Re: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe(Grading/Discussion) SPOILER
Didn't mind the girl. The little kid was awful. He needed to have a bit more about him. He just wandered through the forest, expressionless, slowly.
I thought the boy, Cyril, was meant to be a young Wilf. Yes, it was a tenuous connection -- Cyril has a telescope, Wilf has a telescope -- but it would have been a neat little thing.
The plot, on reflection, was ridiculous. Doctor Who has never been about scientific accuracy nor should it ever be but it at least needs to make sense. Christmas baubles that turned into Wood people? What? Who where they? Why did they make a spaceship? Why did they end up in the time vortex? And the dad came back? Eh?
Stuff just happened because it needed to for the plot. I found myself irritated as the episode went on.
It was very RTD-esque in that sense. The opening scene was the opening of
Star Wars, then there's the
Moonraker steal, then there's the surreal tour through the house, etc. There were scenes that existed because Moffat thought they would be fun to reference and write, not because they moved the story forward.
As an aside, I thought the prequel with the Doctor calling the TARDIS looking for Amy really needed to be in the episode proper because the final scene of Amy and the Doctor needs it to justify the Doctor's decision to go and spend Christmas with Amy and Rory. The final scene is a payoff for a scene that many people haven't seen.
What's the difference between bringing back this dad and what happened in "Fathers day"
Because the episode relies on a giant predestination paradox.
The trees in the 54th century knew there was a prophecy that they would be saved by someone who was "strong" because their lifeforce was taken back to the 20th-century and released out into the universe so that the knowledge that they would be saved from the acid rain would be passed down into future.
The only way that the tree spirits could get back to the 20th-century is if Madge took the trees to that emotionally decisive moment of her husband's death.
Except Madge's husband didn't die because in taking the trees back to the 20th-century she caught his Lancaster in the time vortex and pulled it forward by a week. But as far as the RAF was concerned, her husband
must have been dead because his plane was lost.
So time wasn't changed at all. Saving the husband was always going to happen because the trees wouldn't have been saved -- and known they were going to be saved -- if he wasn't.
It's all recursive. It's a more subtle recursiveness than the Moffaty norm (I'm surprised that Amy's timeline hasn't collapsed under the weight of its own incoherent recursiveness), but it's still a recursive timey-wimey story.
