Review: Doctor Who: Vincent and The Doctor

Richard Curtis of Vicar of Dibley, Love Actually, Notting Hill and The Boat that Rocked fame presents a powerful and moving insight into the trials and tribulations of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh.  It returns to the core of Doctor Who's historical record while still imbued with the Richard Curtis charm and his ability to stir great emotion. The story is noticably less about the "big bad alien" and more about the emotional and chronological banter between characters, meaning that plot is firmly shoved aside.

On a trip to a French art gallery, The Doctor and Amy notice an alien being in the window of a church painted by Van Gogh. After bantering with a brilliant Bill Nighy as the Curator, they travel back to 1890, where they discover a broken and confused man. The monster in question is a space-bug-scavenger-prototype, and in this case serves to act as a metaphor for his mental state. Because of Van Gogh's unique mental state, he is the only one able to see the creature, leading to some invisible faffing around.

After a brilliantly subtle tale that explores the full psycology of Van Gogh, there is a tragic end sequence for the alien and then there is a wonderfully heartwarming scene where The Doctor introduces Van Gogh to the 2010 gallery, and Nighy expresses his life-long admiration.

While the action may be a little pushed back to make way for the character drama, this is no bad thing. The true plot is Van Gogh's altering psyche, and the alien threat serves only as a motivational tool for The Doctor to show Van Gogh how special a being he really was/is. This is of course a brilliant move by Rich Curtis, who does character drama better than anything else.

Next week, The Doctor acts as a Lodger with James Cordon. Lets hope he had no part in writing the damn thing.

Thanks.