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: Mummy on the Orient Express

After last week’s episode, aspects of which seemingly half of Whoville had big problems accepting, it must be reassuring for disgruntled fans to get back to the basics with the far more plausible idea of an invisible mummy stalking people on a flying space train. What’s been so wonderful about this season so far is that no matter how outlandish the plots have been, the emotion-driven, personal aspects have been thoroughly down to earth and relatable. A communication breakdown – the inability for two people to understand each other’s position – must be one of the most common causes of emotional stress and pain, and Doctor Who is seemingly devoting an entire season to exploring it through the lens of the fantastic.

After Clara’s blowup, there was every reason to assume she might not feature in “Mummy,” and all of the publicity over the past week seemed to confirm that. Shrewd marketing BBC and BBC America folk, keeping Clara entirely out of the picture, right up until the episode aired and she stepped from the TARDIS alongside the Doctor, both dressed to the nines. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, can somebody please release some proper publicity shots of Jenna looking so magnificent and classy in her flapper garb? We want those to make memes out of to share back and forth on Facebook. The silver PJ’s were pretty keen, too. I should go ahead and say this if it isn’t already obvious: I am in companion love with Clara, which hasn’t happened for me since Rose Tyler (and long before her, Sarah Jane Smith). Companion love is potentially dangerous, because you become so invested in the fate of the character, that you begin finding it difficult to imagine the show without her, which is never a reasonable place to be as a Doctor Who fan.

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Doctor Who: Kill the Moon

Doctor Who is no stranger to outrageous, unbelievable plots. One could even say the show has practically been built on them. “Kill the Moon” is cut from a cloth that emphasizes emotional wallop and wonder over hard science, and for some folks that could be a difficult hurdle to overcome. If you’re one of the yeahright people (as in “Yeeeaah, right!”), there’s a good chance this episode left you wanting something a little more grounded in reality. But if you’re a Doctor Who fan, and surely you must be or you wouldn’t be reading this, you’re used to suspending pachyderm-sized amounts of disbelief. If you can do that with “Kill the Moon,” it’s a dazzling foray into the beautiful, demanding, and strange, cobbled together around a thrilling sense of uncertainty.

Right off the bat it grabs the viewer with an utterly compelling pre-credits sequence. At first it seemed a function of the script to join the proceedings mid-adventure—as if we’ve been thrown into the middle of a real time episode: 45 minutes are on the countdown timer, Clara and her student Courtney are in the midst of something perilous, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. Surely he’ll show up to save the day? We’ll find out soon enough that "Kill the Moon" isn’t nearly that predictable. Indeed, whatever criticisms one might have of the episode, predictability surely can’t be one of them (except for one thing, but we’ll come to that).

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Doctor Who: The Caretaker

However you might react to “The Caretaker,” hopefully everyone will at least agree that, given the setup of the season so far, it’s a story that needed to be told, and halfway through the season seems a good time to tell it. We’ve been frustratingly teased with the Doctor/Clara/Danny triangle for the past four episodes, curious to know where it’s headed. Where opinions will differ, I imagine, is over the manner in which the story is told.

The bulk of the triangle’s tease has revolved around Clara’s deceptions, which crumble entirely in "The Caretaker," thanks to the Doctor covertly scheduling an alien invasion intervention in Miss Oswald’s backyard, Coal Hill Secondary School, and finally coming face to face with her boyfriend (and vice versa). One of the cheapest-looking aliens the new series has unveiled, the Skovox Blitzer is attracted to the area because of all the artron emissions, which were likely left by the Doctor himself since the TARDIS materializes and dematerializes at the school regularly, not to mention his numerous other visits to the area in his past lives. The invasion storyline is so rote and B-movie in scope that it must exist only to serve as a basic introduction for Danny to the world of Clara and the Doctor. In any case, the Doctor either hasn’t considered that he may actually be responsible for the alien’s presence, or he has and has chosen to take care of business and not mention that part (to Danny he outright denies it). Either is a real possibility with the Twelfth Doctor.

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Doctor Who: Listen

Part of the genius of Season Three’s benchmark “Blink” is how utterly standalone it is, which is why it’s often the go-to installment to show to newbies: The ride can be enjoyed with virtually no knowledge of the Who mythos. “Listen” comes from a different direction; our protagonists are front and center throughout the episode, and far more so than “Into the Dalek,” this feels like a proper introduction to the world of Danny Pink. Whereas “Blink” was about Sally Sparrow and angels that nobody had seen before, this is about the Doctor, Clara, Danny, and ghosts that nobody will ever see.

Perhaps the real difference between the two is where Steven Moffat is as a Doctor Who writer. Back in season three, he was a scribe for hire, likely eager to make another defining mark, but now he’s been the showrunner for five years. Moffat may no longer have any interest in telling a Who story that doesn’t involve the mythos he’s created or is in the process of creating. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long he can occasionally churn out an episode this inventive. Surely one of the most unexpected, abstract episodes the series has produced since Moffat took over as head writer, “Listen” is the sort of fare that should have the torch-wielding villagers ceasing their charge…well, until the next episode, anyway. The show can’t tell stories like this each week, or everyone’s kids would end up in therapy.

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