by Sarabeth Pollock:
Doctor Who Recap: “The Power of Three”
Original Air Date (BBC): Saturday September 22, 2012
Series 7 Episode 4
That’s right, the Year of the Slow Invasion. Amy calls it the “year the Doctor came to stay.” While the world slept, millions of little black cubes materialized all over the planet. Brian Williams, Rory’s dad, wakes the Ponds up to deliver the news. Indeed, hundreds of cubes line the street. They’re all over the place, Brian confirms. As the trio ponders their origin, Amy looks up. There atop the jungle gym sits the Doctor, examining a cube with a magnifying glass. It’s the “invasion of the really small cubes,” he pronounces. “That’s new.”
Several news outlets offer speculation about what the cubes are. In the TARDIS, the Doctor tells Brian and the Ponds that they are all identical. There’s nothing, even on a molecular level, that makes them different from one another. Brian, newly indoctrinated into the Doctor’s world, starts thinking on a more global level. They could be capsules containing tiny robots, they could be pieces of a larger whole, and they could be puzzles that need decoding. The Doctor interrupts Brian’s speculation and gives him the ever-important job of keeping watch over the cubes in their possession. Amy asks if this is an alien invasion, because it sure does feel like it. The Doctor doesn’t know, and he really doesn’t like not knowing.
That means he needs to move in with the Ponds. He sets up a command post in the kitchen with the intention of cooking up some cubes to see what happens. Rory can’t stay, though. He has to go to work. At the Doctor’s confused expression, Amy tells him that she writes travel articles while Rory works at the hospital. This is a foreign concept to the Doctor, who was under the impression that all the Ponds did between his visits was kiss. (Note that Rory doesn’t dispute this idea) While the Doctor ponders the domesticity of his Ponds, what the trio doesn’t realize is that the house is being surrounded by military personnel. Inside, Amy tells the Doctor that they have been wrapped up in his adventures for about ten years. Sure, it hasn’t been ten years for the Doctor, but they have certainly aged ten years since he appeared so long ago. The Doctor smiles sadly. His Amy is all grown up.
The military takes that moment to burst into the house. Rory is led in at gunpoint, and he’s quite…unhappy. “There are soldiers all over my house, and I’m in my pants,” he says, referring to his boxer-briefs (to those of us Americans who think of pants as…pants). The leader of this invasion is Kate Stewart, from UNIT, who recognizes the Doctor and is glad to see him. The Doctor wants to know when science started controlling the military, and she replies that she was the driving force behind the chance. It wasn’t easy, but since they picked up an energy spike at the Pond residence they felt obligated to investigate, and the soldiers do like to get out and play. She tells the group that they have shipped in several hundreds of the cubes from around the world and subjected them to every kind of test imaginable, but there has been no change. They have no weaknesses. This frustrates the Doctor, who wants to know that they have some kind of vulnerability. The only thing that is evident at this point is the willingness of the human race to take the cubes into their homes, as if they were iPads dropped from the sky. People are taking them to work, keeping them in their homes, making videos of them, and after three hours there were already 1000 Twitter accounts. “Twitter,” the Doctor mutters. (Ironically, Matt Smith is the only Twitter holdout from the show) Kate wants to consider this a hostile invasion and thinks they should round them up and lock them away, but it would require too much international cooperation. Instead, the doctor suggests that since the cubes appeared in plain sight, perhaps they want to be observed. He proposes that they watch the cubes, day and night, and take note of everything. “Team Cube” he proclaims. In it together.
