I'm A Grown Man And I Bought This: Doctor Who Rory Williams Action Figure

Last year you'll no doubt remember me voicing my shock and disbelief that Character Options/Underground Toys-- the makers of fine Doctor Who action figures, which I rabidly collect-- made a freaking Winston Churchill action figure before they made one of major character Rory Williams. Because what kid wouldn't enjoy playing with an action figure of a 400 pound Prime Minister?

Thanks to the power of my powerful and highly influential blog, Character Options/Underground Toys announced late last year that they were finally making a Rory figure. It's about damn time! Let that be a lesson to you other corporations out there. You do not want to be the subject of one of my stinging exposés.

The Good News:  

Our long national nightmare is finally over. The Rory action figure's been released!

You may be wondering why I'm all atwitter this toy. After all it's just a figure of a guy in his street clothes. There's nothing unique or exciting about it. But it's Rory! The Boy Who Waited! The guy who was killed several times on the show, reincarnated as a robotic Roman Centurion and waited 2,000 years to see his true love again! Half of the first married couple to ever travel in the TARDIS!

He's a major character and part of the team. Would a company make figures of the Two Musketeers? The Six Dwarves? Of course not! So I don't get why fans had to practically threaten Character Options/Underground Toys before they grudgingly doled out a Rory.

So now that he's finally here, how does the Rory figure look? Pretty good! That's definitely Arthur Darvill's likeness immortalized there in plastic. He's got the sleepy eyes, the prominent nose (well, he does) and the usual unkempt hair.

Bear in mind here that he's blown up way more than actual size here, so things like the big seam in the side of his neck aren't as apparent in person.

He's wearing his trademark down vest, which has a lot of detail sculpted into it. They used a dry-brush paint job on his jeans that does a pretty good job of simulating denim.

One minor complaint: I don't ever remember Rory wearing a maroon shirt on the show. He wore a brown shirt in quite a few episodes and is wearing it in a lot of promotional materials. It's possible he did wear a maroon one and I just don't remember it, or maybe it's one of those deals where something looks one color on TV and another in reality, like Han Solo's Hoth jacket in The Empire Strikes Back. Other than that I think he came out very well.

Anywho (see what I did there?), I took the liberty of Photoshopping his shirt to its proper brown color, and I think it's a big improvement. Maybe one of these days when I have some spare time (HAW!) I'll paint his shirt for reals.

Rory's got the standard articulation for Doctor Who figures these days, including cut joints at the bicep and hip, which greatly increases his flexibility. His untucked shirt kind of limits the range of motion of his hips though, preventing him from sitting down. One thing that's missing: ball joints at the shoulders. Poor Rory can only raise his arms straight out in front of him; he can't raise them at his sides, so he won't be doing any jumping jacks.

At long last, Team TARDIS is finally complete!

Now for the Bad News: 

Sadly, Rory is the last figure in the 5" Doctor Who action figure line. Yep, you heard right. According to Character Options/Underground Toys, high production costs have forced them to discontinue the 5" line and introduce a new smaller scale. From this point forward all new Doctor Who toys will be 3 3/4" scale, the same size as Star Wars action figures (which has inexplicably become the dominant scale in the toy aisle these days). That's a shot of Rory with one of his 3.5" scale brethren above (Willrow Hood, the Greatest Star Wars Action Figure Ever Made). As you can see they're going to shrink them almost by half!

I have to admit I'm not happy with this boneheaded move. I've spent literally thousands of dollars on these toys and it's frustrating and disappointing to see the line end so abruptly. I've not yet decided if I'm going to collect the new smaller line. I really don't want to start over from square one and I don't have the space to store or display yet a second line of figures. 

But the main reason I'm on the fence about them is that thanks to my rapidly aging eyeballs, I can barely see action figures of this size anymore! I'll have to break out the magnifying glass if I ever want to look at them.

Ah well. All good things come to a stupid and ill-conceived end. The Doctor Who figures have had a good run. Time to spend my hard earned money on more important things. Like $4 a gallon gas.

Strangely enough, the Doctor Who Classic line of toys (encompassing figures from the First through Eighth Doctor's tenures) will remain at the 5" scale. That means when the day comes that we get a Twelfth Doctor figure, he won't be in scale with the previous eleven. Brilliant move, Character Options/Underground Toys.

"Come on Doctor, let me in! Doctor! Amy! Amy, I'm you're husband, now open the door! Guys, this isn't funny! Let me in, NOW! We're in the year 5,000,000! I don't want to stay here! Let me in!"

