Day 5362: DOCTOR WHO: Are You My Mummy Returns

Saturday:



It's nice that – as never happens in Agatha Christie – the cybernetic butler did it.

The first of two very different but both very excellent episodes from newcomer Jamie Matthieson ("Being Human" and the tragically-short-lived "Dirk Gently" TV series), "Mummy on the Orient Express" is a story that works on multiple levels.

It's a good old-fashioned faux-murder mystery with sci-fi trappings that works so well that you can enjoy it perfectly for that reason alone.

It's also part of the ongoing serial.

But on top of that it's making commentary on its own workings as a television adventure.

That commentary is more than just hanging a lantern on the Bechdel Test – Clara and new best friend Maisie sitting in the baggage car, two named* women characters having a conversation… but it's about a guy. Throws up hands, hilarity, etc.

(Of course the episode has already passed the test in Clara and Maisie's immediately preceding scene together: they discussed opening the locked baggage carriage door; Mrs Pitt being Maisie's gran not her mum; feeling guilty; and wishing bad things on people. Not a man in sight. If Mrs Pitt hadn't presumed the gender of the Mummy – if it even has one – to be male, it could have made a pass in the pre-title sequence!)

[*and I'm reliably informed that "named" is a later addition to the Bechdel conditions, which I've left in as it makes this a super-pass.]

It's more than just remarking that the production designer of the Space Orient Express has taken the odd liberty with the original…

"It's a completely faithful recreation of the Orient Express. Only slightly bigger."

…and with steam-punk passengers jogging the elbow. The Doctor even refers to the set dressing and extras as, in a twist, "the façade drops" and GUS "steps out from behind the curtain" (a theatrical reference as well as a "Wizard of Oz" one).

"Can I talk about planets now?" he asks petulantly at one point, like a Classic Who far determined to not listen to all that New Who "emotional stuff" from Clara.


Lifting other people's horror stories is nothing new in "Doctor Who", particularly from the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era of early Tom Baker. And, for all his Third Doctor posing and dress-up, there's a lot more of the Fourth Doctor's aloof alien in Capaldi than there is Pertwee's (in so many ways) clubbable establishment rebel. Just as Clara, with her own life and day job, resembles Season Twelve Sarah Jane. She'll be changing into a jump suit and training up her own companion soon, just you see.

So where "Kill the Moon" – cold, clinical space horror about human destiny – lauds "The Ark in Space", this time we are in "The Robots of Death" territory with art deco stylings and spaceship in wood-panelled disguise (even if it isn't the TARDIS this week).

But of course, as with those eponymous "Robots of Death" – the other occasion the butlers did it – the butler is ultimately working for someone else, and that person has an agenda.

So, just as "Ark" shall we say prefigures "Alien" in its devouring body-horror stylings, in "Mummy on the Orient Express" our horror-pastiche du jour is, not Hammer-esque faux Egyptian mythos but, with corporate interests seeking to weaponise the monster, "Aliens".

It helps that it's a particularly good monster: gruesome without being gross. The finest horror moment is when the Mummy's outstretched hand phases through the Doctor, clawlike fingers emerging through his eyes.

There's an interesting not-quite-awkward reflection on the way that people react to seeing the titular "mummy" or the Foretold to give it its legendary name. Denial; running away; shooting at it – anger; bargaining; and, in the end, surrender. That's all the stages of grief.

And where does that leave the Doctor and Clara's relationship?

"It's not like we'll never see each other again."

"Isn't it?"

That's both cutting to the heart of their emotional trauma – or the Doctor not buttering things up any more – but also a neat little comment on what happens (usually) when companions leave.

We begin "in media res", in the middle of the action as they say, with Clara already having agreed to this "one last hurrah". And that's commenting on the fact that, whatever she says, Clara is still carrying on with the Doctor.

It's the main theme of that "emotional stuff", or the heart of the episode, referred to in different conversations between Clara and the Doctor, Clara and Maisie, even the Doctor and Perkins, the heart-and-head difference between what Clara says she want, and what she feels she wants.

"On a collision course I am a satellite, I'm out of control…." sings the diagetic cabaret (this week's special guest star Foxes) "…don't stop me now (because I'm having a good time)" It's another intrusion of the episode commenting on itself and Clara's position in a nutshell.

So we see a resolution to Clara and the Doctor's falling out, the fallout as much of events in "The Caretaker" as "Kill the Moon".

Interestingly, we've also been watching some Fifth Doctor stories recently and so we're reminded of that too when we see last week's argument about choices picked up again here, though it's far more subtle than any of the "as you know, Tegan" conversations used in opening scenes to string stories from Season Nineteen together.

The story that we've seen building all season, which Clara comes out and says this week, is "addiction" – is she a TARDIS junkie? Is the Doctor?

What is most odd about this is that after this week it just falls away from the arc. We see that things have been driven to a crisis last week, when the adrenaline-seeking thrills run smack into being asked to take responsibility. In this episode, we get Clara admitting that she may have a problem and seek to address it. She's not quite going cold turkey, but this "one last hurrah" approach is a pretty sharp cut off. And then at the end… she spectacularly throws herself off the wagon again, transparently lying to both the Doctor and Danny – and herself, even – that this is "fine".

But – and it's not a fault of the writing here – the series then goes off in a totally different direction. Rather than concentrating on the it's-not-even-a-metaphor-anymore of addiction, it becomes more about what it is to be the Doctor.

The roots of that arc are here too (and in "Kill the Moon") with the Doctor pushing Clara to see his point of view, showing her that he doesn't necessarily have the luxury of sugar-coating decisions. She responds to that by becoming more and more like him. Which ought to climax in the "I am the Doctor" reveal in "Death in Heaven" absolutely not being a bluff… but wasted opportunities in the Moffat era are a whole other essay.

(Though on that topic these thoughts on a better Series Six / Season Thirty-Two from Jon Blum are worth a read.)

On being the Doctor: it's more than just "Rule One: the Doctor lies". Clara can handle the lying; but would she be able to give up enough control to perform the surrender that the Doctor does here? Again, throwing forward to "Death in Heaven" where Missy wants to give him an army, here his response is to give up to one.

And though this isn't a flaw either, but I'm not entirely convinced that "Mummy" does properly answer "Moon", though.

"Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose."

As I said in the previous review, I don't think that the choice in "Kill the Moon" is that sort of choice. Even without the hindsight that it turned out fine, Clara could see that it was much more a "do what's right/do what's easy" decision. What made it hard was the enormous pressure to do what was easy.

I'm not even sure that the choices this week are that sort of choice. Certainly, the Doctor lies, and makes Clara his accessory in lying. And he is brusque and callous.

"People with guns to their heads, they cannot mourn. We do not have time to mourn."

But also at absolutely the very first opportunity he has to do so, he takes someone else's place in the firing line. Not one person dies who he could have saved.

Essentially he chooses "not quite socially acceptable" over "saving fewer than the maximum number he can save". Deciding which the "bad choice" is is not the most complex moral calculus.

By allowing Clara to believe that he was lying, he also avoided making a promise that he cannot keep. Just count the number of times the eleventh and tenth Doctor promise that they can save everyone only for a massacre to ensue. The Doctor spoke early in this season of having made many mistakes. One of his biggest – he seems to be thinking – is by becoming young and strong and charismatic he was, in a way, lying to everyone, and that is the lie that he's trying to avoid now.

However, the Doctor also says: "Would you like to think that about me? Would that make it easier?"

At this moment, Clara is open to forgiving him on the basis that he picks the lesser of two evils if those are the choices on offer. That is what she would like to think. So he makes it easier for her.


I'll toss in a really minor quibble, just so you don't think it's entirely perfect. Some confusion, possibly in the production, about who on the train, apart from the "experts", is really "real". When GUS's cover is blown and the Orient Express trappings are replaced by the neon laboratory, the extra guests and staff dematerialise, revealed also to be part of the illusion, hard-light-holograms (yes, like Rimmer from "Red Dwarf") as set dressing. Except, not all of them – as some are still alive to be murdered by GUS as "motivation" for the team who have been set to investigate the Foretold.

At least one guest (Janet Henfrey's Mrs Pitt, the first victim, pitiless damnation for the rest of your… oh about 66 seconds) and two of the staff (the chef who is the second victim and the attendant who is the third) have to have been "real", since the mummy singles them out to kill.

It hardly seems that Mrs Pitt was aboard as an expert – unless it's in poisoning ponies and parents… which come to think might have some relevance if the Foretold were to turn out to use poison or hallucinogens in its workings… perhaps GUS is just being thorough.

Or perhaps the clue is that they are the ones killed – that GUS has selected suitable "Mummy-victims" to give the experts something to study, or at least to keep the Foretold busy and stop all those experts being picked off before they can figure out anything useful.

(Though that would suggest that GUS has some idea of the Foretold's pick off the weakest first M.O. – which he then helps nobody, least of all his own agenda, by not sharing.)

Actually, now I think of it, picking off the weakest first is, in this situation, really bad tactics – it blows all the Mummy's advantage of surprise on those least able to defeat it, leaving more dangerous enemies aware of its presence and better informed. You might put that down to long out-of-date operating procedures, but surely for any stealth attack the best bet must be to pick off the strongest first.

Maybe it wants to die and this is the only parameter it can vary that might give someone a chance of letting it stop.

Oh and why does the Doctor miss an opportunity to remind us that he hates soldiers this season?


So for whom is GUS, the suavely chippy computer, working?

Well it's not clear, it's certainly not spelled out, and it could be a seemingly-hanging plot thread to be picked up later – as Moffat so often does, indeed as he's doing this very week, referring back to the conclusion of "The Big Bang" for no readily apparent reason.

