Under the Lake/Before the Flood

Cass, you are the smartest person in the room when I'm not in it.

Under the Lake is Doctor Who's version of a haunted house story. It incorporates many haunted house tropes including isolation, ghosts coming out at "night" and a slow pick off of the people trapped in the station.
Plot Summary

The crew of an underwater oil drilling station in 2119 has recovered an alien space ship. Inside, they find it empty save for some strange markings on the wall. The company representative, Pritchard, checks a control panel which suddenly activates and the engine ignites. The crew commander, Moran, shoves a crewman out of the way and is caught in the exhaust stream, incinerating him. However, he reappears a moment later as an apparition with blacked out eyes.

Several days later, the TARDIS arrives. The Doctor is uneasy as the TARDIS was resistant to come to this location. They find the Moran specter who leads them to the bay with the ship. They go inside and also see the markings on the side. Emerging from the ship, the Moran ghost reappears along with the ghost of a Tivolian in a Victorian style outfit. Both ghosts grab metal objects and attack them. They run through the base and the crew urges them into a Faraday cage which keeps the ghosts out.

In the cage, the Doctor and Clara are introduced to the rest of the crew who bring them up to date on what happened. The station switches to day mode and the crew leaves the cage as the ghosts don't appear during day mode. They return to the control station where the Doctor starts to investigate what is going on. In the ship, he finds the suspended animation chamber is missing as well as one of the power cells. Pritchard, hearing how valuable the cell might be, slips out of the station in a exterior suit to look around for it.

The station suddenly switches from day to night mode and the ghosts reappear. O'Donnell, the tech operator, manages to revert things back to day mode but not before they attack and kill Pritchard returning from his exterior explorations, adding a third ghost to the mix.

Cass, the new base commander, decides they need to signal the surface for extraction. However, when they signal the surface, they find the sub was already signaled and coming down. The Doctor order the sub to immediately return the to the surface and declares quarantine on the base as the ghosts had signaled the sub. Frustrated by a lack of information, the Doctor hatches a plan and has O'Donnell revert the station to night mode.

Once the ghosts reappear, crew members lure the ghosts down the corridors towards the Faraday cage. The Pritchard ghost breaks off briefly to chase Cass's signer Lunn but despite cornering him, he does not kill him. Instead he reunites with the other two who are lured into the Faraday cage with a hologram of Clara. Once locked inside, the Doctor enters and has Cass read their lips. She reads four words repeated continuously. The Doctor figures that they are space coordinates, pinpointing the location of a building on Earth.

Prior to the valley being flooded, there was a mock town built for military training, including a church. Using the information given, the crew sends out a reconnaissance sub to the remains of the church and discovers the missing suspended animation chamber, active. It is brought back to the base but before they can examine it fully, the station power supply suffers a malfunction and the base begins to flood.

O'Donnell manages to isolate the flooding to a central corridor but it threatens to cut them off from the TARDIS. Everyone races towards it but Clara, Cass and Lunn are separated from the Doctor, O'Donnell and Bennett. The Doctor elects to travel back in the TARDIS to before the valley flooded and try to figure things out so that he can rescue the others. As the TARDIS disappears, a new ghost appears in the water outside of the Doctor.

The Doctor, O'Donnell and Bennett travel back to 1980 just after the Tivolian ship lands. There they meet Prentis, a Tivolian funeral director transporting the body of the Fisher King, the recently deposed overlord of the Tivolians. His ship lacks the markings that are causing the ghost phenomena so the Doctor heads back to the TARDIS to check in with Clara.

Clara informs the Doctor that a ghost of him has appeared but unlike the others, he is saying a list of names. The ghost Doctor enters and releases the ghosts from the Faraday cage, also changing his words to when the suspended animation chamber will open. With the ghosts free, Clara, Cass and Lunn run back to the Faraday cage but pose Clara's phone outside on a ledge in case the Doctor needs to contact her again.

The Doctor and crew head out again, although tries to convince O'Donnell to stay in the TARDIS. She refuses. They find that the Fisher King has reanimated, carved the words in the wall and killed Prentis. Hearing him approach, they duck into a nearby building to hide, but O'Donnell is discovered and killed. Bennett angrily confronts the Doctor for not trying harder to save her as her name was next in the list recited by the ghost Doctor.

Back at the station, the ghost of O'Donnell appears. She cannot get into the cage but she takes Clara's phone. Clara, realizing that the ghosts won't kill Lunn because he hasn't seen the figures, convinces him to go out and retrieve it, much to the resentment of Cass. Lunn obtains the phone but the ghosts lock him into the mess hall.

With Clara's name next on the list, the Doctor heads back to the TARDIS to try and rescue her but the TARDIS refuses to go and instead lands them back at the time they arrived the first time. Bennett tries to warn O'Donnell while their past selves are talking with Prentice but the Doctor stops him, warning him of dangers of screwing with time. While the Fisher King kills Prentice, the Doctor sends Bennett back to the TARDIS to wait for him. The Doctor grabs one of the power cells from the ship while the Fisher King drags the suspended animation chamber to the church.

The Doctor enters the church and confronts the Fisher King. The Fisher King recognizes the Doctor as a Time Lord and prepares to kill him to make more ghosts. The Doctor however tells him that he has destroyed the writing, meaning that the Doctor will not become a transmission ghost. Angrily, the Fisher King bats him aside and heads back to the ship to recreate the writing. He finds the Doctor has lied and the writing still there. He turns back to the church just as the power cell the Doctor stole explodes at the base of the dam. The dam breaches and the valley floods, killing the Fisher King. As it does so, an automatic return program is triggered sending Bennett and the TARDIS back to the base.

