Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls

As I’ve written in past seasons, Steven Moffat two-parters tend to be composed of two very different types of episodes. While “The Doctor Falls” indeed follows that pattern, it was refreshing that the important plot points set up last week pay off; “The Doctor Falls” is indeed the second half of “World Enough and Time” in most every respect. The biggest questions I had (which didn’t even occur to me until after I filed my recap) were: Why was the Master on the spaceship in the first place, and why was he in disguise? Early on here, the Doctor offers up a lengthy theory that the Master neither confirms nor denies, and whether or not it’s on the nose is irrelevant — at least some method was given for all the madness. (Late in the episode, the Master does reveal to Missy that he blew his dematerialization circuit after arriving on the ship and he’s essentially been stranded ever since.)

The thing that concerned me most going into “The Doctor Falls” was that, based on the previews, it would be a raucous affair loaded with battles and explosions. While the episode does have both of those, it manages to place intimacy and character front and center, rarely allowing the battles to take center stage. Moffat has frequently said things like, “We don’t have the money for that anyway,” and thank goodness for that because nobody tunes in to Doctor Who for the fight scenes. High among the things we do tune in for are tears, and “The Doctor Falls” is loaded with them on both sides of the screen. After the big Beeb-sanctioned spoilers of last week, pretty much everything about this one was closely guarded, so there were no shortage of surprises.

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Graphic courtesy of Design by Stuart Manning.

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time

“World Enough and Time” aims to grab your attention from its opening, pre-credits moments. The Doctor stumbles from the TARDIS into a frozen landscape, his hair longer and wilder than ever before, seemingly fighting against his regeneration. It’s a striking sequence, perhaps undercut only by that awful faux-regeneration in “The Lie of the Land,” an episode I’ve grown to despise exponentially since its airing. The series never should have done that knowing a scene like this was right around the corner. But if we can scrub the “Lie” from our brains, this is a hell of a way to kick off the end of an era.

Once the episode begins proper, we’re nowhere near that flash-forward, but instead skimming across the exterior of a vast spaceship that appears to be sitting on the edge of a black hole — and by vast, I mean 400 miles long and 100 miles wide. (Later, we find out it isn’t sitting, but actively attempting to escape the hole.) Between the double shot of openings, we are firmly entrenched in the expansive vision of director Rachel Talalay, who has skillfully guided all of Capaldi’s epic finales. But the enormity of the craft zeroes in on a tiny area of the ship in which the TARDIS appears, and out pops Missy followed by Bill and Nardole.

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Doctor Who: The Witch's Familiar

Given how rooted in the classic series the first half of this two-parter appeared, the second half feels positively grounded in the new. It’s almost as if Steven Moffat constructed an elaborate bait and switch in order to tell a story of pseudo-redemption. Speaking of bait and switch, it was unsurprising that Davros had a scheme all along; yet fascinating were the emotive lengths to which he was willing to go in order to perpetrate the ruse. It would be easy to write off all of the little moments Davros shared in this episode, but one must take into account how rarely, if ever, he has tapped into that side of himself. I choose to believe that by and large they were genuine, even if in the service of an evil plot to drain the Doctor’s regenerative energy and create a race of super Daleks. Certainly, it will be difficult to view Davros exactly the same after this story.

Of course Clara and Missy didn’t bite it. It never mattered whether or not the viewer believed they were dead, it only mattered narratively that the Doctor believed it (though he should have known Missy had it all worked out, given the sheer number of times the Master has cheated death), as it gave him a sense of helplessness that Davros exploited. From those opening moments of Clara hanging upside down, it was shocking how dumbed-down the character became since the first half. Here she seems written entirely to play foil to Missy, which isn’t necessarily a terrible chess move on Moffat’s part, as it provided loads of comedy fodder throughout. Clara ended up the punchline for so many Missy gags, this episode should surely rate high with all the Clara-haters (who appear to be legion).

