From MadCap's Couch - Doctor Who: "The Vampires of Venice"

"This isn't Buttercream at all!"

Last time, the Doctor shoved Amy into the TARDIS to fix a problem.

This time, well... let's get into it...

We begin in 1580 Venice, where a woman named Senora Calvierri vets a new applicant to her finishing school for girls - a young woman named Isabella, daughter of a boatbuilder named Guido. Isabella is accepted and taken in, examined by the Lady and her son Francesco... who has a rather disturbing pair of fangs.

In 2010, Rory shouts over his stag party to send a half-drunken message to Amy's answering machine, telling her how much he loves her. The obviously fake cake is brought in with the accompanying music for a stripper. Unfortunately for Rory, his stripper is the Eleventh Doctor and he's come to whisk Rory away to fix things with Amy.

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor explains his reasoning for doing what he's doing. Traveling through time and space can completely dazzle someone and make them blind to the things that are important in life. "It can tear you apart." He says, something that he has some experience with - and you better believe we'll be coming back to that in the wrap up. After an awkward exchange where Rory doesn't do the "bigger on the inside" line (much to the Doctor's frustration), the Doctor takes them to Venice in 1580.

The Doctor gives a brief history lesson and has a throwaway line about owing Casanova a chicken before the three get stopped by the local customs agent. Venice is apparently locked down due to the Plague - which the Doctor says should have ended long ago - due to the care and benevolence of their patron, Senora Calvierri. The Doctor uses the psychic paper to get them past the man and into the city proper just in time for the time travelers to witness Guido trying to find Isabella among the girls and getting rebuffed by them and by Francesco. The Doctor has a chat with the man, learning that something evil is going on in that school and that he definitely would like to have a word with Senora Calvierri...

"Hey, have we got something in our teeth?"

Elsewhere, Calvierri and Francesco discuss the plan, the former deciding that they're going to stick with it and Francesco obeying his mother... though he clearly isn't pleased by it.

Amy and Rory discuss their relationship... and get nowhere while Amy deflects with the fact that they're in Venice. Hearing a scream, they come upon Francesco feeding on a woman. He flees and Rory inspects the woman while Amy gives chase only to end up at the canal.

Back at the school, the Doctor has Guido cause a distraction while he sneaks into the basement and soon finds himself facing a mirror... and behind him, a quintet of women in white dresses that don't cast a reflection in said mirror. Awash with excitement, he escapes them and reunites with Amy and Rory, the former two expressing glee over running into vampires while Rory has a more measured response of... panicked fear.

Meeting up with Guido again, he reveals that a tunnel under the house can be accessed to get them in. He suggests gunpowder that he's stockpiled, which the Doctor refuses, and Amy comes up with the plan of posing as an applicant for the school. While the Doctor refuses this as well, at first, eventually they set up a plan to have Amy go and Rory poses as her brother (because that isn't weird at all - as Rory points out). Via the use of psychic paper, this seemingly succeeds and Amy is brought into Hogwarts by way of Anne Rice... in Italy.

She meets Isabella, who is largely catatonic until Amy seems to jog her out of it by asking about the school. They come at night, take her to a room bathed in green light, and strap her to a chair... and then she wakes up in the room, remembering nothing else. However, now, the sunlight burns her skin.

Rory switches shirts with Guido... for some reason... and he and the Doctor slip into the tunnels beneath the school while Amy heads downstairs to open up the trap door entrance, narrowly avoiding seeing a desiccated hand dangling from out of a trunk. As the Doctor and Rory head in, Rory confronts the Doctor about the kiss... because timing. The Doctor attempts to play the kiss off as just being excited about surviving the near death experience on the Byzantium, saying that it obviously should have been Rory.

Calvierri has captured Amy, having seen through the psychic paper and prepares her for the conversion process. Down in the basement, the Doctor and Rory find the corpse in the trunk, the Doctor determining that all the moisture has been drained from the body. When he theorizes that not everyone survives the process, Rory is understandably distraught given the situation Amy is in. He lays into the Doctor, Arthur Davill giving a great, short monologue about how dangerous the Doctor is because of what he inspires in other people.

"This is the least accurate adaptation of Dracula that I've ever seen!"

