It's been forty six years since The Gunfighters and now Doctor Who has attempted to do a Western episode again. A Town Called Mercy has the advantage over The Gunfighters of some very good foreign location filming in Spain. Director Saul Metzstein manages to pull off a filmic look for the tale using modern camera techniques.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in the town of Mercy. The Doctor is quick to spot the oddities, as the electrics ten years before their time and the wariness of the townspeople. It turns out that the wariness is caused by an alien cyborg known as "The Gunslinger" who is preventing people from leaving the town is demanding that the townspeople hand over an alien doctor called "Kahler Jex". The town Marshall, Isaac, is trying to keep Jex safe since it was Jex who installed the electrics.
But Jex is no innocent. The Doctor discovers that Jex is responsible for creating the Gunslinger as part of some hideous experiments to create machines of war. The Doctor is angry and comes perilously close to handing over Jex to the Gunslinger. It takes some words from Amy, and the accidental death of Isacc, to force the Doctor back to the path of non violent action.
Despite the movie feel, this is a small scale story, focused on the conflict between justice and mercy. The Doctor is personally baffled by these ethics. He wishes to save the townspeople, but at the same time, he can understand Jex since they are very similar. Both are Doctors who have fought in a war and wish to save people. Surprisingly, Whithouse avoids any specific references to the Time War. When Jex calls the Doctor up, he focuses on the Doctor's morality rather than guilt. For this reviewer, the ommision damaged the episode.
Adrian Scarborough does a good job portraying the guilt that Kahler Jex feels, switching from a polite and harmless suited scientist to a man who has bitterness inside. In spite of his cowardliness he makes the decision to kill himself and bring an end to the conflict.
Amy tries to be the voice of reason for the Doctor and Jex. "That's not how we roll and you know it" she tells the Doctor as he is about to allow Jex to die. "We have to be better than this". These are strange words coming from Amy, who carried a gun in The Impossible Astronaut and again in A Good Man Goes to War. In The Wedding of River Song, she kills Madame Kovarian and only much later shows any feelings of remorse. If anything, I think Rory would be the one more likely to want to save lives. As he is a nurse, he would believe in the sanctity of life. Instead, Rory gets one line about how he is willing to allow the Doctor to kill Jex, and does pretty much nothing else for the rest of the episode. It is disappointing for this to happen in one of his final episodes.
The Gunslinger is inspired by many different sources. His appearance is like that of a Terminator, while his goal of hunting down his creator is similar to that of Frankenstein's monster. It was good that he didn't kill himself at the end of the episode, as that would have been predictable.
The townspeople all fulfill the roles of the Western genre. The Sheriff the young lynch mobster, barmaid and preacher. Ben Browder plays the role of the Sheriff Isaac very straight, and not at all cheesy. In spite of this being a story about mercy, the Preacher doesn't really contribute anything to the tale.
This is an interesting story, with shades of Boom Town due to the Doctor's personal dilemma relating to justice. Nevertheless this episode never quite hits as hard emotionally as it should have done.
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment