A Good Man Goes To War

... worked much better on the second viewing. What particularly struck me (and this is because I've been reading a bunch of stuff recently about gender and the military) was how that notorious misogynist Steven Moffat presents us repeatedly with images of alternative masculinity - images which undercut exactly the destructive hypermacho insisted on by armies ancient and modern, in which femininity and the domestic are contamination which must be purged or controlled.

The Doctor, Rory, and Strax are all warriors; at the same time, without contradiction, they are all nurturers. Strax and Rory both wear armour and uniforms, but are both nurses, and in the Sontaran's case literally, as he boasts in a very macho way about being able to produce "magnificent quantities" of milk. By now we're all used to the image of a warrior woman fighting for her child - to some extent, just an extension of her "natural" role as nurturer.

Here we have woman+baby, but also the less usual image, man+baby - Rory holding his daughter and crying instead of being "cool", the Doctor's cot, the Doctor speaking baby, Rory's meeting with River at the start. (And Craig with Alfie strapped to his front, as if in his womb.) If RTD's leitmotif was mums, Moffat's is surely (and unsurprisingly) dads.

It's fun how the Doctor and Rory keep serving as each others' dopplegänger (not to be confused with ganger) - they're both Amy's "boys", and we're faked out more than once about which of them she's talking about, as in her speech to baby Melody here, or in the overheard stuff in "Day of the Moon". Talk about having your cake and eating it too, Pond!