View source for Doctor Who is currently much pre-occupied by death

{{article
| publication = The Times
| file = 2011-05-16 Times.jpg
| px = 200
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| date = 2011-05-16
| author = Andrew Billen
| pages = 16
| language = English 
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Snapshots that won us the war

Doctor Who

Saturday, BBC One

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Doctor Who is currently much pre-occupied by death: the extinction of the Time Lords at the hands of the Doctor, and its hero's death 200 years hence. On Saturday, he thought he had found some of his kin. This seemed unlikely since we are always being told he is the lonely last Time Lord in the Universe. But we were not in the Universe, but at its "plughole". It looked like a small soundstage in Wales. It was not one of the higher spending editions but the writer Neil Gaiman made up for that with the extravagance of his imagination, which turned the soul of the Tardis into a feisty lady, played with gusto by Suranne Jones. 

She was not letting him get away with anything. When he complained that she (ie, the Tardis) had not always taken him where he wanted to go, she parried: "But I always took you to where you were needed."  Truly she was the Doctor's Wife, which was the name of the episode. Taking my advice last week, Matt Smith produced a more nuanced performance as the Doctor and Karen Gillan, again, was superb as Amy, the companion least likely to buy into the myth of the Doctor as saviour, as propagated by Russell T. Davies. "He'll be fine. He's a Time Lord," she was assured. "That's just what they call themselves," she replied. "It doesn't mean they know what they are doing." But the hero of the day was Gaiman. 
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