Twice As Many Teeth: Revenge of the Giant Snow Ball

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back! Well, most of us. No Ponds. Well... there was one pond, but it wasn't a Pond - just a pond. Anyway, onward to the story.

The Story

There once was a lonely little boy.

Who grew up to become a lonely old man.

Oswin Oswald returns as Clara, a sexy barmaid in 1892.

She meets the Doctor, who fails to fail to intrigue her (there's also something about a magical disappearing snowman), and she follows him, only to discover that he's really got his head in the clouds.

And the TARDIS needs a paint job.

She's not without her own secrets, since it turns out that barmaid Clara has a side-job as Mary Poppins.

So the evil villain of this episode is the lonely old man, Dr. Walter Simeon, who is following the instructions of "The Intelligence", a giant snow globe.

Their evil plan involves creating an army of snowmen, who will take over the world by turning into super-snow beings that can survive July using the DNA of a human - specifically, a woman who was frozen in a pond a year ago.

Much like my former roommate, this snowman hasn't yet learned to chew with his mouth closed.

Through some plot devices and a convenient coincidence that I will address later, everyone ends up at the mansion where Clara Poppins works, and they meet Clara's predecessor, who seems pretty chill.

"This is how you count to one. Are you ready to learn two?"

Dr. Simeon and his Snowman Brigade wait outside for the Ice Lady to come outside, so that they can absorb her DNA and become SuperSnow!

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Clara go up to the TARDIS, luring the Ice Lady to go with them so as to avoid the end of the world, and the Doctor gives her a TARDIS key. The elation from that is short-lived, however, as Scary Poppins decides to bond a little more closely with Clara.

They fall. The Ice Lady breaks into a million pieces. Clara has also realistically splattered all over the ground, given that she fell from the clouds!

The actual image was too graphic to show.

Just kidding. She looks as though she decided to take a nap in the snow.

The Doctor and Madame Vastra go to confront The Intelligence, whom the Doctor deduces is actually Dr. Simeon's childhood loneliness reflecting off of the snow. They kill Simeon, but then The Intelligence brings him back as a zombie.

Simeon: "Winter is coming!"
Catelyn Stark: "Ned?"

But then Clara cries, because she's about to die, and everything melts, because the snow is reflecting her now. Then she dies, and it's kind of strange because now we've seen the same character die twice, which never happens on Doctor Who.

The Doctor realizes something fishy is going on, because Poppins-Clara said the same last words as Dalek-Oswin, and because her name turns out to be Clara Oswin Oswald. He gets excited and leaves in search of another Clara.

...Meanwhile, in the future...

The Good

Overall, the good in this episode pretty much amounts to entertainment value. This episode is genuinely fun to watch, and varies nicely from suspense to horror to comedy to adventure, and eventually to grief. There are also a few things in the episode that genuinely tickled me.

The Overall Feel

Snowmen was beautiful. It was truly a work of art, with a lovely blend of music, effects, sets, and costumes bringing it all together into a single cohesive whole.

True Art

Of course, that doesn't necessarily set Snowmen apart from the other episodes this season. Asylum felt like a post-apocalyptic Sci-fi thriller, Dinosaurs was pure comedy, Mercy was a Western, Three was surreal, and Angels was a gum-shoe detective mystery. And this time, we get a fully-fledged Victorian thriller, and it succeeded in style.

The Bow Tie

Conspicuously absent at the beginning of the episode, and I noticed. And then, halfway through, the Doctor realizes that he has unconsciously donned his bow tie, presumably for the first time since losing Amy and Rory.

It's got a frosty pattern on it... a SNOW TIE!

That moment made me smile.

Ahead of Their Time

I'm pretty sure that the romance shared by Madame Vastra and Jenny will take at least two centuries to be accepted by the general populace. That, of course, doesn't stop them from posing as adorably as an interspecies couple can.

Can't wait to see what their kids will look like.

