I think you can make the case that Peter Capaldi is the best actor that has ever played the Doctor, which is slightly painful to say as much of a Patrick Troughton fan as I am. He certainly got a lot of hype when he came in to play the Doctor and his references and understanding of the character gave him a depth that was not apparent with most of the other actors who played the Doctor.
He also had a period of strong writing as well as strong supporting companions. I never really warmed to Clara but that's my personal opinion. Most fans seem to like Clara a great deal and you can't argue that she wasn't a strong character. I liked Bill a bit better though as her personality just played better in my opinion.
Despite all that, much like the Sixth Doctor, there often is something a bit lacking in the Twelfth Doctor and I think that it is a sense of fun. Series Eight obviously had the angry, brooding Doctor who found himself by the end. But even though the Doctor lightened up, the nature of the stories, good as many of them were, just did not lend themselves to the sense of zaniness or wonder that we saw readily with the Eleventh Doctor and even with the Tenth Doctor. It's not bad, just different. Sometimes you want a light-hearted adventure and sometimes you want the dour, heavy hand. It's just that this Doctor seemed to always be a heavy hand.
But it was a well done heavy hand. The most zany story they tried (In the Forrest of the Night) is easily my least favorite of the Twelfth Doctor era (and possibly of the entire new series). My favorite was of a brooding, angry Doctor who stood in the face of the establishment and spit in their face, saying that he would do things his way. So trying to apply a blanket feel of one Doctor to another is a useless exercise. Still, I wish there had been a few more stories with the scary yet glib feel of Mummy on the Orient Express or Flatline more often. Those were the stories that stood out in my mind as the ones that felt like good and proper Doctor Who.
On balance, this was a very good era. The Doctor was good, the companions good, if not always to my taste. The writing held up for the most part as well. I might not opt for this one with a slightly younger audience the way you could with most of the classical era or even the Eleventh Doctor era, but it also dove richly into the horror echoes of the Hinchcliff era and that is certainly worth returning to now and again.
Highest Rated Story: Heaven Sent - 5.0
Lowest Rated Story: In the Forest of the Night - 0.5
Average overall rating: 3.59
Deep Breath
Into the Dalek
Robot of Sherwood
Listen
Time Heist
The Caretaker
Kill the Moon
Mummy on the Orient Express
Flatline
In the Forest of the Night
Dark Water/Death in Heaven
Last Christmas
The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar
Under the Lake/Before the Flood
The Girl Who Died
The Woman Who Lived
The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion
Sleep No More
Face the Raven
Heaven Sent
Hell Bent
The Husbands of River Song
The Return of Doctor Mysterio
The Pilot
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World
The Lie of the Land
Empress of Mars
The Eaters of Light
World Enough and Time
The Doctor Falls
Twice Upon A Time
Friday, May 4, 2018
Dark Water/Death In Heaven
Did you really think that I care for you so little that your betrayal would mean anything?
Dark Water and Death in Heaven set up for me along the typical Moffat finale lines where the penultimate episode was really creepy and good and then I was let down by the finale. I do recall really enjoying Missy and going back and after watching her again after seeing her whole arc play out, I'm hoping it will give me an additional perspective that I might have missed the first time around. I would also be interested to see what the reaction would be of someone coming to this later. When debuting, everyone knew about the Cybermen's return because filming in front of St. Paul's was impossible to hide. But imagine how intense the reveal would be if that part wasn't known? I'll have to spring that one on my kids sometime.
Plot Summary
Clara calls Danny Pink to confess to him about her continued travels with the Doctor. She catches him on his cell phone as he's about to cross the street. The phone goes quiet when Clara tells him about her travels and an older woman picks up, telling her that Danny has been hit by a car. She runs to the street and a voice over reveals that Danny was killed.
After a few days, Clara calls the Doctor. Relatives try to console her but she remains deadened. She manages to get a hold of the Doctor at the end of one of his solo adventures and asks for him to pick her up. Upon doing so, she wanders about the TARDIS, asking to go see a volcano while pulling TARDIS keys out of various hiding places. She also grabs a sleep patch and slaps it on the Doctor's neck.
He wakes on a cliff side with the TARDIS locked and Clara with all the keys over a pit of magma. She throws a key in, melting it. She then tells the Doctor that Danny Pink is dead and he is going to save him, rewriting time. The Doctor refuses and Clara tosses away more keys. He continues to refuse but she hesitates throwing the last key in until he tries to grab her. That triggers her to toss the last key in and she drops it. She cries but says she would do it again.
The Doctor smirks at her and tells her to look at her hand. He shows her that the "sleep patch" didn't work on him and that he put it back on her hand. It induced a hypnotic state that allowed her to see what she wanted, all while being inside the TARDIS. He picks the keys off the floor and tells her that he wanted to be sure she would go through with it. She initially believes that he is throwing her out of the TARDIS but he corrects her and says that they will be heading to "the afterlife" to see if they can retrieve Danny. The Doctor places Clara's hands in the psychic circuits and turns off the navigation, allowing her to direct the TARDIS to Danny.
Danny meanwhile wakes to find himself in an office of a bureaucrat named Sev. Sev tries to gently break it to Danny that he is dead but Danny doesn't believe it until he opens the curtains to reveal an enormous city wrapped in a sphere. Sev also sends a note down the hall to prevent Danny's body from being cremated.
The TARDIS lands in a mausoleum where the skeletons of humans are displayed sitting on chairs while encased in tanks of a water-like fluid. The Doctor finds a holographic display informing them that this is 3W, a company specializing in the welfare of the dead. They are then approached by a woman named Missy who gives the Doctor an intense welcoming kiss. She attempts to do the same to Clara but Clara declines. Missy states that she is an android and is maintained by one Dr. Chang, whom she summons.
Chang takes them to an office where he tells them that the bodies in the water are held together in a suit but that the water will only show organic matter. He then tells them that the 3W institute was set up when their founder isolated messages he believed were from beyond the grave and indicated that the dead maintained a level of consciousness with their bodies. He plays a disturbing message where a voice pleads not to be cremated.
Back in the Nethersphere, Sev informs Danny that he has a visitor. It is the young boy that Danny killed accidentally while securing a house in a war zone. He tries to reconcile with the boy but he runs away in fear. Danny is disturbed by this when he is told by Sev that he has a phone call. Chang was able to connect to Danny by having the computer telepathically scan Clara and determine who she was looking for.
The Doctor is skeptical and before leaving with Chang to examine the tanks further, he warns Clara to be skeptical and ask Danny questions that only he would know. She talks to Danny and tries to do as the Doctor says but Danny is confused by the line of questioning. He quickly realizes that if she is unable to pull him out, she is considering joining him. Unwilling to let her do that, he antagonizes her by continuing to say that he loves her until she terminates the call. Upset, Danny starts to cry until Sev comes over and offers Danny the opportunity to disconnect himself from his emotions if he wants it.
In the corridor, Dr. Chang notices that the bodies have stood up and activated the drains to their tanks. Missy emerges and kills him after being corrected by Dr. Chang that she is his boss and not an android. She tells the Doctor that she has used a Gallifrean matrix slice to create a housing for the minds of the dead. Their minds are then reuploaded to their bodies once the bodies have been cyber-converted, giving a nearly unlimited supply of Cybermen. She also confirms what the Doctor had begun to be aware of in that she is a Time Lord.
The Doctor rushes out to warn Clara but emerges outside St. Paul's. He attempts to warn the people but they mostly ignore him. Missy then tells the Doctor that she is the Master as the Cybermen walk down from St. Paul's and into the plaza. The Doctor and Missy are approached by Osgood who gives a signal. UNIT approaches and arrests Missy. They attempt to ensnare the Cybermen but the Cybermen launch themselves into the air where they explode over the major metropolitan areas of the country.
The explosions create clouds which concentrate over the cemeteries of the cities and rain begins to fall. As the rain falls, the dead bodies within in them begin to convert into Cybermen. Similar things happen in mortuaries, which begin to flood with the directed rain, including the one where Danny Pink's body is being housed.
Back in St. Paul's Clara turns around and finds a Cyberman emerging from the tank. He scans her and prepares to kill her as a non-entity but she pretends that she is the Doctor. Unsure if Clara is telling the truth or not, the Cyberman herds her into the hallway where he is joined by two additional Cybermen. Clara continues to back slowly from the Cybermen, challenging their logic and keeping them just off balance to where they are unsure of whether to kill her or not. A fourth Cyberman approaches from the real, citing Clara's personal details and noting her a liar. He knocks her unconscious with an electrical pulse and then destroys the three other Cybermen with his gun.
The Doctor, the TARDIS, Missy and UNIT personnel are shuttled on board a plane which takes off. Once airborne, Kate Stewart informs the Doctor that he is now President of Earth with the ability to command the various governments as necessary. On board they observe the rain falling and within the rain, the information to turn any residual organic matter into a Cyberman which then downloads the personality information from the Matrix data slice.
Clara wakes in a graveyard in London observing Cybermen slowly climbing out of the graves. Most are completely disoriented and not fully connected to the central mainframe. Amidst the new Cybermen, she sees one standing erect and watching her. She confronts it as the Cyberman who brought her here. She tells him that while she may not be the Doctor, she will never betray him and is loyal to the end. The Cyberman sags and removes his faceplate to reveal Danny Pink. Danny has not yet had his emotions removed which allows him independent thought. He then begs Clara to activate the inhibitor and remove his emotions as the pain of her betrayal of him is too much.
In the hold of the Doctor's plan, Missy summons Osgood over to her and whispers to her that she is going to kill her. Osgood withdraws but Missy tells her to look in her pocket. Osgood looks and finds Missy's handcuffs there. She then vaporizes the two guards and seizes Osgood. Osgood points out that she is more valuable alive and Missy agrees but kills her anyway. She then summons a squadron of Cybermen who start destroying the plane.
With the Cybermen attacking, the Doctor rushes into the hold to find Missy waiting for him. She admits to setting up the Doctor and Clara as the shop woman who gave the Clara the TARDIS number. Clara calls the TARDIS asking the Doctor how to activate the inhibitor in Danny's chest but he tells her not to and then hangs up. Kate Stewart also comes down and Missy blows a hole in the payload door, sucking Kate out. Missy teleports away just as the plane breaks up, sending the Doctor and the TARDIS falling through the sky.
Missy materializes inside the Nethersphere with Sev. They watch the Doctor fall but manage to direct his fall to the TARDIS and climb inside. Sev is impressed by this but his reaction annoys Missy who vaporizes him. The Doctor then directs the TARDIS to the graveyard where Clara is fumbling with the buttons in Danny's chest plate.
The Doctor again warns Clara not to but Danny insists that he needs this and that he will not harm her. The Doctor appeals to Danny to use his pain but Danny points out that if he is fully integrated with the Cybernetwork, he will be able to read all the plans. Faced with this possibility of information, the Doctor gives Clara his sonic to activate the inhibitor. Clara and Danny tearfully say their goodbyes and Clara activates the inhibitor. Danny's expression goes blank.
The Doctor presses Danny on the plans and he informs him that the dead will be converted by the rain and the remaining population will be converted either before or after death to populate the new Cyber-army. At that moment, Missy teleports in and uses a control bracelet on her arm to manipulate the Cybermen. She then offers the Doctor the bracelet, giving him an army to do all the things that he insists on doing throughout the universe. When asked why, Missy tells him that she needs him to see that they are not that different and that she needs that so that she can have her friend back.
The Doctor points out that he is neither a good man or a bad man but only an idiot passing through. He points out that in her controlling of the Cybermen, Danny never moved. He gives the bracelet to Danny who then takes command of the Cyber-army. They launch themselves into the sky and explode, incinerating the clouds and destroying the Cyber-conversions.
Clara picks up Missy's weapon and prepares to kill her with it. The Doctor convinces her that he will do it instead. But before he can fire, Missy is vaporized by a shot from a single Cyberman. The Cyberman indicates to a different part of the cemetery where they find Kate Stewart. She had been caught in the air and brought to the ground unconscious. Realizing that the Cyberman is the converted Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor salutes him. The Cyberman then takes off into the sky.
Several weeks afterward, Clara hears Danny's voice. He had been able to retain the bracelet in the Nethersphere and figured out that it had the power to send one person back as a living being. Out of a portal of light, Danny sends the boy he killed on the battlefield, asking Clara to send him back to his parents. The light fades and Danny is gone.
A few days later, Clara meets the Doctor in a café. He notices the bracelet and assumes that Danny found a way back, meaning that Clara's adventures with the Doctor are over. Clara starts to correct this when the Doctor interrupts her by telling her that he found Gallifrey with the coordinates that Missy had given him just before she had been vaporized. Unable to dampen this, Clara continues with the misbelief that Danny came back. What she is unaware of is that the Doctor is also lying. He travelled to the coordinates but found only empty space.
The two share a hug and then the Doctor takes off in the TARDIS while Clara walks away. The Doctor slips into a thoughtful state, almost asleep when he hears a knock on the TARDIS door. He looks up to see Santa Claus enter the TARDIS, informing him that things can't end that way and asking what he wants for Christmas.
Analysis
There is an unfortunate trend in the Twelfth Doctor era that the two-part finale starts on such a high note and then comes down with a more disappointing conclusion. This starts that trend but I don't think the fall off from Dark Water to Death in Heaven is as great as it is in the following series. I did like both but I found little problems, especially in Death in Heaven that just annoyed me.
As much as I like the Doctor, the two major standouts in this two-parter are Missy and Rachel Talalay's direction. Missy has such a whimsical insanity about her. She is compelling to a point that you just want to see what thing she is going to do next. She is also quite funny with a lot of dry, dark humor infused in her dialogue and mannerisms. I enjoyed nearly every moment where she is on screen, even her plan weakens in the end. One can only imagine what would have happened if the Roger Delgado or Anthony Ainley Master's had had an army of Cybermen to use as they desired.
Rachel Talalay's direction is outstanding and you can feel her horror bones really come through. There is a creepiness that permeates both stories but especially Dark Water. Even in scenes that are not horror influenced, such as the volcano scene, there is a masterful intensity that comes through both the actor's performances and the framing of the shots. Nearly any fault that I have with either story is through performance (rarely) or the writing. I have nothing but good things to say in how the story is framed and shot.
Both the Doctor and Clara were pretty good in this. The Doctor had his dark and cynical ways going and the tinge of hostility makes Clara's misinterpretation of the "Go to Hell" line that much better. I also liked that he fully turned the corner into the more aloof and happier version of the Twelfth Doctor that was prevalent in Series Nine and Ten with his "Idiot in a Box" speech. Interesting as a dark and angry Doctor can be, it can be a lot to take especially as the history of the Doctor is generally one who cultivates a happier appearance. He can be angry and act angry on occasion, but that should not be his constant state and the move away from that was nice to see.
Clara was pretty good. Her irrationality was easy to understand and unlike other stories, it was easy to see how she jumped from point to point. I think the only thing she did that was more for plot convenience was her interrogation of Danny at the end of Dark Water. She had been so gung-ho about everything to that point that watching her suddenly be guarded and suspicious just because the Doctor told her to didn't quite ring true. Some of that was also fueled by Danny's obtuseness.
Danny wasn't bad in this story but I don't feel that he was written particularly well. His dialogue constantly put him in a position where he just looked dumb. He couldn't respond to Clara with anything definitive except at the end where he guessed that Clara might kill herself to join him. After taking off the Cyberman faceplate, he just acts as the sad-sack and you just want to shake him and tell him to get over himself. His antagonism with the Doctor was enjoyable though I think it would have worked better if it had been a bit more understated; a cold cynicism rather than the angrier smugness that came from showing up the Doctor. Even his speech to the rest of the Cybermen felt out of place. Cybermen didn't need a sergeant talk. They just would have obeyed. A simple word to Clara and the Doctor would have been enough. I get that they were trying to give Danny this moment of nobility but it just felt wasted as Danny would have known better than that.
It is somewhat ironic that Danny's best moments were when you can't see him. His Cyberman moments with the faceplate still attached felt stronger. His dialogue was snappier, his actions more direct. There was no whining and it made his sad reactions more powerful. When Clara calls herself a masterful liar and Danny hangs his head for a moment before agreeing, you feel his pain much more than at any time he is talking with Clara in graveyard. Similarly, you feel the real rage when he almost shoots Clara just before taking off the faceplate. Those were the moments where the tragedy of Danny Pink stood out. The moments where the actor's emotions could be utilized tipped over into either trying to hard or just taking out all the core strength of the character.
Now we must discuss the largest controversy of the whole story: Cyber-Brig. From a pragmatic standpoint, of course the Brigadier's body would undergo Cyber-conversion just as everyone else's did. Arguably, companions of the past, such as Jamie, would also have been converted. It is just something that has to be faced with this plan. That would be easier to ignore except that for some reason, the Brigadier has the same level of resistance to Cyber-control that Danny does. Perhaps it's association with the Doctor as I can't imagine that all the other dead did not have the capacity for love to push past the Cyber-control. But it still is annoyingly convenient.
