Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy (2012)

I'm probably not the world's biggest western fan and other than Firefly and 'Gunmen of the Apocalypse' from Red Dwarf, I can't think of many times that Sci-Fi and Westerns have mixed well. From the glimpses given at the end of the last episode, it looked more like the latter - especially with the Gunslinger looking somewhat like Kryten. Overall I think I was looking forward to this episode least out of the three so far, so while it may have surpassed my expectations I'm not sure how good it was overall.

It started off well though, with the Doctor happily throwing himself into the wild west with that goofy charm we love him for. I couldn't help but think of Drive to begin with and half expected him to come out with 'Toothpicks are cool'. I enjoyed the line about 'Keep Out' signs being more of a suggestion and the slightly cheesy request for 'Tea, the hard stuff', which just brings you back to its innate Britishness, no matter the American focus here.

This episode seemed to highlight two running themes of this series, the first being people looking for 'a doctor' not 'the Doctor'. I'm not sure if there is more to this or if it is just trying to be clear that the universe at large has now pretty much forgotten him. The other seems to be the Doctor's growing lack of mercy and while I didn't have a huge problem with it last week, there is a big difference between not pulling someone out of a spaceship seconds before it's destroyed and holding someone at gunpoint.

Other than Batman I can't think of many other heroes more averse to guns, meaning I can only think of another couple of times he's even held one in the new series. The first was Chris Eccleston picking up some kind of alien ray gun to take down a Dalek (but even then he found he couldn't go through with it). The other is Matt Smith again, where he used a gun to destroy a gravity globe in 'The Time of Angels', which was enough to shock a lot of fans when it was shown out of context in trailers.

I'm not sure whether there is something building here related to the first episode or if Amy's assertion that he has just been alone too long is correct. It also felt to me like someone wanted to shoehorn in the Doctor holding a revolver for a Western episode, without considering whether it felt right. I was much more impressed by the stand-off against the townspeople later, where despite wearing a gun belt the issue was resolved with words instead of bullets.

I've largely been trying to write these updates based on my immediate thoughts but having some time to reflect on this it did seem rather weak on the whole. The final showdown between the Doctor and the Gunslinger looked great but what followed was pretty silly and made some dangerous assumptions about how the Gunslinger would react. You could say that none of the episodes so far have had a really strong ending with the Doctor creating an ingenious solution but here I think it was exacerbated by there not being much going on for large portions of it. I'd wager that if I hadn't decided to write about each new episode that this one wouldn't have remained on my mind for long, even if I still enjoyed it at the time.