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.

Doctor Who: The Witch’s Familiar

Worth the slow start.

The Magician’s Apprentice was a distinctly slow in as a start; very little happened until the last five minutes. As I said in my review of that episode, it was a bit difficult to stay interested, when the episode was about 95% set-up.

But I’m happy to say, that it was worth the wait and the quality of this episode makes it predecessor better by association.

It’s nice to see the image of “the Doctor without hope” resorting to particularly gruesome tactics. I mean Davros is the bad guy, but the Doctor yanking him out of he chair and leaving him (literally half a man) lying on the floor, is pretty brutal.

This is far more effective than the last time we saw Davros bring the darker side of the Doctor out. That was in “Journey’s End” and was so poorly executed that it had to be said in dialogue that it was a dark act. There’s a simple rule of show-don’t-tell in film and television and (for the faults he does have) Moffat writes in a way that meets this far more effectively than Davies.

Capaldi is on form, particularly when he’s rolling around in Davros’ chair, deliberately aggravating the kill bots around him. One thing about the Twelfth Doctor is that you’re never sure if he will actually kill something he’s angry with. He’s a bit like James Bond in that he can switch from the fantastic out-of-this world character to a killer in a second. It’s a trait that wouldn’t have fit on the Tenth or Eleventh, largely due to their relative youth.

Missy’s part in this episode is a bit confusing; it’s easy to imagine that when Moffat thought up this episode it would have been River Song in her place. That said, Michelle Gomez is brilliant as ever, particularly in her turn at the end when she tries to make the Doctor accidently kill Clara. She gives the reason that she wanted to show him his own dark side, but I suspect it was just something she found fun.

On that point, putting Clara back in the Dalek is a good call back to her first appearance and may foreshadow a gruesome end for her.

One thing; I have absolutely no love to the “there’s good in everyone” ending to this episode. One; it’s contrary to all of Davros’ actions in the third act and two; the Doctor shooting all those hand mines was really predictable.

Aside from an annoying ending this is a pretty good episode.

Doctor Who: The Magician’s Apprentice.

Well this was a weird one.

It’s not easy to acclimatize to this kind of format at the beginning of the series. A two-part piece is normally something you’d put in the middle of a series or at it’s conclusion. Throwing it in at the begging has the effect of the viewer not being able to engage with the material properly. This episode does suffer for this, with none of the plot really getting going until over half way through. Had this been placed in the middle of the series or at the end, there would have been a huge body red herrings and plot points pre-established to keep the audience interested.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a good episode; it is. It calls back to the classic series, both in tone and literal in-show references, but still has enough modern comedy to work today. Capaldi is awesome as always, jumping between Tom Baker-esque buffoonery and compelling drama.

The story is basically the baby Hitler problem. The Doctor meets a child he knows will grow up to be an evil dictator. He faces the dilemma of whether to help him or to leave him to die. Of course (predictably) it’s implied that the Doctor left him to die and hence Davros, developed a fear of death that would lead him to create the Daleks.

As is typical of Moffat it’s pretty heavy subject matter to be dealt with in family show, but he just about pulls it off.

There are a couple of sticking points, the most prominent of which is Missy; not her return  - like she says – that’s not really important – but the fact that Clara basically goes “oh ok, you’re back.”

This was the person she was going to kill in cold blood at the end of the last series. Like Amy before her, Clara’s personality has been rebooted to suit the new series’ plot. It’s not impossible for her to act this way, in terms of character development, but that development needs to happen on screen else what’s the point of having the same companion in every episode.

But enough of that; onto the main bit of this episode; the cliffhanger. The Doctor somehow travels back to first time he met the child Davros, this time to kill him, in order to stop the elderly dying Davros from causing the deaths of Missy and Clara. This is something that’s been building throughout Moffat’s tenure. The darker side of the Doctor.

Is this the moment that the Valyard is born? The Doctor altering time in a massive way for selfish ends. Is this how he starts?

Anyhow, it’s a good enough episode, even if it’s not the best thing for a casual viewer.