlocking the trapdoor.

The Doctor explains. Badly.

DOCTOR: She was frightened. I was frightened. But we survived. And the relief of it. And she kissed me.
RORY: And you kissed her back?
DOCTOR: No, I kissed her mouth.

Inside, Amy is caught by the Contessa, who recognised the psychic paper, and demands to know where she got such a thing in a world of savages. Amy refuses to answer seriously, so the Contessa bites her on the neck.

And yet they’re not vampires, apparently? Look pretty vampirey to me. Reminds me of a book I read where a teenage girl insisted that her boyfriend wasn’t a vampire even though he was mysterious, immortal, super strong, and she once caught him drinking her best friend’s blood.

Some serious denial going on there.

Rory tells the Doctor that he’s dangerous because he makes people want to impress him, which makes them take risks. Luckily, they’re caught by some vampire girls before the argument can really get going.

The Contessa explains to Amy that they’re going to drain her dry and then replace her blood and fluids with their own, which will destroy her humanity.

AMY: And if I survive?
CONTESSA: Then there are ten thousand husbands waiting for you in the water.

Amy kicks her, disrupting some kind of device that she has under her skirts—which flickers and reveals her as some kind of, I don’t know, piranha. That’s the best term I can think of. A bipedal piranha.

Amy is rescued by Isabella, comes up to the Doctor and Rory, and they all four leg it—but Isabella can’t get out into the sunshine, and she’s dragged back into Casa Calvierri, with the Doctor electrocuted trying to pull her free.

Elsewhere, the Contessa and Francesco preside over Bianca’s execution, throwing her into the canal. She says, scornfully, that she’s Venetian and they can all swim—until she’s dragged under water by something.

The Contessa kneels down the canal.

FRANCESCO: Mother, change your form. Or my brothers will think they’re being fed twice today.

When the Contessa heads back inside, she finds the Doctor waiting for her, revealing that he knows what species she is and where she’s from. She and her sons fled the silence, the cracks in the world (some of them tiny, some of them as big as the sky) by passing through one of the cracks, which closed behind them. Now she plans to make the Earth into her own version of her world.

And she wants the Doctor to help her.

(There’s a bit about how the perception filters work in here, but I didn’t have time to cover it.)

DOCTOR: Where’s Isabella?
CONTESSA: Isabella?
DOCTOR: The girl who rescued my friend.
CONTESSA: Oh, well, deserters must be executed. Any general will tell you that.

She tells the Doctor that he can help her in any way he likes, but he demurs.

DOCTOR: I’m a Time Lord. You’re a big fish. Think of the children.

Then he tells her that he’s going to tear the House of Calvierri down stone by stone, because she didn’t even know Isabella’s name.

The Contessa heads outside, to tell Francesco that the storm is coming. Then her perception filter flicks on and off, frightening the staff. She says Amy must have damaged the filter.

In the boat builders’ house, the Doctor fits together the Contessa’s plan to sink Venice, but Rory says she can’t repopulate the city just with women.

DOCTOR: She’s got ten thousand children swimming around the canals, waiting for them to make them some compatible girlfriends. Ew. I mean, I’ve been around a bit, but that’s . . . ew.

The vampires crowd around the house—and I know they’re “fish from space,” not vampires. But “fish from space” takes too long to type. (Though I do like the Doctor’s line, “Fish from space have never been so buxom.”)

Either way, the girls have completely changed, and the Doctor pushes everyone out of the house—except the boat builder, who lures the girls back in, shouts, “We are Venetian!” (which Nick doesn’t even flinch at, when he’d normally be shrieking, “This is Sparta!” at that point), and ignites the barrels of gunpowder that I didn’t have a chance to mention before.

(But though I didn’t mention them earlier, I note that they were presented on stage in the first act and used in the third act, so that’s all right by Chekov.)

The Doctor sends Amy and Rory back to the TARDIS, but they’re intercepted by Francesco.

The Contessa begins her plan to burn the skies. The Doctor points out that the girls are all gone, so she might as well spare the citizens of Venice, but she refuses.

Francesco corners Amy in an alleyway, until Rory distracts him by saying, “The only thing I’ve seen uglier than you is your mum.”

Francesco is stunned: “Did you say something about Mummy?”

(I secretly kind of love his spoiled, public-school boy persona.)

Rory tries to hold him off with a broom, with some success, I must add. But Francesco pins him down, flicks off his own perception filter, and is about to eat Rory, when Amy burns him to death with the mirror in her compact.

