Day 792: The Rings of Akhaten

When I first watched this episode, I turned to my family and said "Well, that was lovely". The Rings of Akhaten, in my opinion, is not a story that's high in terms of quality, and it doesn't necessarily work in the framework of the series, but as a standalone piece of television, it's quite enjoyable to watch. The story, whilst a little bit fragmented, still manages to succeed by giving an episode that's quite heart-warming. Also, the script appears to have been written with the intention of giving Matt Smith plenty of speeches, which plays to Smith's strengths as an actor, giving plenty of moments for his Doctor to excel. Murray Gold's music is excellent, with 'The Long Song' being one of his most beautiful pieces of music that he's produced for the programme. But, all of that said, there's still something that doesn't quite work for me with regards to this episode.

I think that it might begin with the design of the aliens. The background aliens in this episode just don't quite work for me; they look a little bit too normal - like generic alien costumes that you'd find in a low budget rip-off of the cantina scene from A New Hope, not the more bizzare and wonderful alien costumes that I've come to expect from Doctor Who. And I think that that begins to reach towards my bigger problem for the episode, which is that it doesn't quite feel like it's reaching to be big, instead settling at normality. The story doesn't feel like it's changed the character's lives, the action moments don't feel particularly epic, even Matt Smith's brilliant speech ends up feeling like it was added in when writer Neil Cross realised he still had five minutes left to fill in the episode. And so I'm left looking at an episode that just feels average instead of leaving me excited about what I've just seen.

But I still enjoy this episode. It's not brilliant, but it's enjoyable. The only other problem that I can think about this episode is that it doesn't quite match up with the programme that we saw last week in The Bells of Saint John. It's beginning to point me towards this whole idea that maybe The Purple Period should really be called something else. Maybe I was wrong when I said that nothing connected these stories, we'll have to delve a little bit deeper into that as we progress further into the series.