Deep Breath

Planet of the pudding brains.

The introduction of the Twelfth Doctor is a real mixed bag for me with some truly excellent scenes mixed with some less than desirable ones.

Plot Summary

The TARDIS is coughed up by a dinosaur that has appeared in late 19th century London. A newly regenerated Doctor appears and collapses. He, the TARDIS and Clara are taken by Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax to their home to recover. While there, the dinosaur is murdered and the Doctor wanders off to investigate. Both the Doctor and Clara see an advertisement in the paper a day later that appears to be coming from the other to meet at a specific restaurant. There they discover the patrons are all robots fitted with human augments and that there is a tunnel leading to the robot headquarters. The robots begin to wake and they discover they can avoid detection by holding their breath and posing as robots. Clara and the Doctor are separated and Clara is captured, however the Doctor emerges and rescues her. Clara and the Paternoster Gang fight off the drone robots while the Doctor pursues the Half-Faced Man leader robot in a balloon. They confront each other while the robots get the upper hand against the Gang but they all deactivate when the Half-Face Man is impaled after falling out of the balloon. The Doctor and Clara leave but Clara is unsure if she will continue to travel with the Doctor until she receives a call from the Eleventh Doctor shortly before he regenerates telling her that he now needs her more than ever. Clara then accepts the Doctor in his new form and agrees to continue adventuring with him.

Analysis

I think it's fairly obvious that the production team was scared of how the audience would react to the Twelfth Doctor. There is a lot of hand holding and exposition that give the impression (unlike other episodes in the new series) that the audience cannot be trusted to either remember information from previous episodes or that they will dislike things because they are less pretty. As someone who doesn't have a problem with either an older Doctor or the darker tone, these hesitations distract from what would have been a very good story.

The acting is quite good, especially from Peter Capaldi in getting his feet wet as the Doctor. There is a contemptuous and dark edge to his Doctor that hadn't been seen since the Sixth Doctor days, but it makes him more interesting. It made for a major contrast with the effervescent and optimistic Eleventh Doctor but in a good way.

My overwhelmingly favorite scene in the episode emphasized this. The Doctor and the Half-Faced Man are facing off at the entrance to the balloon, knowing that either the Half-Faced Man will have to jump out or the Doctor will have to push him out. We are not shown what happens, only that the robot has been impaled. The camera pans back up to the Doctor where he is looking down and then he looks directly into the camera. In that moment, you see that it doesn't matter whether he pushed him or he didn't. You see that he would have pushed him if required. It's similar to the Tenth Doctor triggering the switch that caused the Sycorax to fall to his death in The Christmas Invasion but with so much more subtlety. That look just gave off one singular thought: Don't f*** with me.

The look of the episode also was very well done. The BBC does period very well anyway, but there was a lot of small touches that made it look better. There was also a lot of good trickery to make it feel like it was very big, when it was really very tightly contained to several rooms. In fact, despite the expansive approach, many scenes were done to emphasize the claustrophobic nature, giving you the adding feeling of tension that might lead you to hold your own breath during the fear of discovery moments.

But then there were the down moments as well. The weakest link in the episode was Clara. As the audience proxy, Clara was shown to be in a confused and weak understanding position and it seemed like a complete 180 from her normal attitude. Clara, probably more than any other companion, should have understood and been okay with the regeneration. Yet she is shown as having the biggest problem with it. It is very jarring to begin with and then when you add the exceptionally condescending scene with Madame Vastra and being able to see or not see the veil, it just puts you off both characters.

Clara rebounded a bit with the nice interplay between her and the Doctor and her speech of dedication to the Doctor right before he rescues her, but it was dissipated a second time by the need for the Eleventh Doctor's reassurances. Why would Clara need such reassurances if the Doctor just proved himself after her speech of dedication? It was another point where the audience was assumed to still not be on board with the new Doctor and they must be granted permission to accept his new iteration. It just felt so forced and again, against the characterization that had been built up for Clara.

A second decision that was made by the production staff that I didn't care for was the assumption that the audience couldn't put two and two together. Allusions to the past can work well and there were moments when the Doctor is staring at his face in the alley that it works well. But then it goes too far. In the confrontation between the Doctor and the Half-Faced Man, the Doctor reads an inscription of the SS Marie Antoinette. That should have been all that was needed. Indeed it would have been all that would have printed on any ship designation. But they added that she was the sister ship to the Madame de Pompadour. It was painful exposition and made the production team look like they thought the audience was incapable of remembering something to which people had been pointing out allusions to ever since the Half-Faced Man was first seen in the Series 8 preview trailer.

I also didn't care for the gratuitous kiss between Madame Vastra and Jenny. It seemed like titillating the slash writers and just rubbed me the wrong way. A more subtle scene of displayed affection would have been much better than this which seemed very forced.

Despite all of this, the good heavily outweighs the bad. It's just frustrating to watch something that had the capability of being a top tier story and just gets dragged down by extras. Especially if those extras feel like they came from a Lindsey Naegle memo. But, I've seen this episode at least three times now and it is a good introduction to the Twelfth Doctor. I'd happily recommend it to anyone looking for a good story to watch.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5