The second issue is how heavy-handed his use is. He appears and motions to Kate. At that point, nothing else should be said other than that Kate is alive. Once that was done, a single shot should have been made of the Doctor looking up and then giving the Brig a salute. To have Clara note that Kate is talking about her dad and then the Doctor recalling Earth's greatest warrior in it's darkest hour assumes the audience can't remember something from twenty minutes ago and put two and two together. Use of the Brig when both the character and the actor have passed away is delicate enough but to call such blatant attention to it robs the moment of any quiet dignity that it might have. That was a moment where less is more and would have mitigated some of the controversy. People who loved the call back to the Brig would have still loved it. People who thought it disrespectful to either the Brig or Nicholas Courtney might still have found it thus, but there would have been a layer of ambiguity for them to insulate themselves or to even create alternate head cannon if they so desire. I just think it was lazy writing and poorly executed.
So is it disappointing that the Doctor doesn't really do anything to stop Missy? A bit I think. Unquestionably, she had beaten the Doctor. She could have stayed afar and controlled the Cybermen as she saw fit. Certainly enough to cause some destruction and mayhem, perhaps even to have converted more people before the Doctor found a way to stop her. But instead she gives him control, just as a temptation. She worked to give him something to make him like her and he said no. He didn't even seem to agonize over it. He showed more anguish over having to give in to Danny's desire to cut off his emotions. The destruction of the Cyber-army and the Doctor's easy refuting of Missy just felt like a weak resolution, especially considering some of the outright battles that had to be fought against the Cybermen in the past. After an episode and a half of mystery and dramatic reveal of a billion plus army of Cybermen, to have it disappear without any major plan or effort on the Doctor's part, other than keeping himself alive, just felt empty.
But despite that, I think Death in Heaven has a number of merits. Like other stories in the past, a weak ending can influence the overall opinion of the whole, even if the rest of the story was quite good. Death in Heaven does have the advantage of a nice additional sacrifice on Danny's part and the liars goodbye between the Doctor and Clara. Seeing the Doctor's anger at not finding Gallifrey coupled with their compounded lying and holding each other's pain in was a proper amount of tragedy which did redeem things a bit. Chasing the thing with the non-sequitor of Santa Claus showing up also gave it that little WTF? moment adding a bit of last second humor to the mix.
Overall, a very good set up with a bit of a let down in the resolution. But still framed and acted well and with just enough of an uplift at the end so as to not leave an awful taste in the mouth at the end.
Overall personal score: Dark Water - 4.5 out of 5; Death in Heaven - 3.0 out of 5
Dark Water and Death in Heaven set up for me along the typical Moffat finale lines where the penultimate episode was really creepy and good and then I was let down by the finale. I do recall really enjoying Missy and going back and after watching her again after seeing her whole arc play out, I'm hoping it will give me an additional perspective that I might have missed the first time around. I would also be interested to see what the reaction would be of someone coming to this later. When debuting, everyone knew about the Cybermen's return because filming in front of St. Paul's was impossible to hide. But imagine how intense the reveal would be if that part wasn't known? I'll have to spring that one on my kids sometime.
Plot Summary
Clara calls Danny Pink to confess to him about her continued travels with the Doctor. She catches him on his cell phone as he's about to cross the street. The phone goes quiet when Clara tells him about her travels and an older woman picks up, telling her that Danny has been hit by a car. She runs to the street and a voice over reveals that Danny was killed.
After a few days, Clara calls the Doctor. Relatives try to console her but she remains deadened. She manages to get a hold of the Doctor at the end of one of his solo adventures and asks for him to pick her up. Upon doing so, she wanders about the TARDIS, asking to go see a volcano while pulling TARDIS keys out of various hiding places. She also grabs a sleep patch and slaps it on the Doctor's neck.
He wakes on a cliff side with the TARDIS locked and Clara with all the keys over a pit of magma. She throws a key in, melting it. She then tells the Doctor that Danny Pink is dead and he is going to save him, rewriting time. The Doctor refuses and Clara tosses away more keys. He continues to refuse but she hesitates throwing the last key in until he tries to grab her. That triggers her to toss the last key in and she drops it. She cries but says she would do it again.
The Doctor smirks at her and tells her to look at her hand. He shows her that the "sleep patch" didn't work on him and that he put it back on her hand. It induced a hypnotic state that allowed her to see what she wanted, all while being inside the TARDIS. He picks the keys off the floor and tells her that he wanted to be sure she would go through with it. She initially believes that he is throwing her out of the TARDIS but he corrects her and says that they will be heading to "the afterlife" to see if they can retrieve Danny. The Doctor places Clara's hands in the psychic circuits and turns off the navigation, allowing her to direct the TARDIS to Danny.
Danny meanwhile wakes to find himself in an office of a bureaucrat named Sev. Sev tries to gently break it to Danny that he is dead but Danny doesn't believe it until he opens the curtains to reveal an enormous city wrapped in a sphere. Sev also sends a note down the hall to prevent Danny's body from being cremated.
The TARDIS lands in a mausoleum where the skeletons of humans are displayed sitting on chairs while encased in tanks of a water-like fluid. The Doctor finds a holographic display informing them that this is 3W, a company specializing in the welfare of the dead. They are then approached by a woman named Missy who gives the Doctor an intense welcoming kiss. She attempts to do the same to Clara but Clara declines. Missy states that she is an android and is maintained by one Dr. Chang, whom she summons.
Chang takes them to an office where he tells them that the bodies in the water are held together in a suit but that the water will only show organic matter. He then tells them that the 3W institute was set up when their founder isolated messages he believed were from beyond the grave and indicated that the dead maintained a level of consciousness with their bodies. He plays a disturbing message where a voice pleads not to be cremated.
Back in the Nethersphere, Sev informs Danny that he has a visitor. It is the young boy that Danny killed accidentally while securing a house in a war zone. He tries to reconcile with the boy but he runs away in fear. Danny is disturbed by this when he is told by Sev that he has a phone call. Chang was able to connect to Danny by having the computer telepathically scan Clara and determine who she was looking for.
The Doctor is skeptical and before leaving with Chang to examine the tanks further, he warns Clara to be skeptical and ask Danny questions that only he would know. She talks to Danny and tries to do as the Doctor says but Danny is confused by the line of questioning. He quickly realizes that if she is unable to pull him out, she is considering joining him. Unwilling to let her do that, he antagonizes her by continuing to say that he loves her until she terminates the call. Upset, Danny starts to cry until Sev comes over and offers Danny the opportunity to disconnect himself from his emotions if he wants it.
In the corridor, Dr. Chang notices that the bodies have stood up and activated the drains to their tanks. Missy emerges and kills him after being corrected by Dr. Chang that she is his boss and not an android. She tells the Doctor that she has used a Gallifrean matrix slice to create a housing for the minds of the dead. Their minds are then reuploaded to their bodies once the bodies have been cyber-converted, giving a nearly unlimited supply of Cybermen. She also confirms what the Doctor had begun to be aware of in that she is a Time Lord.
The Doctor rushes out to warn Clara but emerges outside St. Paul's. He attempts to warn the people but they mostly ignore him. Missy then tells the Doctor that she is the Master as the Cybermen walk down from St. Paul's and into the plaza. The Doctor and Missy are approached by Osgood who gives a signal. UNIT approaches and arrests Missy. They attempt to ensnare the Cybermen but the Cybermen launch themselves into the air where they explode over the major metropolitan areas of the country.
The explosions create clouds which concentrate over the cemeteries of the cities and rain begins to fall. As the rain falls, the dead bodies within in them begin to convert into Cybermen. Similar things happen in mortuaries, which begin to flood with the directed rain, including the one where Danny Pink's body is being housed.
Back in St. Paul's Clara turns around and finds a Cyberman emerging from the tank. He scans her and prepares to kill her as a non-entity but she pretends that she is the Doctor. Unsure if Clara is telling the truth or not, the Cyberman herds her into the hallway where he is joined by two additional Cybermen. Clara continues to back slowly from the Cybermen, challenging their logic and keeping them just off balance to where they are unsure of whether to kill her or not. A fourth Cyberman approaches from the real, citing Clara's personal details and noting her a liar. He knocks her unconscious with an electrical pulse and then destroys the three other Cybermen with his gun.
The Doctor, the TARDIS, Missy and UNIT personnel are shuttled on board a plane which takes off. Once airborne, Kate Stewart informs the Doctor that he is now President of Earth with the ability to command the various governments as necessary. On board they observe the rain falling and within the rain, the information to turn any residual organic matter into a Cyberman which then downloads the personality information from the Matrix data slice.
Clara wakes in a graveyard in London observing Cybermen slowly climbing out of the graves. Most are completely disoriented and not fully connected to the central mainframe. Amidst the new Cybermen, she sees one standing erect and watching her. She confronts it as the Cyberman who brought her here. She tells him that while she may not be the Doctor, she will never betray him and is loyal to the end. The Cyberman sags and removes his faceplate to reveal Danny Pink. Danny has not yet had his emotions removed which allows him independent thought. He then begs Clara to activate the inhibitor and remove his emotions as the pain of her betrayal of him is too much.
In the hold of the Doctor's plan, Missy summons Osgood over to her and whispers to her that she is going to kill her. Osgood withdraws but Missy tells her to look in her pocket. Osgood looks and finds Missy's handcuffs there. She then vaporizes the two guards and seizes Osgood. Osgood points out that she is more valuable alive and Missy agrees but kills her anyway. She then summons a squadron of Cybermen who start destroying the plane.
With the Cybermen attacking, the Doctor rushes into the hold to find Missy waiting for him. She admits to setting up the Doctor and Clara as the shop woman who gave the Clara the TARDIS number. Clara calls the TARDIS asking the Doctor how to activate the inhibitor in Danny's chest but he tells her not to and then hangs up. Kate Stewart also comes down and Missy blows a hole in the payload door, sucking Kate out. Missy teleports away just as the plane breaks up, sending the Doctor and the TARDIS falling through the sky.
Missy materializes inside the Nethersphere with Sev. They watch the Doctor fall but manage to direct his fall to the TARDIS and climb inside. Sev is impressed by this but his reaction annoys Missy who vaporizes him. The Doctor then directs the TARDIS to the graveyard where Clara is fumbling with the buttons in Danny's chest plate.
The Doctor again warns Clara not to but Danny insists that he needs this and that he will not harm her. The Doctor appeals to Danny to use his pain but Danny points out that if he is fully integrated with the Cybernetwork, he will be able to read all the plans. Faced with this possibility of information, the Doctor gives Clara his sonic to activate the inhibitor. Clara and Danny tearfully say their goodbyes and Clara activates the inhibitor. Danny's expression goes blank.
The Doctor presses Danny on the plans and he informs him that the dead will be converted by the rain and the remaining population will be converted either before or after death to populate the new Cyber-army. At that moment, Missy teleports in and uses a control bracelet on her arm to manipulate the Cybermen. She then offers the Doctor the bracelet, giving him an army to do all the things that he insists on doing throughout the universe. When asked why, Missy tells him that she needs him to see that they are not that different and that she needs that so that she can have her friend back.
The Doctor points out that he is neither a good man or a bad man but only an idiot passing through. He points out that in her controlling of the Cybermen, Danny never moved. He gives the bracelet to Danny who then takes command of the Cyber-army. They launch themselves into the sky and explode, incinerating the clouds and destroying the Cyber-conversions.
Clara picks up Missy's weapon and prepares to kill her with it. The Doctor convinces her that he will do it instead. But before he can fire, Missy is vaporized by a shot from a single Cyberman. The Cyberman indicates to a different part of the cemetery where they find Kate Stewart. She had been caught in the air and brought to the ground unconscious. Realizing that the Cyberman is the converted Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor salutes him. The Cyberman then takes off into the sky.
Several weeks afterward, Clara hears Danny's voice. He had been able to retain the bracelet in the Nethersphere and figured out that it had the power to send one person back as a living being. Out of a portal of light, Danny sends the boy he killed on the battlefield, asking Clara to send him back to his parents. The light fades and Danny is gone.
A few days later, Clara meets the Doctor in a café. He notices the bracelet and assumes that Danny found a way back, meaning that Clara's adventures with the Doctor are over. Clara starts to correct this when the Doctor interrupts her by telling her that he found Gallifrey with the coordinates that Missy had given him just before she had been vaporized. Unable to dampen this, Clara continues with the misbelief that Danny came back. What she is unaware of is that the Doctor is also lying. He travelled to the coordinates but found only empty space.
The two share a hug and then the Doctor takes off in the TARDIS while Clara walks away. The Doctor slips into a thoughtful state, almost asleep when he hears a knock on the TARDIS door. He looks up to see Santa Claus enter the TARDIS, informing him that things can't end that way and asking what he wants for Christmas.
Analysis
There is an unfortunate trend in the Twelfth Doctor era that the two-part finale starts on such a high note and then comes down with a more disappointing conclusion. This starts that trend but I don't think the fall off from Dark Water to Death in Heaven is as great as it is in the following series. I did like both but I found little problems, especially in Death in Heaven that just annoyed me.
As much as I like the Doctor, the two major standouts in this two-parter are Missy and Rachel Talalay's direction. Missy has such a whimsical insanity about her. She is compelling to a point that you just want to see what thing she is going to do next. She is also quite funny with a lot of dry, dark humor infused in her dialogue and mannerisms. I enjoyed nearly every moment where she is on screen, even her plan weakens in the end. One can only imagine what would have happened if the Roger Delgado or Anthony Ainley Master's had had an army of Cybermen to use as they desired.
Rachel Talalay's direction is outstanding and you can feel her horror bones really come through. There is a creepiness that permeates both stories but especially Dark Water. Even in scenes that are not horror influenced, such as the volcano scene, there is a masterful intensity that comes through both the actor's performances and the framing of the shots. Nearly any fault that I have with either story is through performance (rarely) or the writing. I have nothing but good things to say in how the story is framed and shot.
Both the Doctor and Clara were pretty good in this. The Doctor had his dark and cynical ways going and the tinge of hostility makes Clara's misinterpretation of the "Go to Hell" line that much better. I also liked that he fully turned the corner into the more aloof and happier version of the Twelfth Doctor that was prevalent in Series Nine and Ten with his "Idiot in a Box" speech. Interesting as a dark and angry Doctor can be, it can be a lot to take especially as the history of the Doctor is generally one who cultivates a happier appearance. He can be angry and act angry on occasion, but that should not be his constant state and the move away from that was nice to see.
Clara was pretty good. Her irrationality was easy to understand and unlike other stories, it was easy to see how she jumped from point to point. I think the only thing she did that was more for plot convenience was her interrogation of Danny at the end of Dark Water. She had been so gung-ho about everything to that point that watching her suddenly be guarded and suspicious just because the Doctor told her to didn't quite ring true. Some of that was also fueled by Danny's obtuseness.
Danny wasn't bad in this story but I don't feel that he was written particularly well. His dialogue constantly put him in a position where he just looked dumb. He couldn't respond to Clara with anything definitive except at the end where he guessed that Clara might kill herself to join him. After taking off the Cyberman faceplate, he just acts as the sad-sack and you just want to shake him and tell him to get over himself. His antagonism with the Doctor was enjoyable though I think it would have worked better if it had been a bit more understated; a cold cynicism rather than the angrier smugness that came from showing up the Doctor. Even his speech to the rest of the Cybermen felt out of place. Cybermen didn't need a sergeant talk. They just would have obeyed. A simple word to Clara and the Doctor would have been enough. I get that they were trying to give Danny this moment of nobility but it just felt wasted as Danny would have known better than that.
It is somewhat ironic that Danny's best moments were when you can't see him. His Cyberman moments with the faceplate still attached felt stronger. His dialogue was snappier, his actions more direct. There was no whining and it made his sad reactions more powerful. When Clara calls herself a masterful liar and Danny hangs his head for a moment before agreeing, you feel his pain much more than at any time he is talking with Clara in graveyard. Similarly, you feel the real rage when he almost shoots Clara just before taking off the faceplate. Those were the moments where the tragedy of Danny Pink stood out. The moments where the actor's emotions could be utilized tipped over into either trying to hard or just taking out all the core strength of the character.
Now we must discuss the largest controversy of the whole story: Cyber-Brig. From a pragmatic standpoint, of course the Brigadier's body would undergo Cyber-conversion just as everyone else's did. Arguably, companions of the past, such as Jamie, would also have been converted. It is just something that has to be faced with this plan. That would be easier to ignore except that for some reason, the Brigadier has the same level of resistance to Cyber-control that Danny does. Perhaps it's association with the Doctor as I can't imagine that all the other dead did not have the capacity for love to push past the Cyber-control. But it still is annoyingly convenient.
