City called Mercy

A doctor is a traveler in space and time. It looks like a man, but belongs to the race of the Time Lords from the planet Gallifrey . Representatives of his race have the ability to regenerate (reborn) as they get into fatal situations, as a result of which their appearance and partially their character completely change. The Doctor is the last Time Lord. Having lost his own planet, he saves other worlds, including humanity ^[1] .

As a way of transportation, the Doctor uses TARDIS ( TARDIS - T ime A nd R elative D imension (s) I n S pace) - a living time machine (and at the same time a spaceship ) that looks like an English blue police booth of the 1960s, but containing much more than it seems (“it is more inside than outside”) ^[2] . As a handy tool for performing small operations with objects (locking and unlocking locks, fixing devices, scanning, etc.), the Doctor uses a sound screwdriver . In addition, he has a non-human intellect ^[1] .

Starting with the fifth season of the television series (2010), the Doctor, or rather, his eleventh incarnation , travels with his new companion named Amelia Pond , who appeared in the opening episode of the fifth season of the series “The Eleventh Hour ” ^[3] . Also traveling with them (in the fifth season from time to time, starting from the sixth - constantly) is Amy's groom (and later husband), Rory Williams , who became one of the few male companions ^[4] .

Prequel

The prequel “Cities called Mercy” was available only to iTunes service users ^[5] . According to the plot of the prequel, called "Creation of the Shooter", an unknown humanoid is turned into a cyborg . Each stage of the transformation is accompanied by the voiceover of Cala Jacks.

Synopsis

The doctor , Amy, and Rory head to Mexico to celebrate the Day of the Dead , but instead the TARDIS lands near the small American town of Mercy, a few kilometers north of the Mexican border. The Doctor’s attention was attracted by the border of stones and pieces of wood surrounding the entire city, as well as street electric lighting, which on Earth should only be invented in ten years. Travelers learn from the local sheriff, Isaac, that Mercy has been terrorizing Shooter for the last three weeks - a cyborg using alien weapons to prevent anyone from leaving the city and not allowing anyone to deliver food to the city. The shooter demands to give him a "doctor", but, as it turned out, he doesn’t need the Time Lord, but a humanoid alien locked up behind bars in the sheriff’s office. The alien introduces himself as Cala Jacks and tells that ten years before the events of the episode crashed on Earth. After the locals gave him shelter, he provided them with his services as a doctor, saving the city from an outbreak of cholera, and some innovations, including primitive electric lighting. Despite the fact that the city’s reserves are already depleted, and the situation is becoming increasingly tense every day, Isaac refuses to give out Jacks.

The Doctor offers to evacuate the townspeople on the TARDIS and makes a plan: while Isaac and Rory distract Strelka, the Doctor himself sets off on horseback for his ship. Along the way, the Doctor bumps into Jack's rescue capsule; when opening the capsule, although the Doctor uses a sound screwdriver, an alarm is triggered. The doctor looks through Jacks' video magazines and learns that a civil war has recently ended on his planet, while Jacks and several other scientists have been experimenting with their relatives to create cyborg soldiers; some of the subjects died, and some became merciless mass murderers who ended the war in a few days. Being shocked by what he saw, the Doctor finds Strelka and realizes that he is one of Jack's creations, a cyborg killer. The shooter confirms the fears of the Time Lord and reveals to him that in fact he takes revenge on everyone who created him, and Jack is the last of the surviving scientists. The cyborg also explains that it was he who created the border of stones, since his program forbids him to harm the innocent, but as the townspeople continue to shelter Jack, Shooter sets the Doctor with an ultimatum: the next one to cross the line should be Cala Jacks.

The doctor returns to Mercy, releases Jack from prison and, in front of his companions and several citizens, drags the alien scientist to the border by force. After Jack is forced to cross the border, Amy admits that the Time Lord over the months of travel alone has changed for the worse. The Shooter appears and points a weapon at Jack; the alien is trying to negotiate with the cyborg, explaining that he has changed, that his past deeds are over, but Strelok decides to kill him anyway. Before the cyborg fired, the sheriff Isaac overshadowed Jack and, dying, transferred all his powers to the Doctor, asking the alien traveler to look out for the city. The shooter leaves, having made the last warning: he will return the next day at noon and pick up Jack, even if the innocents suffer.

