Twelve Moffat Era Episodes Worth Keeping

After almost eight years in the driving seat, Moffat's time with Doctor Who is at an end. I have made no secret over the past couple of years how much I grew to dislike his time on the show, sometimes to the point of recommending that new fans skip entire seasons just so they don't get led down the same garden paths I did. But, now we've reached the end, I decided it would be charitable to pick some episodes from Moffat's six seasons of the show that I actually like; two for each series. They're not the only ones I like, but they are the standout few that I would recommend to people, and they are my personal highlights of what I consider to be a terrible part of the show. In order of broadcast...

The Eleventh Hour - Series 5, Episode 1 (2010)

It's easy to forget after all that followed just what a strong start the Eleventh Doctor had. After a lot of initial misgivings following the bizarre ending to The End of Time, Matt Smith's first outing was full of fun action and witty writing that reassured a lot of us about the show's future. Smith's Doctor is yet to degenerate into his later self-obsessed creep and is instead energetic and warm, giving us memorable post-regeneration moments like fish fingers and custard. The time-bending nature of the new companion's introduction strikes an innovative note across the new series, and more than makes up for the run-of-the-mill nature of the rather dull bad guy in the Atraxi.

As I said in my review of the episode, there was definitely a "moment" where the Eleventh Doctor clicked with me as the same character as the previous ten. What interests me now is that despite his actually fairly competent beginning, the bad writing for this Doctor as the show went on led to him becoming my least favourite version. That knowledge makes it difficult to watch the scene here with the same excitement, but I think it just about works. All told, I would say that The Eleventh Hour is the best first episode for any of the NuWho Doctors, and the irony is delicious.

Vincent and the Doctor - Series 5, Episode 10 (2010)

A show like Doctor Who often goes into the past for cameos from historical celebrities, but this episode stands out. Instead of simply placing said celebrity into a story and having events happen around him, this episode is directly aimed at establish Vincent's character and backstory. British comedy writer Richard Curtis uses Doctor Who's conventions in unconventional ways, taking a monster-of-the-week pseudohistorical format and using it to explore the depression of one of Europe's great unappreciated artists.

While the 42-minute format of a Doctor Who story requires that a lot of the real-world subtleties are smoothed over, the story's decision to look into mental health and the legacy of art makes something beautiful out of what would otherwise be an end-of-season filler episode.

The Doctor's Wife - Series 6, Episode 4 (2011)

This series is my least favourite of the revival show by a country mile - long arcs which constrain real story-telling, bizarre decisions like Amy's forced pregnancy and the Doctor's fake-out death, and the mid-season split that exacerbated all of the other issues. The only episode of the season that isn't affected by the all-absorbing tendrils of mediocrity is this one, written by acclaimed fantasy writer Neil Gaiman for the previous series and moved over to this one.

While at times the episode veers into fan-fiction territory, the discussion of the idea of the TARDIS as a sentient entity was a long time coming, and could not have been brought into reality more perfectly than by Suranne Jones. Add to that lots of nostalgic nods to both RTD and the Classic Series, a fab villain in Michael Sheen's House and a general sense of fantastic whimsy, and you have one of NuWho's best episodes.

The God Complex - Series 6, Episode 11 (2011)

So what if Toby Whithouse took the ending straight from The Curse of Fenric? I *love* The Curse of Fenric! And I love Toby Whithouse. Despite me saying that The Doctor's Wife was the only episode that had escaped Series 6's terribleness, this one is actually my favourite from the season, and the only one I consider worth rewatching. The unnerving hotel which exploits people's fears is such a fantastically Doctor Who kind of plot, and with the episode's well-realised cast of characters the episode hits every beat it needs to in terms of action and plot. I remember especially liking the fake-out companion Rita, even if the exchange "You're a Muslim/Don't be frightened" is even more tone deaf now than it was in 2011. And, although it wasn't permanent (it never is with Moffat), I loved the fact that Amy and Rory left! Needless to say that they had outstayed their welcome considerably by this point, and I was glad for the small hope that this was the back of them.

A Town Called Mercy - Series 7, Episode 3 (2012)

The only decent episode of the five episode "September Series" from 2012, A Town Called Mercy is another decent Whithouse episode, this time putting the Doctor, Amy and Rory into a Western town that has been infiltrated by an alien war criminal and the cyborg sent to bring him to justice. Aside from just loving Westerns, I liked this episode because of the fact it actually asked some moral questions. You know, like this is actually science fiction or something. While it has its goofy moments, and the main moral conflict isn't satisfied in a particularly interesting way, the fact that it actually inspires thought makes it an oasis of civilisation in a period of the show that was veering wildly out of control.

Cold War - Series 7, Episode 8 (2013)

Guys, I was so excited for Clara. After watching Amy and Rory's terrible writing for three years, I was looking forward to some Northern charm from Jenna Coleman's new companion. Clara is difficult to parse for me, because her three-ish seasons varied so wildly. In Series 7, she had little to no actual character that we could see, with a great deal more that was simply told to us by other characters without much evidence. Cold War, the third episode of the 2013 half of Series 7, is the best because it manages to take this and, for one episode, subvert it.

Finding themselves on a Russian submarine in 1983, the Doctor and Clara find themselves trying to pacify an Ice Warrior, making their first appearance since 1974. Clara is seen to be compassionate and empathetic, and is ultimately the solution to the episode's dilemma. I love the 80s soundtrack, the base-under-siege plot and the new-look Ice Warriors, who manage the difficult task of respecting the Classic Series and still feeling modern.

Flatline - Series 8, Episode 9 (2014)

True story: this list was almost a ten episode list, because I forgot Series 8 existed. Capaldi's first season suffers from writing that is usually more bland than painful, as the writers tried to make Twelve into an ambiguous moral figure. This has been attempted before, but the issue with this was more that instead of spending time showing Twelve making questionable moral choices, the end result felt a lot more like Capaldi being constantly grumpy and rude, and going "Am I a good man?" every other episode. The only upshot of this was that Clara seemed to gain a personality overnight and the relationship between her and Twelve became more complex and real as a result.

By comparison to the season around it, Flatline felt a lot more like an early Tennant episode - set on a council estate with some unique aliens and TARDIS hijinks. The standout performances of Jovian Wade and Christopher Fairbank as graffiti artist Rigsy and council worker Fenton respectively help to flesh out the premise of 2D aliens trying to enter our dimension by providing stakes we can work with. Add to that the element of The Doctor being trapped in the TARDIS and relying on Clara throughout the episode, and what could have been bland comes alive.

Dark Water - Series 8, Episode 11 (2014)

You will notice later that every one of Capaldi's eleventh episodes is on this list. Capaldi's finales have a flare for the ridiculous that usually start off on the right foot with a strong premise and go downhill in the second half. In this case, the episode actually culminates a lot of the season's slightly nebulous themes and brings it together in a way which threatens to change the status quo of the Doctor Who universe, as well as providing a double whammy cliffhanger that left me excited to be watching the show again after so many boring episodes.

Danny Pink is not my favourite NuWho character, especially as his relationship with Clara gave off some abusive vibes in the mid-season with Clara scared to let him know that she was with The Doctor for fear of his reaction. The finale worked with his character and gave us a side to his soldier past that felt three dimensional and worth the build-up. It also let us have the moment at the start of the episode with Clara and the Doctor where they finally have a stand-off, and it's great stuff.