They seem a lot more close and loving than they did in their previous appearance. In A Good Man, I thought that Jenny was Vastra's maid, especially since she kept calling her wife "ma'am". Of course, even in this episode, it's still pretty clear who the dominant one is in their relationship.

"You'll sit when I tell you to sit.....darling."

Strax

He didn't really add anything to the plot, but he was hilarious. Admittedly, given that the Sontarans were once feared villains (as were, I think, the Silurians), I can see how Commander Strax's inclusion as comic relief might come across as weird, if not downright offensive, but it works, I think. Here's a short list.

His ineptitude with the memory worm.
"Do not attempt to escape or you will be obliterated! May I take your coat?"
"This dwelling is under attack! Stay calm, human scum."
Doctor: "I'm the clever one. You're the potato one!"

I think it suits him.

Pure Terror

I have mixed feelings about the scene where the maid runs around screaming at the various frightening new things that appear in her life.

This is me around needles.

On the one hand, that scene makes her look weak - the frail maid who runs around and screams at everything. On the other hand, it was a genuinely funny scene.

Clara Oswin Oswald

Her acting was great, as before. But what I really liked about Snowmen was the way it set up the mystery about her. I was expecting this to be some companion of the Doctor's who would go on to have her memory wiped and be placed on board the Alaska at the end of Season 8, or something like that. Instead, it turns that she and Oswin are mystically the same person, but different... somehow.

It turned my whole impression of her character upside-down.

And her death was brilliantly scripted and played. As soon as she fell off the cloud, I knew for sure that she was going to come back from the brink of death. It wasn't until she said her now-infamous last words that it hit me like a truck that she really was going to die. And that it was certainly not the last time we were going to see her.

The epitaph kind of gives it away too.

The Bad

Snowmen makes no sense. I don't mean that in the "cannibalistic snowmen are unrealistic" meaning. I mean that whoever was writing this episode had a very clear beginning, ending, and middle for this episode, and didn't bother giving the characters more than three neurons to rub together. Most of the people in Snowmen are either so mindbogglingly stupid or so mindbogglingly lucky [or both] that the episode completely falls apart under any scrutiny whatsoever.

I'll go through a couple of examples, just to show you what I mean.

The Old Governess

You remember that scene where the Ice Lady barged into the children's room? Scary, right? You remember what her purpose was? Oh that's right - it was to go outside and be collected by Dr. Simeon and his friends.

This was basically my social life pre-high school.

So why did she go inside and start terrorizing the kids? The whole conflict, once everyone was gathered at the mansion, was that the Frozen Dame was inside and Dr. Simeon wanted her outside. But she started out outside! In that pond! All she had to do was rise up from her pond and join Dr. Simeon, but instead, she decided to go exactly where Dr. Simeon did not want her to be.

To be fair, he did want her under the carpet, but after midnight, in private, and with him.

You might argue that this was because she was programmed that way, but why did he program her to go inside? Why not program her to go to the Great Intelligence immediately? Or better yet, program her to do nothing at all, and then have a bunch of snowmen surround the pond shortly before she's expected to hatch. It's not like he has any problem making snowmen...

Dr. Simeon

Okay, so let's assume that there is absolutely no way to create a woman out of ice without making her immediately try to kill the nearest child. (Note: If this were, in fact, an obstacle for Dr. Simeon, it would have been nice for the writers to include some explanation of this fact.) Yet you want that woman to end up in your custody. I can think of a few ways to accomplish that.

The Pre-emptive Approach: Set up your army of snowmen to surround the Pond of Doom as soon as the Winter Witch hatches.
The Friendly Neighbor Approach: Establish yourself as a friend to the family that owns the mansion, so that you can swoop in and "rescue" them from the evil Governess who is trying to eat the daughter.
The Unfriendly Neighbor Approach: Wait outside the mansion for the White Woman to dispatch the Latimers and then scoop her up when she comes outside to kill more people. Before Christmas, try not to directly create circumstances in which the only people who can thwart you are actually in that mansion, in full-thwarting mode.

