Day 6202: DOCTOR WHO: Steven Moffat’s The Abominable Bride

Christmas


Last Christmas… was the Doctor Who Christmas Special from two years ago, but last Christmas we got “The Husbands of River Snog”, and this year – to save you from tears – I’m going to review the Special from last Christmas. Which isn’t “Last Christmas”. Are you with me so far?

Time can be rewritten. And so can Doctor Who Christmas Specials. The human colony of Mendorax Dellora, as charming and Christmassy a redressing of the sets from “Face the Raven” as you could ask for, feels a lot like a return to earlier Moffat Christmases, whether Sardiktown in “A Christmas Carol” or the town of Christmas in (shudders) “The Time of the Doctor”; the crashing spaceship is reminiscent of the also-meteor-struck Titanic in “Voyage of the Damned” or more apropos the crash of the Byzantium in “The Time of Angels” or Amy and Rory’s honeymoon liner in (again!) “A Christmas Carol”. Crashing spaceships are the new “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”. You start to get the feeling Mr Moffat’s doing this deliberately.


Steven Moffat, the Grand Moff, has always treated the story of Doctor Who as a palimpsest, even his own works, going back again and again to re-write and over-write what has been before. And always, it seems, to reject closure. He’s never happy to just live with things that end. Even his most famous killer monsters, the Weeping Angels don’t kill – they send you back in time for more life. He’s going to be inconsolable when he has to finally hand over to Chibnall. He’s forever reaching for that get-out clause, to – as the Eighth Doctor might put it – hold back death. Whether it’s rewriting the end of the Time War to save Gallifrey, or going literally to the end of all the Worlds to snatch an endlessly extended extra moment from Clara’s death.

This time he even has his own creation, River Song, accuse him of doing it:

“There’s always a loophole. You wait until the last minute and then you spring it on me. […]
But you will. You'll wait until I've given up hope. All will be lost, and you'll do that smug little smile and then you'll save the day. You always do.”

The life of River Song was always bounded by the fact that it ended where it began back at the Library. Even then, he wouldn’t let her go, giving her a cyber-heaven to inhabit. OR even come back from, in “The Name of the Doctor”.

And he does the same thing again here, giving River and the Doctor one last night together, at the Singing Towers on Darillium… and then teasing it out to twenty-four years. Eventually we’ll have to stop renewing and just return!

In a way, though, it is very Doctor-ish, to keep cheating death, tricking his way out of death.

But you only get a commendation for reprogramming the Kobayahi Maru the first time.


Having said all that, the opportunity to do a screwball comedy across time and space with two of the finest actors working today, written by an author with genuine talent for farce, does kind of make the exercise worthwhile.

All the time they are on the screen together is delightful. Their timing, their chemistry, their obvious enjoyment of the fun they are having.

The supporting cast – makes shrugging gesture – mm, less so.

I’ve never been that taken with Greg Davies, nor the brand of shouty acting that he’s been asked to deliver for the role of King Hydroflax here. Like someone who’s seen Brian Blessed but not understood the subtlety of menace that he can bring to, say, Caesar Augustus, a role that Hydroflax ought to resemble. But, he’s actually there as a slapstick prop, a head-in-a-bag to be tossed about like the quips that Capaldi and Kingston exchange, so I was still laughing out loud at pretty much every scene he was in.

More distressingly, Matt Lucas’s as Nardole was quickly quite irritating: whiny and snivelling and just not given very funny things to do or say. Which is a shame as he’s the one returning this year, though thankfully he appears to have – somehow – got his body back.

I did, however, enjoy the outrageously oleaginous Maître D’, Flemming, played by Rowan Polonski. It’s through his delicious banality of evil that we understand that the passengers of the starship Harmony and Redemption – arrived at in a sudden plot swerve halfway through – don’t believe in harmony and don’t deserve redemption.

And Mr Scratch, River Song’s buyer – not quite Doctor Who versus Scratchman, but whose flip-top head seems very lifted from the New Adventure “All-Consuming Fire” – was very nicely sinister, in a Colony Sarf sort of a way.

But Kingston and Capaldi make a glorious double act. For him, it’s a joy to see the Doctor laughing and grinning his way through the adventure, getting to be the companion, enjoy doing the “bigger on the inside” right, and be the one who knows more than River, just this once. For her, there’s such a range of new and different facets of the character to portray: the lies within lies, or perhaps it’s not lies, it’s acting. When we first meet her, she’s playing Darth Vader, sweeping down the boarding ramp in flowing cloak; then she’s role-playing devoted wife – and so over the top we’re sure she’s not very good at it; then it’s the cold assassin, plotting a decapitation with whom she assumes is a pliantly complicit barber-surgeon; then she’s heroically angry with Hydroflax the butcher for his theft from the Halassi of the diamond that’s stuck in his cranium… and that’s all in the five minutes on board the joyfully retro flying saucer (nice that King Hydroflax can accessorise his spaceship and his robot body, by the way – though I suppose he does have plenty of cash…)

What River’s acting does – and the Doctor notes this when he asks “Is this what you’re like when I’m not about?” – is to flag up the way this story is about different perspectives.

Hydroflax, for example, on the one hand he’s worshipped by millions; on the other he’s loathed as a monster; or the Doctor just thinks he’s a moron; and in the end his own robot body decides he’s just rotting meat.

The passengers on the Harmony and Redemption: are they innocent travellers, as we at first assume? Or are they killers and planet burners, as River tells us? Or are they a cult of Hydroflax followers as they reveal themselves to be?

Even the diamond, the Halassi Androvar, the McGuffin that drives the plot, to the Doctor it’s just downpayment on a dinner date.

And so River herself. Which perspective of her do we take away? Hero or villain? Archaeologist or thief? Righteous or rogue? Warrior or wife? As many faces as, well, as she has husbands.

And what about Moffat? Does he keep coming back and rewriting or is he still trying to capture different perspectives on the same ideas? When – like Big Finish – he inserts more and more stories into tinier and tinier gaps, when he gives Clara immortality in her last heartbeat, is he fishing from an infinitely tiny well or like a fractal unfolding discovering infinite regress within the snowflakes?

Does it even matter so long as it’s fun?


“Happy ever after” doesn’t mean forever, River tells us, just for some time. Perhaps it would be better put as “they lived ever happy after”. But some things even Moffat cannot rewrite.

Merry Christmas.

Day 5417: DOCTOR WHO: Invasion of the Blobby Snatchers

Saturday:


Last year, we loved Peter Harness's "Kill the Moon". This was, er, a controversial opinion. (No, that's not an invitation to tell me again why I am wrong.) Perhaps, having everyone read an allegory that wasn't there into his previous work, you might think he'd be more cautious. Not a bit. This year, we're putting the subtext into the text so blatantly that nobody's going to get the wrong message. (I bet they do get the wrong message.)

But it's always a relief to be able to give an honest review to people you know. And this was terrific.

In fact, at the risk of offending Millennium, this was as globetrotting as SpECTRE – from London's London (Cardiff) to American New Mexico to vaguely Middle-Eastern Walesistan (Snowdon) – but with actual plot twists and character development.

With is extra-pressing to get my guesses for "Next Time" in before the sequel airs tonight, I'll be cutting this sort and may repost with more thoughts later…

This has a longer-ago "Previously on Doctor Who" than most, which makes you worry that Mr The Hurt Doctor is going to turn up at the end and have a Zygon burst out of his chest. Anyway, the Prologue: Previously in "Batman the Movie" (Made From the TV Series for Movie Theatres), at the United World Organisation (not the United Nations for legal reasons), the hostile territorial powers all mixed up who they were and so performed unprecedentedly perfect peace negotiations, summed up by Batman with, “Who… knows, Robin? This strange mixing of minds may be the greatest single service ever performed for humanity.” No, sorry, I’ll start that again. Previously in Doctor Who the (not the) TV Movie (Available At Limited Movie Theatres), at the Unified Intelligence Taskforce (not the United Nations for legal reasons), the hostile space powers all mixed up who they were and so performed unprecedentedly perfect peace negotiations, summed up by a man we all recognise despite his assuming a secret identity with, “Who… knows…?” Er…

So, did I say Agincourt was topical for "The Woman Who Lived"? Let's talk terrorism while the UK celebrates Guy Fawkes. And a Happy Homeland Security Day to all of you at home.