This in turn leads us into the grander plot of the episode - the Nethersphere, and Missy's plot with the Cybermen. While I questioned whether some of the comments in the episode were wise ("The dead can feel it when you cremate them, lol!"), I really did like the concept and how it was executed. Missy is a bloody masterstroke - Michelle Gomez brings a brand new personality to The Master that is playful and unpredictable in a way that is more endearing than Simm's Joker-like performance.

The Woman Who Lived - Series 9, Episode 6 (2015) 

Season 9 had a number of gimmicks that felt a little off. The main one, apart from it being split up into two-parters, was a RTD-style keyword, The Hybrid, which fed into each episode in more subtle way than the previous series' inclusion of Missy in almost every episode's epilogue. Like most of Moffat's running stories, it ended in a copout, but it also gave us the character of Me, a character I genuinely thought was really cool. The only episode where that character gets the right amount of focus is this one, The Woman Who Lived.

Introduced in the first part of this loose two-parter as a Viking child who the Doctor hubristically resurrects by bonding with alien technology, we see her here as an immortal being, slowly losing her morality and memories, and desperate to be The Doctor's companion. I initially dismissed the casting of Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) as stunt casting, but she really can act. I guess it was hard to see that at the time, with her storyline in the 2015 series of Thrones mostly consisting of her wiping corpses and selling cockles.

The only bad thing I have to say about the episode is that it has one too many talking lions. And that is almost entirely negated by there being almost no Clara in it.

Heaven Sent - Series 9, Episode 11 (2015)

Because of this season's odd nature, the finale two-parter is a lot more loose than usual, and this is immeasurably for the better. Simply put, Heaven Sent is one of the program's finest episodes, way beyond the likes of Blink. And I mean it; unlike the previous season finale, where I have to overlook glaring faults, this is a really well-crafted story, with everything just coming together. It's essentially a Capaldi one-hander, seeing him trapped inside a bigger-on-the-inside Time Lord device which makes him relive the same sequence of events over and over again. The theme of persistence and certainty in the face of death is a strong one, especially with Capaldi at the helm, giving it his all, portraying a man so determined to escape that he repeatedly resigns himself to death just to make a millimetre's progress.

Oxygen - Series 10, Episode 5 (2017)

Due to personal goings-on in my own life, I have not reviewed Series 10 and I don't know if I will, but on the whole I enjoyed it. I liked the semi-reboot of the series and Bill Potts is a light shining down on the show. Oxygen was a great base-under-siege episode that had some good ideas, my favourite of which was the Adams-esque dilemma of the parent company making them pay for their oxygen. It's kind of a like a traditional Doctor Who Base-Under-Siege story where the enemy is the life-support system.

Unlike a lot of Base-Under-Siege stories in NuWho, it avoided the pitfall of not feeling like there were any stakes by seriously threatening the lives of both Bill and The Doctor. They both experience the vacuum of space and are choked and chased and electrocuted. Just when you think the status quo will be reasserted, we discover that The Doctor is now blind! This was a great way to end the episode, as well as a lead-in to the following three-part story where The Doctor's need to protect Bill is a major theme.

World Enough And Time - Series 10, Episode 11 (2017)

In the year-long hiatus between Series 9 and 10, I started listening to Big Finish audios - I've listened to about a dozen now, and when they are good, they are good. My favourite, predictably, is the Fifth Doctor audio Spare Parts, which takes place on Mondas and gives a very thorough look at the kind of world that would create the Cybermen. It's spooky and full gruesome moments. I bring it up because World Enough and Time borrows extensively from Spare Parts and it's legacy, even more than the supposed "adaptation" that was Rise of the Cybermen back in 2006.

The marketing was full of spoilers for the return of John Simm as The Master. I will admit that Simm's disguise fooled me for a good while; his reveal at the end to Missy is fantastic. I had always wanted a multi-Master story, and it was a real coup to get Simm back to the show after his ambiguous exit seven year prior. Not only was it fun from a fan perspective, but it was also the perfect way to highlight the character development that Gomez' Master had been undergoing throughout this weird and wonderful season.

For the first time in a while there was a palpable sense of horror in this story, as Bill Potts spent time in the creepy hospital at the base of a ship falling into a black hole, with The Doctor and Missy at the top watching her life pass on fast-forward. The most memorable parts of the episode are the parts that surround the Cybermen, with pre-formed cloth-faced bodies crying out for death, and the crushing blow at the end of the episode when Bill is transformed. I was annoyed that this amazing character had been given so tragic a fate, but the following episodes made up for that slightly. Scenes like the ones in the hospital are what I have been asking for for so long - actually exploring the body horror of the Cyberman premise and using it to bring nightmares to whole new generation.

Epilogue

I can't honestly say, now that it's over, that this part of the show was entirely bad. The Capaldi era feels like a much-needed improvement over the Smith era, which went downhill fast. I think the key difference is that during those first three or so years, the writing of the Doctor and his companions entirely focused on archetypes and "mysteries" which never amounted to anything resembling human behaviour. The Twelfth Doctor is much more of a complex personality, even outside the narrative constantly informing us without evidence that he's morally shady. Now that I've lended the era some charity and genuinely discussed episodes I liked, I think it's time to do a top ten worst list. This is going to be fun.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who 9.13: The Husbands of River Song

Ten years into the run of the Doctor Who revival, and Christmas specials have rather an odd position in the show's makeup. They can't be too dense or packed with mythology, or they'd exclude a large proportion of the audience who only watch on Christmas Day. But, despite this, both RTD and Moffat have on various occasions packed the Christmas specials with huge, important arc stories. The Husbands of River Song is a very odd attempt at both, having some elements designed for mass consumption and some rather more complicated story work related to Moffat's old messy stalwart, River Song, whose presence on the show in my mind is as welcome as a Jar-Jar Binks cosplayer in a Star Trek convention.

Can we just look at how unpretty this poster looks? It's horrid.

     The Doctor arrives on a human colony in the future at Christmastime, but ends up running into River Song and her servant Nardole (Matt Lucas, Little Britain), who don't recognise Twelve as The Doctor and instead think that he is an assassin they tasked with killing Song's genocidal cyborg husband King Hydroflax. River reveals that her marriage to Hydroflax (Greg Davies, The Inbetweeners) was a ploy to steal the space-diamond from inside his head and sell it to a high bidder, and when The Doctor physically removes the still-living Hydroflax's head from his autonomous body, it chases them into the TARDIS, which River uses to escape. She and The Doctor head off to meet her buyers on a space-ship built for rich genocidal killers, but they turn out to be adherants of Hydroflax's religion and so River is forced to crash the ship on its final destination - the Singing Towers of Darillium. Just after River works out who Twelve is, she also remembers that the Singing Towers is the location of their last night together, and it seems as though her story is about to come to a close.
     I'd made it fairly clear before that I wasn't happy about River Song coming back to the series - her story was convoluted, ridiculous and tiring. There were only so many times I could put up with River's smug caricature popping up as one of Moffat's go-to female archetypes. Strangely enough, though, that archetype seems to not be in effect here - River is a lot more clueless, a lot more fallible, even though this is supposed to be near the end of her adventures with The Doctor. While I wasn't happy that her timeline was being dragged up yet again, I did enjoy the slickness and subtlety with which the "Singing Towers of Darillium" prophecy was fulfilled - especially as that particular thread had already been rather less-than-satisfactorily explored in a DVD extra a few years ago (during the height of the show's River-mania).
     And, of course, that level of continuity made those elements of the story a little impenetrable to a lot of watchers, who certainly don't remember minor one-line mentions from a story which aired seven years ago. Despite how much Moffat and his fandom claim that the show is as strong as ever, ratings are falling steadily, and there's a growing feeling, however accurate, that "it's not as good as it was." It feels a little arrogant of Moffat for this special to unload all of this continuity on us at Christmas without batting an eyelid towards explaining those previous connections, especially as the show has been trying it's best during Capaldi's run to forget the period of the show where most of River's adventures happened.