[For the sake of my pronouns, action scenes should only happen between people of opposite genders.]

She snogs Rory, then says, “Now we go help the Doctor.”

NICK: Ah, the dilemma of the companion’s boyfriend.

The Doctor’s a bit annoyed about Rory and Amy following him, but what with the storms, earthquakes, and tidal waves, there’s not much he can do about it. He tells them to tear all the controls out of the Contessa’s throne, which will re-route power to the secondary control hub, which should also be the generator.

This leads to the Doctor climbing up the side of a clock tower, where he finds a lovely steam-punky control, and turns it off.

Well, that was a bit easy, eh?

Blue skies come back, and there’s much indiscriminate cheering.

Outside, the Contessa walks—well, staggers, really—towards the canal. Her perception filter whirs and squeaks—and then dies, locking her in human form. She strips off her skirts and corset, and walks towards the edge of the canal.

The Doctor runs towards her, but she just says that one city wasn’t much a price to pay for a whole race.

The Doctor tells her that she can’t change time.

CONTESSA: Can your conscience carry the weight of another dead race? Remember us. Dream of us.

And she leaps into the canal, where her children devour her.

Outside the TARDIS, the Doctor offers to pop them back at the registry office, but Amy doesn’t want to. Fine, says Rory: drop him back, and he’ll say she changed her mind.

Amy says she could come with them, and the Doctor says it’s fine with him. So Rory gleefully agrees.

AMY: I’ll pop the kettle on. Look at this! Got my spaceship. Got my boys. My work here is done.
RORY: We are not her boys.
DOCTOR: Yes, we are.

As he and Rory follow Amy into the TARDIS, the Doctor says, “Do you hear that?”

Rory says all her hears is silence, and we fade out on the Contessa’s voice describing the cracks that destroyed her world.

Share your thoughts [27]

1

Matthew Smith wrote at May 23, 11:57 am

Oooh I don’t know about you but I’m beginning to think something might be up with those cracks.

Great episode though eh? And I’m glad you’ve managed to shake the head injury in time for the marking this weekend :-/

I was thinking about Time and Relative Dimensions in Sexiness this week with the Doctor’s little aside “Who would have thought fish disguised as vampires would be so buxom!”. It must be confusing being a humanoid alien species amongst humans and fish disguised as vampires disguised as humans. Now that I think of it, this Doctor started with the sexuality stuff from the first few seconds that we saw him, clutching at his chest to check for boobs. I blame Steven Moffat. Geronimo!

I’m glad Rory has come on board as a companion too, I think he displayed some admirable qualities in the first episode and the Doctor seems to like him more than poor old Micky. I also thought Rory had some good stuff to say about the Doctor making people want to impress him – it’s a clever observation of human nature on the writer’s part (whether it was Moffat or Toby Whithouse (who I see through IMDB wrote School Reunion – an episode where vampire bat aliens take over a school to use the children as part of a super computer).

The episode also reminded me a bit of the Shakespeare one, I guess because of the period.

I also loved the opening with the Doctor popping out of the cake and telling everyone he’d just been kissing the bride to be! Nice way to sober everyone up and then remind them all that the real girl from the cake is in fact a human being – what a mood popper.

2

Catriona wrote at May 23, 12:11 pm

Toby Whithouse is not a god on the Steven Moffat scale, but I do adore him. He also wrote Being Human—well, he wrote many episodes and created it—and it was just a delight for me. If you haven’t seen it, it starts with a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire sharing a house and . . . well, I shan’t spoil it for you.

If I’d seen this episode before, which of course I haven’t, I’d have to say I enjoyed it even more on a rewatch. Some aspects made sense that, I suspect, might not have made sense on an initial watching.

And I thoroughly agree with you on Rory: the interactions here with Amy, the Doctor, and Rory are quite different to the Rose/Tenth Doctor/Mickey ones, or even the Tenth Doctor/Captain Jack/Donna, or, basically, the Tenth Doctor and any woman who came near him. I’m pleased to see Rory being all proactive and not terribly annoying.

3

Tim wrote at May 23, 03:15 pm

I was a bit disappointed. Lots of good lines and visuals, lovely sets (though not enough actual canal work), the leads are still great, Relative Dimensions of Sexiness all over the place, but the plot was a bit silly. (It could have been a great four-parter in the old series, though.)

Why did the Doctor have to hide in the cake? Why not just use the door?