And, did I say they were doing "big ideas" this year?

From the earliest "scientific romances" of Mr H G Wells, science fiction has been about things, in fact about the present much more than the future. ("The Time Machine" is about the class struggle; "War of the Worlds" is "How would Britain like it if someone did Imperialism to them?")

And it couldn't be more topical. The Zygons are refugees. Their homeworld (I call it "Zygospore", 'cos that's the way I like to roll) was known to have been blown up as early as 1975's "Terror of the Zygons", but we were told in "The Day of the Doctor" that it was in the early days of the Time War – which of course began, if you think about it, two stories earlier in "Genesis of the Daleks".

So, in a time when some parts of Europe are greeting people fleeing conflict and destruction with "Refugees Welcome" banners while other parts (Britain, shamefully) are grudgingly suggesting they will take the bare minimum people they can, we see an Earth that agreed to take twenty million refugee Zygons.

But, as in the best of sci-fi, the baddies here have something of a point: the Zygons haven't been welcomed to Earth; they're only allowed to live here so long as they integrate. Their own culture has been suppressed and they themselves are forced to adopt human form if they want to live here. They are tolerated so long as they are "passing", as the old phrase would go – when the only "good" homosexuals were the ones you couldn't tell, not like those dreadful camp gays and drag queens(!).

And the response of the "heroes" – all guns and drone strikes – is not coming down on the side of "heroic". I loved the Zygons being their own human shields (even if all the UNIT soldiers falling for the Zygon gambit is excessively dumb, even for UNIT). Even the Doctor is saying "try not to kill too many". Unless that's a clue for next week (see speculation).

Does any of that excuse the "radicalised" faction going all ISIS on UNIT? Well, today we celebrate the Stonewall riots – though in fact today's self-styled "Stonewall" are the most "moderate" (read milksop) face of LGBT rights movement – and we sometimes only think of the more spiritual Martin Luther King's side of the civil rights movement in America.

ISIS are evil. But they aren't just evil. Likewise, the Zygon revolutionaries are not black and white baddies. (No, they're sort of orange… sorry!)


…anyway, time to skip to the speculation on how this might turn out!


Next Time… No next time trailer at all, which suggests spoilers, but it's called the Zygon Inversion so… They're ALL Zygons, aren’t they? All the UNIT people, anyway – hence operating out of a UNIT safe house instead of the Tower of London; hence evil-Clara saying "kill the traitors" rather than "kill the humans" – and maybe even the Doctor after doing a deal with the Zygon High Command – hence travelling by plane rather than TARDIS (isomorphic – one-to-one; or just not wanting a Zygon to be titivating the console). The importance of this would be to make the entire point of the episode: you didn't even notice the "good" Zygons, only the "evil" ones.

Day 5410: DOCTOR WHO: …the Lion Was Flawed

Saturday:


I wanted to call this "outstanding and delivering", but in fairness, it wasn't quite as amazing as part one. The plot was more… generic: Leo the Lion and his "surprise" invasion twist, leaning heavily on 2005's "The Unquiet Dead", which also features a rift opened by death. But that wasn't the point.

This was all about why Maisie Williams was essential to the role of Ashildr/Lady Me. You might have thought that that Viking maid was familiar from "Game of Thrones"; but here we see the range of her talent as she evolves from Arya Stark to Cersei Lannister.

We've met a race of extra-dimensional leonids before in "Doctor Who": the Tharils of E-Space in Season Eighteen, and so it was a shame that "Leandro" didn't turn out to be a Tharil from their early buccaneering, slaving days. And surely "Leandro" (Lion Man) is just Lady Me coming up with a suitable Anglicised (or Latinised) name for him – surely she's not dumb enough to fall for it if it's his own made-up name for himself. Plus it was jolly nice of his fellows to blow him up at the end, especially after missing so many of the locals. (Who, in fact, are Londoners – does no one remember that Tyburn Tree is at Marble Arch? Which in fairness would have been fields at the time, but it does seem no one remembers the "town" nearby is London.)

But cursory as these lion/invasion plot elements were, though, they were key to Lady Me's story: as she's become more and more like the Doctor she just wants to run away. (And one of the best lines of the episode is: "I'm not looking for a husband, you oaf. I'm looking for a horse to get me out of town.")

A life of centuries rather than being full, has become empty. That's not particularly an original observation, and the lesson that the Doctor gives to Me – that immortals need the "mayflies" – is all very "Interview with the Vampire", but that's perfectly appropriate for the gothic romance of a tale like this.

There's a wonderfully playful way that the episode toys with non-binary gender in Maisie Williams' character. In part one, we had already heard her as Ashildr talk about how she was too boyish for the girls and too much a girl for the boys, but still found acceptance in her village. But now we see her switching comfortably between roles as the (male – in presentation, particularly doing the voice) highwayman "The Knightmare"* and the (female – in presentation, particularly the very-off-the-shoulder dress) "Lady Me". Delightfully, the Doctor doesn't appear to see anything at all odd about this. This idea of gender as fluid, optional, as performance even, is very Seventeenth Century, all rakish and Restoration (perhaps a little late, timewise for here, but very in with the romances of the era) but also brings us back to the idea of "gods" and "immortals" choosing to grace us in human form.

(*Yes, apparently K is for Kow in any language; it really is spelled with a "K")

And, just as Lady Me switches from one persona to another, so the episode flips between "highwayman as latter-day Robin Hood or carousing adventurer" larks and "melancholic contemplation of a life not even remembered".

The triumphs and tragedies of her life, from Agincourt (broadcast a day before the 600th anniversary of St Crispin's Day 1415!) to Plague, that we glimpse as the Doctor literally rummages through the pages of her memories are all the more poignant because she herself no longer has them, none more so than the pages ripped out – an extreme version of Bernice Summerfield (from the "New Adventures") and her post-it note bedecked diaries.

(Not quite sure how she lugs them all from place to place every time she fakes her own death, though. And, in "Castrovalva" fashion, the earliest volumes, with uncertain handwriting, are still as beautifully bound as the most recent, which takes quite some doing.)

Not all of the comedy works. The comedy guards come to arrest the Doctor don't half feel like a Shakespearean walk-on gag. The house-breaking goes on perhaps just a bit too long. But it's not just comic relief. It's as vital to the story as the silly lion invasion plot, the idea that life has this vital spark. Sam Swift's desperate gag-cracking, the very (I'm sure deliberately acted) imperfections of the delivery adding to the feel he is cracking jokes as though his life depends on it, convincingly sells the premise of the story.

The contrast is between Lady Me's ennui – epitomised by the way Leandro is just using people; a trap she too falls into until she's turned around – and Rufus Hound's charmingly rough-edged rogue Sam Swift the Quick (not just overcompensating: his name puns on "Quick" as opposed to "Dead", and his swift, brief life). Sam cracks puns on the scaffold literally buying himself more seconds of life with his words because life is so important to him. Lady Me just saw him as a resource not to let go to waste: he was going to die anyway, so why not use him? The fact that the failure of her plans sees her rediscover that she cares, and that she saves Sam to set things right is a little vindication of the Doctor's position.

Of course it's more complicated than that. The Doctor knows that on the most superficial level he did a good thing in saving Ashildr as a girl. He also knows that, given human nature, it had the potential to turn to a really bad thing. But, on an even deeper level, that simply taking her off in the TARDIS and going adventuring with her might lead to an even worse thing, for both of them. And indeed the Universe. While the Doctor makes a number of arguments to Lady Me, Capaldi conveys all this deeper knowledge with a series of looks and postures and an air of "I've been here before and tried all the ways out of this conundrum", until only at the end is Me in a position to understand the lesson properly.

If you've seen Season Two of Game of Thrones you know already that Maisie Williams can hold her own in a scene with Charles Dance. The power relationship between Doctor and Lady Me is more evenly balanced here – indeed, who has the upper hand and who is sidekick is another thread running through the story – but it still takes some mighty acting chops to go head to head with Capaldi in these long often brutal conversation scenes.