Greg Davies works as a bumbling school headmaster, but does
not have the presence to play a genocidal alien warlord.

     Aside from that, the episode was... well, it was fine. It was harmless. The episode was clearly trying, in the bits where it wasn't asking you to consult the TARDIS Wiki, to be humourous. The problem was that the whole thing was imbued with gallows humour, from casual talk of murder, mutilation and beheadings to charming races of genocidal conquerors. This extended to the visual style too, with lots of images of exchanging heads and people literally extracting things from their brains while still conscious which, while funny in say Red Dwarf, felt very out of place for 5ish on Christmas Day. It also jarred with the main comedic thrust of the episode, a very Sarah-Jane-Adventures-style misunderstanding in which despite repeated hints, River doesn't recognise The Doctor until the pivotal moment of the climax.
     I didn't expect much from The Husbands of River Song, and I didn't get much, either. Moffat apparently wrote this episode with the intention that it be the last thing he wrote for Doctor Who - until he decided to carry on and write Series 10. I was surprised given that description that this episode wasn't even more ridiculous than it turned out to be, although I don't think I want to know what that looks like. All I know is that however much Moffat's writing has changed to become a little more subtle and little less offensive, the general meh-ness of this episode is a clear demonstration if any was needed that Doctor Who really needs, if you'll pardon the reference, a regeneration.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who 9.12: Hell Bent

I would have had this out earlier, but as I explained previously, I've had a bit of a weather situation.

Expectations are a difficult thing to bargain with. I didn't expect a lot from this episode, but I expected that if it did something, it would do it in an entertaining way. After eleven weeks of well-made but fundamentally flawed episodes, Moffat fell back on a lot of old tropes, and undid a lot of the meagre good will I've built up for him over the past couple of years. After last season finished its arc with quite a nice, satisfying conclusion, Hell Bent tried to capture Capaldi's lightning twice, as well as expanding the series mythos - but the result, while not outwardly offensive, ended up feeling like a bit of a waste of time. I'll try not to spoil every twist and turn to start with, but be cautious.

The sunglasses are stupid. And so is the electric guitar. But
this shot is totally awesome.

     The episode had a fascinating framing device which prevented it from being a complete washout. The Doctor, equipped with Electric Guitar, tells the story of the episode to Clara, who is a waitress at the same American diner visited in The Impossible Astronaught. At first it appears as though Clara, who returns within the story, has had her memory erased by The Doctor, who is now seeing her for one last time. As the events of the episode transpire, however, it becomes clear that it is the exact reverse - The Doctor cannot remember what Clara looks like, only who she was, and how he lost her. It brings up a few plot holes here or there (especially given the detail to which The Doctor seems to remember the story) but it also provides the few genuine moments of emotional satisfaction between The Doctor and Clara.
     The thing I was looking forward to most of all about this week's episode was the actual return of the Time Lords. The retcon of their existence irked me a lot back in Day of the Doctor and Time of the Doctor, when they seemed to be portrayed as really cool dudes full of love and happiness. Here there are still some elements of that, but at the same time their appearance has been updated to tie into their Classic Series appearances. Rassilon, previously played by Bond actor Timothy Dalton as a hammy but terrifying dictator, appears here played by Donald Sumpter as a tired, bitter old man with no power to his name. It's an interesting choice, and one which kinda works, even if it feels a little odd for the great Rassilon himself to be put aside so willy nilly, and with such little significance to the rest of the episode. If I could say anything really positive about the portrayal of the Time Lords, it was the diversity. I loved the fact that there are Shabogans; there's an actual distinction between Galifreyans and Time Lords. I loved how many black Time Lords there were, and even though it was sad to see the amazing Ken Bones leave the show, seeing an old white man regenerate into a young black woman was an amazing moment for Moffat's time on the show. I also adored the version of Hartnell's TARDIS interior, which the show has barely touched. Talk about timeless design.
     Clara of course returned this week, via The Doctor's use of a Time-Lord tech to bring her from the moment before she died in Face The Raven. I cannot tell you just how disappointed I ended up being with this fact. Even if it had some character significance for this episode (which it does), it's yet another case of Moffat not letting people die. Clara has decided she's going to leave in Mummy On The Orient Express, Death In Heaven, Last Christmas and Face The Raven, and this fifth goodbye felt incredibly hollow. The way her exit was left open was so incredibly frustrating, because Jenna Coleman is not coming back. She's gone. She wanted to go last year, and now she's finally left. It speaks of poor planning to kill her off in a semi-satisfying way and then just ruin it again. She doesn't even do much in this episode, besides complain that she didn't want to be brought back in the first place, and be the moral chain which is driving The Doctor to do the crazy, stupid things he is doing. I think that Jenna Coleman deserves better than this, no matter how cool it is that she has, essentially, become The Doctor after all.

The Classic Console Room used for Clara and Me's TARDIS
is gorgeous. More of this, please.

      And now, to the Hybrid. All season we've had this as an RTD-style arc-word, introduced in a mad rant by Davros as the reason why The Doctor left Gallifrey. Its existence is key to The Witch's Familiar and last week's episode, Heaven Sent, and while its introduction in that episode was a little rushed, it had the potential to be a really interesting mystery if solved well. However, like all of Moffat's little mysteries, there was a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. Why did the TARDIS explode? The "Silence" did it, and then never mentioned it again. How did the Doctor survive death? The Teselecta from that one episode everyone hated. Why does Missy greet everyone who dies? It's all a hologram. It turns out that the identity of the Hybrid is not even something that The Doctor knows. He blames Me, who is part Human, part Mire. She asks him if he is half-human (presumably on his mother's side.) and he denies it. Eventually there's a sweet if stupid cop-out; the Hybrid is in fact both The Doctor and Clara, who together would lead to the death of the Universe, as The Doctor is too determined to save her to let her death, a fixed point, actually happen. It's a metaphor for Moffat, really.
     I really want to like Doctor Who, and there are huge parts of this episode I do enjoy. I love the scenes on Gallifrey, with the Sisterhood of Karn and the High Council and all that grand, amazing stuff. The problem is with everything that Moffat brings to the table, and it's stuff we've seen far too many times before - characters who never die, mysteries with empty or unsatisfying conclusions. The thread is well and truly wearing very thin on his tenure, and as I sat and watched the Doctor and Clara say goodbye to each other for the fifth time in two years, I couldn't help but wonder just how brilliant this episode would be if Clara didn't appear. If we spent the whole thing on Gallifrey. If Moffat knew how to leave well enough alone. I love Capaldi and he makes this show worth tuning into every week. I'm not exactly back to the point where "I'm never watching this show again", but I really have to ask the question - where can Moffat go from here?

Thanks.

THIS CHRISTMAS: Jesus, I didn't think he'd go there. We face the unfortunate return of an old friend in The Husbands of River Song.

Review: Doctor Who 9.11: Heaven Sent

The Doctor loses himself in the Time Lord castle.

