The Doctor Goes to War

“The only water in the forest is the river” – that is if you find yourself in a Gamma Forest. Secrets are revealed and more questions come to the fray as The Doctor brings an army together to rescue the child of Amy and Rory in “A Good Man Goes to War.” The timelord who defeated the Atraxi and removed them from their planet, only to force them to come back to “scold them” doesn’t hold a candle to the Centurion (Rory who in the season 5 finale guarded the Pandorica where Amy was being held from the time Rome fell to the 21st century) who walks onto a Cybermen ship and demands his wife back.

This formidable group is not joined by River Song since this is when The Doctor puts the pieces together of who she is and what she means to him. But this has all began before the first episode, before Utah and the girl in the spacesuit. Still it comes to a head in “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People” where through a solar storm a sentient race called The Flesh battle the ones who created them.

These human-like beings are doppelgangers, they hold a person’s memories, take their form and you can’t tell the difference between the original and the copy. It seems that Amy had been a ganger the entire time and the woman with the eye-patch was in the reality with Amy giving birth to her daughter Melody Pond. The end of the episode brings incredible revelations and even more questions as Melody is taken away to be a weapon to defeat The Doctor.

An embroidered piece of cloth with Melody’s true name on it reveals how “anger is always the shortest distance to a mistake.” This mistake The Doctor makes leaves him blind to the real trap set for up for him.

Don’t worry all is not lost in this action packed episode of Doctor Who where everything you love about the series comes into play, witty dialogue, action, the clever use of a sonic screwdriver and clever jargon that makes science fun. And then there’s River Song who shows up at the end to snap The Doctor out of his rage. She reminds him of how he changed the meaning of the word doctor from healer to warrior – a man to be feared, someone who could bring the Silurians, Judoons and the Sontarans together to fight in his name.

His future, her past – The Doctor and River Song’s complicated history makes for a somewhat, happy ending, but more spoilers await as the raggedy doctor searches for the child of his friends in “Let’s Kill Hitler.”