Doctor Who Season 7, Episode 5: The Angels Take Manhattan

Well, it finally happened-- Amy and Rory have left the Doctor. For good this time, it seems. I was not looking forward to this episode, as I've grown to like the Ponds. It was nice to see the first ever married couple traveling with the Doctor, and I enjoyed watching Rory's transformation from bumbling oaf to bad-ass action hero. But if you don't like change, then Doctor Who is not the show for you.

The Plot: 
The Doctor, Amy and Rory are relaxing in Central Park in the present day. The Doctor is reading an old detective novel and suddenly notices that it's describing their every move. He soon discovers that the Weeping Angels are attempting to take over Manhattan. Rory disappears and the Doctor and Amy are joined by an old friend...

SPOILERS AHEAD! MASSIVE SPOILERS! SERIOUSLY, DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE EPISODE! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!

• When I first heard the title of the Ponds last episode and read writer/showrunner Steven Moffat's quote that their exit would be "heartbreaking," I was sure I knew what was going to happen. I was convinced he was going to have Rory get zapped into the past by an Angel and live out his entire life without Amy, only to see her again seconds before he died. If that happened, especially after Rory waited 2000 freakin' years to be reunited with Amy a couple seasons ago, I vowed I would fly to Cardiff and punch Moffat right in the throat. And then I'd get mad!

And that's exactly what happened to Rory, although he and Amy managed to undo it. Well, sort of. As it turns out they BOTH got zapped into the past anyway. Whatever. As long as they weren't split up, I can live with it. And Moffat's throat remains safely unpunched.

• This week the little kid who's been screwing with the color sliders on the opening credits turned them orangish for a bit and then a bright putrid green.

• This week's font texture is... you got me. I think maybe it's supposed to be the image of the Statue of Liberty behind the text? If I squint I think I can sort of see the curve of her crown or tiara or whatever she's wearing on the right. Why didn't they just give the font a pitted gray stone texture like the Angels have?

• "Mr. Grayle," a wealthy collector of antiquities, hires a detective to investigate the Angels. "Grayle" is a pretty appropriate name for a collector!

• It was a very creepy moment when Detective Garner found his ancient future self dying in the hotel room.

• The Doctor says he always rips out the last page of a book because "he doesn't like endings." Did anyone think that wouldn't come back to bite him in the ass, especially after the very deliberate shot of him placing the page in the picnic basket? 

• Hey, River Song's back. What a surprise in a Steven Moffat-scripted episode. So River isn't in Stormcage prison anymore, because "the man she killed never existed." Once again we see the Doctor has seemingly been erased from all databases throughout space and time, presumably by Oswin the Friendly Dalek in the first episode of the season.

• Ugh... they did the "Doctor who?" joke again. I'm really starting to hate it when they do that. It was funny once, maybe twice, but not 77 times.

• OK, the Statue of Liberty as a Weeping Angel thing? That's going too far. It just raises so many questions. 

Did absolutely no one in the entire city of New York ever once look out their window and notice the Statue was gone? Or that it was walking through downtown Manhattan? Seems like at least one of the millions of people living in in the city would see it, causing it to freeze in its tracks.

And how the hell IS it a Weeping Angel anyway? I was under the impression that the Angels are living, organic beings with internal organs and such, who turn to stone only when observed. The Statue of Liberty is made of copper and it's hollow, filled with staircases and elevators. It was constructed, not born. How is it even moving in the first place? 

Did the Angels use some sort of alien technology on it to make it move? Are they inside its head, driving it like a Megazord? Or is it now alive and full of squishy internal organs? So many questions.

• I don't think the Cherub should have been able to blow out a match. According to the Tenth Doctor himself on the subject of Weeping Angels:

The Lonely Assassins, that's what they used to be called. No one quite knows where they came from, but they're as old as the Universe, or very nearly. And they have survived this long because they have the most perfect defense system ever evolved. They are Quantum Locked. They don't exist when they are being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature they freeze into rock. No choice, it's a fact of their biology. In the sight of any living thing, they literally turn into stone. And you can't kill a stone. Of course, a stone can't kill you either, but then you turn your head away. Then you blink. Then, oh yes, it can. 

So whenever the Angels are being observed, they literally turn to inanimate stone. So how the heck did the Cherub manage to blow out Rory's match?

• I think this is the first time we've ever seen the Doctor unable to land the TARDIS in a particular year. Supposedly the Angels were creating too much time distortion interference for him to land.

• More new info-- the Doctor says that once you know of a future event, it creates a fixed point in Time and HAS to happen. He's mentioned fixed points many times before, but I believe this is the first time he's ever mentioned this rule about them.