The perception filter stuff was stretched too far — it didn’t work the way perception filters have previously.

Francesco is disposed of far too easily — he’d been strolling around the streets with just a hat to cover his head, Rosanna managed with a parasol and the girls were able to uncover their faces at least briefly without exploding.

Rosanna isn’t wearing the same clothes in her real form, so what was she taking off at the end?

The tidal wave apparently vanished. Though why did they need a weather machine anyway? Why not just swim off into the ocean once they had a breeding population?

And the Doctor doesn’t deal with the surviving males (at least, not on screen). Careless.

4

Catriona wrote at May 23, 09:42 pm

I admit, I wondered why they needed to sink Venice, when the Earth is mostly water anyway. But perhaps they’re highly sophisticated bipedal piranhas, and they fancied buildings? Living in the deep oceans might be roughing it a bit much.

I assume the males are simply going to die out, without female companions, and the species with them, but I hadn’t considered that a number of people are going to be eaten in the canals in the meantime.

I had some problems with the ending. Helen McCrory herself I thought was wonderful: the Contessa had these lightning-fast mood swings, but it never seemed stagey or implausible to me. But I admit don’t quite comprehend what happened at the very end.

I blogged it as the perception filter dying and locking her in human form, but I don’t quite understand how that happens. I’ve never been entirely sure how the perception filter works, though. The implication at the end (and in the earlier scene on the steps) is that it actually works physically on the person wearing it (or why else did it cause her pain when it flicked on and off? And, for that matter, why did Amy see the girls as girls when she knew what they were and what they really looked like?). But if I’m recalling the dialogue correctly, it’s supposed to work on the perceptions of others, hence the lack of reflection.

It left me a bit bewildered.

All this would have been fine if they’d called it a chameleon circuit and not a perception filter, though.

I didn’t mind the Doctor hiding in the cake, I admit, because I loved that monologue. I was saying to Nick afterwards that I loved the way it showed that this Doctor, while genuinely interested in people, interested enough to actually talk to Lucy while he’s convincing her to get out of the cake, is actually really, really bad at dealing with them.

Plus, it made me laugh.

5

Tim wrote at May 23, 11:46 pm

I thought Helen McRory was great too. I would have preferred it if they’d called the ‘perception filter’ something else, though even then it’d be very handwavy.

(Re causing pain, though, it could function both physically and perceptually; that is, it has a physical aspect at the user’s end that creates perceptual effects. Like wearing clothes. That doesn’t explain why she doesn’t take off the filter device — perhaps it was bolted on.)

Re Rory being proactive, I read a suggestion elsewhere that maybe the Doctor has learnt a lesson too. He let Rose drift away from Mickey; this time, he’s trying to keep Amy and Rory together.

6

Catriona wrote at May 24, 12:03 am

I thought she did take the perception filter off? If I’d seen this episode before last night, that would have been my point of confusion at the end: she wasn’t wearing the perception filter when she stripped down to her unmentionables, so how was she still in human form?

The physical pain the malfunctioning unit caused her made a bit more sense of that (assuming that I’d hypothetically not noticed that before), since it suggested she couldn’t switch back to piranha form.

The idea that it works both physically on the wearer and psychically on the viewer makes some degree of sense, except that I’m fairly sure that when the Contessa and the Doctor were talking about it, she only mentioned the psychic effect on the viewer.

Of course, Whithouse might have assumed the Contessa’s physical pain when the unit was malfunctioning was enough to cover the physical aspect.

Isn’t all science in Doctor Who a bit handwavy? I know that bothers you a bit sometimes, but I’ve always just assumed that all science is magic (and not just on television) and been quite happy with that.

I think the argument re. Rose/Mickey and Amy/Rory is an intriguing one. Martha fits in there, as well, I think, in that she implied she was putting that part of her life on hold to travel with the Doctor: she might not have been as keen to leave when she did if she hadn’t been attracted to that nice paediatrician.

7

Tim wrote at May 24, 01:40 am

She can’t have taken her perception filter off, else she wouldn’t have been eaten.

Yes, it’s all handwavy, but I prefer it when they’re at least sticking to one hand at a time. ;)

8

Catriona wrote at May 24, 02:09 am

Yes, but that was my problem with it. The perception filter was visible on the outside of her clothes, under the over-skirt. It wasn’t attached to her underclothing. She stripped her outer clothing off before leaping into the canal, including her outer skirts.