Here are a few things not to do:

Attract attention from random barmaids who just happen to be working at the mansion you're using.
Attract attention from the lizard woman and wife-of-lizard-woman whose abilities you cannot or have not fully measured.
Attract attention from the owners of the mansion in question.
Actually, really, attract attention from anyone.

Disclaimer: The above tips and tricks do not constitute my endorsement, implied or otherwise, of genocide in any way, including, but not limited to, with the use of sentient snowmen.

Okay, so we've covered attracting attention. Now even though he made all of those stupid mistakes, Dr. Simeon almost got what he wanted. What I mean by "almost" is this: He had what he wanted, and then chose to give it up for absolutely no reason.

Wait.. what?, you might ask. Well, let me explain. Check out this screenshot:

Notice that she is surrounded by evil snowmen. Now this one, from about fifty seconds later.

See those ice crystals? That's what he needs. Those pieces of the Ice Lady are what Dr. Simeon needs to give to his snowman army in order to accomplish his goals. And for almost a full minute, they are sitting there, in the yard, not ten feet from three snowmen, with the only possible resistance being from a woman who just fell to her death!

I honestly cannot come up with any reason that neither Dr. Simeon nor the snowmen went over and grabbed an ice crystal. Seriously, all he needed was one piece. And he had every single one. And let every single one disappear without even trying to stop it.

The fact that the main villain of Snowmen made all of these obvious mistakes took a lot away from the drama of this episode, and really makes me think that he got his Doctoral Degree from Joe's Pizza and University.

Dr. Walter Simeon has a Ph.D. in making disgusted faces. That seems to be the only thing he's good at.

The Doctor

No, not Dr. Simeon, I mean the Doctor of eleven faces (or three, if, like me, you've never watched the original series). The Doctor's actions are almost as baffling throughout Snowmen as those of Walter Simeon, and the only reason that the Doctor gets away with his stupid mistakes is because of sheer, dumb, luck.

There are a few [if he's trying to avoid attracting attention, he should probably toss out that sonic screwdriver], but the biggest one to me is this:

Here he is all Sherlocked at the GI Labs:

Geronimo, my dear Watson, Geronimo.

At this point, he has figured out exactly what Dr. Simeon's plans are. Exactly! In other words, he knows that inside that pond, there is a woman hatching - a woman containing exactly what the snowman army needs in order to destroy all of humanity, and that the only way to stop the end of humankind is to prevent Dr. Simeon from getting that Ice Lady.

"Should I take precautions and destroy or impede this all-of-humanity-destroying-thing-growing-in-pond, or should I leave it completely unattended to go say hi to Clara?"

So he does the smart thing: He goes to the pond.... And then leaves. He waves his sonic screwdriver at the pond, doesn't do anything to block the snowmen or the Ice Lady, and then walks away. The only reason that this doesn't lead to the abrupt end of the human race is the incompetence (discussed above) of the Ice Queen.

The One-Word Test

Madame Vastra had an interesting bit of wisdom: "Truth is singular; lies are words, words, words."

She's drinking something red; that means she must be wise.

Here's the problem with that wisdom: it's completely and utterly false.

Here's a very simple question that most of you should not be able to truthfully answer in a single word: "When did you stop beating your spouse?"

Let's go out on a limb here and assume that you've never hit your loved ones. The technically correct response is "never", but that answer contains the strong implication that domestic violence is an ongoing issue in your household, and therefore cannot be said to capture the truth. If you really want to convey the true answer to that question, you'll have to say something like "I have never beaten my spouse", but there's no way to convey that sentiment in a single word.

Clara was presented with a somewhat similar task. She had to provide a single word that would explain both what danger the snow presents and why the Doctor should care. Of course, she doesn't know why the snow is dangerous beyond what the Doctor has shown her, and she wouldn't know how to convince the Doctor of anything if she doesn't know about him, his history, and his personality. So there is no possible way that Clara can find a single word that would accomplish both impossible tasks.

