The base-under-siege trope has been a
Doctor Who chestnut since the Patrick Troughton years. It got a particularly heavy series of workouts in his second season, where the majority of the stories fit the paradigm. The problem with whipping out base-under-siege at this point — after exploiting it ad nauseam for decades — is that you really do need to find a way to do something a little different with it. That is unfortunately the failure of “Under the Lake,” which feels so rote in its execution, that on my initial viewing, at one point I nodded off. At this stage in its long history, running up and down and back and forth through corridors, to and fro after ghastly villains, does not a satisfying episode of
Doctor Who make. And let’s be honest, that’s what the bulk of this episode was. This is the possible ugly side of any two-parter: Sometimes there isn’t enough story to fill 90 minutes; the flipside of cramming too much narrative into 45 minutes.
“Under the Lake” also dips into another familiar
Who well, and that’s the ghost story. Of course, the thing with
Doctor Who ghost stories is that they never, ever turn out to be actual ghosts; instead, typically aliens of some kind. To be fair to “Under the Lake” and its writer Toby Whithouse, there’s an effort here to make these projections actual ghosts, despite the knowledge early on that they’re products of alien technology. The Doctor in one scene asserts that they’re “unnatural — an aberration; you live and then you die.” Later on he accuses the unknown aliens of “hijacking souls,” which I’m unsure makes much sense (it certainly doesn’t to an atheist like me).
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