And while it's clear that he's been "dropping in" to check up on here – much as the tenth Doctor did his tour of all his past companions – it's clearly not enough to see what it is she's been losing along the way.

The notion that the human brain isn't big enough to contain all the memories of an immortal life struck me as novel and tragic (though actually, it occurs to me, there's a bit, also from the early "New Adventures", where the Doctor filters his memories through the TARDIS and edits them down a bit because even his brain – larger on the inside, presumably – can get too full). I wondered subsequently if Captain Jack – assuming he really is the Face of Boe, and it's not just Rusty's little joke – evolved into an enormous head as a different solution to the same problem. (Hilariously, the actual Face of Boe – or the voice of, anyway, is Struan Rodger who also appears in this episode.)

And speaking of Jack – interesting that it takes the former "Torchwood" writer Catherine Tregenna to bring him up again; it would be nice to see Barrowman come back (commitment to "Twang!" "Arrow" allowing) and maybe explore Captain Jack's missing memories after all these years – but was anyone else disappointed that when the Doctor said he'd travelled with another immortal it wasn't Romana he was thinking of (after all, if he can mention the Terileptils in passing…)

Because, oddly enough, even though many would say the Tom Baker/Lalla Ward pairing is one of the finest in the series' history, it's also been observed that the two Time Lords together do rather swan about the Universe with increasing disdain for the mortals through whose lives they career. To the extent that if Season Seventeen is mainly about them gadding about having a really really good time, then Season Eighteen – Tharils and all – is, you might suggest, about the real world slapping the Doctor very firmly in the face as a result.


So is this a two-parter? I'm a little caught by my own rules here. Because I take the "To Be Continued…" at the end of "Utopia" to indicate that that episode is the start of a three-parter, I should, in fairness, concede that this is part two and "The Girl Who Died" is part one. Even though, really, they feel more like one episode and its sequel. On the other hand, Alex's feeling – which I find myself strongly in agreement with – was that this episode developed characters and ideas while leaving many plot threads hanging… in other words it feels much more like "The Sound of Drums", i.e. a part two of three.

Does it not, after all, feel as though some elements here have been set up for future pay-off: the appearance of Ashildr/Me in Clara's present day, could she end up being the Minister of War alluded to in "Before the Flood", or the question of how (or whether) she relates to that prophesied "hybrid".

And looked at the other way, the Doctor wanders into this situation clearly in the middle of other business and after dropping Clara off. Time, for him, as passed too – we don't know how long, but we know he's had time to at least look in on Ashildr's progress (and leper colony-founding activities) – meaning that it is only the audience who perceive these stories as juxtaposed.

It might therefore have been even better if there had been another (pair of) episodes in between. Maybe something with, I don't know, Zygons in it?

Next time… Oh look! Something with Zygons in it! Fair warning: I've met the author. Will he be as controversial as last year's space dragon? Expect double trouble, in "The Zygon Invasion".

Day 5403: DOCTOR WHO: The Mouse that Roared…

Saturday:


We loved this. "Doctor Who" doing all the things right I thought the previous story got wrong: seizing on a "big" idea – here the meaning and consequences of immortality – and exploring it while telling a tale with humour and excitement.

It's the entire Tenth Doctor era in a single episode: from the hubris when the Doctor and companion think they're invincible; to the aching regret for "losing"; to the flashback of Donna reminding the Doctor to save people; to the Doctor's "Time Lord Victorious" moment of defiant anger against "the rules"; to the buyer's regret that followed.

The idea of "immortality" and "gods" was grounded from the very start with a few meditations on Clarke's Law (that's the one about higher science being indistinguishable from magic): first with the Doctor's bragging getting those wretched sonic sunglasses snapped (tragically, it won't last); then contrasting the Doctor's yoyo Odin with the Monty Python-referencing sky hologram; building up to the Doctor's great punchline: "the thing about gods is they never show up!"

(And he's masqueraded as a deity before now, as early as being "Zeus" for "The Myth Makers". They didn't believe him either.)

The uber-macho baddies this week, in their enormously butch armour (but pleasingly "Star Wars" "lived in"), literally live off of testosterone. Obviously subtle they do not do. Though it does make me think someone has been reading Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's "About Time 3" with its essay on "what does the mind of evil eat" (clue: they guess it's testosterone, because "evil" is a bit too spiritual for them, though nowadays it would be the artron energy/fairy dust that powers everything from the TARDIS to regenerations).

These villains are the Mire, though on first watching – or before seeing it written down anywhere – I heard it as "Maia", as in Tolkien's name for the choirs of angelic or demi-godly being who populate the Undying Lands of Valinor in his Silmarillion /Lord of the Rings "Legendarium" ur-myth cycle. They, in fact, are not real gods either.

But thematically, this goes right back to (ironically, since he was the author of last time's disappointment) Toby Whithouse's "School Reunion", which explored the Doctor's reason's for running away from his past companions, while even earlier "New Earth" had already dubbed the tenth Doctor as "The Lonely God", which in turn foreshadows his shipper-pleasing anguish over losing Rose in "Doomsday".

(I've often felt that Murray Gold's "Song for Ten" from "The Christmas Invasion" fully prefigures the tenth Doctor's life with its refrain of "today has been the best day" – with his first day being his best day and all the days after that just laying more regrets on him.)

Capaldi's twelfth Doctor gets to revisit that with his talk of "losing", itself now foreshadowing Clara's inevitable departure.

And when the Doctor said he would "do what I always do: get in my box and run away", I wondered if this was linking Clara's leaving to another of the themes that seem to be "arcing" though this season – Davros was hinting about the Doctor's reasons for running away from Gallifrey in the first place and Missy underlined it by reminding the Doctor that he was always the one who ran away. Is Steven Moffat suggesting that the Doctor left Gallifrey after a personal loss? Might that be the fate of Susan's parents, perhaps? Or the Master's daughter? Or is that too deep down the fanwank rabbit hole?

Going even further, I did speculate vaguely that we see the villagers, with their electromagnetic anvils, managed to capture three of the Mire helmets – so presumably there are three "medical kits", meaning that the Doctor could have kept a third for himself, or rather for himself to give to Clara. Giving rise to the possibility that the Clara Oswin Oswald in "Asylum of the Daleks" is not another "splinter" but an ontologically paradoxical future version of this Clara. Is Clara's destiny to be this hybrid we seem to be insisting on teeing up as the Season's Big Bad?

Or is that going to be everybody? Clara, Ashildr/Me, [spoilers] Osgood of the Zygons etc… We are all hybrids in a way: an admixture of our mothers and fathers, our friends and our culture; an alchemical combination of beast and angel, dust and stories.

Except, granting Clara immortality too would very much seem to go against the mood in which the Doctor found himself just moments after curing (or cursing) Ashildr.

Ashildr as the "potent storyteller" and the idea of "story" as "lifeforce" (in that it implicitly takes all of hers to defeat the Mire) are threads deeply woven into the Moffat era, reminiscent of Amy "remembering" the Doctor's story back into being in "The Big Bang". I'll talk more about her and Maisie William's performance when I write about the second episode. It's clear that she's being set up as a reflection of the Doctor – an alternative take on the toll of immortality.

And we see the Doctor literally reflecting quite a lot this episode, reflecting on his new face in the eels' water barrels, linking into the flashbacks to "Deep Breath" and to "The Fires of Pompeii".

Incidentally, it's nice that some of the minor call-backs also work with the immortality theme: the use of the third Doctor's "neutron flow" catchphrase (and a fourth Doctor-esque self-parodying deconstruction of it); or the reappearance of the 2000-year (formerly 500-year and 900-year) diary; maybe, if you want to take it that way, even the "space helmet for a cow" Viking outfits… these aren't just fanboy-pleasing nods but reminders of just how long the Doctor has been at this gig.

Equally, contrasting the Doctor's age and knowledge with the insight he gets from listening to a baby – and that it's listening to the baby that inspires him to decide to stay – also works to the theme of immortals needing mortals. After all it was Donna Noble's humanity in "The Runaway Bride" and again in "The Fire of Pompeii", in the very moment that we return to here, that managed to shake the Doctor out of his cosmic detachment and reconnect him to the world. And taking the gag about the Doctor speaking baby from "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Closing Time" and turning it into lyrical poetry was transcendent.