Back in 1977, upon the departure of Sarah Jane Smith, Tom Baker asked the writers of Doctor Who to allow him to do an entire story without a companion. That story was The Deadly Assassin, and if we're including the various temporary companions popular here and there, that was the last time The Doctor went without a companion. I was a little concerned that 55 minutes of Capaldi wandering around by himself might be a little trying, but I needn't have worried - the man is an acting giant, and he single-handedly carries this bizarre thought experiment through to its glorious, glorious end. Spoilers follow, as usual.
      Teleported to a mysterious castle by Mayor Me in the previous episode, The Doctor is stalked by The Veil, a creature ripped from his childhood nightmares. As he runs through the castle's changing rooms, he discovers that the only way to stop the creature is to tell the truth - specifically, to confess the secret behind the Hybrid, the legendary breeding of two warrior races that caused The Doctor to leave Gallifrey. He eventually comes across the TARDIS encased in diamond, and realises what he must do - the rooms of the castle reset themselves, and so upon The Doctor's death he can bring another version of himself in from the past to chip away at the diamond, a little bit at a time. Over a period of two billion years this continues, until The Doctor finally escapes and finds himself on Gallifrey, angry, and a stone's throw away from the Great Citadel.    
     You know how I go off on one about Moffat and his use of time loops, but for once this felt like a working part of the story which developed Twelve's character and continued a theme of anger and persistence, held together by a repeated line stated by Twelve every single time he "appears" once more - I'm going to find you, and I'm never going to stop. Instead of being corny or trite, there was some actual consistency to the rules of the episode's temporal skulduggery, soaked in tragedy and loss and creating a delightfully dark tone which the series has been striving for for a long, long time under Moffat's reign. It's also been pointed out online that this episode works as something as an extended metaphor for Moffat's episode-writing process - we get to see The Doctor's thoughts as he works out how to survive each deadly encounter, and as he works out that the creature is trying to scare him. Obviously I would have asked to look into the mind of a better writer, but it really is quite interestingly (and for once competently) done.

500 billion iterations of The Doctor chip away at this diamond.
That's committment for you.

      The time loop does mean that we can only really look at what this episode brought going forward, and hoo boy, that's some fun stuff. Clara's sparse appearances of a figment of The Doctor's imagination were expected but not too distracting, and I'm glad that the show is pressing through the fact that yes, Moffat actually let a character die, even if it's unfortunate that the only reason she's dead is to give Twelve character development. The end of the episode, with The Doctor looking out towards Gallifrey's Great Citadel and declaring that "The Hybrid is Me" left open some interesting possibilities - seeing new Time Lords again, the fact that Mayor Me is working with them, and the ambiguous capitalisation on that last word which will hopefully tie together this season into a fairly satisfying conclusion.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Time Lords! TARDISES! Gallifrey! Wouldn't be surprised if The Master turned up either. But Mayor Me definitely is. The Doctor is Hell Bent.

Review: Doctor Who 9.10: Face The Raven

This is from Clara's last scene. Remember when we used to
have to refer to all the different Claras? Thank god that's over.

This episode had the hallmarks of everything important. Two important recurring guest stars, the last single-parter of the season, and the promise/leak from Capaldi himself that this would be Clara's final episode. Clara, if it had escaped your notice (it had certainly escaped mine), is currently NuWho's longest-running main companion, having been in the hotseat since Christmas 2012 in one form or another. This episode, then, required a little bit of gravitas, and who better to deliver that than new writer for the series, Sarah Dollard writer of Being Human's penultimate episode. Despite that, though, a combination of okayish writing and having seen this moment too many times before meant that this episode felt a little single-minded. Spoilers follow.

     Rigsy, The Doctor and Clara's friend from Flatline, gives the TARDIS a call because of a day's memory loss and a mysterious tattoo which seems to be counting down to some unknown event. Following what he does remember, the trio trace back to a mysterious hidden street in London in which aliens live en masse, free from harm. The street is led by Mayor Me, otherwise known as Ashildr from a few weeks ago, who reveals that she gave Rigsy the tattoo after he was found over the body of a dead woman on said street, and that once it runs to zero he will die. His alleged victim is a Janus, a member of a race of two-faced psychics who had escaped from persecution and slavery from her daughter. Another convicted member of the street dies, but not before revealing that the "chronolock" tattoo can be transferred. The tattoo kills through the use of a Quantum Shade, which follows its victims through time and space. Clara ends up offering to take the tattoo from Rigsy to save his life, but doesn't know that once it's been transfered, it can't be removed. The whole mystery turns out to be a ploy by Me to send The Doctor off to some unknown location. Clara goes to face the shade and dies.
     Companion exits rely on a number of well-tuned things to make them work. They should feel satisfying, or if not satisfying utterly heartbreaking. This is kinda neither; Clara gets to go out on a sacrifice, one she made not just as a genuinely brave attempt at saving someone else, but in a clever "ploy" to cheat Death itself. It did ring back into last season's examination of Clara attempting to copy a lot of the Doctor's techniques, and it felt nice to see that come back and kick her in the arse at the end. At the same time, the fact it was the unintended consequence of some random, poorly explained scheme on the part of Me made it feel a little pointless. I was glad that the episode didn't take the ridiculously grandiose route taken by The Angels Take Manhattan, and it was a nice refutation of Series 7's "Clara is the most important everything lol" approach to the character for her to leave in such a random way, but it could have done with some tweaking. I was getting worked up at Clara's teary steps out into the street to face her death, but then started giggling at her silent, action-replayed screams and the following dodgy CGI burp.

Maisie Williams' Me is only really here as a plot device.

      The inclusion of both Rigsy and Me is underwhelming - I understand why they're both here, but they're not used particularly well. Rigsy is obviously here because with Danny gone, we had to find someone Clara was willing to sacrifice herself for that wasn't The Doctor himself, and despite not knowing him that much it was nice to see his character developed a little from vagrant criminal. Maisie Williams was distinctly unimpressive in this particular appearance, often appearing to be reading her lines with very little feeling or sincerity, and given the decent stuff she worked with in The Woman Who Lived that came as something of a surprise. Unlike Utopia's similar rush-to-finale ending, having Clara leave here, itself robbed of tension by the three or four times she "left" last season, kind of made you forget about the fact that she had double-crossed him and sent him to environs unknown.
      It's hard to judge this episode without remembering last season and how Clara's exit from the show has been dragged out far longer than it really should have been. Clara's death in Last Christmas was actually amazingly poignant, and had that not had a "oh it's okay she's fine" tacked onto the end of it, it would have served as a beautiful and appropriate sendoff for the character. This episode is by no means bad, but the final result it not something which moves you or makes you question anything (besides a few seconds here or there of light commentary on refugees), but which unfortunately feels a little like a story utility. Get the right people into the right place at the right time, and make sure that The Doctor is pissed off for the finale. And despite what I've said about Clara many times here on this blog, I love Jenna Coleman to bits, and I had hoped that she would have received a better farewell.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The Doctor is stuck somewhere weird and wonderful in Heaven Sent.

P.S: I hadn't realised quite how much I'm going to miss having Jenna Coleman on the show. And how much I'm dreading having to see River Song at Christmas.

Review: Doctor Who 9.9: Sleep No More

Part of the culture that surrounds Doctor Who is its perception as a "scary" show. Little kids, hiding behind the sofa, peeking between their fingers at the screen, too scared to keep watching but too enraptured to just leave. This occurs whether an episode is designed to be part of the horror genre or not - a lot of things are more scary to a child than they are to the writers. This makes it surprising when the show actually attempts to head into a straight-up Horror direction - it takes extra effort to make a story which will be scary for the adults, but easy enough to understand for the kids. Sleep No More was a brave attempt at subverting Doctor Who convention and wandering bravely into this new direction. It fails spectacularly.