Amy is promised that, should she survive the conversion process, there are 10,000 husbands in the water for her. In an escape attempt, she kicks Calvierri at the waist and damages a perception filter that she's wearing, revealing her to be some kind of fish-lobster alien. The arrival of the Doctor and Rory allows for an escape attempt via Isabella. When they reach the exit, however, Isabella cannot go back into the sunlight and is pulled back by the others. While the Doctor does attempt to save her, the door is closed and then electrified. So, if anything, we should see some Time Lord-Dalek hybrids soon enough.

...oh, right. This is a good episode.

The others escape, but Isabella gets fed to the male fish-lobster things (which is a special effect that is too costly for us to see in such numbers) as punishment for aiding in the escape. When Calvierri returns, the Doctor has identified her as a Saturnynian and begins to grill her on who she is and what she's doing in Venice via a game of Twenty Questions that gets swapped between the two of them. Calvierri expresses surprise that the Doctor is a Time Lord and tells him of Cracks that appeared, some of them tiny and others as big as the sky. Through some of them, they could see other worlds and in others they saw Silence... and the end of all things. To escape the latter, they fled through one of the Cracks to Earth and it snapped shut behind them.

Calvierri attempts to seduce the Doctor into an alliance, but he naturally refuses and tells her that he's going to tear down the House of Calvierri stone by stone... and all because she couldn't tell him Isabella's name. With this dealt with, Calvierri goes to prepare her troops for war.

Back at Guido's, the Doctor checks out Amy to make sure she's fine and pops a sweet into her mouth to help deal with the blood loss before getting down to thinking out a plan. He puts a hand over the mouths of Amy and Rory when they interject, and has Rory put one over Guido's when he starts talking, and quickly works out that Calvierri is going to alter the environment to make it liveable for the Saturnynians, using the female she's converted and the 10,000 male members of the race to repopulate.

The girls attack and the Doctor wastes a bit of sonic screwdriver power to get rid of their perception filters... for some reason. I mean, it's to showcase that they're fully converted, but it really screams to me of "we have the special effects budget, so we're gonna use it, damn it!".

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory escape while Guido locks himself in the house and lures the girls into the room with all the barrels of gunpowder and well... boom.

A device at the top of a bell tower gets activated by Calvierri, clouds start to form over Venice.

Even in Venice, the Doctor's Jesus cosplay was poorly received.

The Doctor orders, loudly, for Amy and Rory to get back to the TARDIS. It seems he's trying to throw Rory a bone here, as Rory does thank him for that. On their way back, however, Francesco is on the prowl. The Doctor attempts to get Calvierri to assist him with disabling her device after telling her that all the girls are dead, but she dismisses him.

We get an amusing bit (that gets commented on later) where Rory tries to make a cross with two candlesticks before he finally hits Francesco with something that really hits... a joke about his mother. Cure Arthur Davill channeling me as a twelve year old and swinging a broomstick around in an attempt at seeming tough. An amused Francesco draws his sword and puts him on the back foot. When he has Rory pinned down and he's shifted into his alien form, Amy gets his attention and then uses the sunlight reflection from a mirror to cause him to explode.

...yeah, that makes sense.

Amy and Rory kiss and then go back to help the Doctor, something that Rory is much more agreeable to now (to be fair, if Karen Gillan had just played tonsil hockey with me, I would be, too). When they return, after a brief exchange, the Doctor has the pair of them destroy Calvierri's throne (part of the equipment) while he goes to handle the device on the roof all in the middle of a torrential downpour all over Venice. Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening... and also, earthquakes that will cause tidal waves. Big fun all around!

Of course, the Doctor manages to stop the machine and the sun shines upon Venice once more with it being only slightly worse for wear. The Doctor rushes to stop Calvierri before she jumps into the pool of her male children, attempting suicide. She asks him if it was worth it, killing off an entire species for the sake of one city and she asks him if his conscience can carry the weight of another dead race. Before he can stop her, she jumps in and is consumed by the offscreen fish-lobsters under the water.

