Pond Life (bbc.co.uk, 2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZkWjkvaKpA What's It About? A series of five online shorts about Amy and Rory's home life that act as a prequel to Series 7 of Doctor Who. Is It Any Good? Brevity is the soul of wit and that certainly seems to be the case for Pond Life. Distributed on the official Doctor Who website, this brief look into Amy and Rory's domestic life is well written and reliably amusing but let down by it having a collective runtime of five and a half minutes It has a very brief storyline in the third and fourth episodes as Amy and Rory try to cope with an Ood that wandered into their house during a visit from the Doctor but nothing really happens beyond that other than Amy and Rory splitting up in the last episode. Which ties into Asylum Of The Daleks (the first episode of Series 7) but is completely disconnected from the first four episodes. Though Pond Life does work in some ways as precursor to the Series 7 episode The Power Of Three, which was also written by Chris Chibnall and was based partly on a role reversal of the characters as the Doctor stays with Amy and Rory instead of them travelling with him. But I'm nitpicking here. It's an enjoyable bit of comedic fluff that was something to tide us over before Series 7 and, for what it is, it's good fun. Particularly the Doctor suddenly turning up in Amy and Rory's bedroom in the middle of the night in the second episode. But the scenes of the Doctor rapping in the first episode should never happen again. Even once is too many. What do you think of Doctor Who's spin-offs? Leave a comment...
JG Moore
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JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
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