Doctor Who - The God Complex

[seriousfic]

Can I first off say that the meta arc here is extremely well-done, because the arc has so played up fears for the Ponds and wracked them with so much catastrophe that even while the audience is sorry to see them go, we're relieved they're making it while they can still sleep at night. Now I just hope Rory doesn't get fridged to drive Amy back into the TARDIS, or vice versa.

Aside from that, my one big caveat is Rory being immune to the complex, which seems very half-thought. Like they come up with the idea "what if you don't have faith in anything, what does the complex do?" and just threw that onto a character. I really don't think Rory is cynical enough to not have any faith in anything. Not that he necessarily strikes me as religious, but even if he were an atheist, he seems more the secular humanist type. And if a gambler can have faith in luck or a conspiracy theorist can have faith in conspiracies, wouldn't faith in romance or Amy's love make sense? Maybe we can just write this off as him being in a funk over last week (and who can blame him?).

But it seems to me they could've taken that into a more interesting place, like the Doctor being forced to choose between sacrificing Rory's faith in Amy or Amy's faith in him, and so actively choosing to let Amy go. Or, to illustrate how death-seeking the Doctor has become, he could be the one who's lost all faith and is seeing exit signs. Just some thoughts.

And should I stop watching this on BBC America, because the audio seemed really poor. Are they speeding things up to fit between commercials (it seems insane if they do, since a lot of the commercials are for Doctor Who stuff)? I missed the part where they explained why it made sense to imprison a Goa'ld minotaur instead of killing it, then kill innocent people to keep it alive instead of... not doing that. Why do they kill people to keep a killer alive to punish him for killing people?

Comments

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

They don't explain why they imprison, not kill the creature, and then feed it innocents. It's dumb, really.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Rory loves Amy, no question, but I actually think there's something compelling (and consistent with their characterization) about him not having any faith in Amy. Yes, he waited hundreds of years for her, but somewhere along the way, I think he kind of ... gave up. In that sense, he really is Sisyphus; he has no illusions that he'll ever finish rolling the boulder up the hill anyway, but he still does it, because, well, that's what he does.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

It kind of goes along with a fanon theory I saw about "The Doctor's Wife," which is that, while House was torturing Amy in the TARDIS by confronting her with her worst nightmares, the reason we didn't see similar scenes for Rory is because House tried and Rory said, "Yeah, but no, sorry, every day of my life with the Doctor has been my worst nightmare," which actually corresponds to a line of dialogue Rory had in "The God Complex."

In short, the reason no one can drive Rory crazy is because he's very quietly been going insane for a very long time now.

[axolotl-lan.livejournal.com]

---> I've been thinking that about Rory too. I just hope it doesn't mean we'll lose him to it.... not that I don't think he would make a spectacular "villain" as things build and continue to boil against the Doctor- I'd just prefer that not happen.

[lurkslikefox.livejournal.com]

I got the impression that the minotaur was imprisoned because the people who built the prison worshipped it as a god and wanted to keep it safe and fed. The Doctor said that his race went around pretending to be deities. I may have got the wrong end of the stick though.