Doctor Who: The Woman who Lived

Refreshingly dark.

This episode is an adventure comedy rolled up in a dark parody…and it’s awesome.

The Doctor stumbled across a thief who turns out to be Maisie William’s Ashildr (though she doesn’t even remember that name) from the previous episode; now immortal. This is where it really comes into its own; in the Davies days, she would be an amazing saint like figure, courtesy of the Doctor and if the Moff was penning the script she’d be some sort of impossible mystery courtesy of some time travel stuff. But with one of the big men long gone and writing about fruit and vegetables for Channel 4 and the other on proof reading duty, Catherine Tregenna gets to explore the darker side of immortality.

Ashildr (now renamed as “Lady Me”) is now so old that she requires several journals in order to remember her life; though it’s hinted that, much like the 11^th Doctor, she simply can’t bear to remember all the nasty events that have befallen her. It’s especially brave of Tregenna to explore the fact that Ashildr has now outlived her own children. This whole concept was kind of explored before with Captain Jack Harkness (who gets a shout out), but this was in the days of the Tenth Doctor, where saying he’s done anything bad or irresponsible was strictly forbidden in the writing room.

Capaldi and Williams have good chemistry and do a pretty good job of building a mentor to learner relationship.

The episode is not without fault; we’re supposed to like Rufus Hound’s Sam Swift, for some reason and his gallows humour stand up show seems a bit contrived. The main villain is so irrelevant that I can’t remember his name and the fact that someone as assertive and clever as Ashildr/Lady Me would be taken in by his lies doesn’t fly for me.

The selfie at the end (with what must be a competition winner?) also feels shoehorned, but I suppose there are only a few ways that you get across that Lady Me is still about.

On that point, I doubt it’s the last of character; she doesn’t say who told her all about the Doctor, but she uses more than one of Missy’s nicknames for him, so I expect they’ll both be in the finale.

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Died

Meh.

So apparently this is a very important episode in terms of the series as a whole. But yeah, as exciting as it was, it was still riding off the back of a guest star. Maisie Williams stars as Aryra  - I mean Ashildr – a Viking, who, though being a girl in a time period where all females were baby incubators, is a respected and rebellious tomboy. No idea where they got that idea.

The episode is another collaborative effort from Steven Moffat and Jamie Mathieson and the quality of structure shows as well as the witty banter. The Doctor coming up with nicknames for the Vikings is a high point, but the whole subplot with a baby figuring out (or helping to figure out) a defensive strategy is juts stupid.

The bad guys are practically filler; some Odin impersonators trying to get high of testosterone…another idea cribbed from a different show. But I can give them a pass for that, as that show was Torchwood, the particular episode of which guest starred Peter Capaldi.

The defeat of the villains comes across as a bit stupid, but then again their essential purpose was to set up the whole Maisie Williams as a semi-regular character thing.

Overall, I really don’t have that much to say about this episode. Its not bad (though a tad derivative with it’s titular character), but it just about gets by.

I’m hoping that it mirrors the series opener and improves by association to it’s sequel.

Doctor Who: Before the Flood.

Get the impression that some people aren’t going to like the opening, but honestly I find Peter Capaldi playing the theme tune on his guitar awesome.

This was a pretty good episode, based around the bootstrap paradox. It’s nice to see a show about time travel construct most of it’s drama out of actual time travel concepts.

It’s interesting to see the show regressing towards the classic era in terms of structure. We’re four episodes in and broadly speaking, the solution to the problem in all of them has been the same. The Doctor anticipated his opponents’ strategy and already had a plan in place to counter it.

It’s nice to have he idea of the Doctor as the chess master again, but the problem that this trick had in the classic era could easily come up again. In basic terms, it get’s tiresome pretty quickly. In fact, in Steven Moffat’s first outing as a writer for who (“The Curse of the Fatal Death, albeit it a Comic relief parody) he made fun of the Doctor’s ability to guess any strategy of his enemy’s.

The supporting cast are all pretty good, but it would be nice, if the two neatly separated couples didn’t both romantically pair off. I know this is a show about a Scottish guy traveling time in a phone box, but can I ask for some realism. Not every female and male in the same space are there simply because they’re in love with each other. Would it be too much to say that Bennett was upset about O’Donnell dying because she was his friend? It’s pretty old fashioned to say that just because one friend is a man and the other is a woman, their only motivation for working together is that at least one of them is secretly in love with the other. The same can be said for the identical trick that’s used to neatly tie off the Cass cares about Lann subplot. I mean come on; he’s actually her interpreter; yes they should be friends, but why do they have to be secretly in love? I mean, I suppose this happy resolution for those two at least lightens the fate of the Ghosts and the fact that the Doctor let someone die to test a theory. But again, why did the surviving person have to be in love with the dead one? Would he have just brushed it off it had it been a mere friend who’d been killed for the sake of an experiment?

The Fisher King is pretty good as a villain; he’s a little bit stupid, but (like Khan  - from Star Trek 2) this can probably be totted up to his hubris. He falls victim to a very simple trick, but that fits with what we see of his personality. Of course he’d assume that the Doctor would risk cracking the Universe open to stop; he’s that much of a big deal.

So yeah, bit clunky in the sub-plots but overall another good episode.

Doctor Who: Under the Lake

Not bad. this is going to be short one...for all the right reasons.

So I’m not exactly a fan of Toby Whithouse, I often find his who scripts to be too wordy, to the extent that the action put in to the episodes feels out of place. This episode, I’m happy to report, seems to finally having him striking the right balance.

I mean I’m still not 100% onboard with the back to back two-parters, but this one actually does a better job than Moffat did in The Magician’s Apprentice. The set-up is good, the humour is good, the vilains are especially good and the cliffhanger is good.

There’s really not much else to say; I was going to complain about how Clara’s personality had been re-written for the sake of the episode, but then Whithouse addressed that. Totting it up to her using the Doctor as an escape from her thoroughly destroyed life. I did think it was a bit odd how she brushed off Missy still being alive in the previous two episodes, when she was ready to kill her at the end of the previous series. This explanation makes a lot of sense in terms of character development and might work up nicely to the reason Clara leaves at the end of the series.

Capaldi is also in his element for this episode, especially with the comedic parts; the cue cards scene is particularly good. It’s a bit like Sherlock, which I doubt is a coincidence. By contrast he leaps well to self aware humour in the handbrake scene in the TARDIS. I get the impression that a lot of script are written with the idea of testing Capaldi’s range.

There’s not really much else to say, it’s a good episode; I only hope the payoff is as good as the set up.