If I were Clara, assuming that I didn't know about the Doctor's previous companions, I would probably have said "Nightmares". That's the only piece of information that I have about the situation that I'm reasonably sure that the Doctor doesn't know about. Or maybe the name of the old Governess, if she knew it and thought that the Doctor would also know it.

Instead, Clara went with "Pond". The problem with that is that as far as Clara knows, the Doctor doesn't know that she works at the Latimer mansion, so "Pond" could refer to any pond... anywhere. In fact, the Doctor didn't even use the word "Pond" to start his investigation. He went straight to the Great Intelligence Institute. The only reason that Clara's choice of the word "Pond" worked at all was that it just so happened to be the name of the reason that the Doctor is so mopy.

GET IT BECAUSE IT'S A POND IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE THAT'S ALSO AMY'S NAME WHY ISN'T ANYONE LAUGHING?!?!

The Ugly

My reaction to the above:

This section has more complaints, but these aren't necessarily about the characters being bafflingly stupid. These are just random inconsistencies or bizarre things that happened that irked me for some reason or another. Here they are, in no particular order.

Clara Didn't Need to Die

Remember when River Pond fell off the 50th floor of some building in New York City?

It's a WATERFALL!!!

Remember what happened to her next?

That's the nice thing about having a spaceship that can go to any place and any time. Why couldn't the Doctor have just moved the TARDIS under Clara when she fell?

It's not that much of an issue, because I'm sure there's some Timey-Wimey explanation, but it would have been nice for that explanation to be shared...

When Did Clara Die?

Small nitpick, but the gravestone shows Demember 24 as her death date. That's wrong - she was still moving - still alive - after midnight on Christmas day. The gravestone should read December 25.

The Doctor and Grief

This isn't the first time in NuWho in which the Doctor has been forcefully separated from his companion. But it is the first time (in NuWho, at least), that he's gone completely off the handle.

Here's the Doctor after losing Rose, a woman with whom he's fallen in love, who was with him when he took the form he has, and who was forcefully ripped away from him.

Immediately after this, he finds himself embroiled in the midst of a conflict involving giant spiders and a woman who has accidentally missed her wedding. After that, he goes and picks up a young med school student to act as his surrogate Rose. Sure, he misses Rose, and in the end Martha realizes that she was just a rebound, but the Doctor grieves and then gets over it.

Now here's the Doctor after losing Amy, a girl he met a few minutes after taking his current form, who is not his love interest but rather the mother of his wife, and who leaves his company to be with her husband.

After this, he holes himself up on a cloud and refuses to help save humanity until someone randomly says Amy's maiden name.

Well, obviously his personality has changed. The Doctor underwent a personality change as well as a complete body change when he regenerated. But I will say that this is one more example of the fact that his personality has changed for the worse.

Clara is Too Confident

Clara Oswin Oswald seems to look danger in the face with little regard for the consequences, and in the end, it costs her her life.

Let's start with the whole thing with the memory worm.

She's been effectively kidnapped (halfway voluntarily) by a stranger she just met and a grouchy walking potato that can't seem to figure out that she's female, and they are actively, if ineffectively, trying to erase her memory, which is a rather personal and invasive thing to do. But does she run? No. Even though she is given about a thousand opportunities to escape, and even though, if they do get their act together, the Doctor and Strax could overpower her and accidentally erase her entire memory, Clara stays put, and acts as though there is absolutely nothing at stake.

But here's the moment that got to me the most:

She's running away from an evil woman made out of ice, who has just materialized right next to her. Instead of climbing as fast as she can in an excited panic, she pauses to make a witty quip. During the time that she took to make the quip, the Ice Lady could have made it over to the base of the ladder and torn her to shreds.

Fortunately for Clara, she didn't, although the only explanation I can think of is Ice Lady's aforementioned incompetence. Also fortunately for Clara, the ladder lifted her up, which Clara was counting on even though there was absolutely no way she could know that it would. But like the other good guys, she got lucky...

Until she didn't...