The whole next night, the Doctor and Jacks discuss the past of Jack, including touching on the beliefs of the home planet Strelka and Jacks. According to these beliefs, after death, a man climbs a mountain, carrying the burden of all human souls, to which he inflicted suffering during his life, and, apparently, Jackson is faced with an overwhelming burden. A crowd of angry citizens gathering outside the sheriff’s office building demanding that Jack be returned at all costs, but the Doctor dissuades them, since this act would have made sense of Isaac’s sacrifice. Instead, the Time Lord offers the townspeople a plan to repulse Strelka: they must increase the power of street lamps, as a result of which an electric discharge will destroy the cyborg. Several townspeople disguise themselves as Jack to confuse Strelka, and the real scientist goes to his capsule, but instead of following the plan, he eliminates the capsule with himself. Before the explosion, the alien says that his last act in life should be the end of the war with the Shooter and a meeting with the souls of those to whom he harmed. After the death of its creator, the cyborg loses the meaning of life and realizes that Cala-Jacks was no worse than himself. Having decided that in peacetime he, as a soldier, is of no use, Shooter announces to the Doctor his intention to self-liquidate far from the city. However, instead, the Doctor persuades the cyborg to remain in Mercy and become his protector as a new sheriff. After this, the Time Lord returns to the TARDIS and takes Amy and Rory home.

Showrunner of the series Stephen Moffat set out before the start of the season to give each series its own unique flavor ^[6] and intended to introduce “the most important movie themes” in the first five episodes of the seventh season ^[7] . The idea of ​​dipping Matt Smith, one of the last people who could have been imagined in the place of Clint Eastwood , into the atmosphere of the Wild West, seemed exciting to Moffat ^[6] , and he turned to to write a script for the episode in which The action takes place in the Wild West. Moffat proposed to Whitehouse the main idea - “a small city that is terrorized by a robot” ^[7] . Whitehouse had previously worked on episodes of “ Meeting at School ,” “ Vampires of Venice, ” and “ The Complex of God. ” ^[8] Before, he had never written a script for an episode in the Western genre, but this genre is "he definitely [likes]" ^[9] . The Doctors Who series, in which events take place in the Wild West, have not been filmed since the 1966 release of the series entitled The Sharpshooters ^[10] . Other scriptwriters advised Whitehouse not to watch “Sharpshooters” before writing the script, since, in their opinion, the series “is far from the pearl of the crown” ^[7] . Nevertheless, the scriptwriter considered himself obliged to include in the script such classical elements of a western as horse racing and a duel of shooters ^[7] . In addition, Whitehouse admitted that it was very difficult for him to write a scene in which the Doctor uses weapons; The doctor is a pacifist by nature, so he needed to come up with the “right kind of emotional shake” ^[7] .

Working on the image of Strelka, Whitehouse decided that the cyborg in the episode would be multifaceted and capable of sympathy: it should not look like a “soulless machine”, it must “glow a spark of living consciousness” ^[7] . To a large extent, the screenwriter was guided by the well-known image of the Frankenstein monster and later called the resulting physical image “fantastic” ^[11] . Subsequently, Andrew Brook took three and a half hours to make up, and in the process of filming the actor could only see with his left eye, since the right one was covered by an element of the costume ^[11] . Smith spoke well of the guest stars of Ben Browder, who turned out to be a “good cowboy” with a “splendidly long speech,” and Adrian Scarborough , who, as Smith put it, “pulls the whole episode” ^[12] . When Ben Browder was asked to play a role in the episode, he immediately accepted the offer; his children liked Doctor Who and they constantly watched the series, and Browder himself had long planned to star in some western ^[13] . Whitehouse was delighted with Browder's game, which accurately reflected his own ideas about the character ^[7] .

The city called Mercy, along with the episode Dinosaurs on a Spaceship , became one of the series in the first production unit of the seventh season. Both episodes were directed by ^[14] ; for the director, they became the debut of “Doctor Who” ^[15] . Most of the episode was shot in the desert, located in the Spanish province of Almeria , where the streets of the city were built in the style of the Wild West - these streets were previously used as scenery for more than 100 Western films, including the film “ For a Fistful of Dollars ” ^[10] . In addition, filming an episode in Spain was much cheaper than in the case of recreating the necessary scenery and the subsequent filming process in the UK ^{[10] [16]} . According to Moffat, “a serious place was needed, and since we were looking for the most iconic American scenery, there was only one possible place - Spain” ^[17] . Filming took place from March 8 ^[16] to March 17, 2012 ^[18] in ^[19] and ^{[11] [20]} . During the filming, Smith was given the opportunity to ride a horse, however, in scenes where the Doctor rides a horse, as a rule, a stuntman was used ^[11] . When composing the music for the episode, the composer Murray Gold sought to make it as similar as possible to the soundtrack of famous westerns ^[21] .

James F. McGrath, who writes for religious website, after watching The City Called Mercy admitted that the episode contained many moral and religious allusions: “This episode is actually about mercy, about forgiveness, about war crimes , about revenge and justice. ” He was especially interested in the scene where Amy said that the Doctor got worse after he was alone for a long time: "When we lose touch with other people, we begin to resolve issues of mercy and justice and the fate of other people in a different, faceless way." McGrath also noted the “religiosity” of the scene at the end of the episode, where city dwellers gather in the church for the time until Strelok and the Doctor figure it out; from his point of view, this scene especially emphasized the importance of human life ^[22] .