We saw her full length before she leapt into the water, and the perception filter clearly wasn’t riding on her hip then.

So why didn’t she change back into her original state? Why did she get eaten?

That’s the bit that bothers me.

I know she can’t have taken it off, but it seems as though she did.

9

Catriona wrote at May 24, 02:12 am

That said, I also don’t really understand why the perception filter worked on their own species (I would have thought it would have needed to be species specific, especially since a species living underwater is unlikely to have the same kind of vision as a land-based species, surely?) or why her sons didn’t have another means of identifying their mother, such as smell or even taste. I mean, Rory said that Francesco stank of fish—wouldn’t the Contessa have had the same distinctive smell, or was that just because Francesco had been frolicking in the canals?

10

Catriona wrote at May 24, 03:36 am

I tried to bring Nick round to my point of view. He’s highly suggestible:

ME: Honey, am I also right about her not wearing the filter at the end?

NICK: I’m thinking she was wearing it at the end.

ME: I know she must have been—but she wasn’t. It was on her outer skirts. I just—I know she must have been, but it really didn’t look like she was.

NICK: Ah! Oh, that’s interesting. I sort of thought it was strapped to her leg or something like that.

ME: What do you mean? We saw it on her outer skirts. No, the under-skirt. Sorry. But she stripped all that off.

NICK: Yeah. That really wasn’t well handled.

ME: If they want us to think she’s wearing it at the end, they shouldn’t have drawn so much attention to its location and to her stripping her clothes off. Plus, hang on! Francesco jumped in the canal in human form. Why didn’t his brothers eat him? Do they only eat girls?

NICK: Maybe they weren’t massing in that part of Venice?

ME: Maybe. Or maybe he flicked his filter off underwater. Or maybe they only eat girls. Still, it’s another weakness in the plot that I hadn’t noticed before.

NICK: The Writer’s Tale book is quite revealing about these kinds of plot holes – the episodes just get written so damned fast. There never seems to be enough time to sort out every story problem.

ME: That’s fair enough. I totes sympathise with that, since I’m plugging plot holes as fast I can right now. But this is the big emotional ending of the story. They could at least have shown her holding the damn thing in her hand.

NICK: Yeah, that’s true, it’s not a good place to play fast and loose.

ME: Exactly. I am always right.

Yes, I know this is my third or fourth comment (on my own blog!) about the same issue, but it bothered me. And, yes, I said “totes.”

11

Tim wrote at May 24, 03:59 am

Maybe the malfunction also affects whether or not the filter covers the device itself. ;)

But writing speed is a poor excuse.

12

Deb wrote at May 24, 06:41 am

I don’t know that the Doctor was trying to keep Rory and Amy together so much as he was trying to deflect what he saw as her inappropriate advances towards him onto a more appropriate target.

13

Catriona wrote at May 24, 07:16 am

It could be both, though, Deb. He might be deflecting her unwanted attentions and working against the inevitable bereavement of his companions (which we’ve seen him struggling with since season two).

14

Sam wrote at May 24, 11:36 am

I think that bringing Rory into it was a great idea and I think it was to keep him and Amy together.

What The Doctor said about how it should have been Rory that Amy kissed but Rory wasn’t there and he was and in the heat of the moment… I can, well not relate, but understand that and I think he’s probably right. Before we started using the edit suite in film in year 11 the teacher informed us that we’d probably end up falling in love with our editing partner just because being together working like that has a weird effect, and I think traveling in the TARDIS is the same.

Bringing Rory into it oughta keep the “Amy is a slut” camp quiet for a bit anyhow.

15

Wendy wrote at May 24, 12:20 pm

Firstly….totes? And what bothered me was when the doctor whipped that handy light sabre-ish thing out of his jacket all out of nowhere. A minor detail I know…..

16

Catriona wrote at May 24, 12:45 pm

Sam, nothing is going to keep the “Amy is a slut” camp quiet—they’ve got the bit between their teeth now, if I can be forgiven the cliche. (Nick tells me the mad TWoP recapper for Doctor Who is in that camp, which just confirms my decision to stop reading his frustrating recaps seasons ago. But that’s not going to help.) And I suspect her travelling with two men isn’t going to calm things down.

I don’t get it myself, and I suspect I never will.

Wendy, I love “totes.” It’s my new favourite word. I do try not to use it on the blog, but I copied the conversation across verbatim.

And I think the Doctor’s pockets are also bigger on the inside than the outside. It’s too useful a technology to keep to the TARDIS alone.

