‘Doctor Who’ Recap (Series 6, Episode 11): Fear and Faith

I spent most of the first half of “The God Complex” bored and looking at my watch. I spent most of the second half with eyes glued to the screen. Throughout the earlier scenes, I was convinced that the story was little more than a frivolous, creepy, expendable romp through a Harry-Potter-inspired hotel (the architecture shifts like Hogwarts and a boggart is in every room). The plot is simple enough at first: The Doctor brings Amy and Rory to a hotel with no exits and no windows. There they encounter a few other trapped souls: a conspiracy blogger, a clever nurse, a gambler, and an alien who craves oppression. One by one, each of them falls victim to a mysterious something that preys on their fears.

As fast paced and funny as it was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all a bit shallow. Sure, there’s plenty of running through corridors and creepy monsters (even the Weeping Angels!), but there’s not much beneath the surface of the story, I thought. What a disappointment after the emotional wringer that was “The Girl Who Waited.” Even “Night Terrors” turned out to have a rather affecting emotional core to it. This, on the other hand, seemed to be a simple story where the expendable guest cast gets picked off one by one until the Doctor comes up with the solution. Not to mention the fact that the core narrative device, facing one’s own darkest fear, seemed a little bland to me, particularly due to its similarity to “Night Terrors.”

But things change when the Doctor realizes that it’s faith, not fear, that the Minotaur feeds off of. Suddenly, there’s a sort of logic to the reason these particular guest characters are here in the hotel. And then the little things that didn’t seem important, like Rory’s ability to notice the exits, take on a new significance in light of this revelation. Suddenly this is a story all about character–and not the hackneyed, superficial kind of character traits like “what do you truly fear?”, but rather something more fundamental and significant: “In what do you put your faith?”

Things get really interesting when we finally step inside Amy’s own hotel room, and the outcome of the plot hinges on the Doctor’s ability to talk Amy down from her unflinching faith in him. It’s a powerful moment, because even while we want to believe that he’s selling her a load of bull, the things he’s saying hits a little too close to the mark for comfort. And we know that he believes it. Amy, the girl whose entire life since the age of six has revolved around the Doctor and her unflinching faith in him, abandons that faith, causing the entire hotel to dissolve around her. The image is powerful—a pyrrhic victory where the monster is overcome but Amy’s world literally collapses around her.

We end up in the Minotaur’s prison, a Tron-inspired technological blank slate. Here the Minotaur, cut off from his food source, can meet his final fate with dignity, as he’s always wanted. A parallel is drawn between the Minotaur and the Doctor as the Minotaur slowly dies. This is reminiscent of the death of the Face of Boe in 2007’s “Gridlock,” but here the comparison is far less flattering to the Doctor. It all leads into one of the biggest surprises of the episode, for me anyway: the departure of the Ponds. It’s a fitting conclusion for their characters, as the Doctor cuts them loose for their own good before he can do any more damage to their lives. He wonders where it all ends: with him standing over Amy’s body, or Rory’s? Amy doesn’t bother to mention that both of these eventualities have already happened more than once.

It’s a fitting end to the arc of these characters: after all the damage that’s been caused since the Doctor came crashing (literally) into young Amelia’s life all those years ago, he finally leaves them to spare them any further harm. Of course, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this isn’t really the end for Amy and Rory. The BBC publicity machine that I complained about in my last recap has made sure we’re aware that the Ponds are here to stay for now, and you can be sure that Moffatt isn’t going to resolve the story of the Doctor’s “death” at Lake Silencio without Amy and Rory present. So I suppose their inevitable return may cheapen it a bit. Or maybe it will only drive the point home, as we learn that the Doctor’s attempt to keep them safe by cutting them loose is just one more in a long string of failures.

Which seems to be what Series Six has been about, at least since “A Good Man Goes to War.” So much of the previous half-decade has been devoted to setting the Doctor up as the lonely, godlike figure who exerts an uplifting influence on all those with whom he comes into contact. That was the vision of Russell T Davies, the previous showrunner, but Moffatt is tearing all that down. That perspective of the Doctor has been consistently undermined and undercut, most powerfully in the last two episodes. I’m a little surprised that the events in “The Girl Who Waited” weren’t referenced in dialogue here in “The God Complex,” but there was at least a clear thematic resonance.

So in the end, what appeared at first to be a somewhat lightweight, mildly spooky adventure turned out to be yet another poignant character piece. We’re four episodes into this fall’s six-episode run, and in my opinion there hasn’t been a single one in the bunch that’s less than fantastic so far. Two weeks will tell whether writers Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat can round out a perfect half-season of Doctor Who.