Realizing that Lunn has been gone too long, Cass and Clara head out to find him. Avoiding the ghosts, they discover him in the mess hall. The ghosts attack and the group runs into the bay just as the suspended animation chamber deactivates and opens. The Doctor pops out, having stored himself when the Fisher King left the church. The Doctor activates a signal, causing his ghost to send the call of the Fisher King, luring the other ghosts back into the Faraday cage where the are locked in. As they do so, his ghost (in actuality a hologram) disappears.

With the ghosts contained, the Doctor informs the crew that UNIT will move in and ship the Faraday cage to space where the ghosts will eventually fade away. Cass and Lunn begin a relationship and the Doctor and Clara leave for their next adventure.

Analysis

Taken as a whole, this may be my favorite overall story of Series 9. Heaven Sent was the best episode but I don't think the overall three part story of Face the Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent is as good as Under the Lake and Before the Flood.

Much like Flatline, Under the Lake is a good horror tale. Better than modern horrors in most regards, it focuses on suspense, fear of what might happen, and character development rather than jump scares and gore. In addition to good acting, there is excellent mood lighting and set design. In many ways, the story borrows from Alien with it's blue collar crew and industrial setting. In doing so, it uses limitations to it's advantage, using the same corridor set to both give the station a large empty feel and yet also feel closed in and claustrophobic. Everything about the setting feels creepy and unsettling.

I also appreciate that despite the ghost's menace, they only successfully kill one person and that both crew deaths in the first part are bloodless. Again, this puts more emphasis on suspense and that threat of danger rather than a body count that has to be satisfied with elevating levels of gore and splatter. Later we have the Fisher King actually killing people with his gun but that is also handled fairly well, though I felt that O'Donnell's death was a bit overplayed.

Despite it being a horror theme, the story was also cut with some good levity. My personal favorite is the Doctor becoming so excited by the ghosts that he is forced to use cue cards to not appear a totally insensitive jerk. There is also a lot of quick contradictory humor where the Doctor raises someone to only cut them a moment later: "Who's in charge so I know who to ignore," for example. The comedy did a good job of cutting the tension just enough so that it did not become overbearing when the horror elements picked up again in the next scene.

The acting of all the characters was pretty good. I really enjoyed the concept of the Doctor having a groupie with O'Donnell and her holding it in until the Doctor had gone with the TARDIS being "bigger on the inside" was particularly amusing. Prichard also does a good job in satisfying the stereotypical company man, more concerned with money than anything else. He is strongly reminiscent of Paul Reiser's character in Aliens.

Of all of them, I actually liked Cass the best. Being a deaf actress, she is forced to put emphasis through facial expression and in how her hand move while signing and both of these played very well with getting across her intensity for the crew. The rapport that she developed with the Doctor is very natural and the conversations she has with him in educating the rest of the crew are particularly engaging. I also enjoyed how she didn't take crap from either the Doctor or Clara. She tells the Doctor off about wanting to stay before they learn they can't leave. Her telling off Clara for her rather cavalier attitude towards the danger Lunn may be in is also very well done. I actually laughed out loud when she cussed out Clara in sign after Lunn leaves the Faraday cage, with Clara immediately getting the point.

Clara is actually one of the weaker points for me in this story. This series as a whole was heavy handed about Clara's departure and it came across way too heavy in this story. Clara was aggressive in the adventure to the point of being reckless and it made Cass's telling her off for being so cavalier about the lives of others that much more satisfying.

The conversation Clara had with Doctor about not accepting death and breaking the rules to prevent it was also very heavy handed. It emphasized everything I didn't like in Hell Bent and reminded me how important it is to accept that the rules of the game must be played and how it takes proper cleverness to manipulate the rules to allow you to win rather than breaking the rules for selfish gain. That it took the TARDIS refusing to allow the Doctor to go back and break the rules of time was probably another warning signal that is only truly visible in hindsight.

One thing that I know that divides fans is the opening to Before the Flood where the Doctor breaks the fourth wall to explain the Bootstrap Paradox. I personally enjoyed it, although I have a sense that it was added mostly as padding since the explanation of it and the Doctor's summary of his ghost using the Bootstrap Paradox at the end are entirely superfluous to the overall story. Of course, I give it an extra pass because I love Capaldi's performance of the opening of Beethoven's 5th and the subsequent rock version of the opening theme. So that's all good from my point of view.

Aside from Clara, the only thing that I felt was lacking in this story was the Doctor's meeting with the Fisher King. I feel like this conversation was too short. The Doctor confronts him in the church and you immediately recognize that the Fisher King is aware that something is different about the Doctor as he engages with the Doctor rather than killing him outright as he did with Prentis and O'Donnell. There is a dark refinement in how the Fisher King speaks and when he identifies the Doctor as a Time Lord, a race that he both has contempt and admiration for, you can feel this extra sense of malice as he relishes victory over the Doctor. Likewise, you can hear his anger and contempt when he realized the Doctor lied to him after heading back to the ship. I enjoyed and appreciated these scenes enough that I felt that there should be more of them. There wasn't enough time to savor the Fisher King and the potential he offered as a foe and that was a bit disappointing.

Overall this is an excellent story and I would highly recommend watching it again. The story is scary but with a proper amount of levity to cut it. The story has a nice science fiction bent with that extra dose of time travel that you expect from Doctor Who, going so far as to indulge in paradox as well. The ending is fairly satisfying though some elements of the second part are not quite the payoff you were hoping for. Nevertheless, I was quite excited to sit down with this story when it became available for rewatch and would happily sit with it again.

Overall personal score: Under the Lake - 5 out of 5; Before the Flood - 4.5 out of 5