The Rings of Akhaten

Go on then. Take my memories. I hope you've got a big appetite.

The Rings of Akhaten is another episode where there seems to be very little middle ground. Fandom seems to either hate this episode or love it. I'm in the middle. It's not a bad episode, but there are poor elements to it.

First, the good. Far and away, this episode has some wonderful music. It's not really a surprise that it was the Long Song that was later co-opted as the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration music. Whatever faults lie in the story or the production, the music has the ability to sweep you away on a wave of enjoyment. Also enjoyable is the performance of the Doctor. I think the reputation of the speech he gives to the star god is a bit overblown, but it is a heart-felt speech and he delivers it with a great deal of passion. There are other moments of both whimsy and concern that play well and make for enjoyable television.

Then there is the not so good side of things. Despite what I believe to be a good effort, this episode looks cheap. The alien gathering looks too much like people in masks and make-up, more so than other times. Worse, the lighting is too bright so that the flaws in said make up are exposed easier. The scooter ride to the temple also is a very bad green screen effect. There is a certain acceptance of the cheap look in Doctor Who, but the modern series has done a better effort in trying to hide and this just sticks out as off.

I also must admit that I didn't care for the resolution to the problem. The sun wakes up and must feed so the Doctor offers up over 1,200 years of memories spanning one end of the universe to the other. The star god does indeed choke on it, but he is able to swallow all of it. Yet he is then defeated by a simple leaf. Not for the memories it contains, but for the potential memories that could have existed with it. That seems rather dumb to me. It doesn't make Clara or the leaf special. Any being there could have held up an object owned by someone and declared the memory potential of that object. For it is the declared potential of the memories, not the object itself. Clara's leaf had regular memories in that it was how her parents met. But it was her declaration that it held potential memories due to her mother's early death that caused the star god to choke. Of course, any object can contain potential memories. The pen on my desk has a number of potential memories of all the work that I will do in the future, the crossword puzzles I will fill out with it, and even potential places I will take it because I left it in my coat pocket. I can declare of it and that would be enough to defeat this creature. It just seems silly and a rather poor excuse to make Clara the hero of the episode.

An unsatisfying ending would seem to shift things more in the negative, but it was an enjoyable ride of an episode, even if it looked off. It is not one that I would choose readily to watch again, but I could plug it in without any real complaint.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5