• I'm a little fuzzy as to how the Angel's "farm" was supposed to work. When they zap a victim into the past, it creates "time energy" that they feed on. OK, I get that. But why are the Angels in this episode keeping their victims captive in the hotel rooms? Once they zap them and consume their time energy, why keep them around? Wouldn't they be useless once the energy was consumed? Or do their victims constantly emit time energy throughout their entire lives? If so, this is new (meaning retro-fitted) info.

Plus if they zapped Detective Garner and Rory years into the past and then kept them in their hotel rooms the entire time, that would indicate the Angels have controlled this building for many, many decades.

Maybe the Angels keep people prisoner in their rooms and zap them back in time just a little bit each day? So maybe Detective Garner and Rory have only been in their rooms for one day from our point of view but decades for them, so the Angels can constantly feed on them? My head's starting to hurt.

• The Doctor pleads with Amy to not let the Angel take her, because "she'll create a fixed point in Time and he'll never be able to see her again. OK, so I get that he might not be able to visit the exact date at which she goes back, but what about after? Say she goes back to the year 1900. He can't go back to that date and get her. Fair enough. But why couldn't he just go back to 1901 and pick her up? Or 1905? I don't get why her entire future timeline should be closed off to him now.

Even if there's some technobabble rule saying he can't bring the Amy and Rory back to the present where they belong, what's stopping him from just visiting them at some point in the past? I'm just not understanding this whole thing.

• What about River's Vortex Manipulator? Earlier in the episode she said she could use it to cut through the time distortions that the TARDIS couldn't penetrate, because using it is like "driving a motorbike through heavy traffic." So why couldn't she use it to go pick up Amy and Rory? 

• So how far back in time did the Angel send Amy and Rory? There's no way to know for sure, since their tombstone left off the date of their deaths (isn't that convenient?). They were supposedly back in the present day, 2012, when they both got zapped. I think earlier in the season Rory mentioned he was 30. The tombstone says he died at age 82. So he lived another 50 years after he was sent back. But how old is the tombstone? If it's a brand new one (and it did look fairly new) then they ended up in approximately 1962. It all depends on how long the tombstone has been sitting there though. They could have gone back much farther.

Many fans are convinced the Angel zapped them back to 1938, which I suppose makes sense, since the Doctor says he can never see them again and can never go back to that year due to the Angel's time distortions. If they did end up in 1938, that means they would have died around 1988.

• The worst part about this timey-whimey farewell is that it was absolutely unnecessary. The past few episodes have shown us that Amy and Rory have been quietly setting up a nice comfortable life for themselves in between adventures. Amy writes travel articles for magazines and Rory is a successful health care professional. 

Why couldn't they simply have sat the Doctor down and told him they were going to "retire" from adventuring? It's happened before. Martha Jones realized her love for the Doctor was unrequited and simply walked out the front door of the TARDIS. Sarah Jane and Tegan similarly just walked away. It seemed like they were setting up Amy and Rory for the same kind of departure. That would have been infinitely preferable to the convoluted and nonsensical parting that we got here.

• I'm a little confused about the ending. In the afterward of the book Amy tells the Doctor to go back to when she was a child (in The Girl Who Waited) and tell her about all the incredible adventures she'll someday have with him. 

Remember the events way back in The Eleventh Hour? The newly regenerated Eleventh Doctor crash-lands the TARDIS in young Amy's back yard. She meets him and then he tells her he needs to take the TARDIS on a shakedown cruise and he'll be right back. Five minutes elapse from the Doctor's point of view, but TWELVE years go by for Amy.

Apparently Amy wants the Doctor to go back to some point during that twelve year gap and talk to her younger self. It's a nice little scene, but... it craps all over established events. Amy spent that twelve year period obsessing about the "Raggedy Man" (the Doctor) who abandoned her. His twelve year absence very definitely shaped her life. So what's going to happen if he visits her a week after he first disappeared, instead of twelve years later? Will she still obsess over him? Won't this substantially alter her history (and possibly her personality)? At the very least I'd think it should violate some kind of temporal law. 

I suppose Moffat was trying to say that by having the Doctor tell Amy about the adventures she'll have with him, it'll create fixed points in time that must happen. 

• Next week: Well, there aint' no next week. The show won't be back until the Christmas Special, thanks to the BBC's bone headed decision to split the season in half.

Rory Update!

A few weeks ago I posted a long-winded rant (do I ever post any other kind?) bemoaning the fact that the Character Options toy company, makers of fine Doctor Who toys, gave us a freakin' Winston Churchill action figure but as yet hadn't given us a Rory. You can read all about it here. Go ahead, I'll sit here and surf 'til you get back.

All that changed today.