Wait, these guys were in this episode? Could have fooled me.

       Initially the episode is presented as the last will of a scientist about to be destroyed, a staff member aboard a satellite surrounding the planet Neptune who is the inventor of the Morpheus device, a series of chambers which allow a user to go up to a month with only five minutes' worth of sleep. The Doctor and Clara arrive on the station a while after it has been evacuated, meeting a team of characters who have arrived to investigate why they went silent. The episode presents most of the scenes as being from some people's point of view, with the excuse first being that the rescue team are wearing camera helmets and later that the Morpheus System has latched onto their optical signal. Soon, the team is menaced by creatures made of Sand, the "Sandmen", who The Doctor claims are the mutated collections of grit that accumulate in the corner of the eye after sleep. It's soon revealed that the whole thing is a sham, that the scientist has been dead for a while, and, in the episode's final moments, that the entire episode is a propaganda video which spreads the sandman-creating signal to whomever watches.
      The found-footage aspect of the episode didn't have to end up being as gimmicky and weird as it ended up being. Sometimes when directors try tricks with hand-held cameras the results are shaky and disorienting, and that was very much in full effect here, to the episode's detriment. Instead of being tense and scared about what the hell's going on, the viewer spends to much time working out what they're actually looking at. To the episode's credit, it did try to counteract a lot of the negative aspects of the genre - the standard "how the hell is everything being filmed" question the genre usually pulls up is turned into a nifty part of the overall plot, but it still doesn't make up for the fact that this was not the best execution of that concept.
      This episode's cast boasted two important guest stars - Reese Shearsmith as narrator/villain Dr. Rassmussen, and Bethany Black as "474". Shearsmith is forced to carry the episode, and he works well with Gattis' gothic horror roots, having worked with him on similar stuff back in their League of Gentlemen days. Rassmussen is a twist on the classic Frankensteinian archetype, his actual form having been destroyed by his own creations and now impersonating him for the video. Shearsmith was born to play these roles and he is one of the episode's few saving graces, especially in his chilling end-of-episode speech. On the other hand we have Bethany Black, Doctor Who's first ever trans actress (!), whose appearance in the episode was hyped up prior to broadcast. Imagine my disappointment when she was made to play a half-human slave soldier of intermediate gender, whose character barely even has a name and dies in a pointless sacrifice half-way through the episode, barely mentioned again. Why even hype up the appearance if all you're going to do is waste a promising guest star?

Shearsmith is just good enough to justify this trainwreck.

     The rest of the episode ended up being forgettable. The cast of the base-under-siege, despite receiving lengthy introduction sequences at the beginning, had so little focus time before their inevitable deaths that you didn't really care about them. The one character who survived the ordeal, Nagata, had no personality traits beyond a really forced Geordie accent. It was nice having a cast mainly composed of British-Asian actors, but as with Black it seems like a bit of a waste if those characters are going to be ignored in favour of developing the three important white people. It was this, combined with the unbelievable nature of the premise (Living eye-dust? This from the guy who criticised "farting aliens" ten years ago), that made this episode hard to watch even ignoring the direction.
     To some this episode's gimmick sold it, and that's all right. But given the development of this season, this single-part experiment felt very out of place. Why organise your scary episode for the week after Halloween? Regardless of that, for me this step into the avant-garde was a step in the wrong direction. We want character development and interesting sci-fi ideas, not empty scares and "clever" plot twists - this was exactly the issue that caused Moffat to go into meltdown four years ago. (Writing that just made me remember how long he's been here :/) Sleep No More, when it wasn't being insulting or weird or disorienting, was just a hell of a lot less interesting than it thought it was, and that was its main downfall.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Harry Potter and the Return of the Guest Stars! It's Face The Raven.

Review: Doctor Who 9.8: The Zygon Inversion

Peter Capaldi delivers the best performance so far in his era.

For some reason, this week's episode felt a lot shorter than the first half, even though I know that that can't be the case. Perhaps it was to do with the pacing or simple nature of the story - resolutions always run faster than build-ups. But there was something else working in this story's favour - it more or less fixed a lot of last week's problems. Curiously enough this week Peter Harness' writing credit was joined by one from Moffat, and opposed to being a negative influence he seemed to balance out some of Harness' harsher methods. Whereas last week seemed hell-bent on causing paranoia and superstition, this episode ran a hard-line message about pacifism that really hit home.
     Clara, stuck inside a Zygon pod, finds herself able to influence her doppelganger's behaviour, and uses this to have her spare The Doctor and communicate with him without her knowing. Kate, who wasn't killed last week, rendezvous with The Doctor as he and Clara guide her doppelganger to The Black Archives, the room where the original ceasefire was built and the "Osgood Boxes" supposedly can mean oblivion or revolution for both Zygons and Humans. Everyone gathered in one room, The Doctor tries to convince Bonnie that war is pointless, and does so using a brilliant speech. When Bonnie finally changes her mind, The Doctor reveals that the boxes were both empty - he removes this information from Kate's mind, but keeps it in the mind of Bonnie, who calls off the revolutionaries and becomes one of the Osgoods.
     The episode focused a lot on pacifism and the victims of war, rather than the previous episode's focus on the paranoia of foreign terrorism. In the first half of the episode we see the painful fate of one of the integrated Zygons, and it strikes all of the crap about "don't bomb them, you'll radicalise the rest" from the first half into painful ignorance. That was then followed by the amazing climax of the episode - I have not heard a speech that good in Doctor Who since The Eleventh Hour, honest truth. Capaldi is a fucking fine actor, and he gave so much to this scene - a genuine sadness, anger, frustration, but also a glimmer of hope that things might become good. He feels genuinely caught up in the moment, and that carried through to me - I empathised with The Doctor more in those few seconds than I have for this entire season thus far. This is how these speeches should be delivered, and how this message should have been from the beginning.

Zygon!Clara (Bonnie) deliberates over the Blue Osgood Box

      Of course, this episode's single-mindedness to race for the resolution did mean that I don't have much else to talk about. Osgood carried on her role from last week as The Doctor's temporary, surrogate companion, eventually becoming a nice personification of a sci-fi idea. After clowning around last week, this week gave Jenna Coleman a lot more beefy stuff, both as Clara and Bonnie, both in and out of her mind. There were moments where Bonnie felt a little cheesy, but we can maybe put that down to her being a big tentacled monster living as a human being. Thinking on it, it's a little too convenient that convincing the terrorist leader to stand down will stop the entire movement - we know from real life that eliminating the head means nothing to radical organisations - but it worked for the story and felt very satisfying.
       I think this is possibly the first time in a while that I can say Moffat saved an episode, but here we are. Doctor Who keeps pulling this nonsense with me where every time I despair about the direction it takes, there's a sudden left-turn and it does something I really enjoy. The Zygon Inversion, true to its name, felt like a reversal of last week. And that was 100% for the better. Now I just wish this whole silly season works its way out right.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The first single-parter of the season, Sleep No More.

Review: Doctor Who 9.7: The Zygon Invasion

This promotional image does not happen within the episode.

