Hello everyone! 🙂
Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!
For me, Series 6 of the new ‘Doctor Who’ TV series is the weakest of the three seasons featuring Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Series 6 is a convoluted jigsaw puzzle of a season that has a lot of good ideas in it. It’s a shame that a lot of the good ideas were executed in a very haphazard manner.
A contributing factor to the proceedings is the decision made by showrunner Steven Moffat to split Series 6 into two halves, with one half shown in the Spring of 2011 and the second half shown in the Autumn in 2011. It’s not a necessarily bad decision, but it’s in the way it’s handled to tell the stories.
For one thing, the season finale ‘The Wedding of River Song’ isn’t presented as a two-part story as you would expect most season finales to be. The mid-season finale ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ and the mid-season opener ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ also suffer from being single episodes instead of two-parters.
Had the season been better organised and if three stories out of ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, ‘Night Terrors’, ‘The Girl Who Waited’, ‘The God Complex’ and ‘Closing Time’ were saved for future seasons, maybe the vital episodes by Steven Moffat would have been given their two-part options.
This season also focuses a lot on River Song and her mysterious identity, which gets revealed in ‘A Good Man Goes To War’. To say I’m disappointed that she happens to be Amy and Rory’s daughter would be an understatement, especially as it turns out she has the Time Lord ability to regenerate. 😐
Despite my issues with Series 6, I still enjoyed Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams. These characters have grown on me over the years, and I do like how constant the romantic relationship between Amy and Rory is, despite certain flaws.
Thanks for reading!
Bye for now!
Tim 🙂
Bradley's Basement 
I enjoyed Season 6 because, despite how overly fantastical a lot of the twists might have been, I was enough of a Whovian to just go with the flow of that kind of storytelling. Nowadays it’s different, in the sense of how I now prefer the more serious aspects of Dr. Who. Hence my revisiting several old favorites on BritBox and certainly from the Hinchcliffe era. Thank you, Tim, for your summary.
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Hi scifimike,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Series 6 of the new ‘Doctor Who’ TV series. I’m pleased you enjoyed the season. I admit, the season has got better for me over the years after deciphering more of the complex aspects of each episode. I just wish I enjoyed it more on my first viewing of the two halves of Series 6 in 2011, since it was often a struggle for me to get into the overall story arc of the Eleventh Doctor and the Silence. I also expected different plots from watching ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’ and ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’. I’m sure there’ll come a point where I’ll be revisiting Series 6 and I hope to update and extend my reviews on the episodes to establish more postive and negative thoughts for each story.
Many thanks for your comments.
Tim 🙂
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You’re very welcome. As Doctor Who was nearing its 50th Anniversary year, it would have made the extravagance on certain stories agreeable enough. But how we reflect on such stories after longer spaces of time makes our reviews much more interesting. We can most fondly remember special guest appearances, like Lily Cole for The Curse Of The Black Spot whom I’m in awe of. And that’s what’s so special about Dr. Who. It has something for everybody even in the most questionable stories. It’s that freedom to think that most other shows may not always permit that makes the controversy of Dr. Who a blessing in disguise.
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Hi scifimike,
I’m glad you have fond memories of Lily Cole being in ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’. I especially enjoyed Sarah Smart in ‘The Rebel Flesh’/’The Almost People’. And it’s been nice to see ‘Downton Abbey’ stars in Series 6 of new ‘Doctor Who’ like Hugh Bonnerville and Raquel Cassidy (I don’t think she was in ‘Downton Abbey’ by then, but I recall her fondly from the Ganger two-parter as well as Big Finish audios like ‘Destination: Nerva’ with Tom Baker and ‘Recorded Time and Other Stories’ with Colin Baker).
Many thanks,
Tim 🙂
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