For example, it's not impossible that it might have been Perkins after all. Although he's set up as more of a red herring character.

Speaking of Perkins*, could he be a Time Lord?

[*Not to be confused with "The Great British Bake Off's" Sue Perkins; could she be a Time Lord?"]

If he is, then which one? There is an obvious candidate: I recall much speculation at the time that Frank Skinner was playing Drax, the cockney wide boy from "The Armageddon Factor" who is still widely loved (possibly because he's one of the few Time Lords who isn't out-and-out evil, just a bit… naughty. About as naughty as the Doctor is, in fact.)

Sadly, there's nothing on screen to confirm this. Perkins probably is just that bright guy. It's a really good part for Skinner and you can see it's physically painful for him to deliver the line turning down the Doctor's offer to travel in the TARDIS.

Also worth mentioning – given the whole "the Doctor lies" subtext fast becoming the text – Perkin's survival eliminates any lingering doubts over the Doctor's "little joke" that he only saved himself and Clara and let everyone else explode with the train.


But who could be collecting "genius experts" to conduct an amoral experiment? It's clearly… The Rani.

Look, she's even kidnapped Einstein again:

Mummy's Experts

Rani's Geniuses

But seriously, who do we know who would find the sort of death-defeating super soldier technology on view here useful for their build-a-better-Cyberman project?

So far this season we've had Missy or mention of "The Promised Land" in every episode except the shaggy-dog story of "Listen ("Time Heist's" being retrospectively the reminder of the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS telephone number). And whoever's responsible here does have that number for the TARDIS. So it would be a little odd for there to be no connection to the series' main plot arc (as opposed to developing story or character arcs).

And GUS's monocle icon is very reminiscent of the 3W logo that will appear in "Dark Water".

SEB / GUS

(Image courtesy of radiotimes and Chairman of the Voord on Planet Mondas forum)

And do I need to remind you that the Cybermen are techno-mummies of long standing (from as early as "The Mummy's Tomb" ahem "Tomb of the Cybermen" or even "The Tenth Planet")?


This is classic "Who": as steeped in the period detail as "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" (give or take a Foxes singing some Queen); as brazen and shameless a rip-off as "The Brain of Morbius"; and as much like Agatha Christie as "Black Orchid". So not very much really. But terribly, terribly entertaining anyway.

Show me to the dining car!


Next Time: More from Jamie Matthieson. And another train. And the Doctor cut down to size. Will it all fall flat or will we branch out in a new dimension as this most varied of seasons swings back from trad to rad in "Flatline".

Day 5354: DOCTOR WHO: Over the Moon

Saturday:


"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals," as, well, Agent K puts it in "Men in Black"!

Thomas Hobbes put it a little less pithily but made substantively the same point when he wrote his potboiler on human nature: "Leviathan".

And if you think Seventeenth Century philosophy is an unlikely starting point for an episode of Doctor Who, remember there's a very literal "Leviathan" Moon Dragon here.

A Leviathan, yesterday

So I'm going to start at the point where Clara asks the Earth to vote on whether or not to, as the episode title has it, kill the Moon.

To my mind that is where the heart of what this moral dilemma is about stands. It's not just about the rights and wrongs of killing, or of killing a baby, or the one life versus many billions. It's about how we make choices like that.

I'm not dismissing those dilemmas. They are important choices. And the episode is driving you to taking sides on each of them.

And frankly it's almost impossible to overlook the "abortion" metaphor. Although in a way I suspect that writer Peter Harness probably did; it's very much there to be read into the text – it's a choice made by women whether to kill a baby that might threaten their way of life or even survival – but that really doesn't seem to be the point that he's making.

The point that Hobbes and K are making – to go back to that – is that asked to make a decision en masse people default to the self-interested choice. Individual acts of kindness and charity happen, of course they do; but look at the outcomes and you must admit that most people will do the least they have to or ask what's in it for me? It's the thinking behind the "Prisoner's Dilemma". It's why we have sayings like "no good deed goes unpunished". It's why referendums are actually a pretty bad way to make decisions. It's why we have Tory governments for that matter.

What accounts for the difference – individuals kind; groups selfish – is information and accountability.

Random people in a large group are unlikely to have expertise in a specific subject, and almost certainly not the time or inclination to spend resources getting themselves informed. So they will make simplistic decisions based on gut instinct and the limited information they have available which is usually "how will this affect me".

At the same time, no one is going to ask them to justify the choice that they have made. We see this time and again in post-election polling: more people say they voted for the winning side than actually did. Or in some cases more people say they voted for the "good" party than actually did.

We have a couple of ways of dealing with this.

One of them is capitalism. Utopian systems such as Communism require every individual to know and understand their place in relationship to the system so that they will not overuse resources, and will appreciate say what the "needs" of others are in order to fulfil the "to each according to their needs" part. Capitalism gets around that by not requiring people to be angels. "Market forces" just means setting the self-interest of one group to cancel out the self-interest of another group and achieve an overall fairness. (Even then a true market requires "perfect" information – otherwise one side can take advantage of, say, insider trading – and since "perfect" information is impossible we have an unstable system where one side usually has disproportionate power, which is why at the very least we need regulations to rebalance the equation, and in the longer term something else altogether. The strengths and failings of liberal capitalism being really a longer essay for another time.)

But the main one is representative democracy: We chose the kind of people we want to make decisions – conservative or progressive, liberal or authoritarian – and expect them to go and get themselves informed on the subject and then make the decision for us.

Hobbes is not a fan of representative democracy, which he largely sees as swapping a large rabble for a smaller one. He favours a monarch, someone in whom the maximum information can be focussed and who has the maximum accountability (which suggests Hobbes knew very little about actual monarchs).

We see this reflected in "Kill the Moon". (Yes, back to the Doctor Who episode.)

Yes, of course it's unbelievable that every single light on Earth would go out. We like to believe that ordinary people would be better than that. And people make excuses, say it's governments or Mr Burns-esque power company bosses making the decisions. Or protest that only a narrow arc of the Earth actually gets a vote (typically it's Western Europe, continent of privilege that makes it.) That isn't the point. Earth here is Hobbes's Leviathan, the people's choice being nasty brutish and short-sighted. (And yes, Leviathan is where that joke about the Sontarans comes from; you probably know that.)

Clara is the person who has most information – not only because she is on the scene but through her experiences from travelling with the Doctor. And she is also the most accountable person, if only to the Doctor. Or to Courtney, her one witness from "real life". But perhaps even more so to herself, because she’s in a position where she can’t just say ‘well I couldn’t make a difference’.

These factors combine to make Clara the right person to make the right decision. The monarch.

And the monarch having made the right decision, the people flourish (the Doctor's vision of mankind's future unfolding across space and to the ends of time).

If you still think this isn't the point, then Courtney – arguably the person with the second best information – is, the Doctor tells us, implausibly going to become President i.e. secular monarch.

What fascinates me – and for me makes the Doctor a real Liberal hero in this episode – is that he denies Hobbes and choses to absent himself from the role of monarch.

When Clara lashes out at the Doctor at the end, she has every right to be furious. Her best friend has just abandoned her to what seemed to her the most painful choice –

This isn't a difficult choice. Difficult choices – and that's not always a politician's excuse for doing the wrong but expedient thing – are when there are only lose/lose options.

The threat to Earth is largely hypothetical. (We are told about flooding that has happened.) But if the baby turns out to be a threat, there are other things that can be done.

Killing the baby Moon Dragon really is just choosing the easy thing over the right thing.

[This week, this could so easily be a metaphor about refugees.]

Clara knows this. She knows what is right. But everything seemed to be telling her that doing the right thing had too high a cost, possibly the whole of the Earth. And when she needed him to support her, to be there, to hold her hand, the Doctor was gone.

But she's also dead wrong.

He knows that he is absolutely the wrong person to make this choice.

He's made this choice before. At the end of the Time War. First time around he got it wrong (or – retcon – he spent nearly three regenerations thinking he got it wrong). When he ended the Time War, he chose to take away everybody's choices.

And in Doctor Who, from pretty much the beginning on, taking away people's choices, whether by possession, mind control or extermination, has been directly equated with evil.

So if he makes it for us now, he's doing the same thing over again, ending everyone else's choices.

He knows that the right choice here is "don't kill the baby". But if he tells Clara that… if he tells her what to choose… he's "killing the baby", where "the baby" is humanity's nascent moral standing in the Universe.

This is why the Time Lords have a policy of non-interference. This is what the Prime Directive really means. DO NOT BE THE DALEKS.


This episode divides people, not – it seems to me – in the way "The Caretaker" seems to have done, which is on the question of quality, but in whether they side with Clara or the Doctor in response to his actions in leaving her to make the choice, or whether they think Clara was right to "overrule" that vote.

There is also a bit of division between those who get the screaming ab-dabs at the use abuse of science and those who get as far as Moon Dragon and shrug. For all that it is dressed up as a piece of hard sci-fi, it's actually a whopping great metaphor. In some ways it's up to the viewer whether you take that to mean the Moon Dragon is a metaphor for Leviathan, or for the unborn child, or for an Engorgio ad Absurdum of the Brothers Karamazov dictum:

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?"

Cards on the table, I think this is one of the very best episodes of Doctor Who. Ever.

It looks gorgeous, as usual – the use of Lanzarote as a moonscape is inspired, and the effects are outstanding: the CG space shuttle crash, the spider-germs, the Moon Dragon itself. It's proper Hinchcliffe scary with real monsters – probably the series' best spiders yet. There are some lovely references, particularly to "The Ark in Space", from the use of the yoyo for gravity testing and mention of the Bennet oscillator to it being an Earth-space-satellite horror with an inspiring speech about the nobility of human nature! (Even if it shoots the continuity of "The Moonbase" into little pieces.)