But here is where we get the answer to the question that "Deep Breath" posed – why this face? Or at least we get an answer. It's quite a good answer – quick and tidy with no intrusive timey-wimey arcs. But is it possible that the Doctor takes the wrong lesson from his reflection? After all, Donna's plea was not to save everyone just because he could, but to save someone when he couldn't save everyone; he goes way beyond that here, and seems to realise it.

What really sets "The Girl Who Died" above is the way that it deftly pivots between these deep, even morbid considerations, and outright slapstick comedy – whether it's the Doctor's "it's meant to do that" yoyo-fail, the jump-cut to the burning village, or the yakety-sax footage of the Mire's ignominious flight from Ashildr's puppet. This would be really hard going if it was as "serious" or "grimdark" as some of the fans might prefer. Instead, by leavening it with memorable funnies, Moffat and Mathieson mean it will, I hope, linger longer in the memories.

Next time… Who is that masked, er, person. Oh, you guessed. It's "The Woman Who Lived"

Day 5396: DOCTOR WHO: Under the Whelm

Saturday:


So the Doctor begins the episode by giving us a lecture on the Ontological Paradox – or as he calls it the "Bootstrap" Paradox, as in Baron Munchausen lifting himself into the air by pulling up on his own bootstraps because it's the "it happened because it happened" with no visible cause or means of support one.

He does this by means of an extended metaphor about Beethoven and you think "ah, clever – Beethoven was deaf and one of our characters is deaf and the ghosts are mute so this is going to be relevant". Only it's not.

And that's typical of why this episode disappointed me. It's full of clever or intriguing or just plain well-designed things, which it holds up for us to examine and then does nothing with. Certainly it never weaves its plot-points into anything that meaningfully amounts to a story.

It looks great: the empty, abandoned village, with its Soviet Russia dressings, haunted by Cold War ghosts (before we get the electromagnetic ghosts, but again no one tries to draw a connection).

But it's full of signifiers that don't signify anything.

The title, for starters, "Before the Flood" suggests an allegory or myth: in Biblical terms, perhaps, it could refer to the age after Eden when we had become sinners over that business with the apple and the talking snake, corrupt and degenerate before God sent Noah's flood to literally clean up our act. It was a time of "great wickedness" when there were "giants" in the World.

Were the Nineteen-Eighties an "age of great wickedness"? Is the monstrous Fisher King a "giant"?

Or is there no metaphor here, only the literal: we have travelled back in time to before the valley was flooded?

It doesn't drive the plot or fit to any kind of narrative that writer Toby Whithouse is constructing. Is it just so that the Doctor can blow up that damn dam in the certainty that there are "no Thals left on Skaro"?

Similarly, why is the big bad named The Fisher King, after a significant if minor character in the Arthurian myth cycle? Surely it's not just because he's a fish?

The Arthurian Fisher King is wounded (read: emasculated) and his kingdom is blighted because king and kingdom are spiritually linked. The knight Sir Percival spends a night at the Fisher King's keep and is granted a vision of the Holy Grail, which has the power to heal the king and hence the land. When he wakes, the castle is deserted as though long abandoned.

This foreshadows the darkening of Camelot when Lancelot and Guinevere betray Arthur – in some readings the Fisher King is Arthur – and the king and kingdom are likewise spiritually wounded, precipitating the Grail Quest where all the knights go off to look for the cup, ultimately leaving Camelot so weakened that Mordred is able to take over.

There are elements of that here: the village is long abandoned, say. But does that amount to anything?

Is the Fisher King in "Before the Flood" supposed to be an Alien Arthur, sent to Earth as Avalon to be healed and return to the stars as their "Once and Future King"?

Because he looks a lot more like a big stompy monster.

Again, it looks pretty impressive, in an after-Geiger fashion, but what's it supposed to mean?

He's given a handful of lines to make his place in the plot seem bigger than he is – knowledge of the Time War and all. But he really does very little.

Addressing – recognising – the Doctor as "Time Lord" (and along with the Soviet trappings) makes me think of "The Curse of Fenric". But the reason that "Fenric" as story was powerful (and Fenric, in-story too come to think of it) was the way it wove together elements from previous adventures into something that actually gave greater meaning to those events, repainting Ace and the Doctor's exploits together as a bigger chess game for her very soul pitted against an ancient Lovecraftian god. Here it's more like the baddie has read the series' PR bible.

Peter Serafinowicz who provides the voice of the Fisher King previously did the same for Darth Maul in "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace". And, as on that occasion, gets all of three lines before being unceremoniously offed. Here it's by being hit in the face by the titular flood.

Unless, of course, he's not dead and all this – not just the dropped-in hint about a "Minister for War" – is set up for something else. In which case it might be a tad less frustrating with hindsight.

Likewise, if Paul Kaye as Tivolian undertaker Prentis seems wasted in a minor cameo, albeit one shot from two angles for time-travel reasons, it's because the episode does nothing with him.

The resolve isn't particularly clever: it's always the Doctor in the box, whether it's the Pandorica or an old Eighth Doctor Adventure ("The Deadstone Memorial", if I remember rightly). The monster was dead all along – which at least references the fate of Arthur in "Battlefield – and the ghosts are just ghosts in the machine, echoes of a design that never came to be.

And then everyone was in love with everyone else at the end, like some kind of instant Shakespeare. We'd had an underplayed hint that Bennett had feelings for O'Donnell last week, when he clearly stays because she does. But Cass and Lunn? I think at least the HR department would have a word.

Killing off of fan-of-the-Doctor O'Donnell earlier – and after killing off fangirl Osgood in "Death in Heaven" this threatens to become a trope – seemed the most gratuitous "insert death here" moment we've had in ages. Plus, they totally blew how to do it – the Fisher King, having set his "ghosts" in motion would have no interest in wasting time adding to his collection. So he would stomp on past on his merry Fisher King business. Only for undead Prentis to appear through the wall and, now programmed to multiply the signal, murder her from behind.

(And it's a completely massive cheat that O'Donnell's ghost does not appear in the "future" until after we see her die in the "past" – no such restriction applies to Prentis.)

So the plot played out just the way it had to because that was the way it had to play out. Practically the very definition of going through the motions.

Which brings us back to that Bootstrap Paradox.

And as for that paradox… it really only amounted to: "well, I had to pretend to be my own ghost because we needed a cliffhanger last week".

And the hiccoughs with the TARDIS (needing the handbrake last week; refusing to return to the Drum; skipping back in time half an hour) were just signs of her not liking that there was a Paradox about. (And not just an excuse to have the Doctor rugby tackle Mr Bennett to prevent a recurrence of "Father's Day".)

After all the set-up with Beethoven at the start, it was something of a let-down that it was only there for lampshading: "I worked out what to do when I realised what I must have done". He didn't even use the guitar!

Why draw attention to it?

It's not like Doctor Who hasn't done Ontological Paradoxes before oh boy, from "Blink" to "The Big Bang" to Clara's entire timeline being retroactively caused by "The Name of the Doctor" (basically anywhere the Grand Moff has left his fingerprints – although the biggie is "Earthshock"). Is Mr Whithouse just writing "HOW HE DID IT!" for the Mister Moffster?

Alex is reminded of Steven Moffat smugly explaining how "The Fire In the Girlyplace" is "Doctor Who Discovers Girls" because he was too important a writer to notice that Russell had just spent the whole Eccleston season doing that more subtly. And when Whithouse is more smug and less subtle than the Moff…

We should at the very least understand that the paradox is in some sense bad, if for no other reason than it's a perpetual motion machine and if left revolving in time and space will eventually wear an entropic hole in the universe.

Turning to the camera with a shrug really won't do. Another name for the Ontological Paradox is the Predestination Paradox or Destiny Trap. It kills free will. Because once you are in it you have no choice but to do what you have already seen yourself do. And the Doctor really ought to be against anything that restricts his free will.

