Note: Full Spoilers for the episode follow.
For a character who spends most of his time fixing wrongs, rooting for the small guy, and drifting in and out of lives/towns/planets, it's surprising that the Doctor hasn't had more cowboy adventures.
In fact, there's only ever been one real Who Western to date - and while 1966's The Gunfighters wasn't exactly what you'd call a classic (the common - and untrue - pop culture myth goes that it had the lowest rating of any Doctor Who story ever), A Town Called Mercy proves that the Doctor suits the genre as well as he rocks a Stetson.
When Amy, Rory and the Doctor appeared in the remote backwaters of the great American dream (well, prairie), the bloodletting game was already afoot. A cyborg cowboy was on the hunt for an alien Doctor, and was going to hold a whole Wild West town hostage until he found (and more importantly, killed) him.
In a tale full of sliding morality scales and shades of ethical grey, the answer wasn't quite as simple as it appeared. For a story touting genocidal vivisectionists, murderous cyborgs, moustache-twirling Sheriffs (courtesy of Farscape's superb Ben Browder doing his best Josh Brolin-lite) and gun-toting townspeople, it was - surprisingly - the Doctor who proved the most volatile.
Throw in a sexually confused talking horse, an exploding spaceship, and some dry, typically British humour ("I don't want to miss The Archers"/"Who got toast crumbs on the console?") amongst all the traditionally American genre tropes, and you had a story that managed to celebrate all things both Who and Western.
When it comes to Westerns, it's all about the mood. Get the score, cinematography and set design wrong, and you've got more chance of looking like a Disney theme park village than a gruff, intense adventure into the heart of gunslinging darkness. Thankfully, writer Toby Whithouse (the man behind the genius Being Human, and last season's not-so-genius Who episode 'The God Complex') and director Saul Metzstein (who just finished work on the Second Unit of our other favourite gritty shoot-em-up of the moment, Dredd) have obviously done their genre research.
While it still held true to a pre-watershed family friendliness, there was a bewitchingly moody beauty to the episode, thanks no doubt to the decision to shoot in Spain, in an area where an array of classic Westerns (including A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad & Ugly) were also made. More importantly, everything fans would want from a Who Western was there - the Doctor rocking a stetson, straddling a horse and chewing a toothpick, a face-off at high noon, an (almost) bar fight etc etc.
And while the Terminator-meets-Predator killer cyborg offered solid thrills, it was in the Doctor's moral uncertainty that the episode really galvanised. Matt Smith dialled down the wacky to explore the cold, judgemental friction that we've seen simmering away since the Doctor returned in The Asylum of the Daleks. His willingness to cross a line both literal and metaphorical, and throw a mass murderer to the gattling-gun happy robo-dogs prompted a Batman-ish moral dilemma - how many times must his mercy come back to bite him in the (surprisingly chapless) ass before he finally cracked and dished out a murderously final punishment?
While Amy's convincingly impassioned wake-up call seemed to do the job, and simultaneously remind us of the importance of the humanity the Who companions bring to the TARDIS, it'll be interesting to see where things go from here - and if the Doctor's renewed mercy is the very thing that leads to Amy and Rory's potentially tragic departure.
Rated as a Doctor Who episode, A Town Called Mercy was a weighty, progressive, sumptuous and entertaining adventure.
Rated as a sci-fi western (hello Cowboys & Aliens), it was a nigh-on classic.
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