The last time Peter Harness tried to stick a message into his sci-fi, we were rewarded with the embarrassment that was Kill The Moon, 45 minutes of anti-abortion propaganda wrapped up in a shitty and unbelievable plot. This time, the concept has come straight from the mouth of Moffat himself, and this time Doctor Who is actually trying to be relevant - most notably surrounding issues in the Middle-East, the increasing criticism of immigration around the world, and the refugee crisis currently dominating Europe's headlines. Like Harness' last story, it's dangerous ground to be walking on, because mixing those discussions with standard Doctor Who tropes can often lead to an unintended message at the end of it.
      Apparently, after the events of the attempted Zygon takeover in The Day of the Doctor, 20 million Zygons were allowed to take human form and were distributed within the human populace to live peacefully with Mankind. However, there has been a Zygon uprising with the ranks who insist on the desire to live out their lives in full Zygon form. The Doctor and "Clara" are called in to help maintain the peace. Osgood, who was believed to have died in Death In Heaven, is revealed to have been twinned with her Zygon copy ever since The Day, and hence one half of the pair is here, having been kidnapped by the Zygon radicals. Kate Stewart heads for the town of "Truth and Consequences" in New Mexico, The Doctor heads with a UNIT taskforce to the fictional country of "Turmezistan" and Clara stays behind in London. After investigating, Kate Stewart is replaced by a Zygon, and the UNIT forces in the UK and Turmezistan are replaced as well. As The Doctor attempts to return to the UK on a private plane, "Clara", who was a Zygon the whole time, fires a rocket-launcher at him.
     The Zygon Radicals are a group who give themselves the name "Truth and Consequences". They are described as terrorists, they have an white-text-on-black-background flag, they release hostage videos and they want to radicalise all of the other Zygons into uprising against Humanity. Subtle, you two. I was made quite uncomfortable by a lot of the discussions that went on in this episode - especially because a lot of the comparisons made directly alienate their real-world counterparts. The most direct comparison one can make is that the Zygons are Muslims and that "Truth and Consequences" are some variation on ISIS, al-Qaeda and the variety of other radical groups - although there are some comparisons to be made with immigrants both in Europe and on the US-Mexico border ("They just turned up. No jobs. Nowhere to live. No money.") It's all very well and good expressing that there are good Zygons living somewhere, but like a lot of the right-wing press this episode criticises, they're never shown to us. The only peaceful Zygon in the whole episode is Alien!Osgood, and by the time we reach the present she's dead.

Osgood's return is actually quite welcome, and her actress is
allowed to be more than a walking joke.

     Dodgy attempts at a political message aside, there were some good moments. The episode's main sense of tension was built upon its clone plot, with evil doppelgangers and enemies hiding in plain sight and manipulating people. This works amazingly thanks to a single performance in the second half of the episode where a Zygon manipulates a soldier into dropping his weapon by pretending to be his mother, but parts of it fall down elsewhere. Little tip for Harness on writing a plot about clones - if you want us to believe that Clara hasn't been cloned, don't have her randomly wander into a flat, come out appearing completely out-of-character (now that Clara has one) and then spend the rest of the episode saying weird shit. The whole "Clara was a clone!" thing was a complete non-surprise, and it made the end of the episode feel a bit naff.
     Had this been penned by the hand of Moffat himself, I think it would have been a hell of a lot more openly offensive, but somehow Harness has learnt from his mistakes in Kill The Moon and is keeping his political discussion very heavily in allegory. Not so heavily hidden that you can ignore it, though, and I think that the way that next week concludes the question of the Zygon Terrorists will really determine whether this week's episode comes with good or bad intentions. I was a little distracted during my first watch, and that did affect the way I viewed the episode, but it did have a fair share of really intense moments which made for good television though. Although, of course, that does not necessarily mean it makes good Doctor Who. We'll have to find out next week.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The ridiculous title which we've been laughing at for about two months - it's The Zygon Inversion.

Review: Doctor Who 9.6: The Woman Who Lived

She may not look it, but Maisie Williams is terrifying in this
episode. Phenomenal actress. Last week was just a crap script.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you something which so very rarely happens on Doctor Who, even rarely in NuWho - a story written by a woman! And it's a woman that isn't Helen Raynor! The woman bringing you this revolution in storytelling is Catherine Tregenna, who previously wrote a few good episodes of Torchwood and who now swoops in to finish off last week's loosely dangling plot thread - namely, the existence of the now-immortal Ashildr, still played by Maisie Williams. Williams was much better this week, and she seems to react very well to the more sci-fi heavy, philosophical material than last week's silly fluff with Vikings. As did I, in fact.
       Seeming to have dropped off Clara on some adventure or another, The Doctor stumbles upon a highway robbery in 1651 being comitted by "The Knigtmare", who turns out not to be an 80s kids show but instead to be Ashildr, now apparently over 800 years old. She explains to the Doctor that her immortality has come with the ability to master new skills over time but not to hold many memories of actual events, a fact she makes up for by keeping a library full of her own diaries. Tired by grief and contempt at the ephemeral nature of humanity, she employs the Doctor's help to steal from a manor an alien jewel - a jewel which, she reveals after the fact, will allow her to go along with her leonine alien pal and escape Earth, provided she kills someone with it. Despite The Doctor's attempts to stop her, she goes through with it, but upon seeing that her alien associate only wishes to invade the Earth with his people, she foils his plot. The Doctor explains to her why he can't take her with him, and they go their separate ways.
      After Williams' relatively lacklustre acting last week, this week was a breath of fresh air. Tregenna, unlike a lot of her compatriots on the writing team, focuses a lot of her writing on the consequences of people's actions. Here we find Ashildr as a genuinely fascinating character - a dozen times widowed, mother to dead children, forgetting the names and the faces but remembering all of the pain and grief by choice. She embodies the consequences of one of The Doctor's rash decisions, and she herself faces similar decisions as The Doctor slowly tries to teach her how to live "amongst the Mayflies". It was wonderful, and touching, and it really felt like I was watching Doctor Who again. Maybe that had a little more to do with Clara's absence than I really thought it would.

Leomon, use "Fist of the Beast King"!

      There were a few things here or there that missed the mark. The leonine alien (whose name I am too lazy to look up, sue me) seemed very tacked-on and his appearance overhyped, much like the unfortunate monster from back in Before The Flood. I've heard many comparisons to Thundercats. There was also this season's "celebrity cameo you almost didn't notice" from Rufus Hound in the form of highwayman/stand-up-comic/inter-dimensional portal Sam The Swift, who filled a good ten minutes of the episode with atrocious puns. Aside from that though, there wasn't much to complain about - there was some comic relief within the plot, but it worked itself so seamlessly into the story that it didn't feel that bad at all.
       The biggest and most important difference that this week brought was in the writing style. You could feel the difference while watching it - instead of last week's Moffat-co-written episode, which jumped from showpiece moment to showpiece moment, Tregenna gave the characters some time to breathe. Characters talked to each other about what they wanted to do, about what they were going to do, and about what they had done. It is these things which lets us define characters and empathise with them. All we learnt about Ashildr last week was that she was a brave but foolhardy child - here we get given a much deeper, much better character that feels like she really deserves her place here instead of just being some shoddy excuse for continuity. It's the pacing and the character development that allows good science fiction to work its way under the skin, and that's exactly what we got tonight.
      Tregenna for showrunner?

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The universe conspires to remind me that the atrocity that was The Day of The Doctor was in fact broadcast as the show's 50th Anniversary Special. It's The Zygon Invasion.