The second issue is how heavy-handed his use is. He appears and motions to Kate. At that point, nothing else should be said other than that Kate is alive. Once that was done, a single shot should have been made of the Doctor looking up and then giving the Brig a salute. To have Clara note that Kate is talking about her dad and then the Doctor recalling Earth's greatest warrior in it's darkest hour assumes the audience can't remember something from twenty minutes ago and put two and two together. Use of the Brig when both the character and the actor have passed away is delicate enough but to call such blatant attention to it robs the moment of any quiet dignity that it might have. That was a moment where less is more and would have mitigated some of the controversy. People who loved the call back to the Brig would have still loved it. People who thought it disrespectful to either the Brig or Nicholas Courtney might still have found it thus, but there would have been a layer of ambiguity for them to insulate themselves or to even create alternate head cannon if they so desire. I just think it was lazy writing and poorly executed.
So is it disappointing that the Doctor doesn't really do anything to stop Missy? A bit I think. Unquestionably, she had beaten the Doctor. She could have stayed afar and controlled the Cybermen as she saw fit. Certainly enough to cause some destruction and mayhem, perhaps even to have converted more people before the Doctor found a way to stop her. But instead she gives him control, just as a temptation. She worked to give him something to make him like her and he said no. He didn't even seem to agonize over it. He showed more anguish over having to give in to Danny's desire to cut off his emotions. The destruction of the Cyber-army and the Doctor's easy refuting of Missy just felt like a weak resolution, especially considering some of the outright battles that had to be fought against the Cybermen in the past. After an episode and a half of mystery and dramatic reveal of a billion plus army of Cybermen, to have it disappear without any major plan or effort on the Doctor's part, other than keeping himself alive, just felt empty.
But despite that, I think Death in Heaven has a number of merits. Like other stories in the past, a weak ending can influence the overall opinion of the whole, even if the rest of the story was quite good. Death in Heaven does have the advantage of a nice additional sacrifice on Danny's part and the liars goodbye between the Doctor and Clara. Seeing the Doctor's anger at not finding Gallifrey coupled with their compounded lying and holding each other's pain in was a proper amount of tragedy which did redeem things a bit. Chasing the thing with the non-sequitor of Santa Claus showing up also gave it that little WTF? moment adding a bit of last second humor to the mix.
Overall, a very good set up with a bit of a let down in the resolution. But still framed and acted well and with just enough of an uplift at the end so as to not leave an awful taste in the mouth at the end.
Overall personal score: Dark Water - 4.5 out of 5; Death in Heaven - 3.0 out of 5
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood
Are you afraid of the monsters?
No, the monsters are afraid of me.
The Silurians are a good idea but they are unfortunately rather limited in their application. When you look at the combined catalogue of the Silurian and Sea Devil stories, they all seem to be rehashes of the same story. Thus it is not surprising that this two-parter hits a lot of the same high notes as has been seen in prior stories. If you like those stories, that's not bad as a new telling of an old tale can still be quite enjoyable. But if the Silurian stories of the past are not your cup of tea, this story will be a bit of a slog for you.
Plot Summary
In 2020, a man named Mo reports to work at an experimental drilling site in Wales. The drill has just past 20,000 km and he is to supervise the drill during the night shift. In the night, the drill is rocked by a small earthquake. Going to investigate, he discovers a hole in the floor filled with steam. It then backfills with a surface layer of earth. He reaches down inside it, pushing through to the space beneath. He is then sucked down through the earth and into the hole.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive the following morning, intending to go to Rio. The Doctor is distracted by patches of blue grass in the graveyard and wants to investigate. As they look around, the trio spies an older Amy and Rory waving back at them from a nearby hill. The Doctor heads down the hill and Amy follows him. Rory however heads back to the TARDIS, having convinced Amy to leave her engagement ring in there for safe keeping.
Rory emerges from the TARDIS and is mistaken for a plainclothes detective by Mo's wife Ambrose and their son Elliot. Ambrose and Elliot take Rory to an open grave and tells him that town tradition has the people buried in the same plot as other family members. Her uncle had recently died and was to be buried in the same plot as her aunt who had died six years earlier. Yet when they dug up the undisturbed plot, the grave was empty. Elliot is convinced that a monster took the body from below.
The Doctor and Amy enter the drill complex where the owner, Tony, has just restarted the drill. His companion, Nasreen, monitors things while also looking for Mo. As the Doctor examines their equipment, ignoring their questions, the drill complex begins to shake. The Doctor orders them to turn the drill off but as Tony runs to do it, his foot gets caught in a hole that has opened up in the floor. Amy runs back to help him but also gets caught. Nasreen pulls Tony free and the two of them go to deactivate the drill. The Doctor tries to hold on to Amy but she is sucked under the earth just as the drill stops.
When Tony and Nasreen come back, the Doctor looks over their equipment again and scans the area below. He detects mechanical sound coming up from the earth and realizes that something is coming up the drill shaft from an underground chamber. The Doctor also realizes that it is an advanced race as they are manipulating the soil to work as a weapon against those on the surface.
Fleeing from the drill site, the trio reunites with Rory, Ambrose and Elliot. They also observe a force field coming into place over the drill and church sites. Trapped within the dome, the Doctor orders everyone into the church. They gather any cameras and other recording devices they can find and install them throughout the area with Elliot making a map for the Doctor. The Doctor does chastise Ambrose for also gathering weapons and tells her to put them back.
Eliot heads back to the house to get his headphones when the invaders darken the dome for attack. The Doctor herds everyone inside the church and locks the door. As the invaders surface, they cut power, shorting out the watching instruments. Ambrose then realizes that Elliot is missing. Hearing him yelling to be let in the church, they pull the door open but find him gone.
The group heads out to look for him. Ambrose finds his headphones and is attacked by one of the creatures. Tony pulls it off of her but it lashes out with its tongue and stings him. The Doctor has Ambrose take Tony back inside while he looks around using sunglasses modified to detect infra-red. He realizes that the attackers are cold-blooded and immediately guesses what they are. He and Rory set a trap where one attacks him but the Doctor uses a fire extinguisher to drive it into a van where Rory traps it. The remaining invaders retreat leaving each side with hostages.
The Doctor takes the creature, revealed to be a Silurian warrior woman named Alaya into the basement of the church. The Doctor tells the others that he encountered a different tribe of Silurians many years ago and believes he can negotiate with them given that they have a hostage now. They saw the drill as an attack as it threatened their life support systems but he is confident that an agreement can be reached.
Nasreen insists on coming with the Doctor so that leaves Rory, Ambrose and Tony to guard Alaya. Alaya smugly tells them that one of them will end up killing her and initiating a war. Meanwhile the Doctor and Nasreen enter the TARDIS but before the Doctor can start it, it is dragged below the surface. The Doctor and Nasreen explore the caverns below and find that the tribe of Silurians is not a small group as the Doctor expected but instead a vast city. They head down to investigate but are captured by a group of guards.
As the two explore the city, Amy wakes to find herself strapped to an examination table. She sees Mo next to her who warns her that she is going to be dissected and examined just as he was. She sees a Silurian doctor approach her with a scalpel and begins to scream. He uses a remote to lock the clamps on her arms but before he can start, he is called away to examine the Doctor and Nasreen. Amy then unlocks the clamps with the remote that she picked from the doctor's pocket, releasing her and Mo.
Amy and Mo slip out of the examination room and find Elliot being held in suspended animation in a room off the main hallway. Mo tries to rouse him but they are locked out. Amy promises they will come back for him either through the Doctor or by capturing the Silurian doctor and forcing him to open it. They travel down another hallway where they find an army of Silurian warriors being held in suspended animation and standing on disks that will carry them through tunnels to the surface. She and Mo take two guns held by suspended warriors and continue to look for a way out.
The Doctor and Nasreen are taken to the examination room where the Silurian doctor, Malohkeh, starts to decontaminate the Doctor. The Doctor tells Malohkeh that as he is not human, that will kill him. Malohkeh stops and examines him further. The Silurian defense commander, Restac is convinced that the four invaders are the scout party for a planned invasion. The Doctor denies this and notes that he only wants to trade hostages, offering Alaya for the humans. As Alaya is from the same genetic line as Restac, she is interested.
Restac orders the Doctor and Nasreen taken to the great hall. Along the way, the Doctor admits that he's met Silurians before but that that tribe was destroyed in a fight with the humans. Restac doubles down on her contempt and flings them into the great hall. Once in, Amy and Mo burst in with their guns but they are quickly disarmed and tied to the pillars of the hall with the Doctor and Nasreen.
On the surface, Tony sneaks to the basement and offers to free Alaya in exchange for the cure to her venom which is killing him. She scoffs at his treachery and ignores him. Tony begins to show signs of the poison attracting the attention of Ambrose and Rory. Rory tends to him while Ambrose heads to the basement. She demands to know how to cure her father and get her family back but Alaya only taunts her. Ambrose produces a Taser and threatens to shock Alaya if she doesn't help. Seeing the chance of death, Alaya doubles down on her taunts. Ambrose shocks her once and then hits her in the chest with the Taser.
Hearing Alaya's screams, Rory and Tony run down to the basement. Rory tries to revive Alaya but she dies, refusing to speak of her anatomy. As they stand over her body, a CPU monitor comes to life with Restac transmitting to them. She demands to speak to the leader (Rory) and shows the four hostages she has. She then demands to see Alaya. Ambrose refuses, fearful of Alaya's death, demanding instead for her family to freed. Restac refuses and cuts transmission, preparing to execute the hostages via firing squad.
Restac is stopped by the entrance of the city leader, Eldane, summoned by Malohkeh who did not want to see the humans executed. Eldane dismisses Restac and the Doctor sends Mo with Malohkeh to revive Elliot. The Doctor then designates Amy and Nasreen to negotiate with Restac as to how to share the planet. The Doctor contacts Rory and sends up four transport disks, telling the three of them to come down with Alaya.
Rory and the others do come down with Alaya's body but not before Ambrose convinces Tony to set the drill to a delayed start, which will destroy the life support mechanisms of the Silurian city. They eventually arrive with Alaya's body, just as Nasreen and Eldane had come to an initial agreement about habitats. The Doctor gets angry with Ambrose, who confesses to killing Alaya and apologizes to Eldane, hoping that he can see past this. He is also distracted by Tony who collapses, the venom taking hold and mutating his genetic code.
Unbeknownst to any of them, Malohkeh discovers Restac waking several squads of troops, preparing to fight the humans. She kills Malohkeh and then storms the council chamber, just missing Tony being lead to the examination room by Mo to have the toxin cleared out of his body. Restac sees Alaya and declares open war, especially after Ambrose informs all of them that the drill will penetrate the life support system in fifteen minutes. Restac orders her troops to fire but the Doctor disables their guns with his sonic and the group flees to the same examination room, which is defendable by a heavy door. The Doctor pauses in the hallway, giving Restac a chance to make peace but she ignores him.
Barricaded in the examination room, Eldane agrees to activate a toxic gas system designed to purify the city of intruders. It will trigger an automatic response system in the soldiers to return to suspended animation. The Doctor thanks him and tells him to trigger the awakening for 1,000 years in the future, by which the humans will pass down the information of the Silurians and be ready to share the planet by then. He also has Nasreen set up a response to destroy the drill, ending the threat to the Silurian city.
Once the gas is announced, the soldiers abandon the siege and return to their chambers, leaving Restac alone. The group runs out a side door and to the TARDIS but Tony is not purged of the toxin and decides to stay behind and be suspended with the Silurians. Seeing this, Nasreen also elects to stay and be suspended. They will also act as human liaisons when revived. With that agreed, the Doctor also runs for the TARDIS.
They arrive as the gas sweeps over the city. Mo, Ambrose and Elliot all get in the TARDIS. The Doctor, Rory and Amy prepare to enter as well but they are distracted by the appearance of a glowing crack, identical to the one in Amy's bedroom and on the Byzantium. The Doctor wraps his hand with a cloth and reaches in to the crack, pulling out a small object.
Before he can fully examine it, Restac crawls from out of the passage, dying from the gas. With her last bit of strength, she fires her gun at the Doctor. Rory leaps to push the Doctor out of the way and gets hit by the blast. He then dies, confused as to how he could have seen himself on the hill at the start of the adventure.
Amy is devastated but the Doctor drags her into the TARDIS as tendrils of light issue from the crack and envelop Rory's body. In the TARDIS, the Doctor urges Amy to hold on to her memories of Rory as he is being erased from existence by the crack. They land back on the surface but the jolt of the landing breaks Amy's concentration and she gets up with no memory of Rory.
The five of them exit the TARDIS just as the drill explodes. As Mo and Elliot settle back to their house, the Doctor pulls Ambrose aside. She thanks him for not letting the Silurians kill her. The Doctor impresses on her to use her failings to teach Elliot to be the best of humanity; that those traits would be passed on when the time for the Silurians to wake again comes.
Amy and the Doctor return to the TARDIS where Amy sees her future self waving from across the hill. Amy waves back but has a moment's hesitation where she thought she remembered seeing someone with her future self. She dismisses it and suggests they head to Rio as planned. The Doctor stalls and pulls the fragment from his pocket that he got out of the crack. He holds it up to the TARDIS and the pieces match, revealing that his TARDIS exploding appears to be the source of the cracks.
Analysis
It is rather unfortunate the turns this story takes. Before the Silurians are revealed, there is an air of mystery an allusion to Third Doctor stories of the past (Inferno and The Green Death most notably). Even after the Silurians show up, there is still an interesting aspect that keeps your attention through The Hungry Earth. Cold Blood however is like someone who read a quick summary of Doctor Who and the Silurians and then tried to do a slap-dash Malcolm Hulke impression, failing to capture the best of that story on both accounts.
Cold Blood takes a slimmed down view by portraying all the humans, save Nasreen, as emotional idiots and the Silurians, save Eldane and Malohkeh, as racist, bloodthirsty monsters. What little character development is done is all for the purpose of having everything fall apart at the end and very few of the positive aspects of either side are shown. No one is given time to think or explain and the Doctor himself jumps on the humans as morons and murders much quicker than he does with the Silurians, who are also fully prepared to murder.
While Doctor Who and the Silurians is too long at seven parts, it still would have needed at least four or five episodes to breathe and get the proper amount of development that it needed. Here, Chibnall is clearly trying to take everything from about Episode Two on and cram it into one 40-minute block. Actually it's even less than that because the last 5-7 minutes deal with the crack, Rory's death and the denouement where the Doctor imposes the lesson to Ambrose. Compressing to that level robs a story of nuance, character and development. I had some problems with Doctor Who and the Silurians but they were relatively small and dealt as much with perceived fan wisdom than the actual story. But that's nothing compared to how squashed and boiled down Cold Blood is.
Now there were positive aspects. The Doctor, Amy and Rory were all enjoyable. It's interesting to see Amy get most of The Hungry Earth off, counterbalancing Rory's absence in Vincent and the Doctor. What time she does get she does well in, though her false bravado can get grating if used too much. Rory is also good and although he doesn't get as much time with him, I do like the times that Rory and the Doctor are together as they have a very good chemistry together.
Much like the Fifth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor does well with an older woman acting as his pseudo-companion. Nasreen actually probably would have made a good companion as she is enthusiastic, open-minded and highly intelligent. Her romance with Tony was a bit forced, but I think that's more of a time issue and the fact that the nature of their relationship was not given time to develop.
In their brief instances, I liked Mo and Elliot. I do think Elliot was a waste though. Mo not getting much development is understandable as he was the first victim and there are other things to work on by the time he gets back involved with the plot. But Elliot had a nice little relationship develop with the Doctor, even including the bit about him being dyslexic. To have him be reduced to window dressing with no active role in anything in Cold Blood just feels like a waste. A plot thread that was supposed to do something or have a small pay off but instead went no where.
I'm more ambivalent on Tony. He was wounded in the attack and didn't serve much of a role other than be the thing that keeps Nasreen around and show the more cowardly side of humanity. But it was Ambrose that was the worst. She was the go to bad guy for everything but she wasn't even good at being a bad guy. She shoves a Taser in Alaya's chest while whining about not being given her family back. Anyone with any common sense would have realized that could have stopped a creature's heart. Then, even after realizing that she's totally screwed the pooch, she decides to go Machiavellian and destroy the Silurian city with the drill while being xenophobic. Which is she: a terrified wife and mother or a speciesist? I think we are supposed to feel sympathetic with her fear at first but she never presents redeeming qualities. She is morphed whenever convenient to the plot to become the villain. She is just an annoying, inconsistent character.
The Silurians aren't much better. There is no attempt at communication, it's just instant military invasion when the life support systems are endangered. Yet, despite launching a military raid, the Silurians are somehow indignant that the humans defended themselves from being captured. Restac and Alaya are so one note with their anti-human feelings that they see and act in no other manner. Restac isn't even a good military commander as she assumes there is a human army waiting to attack them despite their recon providing no information on any army and only capturing one unarmed boy. Malohkeh did better in capturing two people (Mo and Amy) with his science and he was fully convinced that the humans were not attacking them.