And the acting is total quality throughout. Yes even Ellis George's Courtney who is supposed to be that annoying – a very Earthly child. Hermione Norris – "Spooks'" Roz Myers – as bitter, cynical, disappointed, let down by humanity abandoning space travel Lundvik, who still rediscovers wonder at the end. Lovely to see Tony Osoba again too. But especially Jenna Coleman who has transformed as Clara from the previous year's cypher into someone confident, bossy, caring, flawed, terrified, angry and totally human. And of course Peter Capaldi, as the Doctor. Impossible and alien. And liberal and right.

That speech of the Doctor's at the end, played with a sense of wonder as though this is a gift from the Universe to him for trusting Clara to get it right, is one of the great speeches of "Doctor Who", up there with "Indomitable" and "Do I have that right?" both of which are clearly influences on this episode. It was so good that, just weeks later, we had it quoted at our wedding:

"In the mid Twenty-First Century, humankind starts creeping off into the stars, spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the Universe. And it endures ’til the end of time. And it does all that because one day in the year 2044, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that make it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something – wonderful, that for once it didn't want to destroy. And in that one moment, the whole course of history was changed."

Look up not down. See the wonder not the blackness. Discover; don't destroy. Make the right choice.

Above all "Kill the Moon" makes you think. It's clever and challenging and if you get into an argument about it, all the better.

This is what Doctor Who is for.


Next Time Throw Momma from the Train! If "Kill the Moon" is flying the flag for Doctor Who's "rad" tradition, next time things get about as "trad" as they can go. Period drama! Oak panelling! Living Mummy! Gothic futurism collides with sci-fi horror monster mash! Look out Janet Henfrey, time for another death-by-undead! There's a "Mummy on the Orient Express"!

Day 5347: DOCTOR WHO: Don’t Care Was Made to Care

Saturday:


As the new season of Doctor Woo approaches, I thought we might warm up by reviewing one that we missed last year.

Of course, this was on in the running up to the Wedding of the Century™ when daddies got very busy sorting out their big day. Which is NO EXCUSE. Still, it certainly didn’t help that this one’s a stinker!

There’s a school that enjoys “The Caretaker” as a fun romp that advances the character’s story arcs.

I don’t. I loathe this episode. It’s full of people being horrid to each other. And has a really rubbish monster.

This is the episode where we find out what Danny Pink is really like. And it turns out he’s a monster too. Controlling, manipulative, and keeping his emotions buried beneath secrecy, he’s already half way to becoming a Cyberman. Maybe it’s that affinity and not that he’s so so special and wuvs Clara so so much that’s going to let him retain control in the (spoilers) season finale.

He protests that Clara has kept secrets from him, when he’s not telling her about his own past, he’s buried his own name and is staying buttoned up about the child he killed. He is outraged that she has lied to him, right at the moment when he has lied to her so that he can sneak around the school to find out about the Doctor. He unjustly accuses the Doctor of being the man to send you into a burning building when running into a burning building is almost literally what he caught the Doctor doing. His uncontrollable need to demonstrate that he’s the man means putting down Clara’s bravery and saying she ought to have been scared (like a girly), undermining her and trying to force her to be dependent on him. Not something that the Doctor ever does. By the end, he is possessive, jealous and possibly psychotic when he makes Clara give him an unkeepable promise to run to him when the Doctor steps over the line. The first thing Clara needs to do is run to the Doctor to tell him Danny has stepped over the line.

Clara though is far from perfect here either. The opening montage showing her rushing from adrenaline fuelled adventure to date to adventure to date, eventually almost breaking down but telling herself she can have it all… she’s showing every sign of addiction, including lying to everyone including herself. Her worst moment comes when she betrays the Doctor’s trust (not for the last time, either, this season) by stealing the invisibility watch and, faster than you can say Ring of Gyges, gives it to Danny so he can abuse its power to snoop on the Doctor. She too has almost psychotic breaks: snapping at the Doctor about space boglins when he leans through her classroom window to correct her on Jane Austin’s dates; and again when she starts to free-associate the most ludicrous lie yet about the very obvious alien incursion being a surprise school play. It is cringe-making to see her embarrass herself like this. But worse, no one cares: the Doctor and Danny are both expecting her to make them feel better – which indeed she ends up doing – rather than trying to help her when she so clearly needs them to.

So it’s just about possible that the Doctor is actually being the least unpleasant and irrational person this week.

When he tries to lure the monster into the school – as he explains it himself, the largest empty building – he’s trying to do the responsible thing. Is he responsible for the danger being there in the first place? He does say that it’s all the artron energy – presumably from all those TARDIS landings – that has attracted the threat. But then arguably he’s trying to clear up after the mess he’s made. And what responsibility Clara, when it’s all for her benefit that he keeps coming back here again and again?

The monster-of-the-week in question (other than Danny) is the Skovox Blitzer rolly-toy: armed to the teeth; capable of destroying the planet; and, as usual, unable to hit the broadside of a barn.

Why wasn’t it a Dalek? Functionally it’s a Dalek. It’s got the same shape in the plot as a Dalek… in fact come to think of it it’s got roughly the same shape as a Dalek in the physical sense too. And it’s not like they haven’t been actually in Coal Hill School before. (That would be the last time the Doctor was offered the position of school caretaker. Though he was a bit overqualified for the position.) It could even have been a white-and-gold Imperial one left over from “Asylum of the Daleks” the Shoreditch Incident in 1963 (“Remembrance of the Daleks”).

And the Doctor could have pointed at a Dalek and said: “That is a soldier. That is the ultimate in soldiers. And they made me be a soldier. And on Christmas they made me be a soldier all over again. For a thousand years. And then I died. So that, Clara, THAT is why I hate soldiers.”

Because seriously sometimes you really do need to make the subtext the text.

And of course, Danny beats the Blitzer monster with… P.E. That ludicrous look-at-me spring jump. Given the way it talks – all sub-Mechonoid numbers mixed with language – would it have been totally beyond the wit of man for the writer (TV’s Gareth Roberts and Steven Moffat) to have him distract it with maths? (And of course you could not have done that to a Dalek!)

It’s not that the episode is without merit, or moments. That opening montage, if it weren’t so emotionally troubling. Capaldi’s wicked glee when schoolgirl Courtney says she’s a disruptive influence and he shakes her by the hand. And his “I may have a vacancy” line. And that she does get to travel in the TARDIS. Chris Addison as the unctuous afterlife receptionist Seb, and our little glimpse of Missy this week. Oh my god… she’s a bit busy.

Incidentally we get confirmation in passing that Missy’s heaven is the Promised Land mentioned in “Deep Breath” and “Robots of Sherwood”, even though the robots who’ve been trying to get there don’t really seem to fit with that once we find out that it’s a… but I’m telling you the plot.

And there’s an intriguing moment when the Doctor reveals that he thinks that he and Clara look the same age. And given that Clara is wound all around the Doctor’s timeline, then from the Gallifreyan point of view, it’s not impossible that that is exactly what they do look like to him.

But these are like glimpses into another – better – story, possibly some kind of black comedy assembled from these parts but… funny.

There are a lot of times where – and I may be totally misreading it here, in part because one of the writers is Gareth Roberts who is famously witty and the other is award-winning comedy writer Steven Moffat, – we appear to be being invited to laugh at these people, as though emotional distress is supposed to be funny. Chunks of this have the shape of a farce – Clara running down corridors; the mistaken identity of Clara’s boyfriend; the whole “hilarious” parents evening and the monster must never meet. And then they do the thing that farce cannot do and “drop the plates”, have the thing that mustn’t happen happen, i.e. have Danny actually collide with Clara’s other real life. And instead of hilarity ensuing, we just get spikes of raw pain.

Back in Moffat’s first season we had a roughly parallel arc for Amy and Rory. Amy ran away with the Doctor for “secret” adventures behind Rory’s back, but also kept secret from the Doctor that she had a boyfriend (whom she loved); halfway through the season we had a turning point – “Vampires of Venice” – where the Doctor and Rory collided, and Rory got to tell the Doctor a few home truths. And then Rory evolved. Okay, maybe he got killed a couple of times too many along the way. But he became a person who held his own in the TARDIS crew, and supported Amy’s choices and was worthy of her.

“The Caretaker” is no such turning point. Danny rejects all the choices that Rory takes, rejects all the wonders that are on offer in the Doctor’s magic box, and never grows into a better person.

Of course Danny is free to reject those things. That’s his choice. That doesn’t make him a bad person.

But what makes for poor storytelling, why this is poor in comparison with season five, is that “Doctor Who” – always seen as transformative – has no such effect on Danny.

(What does make Danny a bad person is that his tries to reject those choices for Clara and the Doctor too. He knows best. So he needs to control the Doctor by labelling him “an officer”, putting him into a box. He needs to control Clara by putting her into a “relationship” where only she needs make promises to him and he need make none to her (because he’s the boss). That’s why Danny’s a monster: because he will do anything to control other people. That’s what has always defined the villain in Doctor Who.)


At the time of broadcast, we didn’t know that that was the way the series would go; we could have hoped that this was a – deliberate – low point and that the characters’ behaviour here would be seen to be mistakes from which they learned and put things right. Instead, everyone will carry on making the same mistakes and worse lying and covering up so as to stop others seeing they are making the same mistakes.

People do behave like that in the real world. But they are not healthy and happy people. And “Doctor Who” has a responsibility to say to the audience: treating other people like this is not good.

Nobody wins today. When this happens in “classic” Doctor Who – in “Warriors of the Deep”, say – the Doctor sees that it is a disaster and at least has the grace to decry the carnage with a “There should have been another way”.