Behold the first ever Doctor Who Rory Williams figure in all its glory, which is supposedly due sometime later this year. All I have to say is it's about frakin' time!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "What's the big deal? It's just a figure of some guy. He looks like my old roommate." That's what you were thinking, isn't it? Well, you're wrong, it's not just a figure of your old roommate. It's Rory, for Rassilon's sake! Rory Williams! Husband of Amy Pond. BFF of the Doctor! The Boy Who Waited. One third of Team TARDIS! The coolest companion the show's ever had! I mean, the guy's name  (well, the actor who plays him anyway) is in the title sequence after all. It's a crime that it's taken this long to get a Rory figure. A crime, I tell you.

It looks pretty good as action figures go. He's wearing his trademark down jacket and although I don't ever remember him wearing a maroon shirt on the show, I'm not gonna complain. Besides, this could be based on an upcoming episode that hasn't aired yet.

The likeness isn't too bad either. It's not perfect, but I can definitely see actor Arthur Darvill in there. Bear in mind that his head is gonna be a little less than an inch tall, so at that scale it's pretty darn good.

I'm taking full responsibility for this of course. When I posted my displeasure at the lack of an action figure based on such a major Doctor Who character on my widely read and highly influential blog, word spread like wildfire throughout the internet. Teams of designers sprang into action, sculpts were made and approved, factories in the Orient were mobilized and in record time the Rory figure became a reality.

All I have to say is that it better be freely available wherever other Doctor Who action figures are sold, because if this turns out to be another one of those exclusives that you can only get if you fly to Wales and attend the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff (like the Amelia Pond figure last year)... well, let's just say I will be displeased. And Character Options doesn't want me writing another displeased blog entry.

Wherefore Art Thou, Rory-O?

For the past 5 years or so Underground Toys has been pumping out a series of excellent Doctor Who figures. I've been unashamedly collecting them since the first wave, much to my wallet's chagrin.

They've released hundreds of figures based on characters from the new and classic series. They've made a figure of pretty much everyone who's ever been on the show except one: Rory Williams.

Rory isn't just some obscure flash-in-the-pan character, he's a major part of Team TARDIS. He's the husband of Amy Pond, making them the first married couple to ever travel in the TARDIS with the Doctor. He's died several times, only to get better and come back; he was reincarnated as a robotic Roman Centurion (don't ask) and he even punched Hitler in the jaw! In short he's been a big part of the show for the past two seasons. His name is even in the opening credits, for Rassilon's sake.

And yet we still don't have a Rory action figure. We've got numerous figures of the Eleventh Doctor, and we've got FOUR Amy Pond figures (two as an adult and two as a child). Yet poor Rory doesn't even rate one measly little plastic effigy.

Fans haven't taken this outrage lying down. There've been numerous online petitions requesting, nay demanding that Underground Toys produce a Rory figure. As you can see from the photo above, he's had plenty of looks through the years so they could produce several different figures of him (something toy companies just love to do). So far the fan's demands have been met with an eerie silence. Bupkiss.

Then a few months ago rumors began circulating that Underground Toys was going to premiere a top secret exclusive figure at the 2012 San Diego ComicCon. The fans went wild with speculation. The most common theory as to the identity of the mystery figure: Rory! At long last! Our TARDISes would be complete, as we could all finally set our Rory figure in his rightful place alongside the Doctor and Amy.

Then the day finally came when the convention exclusive was announced. The mystery figure was this:

(blink)

(blink)

Jesus Jet-Skiing Christ, are you fraking kidding me? A WINSTON CHURCHILL AND DALEK figure from the episode Victory of the Daleks? Winston Fraking Churchill? Winnie? The British Bulldog?

We're getting a WINSTON CHURCHILL figure before we get a RORY WILLIAMS? Just let that sink in for a minute. What the hell is this, Bizarro World?

It's not like a figure of Churchill is totally out of left field, as he's a close friend of the Doctor and has been on the show twice in recent years. But WINSTON CHURCHILL? I'm honestly finding it difficult to type. I have no words.

Yes, what collector wouldn't want a fully articulated Churchill figure to display on their shelf? What child wouldn't want an action figure of a 400 pound Prime Minister? Imagine the hours of playtime fun as your Churchill figure reads dispatches from the front and confers with the Allies and... drinks tea. And smokes a cigar. And says, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Actually it's not a bad looking figure, as action figures go. It doesn't look a whole lot like the real Churchill, but it's a pretty good likeness of the actor who played him on the show. I don't have a beef with the concept of the figure per se, it's just that WE GOT A CHURCHILL FIGURE BEFORE WE GOT A RORY!!!!

This I vow to you, Underground Toys. If you don't produce at least one Rory figure before he and Amy leave the show later this year, I'll... well, I will send a strongly worded email to your offices, outlining my outrage and displeasure. You've been warned.