Restac wasn't even able to pull off her full coup, which at least happened in Doctor Who and the Silurians. Here she tries and fails with another round of terrible shooting. Yes the Doctor disabled some of the guns, but there were clearly a good ten armed soldiers, any of which could have gotten off a shot to take someone out. The only decent shot is Restac's final shot where she kills Rory and there the Doctor was standing still, distracted by the crack, giving Rory no choice but to push the Doctor out of the way. The Silurians in Doctor Who and the Silurians, killed hundreds and would have worked towards total genocide if not for the Doctor and Liz. When compared to the old, the nuance and detail just isn't there for the new Silurians compared to the ones of the classic era.
The direction was nice and I do like the look of the new Silurians over the old ones. One of my complaints about the old Silurians was the overreliance on the third eye which could do anything they wanted. Here, the Silurians are far more obvious in their employment of technology and it fit better. The new design also gives them much more movement and expression which is nice. This comes more to the fore with Madame Vastra in later episodes but the groundwork is here.
Ultimately, this is a good set up undone by trying to do too much in too short a time. Chibnall's attempt to put a seven-part story into the span of less than 80 minutes just leaves so much left undone. Worse, the near identical set up and follow on from the source material leave the viewer pining for the deeper and more textured version. If a viewer hasn't seen Doctor Who and the Silurians, they might get more out of this two-parter but once the source material is known, it's hard to see this one as anything but a pale imitation. It's just not one that I would want to go back to with any regularity.
Overall personal score: The Hungry Earth - 3.5 out of 5; Cold Blood - 1.5 out of 5
No, the monsters are afraid of me.
The Silurians are a good idea but they are unfortunately rather limited in their application. When you look at the combined catalogue of the Silurian and Sea Devil stories, they all seem to be rehashes of the same story. Thus it is not surprising that this two-parter hits a lot of the same high notes as has been seen in prior stories. If you like those stories, that's not bad as a new telling of an old tale can still be quite enjoyable. But if the Silurian stories of the past are not your cup of tea, this story will be a bit of a slog for you.
Plot Summary
In 2020, a man named Mo reports to work at an experimental drilling site in Wales. The drill has just past 20,000 km and he is to supervise the drill during the night shift. In the night, the drill is rocked by a small earthquake. Going to investigate, he discovers a hole in the floor filled with steam. It then backfills with a surface layer of earth. He reaches down inside it, pushing through to the space beneath. He is then sucked down through the earth and into the hole.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive the following morning, intending to go to Rio. The Doctor is distracted by patches of blue grass in the graveyard and wants to investigate. As they look around, the trio spies an older Amy and Rory waving back at them from a nearby hill. The Doctor heads down the hill and Amy follows him. Rory however heads back to the TARDIS, having convinced Amy to leave her engagement ring in there for safe keeping.
Rory emerges from the TARDIS and is mistaken for a plainclothes detective by Mo's wife Ambrose and their son Elliot. Ambrose and Elliot take Rory to an open grave and tells him that town tradition has the people buried in the same plot as other family members. Her uncle had recently died and was to be buried in the same plot as her aunt who had died six years earlier. Yet when they dug up the undisturbed plot, the grave was empty. Elliot is convinced that a monster took the body from below.
The Doctor and Amy enter the drill complex where the owner, Tony, has just restarted the drill. His companion, Nasreen, monitors things while also looking for Mo. As the Doctor examines their equipment, ignoring their questions, the drill complex begins to shake. The Doctor orders them to turn the drill off but as Tony runs to do it, his foot gets caught in a hole that has opened up in the floor. Amy runs back to help him but also gets caught. Nasreen pulls Tony free and the two of them go to deactivate the drill. The Doctor tries to hold on to Amy but she is sucked under the earth just as the drill stops.
When Tony and Nasreen come back, the Doctor looks over their equipment again and scans the area below. He detects mechanical sound coming up from the earth and realizes that something is coming up the drill shaft from an underground chamber. The Doctor also realizes that it is an advanced race as they are manipulating the soil to work as a weapon against those on the surface.
Fleeing from the drill site, the trio reunites with Rory, Ambrose and Elliot. They also observe a force field coming into place over the drill and church sites. Trapped within the dome, the Doctor orders everyone into the church. They gather any cameras and other recording devices they can find and install them throughout the area with Elliot making a map for the Doctor. The Doctor does chastise Ambrose for also gathering weapons and tells her to put them back.
Eliot heads back to the house to get his headphones when the invaders darken the dome for attack. The Doctor herds everyone inside the church and locks the door. As the invaders surface, they cut power, shorting out the watching instruments. Ambrose then realizes that Elliot is missing. Hearing him yelling to be let in the church, they pull the door open but find him gone.
The group heads out to look for him. Ambrose finds his headphones and is attacked by one of the creatures. Tony pulls it off of her but it lashes out with its tongue and stings him. The Doctor has Ambrose take Tony back inside while he looks around using sunglasses modified to detect infra-red. He realizes that the attackers are cold-blooded and immediately guesses what they are. He and Rory set a trap where one attacks him but the Doctor uses a fire extinguisher to drive it into a van where Rory traps it. The remaining invaders retreat leaving each side with hostages.
The Doctor takes the creature, revealed to be a Silurian warrior woman named Alaya into the basement of the church. The Doctor tells the others that he encountered a different tribe of Silurians many years ago and believes he can negotiate with them given that they have a hostage now. They saw the drill as an attack as it threatened their life support systems but he is confident that an agreement can be reached.
Nasreen insists on coming with the Doctor so that leaves Rory, Ambrose and Tony to guard Alaya. Alaya smugly tells them that one of them will end up killing her and initiating a war. Meanwhile the Doctor and Nasreen enter the TARDIS but before the Doctor can start it, it is dragged below the surface. The Doctor and Nasreen explore the caverns below and find that the tribe of Silurians is not a small group as the Doctor expected but instead a vast city. They head down to investigate but are captured by a group of guards.
As the two explore the city, Amy wakes to find herself strapped to an examination table. She sees Mo next to her who warns her that she is going to be dissected and examined just as he was. She sees a Silurian doctor approach her with a scalpel and begins to scream. He uses a remote to lock the clamps on her arms but before he can start, he is called away to examine the Doctor and Nasreen. Amy then unlocks the clamps with the remote that she picked from the doctor's pocket, releasing her and Mo.
Amy and Mo slip out of the examination room and find Elliot being held in suspended animation in a room off the main hallway. Mo tries to rouse him but they are locked out. Amy promises they will come back for him either through the Doctor or by capturing the Silurian doctor and forcing him to open it. They travel down another hallway where they find an army of Silurian warriors being held in suspended animation and standing on disks that will carry them through tunnels to the surface. She and Mo take two guns held by suspended warriors and continue to look for a way out.
The Doctor and Nasreen are taken to the examination room where the Silurian doctor, Malohkeh, starts to decontaminate the Doctor. The Doctor tells Malohkeh that as he is not human, that will kill him. Malohkeh stops and examines him further. The Silurian defense commander, Restac is convinced that the four invaders are the scout party for a planned invasion. The Doctor denies this and notes that he only wants to trade hostages, offering Alaya for the humans. As Alaya is from the same genetic line as Restac, she is interested.
Restac orders the Doctor and Nasreen taken to the great hall. Along the way, the Doctor admits that he's met Silurians before but that that tribe was destroyed in a fight with the humans. Restac doubles down on her contempt and flings them into the great hall. Once in, Amy and Mo burst in with their guns but they are quickly disarmed and tied to the pillars of the hall with the Doctor and Nasreen.
On the surface, Tony sneaks to the basement and offers to free Alaya in exchange for the cure to her venom which is killing him. She scoffs at his treachery and ignores him. Tony begins to show signs of the poison attracting the attention of Ambrose and Rory. Rory tends to him while Ambrose heads to the basement. She demands to know how to cure her father and get her family back but Alaya only taunts her. Ambrose produces a Taser and threatens to shock Alaya if she doesn't help. Seeing the chance of death, Alaya doubles down on her taunts. Ambrose shocks her once and then hits her in the chest with the Taser.
Hearing Alaya's screams, Rory and Tony run down to the basement. Rory tries to revive Alaya but she dies, refusing to speak of her anatomy. As they stand over her body, a CPU monitor comes to life with Restac transmitting to them. She demands to speak to the leader (Rory) and shows the four hostages she has. She then demands to see Alaya. Ambrose refuses, fearful of Alaya's death, demanding instead for her family to freed. Restac refuses and cuts transmission, preparing to execute the hostages via firing squad.
Restac is stopped by the entrance of the city leader, Eldane, summoned by Malohkeh who did not want to see the humans executed. Eldane dismisses Restac and the Doctor sends Mo with Malohkeh to revive Elliot. The Doctor then designates Amy and Nasreen to negotiate with Restac as to how to share the planet. The Doctor contacts Rory and sends up four transport disks, telling the three of them to come down with Alaya.
Rory and the others do come down with Alaya's body but not before Ambrose convinces Tony to set the drill to a delayed start, which will destroy the life support mechanisms of the Silurian city. They eventually arrive with Alaya's body, just as Nasreen and Eldane had come to an initial agreement about habitats. The Doctor gets angry with Ambrose, who confesses to killing Alaya and apologizes to Eldane, hoping that he can see past this. He is also distracted by Tony who collapses, the venom taking hold and mutating his genetic code.
Unbeknownst to any of them, Malohkeh discovers Restac waking several squads of troops, preparing to fight the humans. She kills Malohkeh and then storms the council chamber, just missing Tony being lead to the examination room by Mo to have the toxin cleared out of his body. Restac sees Alaya and declares open war, especially after Ambrose informs all of them that the drill will penetrate the life support system in fifteen minutes. Restac orders her troops to fire but the Doctor disables their guns with his sonic and the group flees to the same examination room, which is defendable by a heavy door. The Doctor pauses in the hallway, giving Restac a chance to make peace but she ignores him.
Barricaded in the examination room, Eldane agrees to activate a toxic gas system designed to purify the city of intruders. It will trigger an automatic response system in the soldiers to return to suspended animation. The Doctor thanks him and tells him to trigger the awakening for 1,000 years in the future, by which the humans will pass down the information of the Silurians and be ready to share the planet by then. He also has Nasreen set up a response to destroy the drill, ending the threat to the Silurian city.
Once the gas is announced, the soldiers abandon the siege and return to their chambers, leaving Restac alone. The group runs out a side door and to the TARDIS but Tony is not purged of the toxin and decides to stay behind and be suspended with the Silurians. Seeing this, Nasreen also elects to stay and be suspended. They will also act as human liaisons when revived. With that agreed, the Doctor also runs for the TARDIS.
They arrive as the gas sweeps over the city. Mo, Ambrose and Elliot all get in the TARDIS. The Doctor, Rory and Amy prepare to enter as well but they are distracted by the appearance of a glowing crack, identical to the one in Amy's bedroom and on the Byzantium. The Doctor wraps his hand with a cloth and reaches in to the crack, pulling out a small object.
Before he can fully examine it, Restac crawls from out of the passage, dying from the gas. With her last bit of strength, she fires her gun at the Doctor. Rory leaps to push the Doctor out of the way and gets hit by the blast. He then dies, confused as to how he could have seen himself on the hill at the start of the adventure.
Amy is devastated but the Doctor drags her into the TARDIS as tendrils of light issue from the crack and envelop Rory's body. In the TARDIS, the Doctor urges Amy to hold on to her memories of Rory as he is being erased from existence by the crack. They land back on the surface but the jolt of the landing breaks Amy's concentration and she gets up with no memory of Rory.
The five of them exit the TARDIS just as the drill explodes. As Mo and Elliot settle back to their house, the Doctor pulls Ambrose aside. She thanks him for not letting the Silurians kill her. The Doctor impresses on her to use her failings to teach Elliot to be the best of humanity; that those traits would be passed on when the time for the Silurians to wake again comes.
Amy and the Doctor return to the TARDIS where Amy sees her future self waving from across the hill. Amy waves back but has a moment's hesitation where she thought she remembered seeing someone with her future self. She dismisses it and suggests they head to Rio as planned. The Doctor stalls and pulls the fragment from his pocket that he got out of the crack. He holds it up to the TARDIS and the pieces match, revealing that his TARDIS exploding appears to be the source of the cracks.
Analysis
It is rather unfortunate the turns this story takes. Before the Silurians are revealed, there is an air of mystery an allusion to Third Doctor stories of the past (Inferno and The Green Death most notably). Even after the Silurians show up, there is still an interesting aspect that keeps your attention through The Hungry Earth. Cold Blood however is like someone who read a quick summary of Doctor Who and the Silurians and then tried to do a slap-dash Malcolm Hulke impression, failing to capture the best of that story on both accounts.
Cold Blood takes a slimmed down view by portraying all the humans, save Nasreen, as emotional idiots and the Silurians, save Eldane and Malohkeh, as racist, bloodthirsty monsters. What little character development is done is all for the purpose of having everything fall apart at the end and very few of the positive aspects of either side are shown. No one is given time to think or explain and the Doctor himself jumps on the humans as morons and murders much quicker than he does with the Silurians, who are also fully prepared to murder.
While Doctor Who and the Silurians is too long at seven parts, it still would have needed at least four or five episodes to breathe and get the proper amount of development that it needed. Here, Chibnall is clearly trying to take everything from about Episode Two on and cram it into one 40-minute block. Actually it's even less than that because the last 5-7 minutes deal with the crack, Rory's death and the denouement where the Doctor imposes the lesson to Ambrose. Compressing to that level robs a story of nuance, character and development. I had some problems with Doctor Who and the Silurians but they were relatively small and dealt as much with perceived fan wisdom than the actual story. But that's nothing compared to how squashed and boiled down Cold Blood is.
Now there were positive aspects. The Doctor, Amy and Rory were all enjoyable. It's interesting to see Amy get most of The Hungry Earth off, counterbalancing Rory's absence in Vincent and the Doctor. What time she does get she does well in, though her false bravado can get grating if used too much. Rory is also good and although he doesn't get as much time with him, I do like the times that Rory and the Doctor are together as they have a very good chemistry together.
Much like the Fifth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor does well with an older woman acting as his pseudo-companion. Nasreen actually probably would have made a good companion as she is enthusiastic, open-minded and highly intelligent. Her romance with Tony was a bit forced, but I think that's more of a time issue and the fact that the nature of their relationship was not given time to develop.
In their brief instances, I liked Mo and Elliot. I do think Elliot was a waste though. Mo not getting much development is understandable as he was the first victim and there are other things to work on by the time he gets back involved with the plot. But Elliot had a nice little relationship develop with the Doctor, even including the bit about him being dyslexic. To have him be reduced to window dressing with no active role in anything in Cold Blood just feels like a waste. A plot thread that was supposed to do something or have a small pay off but instead went no where.
I'm more ambivalent on Tony. He was wounded in the attack and didn't serve much of a role other than be the thing that keeps Nasreen around and show the more cowardly side of humanity. But it was Ambrose that was the worst. She was the go to bad guy for everything but she wasn't even good at being a bad guy. She shoves a Taser in Alaya's chest while whining about not being given her family back. Anyone with any common sense would have realized that could have stopped a creature's heart. Then, even after realizing that she's totally screwed the pooch, she decides to go Machiavellian and destroy the Silurian city with the drill while being xenophobic. Which is she: a terrified wife and mother or a speciesist? I think we are supposed to feel sympathetic with her fear at first but she never presents redeeming qualities. She is morphed whenever convenient to the plot to become the villain. She is just an annoying, inconsistent character.
The Silurians aren't much better. There is no attempt at communication, it's just instant military invasion when the life support systems are endangered. Yet, despite launching a military raid, the Silurians are somehow indignant that the humans defended themselves from being captured. Restac and Alaya are so one note with their anti-human feelings that they see and act in no other manner. Restac isn't even a good military commander as she assumes there is a human army waiting to attack them despite their recon providing no information on any army and only capturing one unarmed boy. Malohkeh did better in capturing two people (Mo and Amy) with his science and he was fully convinced that the humans were not attacking them.
Restac wasn't even able to pull off her full coup, which at least happened in Doctor Who and the Silurians. Here she tries and fails with another round of terrible shooting. Yes the Doctor disabled some of the guns, but there were clearly a good ten armed soldiers, any of which could have gotten off a shot to take someone out. The only decent shot is Restac's final shot where she kills Rory and there the Doctor was standing still, distracted by the crack, giving Rory no choice but to push the Doctor out of the way. The Silurians in Doctor Who and the Silurians, killed hundreds and would have worked towards total genocide if not for the Doctor and Liz. When compared to the old, the nuance and detail just isn't there for the new Silurians compared to the ones of the classic era.
The direction was nice and I do like the look of the new Silurians over the old ones. One of my complaints about the old Silurians was the overreliance on the third eye which could do anything they wanted. Here, the Silurians are far more obvious in their employment of technology and it fit better. The new design also gives them much more movement and expression which is nice. This comes more to the fore with Madame Vastra in later episodes but the groundwork is here.