“Warriors of the Deep” is better than this.


Next Time… Do not get your hopes up for ALL the missing episodes… last time I said I’d try that the diary entries fell off a cliff again. But IF we manage it, next time we discover the ultimate Kinder Surprise and face the ultimate moral dilemma… without the Doctor. Another episode that divides fan opinion. Which way will I vote? And will Clara choose to “Kill the Moon”?

Day 5107: DOCTOR WHO: Wizard vs Aliens vs Santa

Christmas Day flashback:


26th March 2015 makes it ten years to the day since Christopher Eccleston first took Billie Piper by the hand and, with one word– "Run!" –changed television for good. So in celebration of that first episode of the gloriously successful return, here's a look at the most recent…

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on…"

I normally count Christmas Specials as the first episode of the new season, but "Last Christmas", the point where the Doctor and Clara stop lying to each other and run away together, feels properly the conclusion to Season 34 (8).

As a necessary measure of reality, true information does pass between them: the Doctor admits that he did not find Gallifrey; Clara tells the Doctor that Danny is dead. So in a strange way, in spite of it "all being a dream", this is, in a sense "real".

"It was all a dream" or "it was all a story", and that that does not necessarily stop something being "real", are of course defining characteristics of Stephen Moffat's time on Doctor Who.

The eleventh Doctor survives the crack in his first season because Amy remembers his story back into existence; the Silence arc is mostly about things being written in stone because they are history and how to rewrite them; the 2012 stories are set in the shadow of the Doctor erasing his story; Clara the "impossible girl" is the ultimate retcon, reinserting herself into the whole of the Doctor's story; and Peter Capaldi's first year has dwelt extensively on the danger of the story in the form of the lie.

This makes Santa only the most-cuddly of Moffat's self-insertions into his own writing, explicitly telling us that he is a dream; more than that, a dream that is trying to help.

Santa having an existence in the Doctor Who universe (as written by Mr Moffat) has indeed been alluded to before: the eleventh Doctor claimed to know him as Jeff in "A Christmas Carol"; while Rose asks the ninth if he thinks he is Santa in "The Doctor Dances" – "who says I'm not? Red bicycle when you were twelve," he replies, quoting "Miracle on 34th St" though Rose is perplexed enough that he may have genuinely delivered that red bike to her, too.

And the idea that the Doctor might be Santa does not entirely go away here. Since he first appeared to the Doctor alone, at the end of "Dark Water", you can infer that this "story" of Santa is a little corner of the Doctor's psyche that finds strength and resonance in the shared dream with first Clara and then the other victims of the deliciously creepy Dream Crabs, making him something a little bit more than the Dream Lord and a little bit less than the Valeyard – a distillation of all that is Christmas somewhere between the Doctor's twelfth and final incarnation. (sorry!)

This means, of course, that Nick Frost is playing the Doctor here, applying his usual "bumbling Nick Frost" persona with a salting of asperity, giving his Santa a grumpiness and fake bonhomie, to make it a not-quite-but-almost-reflection of Capaldi, which certainly fits the fact that they rub each other up the wrong way (he always does). As always, there's a lot of humour to be found in different aspects of the Doctor trying to score points of each other ("No one likes the tangerines", "bigger on the inside", "No, I do the science bit", "Dreamy-weamy"). Terrifying to think what the elves mean for the Doctor's view of his companions, though.

"…and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

But if Santa is not ever real, then how many of the other people in this story were really there? Do we accept at face value the Doctor's explanation that it was a shared dream? Does that not raise rather more questions – in terms of how the Dream Crabs arrived on Earth; why they picked the small number of people they attacked; why only those people – or are the rest of us supposed to be still trapped (which will make Fiona's Christmas dinner "uncomfortable" to say the least); are there more Dream Crabs (a whole invasion force, as is implied)? Or is it possible that Ashley, Fiona, Shona and Albert, the "Professor" with the suspiciously-familiar face, were all dream-aspects of the Doctor too?

The charismatic competent leader, the science-genius mother-figure, the gobby shop-girl who's smarter than she appears… don't they all sound just a bit like generic companion descriptions? While the nasty "Professor" who is the butt of the Doctor's scorn… would anyone like to hazard that he's not a reverse-Dream Lord, with the Doctor dishing out the self-hating instead of receiving it? Makes for a whole new take on death-of-the-self when he's swallowed by his own image. (And a Troughton interacting with a television screen is itself an in-series flashback to the second Doctor era.)

We see them wake up… but we see Clara wake up, too and that turns out to be a dream…

And what about the Dream Crabs? The fact that they look like Face-huggers doesn't just get a lantern hung upon it, it gets a 1000 Watt spotlight trained on it and gives us the best gag in the show ("No wonder you keep getting invaded!"). So do Face-huggers look like Dream Crabs because Giger was once a victim too, or do Dream Crabs look like Face-huggers because the Doctor (in his real reality) has seen "Alien" and is still pissed about it?

It's not completely impossible that all of this takes place in the TARDIS, inside the Doctor's head, in the minutes (seconds?) after the end of "Dark Water": everything from the moment Santa first appears, Dream Crabs included, being a Doctor-generated dream. He did open up the telepathic circuits again earlier in that story so that Clara could lead them to wherever, if anywhere, Danny was. And he did smash up the console (again) just before the end. There's no knowing what sort of state the old girl was in, and could easily have been cross-wiring the Doctor and Clara's brains (especially if his subconscious is trying to tell him that he cannot leave things that way).

And so what about Clara herself? Of all of them, she seems the most likely candidate to be in the Doctor's dreams – just as Danny Pink is (in a beautiful sequence) in hers. Well, we will have to come to the conclusion that aside from the Doctor she, and perhaps only she, is real. But it's a definite Descartes's second axiom moment ("cogito ergo sum" proves that "I" exist, but other people are real… because God's not a bastard.)

There is some rather clever direction going on, changing the lighting and tone to suit the different "depths" of the dream. Clara and Danny's dream Christmas is full of warmth and soft focus, and a lot of blurring of time – not just the jump-cuts allowing the intruding Doctor's thoughts to place chalkboards in her dream home, but the entire day vanishes in seconds. In short the artificiality is heavily emphasized so you cannot help but arrive at the Blackadder conclusion: "Baldrick? Who gave you permission to turn into an Alsatian?" (Oh, all right: "Oh god, it's a dream, isn't it? It's a bloody dream!")

But notice too, the way that all the scenes at the North Pole are filmed to be reminiscent of the movies – well "Aliens", specifically, from the creepy laboratories to Santa's "war movie" entrance to the bucket-loads of X-Files blue lighting – setting them apart from the more conventionally "TV" looking scenes on Clara's roof at the start (and for that matter inside her house at the end).

"If we shadows have offended; Think but this, and all is mended…"

Here, the clue of the tangerine on the windowsill, the last image of the episode, might suggest that it's all been a comforting dream in the mind of the dying Doctor, with the happy outcome that he gets a second chance with his friend.

So if you're one of those people who've lost the taste for the series – and it happens – then this is one of those rare moments when Doctor Who occasionally provides "jumping off points" (the opposite of "jumping on points" such as "An Unearthly Child", "Spearhead from Space" or – since we're celebrating it – "Rose"), places where the story can be said to have "ended". Places like: the conclusion of "The War Games", for example (and any stories you might imagine being made after that are in fact an illusion woven by the Time Lord guardians of their prison planet Shada where the Doctor is imprisoned); or "The Well-Mannered War" (Gareth Roberts' slightly-spiteful novel set at the end of Season 17, which ends with the Doctor and Romana leaving reality altogether before the John Nathan-Turner era can begin); or the end of "Survival", which sees the Doctor and Ace depart with work to do (with no messy modern-era New Who getting in the way).

This is one real flaw with the Moffat approach to storytelling: when story is treated as as important, as "real" as "reality", then it's never entirely clear where the dream or the story ends and the "real" events begin. If you're the sort of person for whom that matters, if you want your stories to be reportage (if of a fictional world), then this is going to become grating, an abdication by the writer to tell you what "really" happened.

But in our really real "real world", of course, the series hasn't been cancelled, indeed new production is already under way. So we know that the Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman will be returning to our screens in the Autumn (probably) for more episodes. So the meta-reality is telling us that in the story-reality, these events must properly finish as they appear to, with the Doctor and Clara escaping to adventures new.

That's sort of grating too – Moffat cannot, ultimately, pull off the (to pick a movie entirely at random) "Inception" trick of leaving you with an ambiguous ending, for the simple reason that he is making serial television. He might be able to keep us puzzling until September, but eventually the top has to topple over.

(Can't resist popping this in here: people say that the spinning top in "Inception" doesn't prove anything because it was never Leo DiCaprio's totem, it was his wife's. It doesn't matter whose totem it was; if the darn thing won't fall over, it definitely proves you're still in someone's dream!)

An interesting – at least to me – fact of semantics: adding an assertion of truth to a statement does not change that statement.

What I mean is:

"This is a dream"
"It is true that this is a dream."
"It is true that it is true that this is a dream."

All mean the same thing.

Moffat's hanging a lantern on the fictionality of his storytelling does much the same thing (or rather doesn't do). By repeatedly telling us that this is a story (within a story within a story) is he really adding anything (beyond circumlocution)?

"And this weak and idle theme; No more yielding but a dream."

But as a celebration of the telling of stories, and that stories – like Santa – can be "true" even when they are fiction, "Last Christmas" is a great success, unusually heart-warming for a Christmas horror story, and a much-needed antidote to the "year of lies", finally resolving Clara and the Doctor's position with some truth between them.

