The Bells of St. John

Yes, I'm an alien who travels in a blue box that's bigger on the inside. I'm over a thousand years old and I don't know how to fly a plane.

The Bells of St. John kicked off Series 7B (as it was known) and introduced Clara as full time companion after teasing her twice before. Series 7B is generally not regarded very highly by the fans outside of The Name of the Doctor but I think that's a little harsh. It is a more light-hearted series and I think the mixture of silliness with a tinge of dark first brought forth here sets the mood fairly well. I generally enjoyed it, but I also wasn't going in expecting the answers that people were getting antsy for.

Plot Summary

The story opens with a man giving a warning about a strange script appearing on Wi-Fi access screens. He warns that if it is clicked on, the person is found and their mind pulled into the cloud and their body left to die. He knows this because he is lost in the cloud, along with many others.

The Doctor is in seclusion in a 13th century monastery, attempting to discover the secret of Clara, when a monk comes to him to tell him that the bells of St. John are ringing. He walks with the monk to a cave where the TARDIS is hid and answers the ringing TARDIS phone. On the other end is Clara who had called the number thinking it a tech support line, given to her by a woman in the shop where she bought her computer. He walks her through setting up Wi-Fi but becomes excited when her mnemonic for the Wi-Fi password is the same phrase her two previous iterations told him.

His excitement causes her to mistype the password and when she reconnects, she clicks on the trap script, alerting a nerve center to her presence. The Doctor travels in the TARDIS to her location but she has no knowledge of who the Doctor is and is unnerved by him, locking him out. Thinking it's his clothing, he goes back to the TARDIS to change.

While he is distracted, a girl from a book Clara had recommended to one of the children Clara watches appears from upstairs. The girl's head turns around to reveal electronics which begins to suck up her mind. The Doctor overhears Clara's lost cries from over the intercom and bursts in. He uses his sonic and her computer to reverse the process, to the surprise of the workers in the nerve center. The Doctor takes Clara upstairs to rest in her bed and heads outside to keep watch.

She wakes several hours later and comes down to investigate, still unsure of the Doctor. While out, they are spotted by a robot and the nerve center group turn up the lights in the neighborhood and turn off the lights around them. They then knock out the crew and passengers of a plan and guide it to crash in the lit area. The Doctor and Clara hop aboard the TARDIS which the Doctor lands on the plane. He pulls the plane out of the dive and disconnects the Wi-Fi, allowing the crew and passengers to wake.

The Doctor and Clara reappear at a café the following morning. They have discovered that Clara's near upload to the cloud affected her brain, leaving her with a new ability to manipulate computers. She hacks in and discovers the nerve center of the activity is taking place on an upper floor of the Shard.

The Doctor heads in to the café to get coffee and is distracted by taunts from the director of the activity, Miss Kizlet, who is using the Wi-Fi to temporarily take over people. Whilst doing that, another robot, taking the form of the Doctor, uploads Clara into the cloud.

The Doctor discovers this and reprograms the robot to work for him. The robot takes the Doctor's motorcycle and using an anti-gravity adaptation, drives up the Shard and into Miss Kizlet's office. The robot uploads Miss Kizlet into the cloud where she screams to be let out. Her primary assistant, Mahler, hesitates but the Doctor robot is ordered by the Doctor to increase Mahler's obedience and he releases all captured minds out of the cloud.

The Doctor directs UNIT to the nerve center and they move in. Back in her body, Miss Kizlet informs the Great Intelligence of what is happening and he orders a complete shut down. She deactivates the system, releasing all the workers who had been brainwashed. Miss Kizlet herself reverts to her normal mind, that of a very young girl who was waiting for her parents.

Clara revives and returns to the house where she finds the Doctor waiting. He offers her the chance to travel but she tells him to return tomorrow, preferring to go on her own terms. The Doctor then departs, determined to unearth Clara's secrets.

Analysis

It is difficult not to enjoy this one even if it gets a touch silly with the Doctor driving up the Shard. I also have to admit that I prefer "Impossible Girl" Clara to the regular Clara she is with the Twelfth Doctor so this story already gets a bit of a boost in my book. It's not perfect by any stretch but it is a fun little story with some good humor, fun references, and a dark edge behind the curtain.