Four days later, the Doctor appears to be bored out of his mind, sitting upside-down on the Ponds’ couch observing a stack of cubes. Four days and nothing. No change to any cubes anywhere on the planet. The Doctor can’t sit still anymore. Rory reminds him that he was the one who told them to be patient, but the Doctor points out that he thought something would happen by now. And besides, “patience is for wimps.” He can’t sit in the Ponds’ lounge (that’s living room for we Americans) and watch nothing happen. He needs to be busy. “Fine!” Amy explodes. “Be busy!” She and Rory will watch the cubes. While they sit, the Doctor tends to the yard work, paints a fence, and bounces a soccer ball on his knee five million times. Unfortunately, that all took about an hour. He can’t keep it up, so he bounds into the TARDIS, which is parked in the lounge as well, and they find Brian, who has been sitting there for four days. Time certainly does fly when you’re alone with your thoughts, he says. The Doctor proposes a short trip to clear their minds.
This is a great opportunity for the writers to show how the Ponds are affected by traveling with the Doctor. Rory can’t leave his job. Brian doesn’t understand how they can simply uproot themselves. So the Doctor leaves without them, promising to monitor the news feeds (the media posits that the cubes might in fact be part of a wide scale marketing blitz). Months pass. Amy accepts the role of a bridesmaid in a wedding, and Rory accepts a full time position at the hospital. Everyone around them talks about how they have been gone for long periods of time. Finally Amy and Rory sit in bed and discuss that they are now taking on long-term commitments, almost as if they know they’re going to be there for them. “Did real life just get started?” Rory wonders. “I like it!” Amy exclaims. Holy foreshadowing, Batman!
Brian is taking his cube-watching duties very seriously. He has been recording “Brian’s log” for sixty-seven days so far and nothing has changed with the cube. Rory looks on as Brian finishes the recording. He goes on to explain to his son that he watches the nighttime feed on fast-forward, then he sends his report to UNIT. He’s doing what the Doctor ordered, Brian points out, and his middle name is diligence. “I can’t wait to see day sixty-eight,” Rory deadpans. “Don’t mock my log,” Brian retorts.
We jump to December. Rory is at work and the hospital is full of people. He walks a patient through the triage area, where we see a young girl sitting on a chair. Her expression is distant. She’s holding a cube, and it’s very clear that something is off with her. In one of the exam rooms, a man is waiting to be discharged. Twin orderlies wearing masks come in and start to take him away. When he protests, he pulls away their masks to reveal that their mouths are cube-shaped (rather like the little boy with the gas mask in “The Doctor Dances”). The little girl looks on as they wheel him down the corridor to the elevator, where they disappear. Back in the man’s hospital room, the cube glows blue.
Meanwhile, life goes on with the cubes. The next sequence is a reminder of how adaptable human beings are. All around the world, the cubes have become integrated into everyday life. They hold post-its, they serve as paperweights, they hold espresso cups and menus, and some executive somewhere is using them to practice his putting. The cubes have infiltrated every aspect of our lives.
Now it’s June, and the Ponds are hosting a BBQ to celebrate their anniversary. Amy gives the Doctor a call. The cubes have been declared provisionally safe and after nine months they are still everywhere, accepted by everyone around them as if they had been there all along. Amy mentions that she’d been in her friend’s wedding and on that note wishes the Doctor was there to help celebrate their anniversary. A man with a huge bouquet of flowers appears behind here. It’s the Doctor. “Come with me, and bring your husband,” he says. They leave in the TARDIS and find themselves in 1890 in the recently opened Savoy Hotel. Dinner, bed and breakfast for two, he says, promising that they’ll return before the party is over. No complications.
Of course, the Ponds should know better. As it turns out, there was a Saigon ship under the Savoy and half the staff was made up of imposters. Rory and Amy look like they’ve been through the wringer. Then they find themselves running into a bedroom. Now it seems that Amy mistakenly agreed to marry Henry the Eighth (on their wedding anniversary) and he’s chasing them. They hide under his bed, but the Doctor sneezes. When they do return to the party, the Doctor tells Brian that they have been gone seven weeks. He didn’t mean for it to happen, but they got sidetracked. Brian wants to know what happened to his other companions, and the Doctor admits that some leave him, and some have died. But that will never happen to Amy and Rory. Never.