It is difficult to believe that Jenna Coleman ever thought of leaving because of working with Peter Capaldi, such is the quality of their chemistry here as always. She picks him up on his faults; he challenges her to better herself. (Shame Clara still thinks punching him is an acceptable chastisement, though.)

Coleman is touching throughout, emphasising the smug and controlling Clara when in the Danny dream, fading to self-effacingly good in the "old" make-up. (Many people thought the reverse of the Christmas cracker touching; I thought it slightly undermined the better moment with the eleventh Doctor – for me it was all about the companion doing something for the Doctor.) Again there is good direction for the "Doctor's eye view" where he genuinely still sees her the same, unchanged by the years (or perhaps just insufficiently changed by a human lifespan compared to his millenniums).

The guest cast are all outstanding too. Even the reindeer. It's always good to see a Troughton back on the show. Dan Starkey makes a great elf, and Nathan McMullan makes a hot one. And especial kudos to Faye Marsay as the loveable Shona. If she does turn out to be real after all, I'm with the many who would see her as a potential companion.

Even aside from the clever visuals, which I've already admired, the pacing of the story is very well handled – possibly the sleigh ride goes on a little bit too long – as usual, showing that Moffat can fill up the longer form story better than when keeping to forty-five minutes. There's a profusion of set pieces – the crashed sleigh on Clara's roof; all the pastiche Face-hugger attacks; Santa's rescue, a literal army of toy soldiers; the dream-within-a-dream of Danny; and so on, through to the old-Clara fake-out – and they all come off. I'm reminded of, say, "The Runaway Bride" or "Voyage of the Damned" where the one big set piece (the TARDIS/taxi chase or the trying to cross the abyss) seemed to draw life away from the rest of the story. Nothing like that here, with the dreams-within-dreams shtick actually helping the structure to build with each level of "but ah ha!". The jokes arise naturally from the script, and they are good, clever jokes too, whether pointed or even poignant. They even manage to get away with the car lock bleep gag that defeated David Tennant in "The End of Time". Maybe it's a shame – or maybe it's a relief – that Moffat couldn't quite bring himself to go the full meta and include "Blink" on Shona's DVD marathon list.

More challenging than the usual Christmas fare, even by Doctor Who's standards. And all the better for it.

And, at least for the few brief moments as they run to the TARDIS, the Doctor and Clara can actually be happy. A dream come true.


Next Time…
A very familiar Witch. Possibly the fastest ever bounce back from absolutely, categorically, unequivocally dead. SPOILER! "Did you Missy me?" I imagine that trying harder than ever to be the Doctor makes Clara "The Magician's Apprentice".

(Or will she be "The Witch's Familiar"?!)

But first… if you're really, really lucky, I'll go back and fill in the gaps with reviews of "The Caretaker", "Kill the Moon", "Mummy on the Orient Express", "Flatline" and the rest, but starting with "The Crimson Horror"!

Day 5060: DOCTOR WHO: Remembrance (Day) of the Cybermen*

Saturday:


There’s one central idea here done superbly well: the Master is just doing all this to get her friend back.

Alex once wrote a piece – one I fully endorse – titled “The Time Lords are Gits and Always Have Been”, chronicling their use and abuse of arbitrary power from “The War Games” on.

And suddenly, watching this, I realised that it’s the Doctor who is the fallen Time Lord, not the Master. The Master, Missy, just wants him to see that they are supposed to be ruling the cosmos and then he’ll come back and play with her the way they used to.

Michelle Gomez is really good at this. Properly bananas as her character says. Even in handcuffs. (Eat that, River Song!) The horrible brutality of killing Osgood the cos-play fangirl – for no reason – is exactly the sort of thing that the Master needed, to underline that she is not just some suave giggling loon, but really properly evil. And grounded in a solid motivation (and decades of “shipping”), the character is a better, more worthy adversary than she has been in years.

It’s not a novel observation to say that “Dark Water”/“Death in Heaven” is Moffat doing “Army of Ghosts”/“Doomsday” his way. Ghosts or skeletons that are revealed as Cybermen; a global invasion; a twist halfway to introduce another old enemy (the Daleks even get a cheeky name-check); even the hand-brake turn last-minute twist to stop the heartbreak ending being too much.

Nor is it a secret that Moffat is not very fond of two-parters: he hasn’t done one since “The Rebel Flesh”/“The Almost People”; hasn’t written one himself since “The Pandorica Opens”/“The Big Bang”; and even when he has, it’s usually to perform a big scene shift to a second part that is often hugely different in location or scope or tone.

But Russell clearly got something right when he minted the new series with a spectacular two- or even three-part finale at the end of every year.

The success of the individual stories is less of the issue here, than how they round out the seasons. For the record, we love the Mister Master in his “Last of the Time Lords” trilogy, and of Russell’s five finales, only “Journey’s End” and “The End of Time” bellyflop into disappointing us, but your mileage may vary. What I’m saying is that the Moffat era could be characterised by series – six, seven a and seven b – that come to an end without coming to a climax.

So it’s some sort of irony that Moffat’s here using the form to write what is ultimately a pretty good story that is also a seriously good capstone to the series arcs, for a series where those arcs have been based in character rather than plot. It seems that Steven is just better at re-writing Russell “but better” than he is at his own stuff.

The other fantastically good scene here is, of course, also a collage of Russell moments, which is Clara’s farewell (even though it isn’t… what is it with Moffat-era companions not being able to say goodbye?).

The way that it’s prefaced with Danny’s inevitable self-sacrifice (a voice from the other side, riffing on Rose’s summons to Bad Wolf Bay in “Doomsday”) and intercut with the raw emotion of the Doctor assaulting the TARDIS in grief that the Master lied and Gallifrey is still gone beautifully composits the information that the audience needs to understand what is happening.

Coleman and Capaldi have been brilliant all year, but never better than in this goodbye that caps off the emotional arc of (this year’s version of) Clara Oswald where all her lies have finally come back to bite her on the bottom, only for her to finish by telling the biggest white lie of all to spare the Doctor just as he does the same for her.

If only all the moments could be as good. Or at least not so cripplingly disappointing.

When I said last time that I thought I’d been spoiled, it wasn’t about the slow, careful, clever build up to the revelation of the Cybermen in “Dark Water” being blown in the teaser at the end of “In the Forest of the Night”. Although it was.

(Of course knowing there would be Cybermen, it was obvious that they were Cybermen, to the extent I didn’t even realise it was meant to be a surprise and so the slowly draining tanks reveal seemed a bit pointless. But I didn’t spot that the 3W logo was a Cyber teardrop until the doors closed to reveal them as a pair; I’d been thinking of it as a “map” of the Nethersphere touching the larger sphere of the real universe as it were as the City of the Saved.)

But I had a much bigger problem with “Clara Oswald has never existed”, because to me that suggested a retrospective redemption of the whole Impossible Girl arc and too-good-to-be-true Clara of season seven.

With Missy, as everyone guessed, turning out to be the Master and also, as everyone guessed, the “woman on the phone” who gave Clara the TARDIS telephone number, along with the drop-in scenes suggesting that Missy “chose” Clara for the Doctor… the expectation rose that Clara was either a construct of the Master’s, like Seb, or maybe the Master’s TARDIS (remember how Clara and the TARDIS did not get on in series seven?), or even the next regeneration of the Master herself (Missy = Miss C Oswald… apparently, nahh). (Or was Oswald the Penguin!)

Having Moffat’s companion be the most specialist ever, who jumps into the Doctor’s timestream to save him and so meets him (and beats him!) everywhere smacks just a teensy bit of “Mary Sue”. But having the Master wrap him/herself around every point in the Doctor’s timestream because… “a Universe without the Doctor scarcely seems worth imagining”, now that would be properly epic. In fact, it would be an almost perfect reversal of the “they turn out to be the same person” ending that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had in mind for their “Final Problem”, and incorporate elements of the Reichenbach Fall ending that Saward and Holmes planned for “Trial of a Time Lord”. It would even be satisfyingly timey-wimey for a Moffat story.

Really, the only other way to go would be for Clara to turn out to have been the Doctor all along.

Oh.

The twist with Clara turns sour because it is so obviously a fake-out, and such a waste of a terrific idea.

It would be such a great story to do, too: the end of season switcheroo reveal that Doctor and companion were actually the other way around. But having done it for false now, how can someone do it for real?

But you couldn’t have done it at the end of this season eight. You couldn’t have done it after seeing Matt Smith turn into Peter Capaldi, or after the scene in “Deep Breath” where Capaldi’s Doctor remembers the phone call made by Smith’s. You couldn’t do it after a season that included “Listen” that expressly takes the present Doctor back to his childhood on Gallifrey. You couldn’t do it after a season that included “Flatline”, a story about Clara trying to be the Doctor. (Though wouldn’t that have worked differently in retrospect if she’d turned out to be the Master!)

What you needed was to end “The Time of the Doctor” with Clara (or “Clara”) returning to the TARDIS and meeting Capaldi, and he knows nothing about who he is so she tells him that he’s this man called “The Doctor” and then season eight is about her setting out to teach him how to be this Time Lord, this hero.

(And – suggests Alex – we could have cast that jobbing actor, even though he’d been in it before, who’s been in tons of things and was very respected but really became well-known when he got a bit older and got all crabby and sweary and was in a sit-com. He meant “A Very Peculiar Practice” and “Waiting For God” of course…)

In order to work, it needs some things to be more ambiguous. The fake Doctor can’t fly the TARDIS alone, for example, so can’t keep materialising at Clara’s home to collect her. And he can’t rely on pulling knowledge or Gallifreyan superpowers out of his hat (though you could slyly imply that Clara does – perhaps having her seem to appear somewhere out of nowhere, the way Missy appears to shift at super-speed when she makes her move and grabs Osgood).

