Doctor Who’s New Showrunner: Who is Chris Chibnall?
By Sam Callahan
Doctor Who, Season 7 – Pond Life
Pond Life is the five-part minisode prequel to season 7.
It feels more like a practice version of the introduction to Rory and Amy’s domesticity in “Power of Three,” or perhaps the discarded rough drafts that ended up on the writer’s cutting room floor before the final script.
It was funny in moments — the Ood on the Loo, for example — which is a challenge in something so short and jam-packed with action. Also, Chibnall dropped so many names, planets, incursions in such a short amount of time, I can only assume he’s simultaneously setting us up for potential in-between adventures in Big Finish radio dramas or novelizations and doing a Classic Chibnall nod.
I would have liked an extra fight scene to point up the problems between Amy and Rory before ultimately arriving at a divorce, as we learn in “Asylum of the Daleks”. The way it is felt like everything was perfectly dandy and then out of absolutely nowhere, just for the convenience of the season 7 premiere, they split up. Wait…huh?
Another thing I’m noticing about Chibnall is how he makes the Doctor into a more sexual being than Time Lords may have been portrayed before, like in this scene with Mata Hari:
It’s also seen at the beginning of “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”: the Doctor is accosted by Queen Nefertiti of Egypt. The way his voice goes up, her arm movements, and the comical folly horn coming from inside his pants pocket (it is his cell phone, technically), one can only imagine exactly what her hand is doing…
