Previously on Doctor Who…

Having survived a dangerous adventure together, Amy reveals to the Doctor that she’s getting married in the morning. She then tries to have sex with the Doctor, who rejects her advances because she’s getting married in the morning. The Doctor then resolves to sort out this whole mess.

The episode opens in ancient Venice, where a man named Guido (I’m serious) begs a Signora Calvierri to accept his daughter Isabella into her school. Calvierri agrees, and takes Isabella immediately. Guido is separated from his daughter moments before Calvierri’s son Francesco bares his vampiric fangs and bites into Isabella’s neck.

Cue the theme son– no, wait.

We switch over to Rory’s stag party/bachelor party, where he’s having a few drinks with the boys. He’s also drunk-dialing Amy to tell her how smashing she is. Rory has to hang up quickly when someone wheels out a particularly large cake. Everyone gets ready for a stripper to jump out, but…

She looks a bit manish

The Doctor pops out of the cake instead. He says someone should probably go retrieve the lovely diabetic girl in the bikini he left outside. If the mood wasn’t already ruined enough, the Doctor practically destroys the party when he tells Rory that Amy tried to kiss him. And he says this in front of everyone. Yeah… Cue the theme song now, please.

Now we’re inside of the TARDIS, where the Doctor warns Amy and Rory about the dangers of traveling with him. He’s seen people go back home and have trouble readjusting to their normal lives (like Sarah Jane Smith), and he’s seen his travels tear relationships apart (Rose and Mickey). So to make things better between our lovely companion and her fiance, the Doctor is sending them on a romantic trip through time and space. If the episode title wasn’t a big enough hint for you, he’s taking them to Venice.

The Doctor looks at his wristwatch and says it’s the year 1580. Two things stand out about this bit: First, that the Doctor is wearing a watch. That rarely ever happens. It’s difficult to keep track of time when you’re a time traveler. Second, that the Doctor’s watch is apparently tuned into the TARDIS and can tell him what year he’s in. So let’s add another item to the list of the Doctor’s crazy gizmos.

After walking around for about a minute, our heroes are stopped and asked for papers to prove their residency. The Doctor pulls out his psychic paper and tells the official that they are a holy man from the Vatican, a countess, and her eunuch. Rory takes the psychic paper and sees that he’s the eunuch. The city official was checking for papers because, according to Sig.ra Calvierri, The Plague is still running rampant outside of Venice. For those of you not keeping up, they’re in 1580. The Plague ended years ago. So that means Calvierri is shutting down the city for some unknown reason.

Decent boobs, but historically inaccurate hair for a black woman.

Our heroes then spot Guido approaching a group of girls from Calvierri’s school. He snatches the veils off of their faces, hoping that one of them will be his daughter Isabella. He finds her, but she doesn’t seem to recognize him. The other girls bare their fangs, and Francesco tells Guido to stay away.

The Doctor runs over to Guido and asks him what’s going on with the school. Guido explains that something dark and evil is happening at the school, he’s no longer allowed to see his daughter, and the girls there have teeth like animals.

Oh, that’s not a pretentious shot at all…

Francesco runs to his mother Sig.ra Calvierri and tells her that they were accosted by another outsider. They then discuss whether or not they’ve recruited enough girls, and if it’s time to introduce Francesco’s brothers. Sig.ra Calvierri wants to stick to the plan a little longer, until they can recruit a few more girls.

Later on, we see Amy and Rory walking around on their little date. Rory is worried that he’s losing Amy, since she did run away with a time traveler on the night before their wedding. Before they have the chance to discuss this further, they hear a nearby woman screaming. They find Francesco, fangs out, standing over the body of a woman with bite marks on her neck. Francesco runs away.

Outside of Calvierri’s school, Guido creates a distraction so the Doctor can sneak in to investigate. Before the Doctor can get far, he’s stopped by some of the school’s creepy vampire girls. When they ask who he is, he reaches for his psychic paper, but accidentally pulls out an old library card. A card so old, in fact, that it has a picture of the Doctor with his first face (played by actor William Hartnell), which had to have been taken half a millennium ago from the Doctor’s perspective. The psychic paper, it turns out, is still with Rory. The Doctor figures that the girls are all vampires and runs away before he gets bitten.

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory run into each other after their little encounters and confirm that they all saw vampires. They regroup at Guido’s house, where Guido reveals that he knows a way into the school. However, there’s a trap door that’s always locked that blocks their way. Guido suggests they use his supply of gunpowder to blast their way in, but Amy suggests she enrolls in the school, sneaks to the hidden entrance that night, and unlocks it. They go with this plan, with Rory posing as Amy’s brother with references from the king of Sweden projected on the psychic paper.

“I’m a gondola… driver. So… money’s a bit tight.”

Amy is immediately taken in by the school. It takes her all of five minutes to find Isabella and her anachronistically straight hair. Isabella hasn’t been completely changed yet. The sunlight hurts her skin, but she doesn’t have fangs yet and she still remembers who she is. Amy promises to get Isabella out of there just before sneaking off to the trap door and unlocking it. Amy plans to stay there and wait for the Doctor and Rory, but she’s captured and taken to a room in the school filled with alien tech. Calvierri knew Amy was a spy from the start, as the psychic paper didn’t work on her.

Sig.ra Calvierri and Francesco take a bite out of Amy’s neck and start drinking. Before they get the chance to inject Amy with their own blood, Amy kicks Calvierri in the leg and damages a device that was projecting a perception filter. It turns out they’re not vampires, but alien fish people.

