The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar

So, anyone for dodgems?

The two-part kickoff for Series Nine saw the return of Davros and the Daleks with Davros once again played by Julian Bleach, who played him in Series Four. While a stand alone story in it's own right, the story also set up the larger motifs for the series by introducing the hybrid and giving the first fake out of Clara's impending death.

Plot Summary

The Doctor arrives on the planet Skaro in a time prior to Genesis of the Daleks where he finds a young boy trapped in a mine field. He tosses the boy his sonic screwdriver to talk to him and finds out that the boy's name is Davros. The Doctor, stunned, then leaves in the TARDIS.

Centuries later, a creature called Colony Sarff searches the galaxy for the Doctor. The Doctor learns of the search on Karn and goes into hiding, leaving a confession dial with Ohila, head of the sisterhood of Karn. The confession dial comes to Missy, who travels to Earth and freezes all the in-air aircraft in time. This is noticed by Clara and UNIT, whom she contacts, and arranges a meeting with.

Clara meets Missy who notes that the Doctor has disappeared. Clara and UNIT agree to help Missy find the Doctor in exchange for releasing the planes. Searching through history, they discover a disturbance in the 12th century that appears to be a giant party. Missy grabs Clara and they travel to that point using a vortex manipulator.

The Doctor enters a great hall riding a tank and playing an electric guitar. He spies Missy and Clara and shows them off to the crowd. They are interrupted by Colony Sarff, who followed Missy and Clara. The Doctor agrees to go with him to see Davros in exchange for Sarff not hurting anyone as Sarff is actually a body made of venomous snakes. Missy and Clara insist on going with and the four teleport to Sarff's ship. Also during the event, a friend of the Doctor's named Bors becomes a Dalek puppet and reveals the location of the TARDIS to the Daleks, who take it with them.

Sarff takes the three prisoners to what appears to be a space station but is in fact the planet Skaro rebuilt. Missy and Clara are left in the ship while the Doctor is taken to Davros. Davros confesses that he is dying to the Doctor and plans to keep him with himself until the Doctor admits that mercy and compassion are weaknesses.

Missy and Clara break out of the ship and walk across Skaro. They are captured and taken to the Supreme Dalek who has them both vaporized while the Doctor watches. He then uses a special weapon to destroy the TARDIS. Incensed at this, the Doctor seizes a Dalek gun from a bench and pulls Davros out of his chair. He takes the chair to the room of the Supreme Dalek and demands that they return Clara to him or he will destroy them. Davros calls on Colony Sarff who sneaks into the chair and recaptures the Doctor.

Outside the Dalek City, Clara wakes to find Missy sharpening a stick. Missy relates a story of how the Doctor turned a group of android's weapons into energy allowing him to teleport to a safe location. Clara realizes that Missy used the same trick to teleport the two of them when the Daleks shot them. They then trek back towards the city.

Missy and Clara head into the Dalek sewers which are actually repositories for Daleks that have decayed beyond the ability to function in their casings but are still alive. Missy uses Clara as bait to lure a Dalek down into the sewers where she punches several small holes in the casing. The Dalek is attacked by the decayed mutants who seep in and kill the Dalek inside the machine. Missy then puts Clara inside the Dalek and uses her to pose as a prisoner.

The Doctor wakes back in Davros' lab where Davros and he talk. The Doctor slowly begins to realize that Davros is actually dying and begins to feel pity for him. Davros goes so far as to uses some of his waning strength to open his real eyes to look at the Doctor and even make a joke.

Missy and Clara meet another Dalek in the corridors who demands to know who Missy is. Missy orders the Dalek to scan her and realizing that she is a Time Lord, takes her to the Supreme Dalek. Clara follows, still disguised.

Moved by Davros' desire to see one last sunrise, the Doctor hooks up several tubes to Davros' chair from his life support system and prepares to release a small amount of regeneration energy to keep him alive. As he does so, Colony Sarff comes down and binds the Doctor. Davros comes to life once more, mocking the Doctor for his compassion. He funnels the Doctor's regeneration energy into himself and all the Daleks he had been drawing life from.

In the control room, Missy sees the Daleks infused with regeneration energy. She grabs a Dalek gun and runs to Davros' lab where she shoots Colony Sarff, releasing the Doctor. Davros mocks the Doctor once more but is interrupted by a sudden shaking of the floor. The Doctor in turn mocks Davros as he suspected what his plan was. His regeneration energy was distributed to all Daleks on the planet, including the ones in the sewers. Infused with new strength, they begin climbing out of the sewers to attack the regular Daleks and destroy the city.

