Cold Blood (Second of Two Parter)

Can the humans and Homo Reptilia agree to get on with each other?

Like the previous part, The Hungry Earth, Cold Blood exceeds all of the stories of this current season in excellence. It is not perfect, but we are close too classic Doctor Who.

The sets are excellent. While these Eocenes are arguably too human, they do look great visually.

Matt Smith gives us a top performance as the Eleventh Doctor. Rory is also well portrayed. He has moved from being a neverous little bloke to being a genuinely capable assistant to the Doctor. Karen Gillen as Amy is decent enough.

Having Ambrose brutally kill Elaya was a smart move. It showed how easily men and women can be overcome by fear, anger and distress. Any of us could have done what she did.

Some aspects of the story follow Doctor Who and the Sillurians (and its novelization, The Cave Monsters) rather too much. Nevertheless, a clear advantage of the scenario in Cold Blood over DW and the Sillurians is that in this story, the human characters come into face-to-face contact with the Eocenes. In the Pertwee story, the UNIT team only faced the Eocenes in combat.

I am puzzled by the Doctor's claim that the characters have the potential to change history. Is he really not concerned about the possiblity of an alternate timeline? The Doctor has never been this cavalier about changing history. In any case the negotiations seem heavily academic, as none of the humans has any political authority.

Doctor Who often does not do combat well. I was not quite convinced by the ease with which the Doctor disarmed the Eocene warriors.

The death of Rory was poignant, though we all suspect that we will see him again somehow.

There are lots of puzzling questions about this story. Why does the timecrack not harm the Doctor when he puts his hand in it? If Rory is erased from history, would this not remove his part in the story and thus the outcome of events? Why does Elaya's sting cause Tony to mutate and how exactly?