The Doctor asks Amy if he can move in with them again. It will be different this time. She agrees, and he tells her that he has missed being with her. Next we go to Brian making a recording on day 361. It has been a year since the arrival of the cubes. Still no changes…until he drifts off to sleep.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory are watching the UK version of “The Apprentice” and enjoying a meal of fish sticks and pudding. The Doctor says that if he had a restaurant, this would be all that he’d serve. Amy teases him until he admits that he has in fact managed a restaurant (I’d personally love to see the Doctor go toe-to-toe with Gordon Ramsay). Brian’s cube starts moving. Rory is cleaning the kitchen while Amy goes to take a bath. The Doctor is playing on the Wii. Rory’s cube starts changing shape, which Amy’s cube turns blue and starts relaying her vital signs. The Doctor’s cube interrupts his Wii Tennis match by hovering in front of him. “Is that all you can do? Hover? I had a metal dog that could do that.” He tells the cube that the people of earth are precious to him. Then the cube starts firing lasers at him. They all convene in the hallway, joined by Brian, who shares that his cube “rattled.” The Doctor’s cube is still in front of the television, surfing the Internet. Rory is called away to work, as there is a rash of cube-related injuries as the cubes launch some kind of assault on their human “owners.” Brian wants to come along to help. That leaves the Doctor and Amy to answer a call on the psychic paper to report to the Tower of London.
Kate Stewart is there, in a secret underground lair below the Tower of London. The Doctor is impressed that she was able to contact him through the psychic paper. But there are more pressing matters to attend to. UNIT has collected over fifty cubes so far, and they’re all having a different reaction. Some are shooting plumes of fire, while another plays the “Chicken Dance” song over and over again. It’s happening all over the world. Kate’s at a loss for what to do. The Doctor tells her that her dad never gave up…it turns out that her father had worked with the Doctor before. And as he reassures her that they won’t let him or the planet down, the cubes stop. After 47 minutes, they stop operating. The Doctor needs to get outside to think.
The Doctor sits outside with Amy. He asks her if she’s thinking about stopping. He knows that they’re thinking about it. After all this time, she says, it’s hard to function in both worlds. He points out that they’re living in such a small corner of a small planet in a small galaxy in a small universe…and he’s not running from anything. He’s running to something. He’s running to her, because she was the first person he saw with his new face, and he knows that one day she won’t be there for him anymore because she and Rory will fade away. “Don’t be nice to me,” she says. The Doctor says that she wants him to be nice, and she always gets what she wants. That’s it! the Doctor exclaims. The cubes wanted information, and once they had it they shut back down. They rush downstairs as the power goes out. The cubes are now lit up with the number 7 on all of their sides. But what does that mean? Why would they wait so long if they wanted to collect information? The Doctor reasons that they waited so long so that people would let their guards down. They accepted the cubes into their lives, and so the cubes were in a prime position to gain all the knowledge they needed…which also included the best way to attack. But why 7?
The media advises everyone to dispose of the cubes, which have now counted down from 7 to 4. At the hospital, Rory helps organize the cube disposal. He sends Brian to fetch supplies…and of course Brian runs into the twin orderlies. They load him onto a gurney and wheel him down the hall. Rory arrives in time to see them get on the elevator, where they disappear. But Rory is a seasoned veteran of strange happenings, and he discovers that they wall of the elevator is actually a portal. He jumps through it and finds himself on a spaceship orbiting earth.
Back at the Tower of London, the Doctor locks himself into a room with the remaining cube that is about to reach zero. “Geronimo,” he says. The cube opens up. There’s nothing inside. It doesn’t make sense. The same thing happens all over the world. Nothing. But then, all of a sudden, people start collapsing. The cubes trigger cardiac arrest in people. One of the Doctor’s two hearts shuts down. (How do humans deal with only having one heart? he muses, grasping his chest) The countdown was merely a distraction. The cubes were receiving a signal from seven transmission centers across the globe. Of course, the closest transmission center is at the hospital where Rory works.