The Eleventh Doctor is highly entertaining in this story and quite enjoyable. He drops the sullenness from The Snowmen and gets back to his more spritely self. That being said, he still seems to retain a darker edge. Not the dark edge that the Tenth Doctor had or that was attempted badly in The Beast Below, but an undercurrent indicating that the Eleventh Doctor is less naïve than he would occasionally come across as in earlier iterations. Even beyond the escaping his own death, this is a Doctor who has experienced loss and it makes his character richer for it.

Clara, as already noted, is also enjoyable in this one. She is the more hesitant version of herself. You can see elements of the brashness that would eventually come to define her with the Twelfth Doctor, but there is still a hint of uncertainty. Her controlling tendencies come across as more cautious as when she forces the Doctor to accept travelling on her terms. Granted, she doesn't do a whole lot and gets captured by the Spoonheads twice but we can mitigate that with the idea that she is unfamiliar with the Doctor's world and would be more susceptible to capture as happened with a great many of the Doctor's companions at the beginning of their tenure.

The enemies were pretty good in this too. I liked the idea of using Wi-Fi as an agent against people, though their ability to hack random people seemed odd. If they had that power, why couldn't they just hack Clara directly to attack the Doctor. What's more, why not make further attacks on the Doctor? Once he's in a known locations, send every person in the café against him at once like the Agent Smith clones at the beginning of Matrix: Reloaded. I never like it when the villains decide to be sporting.

I liked the Spoonheads as well, although I think they would have been more effective if they had been a bit faster. The slow spin is a bit too dramatic and it makes you wonder why the person simply cannot run away while the spinning in happening. A quick dissolve of the face to the receptor plate would make more sense and you wouldn't have the question of seeing a person walk by with a glowing plate of metal instead of the back of the head. I'd also like to know how the Spoonhead got into Clara's house while the Doctor was outside. I can see the Spoonheads being distributed throughout London and other areas, but did it magically jump through a window to get around the Doctor outside? It's a bit of a plot hole for me.

There was an interesting twist with the idea that none of the workers was actually of their right mind. It does make you wonder how the Great Intelligence got a hold of Miss Kizlet all those years ago but it feels especially tragic to have her mind wiped and you hear the mind of a three to five year old child coming out. It also seems slightly callous of the Doctor that once he has returned everyone (most to death) that he doesn't bother with any follow up because he is so focused on Clara. It sets up the return of the Great Intelligence, but it seems a bit uncharacteristic of this Doctor.

I also couldn't help myself wondering if Miss Kizlet was taken around the time that the Great Intelligence was driven away in The Web of Fear. She could have been taken earlier as an experiment in the mind absorption technique and then held on to when Jamie destroyed the machine, preventing the Second Doctor from destroying the Great Intelligence outright.

If I had any problem with this story, it was the slightly silly tone that it took at times. Driving up the Shard looked neat in the forward shot, but the profile shot reminded me of Adam West and Burt Ward climbing a building in the 60's Batman. Most of the jokes landed (the demon-woman one from the beginning was particularly funny) but every once in a while there was a bit of a groaner.

The references were fun as well. The book being written by Amelia Williams with a cover suggesting her, Rory and the Doctor was pretty good, although I could have done without the overt "Eleven is the best" reference from Clara. I'm sure this wasn't a reference since it's a common location but I enjoyed the Doctor and Clara driving over the bridge outside Parliament. In my mind, I could see the line of Daleks coming from the other directions as seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I know they were downplaying the Great Intelligence connection, but I do wish there had been some little connection to the Great Intelligence of the past, like if the Doctor pulled a control sphere out of the Spoonhead while waiting for Clara to wake. That would have been a fun little tease.

Overall, I'd say this was an enjoyable story and one worth going back to. It doesn't flow quite as well if you haven't seen The Snowmen so that is one drawback to it. I think you can get by without Asylum of the Daleks but given that Clara is the best part of that story, I would indulge in that one as well. But knowing the whole story, this one is perfectly good to sit down and enjoy without prerequisites. Not great, but a solid little adventure.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5