Review: Doctor Who 9.5: The Girl Who Died

We've just rolled upon the hundredth NuWho story - the new series having accomplished in ten years what took the Classic Series sixteen. Not bearing in mind this particular anniversary, we're presented with a welcome return this week of the pseudo-historical, and to Jamie Matheson, whose two scripts for the last season helped Doctor Who to make a triumphant return to form after the horrendous Kill The Moon. The Girl Who Died's publicity ran along two stands - the ridiculous name which brings back memories from Moffat's more arsey period, and the fact that the titular girl is played by Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones fame. Despite the latter being the main thing I was looking forward to, the writing actually held itself up on its own - albeit in the strange, barely recognisable way that only Capaldi's Doctor Who can. Spoilers will follow.

They don't use these swords, btw. It's just to look cool.

     After the ending of some other adventure, The Doctor and Clara end up landing in medieval Scandinavia, and come across a group of warriors calling themselves Vikings. Upon reaching their village, an alien voice appears in the sky, and warriors come down to pick-and-choose the most war-worthy among them. Clara and a girl, Ashildr (Maisie Williams) are accidentally sent up with them, and get to see the blokes mushed into adrenaline for an alien warlord to drink. When Ashildr declares war on the Mire, The Doctor is the only one who can help the town get into shape, with the aliens declaring that they will return in a day's time to kill everyone in the town. After a lot of thought, the Doctor eventually discovers the town's electric eels, and use's them in combination with the Mire's own technology to humiliate the warlord. In the process of saving the town, Ashildr dies, but using Mire technology The Doctor brings her back to life. There's one snag, though - she's now immortal.

     Moffat said that this episode would stretch the definition of a two-parter, and I can see why - next week's episode is written by someone completely different, and seems to be set in Revolutionary France. To be fair, that assessment has been true of a lot of this season, although I get the feeling that the first two two-part stories did so for much more unintentional reasons. Given that Maisie Williams is the only thing holding these two episodes together, I would have thought that she would have been... more impressive? I don't know whether it was her or just certain odd lines given to her, but I never really got any special vibes from her performance beyond the fact that she's a guest star. The fact she ended up being the main focus of the episode's recurring philosophical debate on the nature of Time Travel came with a bit of a whimper.

     The Vikings in the story were fairly anachronistic, although the episode tried to avoid that by getting rid of the horny-helmeted warriors in the first act and focusing on the Norse people as farmers and craftsmen. You could argue, if you're being generous, that this story is a Base-Under-Siege story, but if that's true then the character archetypes weren't all that deep. The main characterisations that we got to see this week were the main duo, and right now I'm really noticing that difference - Classic Who develops the guests of the week, NuWho develops the mains. That unfortunately means that we're not really inclined to care about anyone else than The Doctor and Clara, and if you don't care about them there's not much left to care about. #

GORDON'S ALIVE!!!!

      One of these moments included the beginning/conclusion/mention of a point which Moffat has been bandying about for ages, which is attempting to give an in-plot reference to the reason why Peter Capaldi has played characters in the Doctor Who Universe before. While I was glad that this explanation wasn't given ages of runtime, the explanation here was given very suddenly and quite underwhelmingly - that he picked this face to remind himself of the events of The Fires of Pompeii, that he can always save someone, to make him go and save Ashildr. While it was nice seeing actual continuity with the RTD era, I had perhaps expected something a little more interesting done with it than a retread of "Time Lord Victorious" thinking - especially with the whole "hybrid" arc rearing its head like yesterday's gone-off porridge. 

      Matheson knows what he's doing with these characters, and I enjoyed Twelve and Clara's dynamic this week a lot more than I have the past four weeks. He makes it feel like they're Doctor and companion going on adventures all the time, and they trust each other, and care about each other, like normal. One thing that Matheson is particularly good at is balancing ongoing arcs with his own stories, and developing The Doctor and Clara in a way which is new and fun, but which doesn't make me want to smash the screen. The Girl Who Died did all of that to the tee, and I really enjoyed it - but the fact that it's a two-parter and there are hints that Moffat is planning to drop yet another retcon bomb in the near future is putting me a little on edge. Just a little.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: No, Blackadder, I am the Scarlett Pimpernel! We fast forward seven hundred years to look at The Woman Who Lived.

Review: Doctor Who 9.4: Before The Flood

Rita Repulsa will be along after this and he'll have to fight
him with a MegaZord.

The Doctor is not going to die. Let us all accept this, consign it into the ledger of time, and move on with our lives. And, most importantly, stop writing stories in which the tension of the story derives from the idea that the show's main protagonist is going to die for good in the fourth episode of a twelve episode series. There was a lot to love in this week's outing, but after the tight tension of last week's Base-Under-Siege, this more traditionally Moffatish episode lost a lot of what made last week fun. After last week's pleasant surprise, I was so disappointed in the show's return this style - especially as being the second half of a two-parter sullied the first half by association.
     The Doctor and two of the members of the Base travel back in time to 1980s Scotland, the titular Lake of the previous episode being held back by a dam. The town is abandoned and covered in Soviet Propaganda - apparently the town was a training ground for Western operatives. They find the Spaceship, and the Tivolian undertaker who has brought it here, while in the future Clara notes that The Doctor's "ghost" is simply speaking the names of each member of the group in the order in which they are going to die. The occupant of the spaceship soon turns out to be a huge Power-Rangers-esque villain known as The Fisher King, a former occupier of Tivoli who wishes to use the "ghosts" to call an invasion fleet to anihilate Earth, for whatever reason. The Doctor, having until this point being adamant that the existence of his ghost means he must die here, decides to fuck that and blows up the damn, killing the Fisher King. He makes his way back to the future and saves the day. Oh, and lots of the crew declare their love for each other, or something.
     Last season the show liked to mess around with its opening credits. This is nothing new, and it was common in the Classic Series to have the title card of the story be thematically matched to its contents. This week was... not at all like that, in fact. We began the episode with a long sequence in which The Doctor, directly addressing the camera, explained a Bootstrap Paradox to us, which was later then namechecked at the episode's conclusion as an explanation (or rather an analysis) of the episode's events. He then proceeded to play the Doctor Who theme on an electric guitar, which formed the episode's titles. There didn't seem to be any reason thematically for this to be here - it was almost as if the producers heard Capaldi playing electric guitar at some point over the Summer and just decided to throw it into a bunch of episodes. The breaking of the fourth wall took me out of the excitement I had for the episode, and broke the cardinal rule of visual media - show, don't tell.

There has been more or less no signs that these two had anything
other than a professional relationship, and yet they're bunged
together at the end in a way which feels like they'd only just read
that part of the script.

     The explanation of the mythology behind the events of last week felt quite underwhelming. The Fisher King was kept in the shadows quite a lot, and I think the shadows was where he should have stayed - there have been some naff monsters on Moffat Who, and this was another of them. The anticlimax the Fisher King provided acted as a metaphor for this two-parter as a whole - tense and brilliant in its first appearance, and less than impressive once it actually reveals itself. The wishy-washy time travel element of the plot didn't add anything to the story, and the somehow rushed conclusion at the end threw together the mixed evils of "it wasn't me who died it was a robot/tessalecta/hologram" and "let's pair people together despite no romantic chemistry."
      Last week, I was singing Whithouse's praises as the last of the Doctor Who "old guard" who wasn't writing crap. I don't know how much influence Moffat had on this week's episode, but it seemed such a departure from last week that I felt a little disappointed. I'm still enjoying Doctor Who at this point, and I'm very glad that's still the case, but the show's creative engine is spluttering at the moment. The oil needs changing, the engine needs a refit. The relationship between The Doctor and Clara doesn't feel naturalistic because it's essentially been tacked-on to the end of last season's arc, too many plots this season have revolved around "ooh ah they gonna die", and each episode keeps making these disparate, "subtle" hints forward to the end of the season. Things were so close to being great, but yet again the arrow just missed the mark.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Arya Stark helps The Doctor fight Vikings in the past. Apparently.