There was a chance there to have done something jaw-dropping. But instead, Moffat burned that idea. Tossed it away for a gag. It brings to mind his engineering the Doctor’s regenerations so that he could be the one to confront the “thirteen regenerations limit”, only to blow it off with “and the Time Lords gave him some more lives”.

Burning up ideas like TARDIS keys, Moffat is closing the box on other people using these ideas to tell much better stories, and I think that’s a real shame. Russell used to throw out ideas for people to tie up in better stories – the Fall of Arcadia, the Moment – so it’s a good job no-one’s used those up in half-baked fan-fic…Hang on…



The Cybermen were, obviously, totally wasted. Where exactly did all those metal suits come from, I ask? Gallifreyan technology, says Alex and fair play to him I’ll give him that. And I suppose you could say that just for once in her lives, the Master teams up with a monster menace only to betray them before they betray her!

But really, do we have to believe that every single human was willing to delete their emotions and turn bad, unless they were so specially-wecially as to be in love with Clara Oswald (or the Doctor… see below). Seb tells us the Nethersphere is emptying and we see the lights going out. And yet only two Cybermen out of all of humanity resist the conversion.

Again, it’s the better story not told. The Cybermen are never (apart possibly from “The Tenth Planet”) treated as individuals. They all just become an army of grunts. (Ironically, when the season’s been trying so hard to tell us that soldiers have personalities too.)

Whatever Danny might say about the Doctor being an officer and a general, he’s lying to himself if he thinks he’s not doing exactly the thing he condemns when he orders the Cyber-army to their deaths without compunction. Though to be fair, he’s probably had Clara delete his compunction.

As for his big soldier speech to the Cybermen – was anyone else just hoping they’d reply to “love is a promise” with “we don’t care; we’re Cybermen, you moron!”?

Still it could have been worse. Oh wait. It was.

I’d really expected that the Doctor would use the TARDIS to save Kate from falling out of that airplane – as he’s done to save River Song at least twice. It’s not like he was going to be late for getting to Clara in the graveyard in his time machine. And at least it would have spared us the Cyber-Brig. Oh for shame, they even painted his handles black to make him a Cyber-leader.

The Brigadier’s passing in “The Wedding of River Song”, the Doctor missing it, and learning a lesson about mortality, was understated, tasteful and a last nod to a beloved old friend. So why the need to bring him back? And as a Cyberman?! What is it with Moffat-era companions not being able to say goodbye?

(And while we’re at it, “permission to squee” is up there with burping bins and farting Slitheen as… something I will have to get used to.) I’m glad to say that Alex enjoyed it, though. Mainly because the Master immediately shot him.

If there’s one tiny sliver of redemption for the whole wretched idea it’s this:

“Who will save your soul, Doctor?” Well who is it who is always there to shoot the monsters so that the Doctor doesn’t have to?

But, having got all that out of my system, let me return to the story that was actually there, rather than the stories I thought might be there or hoped might be there, because the one that Steven does tell is still a good story.

The genius of it is this: all season we have seen Clara trying to be the Doctor, trying to keep up with his breakneck lifestyle, trying to match his moral ambiguities. And all season the Doctor has been asking the question that Clara should have been asking herself, practically shouting it in her face: am I a good man?

How often do we stop to interrogate our own actions? Or do we, like Clara, keep on doing what we’re doing – telling the little lies to cover the bigger ones – because it’s simpler to keep following the path rather than stopping to think, really think if it’s the right path.

We all like to think we are “good men/women/choose your own label or none”. We are all the heroes of our own story, as the saying goes; and as Moffat has said, Clara thinks the show is called “Clara”. But the Doctor’s answer is a good one: it’s too hard to be a “good man”; it’s okay to recognise yourself as a silly one, one just muddling through with a box and a screwdriver, trying to help. That’s actually quite liberating – the freedom from the obligation to “do good”; and the avoidance of the total harm that “do-gooding” can do (take heed, politicians of all stripes).

The Master thinks only in absolutes. She takes the logic of being good to the max: obviously you want an army raised from the dead and slaved to your will because if you are going to be “good” you need to do all the good, stop all the evil, destroy all the monsters.

And that’s bananas.

We, as a society, seem to have gotten ourselves stuck in a place where we are all expected to work harder, increase the productivity, deliver more. We are trapped in a World of “The Apprentice” where we have to give it 110%. And that’s the same logic that the Master uses. It’s not okay to be just okay.

I like that our hero, the fallen Time Lord, wins with the simple, welcome realisation that it’s okay to fall short.

So forgive me for demanding better stories. It was wrong, when the lesson of this one is so good.

Also, somewhere, presumably, Rory has just come back from the dead again as a Cyberman.

Next Time: Santa Claus? Santa Claus! Dammit we’re British! He’s Father bloody Christmas!

Start the Wham! It’s “Last Christmas”.


*May not contain actual Cybermen.

Day 5011: DOCTOR WHO: Crime Traveller, no, wait, come back!

Saturday:

Now that’s much more like it.

Superficially, a piece of stylish fluff after “Ocean’s Eleven” or TV’s “Hustle”, even to the slo-mo entrance and how-they-did-it flashback.

But, Saibra, a shape-shifter just dying for someone to see the real her, and Psi, a human computer who casts aside his memories and his past, could almost be wearing signs saying “we’re aspects of the Doctor”. And a descent into the Plutonic underworld, the minotaur-guarded labyrinth, to unlock the heart’s desire might just make this the most heavily symbolic episode yet in this series that seems intent on “unlocking” the Doctor’s psyche.

The much talked about “change of tone” for season eight seems less of a specific new direction and more a real effort to grasp the series defining ethos of change. With a different kind story every week, Victorian mystery to space war, historical romp to urban horror, they’re almost taking us back to the Hartnell era for diversity of story modes (and oh look, there’s a Sensorite between Androvax from “The Sarah Jane Adventures”, Captain John from “Torchwood” and Daffy Abslom Daak from the pages of “Doctor Who Magazine”). And they’re not so much defining Capaldi’s Doctor as any one thing, yet, but throwing a whole lot of things at him to see what he does with them all.

So let’s look at the Doctor’s psyche this week: a mix of seventh Doctor cunning, first Doctor scorn, and a dash of sixth Doctor braggadocio (“What you need right now is ME!”). And I forgot the eighth Doctor amnesia!

Let me toss a theory out there: each episode so far this year is looking at a side of the Doctor’s character, in fact one of his character flaws: “Deep Breath” represents his self-doubt; “Into the Dalek”, obviously, hatred; “Robot of Sherwood” is cynicism; “Listen” clearly fear; (and of course “The Caretaker” will be all about the Doctor’s jealousy); so, this week – well, given how secure the “securest bank in the Universe” turns out to be, it’s tempting to say we’re talking about his insecurities, but it’s pretty flagged up that really this is all about guilt.

The beautifully designed Teller creature feeds on guilt – and I love the twist of satire that I read on the Net that the bank is quite safe from their pet monster because bankers feel no guilt; harsh but fair. The reveal at the end that the escapade has been initiated by the guilt – as regrets – of the bank’s director, Madam Karabraxos. And the thing the Doctor desires most in the Universe, (or at least appears to) is to make the Teller not the last of his kind, the “survivor guilt” that has plagued the Doctor since Gallifrey, even if he now never foomed the homeworld after all.

Admittedly, the “monster actually pining for his mate” is a rerun of the ending of “Hide”, but rather than being a handbrake turn in a scary-movie story, this felt like a natural twist in a story mode where twists are the order of the day. And it’s not like it wasn’t flagged up ahead of time: the Guantanamo jumpsuit and chains, and the Doctor even asks what hold the bankers could have over the Teller.

And what sort of Teller would the richest bank in the galaxy employ anyway? Obviously a fortune teller.

Mind-reading you to death was new and grotesque. I liked that. And made a good counterpoint (and cure) to the reuse of the Memory Worms, previously established in “The Snowmen”. And the monster is still a monster, in the end – it still turned a whole lot of people’s brains to soup. The Doctor just found a way to deal with it that didn’t involve killing it. Interestingly, the Doctor doesn’t pass judgment on that either. Perhaps it’s not his place to mete out more guilt.

Okay, so “Time Heist” is yet another ontological loop: the Doctor becomes involved because Madam Karabraxos calls him on the number she only had because the Doctor became involved. Perhaps I minded it less this week because I didn’t really notice until I thought about it afterwards. It’s fridge logic: you only notice it when you think about it later.

(Unlike the “if he could set it all up, why couldn’t he have just used the TARDIS?” question I’ve seen on the net. They’ve thought of that one: the Doctor even says robbing a bank is easy if you’ve got a TARDIS. But the last lock on the vault can only be opened by the sun exploding(!) which is the one moment that they can’t use the TARDIS. And as for the complaint that the air vents with the “Do Not Enter” signs on are way too big and easy to get into… well of course they are: they lead straight into the Teller’s tank; they are very obviously a trap!)

Unless, of course, the Doctor, as a Time Lord, can just create ontological loops at will – which it certainly looks like he does, just to drag Clara away from her date, an interpretation reinforced by the last moment of the last scene.

Perhaps this one is about his jealous ego after all.

Actually, there are plenty of ways that it does fall apart – surely it’s a bit unlikely that Ms Delphox would leave the big door unlocked after catching the Doctor and Clara in the vault, so how did they get back in after being captured? But if they don’t need to get into the main vault to penetrate the private vault, then why break in there in the first place? And obviously the biggie: why does no one notice that the solar storm is going to destroy the bank?