Conclusion Jumping

There's an interesting scene, during Clara's funeral, when Jenni says this:

Jenni: "Well we can't be in much danger from a disembodied intelligence that thinks it can invade the world with snowmen."

But they were. The whole episode was about all of post-Victorian humanity being threatened by a disembodied intelligence that thought it could invade the world with snowmen. I'm not sure how Jenni makes that deduction, but I assure you, if Doctor Doyle had based his famous detective on reasoning like that, Sherlock Holmes would never have become a household name.

The Sonic Screwdriver

Okay. Enough with the sonic. The Doctor uses it for freaking everything!

To lock the doors at the G.I. Labs

To analyze the pond

To do ... something to the force field that Jenni created

To unmask Little Walter's voice from the Intelligence

And he even trained a puppet to use it for him!

I'm as much a fan of Sonic as anyone else, but seriously Mr. Moffat! It's too much!

Kissing!

Why does every female character suddenly get the hots for the Doctor? I don't think there's been a single one (except Rita) who didn't try to jump him.

It's like Moffat's trying to make us believe that he's attractive. By telling us.

It also didn't make a whole lot of sense in the story. They were both busy, and they wasted at least seven seconds with that kiss. Those seven seconds might have saved Clara's life.

The Greatly Unintelligent Dialogue

There were two scenes in which Dr. Simeon and the Snow Globe of Doom have a heart-to-heart, and in both cases, it's kind of silly.

In the first scene, we are meeting Dr. Simeon and the Intelligence for the first time, and the writers have decided that we need to learn that Dr. Simeon is subservient to the Intelligence. So, they decide to go the subtle route, and have the characters explicitly explain that fact in the most clunky and robotic way.

Here's the dialog:

Intelligence: "A great swarm is approaching. As humanity celebrates, so shall it end. Will the final piece be ready?"
Simeon: "It's in hand. I serve you in this, as in everything else."

And who wouldn't want to obey giant sparkling balls filled with white stuff?

The other scene is even more baffling to me. The entire scene is just Snowy talking while Simeon walks around, and all he's saying is a rehash of their plans. Again, this is kind of for the audience's benefit, since we don't technically know that yet, but we find out pretty soon after anyway, and way

Intelligence: "Tonight, the thaw. Tomorrow the snow will fall again yet stronger. The drowned woman and the dreaming child will give us form at last. Tomorrow the snow shall fall and so shall mankind."

The only reason that I can think of for having this scene is to pad episode length.

Bad Guy Development

For parts of the episode, I thought that the story was developed pretty well. Clara, for instance, and the Doctor. But the bad guys were so badly written that it was almost comical.

I remember a Doctor Who with some semblance of mystery, in which our understanding of the bad guys would evolve as the episode went on. A great example of that could be found as recently as The God Complex, where we learn more and more about the Minotaur bad guy thing as the episode progresses.

This is how it learns about you.

But in this episode, we're told right away who the bad guys are and what they want. And what they want is the destruction of mankind; that's all that Snowball can seem to talk about. It seems like we've just got another case of the Gratuitously Evil Man, with no clear aims of his own - just an inexplicable desire to be as nasty towards humanity or the main characters as possible.

Richard Grant made this face when he first read his character's arc, and it froze like that, so the directors had to use it.

Overall

Finally got to the "Overall" section.

In many ways, Snowmen was just like the other episodes this season. It was a work of art that set its scene beautifully, and played the emotions of the characters very well. When Clara fell, I didn't buy it, but when she said her final words, my heart jumped into my throat, and I was genuinely grieving by the time the funeral rolled around.

But what really dragged this episode down is the fact that the writers didn't put any effort into making the characters have any sensible motives, or anything resembling intelligence. There was obviously no sense behind a lot of the action in this episode other than advancing the plot. I wish I could say that this is a new phenomenon, but this lack of thinking the script through has plagued all of Season 7, and it's starting to feel like the writers have stopped caring about putting together coherent storylines.

Still, looking forward to see what the Clara storyline has to offer, and I'm not giving up yet.

Run.

Run, you clever boy.

And remember.