Ultimately, this is a good set up undone by trying to do too much in too short a time. Chibnall's attempt to put a seven-part story into the span of less than 80 minutes just leaves so much left undone. Worse, the near identical set up and follow on from the source material leave the viewer pining for the deeper and more textured version. If a viewer hasn't seen Doctor Who and the Silurians, they might get more out of this two-parter but once the source material is known, it's hard to see this one as anything but a pale imitation. It's just not one that I would want to go back to with any regularity.
Overall personal score: The Hungry Earth - 3.5 out of 5; Cold Blood - 1.5 out of 5
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
The Woman Who Lived
I am Me.
This story had everyone in a tizzy with who Ashildr was prior to it and The Girl Who Died's airing. Once her secret was revealed, the air was let out of the balloon and these two stories got left in the dust of more interesting stories. As with the previous story, there are nuggets of good things in this story but it suffers from focus issues, though of a different variety than the prior story.
Plot Summary
The Doctor arrives in 1651 looking for a piece of lost alien technology. He stumbles across a highway robbery being performed by a criminal called the Knightmare. His interruption allows the coach to speed away before either of them can get the lady's amulet which appears to be the alien technology the Doctor is looking for. After they have gone, the Knightmare reveals himself to actually be Ashildr.
Ashildr takes the Doctor back to her manor house though she does not go by Ashildr any more. She now only refers to herself as "me" and operates as a highwayman for the adventure. She relates to the Doctor her various lives that she has lived over the past 800 years, much of which she has forgotten but has written down in a vast library. Knowing where the noble couple's home is, Ashildr tells the Doctor they will leave in an hour and steal the amulet from there.
The Doctor reads through her journals, noting two particular periods where a lover died of old age and her children perished in the Black Death. Those experiences hardened her to live her life alone. As he reads, Ashildr heads outside where she meets with an alien hidden in the shadows, informing him that she and this visitor will be heading out to find the lost artifact and that he has no idea of their true purpose.
The Doctor and Ashildr travel on foot to a nearby manor where they break in through the kitchens. They light a candle and search the house. Eventually they discover the amulet with an iridescent purple gem at the center. They pocket the amulet and sneak downstairs. But they accidentally wake the lord of the manor, having fallen asleep on the couch, and are forced to escape by climbing up a chimney.
The head back to Ashildr's manor where they are accosted by another bandit named Sam Swift with a couple of helpers. Ashildr disarms him but he tries to get the upper hand while the two companions restrain the Doctor. Ashildr eventually pins him and has the gun. Sam pleads for mercy but Ashildr is not inclined to give him quarter until the Doctor vows to become her enemy if she kills him. She lets him up and the three men run away.
In the morning, Ashildr comes down, dressed as an upper class lady and attended by an old, half-blind butler named Clayton. She expects the Doctor to leave again but he promises to stay and keep an eye on her. She begs him to take her away as she has lost so much and feels so trapped on Earth but the Doctor refuses, not trusting her.
At that moment the alien who had been waiting outside bangs on the door. The Doctor opens the door to let him in. The alien is called Leandro and claims to be the last of his kind. The amulet is his and will open a doorway to the afterlife and his people. In exchange for her help, Leandro has offered to take Ashildr with him through space. But the gem requires a death to activate it. Leandro is inclined to use the Doctor but Ashildr refuses to see the Doctor killed as payment for his saving of hers, no matter how much she might curse him for it.
Ashildr intends to kill Clayton but they are interrupted by two pike men who are here to warn the lady that the Knightmare has been seen in the woods and that Sam Swift has been captured and is going to be hanged at noon. Ashildr changes her mind and decides to use Sam's death instead. She had already tied up the Doctor when she announced that she would kill Clayton. She then turns the Doctor over to the pike men, telling them that he is the Knightmare's assistant. Ashildr and Leandro then drive off in her carriage.
The pike men take the Doctor haul him to the door, noting that they intend to collect a reward for him. The Doctor counters, pointing out that he knows where the Lady Me keeps a chest of gold. They release him, he shows them the chest and then rides to town to stop her.
In town, Sam forestalls his hanging by entertaining the crowd with humor. Ashildr and Leandro get impatient and call for his hanging. The Doctor arrives and he and Sam continue with the jokes, getting the crowd back into the entertainment. As they tell jokes, the Doctor offers the hangman his psychic paper, pointing out that Sam has a pardon from Cromwell. The hangman gives in but the crowd is unruly. Noting that the Doctor has a wanted poster for abetting the Knightmare, the crowd calls for his hanging.
Ashildr, not wanting the Doctor hanged, pulls out the amulet and stabs Sam in the chest with it. The gem extracts his life force and shoots a beam of purple light into the sky, opening a porthole to a waiting fleet of spaceships. The ships begin firing on the crowd. Ashildr realizes that she was tricked and that Leandro was only a scout sent to create a doorway for his species to invade. She pleads with the Doctor to help her save the people.
The Doctor tells her that the only way is to close the porthole by bringing Sam back to life. Ashildr then grabs the second Mire health chip and places it on Sam's head. The chip brings him back to life and ejects the amulet from his body. The porthole closes before any of the ships can pass through and Leandro is incinerated by his own kind for his failure.
The trio celebrates in a pub afterward and Ashildr asks if Sam is also now immortal. The Doctor doesn't know given how much power might have been drained to counter the amulet. Ashildr, now realizing that she does still care for the lives of others decides that she will change and now devote herself to watching over those impacted by the Doctor and then left behind like herself. This meets with the Doctor's approval and they promise to see each other in the future.
The Doctor arrives back in modern London where Clara greets him. She offers him a selfie taken by one of her students as a thank you for helping her with a history report. Looking over the picture, he notices Ashildr standing in the background and staring directly at the camera. The Doctor then offers Clara the chance to pick the location of their next adventure.
Analysis
If this story were 45 minutes of the Doctor and Ashildr running around committing crimes and playing a bickering duo, I think this story would have been much higher rated. The interplay between Ashildr and the Doctor, especially with no Clara to act as a third wheel, is quite amusing, even if Ashildr's whining about being left behind by the Doctor gets a bit grating after a while. Where the story falls apart is when they get to the "invasion".
The Doctor is in good form in this story and is quite entertaining. The Twelfth Doctor doesn't give in to comedy that much even in Series 9 but here there is a lot of bit play that is reasonably funny, especially in his getting offended at being referred to as the assistant and in the jokes in regard to his age. But he also has that moral streak which puts an underlying note of seriousness in things and also punctuates the comedy with the dark edge. He has pratfalls but not so blatant and over-the-top as were seen in the previous story. He's just fun to be around.
Ashildr is a mixed bag. She is better when she has the darker edge and false bravado to her. Her moments of softness, of opening up and recalling the old Ashildr seem weaker. I'm not sure how the set up would have really worked but I feel that the story might have been better if we didn't have any of the set up about Ashildr from the prior story and instead came in cold with a jaded woman who had known the Doctor previously but that story was left unknown. There is just something about knowing the girl from whom this woman came from that undercuts her edge or takes away from the tragedy.
Still, she is witty and clearly of a good mind. What doesn't make a lot of sense is why the Doctor wouldn't take her away, especially after she saved Sam. I can understand the Doctor not taking her while she acts like a petulant child, but once she shows that the she does care about life and people, why not take her on a trip here and there? It just feels like a plot convenience not to have the Doctor promise to take her to a new place if she shows growth or reform.
And on the subject of plot conveniences... the entire plotline with Leandro doesn't work on all kinds of levels. It feels slapped on with Leandro not being properly introduced until halfway through the story. With all the wit and intelligence Ashildr shows through the rest of the story, she has to be portrayed as very naïve to not see through Leandro's plot and that does not mesh with the hard, cynical character we have come to know. Then, after all that, Leandro is vaporized by his own people when the invasion porthole is closed. Never mind how that was done, that is the laziest means of getting rid of a villain and a loose plot thread that I've seen in quite a while. There was just very little about the second half that I found enjoyable.
Actually, there's not much else to say after that. None of the secondary characters add much, even Sam as he is also introduced late. The direction is adequate but not overly memorable and the scene of the fighters firing on the crowd gathered had a rather cheap look to it. Even the selfie scene at the end had a rather forced feel to it, though it did give Clara a chance to be genial. Honestly, if it wasn't for the fun repartee between Ashildr and the Doctor, this story would clearly be in "1" territory. But that interaction was good enough that I'll give it some additional consideration.
Overall personal score: 2 out of 5
This story had everyone in a tizzy with who Ashildr was prior to it and The Girl Who Died's airing. Once her secret was revealed, the air was let out of the balloon and these two stories got left in the dust of more interesting stories. As with the previous story, there are nuggets of good things in this story but it suffers from focus issues, though of a different variety than the prior story.
Plot Summary
The Doctor arrives in 1651 looking for a piece of lost alien technology. He stumbles across a highway robbery being performed by a criminal called the Knightmare. His interruption allows the coach to speed away before either of them can get the lady's amulet which appears to be the alien technology the Doctor is looking for. After they have gone, the Knightmare reveals himself to actually be Ashildr.
Ashildr takes the Doctor back to her manor house though she does not go by Ashildr any more. She now only refers to herself as "me" and operates as a highwayman for the adventure. She relates to the Doctor her various lives that she has lived over the past 800 years, much of which she has forgotten but has written down in a vast library. Knowing where the noble couple's home is, Ashildr tells the Doctor they will leave in an hour and steal the amulet from there.
The Doctor reads through her journals, noting two particular periods where a lover died of old age and her children perished in the Black Death. Those experiences hardened her to live her life alone. As he reads, Ashildr heads outside where she meets with an alien hidden in the shadows, informing him that she and this visitor will be heading out to find the lost artifact and that he has no idea of their true purpose.
The Doctor and Ashildr travel on foot to a nearby manor where they break in through the kitchens. They light a candle and search the house. Eventually they discover the amulet with an iridescent purple gem at the center. They pocket the amulet and sneak downstairs. But they accidentally wake the lord of the manor, having fallen asleep on the couch, and are forced to escape by climbing up a chimney.
The head back to Ashildr's manor where they are accosted by another bandit named Sam Swift with a couple of helpers. Ashildr disarms him but he tries to get the upper hand while the two companions restrain the Doctor. Ashildr eventually pins him and has the gun. Sam pleads for mercy but Ashildr is not inclined to give him quarter until the Doctor vows to become her enemy if she kills him. She lets him up and the three men run away.
In the morning, Ashildr comes down, dressed as an upper class lady and attended by an old, half-blind butler named Clayton. She expects the Doctor to leave again but he promises to stay and keep an eye on her. She begs him to take her away as she has lost so much and feels so trapped on Earth but the Doctor refuses, not trusting her.
At that moment the alien who had been waiting outside bangs on the door. The Doctor opens the door to let him in. The alien is called Leandro and claims to be the last of his kind. The amulet is his and will open a doorway to the afterlife and his people. In exchange for her help, Leandro has offered to take Ashildr with him through space. But the gem requires a death to activate it. Leandro is inclined to use the Doctor but Ashildr refuses to see the Doctor killed as payment for his saving of hers, no matter how much she might curse him for it.
Ashildr intends to kill Clayton but they are interrupted by two pike men who are here to warn the lady that the Knightmare has been seen in the woods and that Sam Swift has been captured and is going to be hanged at noon. Ashildr changes her mind and decides to use Sam's death instead. She had already tied up the Doctor when she announced that she would kill Clayton. She then turns the Doctor over to the pike men, telling them that he is the Knightmare's assistant. Ashildr and Leandro then drive off in her carriage.
The pike men take the Doctor haul him to the door, noting that they intend to collect a reward for him. The Doctor counters, pointing out that he knows where the Lady Me keeps a chest of gold. They release him, he shows them the chest and then rides to town to stop her.
In town, Sam forestalls his hanging by entertaining the crowd with humor. Ashildr and Leandro get impatient and call for his hanging. The Doctor arrives and he and Sam continue with the jokes, getting the crowd back into the entertainment. As they tell jokes, the Doctor offers the hangman his psychic paper, pointing out that Sam has a pardon from Cromwell. The hangman gives in but the crowd is unruly. Noting that the Doctor has a wanted poster for abetting the Knightmare, the crowd calls for his hanging.
Ashildr, not wanting the Doctor hanged, pulls out the amulet and stabs Sam in the chest with it. The gem extracts his life force and shoots a beam of purple light into the sky, opening a porthole to a waiting fleet of spaceships. The ships begin firing on the crowd. Ashildr realizes that she was tricked and that Leandro was only a scout sent to create a doorway for his species to invade. She pleads with the Doctor to help her save the people.
The Doctor tells her that the only way is to close the porthole by bringing Sam back to life. Ashildr then grabs the second Mire health chip and places it on Sam's head. The chip brings him back to life and ejects the amulet from his body. The porthole closes before any of the ships can pass through and Leandro is incinerated by his own kind for his failure.
The trio celebrates in a pub afterward and Ashildr asks if Sam is also now immortal. The Doctor doesn't know given how much power might have been drained to counter the amulet. Ashildr, now realizing that she does still care for the lives of others decides that she will change and now devote herself to watching over those impacted by the Doctor and then left behind like herself. This meets with the Doctor's approval and they promise to see each other in the future.
The Doctor arrives back in modern London where Clara greets him. She offers him a selfie taken by one of her students as a thank you for helping her with a history report. Looking over the picture, he notices Ashildr standing in the background and staring directly at the camera. The Doctor then offers Clara the chance to pick the location of their next adventure.
Analysis
If this story were 45 minutes of the Doctor and Ashildr running around committing crimes and playing a bickering duo, I think this story would have been much higher rated. The interplay between Ashildr and the Doctor, especially with no Clara to act as a third wheel, is quite amusing, even if Ashildr's whining about being left behind by the Doctor gets a bit grating after a while. Where the story falls apart is when they get to the "invasion".
The Doctor is in good form in this story and is quite entertaining. The Twelfth Doctor doesn't give in to comedy that much even in Series 9 but here there is a lot of bit play that is reasonably funny, especially in his getting offended at being referred to as the assistant and in the jokes in regard to his age. But he also has that moral streak which puts an underlying note of seriousness in things and also punctuates the comedy with the dark edge. He has pratfalls but not so blatant and over-the-top as were seen in the previous story. He's just fun to be around.
Ashildr is a mixed bag. She is better when she has the darker edge and false bravado to her. Her moments of softness, of opening up and recalling the old Ashildr seem weaker. I'm not sure how the set up would have really worked but I feel that the story might have been better if we didn't have any of the set up about Ashildr from the prior story and instead came in cold with a jaded woman who had known the Doctor previously but that story was left unknown. There is just something about knowing the girl from whom this woman came from that undercuts her edge or takes away from the tragedy.
Still, she is witty and clearly of a good mind. What doesn't make a lot of sense is why the Doctor wouldn't take her away, especially after she saved Sam. I can understand the Doctor not taking her while she acts like a petulant child, but once she shows that the she does care about life and people, why not take her on a trip here and there? It just feels like a plot convenience not to have the Doctor promise to take her to a new place if she shows growth or reform.
And on the subject of plot conveniences... the entire plotline with Leandro doesn't work on all kinds of levels. It feels slapped on with Leandro not being properly introduced until halfway through the story. With all the wit and intelligence Ashildr shows through the rest of the story, she has to be portrayed as very naïve to not see through Leandro's plot and that does not mesh with the hard, cynical character we have come to know. Then, after all that, Leandro is vaporized by his own people when the invasion porthole is closed. Never mind how that was done, that is the laziest means of getting rid of a villain and a loose plot thread that I've seen in quite a while. There was just very little about the second half that I found enjoyable.
Actually, there's not much else to say after that. None of the secondary characters add much, even Sam as he is also introduced late. The direction is adequate but not overly memorable and the scene of the fighters firing on the crowd gathered had a rather cheap look to it. Even the selfie scene at the end had a rather forced feel to it, though it did give Clara a chance to be genial. Honestly, if it wasn't for the fun repartee between Ashildr and the Doctor, this story would clearly be in "1" territory. But that interaction was good enough that I'll give it some additional consideration.
Overall personal score: 2 out of 5
The Girl Who Died
I am the Doctor and I save people. If anyone has a problem with that, to hell with them!
I debated long and hard as to whether The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived should be done separately or together. Series 9 was made up of several two-parters and this set up in a similar fashion. However unlike the others, these two had no real plot tie-ins other than that they featured the character of Ashildr and showed the Doctor doing a follow up to her story. I thought that a loose enough thread that it would be better to evaluate each story on it's own merits rather than trying to weave it together as a single narrative, despite The Girl Who Died trying to shoehorn a "To Be Continued" at the end of the story.
Plot Summary
After taking a short side trip, the Doctor rescues Clara floating in space with a brain sucking spider roaming in her suit. After stomping on the spider, he lands the TARDIS on Earth to wipe his shoe. The two of them are then apprehended by a group of Vikings. The Doctor tries to impress them with his sonic sunglasses but the lead warrior snaps them in half. They are then taken back to the Viking village.