I’d like to say I forgave it because at least Steve Thompson’s script was showing signs that he’d thought about some of the flaws and set up answers for you to pick up. But perhaps it’s just that I was just having too much fun watching this to notice or mind those as it went along.

And it’s a bit rude of me to just reduce Saibra and Psi to cyphers for the Doctor. In spite of their brief screen time, they both came across as distinct and interesting characters played with a proper sense of the fun that a heist story can be. It was a proper shock when Saibra was got by the Teller and her smart realization of what the “way out” would be. Psi’s decision to sacrifice his empty/forgotten life for Clara was perhaps a bit sketched because of the episode’s runtime, but came across. And for once the “no they’re alive” was less of a sentimental Moffat trope than a genre-appropriate “fooled you!”.

(Does it count as an “everybody lives” if the Teller’s victims are sitting around drooling with their heads caved in? I would say not, actually.)

And they are genuine Lawrence Miles-esque posthumans! The series very underuses the idea that the human race will have a future beyond homo sapiens and – sure, maybe because they borrow all the clichés – these people felt like they were coming from a genuine future culture (or cultures). The bank itself, for that matter, with its mixed clientele and staff in African, Japanese and European couture – not to mention being a big old pyramid – came across as proper transgalactic, too.

Jonathan Bailey as Psi and Pippa Bennett-Warner as Saibra looked good in the roles and looked like they were having a good time doing it. I wouldn’t mind if the Doctor’s “call me” gesture to them at the end led to them returning.

Meanwhile, Keely Hawes is a wonderful and subtle actor playing both Ms Delphox and her boss Director Karabraxos, and managing to make the latter just slightly more human, ingeniously conveying the brittle, hollowness of the clone – again, online complaints that Ms Delphox is just a caricature, a typical Moffat “strong woman villain in black suit and heels” (to be fair, reinforced by Doctor Who Extra making the same point), fall down because that’s exactly what she’s supposed to be – it’s a choice that both confirms Karabraxos’ opinion of Delphox as a “pale imitation” while telling us that it’s possibly the powerlessness and fear of a literal firing that makes her a different person. It’s quite a clever take on the old nature versus nurture debate – Karabraxos puts it down to “nature”: she thinks the clones are by nature inferior to her original; she cannot entertain the possibility that she is not superior, merely lucky to be in the top position. Would she even have felt regrets if the Doctor hadn’t planted the idea in her head? Another paradox, but again, for me, a pleasant tease rather than an annoying flaw.

Anyway, if it is all about psychoanalysing the Doctor it might add some weight to the idea that “Missy” is indeed inside the Doctor’s head, and Clara’s references to the Doctor’s missing conscience resonate too. (Missy, missy, miss…ing? Nah.) This is the second week running without reference to the series arc – baring the briefest reminded about “the woman in the shop” who gave Clara the TARDIS telephone number, and that more as a lead-in to the unlikeliness of the phone ringing… ooh, it’s ringing…. But then this is the “hiding in plain sight” episode, so who knows what might come back to bite us.

If there’s a downside to the “a different story every week” format, it’s that you know from the outset that you’re going to get divided reactions to all of them. And I can see why this wouldn’t be for everyone, just as I can see why “Listen” pushed so many people’s buttons but not mine. It makes for a roller-coaster of a series, but one with Peter Capaldi at its heart and always dragging us back to see how he reacts to the next trick out of the bag. His superpower, clearly, is to be the centre of attention. It’s the eyebrows.

Next Time: We’ve done horror. We’ve done heist. Let’s try… a rom com. The horror! The horror! All that stands between the Doctor and a fateful meeting with Clara’s boyfriend is a guy in a bow tie. Oh, and a sort of clockwork owl on castors. With really big guns. There’s been a spillage! Call “The Caretaker”.

Day 5004: DOCTOR WHO: Nothing at the End of the Plot

Saturday:


"Listen" certainly seems to have pushed the right buttons for most fans of the show, garnering near universal praise from the online communities: an acting tour de force, an intricate character study, and the rest. So I know I'm in a minority on this one.

And there must be some irony there, because "Listen" is a shaggy dog story to which the punchline is "the Emperor has no clothes".

"Why has evolution not come up with perfect hiding?" asks the man who lives in a machine that does – or at least is supposed to do – exactly that.

"Why do we talk to ourselves when we know no one is listening?" he asks when he knows his machine listens to every work he says… and broadcasts them in episodic chunks on the BBC(!)

The story opens with this typical piece of Moffat sleight-of-hand, and he proceeds to run through his usual playbook of directing you to think one thing and then pulling the rug from under you. He does it twice with the identity of the person in the spacesuit, for example.

This is the episode's biggest cheat: the "monster" on the bed. No, the cheat isn't the "did we just save him from a kid in a blanket" line, it's that Clara – who just climbed under the bed to show there was nothing there – does not just whip the sheet off whatever it is. Or at least call out the Doctor for stopping her.

And again we have non-linear intervention in childhood creating someone's future. Clara here is appalled to think that she is now responsible for Danny's past as a soldier which she clearly has trouble relating to as all the misfiring jokes attest.

It ought to be clever, this lifting the veil on how we all change each other by our interactions but rarely see the consequences separated from them as we are by time.

But this is all so familiar now, after Reinette, Amelia, Kasran Sardick, Melody/River Song, and Clara herself. So when Clara ends up doing it again to the Doctor himself, forgive me I stifled a groan.

(With all the repeats of Moffat tropes in this I was tempted to call this "Listen Again"!)

And it very much raises again the issue of consent: how can it be okay for Clara to change people's past this way, which we can explicitly link to her continuing to hug the Doctor even though he has said he doesn't like it. The message here seems to be it's okay for a girl to do that to a man because he has to change, or more bluntly grow up and stop being afraid of that thing that happens in the dark and in beds.

More interesting, potentially, is when we see it flipped when Orson hints to Clara that she is the one caught in a destiny trap now, as it's pretty obvious that if she is Orson's great-grandmother, then she and Danny have to... Does that mean Clara has no free will? Or is that her choices – getting Danny to ask her out for this drink – have set a train of events in motion. After all, if you exercise free will to jump out the window, you can't blame gravity for your lack of further choices in what inevitably follows.

In Marvel's "Days of Future Past" – comic not movie version – or rather the much longer follow up strip "Days of Future Present", knowing that their child from the future means that they have to be together actually drives a couple further part. Is Orson Pink, by telling her and potentially putting her off Danny, creating a Grandfather Paradox? Not every Grandfather Paradox has to involve killing your (great) grand-parent.

But anyway, and speaking of paradox, the answer to the mystery is that the Doctor, by investigating his childhood dream, sort of caused it himself.

All of the rational explanations could just be true. (As long as you ignore the big cheat of the possibly-child on the bed.) The Doctor wrote "listen" on his blackboard himself and forgot, as he later accuses Clara of forgetting her own childhood. When your coffee goes missing, it might just be the Doctor. The knocking sounds on the door of Orson's time capsule might just be the metal cooling and shrinking.

Do we infer that the Doctor being a Time Lord (eventually) the events in that barn on, let's say it, Gallifrey, somehow "imprint" themselves on the Universe so that the dream is repeated throughout time? Or that it's a coincidence that Clara causes the child Doctor to experience what a lot of people have dreamed? Perhaps it's just that I have never had a dream remotely like that, and it bugs me that – once again – Moffat has taken his own experience as universal, rather than subjective. (See also, though more entertainingly, Clara and Danny retreading the autobiographical relationship paths of "Coupling"). And Moffat's life experience comes across as boys need to grow up and have relationships with girls; which is why girls need to force themselves upon him.

Thematically, the Doctor causing his own nightmare feels satisfying, but irritatingly it's another ontological paradox, another Moffat sticking himself in as first cause.

Alex was particularly irritated by Moffat expropriating "fear makes companions of us all", reducing the first Doctor from a wise old man to a parrot quoting parables, which is at least up there with "Timelash" suggesting that HG Wells never had an original idea he didn't copy from a trip with the Doctor. (Does that sound familiar?)
What most infuriated him was Moffat, for the millionth time, being so arrogant as to make a continuity reference and get it wrong because he assumes he must be right in everything and not need to spend a moment checking (starting with the "Time Agents" in his very first story – Greel assumesdoes not work). It's actually "Fear makes companions of all of us," but Moffat just assumes he's right. He's saying he wrote these words and he can't even write the right ones.

But I'm even more bugged by Moffat's own "fear is a superpower" (which he'd already used in "The Time of Angels") ending up a paradoxical "gift from time", as the New Adventures used to have it. Clara hears it first from the Doctor, then tells it to the child who will become the Doctor. So where did it come from?

Well possibly the TARDIS, taking him "where he needs to go", but still.

And we're also doing fan service, tying up three (and more) continuity points: the Doctor's worst day as recounted to Jo in "The Time Monster"; the moment, as he tells Martha in "The Sound of Drums", when as a child of eight he gazed in to the Untempered Schism; and the unasked question of why the War Doctor chose that particular barn in which to do the deed in "The Day of the Doctor". (With a side nod to not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords and just a hint of "Lungbarrow" and a family of cousins in "all the other boys".)

So it's another copying from Russell with more attempted justification for "I never stopped running", which I've never seen as right. He stopped long enough to go to the Academy and take his exams twice, didn't he? He took a TARDIS and went adventuring; that's more than just running away.


And if I'm being picky… the end of the Universe is not going to look like that. There's still a star in the sky! The Stelliferous Era – the Age of Stars – is going to last a hundred trillion years, but that is an eye-blink to a Universe that is going to go on a hundred trillion times a hundred trillion times longer. When the last star burns out, the sky will be full of black holes that eat most of everything that's left, and then slowly evaporate into Hawking Radiation. And once they're all gone, all that remains is dust that escaped the gravity wells infinitesimally gradually, over eons and eons, falling to bits by proton decay until there are only scattered photons barely warmer than absolute zero. The long, cold dark is very long and very cold indeed.

