There's nothing worse than when Doctor Who doesn't do so great in the ratings, particularly when the episode being broadcast is bloody awesome. In Series Two, the series suffered on the broadcast of The Satan Pit, and that was a great episode. Sadly, for Silence In The Library, it's happened again, and once again it's a brilliant episode, penned by Doctor Who's Executive Producer-elect Steven Moffat. Curiously it was Moffat's BAFTA-winning episode Blink that suffered from the slump last year as well. Do the general populace just not like Moffat's work? Or is it just that Britain's Got Talent was far too interesting to switch off. Hopefully the episode will get a good time-change.
Meanwhile, onto the episode itself. Moffat, in a similar way to P J Hammond, realises that horror is all about imagery, and he also believes that (like one of his predecessors, Robert Holmes), Doctor Who is a horror programme. Skeletons, freaky little girls and libraries are all very scary and they play on the imagination to freak us out. All these elements turn up in Silence In The Library, but the weird thing about this episode - and something that's a great idea - is having two story strands that are definitively tied together (the little girl's and the Doctor's) but there is no obvious way in which they are tied together. It's an idea that was used in the Matrix, and subsequently used in reverse in the sequels very unsucessfully. When the audience knows what the link is, but can't see the storylines interacting, it loses the freakiness-effect of being in the same position as the characters - knowing that there is another storyline out there, but unable to see how they are tied together.
Similarly to Moffat's own The Girl In The Fireplace, we have another female character who is linked in a very soulful way to our hero, though interestingly we have a character who has met the Doctor before, but he has never met her before. Professor River Song is an archaeologist who keeps a book which looks not dissimilar to the TARDIS that charts her meeting with the Doctor. Riversong is a slightly odd character, coming across as overly flirty in the first few moments we meet her, before implying that she knows the Doctor in a romantic way. It's odd, but can be explained away by the suggestion that the character was trying to get the Doctor jealous. Perhaps we shall see more of Prof River Song in Moffat's take on the series.
The episode has a superb cast with ER's Alex Kingston playing River, Bond movie regular Colin Salmon as Dr Moon and St Trinian's Talulah Riley as poor Miss Evangelista. On that note, the death of Miss Evangelista and her subsequent ghostly return is one of the most disturbing moments of the episode and also one of the saddest in the series. It is handled so well by Catherine Tate, and she should take full credit for the tears that came to my eyes. The production team should take great joy in the knowledge that in an episode with an amazingly high calibre guest cast, it is still the series leads that steal the show, with both Tennant and Tate on top form.
Giving the episode a rating with the second part still to come is a bit difficult, but I'll do it all the same. So much of the little girl's storyline has yet to be explained and if I were to discuss it at any length I would be doing it a disservice as it is clearly being set up for quite a revelation in the second half. But on the same note, the cliffhanger is one of the most unsettling that has appeared in the series to date.
"A"
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