Flatline

You are monsters! That is the role you seem determined to play so it seems I must play mine; the man that stops the monsters.

Flatline is definitely one of the high points of Series Eight. You'd never realize that it was the Doctor-lite episode of the season given the way they cut the episode but it works very well.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Clara accidently land Bristol when the Doctor detects an energy drain to the TARDIS. Upon emerging, the TARDIS is reduced in size. The Doctor re-enters the TARDIS to monitor while Clara looks around for anything that might lead to the drain. While investigating, she meets a man named Rigsy who is part of a community service work crew to paint over a tunnel. Rigsy protests as the tunnel is covered in murals of people that have recently disappeared.

Clara returns to the TARDIS only to discover that it has shrunk again to a point where Clara can carry it around in her purse. The Doctor equips her with an earpiece and taps in to her eye so he can see as well. He also gives her the psychic paper and sonic screwdriver. Clara poses as a police detective and has Rigsy and a local police officer take her to the apartment of one of the victims.

The Doctor diagnoses that the images on the wall are 2-D slices of a human body and they are dealing with two-dimensional creatures. The police officer is attacked and is pulled into the floor. Other 3-D aspects of the room, such as the door knob are pulled into 2-D space, trapping Clara and Rigsy. The two climb onto a hanging chair and they swing out through the window. They run down to the tunnel to warn the work crew. The murals begin to come to life as the 2-D creatures begin to manipulate their forms to move after them.

The group flees to a warehouse where they attempt to communicate with the creatures. The Doctor even gives Clara a device that will help revert things from 2-D to 3-D space, but it lacks the power of the creatures. The creatures respond by broadcasting a number, the work number of one of the crew. He is then killed and pulled into 2-D space. Rigsy leads the group down into the train tunnels to get away. The creatures begin to take 3-D form through the mural people and in the chase after the crew, the TARDIS falls down onto a track. The Doctor pulls the TARDIS off the track briefly using his hand, but it falls back and he is forced to engage the HADS, saving the TARDIS but cutting him off from communication with Clara.

Clara and Rigsy hijack a train to send after the creatures to buy themselves time, but it is turned 2-D as well. Clara realizes that they need to get power to the TARDIS so they can bring the Doctor back into the fight. She has Rigsy paint a door on the back of a poster and then doubles back, planting it on the wall. The creatures see the door and assume it was a 3-D door they converted and begin attempting to pull it back into 3-D. Clara had placed the TARDIS behind the poster and the influx of energy revives the TARDIS to the point where the Doctor can bring it back to normal size. He sets up an energy field around the creatures and then uses the sonic screwdriver, which Clara gives back to him, to send the creatures back to their own dimension.

The Doctor and Clara deliver Rigsy and the remaining member of the work crew back to their work point. Clara gloats a bit over doing a good job in acting the Doctor. The Doctor slaps her down a notch by noting that while she performed well in his role, being good had nothing to do with it.

Analysis

What I think that Flatline, Mummy on the Orient Express and Listen all have in common is a simple concept foe and a heavy dose of proper scary storytelling. There is humor mixed in as well but it is a generally fearful premise that drives the action. Flatline is probably the scariest that involves a villain you can actually see.

Probably the best aspect of the story is how it turns the Doctor-lite aspect and makes it an asset. The monsters are scarier and the tension greater because the Doctor is not fully available to deal with the problem. He is there to give advice and try things, but without his full array of talents, people are left to their own devices to try and escape. It's made even better by the nature of the monsters as well. A monster you can't see and could attack you from anywhere is far scarier than even something large with lots of teeth right in front of you.

Also in the favorable column is the continued schooling of Clara. Clara was in full high horse mode at the end of Kill the Moon but her failure to learn from that opportunity rebound on her in Mummy and Flatline. Mummy for both the greater good (the greater good) and to choose between two bad options. Flatline continues with that line of thinking in acknowledging that sacrifices must be made of innocents and that not all evil can be reasoned with. Sometimes it must be destroyed as the only way to stop it. To be the Doctor is not necessarily to be good but to do what is right and those can be very different things.

The supporting cast was also very good. Rigsy was quite enjoyable as the stand in companion to Clara's Doctor and the dry humor that came from the interactions with the other workers was also very good. I would also give a serious one up to the effects team. There were a number of simple practical effects that looked good, but there were also a number of digital effects that did a very good job enhancing the story rather than taking away from it as is too easy to do these days. The almost cartoonish, shifting nature of the creatures as they shambled in their 3-D forms was quite good and it gave them a more alien feel than might have otherwise been achieved with a costumed suit.

About the only thing that I think I had a slight problem was with the ease that the Doctor dispatched the creatures upon the enlarging of the TARDIS. Suspending them in a force field is one thing, but then to just send them back to their own dimension with a pulse from the sonic screwdriver seemed a little simple. The Doctor had built Clara a device to undo the 2-D converting and I think it would have been a little better if he had come out with a device that would have done the same thing but not been quite as simple as the sonic. It would have also made it look as though the Doctor hadn't been sitting on his duff since engaging the HADS. I get that they were going for the speech moment and his reemergence as the Doctor and anything other than the sonic would have been out of place, but it still just seemed a little too easy to dispatch the monsters in that way. But that's a pretty small nit to pick.

This episode was a genuinely good one and not only would I easily pull it off for a rewatch, I actually have when I borrowed this disk from the library (Series Eight wasn't on Netflix at that time yet). So I would definitely recommend watching this one if anyone ever asked.

Overall personal score: 5 out of 5