Rate and Discuss: A Town Called Mercy

[Nyder]

If we all liked the same stories life would be very dull - and these threads would be a lot shorter.

How can you not like Blink Si it's a great story with ........... see what I mean? ;-)

[Stuart Wallis]

Oh dear...

Amy and Rory might as well not have been in it - must we have had a rehash of Donna's big speech from The Runaway Bride? The other Doctor was rather predictable, Isaac was the only decent character and they killed him off partway through, and it had completely the wrong setting for me - Westerns do for me what pirates do for Mr. McCow. That alone was enough to only give it 2/10.

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

As much as I love The Gunfighters, it's amazing how much more believable a story like this is when it really is filmed in the Wild West (at least I assume it was!).

It was filmed on standing sets in a remote area of Spain which were previously used for Spaghetti Western films of yesteryear but if I hadn't known beforehand where it was filmed I wouldn't have guessed either.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Makes you wonder why they bothered flying to Utah for all that Astronauty stuff really.

[Perry Vale]

It seems that I may have been watching another show entirely because everyone else thought it was great.

Not everyone, I agree with you it was Who by numbers.

Who exactly is Ben Browder? Everyone here seems to be going on about him but I've never heard of him before!

[Dirk Gently]

Not everyone, I agree with you it was Who by numbers.

Who exactly is Ben Browder? Everyone here seems to be going on about him but I've never heard of him before!

What Steve said.

[Jon Masters]

Who exactly is Ben Browder? Everyone here seems to be going on about him but I've never heard of him before!

Star of Farscape, then joined Stargate SG1 as the main male lead in season 9

[Zbigniev Hamson]

And who was he in this?

[Richard Brinck-Johnsen]

He played Sheriff Isaac. It was slightly a shame he got killed off as he was a lot better than I expected despite appearing to have piled on the pounds since his Farscape days.

[Junkyard]

An enjoyable episode, not great but good, and with no more plot holes than tv drama usually has. The Doctor getting a little darker as he often does when faced with a moral problem ('You don't get to choose when and how your debt is paid!') and some comic bits to ease the tension (the undertaker and Susan the horse). All in all, this is shaping up to be a good series.

[Rob McCow]

Oh I see what Si Hart means about Ben Browder being foxy in this one!

A seven for this episode from me!

It was good, but I can't help thinking that RTD would have pushed Toby Whithouse harder and produced a better episode at the end of it. There were a couple of cliches creeping in to the dialogue which were quite jarring.

That said, there were some wonderful iconic images and OH WOW explosions! And the acting was superb from absolutely everyone. Matt Smith's Doctor does angry extremely well and far more convincingly than Tennant ever really managed. But here he's got something to be genuinely angry about too.

I couldn't help but think of Davros in relation to the Alien Doctor, how they both experimented on subjects during times of war. The essential concept of 'What if Davros was an affable little man' is a great one and well played here.

Also, I thought it was nice to have a slightly slower, talkier episode than last week's.

So hah! Face me!

[Jason Thompson]

A bit late I know, but I thought I'd think it over for a while first. On the whole I really enjoyed it. Yes, there were a few inconsistencies and Amy and Rory had very little to do, but at least it wasn't as plain ridiculous as Asylum or as disjointed as Dinosaurs. We saw the twist that the gunslinger was after the nice old man because he wasn't as nice as he appeared coming, since the setup seemed too obvious otherwise, but in this case it wasn't a case of it being a disappointingly obvious twist but more of wondering how that situation came about.

The bit that most swung my opinion first one way and then the other was the scene where the Doctor pushes Jex out of the town. I loved that: seeing the Doctor's fury and rage prompting him to push a defenceless man to his death. It was just as shocking as it should have been. And yes, Amy should indeed have been the one to make him calm down and play nice, but the way it was done was so grating. 'You've clearly been taking stupid lessons' and 'that's not the way we roll' are just shockingly clunky lines that should have been cut from the first draft.

The character of Jex made me think that possibly the story was influenced by the life of Wernher von Braun. He was dogged by controversy because he developed the V1 and V2, and was in fact a member of the SS (though he hed little choice in that regard due to his position in the war effort). He was put in charge of a facility that used slave labour to build weapons of war. And then he surrendered to America and became a respected and well liked member of the community, helping to put a man on the Moon by designing the Saturn series of rockets. Some forgave his past, others did not, and wherever he went opinion was divided.

The heart of this episode was that dilemma of what makes a person, and when good people do bad things, and so on. Overall I thought it was played out excellently, and the viewers feelings towards Jex are constantly being questioned with each new revelation about him. A very nice effort.

[MacNimon]

The poorest story of the season so far for me. Possibly because it was the story I was looking forward to most of them all....I was quite simply hoping for Doctor Who's take on Westworld, which was a million miles from what we got. There was nothing wrong with the story itself, it was an interesting concept but it was just so dull in it's excecution...the regulars were great as usual though, and it looked fantastic on-screen. Just so dull, though. 5/10.