Doctor Who: The Power Of Three – Dork Review

Despite this Doctor Who series being the well-advertised Last Days Of The Ponds, we haven’t seen them that front and centre. In the last episode, they barely did anything.

Well, all that changes in The Power Of Three, as the merry band face… an onslaught of cuboid alien droppings? The Doctor staying over? Watch on iPlayer before reading this, obviously.

Karen Gillan + Arthur Darvill = James Corden

In series five and six of Who, we had The Lodger and Closing Time, just-before-the-finale calm-before-the-storm episodes where the Doc visits James Corden and does comedy. Well, The Power of Three is another one of those, except Corden is played by Amy and Rory.

Really, it’s an excuse to spend time with the old gang, hanging around, doing banter, the inevitable jokes about the Doctor and normal life, occasional emotional conversation. As ever, Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill have been doing this together so long that they can make this stuff pretty endearing.

In short, one last chance to have warm fuzzy feelings towards the Ponds before next week, when a weeping angel will messily beat them to death with some New York bagels. And I think they pulled that part off – unless you hate these characters and their overly cozy dynamic, in which case this must have been sheer hell for you.

The Tragedy Of The Neglected Cubes

The alien cube plot, on the other hand. Well, it’s a pretty good idea, shame it’s been tossed off as background noise in the comedy episode, rather than given space. This felt like the first half of a two-parter, a whole forty minutes of build-up and then… instead of an amazing cliffhanger, the Doctor zaps a console with the sonic screwdriver and it’s all over. Weird.

In other news: the new UNIT dynamic was interesting enough, although it felt like set-up for later episodes, and Mark Williams has slotted seamlessly into the cuddly family set-up as Rory’s dad, after his earlier appearance in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.

But basically: the moral here was “Look at the Ponds! Don’t you love them? Won’t you be sad when they’re gone?” And since I’m not yet sick of those guys, it worked okay on me, although I still feel they could’ve made the plot of the episode less half-arsed. Next week: no doubt something awful will happen!

More Doctor Who on Dork Adore | Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks – Dork Review

Nick Bryan

Nick learned to read and write at an early age. This has developed into an unhealthy need to either write stories or consume them for later dissection. He reviews film and TV on Dork Adore and The Digital Fix, lives in London and enjoys a nice white beer.

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