There was an opportunity here – after refreshing our views on the "Let's Kill Hitler" moral dilemma in the first two-parter – to have a look at another cornerstone of Doctor Who: "you cannot change history, not one line" versus "time can be rewritten".

And we completely failed to.

The risk of invalidating your own past is creating a Grandfather Paradox. That's the one that usually spins people's heads because of the way it flips and flops between preventing itself happening and so not happening so it doesn't prevent itself happening so it does happen and back again.

Funnily enough, the Faction Paradox masterwork "The Book of the War" suggests that Grandfather Paradoxes are a way of creating something very like ghosts – if you kill one of your own ancestors you reduce your own level of "reality", becoming less connected to the Universe. (If you are 50% "real" and you kill your Grandfather that only 50% applies to reality and so you create your own 50% existence – and so it actually adds up.) The possibility that the ghosts in "Under the Lake" are actually a result of the Doctor breaking time back in the past of "Before the Flood" would have made for a very much more interesting threat. Unfortunately we didn't go there.

But why would a Grandfather Paradox be bad and a Bootstrap Paradox a… shrug?

I'd say that, in Doctor Who, the exact opposite ought to be the case.

A Universe riddled with contradictions – rather like the continuity we've got, as it happens – or one of rigid order and doing what you're told? You know which choice the Doctor ought to make.

Which, again, is where throwing in the ghosts as consequences of choosing to break the Destiny Trap would have challenged the Doctor, been an actual story about something.

From a writer's point of view, outside the story universe, the Ontological Paradox makes you look clever, it leaves the audience with a satisfied sense that the piece fits together that the end is the beginning is the end and so on. Whereas the Grandfather Paradox looks like you've forgotten something. Because you have to end on one flip or the other, so it's never "complete".

But the Bootstrap, because it has no starting point, can never be created from within the Universe, only imposed from outside by the writer. Or god. Which is why it flatters the writer. The Grandfather Paradox means the characters take charge of their own narrative, in fact rewrite their own backstory, and set themselves free.

But in "Before the Flood" everyone remained trapped in their own perfect little clockwork plots full of references to nothing very much really.

However, Peter Capaldi can play electric guitar on the main theme every week forever, as far as I'm concerned.


Next time… Maisie Williams! Vikings! Maisie Williams! Cyber-Odin! Maisie Williams! Metal Judoon things! A thousand articles on how Maisie Williams should be next companion! Also Maisie Williams! "The Girl Who Died"

Day 5389: DOCTOR WHO: Lake Superior

Saturday:


This was Classic Who done in Classic style.

This was so old-school it was Quatermass, down to its mysterious etchings on the inside of its unearthed alien spacecraft.

This was so trad you could carve it into a dining table. And it wasn't ashamed to have characters announce the tropes they're riffing on: from "base under siege" to "Aliens" to "you can stay here and play cabin in the woods". Nothing wrong with that. Each generation deserves a chance to see why the classics became classics, especially if done well. Except it doesn't leave me much to talk about.

Although playing with tropes like "dead bro walking" still means you end up killing off the black guy first. (And what a waste of the magnificent Dr Muhahahaha.)

This was Toby "Being Human" Whithouse denying the reality of ghosts, only to whip the rug out from under us, only to whip the rug neatly back into place with a scientific non-explanation explanation: they're not ghosts, they're transmitters; transmitters that imprint a message on your mind and then kill you to start you signalling – the weirdest form of signal boost since six-billion iterations of the Master opened a route out of the Time War for Rassilon.

There must, incidentally, be something in the water (as it were), as I've just listened to "Prisoners of the Lake", the first of Big Finish's "new" Third Doctor Adventures with Tim Trelaw not quite being Jon Pertwee but not quite being his own interpretation either. (He can hit the lisping "s" very well, but I think hasn't quite the "attack" that Pertwee gives his line readings.) To be fair, Katy Manning's Jo Grant voice doesn't sound the same as she did in 1972 either, but with considerably larger store of goodwill. Nevertheless it goes some way to recapturing the feel of the UNIT "blood and thunder" era, at least for the first three parts; resolving itself rather too quickly in part four – limitations of the budget for cast seems most likely reason – when I was expecting it to break out into a bigger six-parter. (Because a three-and-three would have been a to-date unique variation on how to do a six episode Doctor Who). And the Brigadier, alas, is a sadly-missed silent voice at the other end of the telephone. Anyway…

Nice that we had a deaf character on board, fully integrated into the team. Nice that – as my friend Daniel pointed out – they showed that lip reading is hard. But wouldn't it be nicer if there wasn't a plot-contingent reason for her being there? (And "Hello, 22nd Century!" – fairly sure smart phones will do voice-to-text and text-to-voice really very nicely by then.)

Add to that a really picky quibble: the TARDIS translation circuits enable her passengers – or, if it's "the Christmas Invasion", anyone even randomly in the vicinity which must really help with staying incognito for all those non-interfering observation trips the other Time Lords make – to understand other spoken or written languages. But surely that doesn't include the shape of their lips flapping as they make the sounds. So why are the transmitters transmitting a message in English, when they're under the control of presumably an alien signalling to presumably other aliens?

Also, from what angle exactly do the stars in Orion's sword line up with Earth?

Actually the Doctor is wrong here, because only one of them really is a star – the three shiny things apparently hanging below Orion's belt are: the Orion Nebula (M42), which isn't any stars at all; the Trapezium Cluster, which is at least four, possibly eight, possibly more stars; and the star Hatsya (Iota Orionis) at the tip (and there's actually a couple more stars and the M43 nebula too, but they're all much less visible and the Doctor's only got so many tennis balls). Yes, the Trapezium Cluster used to be designated Theta Orionis (a star), but if he's going to be all showy-offy the least he could do is Google it.

One Google search later...

All of the "bright three" are about 1350 light years distant. So if you can draw a line through them, it sure ain't pointing this way.

In fact the only place in the Universe where they line up with Earth is on Earth.

(Oh, all right, or in a direct sightline from Earth to Orion – but that's just getting silly: you need to know where Earth is to line it up to form the sword that's supposed to give you directions to find… Earth. Even the Battlestar Galactica would have had difficulty figuring the way to Earth with clues like that.)

Alternatively, "Sword of Orion" is the second of Big Finish's adventures with Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor. Which was exciting back in the day. So maybe the directions mean: "Go to that planet where Briggsy got to remake the audiovisuals with a proper Doctor and Cybermen".

Anyway, and once again I may be too "seen it all before" to appreciate that cliffhanger properly. To fresh eyes it may be quite the W.T.F. To me it's very obvious that the Doctor isn't dead, which actually dispels the possibility that the "ghosts" are the spirits of the deceased trapped in electromagnetic form. Plus it threatens to be "timey-wimey".

There's nothing intrinsically paradoxical about going back in time to investigate the origin of events that have occurred. In fact, it's something of a surprise that Doctor Who has never done a "reverse The Ark" (fifty minutes of story; leave; arrive 700 years earlier). Although actually, this is closer to "City of Death", where the Doctor (spoilers) uses the TARDIS to pop back – mid-adventure – to Leonardo's studio to check out what's going on with all those Mona Lisas.

But the cliffhanger gives the impression that going back in time, the Doctor has changed the past (and gotten himself killed) resulting in a change to the present (namely the appearance of his ghost).

(And obviously that doesn't have to be how it works out. If the Doctor is just using the "whatever it is that makes signal devices out the images of people who die hereabouts" to send a message to Clara telling her how to resolve the situation, then he can have "programmed" it to wait quietly out in the lake until after he's got back in the TARDIS and gone back in time. Because giggles. Well, no, because to avoid it being one of those irritating ontologically-paradoxical notes to himself from the future he used to leave for/in his seventh incarnation.)

But you have to admit we're stepping dangerously close to "I'll just jump in the time machine and fix this before it ever happened" territory, the sort of "Curse of the Fatal Death" stuff that the series has always said it cannot do. For the perfectly good (Doylist) reason that if he can do that, then there's no drama he can't go back and fix, and there's no excuse for any of the terrible things that happen in the series happening.


And haven't we played enough with "the Doctor's really, really, really dead this time" recently? From "The Impossible Astronaut" to "The Time of the Doctor" to last week's confession dial in "The One with Missy versus Davros"? (*episodes of "Dammit! Missy" not guaranteed to conform to Doctor Who content.)