James F. McGrath on one of the moral aspects of the episode :

In my opinion, there is a kind of religious message in the scene where people took refuge in the church. It is not feverish prayers that save lives during a terrifying crisis. It makes a daily reminder to people that life is valuable. When this is done, even crippled by war, a man burning with revenge may not want to take life from an innocent. Если же такие вещи забывают, то даже без всяких киборгов мы уничтожим друг друга в схватке за собственное спасение и обеспечение собственной безопасности ^[22] .

Original text

I think one can find a take-home religious message in the church scene. What saves lives is not frantic prayers in the midst of a terrifying crisis. It is the teaching of people to value lives consistently on a day to day basis. When that is done, even a war-scarred vengeance-seeker may avoid taking innocent lives. When such things are ignored, then even without a cyborg in our midst we will destroy one another in a scramble to save ourselves and ensure our own safety.

По мнению Гэвина Фуллера, рецензента The Daily Telegraph , атмосфера вестерна стала «по сути всего лишь оформлением для мощной назидательной притчи Тоби Уайтхауза, где всё было не совсем так, как кажется, и где рассматривались проблемы морали, этики, совести и справедливости» ^[23] . Критик из The AV Club , Кит Фиппс, писал, что в основе практически всех вестернов лежит «бесконечная борьба порядка и хаоса», в данном эпизоде представленная вопросом «Что должно победить: беззаконная месть или цивилизованное правосудие?» ^[24] . Йен Берримен из SFX обратил внимание на характерно очерченную границу вокруг Милосердия, что по его мнению является метафорой для того, как сам Доктор, собираясь отдать человека на смерть, «преступает черту» и едва не нарушает собственные моральные принципы. Он сравнил моральные рассуждения Повелителя Времени с теми, которые вели его предыдущие инкарнации: четвертая ( Том Бейкер ) — в серии « Происхождение далеков » — и пятая ( Питер Дэвисон ) — в серии « Воскрешение далеков » ^[25] . Кроме того, все рецензенты отметили, что, в отличие от других эпизодов, в данном случае нельзя сказать, какой персонаж перед тобой — отрицательный или положительный — так как все они изображены «в оттенках серого» ^{[23] [25]} .

Премьера «Города под названием Милосердие» состоялась 15 сентября 2012 года на британских каналах BBC One и BBC One HD ^[26] и американском канале ^[27] . Рейтинги вечерних трансляций показали, что эпизод посмотрело 6,6 миллионов зрителей, что стало самым высоким показателем для серии седьмого сезона на тот момент. Эпизод занял третье место среди всех передач 15 сентября, а на следующий день стал лидером онлайн-просмотров на сайте ^[28] . После подсчёта общего количества онлайн-просмотров за месяц выяснилось, что «Город под названием Милосердие» уступил по популярности двум предшествующим эпизодам — « Изолятору далеков » и « Динозаврам на космическом корабле » — набрав всего 1,4 миллиона просмотров ^[29] . Однако окончательные рейтинги показали, что эпизод посмотрело 8,42 миллионов зрителей, в результате чего «Город под названием Милосердие» вновь побил рекорд среди эпизодов седьмого сезона, ранее установленный «Изолятором далеков» ^[30] . составил 85 баллов — «отлично» ^[31] .

Criticism

«Город под названием Милосердие» получил преимущественно положительные отзывы, за исключением нескольким смешанных. Мэтт Ризли ( IGN ) поставил эпизоду оценку 8,5 из 10, назвав его «веским, прогрессивным, пышным и зрелищным». Он похвалил работу Уайтхауса и Мецстина над созданием правильного настроения, а самым запоминающимся элементом назвал моральные метания Доктора ^[32] . Дэн Мартин из The Guardian описал серию как «сложную моральную дилемму, обогащённую острыми диалогами». Мартин назвал настоящей звездой эпизода Карен Гиллан, отметив разговор Эми с Доктором о том, как на нём сказались странствия в одиночку ^[33] . Кит Фиппс, рецензент AV Club, поставил эпизоду оценку B+, посвятив большую часть обзора поднимаемым в нём моральным проблемам ^[24] .

Гэвин Фуллер, обозреватель The Daily Telegraph , оценил серию в четыре из пяти звёзд и назвал её захватывающей и содержащей глубокие взрослые мысли. Он похвалил сдержанную игру Смита и диалоги его персонажа с Джексом. Хотя Фиппс тоже высоко оценил сцену противостояния между Эми и Доктором, по его мнению данный эпизод был «бесполезной тратой талантов Гиллан и Дарвилла», так как, по его мнению, их персонажи в нём слишком мало задействованы ^[23] . Морган Джеффри из Digital Spy также оценил эпизод в четыре звезды, похвалив атмосферу вестерна и способ, которым извлекаются наружу внутренние демоны Доктора. Кроме того, с точки зрения Джеффри, Бен Браудер привнёс в своего персонажа ту американскую аутентичность, которой не мог бы добиться британский актёр. Однако, как и Фуллер, он посчитал недостатком эпизода нехватку внимания, уделяемого Эми и Рори ^[34] .