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Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice

“The Magician’s Apprentice” casts an immediate spell. Anyone versed in the classic Tom Baker serial “Genesis of the Daleks” was surely mesmerized within seconds. The misty battleground/rock quarry; a war fought with a mishmash of weaponry from different eras of time – this was all set up back in 1975 by Terry Nation. But just as quickly, Steven starts Moffating by unveiling the handmines, an eerie, unsettling aspect of this particular warfare (we’ll hopefully learn more about them next week). And then, of course, he wickedly thrusts a child into the middle of it all, followed with an obscured by clouds Doctor (Peter Capaldi), attempting to assist. Then BOOM! Davros. The kid’s name is Davros. You needn’t have seen “Genesis” to appreciate that revelation.

Post credits, the action shifts to the freakishly serpentine alien Colony Sarff, hunting for the missing Doctor in some of his previous haunts - the Maldovarium, then to the Shadow Proclamation, and finally Karn (where a briefly seen Doctor hides from his stalker). Unlike some other season premieres, “Apprentice” has little interest in being accessible to newbies. It assumes viewers now know the show’s minutiae and iconography. Given that this is the ninth season of Who redux, why not? With so many places to easily access the series, what’s the point in constantly trying to find new avenues through which to lure or entice new viewers? If someone wants to start watching Doctor Who, they’ll start with “Rose” or “The Eleventh Hour” or “An Unearthly Child” or wherever their friend or an article on the internet advises them to begin. This storyline is for those of us who’ve lived with the series for years.

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Doctor Who: Death in Heaven

Picking up from the various precarious cliffhangers we were left with last week, “Death in Heaven” goes pretty silly for the first 10 or 15 minutes. In the peculiar pre-credits sequence, Clara dives into an extended deceptive riff about being the Doctor in disguise so as to avoid deletion by a Cyberman. Even stranger is the decision to put Jenna’s eyes into the credits where the Doctor’s should be, which I guess extends the joke. This goes on for several scenes, and if nothing else, it’s sort of amazing to find out exactly how much she knows about the Doctor – maybe more than any other companion.

Last week I cracked wise about whether or not the Londoners would care that they’re being invaded, and it turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark: Selfies. Oh, if poor Karen Gillan was watching, she must have cringed. Speaking of cringing, how about that Cyberpollen? Doctor Who often does weird stuff to get from Point A to Point Q or whatever, and after last week’s set-up, I was curious as to how Moffat would have Cybermen rising from the grave. Never fear! Magic Cyberrain, made up of exploded Cybermen, pouring down on the cemeteries of the world somehow transforms dead bodies into living Cybermen. Surely it didn’t take long for the show to lose loads of viewers based on this process alone (some of the vitriol going around the net seems to confirm this). Don’t expect me to explain it all; I’m not even sure Moffat could explain this beyond what’s on the screen.

UNIT, in the form of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), her asthmatic scientist sidekick Osgood (Ingrid Oliver), and a bunch of soldiers arrive outside of St. Paul’s. They quickly secure Missy and the Doctor, taking the pair to a hangar, wherein resides Earth Force One. By this point in the episode, it’s pretty clear the stakes are high, and that this is big, big, big stuff. But it gets even bigger when it’s revealed that the world powers have named the Doctor the President of Earth, should an alien invasion occur – placing him squarely in charge of everyone, and specifically the military. The Doctor becomes the thing he’s railed so hard against throughout the entire season.

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Doctor Who: Dark Water

Let’s not bury the lede here, and please allow your recapper a bit of gloating. All the way back in my recap for “Deep Breath” I posited that Missy was short for Mistress – the feminine of Master (though to be fair, I was only one of many who did), and of course, it is. Beyond that, I’ve since been in an almost weekly dialogue with numerous fan friends who’ve thrown out a dozen different predictions and possibilities as to who Missy really is, and never did I give up on that initial instinct. It was never going to be anyone else, but to say it’s anticlimactic is to miss the rather innovative point of it all.