Review: Doctor Who 9.3: Under The Lake

One last nitpick - the Black Guy Dies First in this episode.
Not sure whose fault that is.

And on gilded wings the angel came. One of the few writers in this present era of the show who doesn't make me collapse into thorough despair is Toby Whithouse, former writer of Being Human and the writer of The God Complex and A Town Called Mercy, two Eleven episodes which I genuinely love. This is because his stories tend to be about things, with themes and stuff, as well as managing to deliver quick, witty dialogue that doesn't devolve into lewd jokes. Some of his character work can be a little out of turn with the rest of the show's writers, and he's not immune to mistakes, but if this week meant anything to me, it was as proof that Toby Whithouse can write this show a hell of a lot better than its showrunner - even if Under The Lake went over a lot of old ground.
     The Doctor and Clara arrive at an undersea base an unspecified amount of time in the future, in which a group of terrified scientists and soldiers have been attempting to avoid the ghosts of an ancient alien and their former commander. The ghosts silently mouth the same phrase over and over again, are attempting to kill and resurrect the crew, and vanish when the floodlights come on. The Doctor and Clara choose to stay and investigate, even after another crew member joins the roster of the dead. With the help of the leader of the group, Cass, and her interpreter, The Doctor realises that the words spoken by the ghosts are in fact riddle-like co-ordinates pointing to the church in the sunken town the base is adjacent to. As The Doctor chooses to go back in time to before the flood to find out what was in the church, Clara is left behind - and is shocked to find the ghost of the Twelfth Doctor.
     So, standard NuWho variation on a Base-Under-Siege story - largish group of secondary characters, following several archetypes - harsh but fair leader, scientist voice of reason, cowardly guy, traitor guy (although in this case he only turns traitor because he dies) and, in this case, we also have Cass' sign interpreter. I like the inclusion of a deaf character, both for the way it provided representation and for the way it worked into the story seamlessly. Cass' ability to lipread was a crucial point in the story, and I loved the fact that her deafness was so completely normal. It also didn't hurt that the team wasn't wonderbread this week, which is sometimes a problem in BuS stories.

The Doctor helps a team of well-developed scientists.

     Say what you want about the "meat-and-potatoes" nature of the Base-Under-Siege story, it does help to provide a lot of tension and mystery which come inbuilt into that format. Whithouse built up the mystery and suspense in this story across the entire runtime, and it was the first episode in a while where I really felt like the show was filling its 42 minutes. This brilliant use of the tension provided by the format of this story is not something I think will transfer to next week - the way that these two-parters are being told has them much more loosely connected to one another than in prior series. This made the cliffhanger - the groan-worthy cliffhanger of "The Doctor's going to die", which I'm really sick and tired of by now - feel more irritating in its appearance than the tension bomb it should be.
     Aside from a few nitpicks, I was able to watch Under The Lake and easily, unironically enjoy it. This format has, in the past in NuWho, been the undoing of some other writers - Chibnall never developed his "base" members enough, and RTD's attempt at the genre in Voyage of the Damned went as well can be expected. I perhaps wish that Whithouse would step outside the bounds of this genre, and it looks in fact like that's what he's about to do with this story's conclusion, but either way he's still a fantastic writer and I really enjoyed this episode. Which makes a nice change.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The thrilling conclusion, in Before The Flood.
   

Review: Doctor Who 9.2: The Witch's Familiar

It's nice to see the older Daleks after the whole
"Every Dalek Ever" fiasco, but what's the point of them?

This is really frustrating. Really, really quite frustrating. Because it wasn't necessarily the case this week that I thought that the episode was bad - Moffat is continuing with this whole thing of getting better at some elements and just as terrible at others. This week I wasn't cringing at insensitive lines so much as I was cringing at the more twist-and-turn aspects of the plot which have become so idiosyncratic of Moffat's style. While the episode was so filled of terrible Moffat cliches, I think I'm just so tired of them that I saw past it to the genuinely good moments, of which there were myriad. It keeps coming back to this point with Moffat scripts that even if I enjoy the more recent ones, I still wish they were better and that they were something I could call "good Doctor Who."
     The episode immediately negated the cliffhanger of the previous episode with a lengthy cold open which used technobabble to excuse it away, as well as explaining why The Master survived being shot in Death In Heaven. The episode followed two subplots, one with The Master and Clara making their way through the Dalek "sewers" (an interesting concept where the sewer consists of the still-living rotten remains of dead Daleks), and another with The Doctor and Davros discussing his fate. Davros claims to be dying, and offers The Doctor congratulations at the knowledge that the Time Lords are alive. He even goes so far as to open his real eyes for the first time in the show's history, just to be able to watch one last sunrise. The Doctor, being compassionate, decides to give some of his new regen. energy into the Dalek's hivemind, which apparently is a trick by Davros to rejuvinate himself and the Daleks. This is discussed for a while but then turns out to be another trick by The Doctor, with the living sewers rising up against the Daleks. And at one point Clara ended up inside a Dalek casing and it was weird.
     Ignoring for now the question of whether it was a good Doctor Who story, let's ask - was this a good Dalek story. Everyone has their own criteria for what that means - for me, it means that we got a story where the Daleks were not only good villains, but which showed us something new about them. Like the rest of the episode, there is good and bad. On the bright side, a lot of the scenes where Clara's voice was translated through the Dalek speech modulator, and The Master explained how a Dalek thinks. Julian Bleach's Davros is still an amazing addition to the show, and the scenes where Davros is pretending to be dying had me on the edge of my seat. The downside was that a lot of the episode's concepts for the Daleks are either derivative of other Dalek stories, or directly contradict previous stories.

Julian Bleach is the best Davros since Michael Wisher,
hands down.

     There are elements of the show which still really don't work going forwards, and it's the kinds of things which prevent me from fully enjoying the episode. Moffat had the first female Master call herself "the bitch" in this episode - not a word unique to Moffat, RTD used it twice in reference to Cassandra, but the word rings differently coming from The Master because he has spent the majority of his life (as we've seen it) as a male persona. Ignoring for now the relative absurdity of an alien race that can completely rearrange its DNA having the same concept of gender as we have, this history means that all of "Missy"'s lines come from the mouth of a man. Gomez is brilliant in the role and there are a lot of moments her character brings which are genuinely enjoyable villainy. But there was no reason for Gomez' Master to be here for anything other than popular demand, and she seems to be being employed in the same way that River was a few seasons ago.
     When I watched Dark Water last year, I had some hope that Moffat had maybe learnt to tone down some of his old habits. That story had some brilliant buildup, slow and menacing, alongside an interesting sci-fi idea. It avoided Moffat's old traits - bizarre posturing, women being used as devices, "wacky" moments that had no effect on the plot. This episode was so on the edge of being brilliant - Julian Leach is amazing, the Davros moments were phenomenal, and the scenes with The Master and Clara in the sewers were making my day. But the fact is, they were sharing the stage with so many of those old moments: the weird effing "sonic sunglasses", this claim about a "great prophecy" of a Time-Lord/Dalek hybrid when the same thing happened in Evolution of the Daleks eight years ago. I don't expect perfection in TV - I couldn't be a critic, otherwise. But this episode was blisteringly close to that perfection, and that makes the bad moments sting all the more.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Underwater mayhem in Under The Lake.