In the village, the Doctor tries to pass himself off as Odin but is interrupted by an image of Odin in the sky. Several armored figures appear and transport the warriors away. Clara notices that one of the Viking girls was given half of the Doctor's sonic sunglasses and she rushes forward, telling the girl how to activate them. This registers with the armored warriors who transport the girl and Clara as well before transporting back themselves.
The group finds themselves on a ship in space, trapped in a holding room. One of the walls pushes the group to a second room where the warriors are broken down into their chemical essence, which is consumed by the aliens. However Clara and the girl, called Ashildr, are spared as the leader of the aliens is curious about the technology of the sunglasses. Clara starts talking and bluffs the warriors into thinking that they are opposed by a race of much stronger aliens. Ashildr then jumps in and challenges the warriors to combat, pulling the aliens out of their second thoughts. They accept her challenge and promise to return the next day to fight.
Clara and Ashildr are returned to the village where Clara relates what happened to the Doctor. The Doctor in turn tells Clara that the aliens are known as the Mire, a strong warrior race who will destroy the village without a second thought. The Doctor urges the villagers to flee, letting the Mire declare victory and leave the rest in peace. But the villagers refuse to abandon their homes and vow to fight, despite none of them having any combat experience.
Clara asks the Doctor why he won't fight and the Doctor responds that he is worried about upsetting time, for if he defeats the Mire, it will increase the standing of Earth in the minds of other Mire raiding parties and bring further invasions. But the Doctor changes his mind after listening to the cries of a baby, who can sense the danger coming.
The Doctor takes command of the villagers and attempts to train them in basic swordsmanship. The results are poor and the Doctor feels discouraged. Clara urges the Doctor to stop trying to be a soldier and instead think of something else.
The Doctor follows Ashildr into a barn and watches her put on a shadow puppet show to distract herself from her fears. The Doctor is amused and joins in but is distracted by the baby crying again. He sees her father taking her to a building near the water and Ashildr tells the Doctor that watching the fish in barrels amuses her. The Doctor is puzzled at first but then puts together her "fire in the water" comment and comes up with the plan.
Clara sees his excitement and follows him into the building. The Doctor shows her barrels filled with electric eels, giving off the surges of current: the "fire in the water." He then pulls the villagers together and creates a plan with various props to defeat the Mire.
In the morning, the Mire transport to the village and find it strangely deserted. They enter the great hall and find the Doctor and villagers dancing. They are confused by this, also finding no weapons. The Doctor asks if they will kill unarmed people and Odin responds that it wouldn't be the first time. The banter distracts the Mire while a villager from above lowers a wire on to the Mire soldiers. The Doctor gives a signal and the villager excites the eels, sending electric current down the wire and stunning the soldiers.
The Mire recover and advance on the scattering villagers. As a group walks to another part of a hall, the eels are excited again and the electricity is used to make a magnet which rips the helmets of a couple of the Mire soldiers. The Doctor grabs a helmet and puts it on Ashildr. The villagers then open the doors of the hall and the Mire see a dragon-like serpent advancing on them. Immune to their weapons, the serpent advances and the Mire retreat and transport back to their ship, leaving Odin behind.
The Doctor then kills the signal from the helmet and the "serpent" is revealed as a puppet made from the prow of a longboat. The Doctor also reveals that Clara had recorded the whole attack on her phone but without the images transmitted through the helmet to the Mire, it appears the Mire are retreating before a wooden prop. The Doctor tells Odin that they will leave and never come back or he will upload the video to the universal hub and every species wronged by the Mire will attack them as being revealed as a race of cowards. Odin vows revenge but the Doctor grabs his transponder and sends him back to his ship. The ship then flies back into space.
The villagers celebrate but when they take the helmet off Ashildr, they find her heart has given out from the stress of using the helmet. The villagers mourn her while the Doctor mopes in the fish house. Clara comes to comfort him. While she does so, the Doctor suddenly realizes that he chose the face of Caecilius to remind him that he saves people. He runs out and pulls a chip out of the Mire helmet. He modifies it to adapt to human physiology and places it on her head. The chip is absorbed and repairs the damage to her heart, bringing her back to life.
The villagers thank him and the Doctor gives Ashildr's father a second chip to give to her with the instruction that it is for her to give to someone special. Walking back to the TARDIS, Clara asks about the second chip and the Doctor tells her that the Mire chip may continually repair Ashildr, rendering her unable to die of natural causes. Immortality is a curse of watching others die while you live and the Doctor gave her the chip to give her companionship should she find someone she can't live without.
Ashildr is then seen watching the sky as time passes around her. Her expression of hopeful innocence turns first to tired sorrow and then to cold cynicism.
Analysis
The Ashildr stories got a lot of attention when Series 9 debuted, mostly due to the prominence she got in the trailers and the crazy theories that came about due to her. Being removed from the hype and just watching this story for what it is, I have to say that it is a bit thin. It's got some entertainment and can be fun at points, but it feels like there should be more.
In addition to being a bit thin in plot, there's something slightly off about this story and I think it's the tone, both in the writing and in the acting. The story can't quite decide if it wants to be a full bore comedy or drama and I think that pulls the story and the actors in different directions.
The Doctor is one of the worst sufferers of tone. Much of dialogue is clearly meant to be funny, either in that "guy talking nonsense out of his butt" way or just his general treatment of the Vikings. But peppered in are these dark, dramatic moments where the Doctor speaks of the baby's fear and his lashing out at the consequences of time in deciding to save people. The lashing out especially is reminiscent of the Time Lord Victorious (The Waters of Mars) which took a suicide to bring the Doctor back to humility. Here he just rails, makes his decision and then leaves with no one to challenge him on his actions until his own conscious starts to gnaw at him.
I enjoy his performance for the most part but the swings are a bit hard to latch on to. I also have to admit that I'm not a fan of humiliation comedy where a character is going off, like the Doctor with the yo-yo, claiming to be Odin, when you know he just looks like a fool. I always found that rather painful to watch but that's a limitation of my own taste rather than anything wrong with the show in particular.
The character who actually came out the best here is Clara. There is an interesting conclusion to a previous adventure which has her both a full participant but also with the wherewithal to be scared. During the main adventure, she is bold and Doctor-like with the Mire but not to the point of arrogance which develops later. She uses the Doctor's reputation as a sword and it would have worked had Ashildr not intervened which shows both cunning and intelligence.
Yet when reunited with the Doctor, she takes a backseat to him, knowing that he will turn and come up with a plan. She prods him when she knows he's going down the wrong path and encourages him when he feels discouraged. Even after Ashildr's death, she doesn't drive him to fix it. She offers comfort instead, noting that the plan worked. Her compassion does prompt him to make the decision to save Ashildr but she doesn't hammer on him that that is what needs to be done. It is a restrained performance and one of her better outings.
The Vikings themselves, and I would even include Ashildr in this, are pretty non-descript. The warriors act like warriors and the villagers are used mostly for comic relief, being shown mostly as near incompetents in anything not involving their actual craft. Ashildr herself gets very little development as well. She is shown as an imaginative yet pessimistic girl who serves only to both thwart Clara's deception of the Mire and to be the driver of the mental dragon. The screen time and development she gets is actually rather minimal and it is a bit strange that the Doctor regrets her death any more than if one of the other villagers had been killed. Perhaps it's guilt since he put her in the situation that killed her.
The Mire are also a rather non-descript villain. They pop in, kill a few warriors, disappear while the Doctor and the villagers make their plans and then retreat after their battle in less than five minutes. The Mire are functionally just not on screen enough to offer any particular opinion. Any race of aliens or even human could have been put in and it would have had the same effect. The two things that you needed from the Mire, prompting their insertion is that they need to have a sense of self preservation (as opposed to Sontarans) and the use of a projected screen that could be hacked. Use of natural vision would have thwarted that plan as well. But the Mire feel like they were created for their flaws rather than developed independently.
One of the complaints I remember people making about the resolution was how much it reminded them of Three Amigos in that the villagers are working at a deception rather than any meaningful fighting skill. I didn't think it was quite that bad but I could see how some would find it disappointing. The Doctor did point out that their victory needed to be deceptive because an actual military victory would only encourage the Mire to send more ships as humans would be seen as a worth foe. So I didn't have any problem with the resolution there, except for the underdevelopment of the Mire as an actual threat.
The direction and setting were nice though the voice work on Odin was a bit strange. At the very least the story looked like it was set in a real village with real considerations for the limitations of the time. It was pleasant on the eyes and most of the problems I had were with the writing.
If it wasn't for the use of Ashildr later in Series 9, I think this would have been a very forgettable story, along the lines of The Eaters of Light in Series 10. Its most memorable aspect outside of her is that it can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a farcical comedy or a cautionary tragedy. That gives inconsistent writing and poor character development. There is nothing overtly bad about it and the comedic points are legitimately amusing. It also has decent acting from the Doctor and Clara which gives it a little extra boost. But it's a story that slides off the brain very easily. Easy in, easy out.
Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5
I debated long and hard as to whether The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived should be done separately or together. Series 9 was made up of several two-parters and this set up in a similar fashion. However unlike the others, these two had no real plot tie-ins other than that they featured the character of Ashildr and showed the Doctor doing a follow up to her story. I thought that a loose enough thread that it would be better to evaluate each story on it's own merits rather than trying to weave it together as a single narrative, despite The Girl Who Died trying to shoehorn a "To Be Continued" at the end of the story.
Plot Summary
After taking a short side trip, the Doctor rescues Clara floating in space with a brain sucking spider roaming in her suit. After stomping on the spider, he lands the TARDIS on Earth to wipe his shoe. The two of them are then apprehended by a group of Vikings. The Doctor tries to impress them with his sonic sunglasses but the lead warrior snaps them in half. They are then taken back to the Viking village.
In the village, the Doctor tries to pass himself off as Odin but is interrupted by an image of Odin in the sky. Several armored figures appear and transport the warriors away. Clara notices that one of the Viking girls was given half of the Doctor's sonic sunglasses and she rushes forward, telling the girl how to activate them. This registers with the armored warriors who transport the girl and Clara as well before transporting back themselves.
The group finds themselves on a ship in space, trapped in a holding room. One of the walls pushes the group to a second room where the warriors are broken down into their chemical essence, which is consumed by the aliens. However Clara and the girl, called Ashildr, are spared as the leader of the aliens is curious about the technology of the sunglasses. Clara starts talking and bluffs the warriors into thinking that they are opposed by a race of much stronger aliens. Ashildr then jumps in and challenges the warriors to combat, pulling the aliens out of their second thoughts. They accept her challenge and promise to return the next day to fight.
Clara and Ashildr are returned to the village where Clara relates what happened to the Doctor. The Doctor in turn tells Clara that the aliens are known as the Mire, a strong warrior race who will destroy the village without a second thought. The Doctor urges the villagers to flee, letting the Mire declare victory and leave the rest in peace. But the villagers refuse to abandon their homes and vow to fight, despite none of them having any combat experience.
Clara asks the Doctor why he won't fight and the Doctor responds that he is worried about upsetting time, for if he defeats the Mire, it will increase the standing of Earth in the minds of other Mire raiding parties and bring further invasions. But the Doctor changes his mind after listening to the cries of a baby, who can sense the danger coming.
The Doctor takes command of the villagers and attempts to train them in basic swordsmanship. The results are poor and the Doctor feels discouraged. Clara urges the Doctor to stop trying to be a soldier and instead think of something else.
The Doctor follows Ashildr into a barn and watches her put on a shadow puppet show to distract herself from her fears. The Doctor is amused and joins in but is distracted by the baby crying again. He sees her father taking her to a building near the water and Ashildr tells the Doctor that watching the fish in barrels amuses her. The Doctor is puzzled at first but then puts together her "fire in the water" comment and comes up with the plan.
Clara sees his excitement and follows him into the building. The Doctor shows her barrels filled with electric eels, giving off the surges of current: the "fire in the water." He then pulls the villagers together and creates a plan with various props to defeat the Mire.
In the morning, the Mire transport to the village and find it strangely deserted. They enter the great hall and find the Doctor and villagers dancing. They are confused by this, also finding no weapons. The Doctor asks if they will kill unarmed people and Odin responds that it wouldn't be the first time. The banter distracts the Mire while a villager from above lowers a wire on to the Mire soldiers. The Doctor gives a signal and the villager excites the eels, sending electric current down the wire and stunning the soldiers.
The Mire recover and advance on the scattering villagers. As a group walks to another part of a hall, the eels are excited again and the electricity is used to make a magnet which rips the helmets of a couple of the Mire soldiers. The Doctor grabs a helmet and puts it on Ashildr. The villagers then open the doors of the hall and the Mire see a dragon-like serpent advancing on them. Immune to their weapons, the serpent advances and the Mire retreat and transport back to their ship, leaving Odin behind.
The Doctor then kills the signal from the helmet and the "serpent" is revealed as a puppet made from the prow of a longboat. The Doctor also reveals that Clara had recorded the whole attack on her phone but without the images transmitted through the helmet to the Mire, it appears the Mire are retreating before a wooden prop. The Doctor tells Odin that they will leave and never come back or he will upload the video to the universal hub and every species wronged by the Mire will attack them as being revealed as a race of cowards. Odin vows revenge but the Doctor grabs his transponder and sends him back to his ship. The ship then flies back into space.
The villagers celebrate but when they take the helmet off Ashildr, they find her heart has given out from the stress of using the helmet. The villagers mourn her while the Doctor mopes in the fish house. Clara comes to comfort him. While she does so, the Doctor suddenly realizes that he chose the face of Caecilius to remind him that he saves people. He runs out and pulls a chip out of the Mire helmet. He modifies it to adapt to human physiology and places it on her head. The chip is absorbed and repairs the damage to her heart, bringing her back to life.
The villagers thank him and the Doctor gives Ashildr's father a second chip to give to her with the instruction that it is for her to give to someone special. Walking back to the TARDIS, Clara asks about the second chip and the Doctor tells her that the Mire chip may continually repair Ashildr, rendering her unable to die of natural causes. Immortality is a curse of watching others die while you live and the Doctor gave her the chip to give her companionship should she find someone she can't live without.
Ashildr is then seen watching the sky as time passes around her. Her expression of hopeful innocence turns first to tired sorrow and then to cold cynicism.
Analysis
The Ashildr stories got a lot of attention when Series 9 debuted, mostly due to the prominence she got in the trailers and the crazy theories that came about due to her. Being removed from the hype and just watching this story for what it is, I have to say that it is a bit thin. It's got some entertainment and can be fun at points, but it feels like there should be more.
In addition to being a bit thin in plot, there's something slightly off about this story and I think it's the tone, both in the writing and in the acting. The story can't quite decide if it wants to be a full bore comedy or drama and I think that pulls the story and the actors in different directions.
The Doctor is one of the worst sufferers of tone. Much of dialogue is clearly meant to be funny, either in that "guy talking nonsense out of his butt" way or just his general treatment of the Vikings. But peppered in are these dark, dramatic moments where the Doctor speaks of the baby's fear and his lashing out at the consequences of time in deciding to save people. The lashing out especially is reminiscent of the Time Lord Victorious (The Waters of Mars) which took a suicide to bring the Doctor back to humility. Here he just rails, makes his decision and then leaves with no one to challenge him on his actions until his own conscious starts to gnaw at him.
I enjoy his performance for the most part but the swings are a bit hard to latch on to. I also have to admit that I'm not a fan of humiliation comedy where a character is going off, like the Doctor with the yo-yo, claiming to be Odin, when you know he just looks like a fool. I always found that rather painful to watch but that's a limitation of my own taste rather than anything wrong with the show in particular.
The character who actually came out the best here is Clara. There is an interesting conclusion to a previous adventure which has her both a full participant but also with the wherewithal to be scared. During the main adventure, she is bold and Doctor-like with the Mire but not to the point of arrogance which develops later. She uses the Doctor's reputation as a sword and it would have worked had Ashildr not intervened which shows both cunning and intelligence.
Yet when reunited with the Doctor, she takes a backseat to him, knowing that he will turn and come up with a plan. She prods him when she knows he's going down the wrong path and encourages him when he feels discouraged. Even after Ashildr's death, she doesn't drive him to fix it. She offers comfort instead, noting that the plan worked. Her compassion does prompt him to make the decision to save Ashildr but she doesn't hammer on him that that is what needs to be done. It is a restrained performance and one of her better outings.
The Vikings themselves, and I would even include Ashildr in this, are pretty non-descript. The warriors act like warriors and the villagers are used mostly for comic relief, being shown mostly as near incompetents in anything not involving their actual craft. Ashildr herself gets very little development as well. She is shown as an imaginative yet pessimistic girl who serves only to both thwart Clara's deception of the Mire and to be the driver of the mental dragon. The screen time and development she gets is actually rather minimal and it is a bit strange that the Doctor regrets her death any more than if one of the other villagers had been killed. Perhaps it's guilt since he put her in the situation that killed her.