17

Tim wrote at May 24, 02:35 pm

I’m not a fan of Jacob’s recaps in general, but I don’t think he’s exactly ‘in that camp’. When you consider how the Doctor has affected Amy’s life, the end of episode 5 is a bit creepy, no? That’s not the same as thinking she’s a slut. And in the TWoP recaplet for this episode, I read ‘The whole “men are like this, women are like this” thing is pretty egregious, but the technical skill with which last week’s sexual cliffhanger is resolved gets points for authenticity and maturity that seemed possibly lacking before.’

18

Catriona wrote at May 24, 09:29 pm

I really need to stop listening to Nick, apparently.

;)

I admit, my comment above was late-night hearsay: I haven’t read Jacob’s recaps since . . . actually, I can’t remember when I stopped. I came up to one where he declared that he was going to read the episode through Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and thought, “I am so done with these.”

I think Nick’s problems with him differ from mine: I just found that reading his recaps was like marking the work of a clever student who thought he was much cleverer than he was and didn’t bother to pay attention to text and context.

I’m not sure I do find the end of episode five creepy. I found it intensely embarrassing and hard to watch, but that was more because it was the most awkward seduction scene on the planet. But creepy? Not so sure. Yes, he’s had a big influence on Amy’s life, but from a distance—he only spent about an hour with her. And everyone around her treated him as an invisible friend. Plus, she’s an adult when she snogs him. I don’t know: I’ll have to think about that one a little more.

19

Nick Caldwell wrote at May 24, 10:19 pm

Jacob also seems to think Benny Hill says something meaningful about British sexual ideology, despite the fact that Benny Hill became a lot more popular in the US than he was in the UK.

Anyway, I was prompted to have another look at TWOP by some commenters on the AV Club forum who were suggesting he’d gone misogynistically off the rails and I had a bit of a skim around. His recapping of the Eleventh Hour wasn’t too bad but he was clearly getting worse as the season progressed. I’m not sure I want to look again to validate my argument though, so I’ll withdraw it.

20

Catriona wrote at May 24, 10:31 pm

And I should add that I did unwittingly misrepresent Nick’s comment, which was much more of an “apparently . . .” statement than I made it look.

21

Tim wrote at May 25, 07:05 am

Re ‘creepy’, it was that for me more in retrospect — she’s an adult, but her entire life so far has been warped by a few hours of his. She’s a damaged person. (That’s not a criticism of her, by the way.) She wants to do adult things with her childhood imaginary friend. But at time of viewing I was thinking more awkward and embarrassing (but also funny, and quite refreshing after the moping of previous companions).

I agree about ‘work of a clever student’, though.

22

Heather wrote at May 25, 08:21 am

Perception filter conundrum solved—she wished upon a falling star and became ‘a real boy’.

23

Catriona wrote at May 25, 10:52 am

Heather, without even the presence of the Blue Fairy?!

I’m struggling with how to explain why I’m not sure I find it creepy. At the time, I did find it embarrassing to watch and awkward (albeit in a funny, gorgeous kind of way). For someone who really isn’t behind the whole “Doctor as a sexual being” thing, I loved it. But I didn’t find it creepy, and I can’t explain why, even now.

I agree Amy’s damaged, and I also don’t mean that as a criticism. I agree that the Doctor had more of an influence on her than the usual childhood imaginary friend. But I don’t know that his influence was such that her snogging him ten or more years later would be creepy—I mean, I don’t think it was that kind of influence.

I don’t know how to explain what I’m thinking, which means I’m probably wrong, or at least that my thoughts aren’t fully developed.

I tried to explain it to Nick by saying that it was like going to a film as a child, and unexpectedly developing a crush on the lead actor. It might be overwhelming, might colour your daydreams for some months (or years), might even influence your romantic development—but it wouldn’t necessarily make it creepy if you met that actor when you were an adult and snogged him.

But even that’s not a great analogy.

24

Tim wrote at May 25, 02:38 pm

We may also be meaning slightly different things by the word ‘creepy’. Let’s talk about the costumes or something. :)

25

Catriona wrote at May 25, 08:39 pm

Nah, if we talk about the costumes, we’ll just end up thinking about Amy’s short skirts again, and who wants to do that?

26

Tim wrote at May 26, 01:13 am

Is that a trick question? :p

27

Catriona wrote at May 26, 05:15 am

Only you can answer that, Tim. Search your heart . . .

;)

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