If we'd perhaps established that the Doctor wasn't certain if the Time Lords had given him just one new life or many it would still be getting repetitive. But at least the threat of him being dead might make sense. Might even develop into a series theme there (too early to say though). But no, quite the reverse, in last year's "Kill the Moon" (yes, I risk mentioning it again; I know some of you have deleted it in favour of Semaphore) he actually raised the idea that he might go on regenerating forever. And even last week he was casually giving away regeneration energy, to Davros of all people, in no way as though it was going out of fashion.

So could we all get on the same page and put at least that trope behind us for a while.

For me this was really good, tense and gripping for the forty-odd minutes of its duration. And vanished like the ghosts in daylight. There was no sense that this was about something other than being a really good Doctor Who episode.

To be fair, it's a part one. It's full of setting up mysteries, investigating, asking a lot of questions, and, yes, a good bit of running up and down corridors. Running up and down very nice corridors and with a purpose. But corridor running, big tick.

Part two might change all that, which would be clever, to illustrate how discovering the past changes our understanding of the present (or future), and how and why the future is haunted by the past.

Until then, it's just a really good episode one.

Next time: reverse Agatha Christie warning as "After the Funeral" backs into "Taken at the Flood". With added fishy monster. Who's in the box? And will it all resolve itself? Avant nous le deluge. Let's step back "Before the Flood"

Day 5382: DOCTOR WHO: The (Magician's) Apprentice – You're Fired Exterminated

Saturday:


Did everyone else get the same reaction to the recently announced latest spin-off from "Doctor Who": disappointment, regretfully, that it's not the "Missy and Clara Show"?

(Or "Dammit, Missy!" as the Verity podcasters hilariously dubbed this sadly-not-yet-to-be project – and can I also add that their "replace Clara and Michelle Gomez' Missy with Jo and Delgado's Master" game works so perfectly!)

Has there ever been a sci-fi psychodrama sit-com before? What a wasted opportunity if there hasn't. Because judging by this week's episode, it would be genius.

Because this week is all about the Time Lady and the Puppy.

I love Missy's little reminiscence at the start, getting Clara to work out "how I did it!". (Yes, yes, I scored all the points for guessing how the cliffhangers would resolve. Thankfully, Steven Moffat got the answer to the moral question posed last week right too.)

I love that – and I only spotted it on second viewing, but I'm sure most people got it first time out – they actually show three instances of the disintegration/teleport/escape trick, including the end of "Death in Heaven", to confirm that this is what happened then too (meaning last week's cheeky "Not dead. Back." was just a slap to the Saward years' habit of the Anthony Ainley Master to survive without bothering to explain how. Or why.)

I love that it's actually the Doctor's trick – he's done the working out, and on the fly I might add ("what a swot!"), and the Master (he's such a plodder) is merely copying, which seems very much in keeping with the old Jon Pertwee/Roger Delgado relationship (think "Sea Devils") where the Master would have a plan but would have to harness the Doctor's flair and improvisation.

I like to think that the scene with the invisible android assassins might have been written as a cameo for Sean Pertwee to double for his father; he can do the look and would not have had to do the voice. I mean it probably wasn't, but think of the resonance if it had been: "they're all the Doctor to me, so let's give you the frilly shirt" instead of "the eyebrows".

(Of course, that "they're all the Doctor to me" line is pinched from Iris Wildthyme, the erratic possibly-Time Lady created by Paul Magrs and brought to life by the magical Katy Manning.)

This pair of episodes, particularly the second but including moments like the naked horror of her realisation that Skaro is indeed returned in "The Magician's Apprentice", allow Michelle Gomez to transform her Master from merely bananas, however entertaining, pantomime villain Mary Poppins into a fully rounded anti-Doctor. Look at the way she encourages, coaches, even occasionally protects Clara. She's being the Doctor. Of course she might just think of it as house training the puppy, or breaking her in, but…

"If you ever let this creature live, then all this is on you."

That was Clara's accusation to the Doctor in "Death in Heaven". Complicity with the Master if he didn't stoop to the Master's level and murder his oldest frenemy.

Well, how'd'ya like them onions now, Clara Oswald?

Clara's inability to kill Missy the moment she obligingly turns her back is reassuringly human. We would think she was a monster, or a sociopath, if she could actually do it. Even if it wasn't borderline suicidal when wading knee-deep in Dalek sewer.

(The Doctor, incidentally, does to the Daleks what Missy did to the human race in "Death in Heaven": weaponising their dead against them, when he out-Xanatos-Gambits Davros (again), which pays her back for her nicking his teleport trick I suppose. And of course we're playing Time Lord "Hustle" again too ("Time Heist"). My head-canon is going to say that if Davros had taken only the regeneration energy offered rather than trying to take it all, then the Doctor would have let it go at that: that was the "out" he was being offered.)

But it's also a firm rebuke to Clara's words (spoken, to be fair, in anger) at the end of last year's finale. It is a false equivalence to say that one act of compassion is causative of all the harms that follow. This is pretty basic to all our modern morality from "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" to Gandalf's gentle admonition of Frodo that "it was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand" (an act of compassion that, ultimately, leads to the destruction of the One Ring and the utter ruin of evil. So you know, hard to top).

(And I do mean modern; I suspect that a Roman or a Spartan or for that matter the knights of King Arthur would all be entirely happy to stab the evil Time Lady in the back.)

Of course compassion (and mercy) are what saves Clara, in the end, from Missy's machinations trapping her inside a Dalek. That's more than merely an inspired bit of twisted sadistic play from the Master; it's virtually the entire point of the episode – what is compassion if not finding the friend inside the enemy.

Mind you, Clara seems to have forgotten the lesson she tried to teach the Clockwork Man back in "Deep Breath": "Never start with your final sanction. You've got nowhere to go but backwards." Just as Clara called the Clockwork Man's bluff, so Missy immediately calls Clara's. And thus psychologically disarms her. Before physically disarming her using what looks like another example of that super-speed she (maybe all Time Lords) sometimes appear to possess (see also Missy's murder of Osgood).

Actually, Missy was never in any danger from a pointy stick: she (though she could have been, indeed probably was, lying) told us that you would need to take out both hearts and brainstem all at once to stop her regenerating. Which more than slightly suggests that Missy deliberately left her pointy stick for Clara to pick up. Another little game. Who hasn't thrown a stick for a puppy, after all?

Moffat has struck on a rich seam of ideas to explore here. There's something Lovecraftian about the episode (even without the "something slimy lurking down below", why hello Freudian scatological horror!). The idea that humans – even ones like Clara – run into primal forces like Missy and mistake them for something… understandable.

Like the "First Ones" in "Babylon 5" – G'Kar (Andrea Katsulas) has a memorable scene where he picks up an ant on the tip of his glove – "if I put it down and another ant asks 'what was that?' how could the ant explain?". Moffat seems to get that the Time Lords, who really are the "first ones" of the Doctor Who universe are… in the old cliché …aliens beyond our comprehension. That's proper sci-fi that is.

This expands on the scene in the first episode, where Missy is genuinely (to whatever value of genuinely you think applies to her) revolted by the idea she might "love" the Doctor.

"Try, nano-brain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain and contemplate friendship. A friendship older than your civilization, and infinitely more complex."

(I pondered last time whether they have really been at this longer than [our or Clara's] Civilization. If Missy meant modern England, which is probably the 400 years from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II then easily; or even the nearly-thousand years from 1066 and all that, given the Doctor's now more advanced age; but the five thousand plus of human Civilisation from Mesopotamia to present day? That might be pushing it. Unless Missy means that Gallifrey is from, as long suspected, billions of years in the past.)

Andrew Cartmel and Russell Davies toyed with the idea of the Doctor as "god" before, but in Steven Moffat's hands Doctor and Master are rather more Cthulthu and Nyalothatep (horrors from the dawn of time) than magic floaty Jesus.

If this is Lovecraft, then the Daleks, all amoeboid protoplasm and rage, are the Shoggoths, the "machine creatures" of the Elder Things that made war to overthrow the gods.