(Enough time even for me to get a few reviews done!)

And I know it's really not the point, but it does bug me that the "things that come out in the dark" don't even get to wait for the real dark.

Unless, unless… could it even be deliberate – that though we're told it's things coming out of the dark, the truth is that things come out of the pink? And the message is don't listen – don't blink – to what you're told and instead use your eyes to make your own observations…

"Listen" is full of the Doctor and Clara making mistakes, but because they don't tell each other what they know, actively deny each other information – the Doctor orders Clara back into the TARDIS; Clara makes the Doctor take off from Gallifrey without knowing where he's been – then they don't learn from this. If Clara had just explained she'd been distracted and piloted them into in Danny's childhood, not her own… If she'd said something about what she suspects is her timeline's connection to Orson… if she'd just told the Doctor "I may have just accidentally caused your dream" then… well, the plot would have collapsed like a bubble of air.

And because the direction cuts away, we don't get the whole picture of either of their points of view either. Did the Doctor see anything when that door opened? Why does he seem to feel the plot is resolved at the end when he underlines the word "listen" on his chalkboard? (Particularly when he missed the key revelation to Clara.) Either he's just been a bit of an idiot or she has. Occam's razor: Moffat has.

These ambiguities are what the series is playing on at the moment, a more metaphorical take on "Who", perhaps, than the season six arc, but it's still all bit "ooh, I'm so ambiguous, I am. Or am I?"

Fear is more complicated than a super-power (and more common: we can't all fly. That's why that's called a super-power): it can paralyse as well as empower; it can make us procrastinate as well as set us running; it can be an incredibly conservative force – as we've seen in the Scottish referendum, only most recently. Clara's fear of embarrassment (perhaps to partially redeem what I said above) drives her failure to explain – and disarm – the plot to the Doctor. But not everything in life can be a farce. Part of the illusion of "Listen" is that it uses the series' history and quotes, and Moffat's usual storytelling gimmicks, to dress up Robert Holmes' riposte to Mary Whitehouse about scaring the little buggers as though it's something profound.

And "sometimes it's good to scared" is fine as far as it goes but it just isn't that profound.

A lot of it is very, very good. Jenna Coleman is outstanding, whether it's being brave for Rupert Pink when something sits on the bed or realising just what she's done when she grabs the child Doctor's ankle. The direction manages to take some shonky stock horror scenarios and make them genuinely tense or tender or even moving as required. Samuel Anderson as Danny Pink is much more interesting than your usual male Doctor Who companion – or male Moffat character for that matter – with a habit of emotional hand-break turns that suggests something broken and an interesting past even (or especially) before Clara starts messing with it. The one outstanding visual of the episode – the Doctor's zen meditation atop the orbiting TARDIS – will stay in the mind for a long time. And Capaldi himself dances a line between terrifying and hilarious, and continues to give his Doctor an alien, not quite getting it vibe, and terrible, aching yearning to know.

But still we end with the Emperor telling us that there was nothing under the bed, it was all just scary misdirection, he has no clothes on. Which is at least a cheeky admission of sorts, I suppose.

Next time: Let's do this properly by crashing the TARDIS into someone else's genre, or in this case Doctor Who does "Hustle". Take the money or open the box? In "Time Heist".

Day 4993: DOCTOR WHO: Carry On – Don’t Lose Your Head

Saturday:

There are two problems with my writing a review of "Robot of Sherwood". Pressure of work is one, and the other is that beyond saying it was laugh-out-loud hilarious but that ending with the golden arrow is a total fail, what is there to say? And everyone else has said those things already.

Capaldi is a great comic actor, and here he's at his most Malcolm Tucker-alike, especially in the exchanges with Robin in the dungeon. Dressed in black, getting robbed by Robin Hood, he's very nearly the villain for the first act, particularly the "thwarted again" face Capaldi pulls when dunked in the stream. Which is great, but might be a danger. He's got such range, it might be better to let him find new ways of being funny, rather than writing for the Doctor as the acerbic spin doctor. Shades of writing for Bonnie Langford as "Bonnie Langford".

The message was a bit blunt force trauma as well: Clara spells it out before they've even left the TARDIS; Robin hammers the point home at the end. Yes, we get it, the Doctor is a hero, one of the iconic figures of British myth, to stand alongside Arthur, Gloriana and Sherlock. And of course, Robin.

Having spent a year deconstructing his own legend because it cast too long a shadow, though, his denial that Robin could be real just didn't ring true. He's not a stupid man; he would see the reflection. If the Doctor had been trying to tell Clara "you'll be disappointed; heroes never live up to the legend" it would have fit more with this newly self-doubting Doctor. His initial friction towards and mockery of Robin would have had a more solid foundation in his own psyche. And the journey towards liking the outlaw, seeing the man under the bluster, would have been more personal, of self-acceptance.

It was a good story for Clara. For once – finally – I could see the "control freak" tendencies. Though what happened to "my only pin up was Marcus Aurelius"? Squeeing over a Robin Hood is a lot closer to "young men performing sport" than "flirting with a mountain range". But the moments where she allows Tom Riley to uncover that Robin is more than just that guy whose laughing face you want to punch bring out the good teacher in her. And the scene between her and Ben Miller's delicious Sheriff of Nottingham, where she turns the tables and convinces him to tell her everything was excellent for the character. Very reminiscent of the Doctor doing something similar in the one really great scene from Gatiss's earlier "The Idiot's Lantern"; clearly Mark writes a good interrogation.

Though it's a shame the full reveal of the Sheriff's cyborg nature was dropped for entirely sensible reasons, as it would have added the twist that he lied to her too. Miller was a great villain as the Sheriff, just the right side of over-the-top ham. And I liked that he would undercut some of the more ludicrous clichés – "You'll live to regret that... actually, no you won't", or "that would be a ridiculous plan". Like Robert de Rainault of "Robin of Sherwood", or Blackadder (to Robin's Lord Flashheart) he brings the sensibilities of the modern viewer to the land of make believe. The (pardon the pun) cut slightly derailed a more interesting twist that he'd been literally rebuilt in the image of the legend. Though, again, the story could have done with a little tightening – if the robot knights had made themselves a Sheriff in response to a real Robin Hood, it could have tied up some of the story's contradictions.

Essentially, the story sets us up to expect this to be a fool. It's too good to be true, too true to the legend to be good.

And the scene where Robin goes into the moat with Clara – and is under for a long time – and then emerges carrying her Frankenstein fashion... That and the flip archery certainly look like they're trying to tell us he's a robot too.

So we keep expecting the other shoe to drop. And it doesn't . I suppose I should be praising that, given how absolutely by the numbers Gatiss ticks off the key Robin Hood plot points. But dramatically it feels off. If Robin were real but everything else faked by the robots reacting to him based on their faulty foreknowledge, that could work. But it's not. The Merrie Men are real, the splitting the arrow archery is for real (at least Robin's is). Yes, we get a bit of hand waving about the radiation leak making Sherwood CinemaScope green, but that's to explain something the Doctor's quibbled about rather than a cohesive story element.

The spaceship that disguises itself as a castle is very proto-TARDIS, a point that nothing is made of. And then there's that bit with the arrow. Was it scripted that the arrow should fly through that hole the robots had blasted earlier and strike the controls? (People who've read the leaked scripts will know.)

Obviously Gatiss has been going through those Robin Hood moments – the log over the river, the archery contest, the big fight with the Sheriff – but all nicely undercut and peppered with references to the Pertwee era, clearly a Gatiss favourite. Mention of miniscopes, and Capaldi's hilarious "Hai!" karate chop. But the biggest influence is season eleven opener "The Time Warrior", to the point I was expecting Dan Starkey to cameo as Field Marshal Swag on video link to the spaceship control room, demanding what they were doing with the Sontaran's robot knights. Which might be why the conclusion – shoot the arrow; castle explodes – deviates from the Hood myth (King Richard arrives to put all to rights. ish).

Or it's just as crushingly banal as the end of "The Shakespeare Code" (must use historical guest star's "superpower" to resolve plot. Somehow).

Only a brief nod to the arc this week. Or maybe two, if the Doctor's chalk and calculations are going somewhere. Obviously we've got more robots looking for "the Promised Land". Where, indeed, do all the calculators go? Which may or may not be Missy's heaven. It seems to be a real place though, which might count against the rather good theory I heard from The Pharos Project podcast: "heaven" is inside the Doctor's head, a place where he's remembering all the people he's killed. Making Missy his conscience. Which would be why she's a bit... broken. (Missy... My self... Nah!)

As for the Gallifreyan math... Obligatory Lawrence Miles reference: in "Interference" (book 2, I think) the eighth Doctor uses Gallifreyan written maths to create a fold in time. It has been argued that the twelfth Doctor might be doing the same, trying to engineer a backpack door into wherever Gallifrey is now, beyond the "crack". Presumably, Heaven.

None of which is to detract from the fact that this made me laugh. A lot. And on second viewing too. The sword v spoon fight is very Doctor Who. As is staging a genuine peasants' revolt and overthrowing the feudal tyrants. Nice nod to Troughton. The Sheriff is a hit. Clara is much more than a pretty dress. Robin is a true hero. Oh yes, and the Doctor is a hero too.

Next Time: the one with the scary poetry, the one with the thing in the corner of your eye, the one with something under the bed, the one with companion in the timey-wimey spacesuit... It's the most terrifying story... "Doctor Who and the Tropes of Moffat"! No, listen...