Elsewhere, the Doctor and Rory stumble their way through the castle until they finally find Amy. Along the way, the Doctor tries to comfort Rory by telling him that Amy only kissed him because she was under a lot of stress, and she would’ve kissed Rory had he been there at the time. The Doctor is carrying a UV light that he uses to ward off the vampiric fish people. Isabella tries to help the Doctor, Rory, and Amy escape. However, Isabella herself gets caught on the way out.

For Isabella’s betrayal, she is executed. They shove her into a pool in the back of the school filled with Calvierri’s ravenous fish-sons who eat Isabella alive. Sig.ra Calvierri leans over to watch, but Francesco warns his mother than his brothers might accidentally eat her as well if her perception filter is still on.

I actually wasn’t a fan of Isabella’s death scene. As she treads water, she shouts phrases like “Something touched my leg” and “They bite” before getting dragged underwater. Anyone who’s ever seen the first five minutes of the movie Jaws knows that you don’t need any dialogue beyond the pained screams of the victim to tell the audience that something underwater is biting off your legs.

So if you’re going to learn one thing after having watched this episode, let it be this: writer Toby Whithouse has never seen Jaws.

The Doctor barges into Calvierri’s throne room (despite the fact that the episode made it clear how difficult it was to sneak in up til this point) and confronts her about her actions. He figures out that she’s from the planet Saturnyne. Calvierri and the Doctor have a Q&A session where the Doctor reveals who he is and where he’s from, and Calvierri tells the tragic story of her people: There were cracks all over Saturnyne, followed by a great silence. The cracks eventually swallowed her homeworld. She and her sons are all refugees who fled to Venice because, being flooded, it’s a city not unlike their lost world. She wants to make Venice the new home for her people. They were capturing and changing the girls of the city into their kind so the girls could mate with Calvierri’s sons and restart their species. As far as evil plans go, this one actually isn’t all that evil. It’s incredibly inconsiderate to the natives, but not it’s not at all malicious.

The Doctor almost sympathizes until he finds out that not only did they execute Isabella, but they didn’t bother learning her name beforehand. The Doctor storms off and joins the team back at Guido’s house. The Saturnynian girls follow the Doctor and attack the house. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory manage to escape, but Guido lures all of the girls upstairs to his supply of gunpowder. Having lost his daughter and his world, Guido kills himself and all of the girls by blowing up the house.

Meanwhile, a storm is brewing. Calvierri is using a device to manipulate the weather so she can flood Venice even more, sinking it completely so she and her family can take it for themselves.

Francesco tracks down Amy and Rory, intent on draining Amy dry. Then Rory does something incredibly stupid and incredibly brave: He saves Amy’s life by picking up a nearby broom to fight off Francesco. Yeah, Francesco has a sword. It’s a one-sided fight where Rory clearly has the disadvantage, but he’s clearly willing to die if it means giving Amy the chance to run away. Just when it seems like Rory’s days are numbered, Amy pulls out a hand mirror, reflects some sunlight off of it, and shines it on Francesco until he bursts into flames.

Okay, what the fuck? Even accepting that too much exposure to sunlight could kill a Saturnynian, why was a little sunlight bouncing off of Amy’s mirror more deadly than walking outside in direct sunlight with nothing more than a hat? Francesco clearly wasn’t that sensitive to sunlight. Also, the skies are completely clouded over; where the hell did Amy even find direct sunlight to reflect onto her mirror?

Oh well. Francesco’s dead, our companion is safe, and so is her fiance. Time to make out.

Calvierri learns from the Doctor that all the girls she recruited are dead, and so she sorta disappears for the rest of this scene. Amy and Rory meet the Doctor in Calvierri’s throne room, where they find a control module for the rainstorm hidden in the back of the throne. Amy and Rory smash the chair while the Doctor climbs up to the roof to disable the antenna.

Defeated, Sig.ra Calvierri runs to the pool where her sons are swimming. She makes sure her perception filter is still working, so her sons will see her as a human and eat her alive. The Doctor finds her and tries to stop her. He says that rather than end it all, she and her remaining sons should continue to live and mourn together, as the Doctor does for his own people. Calvierri throws herself into the pool anyway, and her sons consume her.

I was disappointed in how her story ended. Suicide and the death of her species. I was really hoping the extinction of an entire alien species was a thing of the past. It happened so often back when Russell T. Davies was the head writer that it was beginning to lost all impact. I was hoping new head writer Steven Moffat would leave those kinds of stories behind, but I was apparently hoping for too much.

Our heroes make their way back to the TARDIS. The Doctor is ready to drop Amy and Rory off at home, just in time for their wedding. However, when Amy seems hesitant to go back, Rory assumes she wants to cancel the wedding, and he says they can just drop him off. That’s not what Amy meant, though. She asks Rory to stay so they can all travel around together for a little while longer. The Doctor says he’d love it, and thus Rory becomes another companion. Just before they depart, the Doctor notices an odd silence sweeping over Venice. The rushing water, the people walking the streets, and chickens– he can’t hear any of it. Is this the same silence that consumed the planet Saturnyne? The same silence that Prisoner Zero said would fall before the Pandorica opens?

The Vampires of Venice is a fun episode. Unfortunately, its quality is inconsistent. The story starts off well enough, but things start to make less and less sense as we learn more about the villains. Their physical appearance isn’t actually changed, but just what people see of them. However, the clothes that aren’t there in their fishy forms are real clothes that they can take off in their human forms. They’re not really vampires, but they prefer to drink human blood for no clearly stated reason. And again, there’s the thing with Amy’s mirror and Francesco.