The Mire are also a rather non-descript villain. They pop in, kill a few warriors, disappear while the Doctor and the villagers make their plans and then retreat after their battle in less than five minutes. The Mire are functionally just not on screen enough to offer any particular opinion. Any race of aliens or even human could have been put in and it would have had the same effect. The two things that you needed from the Mire, prompting their insertion is that they need to have a sense of self preservation (as opposed to Sontarans) and the use of a projected screen that could be hacked. Use of natural vision would have thwarted that plan as well. But the Mire feel like they were created for their flaws rather than developed independently.
One of the complaints I remember people making about the resolution was how much it reminded them of Three Amigos in that the villagers are working at a deception rather than any meaningful fighting skill. I didn't think it was quite that bad but I could see how some would find it disappointing. The Doctor did point out that their victory needed to be deceptive because an actual military victory would only encourage the Mire to send more ships as humans would be seen as a worth foe. So I didn't have any problem with the resolution there, except for the underdevelopment of the Mire as an actual threat.
The direction and setting were nice though the voice work on Odin was a bit strange. At the very least the story looked like it was set in a real village with real considerations for the limitations of the time. It was pleasant on the eyes and most of the problems I had were with the writing.
If it wasn't for the use of Ashildr later in Series 9, I think this would have been a very forgettable story, along the lines of The Eaters of Light in Series 10. Its most memorable aspect outside of her is that it can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a farcical comedy or a cautionary tragedy. That gives inconsistent writing and poor character development. There is nothing overtly bad about it and the comedic points are legitimately amusing. It also has decent acting from the Doctor and Clara which gives it a little extra boost. But it's a story that slides off the brain very easily. Easy in, easy out.
Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People
I was going to drop you off for fish and chips but then things happened. There was stuff and shenanigans. Wonderful word: shenanigans.
This story is often derisively referred to as "The Pudding People" two-parter. That is both a bit harsh but also a somewhat apt description when you look at the effects in how they brought the gangers to life. My initial recollections for this one are of a story that had some decent promise but that fizzled out into a generic monster story with some unanswered questions. I also recall it feeling a bit drawn out and not quite worth a two-part entry. But my memory could be off and influenced by negative comments that surround it. Let's see what a second viewing does.
Plot Summary
The Doctor, Amy and Rory are caught in large solar flare which drives them down to Earth in the near future. They land outside a medieval castle that has been converted to a factory to process large volumes of acid. They enter and find four workers linked to machines. Those same workers enter the room when an alarm sounds, along with a fifth.
The Doctor poses as a representative from the Meteorological society, come to inspect things after the flare and warn them about a second. The leader, Cleaves, takes the Doctor to a vat where a substance known as "flesh" is kept. The liquid is poured into a vat and when a worker is hooked into a machine, it forms into a body that is controlled while keeping the worker safe from the acid. Cleaves has the fifth worker, Jennifer, demonstrate by hooking herself up. The Doctor is wary, sensing the emotions and intelligence the flesh has absorbed from them every time they hook themselves up.
A quick surge alerts the Doctor to the approaching solar storm. He warns Cleaves to abandon the factory but she declines to do so, not wanting to extend the tour. The Doctor runs out to disconnect the solar array from the power grid but he is electrocuted while doing so and the flare knocks out everyone else in the facility as well as knocking out the power.
The Doctor wakes up an hour later and re-gathers everyone. Everyone has disconnected from their machine but their flesh bodies are not where they remember being. They examine the crew quarters and find things disheveled there. The Doctor informs them that the power from the flare has given the flesh the spark it needed to become independent, harnessing the emotions, memories and thoughts that were poured into it from the workers.
Jennifer is the most affected by the event and runs to the bathroom, thinking she will be sick. Rory goes after her to help in case she is sick. In the bathroom, a piece of flesh falls off Jennifer revealing her to be a ganger. She lunges at Rory, demanding to be left alone and he runs away. Ganger Jennifer runs after him.
In the quarters, the Doctor microwaves some food and hands it to Cleaves. He then tells her the plate is hot and she drops it, but her reaction was too slow and she is also revealed to be a ganger. She too runs off to join the other gangers, who have assembled in the acid room. The group then splits up. The Doctor goes looking for both Rory and the TARDIS. Jimmy and Amy head out for supplies while Buzzer and Dicken go to get the acid suits.
The Doctor heads down to the flesh pool and triggers something within the pool. He then heads out to the TARDIS to find that it is sinking into a hole caused by a pool of acid. That pool has spread and is now melting his shoes so he retreats back into the building barefoot. Buzzer and Dicken find the acid suits gone and head back to the crew quarters. Amy splits off from Jimmy to look for Rory when he heads back with the supplies.
Rory and Jennifer reconnect and Rory feels compassion to her appeal for help. They head back to the quarters to get help from the Doctor. The Doctor then finds the gangers in the acid room and convinces them to come back to the quarters so they can negotiate a peace between the two sides. As a carrot, he offers to use equipment in the TARDIS, when it has been fished out, that will help stabilize their bodies into a fully human form as they have been oscillating between normal and white flesh.
The gangers come back to the quarters where they tentatively agree to work together. However the original Cleaves, who had been hiding, emerges and declares a state of war. Ganger Buzzer approaches her and she shocks him, stopping his heart. The gangers flee the room as the Doctor grabs the electrical equipment from her. The gangers retreat to the acid room where ganger Jennifer takes command and declares war. Original Cleaves also declares war and the group retreats to the flesh room, which is the most well defended part of the castle, the gangers having seized the weapons.
As the gangers approach the room Rory runs off, having heard the original Jennifer screaming, to help her. The rest are forced to barricade themselves in where they find themselves with a ganger version of the Doctor. The ganger Doctor has trouble adjusting to the download of information from the previous iterations of the Doctor but eventually stabilizes with a set of the Doctor's original shoes while the original Doctor wears a pair borrowed from the factory workers.
With the gangers breaking down the door, the group slips into an air duct and the Doctor seals the entrance behind them with his sonic screwdriver. They pass through the lower tunnels of the castle but are blocked by clouds of gas formed by the acid interacting with the stone. They head to the tower with the communications equipment where Cleaves and the Doctor are able to reactivate the power and get the radio working.
Ganger Cleaves is aware of what they are doing but opts not to engage, knowing it will be too well defended. Instead they monitor on their own equipment and try to break up the radio transmission. Cleaves does manage to get through to the mainland and requests both emergency evacuation and destruction of the facility.
Ganger Jennifer meanwhile makes her way down to the thermal controls but can't access the codes since she is not human. She makes her way back to a bathroom and calls out to Rory, who is nearby. Rory enters and finds two Jennifers, both claiming to be the real one. One is limping and pulls up her pants to show a burn. Rory immediately sides with her, assuming her to be the human one. Angered, the other Jennifer attacks the first one. They fight but the second Jennifer is knocked into a pool of acid that is leaking from the floor and her flesh form quickly dissolves.
In the communication tower the ganger Doctor has a fit, responding to emotions from the other flesh bodies. Amy, who came to check on him, is terrified when he confronts her. She retreats back into the room and refuses to have anything to do with him, already feeling biased against him.
Rory and Jennifer make their way to the thermal controls. Jennifer tells Rory that it will clear the air and has him deactivate the controls. She then takes him to a pile of discarded flesh bodies, viewed as defective and left to rot but still with sentience. Rory is appalled and offers to help show the world how the flesh is being treated.
In the tower the group becomes aware of the deactivation of the thermal controls, which destabilizes everything. The factory has now become a bomb. Worse, the rescue shuttle signals that the atmosphere is too unstable for them to pull the people from the communications tower. Cleaves signals for them to land in the courtyard but the system shorts out before she can finish her transmission. Monitoring, ganger Cleaves finishes the transmission, correctly guessing the code word Cleaves had set up.
While the rest of the group make their way to the courtyard, the ganger Doctor and Buzzer go looking for Rory. They find the body of human Jennifer when Buzzer knocks the Doctor out. He heads down towards the courtyard but is distracted by a noise. He finds ganger Jennifer soothing the pile of discarded flesh bodies. She then attacks and kills him.
The rest of the party is intercepted by Rory who leads them down to the acid room and then locks them in. He had intended to show proof of the discarded flesh but he is soon surrounded by the gangers and ganger Jennifer. He realizes he has been tricked as she drags him away. Cleaves then offers a taunt to her ganger, noting that she will die soon anyway as they are both suffering from a fatal blood clot in the head. Trapped in the room with the acid beginning to boil over, the group tries to buy themselves time by lowering the cap on the reservoir.
In the crew quarters, Rory reacts angrily to Jennifer's trickery. He lashes out at the Doctor as well who distracts him with a received telephone call. The call is one the Doctor had reserved earlier to Jimmy's son. The Doctor asks the boy if he wants to talk to his dad and he starts to call for him. Ganger Jimmy recalls all the emotions and memories and bolts out of the room to rescue the people from the acid room. Thwarted in her desire for a war, Jennifer also storms out, vowing revenge.
Ganger Jimmy opens the door while the humans are trying to seal the tank. The lid ruptures under pressure and human Jimmy has acid projected on him, burning through to his heart. As he dies, he gives his ganger his wedding ring and tells him to go be a father. The whole group returns to the crew quarters and ganger Jimmy talks to his son with the Doctor encouraging him.
With the site nearing critical, the group tries to get to the courtyard but is cut off by Jennifer who has morphed into a more bestial shape. The group retreats to an inner chamber but the door lacks a lock. A second door further down the hall does and human Dicken runs to close it. It is stuck and though he does manage to close it, Jennifer attacks him before he can lock it.
Ganger Cleaves and the Doctor hold the door shut while the ganger Doctor points to a point in the ceiling. The spot gives way and the TARDIS fall though. Ganger Jimmy and Dicken head inside along with human Cleaves. Rory urges Amy but Amy insists that the Doctor come too. It is then that he reveals that the Doctor and the ganger Doctor had switched shoes to learn more and test Amy. The real Doctor tosses the ganger Doctor the sonic and bids him good luck. Ganger Cleaves also insists on staying behind. The rest enter the TARDIS and disappear. The two gangers open the door and as Jennifer moves on them, the ganger Doctor activates the sonic, turning all three of them into puddles.
In the TARDIS, the Doctor stabilizes the gangers, allowing them to stay in their human forms permanently. He also gives Cleaves a vial of liquid that will clear the blood clot in her brain. They drop Jimmy off with his son and then take Cleaves and Dicken to their corporate headquarters where they will explain what happen and advocate for better treatment of gangers.
As they prepare to leave, Amy doubles over in pain. The Doctor takes her and Rory into the TARDIS where he tells Amy that she is going into labor. Amy is confused as she is not visibly pregnant. The Doctor then tells her that he and Rory will find her and to not worry. He points a new sonic screwdriver at her and her flesh body dissolves.
Amy wakes lying in a white tube with a large pregnant belly. A panel slides open above her to reveal the woman with the eye patch whom she had seen randomly ever since The Impossible Astronaut. The woman urges Amy to push and Amy starts to scream.
Analysis
A retread of the territory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Android Invasion, this is a decidedly mixed story. For just about every positive thing you can say about it, there is a countering negative. That in and of itself is not bad but the fact that it is a two-part story and one that gave a huge reveal about Amy at the end makes it feel like we should have expected more that what it is.
My single biggest gripe of the piece is the convoluted story. The set up through the first half of The Rebel Flesh worked well with tension and a real sense of unease. There was even the good set up where two of the crew had already been replaced with their ganger versions. But after that it starts to fall apart. Cleaves and Jennifer had been replaced by gangers but where were the human versions. We are shown Cleaves hiding and then discovering the group while Jennifer comes limping out of nowhere to be attacked by her ganger. Where were they and why weren't they part of the group of humans that were clustered in the control area?
Things get even more convoluted with the almost schizophrenic difference between human Cleaves and ganger Cleaves to force the fight between the two sides. Ganger Cleaves is shown to think just like her human counterpart but she is also more rational, thoughtful and empathetic. Human Cleaves bursts in and threatens the gangers without any consideration of what is going on and overreacting while her ganger version sits back and lets it happen. The ganger version also lets Jennifer take control where the human Cleaves barely let the Doctor take charge. There is a difference in Jennifer as well but given the mutations ganger Jennifer was undergoing, you can head cannon those into the idea that Jennifer became the primary outlet for the flesh's anger and she was its personality rather than Jennifer's.
All through the remaining parts, characters are constantly doing things that serve the plot. Rory may have compassion for Jennifer but would her well-being overcome his affection for his wife and the desire to be safe? Rory's separation and his manipulation by Jennifer drives most of the action in the second part but it involves him being especially dumb. Why does the Doctor need to get Amy to trust the flesh Doctor when she herself is in a flesh body that it going to be destroyed by the Doctor? Exposing Amy as a "flesh racist" does nothing for the plot other than give her something to do. In fact, the flesh Doctor is mostly unnecessary except that it allows a version of the Doctor to be in both camps.
Consistently, it felt like their were too many characters or versions of characters and they were being pushed in ways to drive the plot, but with bits left hanging. Dicken has exactly one line per episode and mostly stands around doing nothing except to killed by Jennifer in the final attack. Jimmy gets the emotional arc of his son but is also otherwise just there for a body. Buzzer's ganger is killed to start the war while his human counterpart is ganger Jennifer's token victim before becoming a full monster. A larger cast makes sense with the running of a factory, but it makes for a very crowded story, especially when you insert four additional characters in.
It was also rather disappointing that after all the hullabaloo about racism and the definition of what it means to be human, the story ends with just another monster coming at the group. Jennifer goes warped and comes at them like a beast. Keeping everyone looking human and letting the threat be from within would have been a lot more interesting of a resolution. I think it would have actually amplified the tension rather than defusing the situation by giving everyone an ugly bad thing that we all can oppose.
That is a lot of negativity to start things off. So on to the positives. I thought the story was well acted. Those that had enough lines and development to get fleshed out characters (pardon the pun) were genuinely interesting, even if they diverged from what you are conditioned to expect. While the Doctor, Amy and Rory's behavior might have been a bit strange at times, they were all well performed and you genuinely believed in their emotions, especially the enraged outburst by the Doctor that set Amy off against him. I thought it a well controlled bit of acting.
The location and direction was nice as well. The use of the color pallet especially really helped set the mood of the situation. The only real drawback of the location, which looked very nice, was that some of the audio might have been affected. There were several points where I had trouble hearing what was being said and I think that was because the audio was oddly affected by the location. It's a small quibble but when you're having trouble keeping track of why someone is behaving as they are, it goes a long way in influencing the overall mood.
It's frustrating to see a story that has so much potential be wasted. It's not bad at its core but there are so many wanderings, dead ends and loose threads in the plot that it just gets frustrating to watch it rather than enmeshing you in the story as you would hope it would. It is pretty to look at and well acted so it's not a slog to get through. But when you get through a story with that amount of frustration at the plotline, you can't mark it particularly high.
Overall personal score: The Rebel Flesh - 2 out of 5; The Almost People - 2 out of 5
This story is often derisively referred to as "The Pudding People" two-parter. That is both a bit harsh but also a somewhat apt description when you look at the effects in how they brought the gangers to life. My initial recollections for this one are of a story that had some decent promise but that fizzled out into a generic monster story with some unanswered questions. I also recall it feeling a bit drawn out and not quite worth a two-part entry. But my memory could be off and influenced by negative comments that surround it. Let's see what a second viewing does.
Plot Summary
The Doctor, Amy and Rory are caught in large solar flare which drives them down to Earth in the near future. They land outside a medieval castle that has been converted to a factory to process large volumes of acid. They enter and find four workers linked to machines. Those same workers enter the room when an alarm sounds, along with a fifth.
The Doctor poses as a representative from the Meteorological society, come to inspect things after the flare and warn them about a second. The leader, Cleaves, takes the Doctor to a vat where a substance known as "flesh" is kept. The liquid is poured into a vat and when a worker is hooked into a machine, it forms into a body that is controlled while keeping the worker safe from the acid. Cleaves has the fifth worker, Jennifer, demonstrate by hooking herself up. The Doctor is wary, sensing the emotions and intelligence the flesh has absorbed from them every time they hook themselves up.
A quick surge alerts the Doctor to the approaching solar storm. He warns Cleaves to abandon the factory but she declines to do so, not wanting to extend the tour. The Doctor runs out to disconnect the solar array from the power grid but he is electrocuted while doing so and the flare knocks out everyone else in the facility as well as knocking out the power.
The Doctor wakes up an hour later and re-gathers everyone. Everyone has disconnected from their machine but their flesh bodies are not where they remember being. They examine the crew quarters and find things disheveled there. The Doctor informs them that the power from the flare has given the flesh the spark it needed to become independent, harnessing the emotions, memories and thoughts that were poured into it from the workers.
Jennifer is the most affected by the event and runs to the bathroom, thinking she will be sick. Rory goes after her to help in case she is sick. In the bathroom, a piece of flesh falls off Jennifer revealing her to be a ganger. She lunges at Rory, demanding to be left alone and he runs away. Ganger Jennifer runs after him.