For several years there’s been a vocal contingent calling, often rather loudly, for a female Doctor. The only reason people are even able to demand such a development is because it could in theory occur, given how Time Lord physiology appears to operate (really, on no other TV series could one insist that the sex of the lead character needs to change). But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you must; there has to be a strong narrative reason behind such a radical shift. Within the series, there’d previously been only one confirmation that a Time Lord could change sex, and that was in “The Doctor’s Wife,” when the Doctor offhandedly referenced a Time Lord named the Corsair, who at some point was a woman. That was a big moment, but this development just dwarfs it.

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Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night

If there’s one thing that continues to amaze me about Doctor Who, or more specifically its fans, it’s all the wildly different reactions — most of them valid — to any given episode. I make no claim to offer up definitive interpretations or reactions in my recaps, and likewise it’s frequently baffling when someone insists that a particular episode is awful or without redeeming qualities. Doctor Who often plays its points of view broadly enough that it inevitably leads to differing readings. Pick the greatest and most hailed episode of the series — "Blink," for instance — and somewhere out there is somebody who’ll explain to you how it’s indulgent, poorly written garbage riddled with conundrums, and they might actually have a point. This is a big reason why Doctor Who is great TV: It means something different to every person who watches it, and no two people see it the same way.

With those qualifiers out of the way, "In the Forest of the Night" is the first episode of the season that, for me, doesn’t work within the thematic framework of the ongoing storyline. Yet looking at it objectively, say as a standalone story not related to the bigger seasonal arc, it feels cruel to pick on it or pull it apart. It’s like tearing into Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are for not playing to the adults in the house. This season, which has been so fraught with interpersonal conflict, has been a pretty specific thing, and all of a sudden for this one episode it feels like something that it wasn’t before (and judging by the preview for next week, doesn’t look like it will be again). It’s jarring at this particular juncture, coming right before the finale in which all hell (or perhaps heaven) is about to break loose. It’s too cute, too syrupy sweet — like this season’s been a charging locomotive and here it suddenly runs into a wall of Jet-Puffed marshmallow creme.

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Doctor Who: Flatline

Honest to Pete, it’d be nice if this season could deliver just one truly awful installment, so as a recapper I could have a little fun tearing into the show for a week. (Somewhere out there someone’s saying, “Dude, you had your chance with “Robot of Sherwood” and you blew it.”) “Flatline” continues this unexpectedly wonderful season of Doctor Who by delivering an alien threat unlike anything the series has ever showcased. It simultaneously harkens back to Tom Baker’s swan song, “Logopolis,” in which the TARDIS shrank with the Doctor inside.

The episode demands attention from its opening sequence. A man places an emergency call, frantically babbling about “they” being “everywhere” only to disappear mid-sentence and reappear as a smeared painting on the wall behind where he was standing. The way the camera moves and tilts to reveal his face is like one of those street paintings that only comes into focus when you see it from a certain angle. Sure enough, “Flatline” centers on an alien invasion from a two-dimensional universe, and in ours their deadly handiwork ends up looking like street art – a bizarrely weird idea worthy of Moffat himself, but dreamed up by Jamie Mathieson, who also penned last week’s outing.

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Doctor Who: Deep Breath

Since last we spoke, loyal readers, it’s been eight months of equal parts anticipation and dread. The former because it’s a new Doctor played by an enormously talented actor whose TV résumé dates all the way back to the time when Peter Davison was still playing the part. The latter because the head writer and lead creative mind on the show is still Steven Moffat, who last time we checked in with him at Christmas proved that even he can cock-up the end of an era that he spent four years shepherding. Would he actually be able to deliver on all of the promises he’s made in the intervening months that we’d be getting a new, reinvigorated version of Doctor Who?

With only one episode down, it’s impossible to answer that question, but based on this 80-minute opener, the future looks tight. To rework some classic dialogue from the Master, an entire season of this level of quality scarcely bears thinking about. Here we’ve been blessed with an episode of Doctor Who that feels like cinema. The scenes play out for four and five minutes at a time. The script isn’t in a rush to get to the end. The performances feel as though they’re building toward something fresh and new, rather than being built upon something that previously existed. The amount of quotable dialogue could make up its own recap. And yet it’s never, ever an “everything but the kitchen sink” type of affair. It has to be one of Moffat’s finest, most restrained and well thought out Who scripts.

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