Well, there was that very overt storytelling thread for one thing, that started with Amy telling Melody the story of her father, the Lone Centurion and then went on with many conflicting stories of the Doctor--we were quite forcibly reminded that these people are all fairytales, just as River said they are, even when they're real people too.
River's reveal at the end is classic fairytale, but done backwards. Usually the orphaned/fostered hero character does whatever heroic deeds and then is rewarded at the end with the reveal of their true (usually noble) parentage, but here we had a reveal to the *parents* of the fantastic identity of their lost child, at the *beginning* of the story, like a reassurance.
A stolen child--again classic fairytale (do any kids in fairytale have normal parents and childhoods?). Kovarian is a pretty archetypal evil stepmother/witch character. Little Melody's white bassinet thing even calls to mind Moses as a baby set adrift on the water . . . Moff brings back the nursery rhyme/poem voiceover like he used in "The Beast Below." And older River who shows up at the end is sort of playing fairy godmother again--appears magically at just the right moment to explain everything that happened, give advice and consolation and good news, etc . . .
Probably I am missing things, too, but you get the idea. I don't really think there were markedly fairytale-like elements earlier in the series, though. Well, in Neil Gaiman's episode, but that felt pretty stand-alone. In TIA/DotM where you'd expect to find them, though, the feel was so different, you know? There were all the things with the lost child, but the overall tone of those episodes was more sophisticated scifi, a bit X-Files, trippy psychological horror. There wasn't a lot to remind you that you were in a fairytale, which is why it came as a bit of a shock to the system, for me, for AGMGTW to happen, and it's all romantic fairytale logic where we'd been getting something a lot grittier and more realistic for most of the season, you know?
It would be so much more awful than just having a sad ending, like so many companions get, because our expectations have already been set by last season's wonderfully, unreasonably happy ending. Ugh, this would be beyond horrible. I'm continually reminded with this show that if Moff wanted to *break* me, he could . . .
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River's reveal at the end is classic fairytale, but done backwards. Usually the orphaned/fostered hero character does whatever heroic deeds and then is rewarded at the end with the reveal of their true (usually noble) parentage, but here we had a reveal to the *parents* of the fantastic identity of their lost child, at the *beginning* of the story, like a reassurance.
A stolen child--again classic fairytale (do any kids in fairytale have normal parents and childhoods?). Kovarian is a pretty archetypal evil stepmother/witch character. Little Melody's white bassinet thing even calls to mind Moses as a baby set adrift on the water . . . Moff brings back the nursery rhyme/poem voiceover like he used in "The Beast Below." And older River who shows up at the end is sort of playing fairy godmother again--appears magically at just the right moment to explain everything that happened, give advice and consolation and good news, etc . . .
Probably I am missing things, too, but you get the idea. I don't really think there were markedly fairytale-like elements earlier in the series, though. Well, in Neil Gaiman's episode, but that felt pretty stand-alone. In TIA/DotM where you'd expect to find them, though, the feel was so different, you know? There were all the things with the lost child, but the overall tone of those episodes was more sophisticated scifi, a bit X-Files, trippy psychological horror. There wasn't a lot to remind you that you were in a fairytale, which is why it came as a bit of a shock to the system, for me, for AGMGTW to happen, and it's all romantic fairytale logic where we'd been getting something a lot grittier and more realistic for most of the season, you know?
It would be so much more awful than just having a sad ending, like so many companions get, because our expectations have already been set by last season's wonderfully, unreasonably happy ending.
Ugh, this would be beyond horrible. I'm continually reminded with this show that if Moff wanted to *break* me, he could . . .