Again, Moffat is just full of ideas here, gleefully binding together new notions with riffs on old bits of continuity:

The idea that Daleks are functionally immortal was made as a promise from Davros in "Revelation of the Daleks". The full horror of that can only be described as plumbing new depths here.

The third Doctor described the Daleks as moving by psychokinetic power ("Death to the Daleks"), which here translates to emotional energy firing the Dalek gunstick, and saying plainly that Cybermen repress emotion, Daleks channel it into anger. "It's why they keep yelling 'Exterminate!' – it's how they reload." It is absolute genius. As is seeing Missy work this out as she's examining Clara. (Again using her as the canary in the mine, or the test guinea pig in the experiment casing… are you getting that all these are references to Clara as a useful, useable animal, or familiar. Of course both titles refer to Clara – and to the different ways the two Time Lords see her.)

And of course Moffat is not above riffing on himself rewiring the idea of the Dalek's "cortex vault", the prison for their wrong-thinking memories from "Into the Dalek", so that it even translates the words they think/say into Dalek newspeak. Again, entirely consistent with the "computer control" that Davros saddled them with (before they exterminated him for the first time) back in (everything comes back to) "Genesis of the Daleks".

Of course it doesn't quite stack up. We've heard Daleks say things like "Mercy" and "Pity" before, even if it's just to deny they understand the concepts. And if Clara had been thinking calmly – which of course the point is she is not – then she should have been able to come up with a linguistic work-around. But then, given the way that she appears to lose the use of contractions, it's possible there's a kind of feedback occurring between her and the casing by means of the language she is allowed to use. Which is, of course, the point of Newspeak.

We are all a product of our environment, a Dalek even more so.

It's also slightly naughty that the first Dalek to be killed by the let's call them slime Daleks needs to be broached by Missy's brooch, whereas by the end they all seem to be vulnerable to the eldritch horrors of their ancestors' cells. (Oh, I'm so sorry.)

And Alex was quite right when he said how silly it was to have the Special Weapons Dalek right there and not have it be the one to blow up the TARDIS. What do you think it is for?

(I appease him slightly by saucily retconning Moffat's redubbing of the H.A.D.S. from "Displacement" to "Dispersal" by suggesting that it's a call-back to "Frontios" rather than a desperate cheat.)

Anyway, apparently the Doctor and Davros have some special time together in this episode too. But everyone else has talked about that*. And there's some guff about a prophecy and a hybrid and the Doctor's confession dial (which almost certainly contains the message "haha fooled you!"). Tediously that will no doubt turn out to be this year's arc plot. (Rather than the far more interesting hints about the Cloister War or the Master's Daughter.)

Last thought. Every Dalek ever… except for "some of our greatest mistakes". I know it's wrong of me, but in a secret place in my imagination, I see Mr Moffat crying out: "You think my Daleks are sh** Daleks? I'll give you sh** Daleks!!!"


Next time… If the Daleks are aliens from the past then these are ghosts from the future, and Christopher Eccleston needs to be put on danger money. We're going "Under the Lake".


*OK, I can't go entirely without praising the excellent work of Julian Bleach and Peter Capaldi. But I feel I talked a lot last time about the central moral dilemma – which is the thrust of the Doctor/Davros battle of wits here – whereas this week is a really good exploration of what the Master and the Daleks are about.

Day 5372: DOCTOR WHO: This Seems Very (Witch’s) Familiar

Saturday:


This seems familiar because we've seen this story play out before: the Doctor going alone to face his absolutely final death, after one final farewell party; the romp through the back-catalogue of places we’ve seen and monsters we recognise; the time-twisting trap. It’s the start of Series Six, the end of Series Seven, and several times in between. It’s the Wedding of Let’s Kill Hitler Again with the Time of the Impossible Moon.

Yet I love how this show brings me a whole new existential horror: dare I pronounce it "good" until I've seen how it resolves next week?

The return of two-parters – while welcome for the scale and scope and not-to-mention old-style cliffhanger – also spells the return of trying to comment on a story only half seen.

But this cliffhanger is so well-constructed, not merely mechanically in rounding out the episode by completing the circle back to the pre-title jaw-dropper, but in that it leaves us asking the fundamental question of the episode: “will the Doctor kill a child to save billions?”

That was, infamously, the scripted cliffhanger to Part Five of “Genesis…”, but the production team bottled it, moving the cliffhanger back to have the Doctor attacked by a random wandering (baby) monster instead of the philosophical question. So well done Moffat for restoring the question to the cliffhanger here.

And because that cliffhanger is so integral to the moral question on which the episode, indeed much of Doctor Who itself, hinges I really want to review this before the Schrödinger’s Cat gets out of the box and we see how Moffat resolves his moral dilemma.

(Publishing this, I hope, with just hours to go before part 2.)

“The Magician’s Apprentice” is, essentially, five spectacular set-pieces: the battlefield of the thousand-year war (the "hand mines" with their single eyes surrounded by finger-appendages seeming so foreshadowing of the Dalek mutants, and did they mention "clam drones" in the vicinity?); Colony Sarff's oily, slinky glide from vignette to vignette in search for the Doctor (Maldovarium, Shadow Proclamation and Karn tying together Moffat, Russell and Classic eras of the show); Clara’s eye-acting face-off with the Master (and UNIT have so clearly co-opted Roz from "Bugs" to fill the science roll of the lamented Osgood); the Doctor's Party (the two prologues, the one on Karn and the Doctor’s meditation which leads into the party, both feel like “deleted scenes”, being very integral to the action but, I think rightly, excised because they break up the Doctor-less flow); and the return to a gorgeously-realised Skaro (though didn’t he do that already in “Asylum of the Daleks”? Or at least its prequel).

And each is done very well.

Okay, I think that the Dalek control room should have looked bigger. A lot bigger. I get that it’s trying to recreate the look of the first Dalek serial (and of the first Dalek movie) but for all that is was a large set, it still looked like the Dalek Supreme and his chums were playing dressing-up in the attic.

I’d like to see the Dalek throne room looking this big.

It certainly looks like what they were aiming at

From Mechmaster's Daleks Second Empire.

And there's something of a logic flaw in the Master's spectacular "Did you Miss(y) Me" stunt. Why do writers always forget that the planet is moving, both spinning on its axis and hurtling through space; a localised "time stop" – stopping the planes in the sky but not the ground underneath them – would see the planes on one side of the Earth smashed into the ground and on the other left behind in space. You're not "freezing" the planes in space when you freeze them in time; you're making them move through spacetime in a very different and physics-defying way. And if you want to make play of the shadows that they cast on the ground then yes you are saying that the other rules of physics (light and gravity, as well as entropy et al) are all still applying to the "fixed" planes.

But, you know, Time Lord science (aka magic). And it's a call back to "The Time Monster" too.

(While: "I'll be talking to you through…" boing "…the square window" reminds us of the Master's penchant for watching children's television – "The Sea Devils" and "The Sound of Drums". And was hilarious.)

And it's a very Moffat way of making the show. Where Bob Holmes would make the worlds seem larger by alluding to events off screen, the Grand Moff has the budget and the CGI to show rather than tell.

All of which is dressing this up to be a big and important story.

But to be fair, because of the central argument, the difference of philosophy between the Doctor and – let’s say it – Davros, actually this is a big and important story.

Who is the Magician’s Apprentice of the title? I thought it was going to be Clara, but it’s got to be Davros, hasn’t it? Who is the one learning the (possibly wrong) lesson from the self-avowed Magician here?

The choice of title itself is interesting: being a mash-up of the old fable (and Micky Mouse bit in Fantasia) “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia prequel “The Magician’s Nephew”. In the former, the apprentice seeks to solve his problems by creating an army of servants which he quickly loses control of with disastrous consequences. In the latter, the Magician has the (stolen) power to move between worlds, which the boy misuses to release destruction, in the person of Jadis the White Witch, into the world of Narnia. Either seems strangely apposite.

