OK, watched it again, and went back to the thread for Part One, and I'm having more thoughts.
Total bit of trivia: the Laurel and Hardy movie was
The Flying Deuces. Oddly enough, my copy doesn't have the Doctor in it
Interlord1 in last week's thread wrote:Spacesuits are bulletproof arn't they?
Answered in part 2 – it's a NASA spacesuit alright (I read something about it actually being based on an Apollo 17 suit, but whatever) but it's also got “about 20 kinds of alien tech” in it, which would “explain” the bulletproof aspect since, presumably, there is some sort of shielding as well as life support, weaponry, and communications gear.
Although we never again see the picture Amy took with her phone, in part 2 we do see they've made use of it.
The Doctor's death at the beginning of this two-parter seems a bit throw-away to me. Even putting it 200 years in the Doctor's timeline doesn't help much, as the Doctor changes bodies as often as a fashionista changes wardrobes. A Doctor 200 years older is extremely unlikely to be wearing the same face. I suppose we could dodge that with
[technobabble] a perception filter
[/technobabble] but it just seems gratuitous to me. We only have the future Doctor's word he was 200 years older, he might just be a few months older, going back to arrange the whole thing. Older Canton declares the body on the beach to be the Doctor and to be dead... and they take him at his word. But what if Canton was instructed to lie? What if River is also in on a deception? We really see that whole sequence only from Amy and Rory's viewpoint, we don't know what else was arranged off stage with River and Canton. This could be one of those bits that tie in with a future episode.
Several odd dangling threads here, little bits that stand out as not quite fitting: the child, for one – at the end of part 2 the Doctor is going on about “it's all about the little girl” and in a sense it
was, she was obviously very important to the Silents, they exerted significant effort to keep her alive and cared for despite their obvious contempt and disregard for human life. Then it's off to have more adventures and the little girl is forgotten – WTF? That is unlike the Doctor. Is it some odd lingering forgetting effect of the Silents?
Who really killed the Doctor? The little girl got out of the spacesuit/exoskeleton, after all, so when the Doctor is killed it could be someone else inside it.
Who is that girl, anyhow?
There was also the woman with the silver eye patch and the sliding window in the door – it's reminiscent of that bit in “Flesh and Blood” where the Doctor runs off, leaving Amy with her eyes closed, then shows up briefly telling her to remember... which in the last episode of the series is revealed to be a later doctor on “rewind” trying to get Amy to remember him before he falls out of the universe. I suspect the lady with the eyepatch is a similar sort of thing. She'll show up again later, and we'll go “ah-ha! So that's what that was about!”
In a sense, this works in that a time-traveler's life would, presumably, have odd moments that didn't make sense until later. But it can be annoying and confusing to the viewer of the story. River Song's “reverse” timeline in relation to everyone else is another example of time travel actually being an integral part of the show, unlike some prior OldWho season's where it's almost irrelevant and the TARDIS might as well just be a taxi from one point in space to another. Heck, there used to be entire multi-part episodes where the TARDIS was only seen twice – once at the beginning to get them to the adventure, and once at the end when they were leaving. Like everything else, you don't want to over-use the TARDIS and time travel, and there's nothing wrong with an occasional episode where they're almost irrelevant for a change of pace, but the Doctor should be using the TARDIS fairly frequently.
Another thought – people have got to stop putting the Doctor in boxes. It doesn't work. First, the Pandorica, now that whatsit cube in Area 51 (we all noticed they were holding the Doctor in Area 51, right? 'Cause that's where the aliens are kept, right?). If you want to keep the Doctor confined you gotta do it like they did before the cube was finished: tie him to a chair, with lots of guards around him watching him. As soon as you stop watching him he'll get the TARDIS or swap places with someone else or whatever. He's a Pan-Galactic Time-Traveling Houdini. Don't take your eyes off him for a nanosecond, not even to see the funny man behind the little curtain over there.
Called it in last week's thread – he was cooperating with being held (since he could have just snapped his fingers and hopped into the TARDIS, chains and all), and initially they did it by guys standing around pointing guns at him. But he still easily escaped, and of course the irony is that the “impenetrable cell” is the very thing that allowed him to escape. That, and he was clearly sitting right next to an invisible TARDIS the whole time. Of course, Canton had to be in on it all, and apparently Nixon was, too. And the “don't cross the yellow line” bit was essential to preventing people from accidentally colliding with an invisible TARDIS. So, as usual, the elaborate precautions were what allowed him to escape.
While opening with Amy being chased was very dramatic, I wasn't too thrilled with how they get out of the warehouse being seen as a flash-back. I get the sense that there could have been an entire episode between part 1 and 2, although maybe it's just as well they didn't make it a three-parter. I'm OK with this, but the flash-back technique can be over used.
TimothyC wrote:[As an aside while I do get where it comes from, Canton's lover* was a bit gratuitous, and could have been done without. It seemed like it was added for the sake of adding it, and didn't add anything to the story.
*Being male, not black.
I called Canton being gay back in last week's thread. It was the only thing that made sense. In 1969 in the US being a homosexual was pretty much the same as being a pedophile in most peoples' mind, in some states it was a felony with similar penalties to child molesting. Of course, there were people in the FBI who were gay (with long standing rumors of J. Edgar Hoover being one, or a transvestite, which was almost or equally bad for most people back then), they just hid it.
A white man marring a black woman in 1969 would have been a touch scandalous but legal everywhere in the US (after all the current president's parents were legally married in 1961, interracial marriages did happen), but Canton said his getting married would have been a crime, and it was pretty clear he meant a literal crime and not hyperbole. That means he was gay.
Yes, it's gratuitous. On the other hand, aside from those very few lines, there's nothing about Canton that says “gay”. He really is just like any other government/FBI agent except for preferring men to women for sex. In that sense, it's just another trait of the character, like hair color or height. Was it really necessary as a trait of the character? I'm not sure – there is something to be said for the “outside the FBI, but with FBI training” and in that sense it's an easy way to get him kicked from the FBI, as well as continuing leverage over him to get him to work for the government even when he's reluctant (widespread public knowledge of his sexual orientation would have made life extremely difficult for him, so essentially the government could blackmail him into doing work).
The thing that's still not quite working for me is the relationship between Amy and Rory. No one doubts Rory's devotion to Amy – after all, he
waited 2,000 years for her at one point – but there's still that “thing” Amy has for the Doctor. There's nothing inherently
wrong about a married woman having a man as a friend outside the marriage (at least, I hope not, seeing as how often I've had such male friends myself) but there's that “vibe” that's still leaving it up in the air where her ultimate loyalty lies. I don't mind them playing with it a bit in this episode, but I'd really like to have that resolved, preferably with her and Rory and a solid couple. True, with the Dreamlord Amy chose the reality that had a live Rory in it, but I think we need to see more of Amy's attachment to the man she married.
Nah, no Indiana Jones fans here, none at all. 
"
- PeZook