First, fair warning of bias: I think Neil Gaiman, the writer of this episode, is probably the best fantasy writer working today. His métier is to take the images of fantasy, strip them to their basic signs, offer them to the reader -- or, in this case, the viewer -- as the things they symbolize and make you realize what those symbols have been doing to you all those years -- and tell a ripping good yarn in the process. In literary terms this is called deconstructionism and it's far more intellectual a game than Doctor Who usually plays, but as an ex-English major, I love it. Gaiman does for fantasy what Penn & Teller do for stage magic: he shows you how he's doing his trick, and then performs it, baffling you. And now he has done it for Doctor Who.
In deconstructing the symbols, we get to see images from the classic series as Hypercubes from the Second Doctor, half a dozen Tardis control rooms -- including Eccleston's -- and a junkyard just outside the universe where the ragtag remnants of perhaps hundreds of broken TARDISes have been discarded. We see the infinite corridors of the TARDIS and we see the title character, the Doctor's Wife... and it is all quite mad and nonsensical until the end, when you realize that, yes, this is what has been going on all these years. The story is, for DOCTOR WHO, typical and straightforward: evil entity wants to destroy the universe and gets inside the Police box in order to do so -- but at the end you blink and realize what has been going on here for the last half century, and you knew it all along. It just took Gaiman to tell you.
Suranne Jones, as the Doctor Wife, is quite marvelous as what appears to be a madwoman for whom time is out of joint. Once again, Matt Smith has shown himself to be a fine actor, always interesting, an alien creature of sharp elbows and incomprehensible thoughts. It's an episode that can be viewed numerous times, not just for the jokes and twisty bits, but to admire the way it all fits together so beautifully in unexpected ways.
It won't be to everyone's taste, but it is certainly to mine. I hope they can get Mr. Gaiman to write another episode one of these days.