And playing off Davros against the Master makes for an interesting contrast. There is the fabulous discussion of what the Doctor and Master's – have they really been at this longer than our Civilization? possibly, yes – friendship means: the Master is the dark side of the Doctor, the Doctor gone berserk, the Doctor’s ego run rampant. But Davros is the Doctor’s inverse: the scientist-tyrant to the Doctor’s philosopher-knight-errant; the deposed emperor to the Doctor’s abdicated lord; the fascist to his liberal. Missy is the Doctor’s best friend; Davros is his arch enemy. Just as last year the Master tempted the Doctor with an army of Cybermen to see just how far a good man would go: will you do anything to people for their own good? (i.e. are you a communist?) Here were we see Davros asking the “Let’s Kill Hitler” question that “Let’s Kill Hitler” ducked: is compassion worth the price or do you put the greater number first? (i.e. are you a fascist?)

I’ll give the Mister Moffster this: he’s not shy of tackling the big questions.

The problem with the moral question first posed in "Genesis of the Daleks" is that it's just so easy to present the downsides to letting Davros live.

But the Doctor is clearly not going to "exterminate" Davros.

Apart from anything else it would be a paradox big enough to implode the Universe; wiping out the Time War and most of the Doctor's own history. In the climax to last year (also written by Steven Moffat) the Doctor explained the grandfather of time paradoxes to Clara: if she rewites her own history so that Danny's death doesn't happen, she won't have any reason to rewrite her own history. This is that times a billion. Times a billion billion. Times a google.

And I don't think it's particularly difficult to work out how the cliffhanger resolves.

Just to deal with the side-bluff of killing Missy, Clara and the TARDIS for starters… they ain’t dead. Missy and Clara are, for example, carefully established to be wearing vortex manipulators (Clara's, presumably, still got Jack's one which she acquired in "Day of the Doctor") and they are slaved together so (visible skeletons notwithstanding) the pair of them can be teleported away together to wherever Missy planned to escape to. And it’s not impossible that that’s a fake TARDIS shell, either – and the real one has been chameleon-circuited into that tank. (Which in itself might be a comment on the Daleks.)

And for the biggie: the Doctor isn't aiming the Dalek gun at Davros but at the hand mines, not to pre-execute the genocidal megalomaniac, rather try to teach him a lesson in compassion.

But by placing as the cliffhanger rather than instantly resolving this, Moffat forces us to sit and think about this for a whole week. And because Moffat has timey-wimey form, we cannot just dismiss the possibility that he (Moffat if not the Doctor) might just consider rewriting the whole of Doctor Who history. Again.

Moffat and/or the Doctor as written by Moffat is such a tricksy person to pin down, morally. I maintain that he commits genocide against the Silence in “Day of the Moon” (genocide and attempted genocide are the same crime; guilt does not require you to succeed or there would be no one Jewish left alive; and the Doctor is culpable for the order to “kill them all on sight”). But he also undoes the genocide of the Time Lords (and possibly the Daleks – although I’m pretty sure he’s still intent on getting them all killed, they do kind of become the biggest ever “shot with their own weapon” rather than shot by the Doctor).

As recently as last season, he was trying very hard not to have to treat the Boneless (“Flatline”) as monsters to be defeated until they exhausted their last chances and his excuses; and of course this is the same question that sits at the heart of “Kill the Moon”.

It certainly looks like Moffat is saying that anyone who came down on the side of killing the Moon – one life for billions – is buying Davros’ argument that “compassion is wrong”. That’s a pretty serious slap in the face to a lot of Who-fans.

What we’re hoping is that this time the Doctor will win his moral argument with Davros, rather than hand-waving or timey-wiming his way out of answering, having failed so disastrously with Saward and (incredibly) with Russell having Davros apparently shame the Doctor with his rant in “Journey’s End”.

It’s a lot easier to accept “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” when it’s Mr Spock spouting the fascist (in the original sense of the nation must all bind together to the will of the leader) dictum rather than the creator of the Daleks.

But it also gives weight to Davros’ point of view, to Davros having a valid point of view, if quite a sizeable percentage of the audience might be thinking: “hang on though, he’s got a point about this one life for many business”.

In a way, though, that question is much better framed here, because – unlike “Kill the Moon” – we know that the outcome is not that the Earth survives unharmed/“gets away with it”, but that Davros alive is a total Universe-fracking disaster for everyone alive everywhere ever.

And of course it’s wonderful to have the ever-melodious tones of Tom frame the question for us so unambiguously. (And isn’t it nice that Davros has the BBC DVD of “Genesis of the Daleks” – available in good shops and online – for reference.)

I’ve seen this referred to in Craig Hinton’s terms as “fanwank”.

(Even aside from the “so it’s come to this, a Doctor Who clips show”, there were a number of moments that were… reminiscent of earlier Doctors, from the “Dead Planet” Daleks and the look of Skaro’s gleaming, futuristic, Dalek city; via a twelfth century Essex castle like the one the third Doctor visited in “The Time Warrior”; to the look of Skaro’s mist-haunted, blasted wasteland of mines and biplanes with lasers versus bows and arrows as visited by the fourth Doctor; via the possible nod of Colony Sarff to the Mara, the fifth Doctor’s demons, at just the moment he’s facing his shame; up to UNIT’s Tower of London base as visited by the tenth and eleventh Doctors. I’m sure there were others.)

It’s certainly very fan-pleasing. But I would have to say “fanwank” is fan-satisfying to no other purpose. It would be – to pick an example from entirely out of the air – having a story set in 1987 to clarify that the Doctor knows for a fact that there are no Thals left on Skaro before he fries the place to a cinder in 1988’s “Remembrance of the Daleks”.

But Moffat is using the history of Doctor Who to remind us over and over of the importance of his central question: “is compassion wrong?”

Hell, that’s pretty much what the Time War was fought over.

The clips that we see (or rather more hear, though they are up on Davros’ DVD wall of shame) from Peter D and Baker C are from “Resurrection of the Daleks” where the Doctor thinks he will execute Davros, but fails, and from “Revelation of the Daleks” where he castigates Davros not for turning the galaxy’s greatest funeral home into a Soylent Green factory but for not telling the deceased’s relatives. Both in their very different ways hinge on “compassion”. Even Sylv’s “unlimited rice pudding” speech (which we also hear) finishes with the Doctor having pity for Davros.

In the Saward and Davies philosophical confrontations, Davros was an enormous hypocrite. With his back against the wall, he rants and jeers, in part, because his own Daleks are on the verge of killing him. And he would rather die at their plungers than concede the Doctor might have won the argument.

But here, although he’s the mad uncle in the attic, it’s like the Daleks in the other attic have forgotten about him – Alex has a terrible thought: maybe Moffat’s going to announce that the few Daleks playing dress-up are in their attic because the whole rest of the city is run by… Their Greatest Mistakes. The Horror. Though they’d have to have those doors widened – But that brings me back to my point. Who has the Dark Lord Moff, brooding for long ages in the darkness, come to believe is the greatest evil and his arch-enemy, bringing him low since the days of his greatness (under Russell, when he only had to write one script a year, as opposed to now where he… struggles to write two scripts a year)?

The critics, that’s who. The fans. The people who watch his stories over and over again and pull them slowly to pieces until there’s nothing left.

Davros has summoned the Doctor to his DVD wall of shame to do just the same to the Doctor. Never mind “We are the Daleks” (actually, while some of it’s brilliant, I minded some of it very much); Tonight, Matthew, the curly-haired Scottish hero turns directly to camera and tells us: “You are Davros!”

“Genesis of the Daleks” concludes with Sarah Jane asking if their mission to Skaro has failed. The Doctor tells her that out of the Evil of the Daleks, will come good. I’ve previously argued – and still believe – that that good is a Universe with compassion. You can either have a Universe, a version of History, that has compassion or you can commit genocide. Your History can either be Time Lords and Daleks. Or you can be Daleks.

What makes the Doctor a moral character is that he makes choices. Davros makes one choice and creates the Daleks. Who promptly take all his choices away from him. The Doctor still has the ability to choose. Let’s see how he chooses.

Next Time… So Davros is dead and now the Quarks are the most deadly threat in the Universe… perhaps not. If Davros is the Magician’s Apprentice then Clara… “you’re the puppy” …must be “The Witch’s Familiar”.