2011 Christmas Special: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

 We start out in space - and apparently, there is sound in space.  Take a lesson from Joss Whedon, Mr. Moffat.  There is no sound in space!  Okay, the Doctor runs through the exploding spaceship - very exciting!  I do love this music.  But wait!  He's now hanging off of the spaceship, breathing, groaning, talking, yelling.  Why does he need the space suit?  I guess for reentry?  Are spacesuits built for reentry?

But I'm deviating away from my normal "let's save the nasty comments for the Dislikes section".  Maybe I should start over.

So the Doctor is on this exploding spaceship.  He ends up on the outside, and as he lets go of the ship, he spies a space suit.  He and the suit both hurtle through space, and he crash lands somewhere in England.  Madge, a housewife, finds him, but because he put the helmet on backwards and now it's stuck, she doesn't see his face.  She helps him get to the TARDIS.  Back home, she discusses the impending war with her husband.  A few years later, he is a pilot in World War II, and he disappears over the English Channel.

Madge receives the news at Christmas, but she promises Cyril and Lily, her children, that their father will be coming home.  They all go to their uncle's mansion in the country, apparently to escape the bombing.  They are greeted by the Doctor, who calls himself the Caretaker.  He has specially prepared the house for them in a ridiculous display in an attempt to cheer them up (though we don't know yet that he knows about their father's death).  Madge sends the kids out of the room and tells the Doctor that their father is dead.

The children find a giant Christmas tree downstairs and equally giant present, which glows eerily like the TARDIS.  That night, Lily wakes up and starts to sneak downstairs to look at the present, but instead, she wanders into the Doctor's room.  She starts flirting with talking to the Doctor about the TARDIS, which he calls a wardrobe.  Meanwhile, Cyril does go downstairs and open the present, which is really a doorway to Narnia a mystical wood.  Of course, he enters the wood.  Lily, however, tells the Doctor that her brother is in bed asleep.  This eases the Doctor's mind, because now he can get some alone time with Lily he can continue to work on rewiring his wardrobe.  But then an alarm goes off, and he knows that Cyril has gone into the wardrobe present.  He then pulls Lily into the magical wood as well, and tells her that it's a dimensional portal thingie.  She smiles alluringly innocently at him.  They start following Cyril's footprints; Cyril, in the meantime, is following ever-growing footprints.

Cyril ends up at the witch's castle a tall tower which has a lion's face in the door handle.  He goes inside, where a statue of a treeman sits in a throne.  He decides then to climb up the tower, and as he does so, the statue blinks (I actually was typing that as a joke, and then the statue blinked).  As Cyril climbs the tower, there are flashing lights in the sky, and some kind of transport vessel lands in front of Madge, who'd been following all the footprints.  Some entirely irrelevant soldiers climb out to provide some comic relief.

Back at the ranch tower, Cyril finds a room with a treegirl standing over a throne, holding a crown.  The Doctor and Lily enter the tower and he tells her that the entire building is a group of trees disguised as a building.  Lily holds the Doctor's hand (for the second time, I might add).  Bow chick a wow wow.

Back to the soldiers for some more comedy.  They aren't going to shoot Madge for trespassing, and they lower their guns.  But Madge pulls one out and tells them she's looking for her children.

In the tower, the treegirl is trying to put the crown on Cyril's head, and the Doctor and Lily try to get into the room.  Lily notices that their are stars coming out of the forest, and the Doctor says it's life.  The treegirl places the crown on Cyril's head, and the king statue starts climbing the tower.

Madge is in the transport ship - the soldiers tell her that the entire forest is about to be burned with acid rain to make battery fluid.  The soldiers evacuate the ship.

Cyril tells the Doctor that the trees are evacuating.  Lily goes to the window and the Doctor explains that the life forces are trying to evacuate to leave the planet.  He holds her shoulder.  How creepy is this?  The crown is a relay, it's an escape plan for the trees.  The treepeople tell the Doctor that Cyril is weak, and the Doctor is weak, but Lily is strong.