On board the ship, the twin orderlies capture Rory. At the hospital, the Doctor tells Kate to warn everyone that the attack could happen again. By her estimate, over a third of the earth’s population has been killed. She leaves Amy and the Doctor to discover the source of the signal. The Doctor whips out his sonic screwdriver while Amy supports him, and he detects that the little girl is the source of some odd power. She’s sending information back to the source of the signal, and the Doctor manages to shut her off. As he lowers her to the ground, his other heart starts to give out. Amy grabs the nearby AED (thank you to many years of CPR/AED training), rips open his shirt, and shocks him. He sits up- “welcome back, Lefty!” he cries, then he tells Amy to never do that again.
They trace the signal to the elevator. It doesn’t take long to realize that the wall is a portal to the ship. He gives her a smile, and she beams at him. “Through the looking glass, Amelia,” he whispers, and off they go. They find Rory and Brian on beds in the large chamber of the ship. The Doctor wakes up Rory as a figure in black appears and tries to stop them from getting away. He tells Amy and Rory to get Brian back to the hospital (as soon as they disconnect him, he sits up and watches in confusion as he’s wheeled away and the mysterious figure in black shoots laser beams at them).
The Doctor learns that the mysterious figure is a member of the mythical Shakri, the tales of whom were told to frighten the young Gallifreyan children. The Shakri have existed throughout time, and their purpose is to control the spread of the contagion known as humanity. Amy and Rory return despite the Doctor’s warnings (“Haven’t you learned by now?” Rory asks), and they ask what the Shakri means by “tally.” It’s kind of like judgment day, the Doctor explains. The Shakri are the pest-controllers of the galaxy, and the cubes are like slug pellets meant to contain humanity. “You want a tally? Put their achievements against their failures through the whole of time,” the Doctor tells the Shakri. But it does not good. The second wave is coming, the Shakri warns. More cubes will arrive on earth. Then he disappears. He was never there to begin with—he was an interface. The Doctor hurries to the monitor. He can shut down the seven Shakri portals, but he wants to do one better. He wants to use the cubes to restart peoples’ hearts. The energy required to do that will blow up the ship. “Run,” the Doctor says. “I missed this,” Rory says as they hurry away. They jump through the portal right as it explodes.
The media reports that people all around the world are coming back to life. Kate bids adieu to the Doctor, and he gives her a little salute. Later, Rory and Amy eat dinner with Brian and the Doctor. The Doctor is eager to leave now that the planet is safe. At first, Rory and Amy hesitate. The Doctor acknowledges that they have lives to live, but it’s Brian who speaks up and points out that they have an amazing opportunity to go places and see things that no one else can. They should do it while they still can, and besides, he knows that the reality is that Amy and Rory can’t quit the Doctor. The Doctor grins and tells Brian that he can come along, too, but Brian politely declines. Someone needs to water the plants. Amy’s voice closes out the episode as the trio climbs into the TARDIS, talking about how the Shakri were wrong, that cubed really means the “power of three.”
Well, fellow Whovians, we only have one more episode with the Ponds. Tonight’s episode was much lighter in tone than the past few episodes, but there is still the sense that something big is coming. Of course, we know that the end is coming for the Ponds, and that’s huge, but there’s also the buildup as we move toward a new era with the Eleventh Doctor. Don’t blink, friends, next week the Angels are coming back, and they’re hitting New York!
As always, I want to hear your thoughts. Was this your favorite episode of the season?
Sarabeth Pollock is a contributor for DarkMedia. She covers True Blood, Doctor Who, Fringe and American Horror Story, as well as the True Blood comics and whatever movies and books happen to catch her fancy. She’s an avid writer, reader, and pop culture fan, with interest in everything from True Blood to Doctor Who to Anne Rice to Deborah Harkness. Follow her on Twitter at @SarabethPollock and check out her blog at http://sarabethpollock.wordpress.com
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