In the quarters, the Doctor microwaves some food and hands it to Cleaves. He then tells her the plate is hot and she drops it, but her reaction was too slow and she is also revealed to be a ganger. She too runs off to join the other gangers, who have assembled in the acid room. The group then splits up. The Doctor goes looking for both Rory and the TARDIS. Jimmy and Amy head out for supplies while Buzzer and Dicken go to get the acid suits.
The Doctor heads down to the flesh pool and triggers something within the pool. He then heads out to the TARDIS to find that it is sinking into a hole caused by a pool of acid. That pool has spread and is now melting his shoes so he retreats back into the building barefoot. Buzzer and Dicken find the acid suits gone and head back to the crew quarters. Amy splits off from Jimmy to look for Rory when he heads back with the supplies.
Rory and Jennifer reconnect and Rory feels compassion to her appeal for help. They head back to the quarters to get help from the Doctor. The Doctor then finds the gangers in the acid room and convinces them to come back to the quarters so they can negotiate a peace between the two sides. As a carrot, he offers to use equipment in the TARDIS, when it has been fished out, that will help stabilize their bodies into a fully human form as they have been oscillating between normal and white flesh.
The gangers come back to the quarters where they tentatively agree to work together. However the original Cleaves, who had been hiding, emerges and declares a state of war. Ganger Buzzer approaches her and she shocks him, stopping his heart. The gangers flee the room as the Doctor grabs the electrical equipment from her. The gangers retreat to the acid room where ganger Jennifer takes command and declares war. Original Cleaves also declares war and the group retreats to the flesh room, which is the most well defended part of the castle, the gangers having seized the weapons.
As the gangers approach the room Rory runs off, having heard the original Jennifer screaming, to help her. The rest are forced to barricade themselves in where they find themselves with a ganger version of the Doctor. The ganger Doctor has trouble adjusting to the download of information from the previous iterations of the Doctor but eventually stabilizes with a set of the Doctor's original shoes while the original Doctor wears a pair borrowed from the factory workers.
With the gangers breaking down the door, the group slips into an air duct and the Doctor seals the entrance behind them with his sonic screwdriver. They pass through the lower tunnels of the castle but are blocked by clouds of gas formed by the acid interacting with the stone. They head to the tower with the communications equipment where Cleaves and the Doctor are able to reactivate the power and get the radio working.
Ganger Cleaves is aware of what they are doing but opts not to engage, knowing it will be too well defended. Instead they monitor on their own equipment and try to break up the radio transmission. Cleaves does manage to get through to the mainland and requests both emergency evacuation and destruction of the facility.
Ganger Jennifer meanwhile makes her way down to the thermal controls but can't access the codes since she is not human. She makes her way back to a bathroom and calls out to Rory, who is nearby. Rory enters and finds two Jennifers, both claiming to be the real one. One is limping and pulls up her pants to show a burn. Rory immediately sides with her, assuming her to be the human one. Angered, the other Jennifer attacks the first one. They fight but the second Jennifer is knocked into a pool of acid that is leaking from the floor and her flesh form quickly dissolves.
In the communication tower the ganger Doctor has a fit, responding to emotions from the other flesh bodies. Amy, who came to check on him, is terrified when he confronts her. She retreats back into the room and refuses to have anything to do with him, already feeling biased against him.
Rory and Jennifer make their way to the thermal controls. Jennifer tells Rory that it will clear the air and has him deactivate the controls. She then takes him to a pile of discarded flesh bodies, viewed as defective and left to rot but still with sentience. Rory is appalled and offers to help show the world how the flesh is being treated.
In the tower the group becomes aware of the deactivation of the thermal controls, which destabilizes everything. The factory has now become a bomb. Worse, the rescue shuttle signals that the atmosphere is too unstable for them to pull the people from the communications tower. Cleaves signals for them to land in the courtyard but the system shorts out before she can finish her transmission. Monitoring, ganger Cleaves finishes the transmission, correctly guessing the code word Cleaves had set up.
While the rest of the group make their way to the courtyard, the ganger Doctor and Buzzer go looking for Rory. They find the body of human Jennifer when Buzzer knocks the Doctor out. He heads down towards the courtyard but is distracted by a noise. He finds ganger Jennifer soothing the pile of discarded flesh bodies. She then attacks and kills him.
The rest of the party is intercepted by Rory who leads them down to the acid room and then locks them in. He had intended to show proof of the discarded flesh but he is soon surrounded by the gangers and ganger Jennifer. He realizes he has been tricked as she drags him away. Cleaves then offers a taunt to her ganger, noting that she will die soon anyway as they are both suffering from a fatal blood clot in the head. Trapped in the room with the acid beginning to boil over, the group tries to buy themselves time by lowering the cap on the reservoir.
In the crew quarters, Rory reacts angrily to Jennifer's trickery. He lashes out at the Doctor as well who distracts him with a received telephone call. The call is one the Doctor had reserved earlier to Jimmy's son. The Doctor asks the boy if he wants to talk to his dad and he starts to call for him. Ganger Jimmy recalls all the emotions and memories and bolts out of the room to rescue the people from the acid room. Thwarted in her desire for a war, Jennifer also storms out, vowing revenge.
Ganger Jimmy opens the door while the humans are trying to seal the tank. The lid ruptures under pressure and human Jimmy has acid projected on him, burning through to his heart. As he dies, he gives his ganger his wedding ring and tells him to go be a father. The whole group returns to the crew quarters and ganger Jimmy talks to his son with the Doctor encouraging him.
With the site nearing critical, the group tries to get to the courtyard but is cut off by Jennifer who has morphed into a more bestial shape. The group retreats to an inner chamber but the door lacks a lock. A second door further down the hall does and human Dicken runs to close it. It is stuck and though he does manage to close it, Jennifer attacks him before he can lock it.
Ganger Cleaves and the Doctor hold the door shut while the ganger Doctor points to a point in the ceiling. The spot gives way and the TARDIS fall though. Ganger Jimmy and Dicken head inside along with human Cleaves. Rory urges Amy but Amy insists that the Doctor come too. It is then that he reveals that the Doctor and the ganger Doctor had switched shoes to learn more and test Amy. The real Doctor tosses the ganger Doctor the sonic and bids him good luck. Ganger Cleaves also insists on staying behind. The rest enter the TARDIS and disappear. The two gangers open the door and as Jennifer moves on them, the ganger Doctor activates the sonic, turning all three of them into puddles.
In the TARDIS, the Doctor stabilizes the gangers, allowing them to stay in their human forms permanently. He also gives Cleaves a vial of liquid that will clear the blood clot in her brain. They drop Jimmy off with his son and then take Cleaves and Dicken to their corporate headquarters where they will explain what happen and advocate for better treatment of gangers.
As they prepare to leave, Amy doubles over in pain. The Doctor takes her and Rory into the TARDIS where he tells Amy that she is going into labor. Amy is confused as she is not visibly pregnant. The Doctor then tells her that he and Rory will find her and to not worry. He points a new sonic screwdriver at her and her flesh body dissolves.
Amy wakes lying in a white tube with a large pregnant belly. A panel slides open above her to reveal the woman with the eye patch whom she had seen randomly ever since The Impossible Astronaut. The woman urges Amy to push and Amy starts to scream.
Analysis
A retread of the territory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Android Invasion, this is a decidedly mixed story. For just about every positive thing you can say about it, there is a countering negative. That in and of itself is not bad but the fact that it is a two-part story and one that gave a huge reveal about Amy at the end makes it feel like we should have expected more that what it is.
My single biggest gripe of the piece is the convoluted story. The set up through the first half of The Rebel Flesh worked well with tension and a real sense of unease. There was even the good set up where two of the crew had already been replaced with their ganger versions. But after that it starts to fall apart. Cleaves and Jennifer had been replaced by gangers but where were the human versions. We are shown Cleaves hiding and then discovering the group while Jennifer comes limping out of nowhere to be attacked by her ganger. Where were they and why weren't they part of the group of humans that were clustered in the control area?
Things get even more convoluted with the almost schizophrenic difference between human Cleaves and ganger Cleaves to force the fight between the two sides. Ganger Cleaves is shown to think just like her human counterpart but she is also more rational, thoughtful and empathetic. Human Cleaves bursts in and threatens the gangers without any consideration of what is going on and overreacting while her ganger version sits back and lets it happen. The ganger version also lets Jennifer take control where the human Cleaves barely let the Doctor take charge. There is a difference in Jennifer as well but given the mutations ganger Jennifer was undergoing, you can head cannon those into the idea that Jennifer became the primary outlet for the flesh's anger and she was its personality rather than Jennifer's.
All through the remaining parts, characters are constantly doing things that serve the plot. Rory may have compassion for Jennifer but would her well-being overcome his affection for his wife and the desire to be safe? Rory's separation and his manipulation by Jennifer drives most of the action in the second part but it involves him being especially dumb. Why does the Doctor need to get Amy to trust the flesh Doctor when she herself is in a flesh body that it going to be destroyed by the Doctor? Exposing Amy as a "flesh racist" does nothing for the plot other than give her something to do. In fact, the flesh Doctor is mostly unnecessary except that it allows a version of the Doctor to be in both camps.
Consistently, it felt like their were too many characters or versions of characters and they were being pushed in ways to drive the plot, but with bits left hanging. Dicken has exactly one line per episode and mostly stands around doing nothing except to killed by Jennifer in the final attack. Jimmy gets the emotional arc of his son but is also otherwise just there for a body. Buzzer's ganger is killed to start the war while his human counterpart is ganger Jennifer's token victim before becoming a full monster. A larger cast makes sense with the running of a factory, but it makes for a very crowded story, especially when you insert four additional characters in.
It was also rather disappointing that after all the hullabaloo about racism and the definition of what it means to be human, the story ends with just another monster coming at the group. Jennifer goes warped and comes at them like a beast. Keeping everyone looking human and letting the threat be from within would have been a lot more interesting of a resolution. I think it would have actually amplified the tension rather than defusing the situation by giving everyone an ugly bad thing that we all can oppose.
That is a lot of negativity to start things off. So on to the positives. I thought the story was well acted. Those that had enough lines and development to get fleshed out characters (pardon the pun) were genuinely interesting, even if they diverged from what you are conditioned to expect. While the Doctor, Amy and Rory's behavior might have been a bit strange at times, they were all well performed and you genuinely believed in their emotions, especially the enraged outburst by the Doctor that set Amy off against him. I thought it a well controlled bit of acting.
The location and direction was nice as well. The use of the color pallet especially really helped set the mood of the situation. The only real drawback of the location, which looked very nice, was that some of the audio might have been affected. There were several points where I had trouble hearing what was being said and I think that was because the audio was oddly affected by the location. It's a small quibble but when you're having trouble keeping track of why someone is behaving as they are, it goes a long way in influencing the overall mood.
It's frustrating to see a story that has so much potential be wasted. It's not bad at its core but there are so many wanderings, dead ends and loose threads in the plot that it just gets frustrating to watch it rather than enmeshing you in the story as you would hope it would. It is pretty to look at and well acted so it's not a slog to get through. But when you get through a story with that amount of frustration at the plotline, you can't mark it particularly high.
Overall personal score: The Rebel Flesh - 2 out of 5; The Almost People - 2 out of 5
Monday, March 5, 2018
Tenth Doctor Summary
The Tenth Doctor was a real up and down case, due mostly to the whims of Russell T. Davies. He is probably the darkest of all the Doctors and one of the quickest to resort to lethal violence. More than that, he seems to relish the violence once he has been tipped into it. It can go to a further extreme when you also contrast it to the very bubbly and happy personality that he tries to keep on most of the time. All of which make for an interesting and complex character that draws you in to his world.
But you also have some of the dumbest and most self-aggrandizing stories at the same time. You have to deal with the Tenth Doctor-Rose relationship which not only is the most annoying in terms of the romance but also with their smugness. There is the pining of Martha to deal with, which undercuts some rather good story premises. It's really not until Donna that the Tenth Doctor settles in to just having adventures and even then there is the constant joke about them being a couple.
As annoying as the romance can get, the real problem with the Tenth Doctor is the Jesus moments. Before the era of the Tenth Doctor, the Doctor was just a guy bumbling around the universe, exploring and trying to help out. This ultimately became a quest to save everyone from every evil imaginable and his legend began to take on messianic tones. This is both contrived (the messiah metaphor is overused in many forms of media) and washes out the character of someone who just gets caught up in things.
But on the other hand, there is excellent writing with the Tenth Doctor. There is also genuine drama, apart from the series finales, in most episodes. RTD, in contrast to Steven Moffat, didn't seem to have a problem taking well liked characters that passed through the show and either killing them or giving them terrible resolutions. A viewer when then be invested in the peril of the character because there was a real chance that the bad thing would stay bad: Rose was left in the alternate dimension, alternate universe Jackie stayed dead after being converted, most of the likeable characters on the Titanic died in their escape attempt, etc. One of the great complaints against the various series enders and the end of the Tenth Doctor in general is that RTD went back and tried to undo some of his most dire consequences.
As far as overall feel goes, my watching of the Tenth Doctor era depends on my mood. For darker, more dramatic stories, definitely the Tenth Doctor era. Good adventure runarounds and the occasion psychological thriller, also good for the Tenth Doctor. Not great if you want something lighter and comedic and the era was not immune from shake your head silliness either. But overall, I like the Tenth Doctor and his era a lot. It's fun, engaging and a good balance between what the show is capable of, even if it does fall on it's face here and there.
Highest Rated Story: The Waters of Mars - 5.0
Lowest Rated Story: Last of the Time Lords - 0.5
Average overall rating: 3.26
The Christmas Invasion
New Earth
Tooth and Claw
School Reunion
The Girl in the Fireplace
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
The Idiot's Lantern
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Love & Monsters
Fear Her
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
The Runaway Bride
Smith and Jones
The Shakespeare Code
Gridlock
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks
The Lazarus Experiment
42
Human Nature/The Family of Blood
Blink
Utopia
The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
Voyage of the Damned
Partners in Crime
The Fires of Pompeii
Planet of the Ood
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
The Doctor's Daughter
The Unicorn and the Wasp
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
Midnight
Turn Left
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End
The Next Doctor
Planet of the Dead
The Waters of Mars
The End of Time
But you also have some of the dumbest and most self-aggrandizing stories at the same time. You have to deal with the Tenth Doctor-Rose relationship which not only is the most annoying in terms of the romance but also with their smugness. There is the pining of Martha to deal with, which undercuts some rather good story premises. It's really not until Donna that the Tenth Doctor settles in to just having adventures and even then there is the constant joke about them being a couple.
As annoying as the romance can get, the real problem with the Tenth Doctor is the Jesus moments. Before the era of the Tenth Doctor, the Doctor was just a guy bumbling around the universe, exploring and trying to help out. This ultimately became a quest to save everyone from every evil imaginable and his legend began to take on messianic tones. This is both contrived (the messiah metaphor is overused in many forms of media) and washes out the character of someone who just gets caught up in things.
But on the other hand, there is excellent writing with the Tenth Doctor. There is also genuine drama, apart from the series finales, in most episodes. RTD, in contrast to Steven Moffat, didn't seem to have a problem taking well liked characters that passed through the show and either killing them or giving them terrible resolutions. A viewer when then be invested in the peril of the character because there was a real chance that the bad thing would stay bad: Rose was left in the alternate dimension, alternate universe Jackie stayed dead after being converted, most of the likeable characters on the Titanic died in their escape attempt, etc. One of the great complaints against the various series enders and the end of the Tenth Doctor in general is that RTD went back and tried to undo some of his most dire consequences.
As far as overall feel goes, my watching of the Tenth Doctor era depends on my mood. For darker, more dramatic stories, definitely the Tenth Doctor era. Good adventure runarounds and the occasion psychological thriller, also good for the Tenth Doctor. Not great if you want something lighter and comedic and the era was not immune from shake your head silliness either. But overall, I like the Tenth Doctor and his era a lot. It's fun, engaging and a good balance between what the show is capable of, even if it does fall on it's face here and there.
Highest Rated Story: The Waters of Mars - 5.0
Lowest Rated Story: Last of the Time Lords - 0.5
Average overall rating: 3.26
The Christmas Invasion
New Earth
Tooth and Claw
School Reunion
The Girl in the Fireplace
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
The Idiot's Lantern
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Love & Monsters
Fear Her
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
The Runaway Bride
Smith and Jones
The Shakespeare Code
Gridlock
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks
The Lazarus Experiment
42
Human Nature/The Family of Blood
Blink
Utopia
The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
Voyage of the Damned
Partners in Crime
The Fires of Pompeii
Planet of the Ood
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
The Doctor's Daughter
The Unicorn and the Wasp
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
Midnight
Turn Left
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End
The Next Doctor
Planet of the Dead
The Waters of Mars
The End of Time
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