Рецензент Slant Magazine Стивен Купер назвал «Город под названием Милосердие» «очень приятным эпизодом» несмотря на то, что, по его мнению, финал уступает по уровню большей части предваряющих его сцен из-за того, что осталась неразрешённой коллизия между Доктором и Джексом ^[35] . Ниэла Дебнат из The Independent похвалила «блестящий ход», после которого роль злодея перешла от Стрелка к Джексу. Сцену, где Доктор целится в Джекса из оружия, она назвала «абсолютно нетипичной», но объяснила данную ситуацию тем, что Эми и Рори вскоре должны покинуть Доктора ^[36] . Похожее мнение высказала Чарли Джейн Андерс , рецензент сайта : с её точки зрения, решение Доктора позволить Джексу умереть было «абсолютно не в духе» Повелителя Времени. Также она раскритиковала образ Стрелка, который почему-то не использует свои предположительно «невероятные» системы наведения для того, чтобы расстрелять свою цель, не нанося вреда невинным людям, и не даёт им покинуть город, чтобы лишить своего врага человеческих щитов. Кроме того, по её словам, сюжет оставляет ощущение «эпизода „ Глубокого космоса 9 “, перенесённого на Дикий Запад» ^[37] .

Рецензент SFX Йен Берримен оценил серию в три с половиной звезды из пяти. Согласно его комментарию, этические рассуждения сделали сюжет «удивительно зрелой историей», но элементы вестерна «кое-где оставляли чувство дежавю». У него также осталось чувство излишней линейности сюжета, поскольку на протяжении большей части эпизода решался вопрос, что делать с Джексом, а не раскрывалась его история. Берримен, как и Андерс, отмечает, что Стрелок мог просто войти в город и убить Джекса, а Доктор мог бы забрать его с собой на ТАРДИС ^[25] . Его коллега Дэйв Голдер назвал «Город под названием Милосердие» «разочаровывающим» научно-фантастическим вестерном и прокомментировал это следующим образом: «В этом эпизоде есть прекрасные моменты… Но для семейного шоу, постоянно изобретающего новые телевизионные приёмы, „Город под названием Милосердие“ немного вторичен» ^[38] . Патрик Малкерн, рецензент Radio Times , был тоже настроен критично., написав, что не верил в происходящее на экране и не проникся им. По его мнению, вестерны и «Доктор Кто» «никогда не сочетались»; кроме того, он был разочарован «черепашьим» темпом развития сюжета и почти полным отсутствием в нём места для Рори. Тем не менее критик похвалил «великолепные» декорации и «умело построенную» нравственную коллизию ^[39] .

• Graeme Burk, Robert Smith. Who's 50: The 50 Doctor Who Stories to Watch Before You Die — An Unofficial Companion . - Toronto: ECW Press, 2013 .-- P. 379-383. - 420 p. - ISBN 978-1-77090-475-0 .
• Graeme Burk, Robert Smith. Who Is the Doctor: The Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who-The New Series . - Toronto: ECW Press, 2012 .-- 421 p. - ISBN 978-1-55022-984-4 .
• Gillian I. Leitch, Sherry Ginn. Who Travels With the Doctor ?: Essays on the Companions of Doctor Who . - Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2016 .-- 180 p. - ISBN 978-0-78649-525-2 .

• A Town Called Mercy on Tardis Data Core, an external wiki
• "A Town Called Mercy" on the official website of Doctor Who
• A city called Mercy on the Internet Movie Database

Criticism

• Holmwood, Leigh Matt Smith travels to the Wild West in Doctor Who episode (neopr.) . The Sun (March 8, 2012). Date of treatment July 19, 2012.
• Fuller, Gavin 'Doctor Who' - 'A Town Called Mercy' review (neopr.) . Digital Spy (September 15, 2012). Date of appeal September 16, 2012.
• Martin, Dan Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy - series 33, episode three (neopr.) . The Guardian (September 15, 2012). Date of appeal September 16, 2012.
• Risley, Matt Cowboys & Aliens. Only, You Know, Good. (unspecified) . IGN (September 15, 2012). Date of appeal September 16, 2012.
• Debnath, Neela Review of Doctor Who 'A town called Mercy' (neopr.) . The Independent (September 15, 2012). Date of treatment September 16, 2012. Archived September 16, 2012.