...wait, why didn't her perception filter show off her form again? How is she able to take off clothes that the filter is creating? Why-

Back to the TARDIS, Amy tells Rory she wants him to keep traveling with them and the Doctor definitely agrees. It seems that all is patched up with the pair of them. Amy has her spaceship and her boys and all is well. As they prepare to leave, though, the Doctor looks back and asks Rory what he hears. Rory says that all he can hear is... Silence. We hear the words of the Senora to the Doctor, speaking of how through some cracks they saw Silence... and the end of all things...

They play off the kiss way, way too easily...

So, The Vampires of Venice is a good episode for reasons that ironically have very little to do with its plot and very much to do with its themeing. The episode is by Toby Whithouse, who also wrote School Reunion from all the way back in Series 2. While that episode is not directly mentioned in this one, I like to think of this episode as a bit of a successor to that one in the drama department, albeit from a different perspective. Rather than a former companion coming back in the form of Sarah Jane, we have Rory as an outsider looking in on the world of the Doctor and being not as dazzled by the life as Amy or others might be, sees the dangers in it all.

As I said above, Arthur Davill's short monologue reminds me of two things in particular: the words of one Elton Pope and those of Davros. Rory claims that the Doctor is dangerous not because of his skills or knowledge, but in how he inspires his companions to impress him. It echoes Davros' speech from Journey's End, about how the Doctor abhors violence but makes weapons out of other people. Whether he intends to or not is irrelevant, it happens.

The connection to the bit from Love & Monsters didn't come back to me until this re-watch, however. Elton, not being a companion of the Doctor but having that outsider perspective like Rory, put it very well in that episode.

"'Cos the Doctor might be wonderful but, thinking back, I was having such a special time. Just for a bit, I had this nice little gang... and they were destroyed. It's not his fault. Maybe that's what happens if you touch the Doctor, even for a second. I keep thinking of Rose and Jackie and how much longer before they pay the price..."

A chilling monologue that...

gave me false hope that Rose Tyler was going to finally be set on fire.

is very unfortunately placed right before the reveal of a blowjob dispensing slab of concrete. Seriously, what in the actually hell, Russell?! It's 2023 and there's still no way you could have thought that was okay! 

...has more than a little bit of punch. Elton is completely right. The Doctor is wonderful, as is their world, that their companions are privileged to get a look at through the miracle of time travel. It is also a terrifying world, full of danger and desolation, destruction and death. As the Doctor says in the beginning, their life can blind you to the things that are important.

This episode shows that they can avoid being blinded by the glamour of it all but, one is given to wonder, for long will it be before Amy and Rory pay the price? Now, was Moffat trying to set up their departure from the show this early? I don't think so, but the subtext is definitely there. It'll be a while before the subtext becomes text, but it's there: reality of life with the Doctor.

Ducking around Amy's sexual assault of the Doctor is a bit of a massive problem as well, but it never really gets brought up again after this, either. Still, a bit of a black mark on Moffat's writing career and this episode kind of just trying to sweep it under the rug is not all that better.

It just comes off as a bit creepy...

As for the episode's actual plot - it's fine. You've got a standard aliens arrive on Earth trying to convert/conquer and the Doctor saves the day. Simple enough, really. Calvierri made a pretty good villain, if a little one note. Her son is the full on Mama's Boy, with the two having some undertones that reminded me a bit too much of the definitely not incest-y father and daughter from The End of Time. They don't go full on overtly creepy with it, but they do have a scene where the two are a bit too cuddly...

The design of the fish-lobster alien is fine in that it looks alien. Nothing super special, but not anything to point and laugh at. Not really sure it was worth the special effects budget either way, though.

Also, seeing the House Calvierri logo makes me think of the Clan Tzimisce logo and that I should probably finish Season 1 of Seattle By Night at some point. Busy busy busy!

Next time, the TARDIS lands in Leadworth in the year 2015. It's been five years, Rory and Amy did indeed get married and Amy is pregnant with their first child! Wonderful! However, when all three of them sleep, the Doctor, Amy (not pregnant), and Rory find themselves in the TARDIS that is out of power and drifting toward a cold star. An enigmatic figure in a bow-tie is behind it all, telling the time travelers that one of the scenarios is real and one is a dream... but which one?

It all comes down to Amy's Choice.

Be there!