The Doctor and Missy flee Davros' lab where they meet Clara, still in the Dalek. Missy tries to convince the Doctor that this Dalek killed Clara and Clara is unable to say her name. However, as she tries to convince the Doctor, the Dalek translator circuit speaks of mercy. The Doctor is stunned that the word is known to a Dalek and he realizes that Clara is in there. He lets her out and orders Missy off. Missy runs down a hall where she is cornered by several Daleks. She offers to make a deal with them.

The Doctor and Clara return to the control room where several Daleks have been killed by the old mutants. The Doctor recalls the TARDIS from it's HADS system using his new sonic sunglasses. They take the TARDIS outside the city and watch the city collapse on itself. The Doctor tries to figure out how the Dalek vocabulary knew mercy when he suddenly gets and idea. The Doctor takes the Dalek gun and then takes the TARDIS back to a few seconds after he left the boy Davros. He uses the gun to destroy the mines trapping the boy. He tells him that there must always be mercy and then takes him home.

Analysis

Both episodes are good and both have some parts that are very good, but both also have moments that drag them down just a bit. The real star of this story is actually Missy who is clearly having an absolute ball being both crazy and amazingly competent in her desire to rescue the Doctor. It's also fun to see Missy keep her evil streak as she open kills two UNIT men when Clara has the gall to suggest she has turned good. Her repeated instances of nearly killing Clara and threatening to do so are also highly amusing.

The Doctor is pretty good in this one. I love his introduction on the guitar. The tank is a bit much but he had to roll in on something so that's somewhat forgivable. But the rest of his performance is also enjoyable, especially with his dips into sarcasm and open derision. Even his moments of tenderness with Davros are well done, even if the overall scene itself is a bit strange.

Clara also pretty good in this and what helped was that she was constantly on the wrong foot. Clara's biggest weakness (and it came through hard this series) is her arrogance at thinking she can tackle a situation just as well as the Doctor can. Here, Missy is always keeping her off-kilter, making her more dependent and a much better companion. You even get a strong flashback with Clara in the Dalek to Oswin in The Asylum of the Daleks where Clara keeps insisting that she is Clara but the Dalek casing translates it to "I am a Dalek" and to Oswin insisting that she is not a Dalek as she is converted. It gave the scenes with Clara in the casing just that fun little twist and was just another way that Clara was on the wrong foot with Missy most of the time.

Davros was good but here we start to run into one of the problems with The Witch's Familiar. Davros is played quite well and his interactions with the Doctor are quite well done. But it takes it a step too far with the seeing the Doctor with his own eyes bit. First, Davros' eyes have never been open and it's always been assumed that they decayed or were destroyed at some point in the past, hence the need for the third eye. Second, as soon as you hear him say that he wants to look at the Doctor with his own eyes, the mind is instantly drawn to a dying Darth Vader saying the same to Luke and the sense of the scene is immediately lost. It also clangs false as there has never been a moment in the entire run of the series where Davros has shown any moments of tenderness or sympathy. He has always been cold, conniving and consumed with megalomania. Of course the Doctor doesn't really believe him but that he can put up a front of believing and had compassion for a man that he has tried to kill on more than one occasion is just a bit too much to swallow.

It is nice to see that the Daleks rebuilt Skaro in an old school sense. Everything about the city harkened back to the design of the city in The Daleks. It's also nice to see a mixture of all Daleks from the modern gold Daleks, the original silver and blue Daleks, to even a cameo by the special weapons Dalek. It was a well designed set and the only point of jankiness was supposed to look that way as the space around the ship that Missy and Clara and step on to is not actually there anyway.

The one quibble I have with The Magician's Apprentice is that it's a bit too slow a burn. Obviously you know it's a two-parter and you know that the plot won't resolve itself quickly, but it just feels like Colony Sarff's mission eats a lot of time, especially when you know that Davros is involved right from the start. It's about as close as you can get in the new series to padding like you had in the old show. As fun as Missy is, there are points where you just want to tell them to get on with it and that drags the pacing down.

The talk of the hybrid comes a bit out of left field as well. I don't particularly care for prophecy stories as they tend to muck things up a bit and this one had a really heavy-handed intro. I'd have preferred a more subtle take with Davros mentioning it quietly and perhaps even discussing it with the Doctor while he was still dying rather than in his gloating stage.

Overall, it was a good start to the series. Each episode was solid and had really enjoyable bits, but it also had slow points or scenes that just didn't work. This is actually one of the few times where I actually could have enjoyed less of the Doctor as the Clara and Missy road show was probably the best part of the whole story. Definitely worth watching again, but not quite the A-game that was expected.

Overall personal score: The Magician's Apprentice - 4.5 out of 5; The Witch's Familiar - 4.5 out of 5