The acid rain starts, and the Doctor tells them they have to go.  But then Cyril throws a temper tantrum and says he has to wait for his mummy.  She then comes crashing through the forest in an AT-AT.  She enters the tower, and the treegirl puts the crown on Madge.  The life forces start pouring into her brain until she has the entire forest in her head.  Turns out that Madge is strong because she's a woman and all she's good for is popping out kids she's a vessel for life.

The top of the tower takes off because it's a spaceship, and they enter the time vortex.  They have to go home, and the only way for that to happen is for Madge to think of home.  She then climaxes pictures home and her husband, but then says she doesn't want to see him die.  We then cut back to the plane, but then Reg sees a brilliant light and decides to follow it.  How he can follow that blinding light is beyond me, but whatever.

The ship lands back home at the mansion in the country.  The children are very upset, though, about Madge saying that she didn't want to watch him die.  She decides she has to tell the children the truth.  The Doctor leaves to give them privacy, but as she starts to tell the children about her father, the Doctor starts calling to them very excitedly.  They run outside and their father's plane is parked outside the mansion as well.  Apparently, Madge's having a tree inside her head led her husband home.  It's so very heartwarming.

Madge visits the Doctor up in the attic and says that she knew it was her spaceman.  She convinces him to go home to see his friends and tell them that he's still alive.  He goes to see Amy and Rory.  Amy shoots him with a water pistol.  They hug.  It's incredibly charming.  The Doctor wipes the water from the water pistol - or is that a tear? - from his cheek.  Hang on, I have to go barf.

Narnian references:

What do they teach you in schools these days?
Time moves differently across dimensions.
World War II/going to a mansion in the country to escape the bombing in London
Magical wood
Calling the TARDIS a wardrobe
The trees are talking to each other (even some of the trees are on her side)
Trying to crown the children

Likes:

1)  Madge takes him to an actual call box.

2)  Madge asks if he's the new caretaker, and he says, "Usually called the Doctor, or the Caretaker, or Get Off This Planet, though strictly speaking, that probably isn't a name."

3)  Madge really is strong.  She doesn't freak out about the whole affair.

Dislikes:

1)  How is he talking and shouting in space?  IN SPACE!

2)  How did falling from space NOT kill him?  Apparently that's an "impact suit".  But from SPACE?!

3)  Haha, Madge keeps hitting things with her car.  Women can't drive.

4)  The back of the Doctor's space helmet has breathing holes.  Are space helmets supposed to have
holes in the back of them?

5)  The "repairs" to the house are ridiculous.  This whole thing is ridiculous.

6)  He's being over the top again.

7) When the Doctor rushes around like a deranged clown shows the children their bedroom, I feel very much like Madge - just STOP TALKING!

8)  Relationship between Lily and the Doctor = CREEEEPPPY!

9)  Too many Narnia references

10) These kids are STUPID.

11) "Mummy, is Daddy dead?"

12) What the hell was the Christmas present for?  He's just going to take them into this other dimension, la dee da?

13) Did they have to put the loudmouth red head Amy back in? 

14) Humany-wumany.  It works with timey-wimey.  It doesn't work when he does it with other things, and this is the second time in this episode he's said something like "timey-wimey" that wasn't timey-wimey!

15) If she saved her husband, why did she still have the telegram? 

16)  Seriously, I think Lily was trying to get in the Doctor's pants.

17)  I just realized - the Doctor showed up because Madge made a wish.  A WISH!  Since when does the Doctor hear and respond to wishes?!?

I dislike Moffat's tenure so much.  He has completely crushed me, he's destroyed this show that I so completely embraced.  I feel cheated now that I came to it so late, that I only had one real season to watch in real time.  So quickly did Doctor Who enter my life, make it a bit more enjoyable, and then exit.  Thankfully, I have a few dozen seasons of the classic series to watch, because god knows, I'd rather watch the most horrible reconstruction than Matt Smith.

I so wish David Morrissey had really been the next Doctor.