The Girl Who Died

I am the Doctor and I save people. If anyone has a problem with that, to hell with them!

I debated long and hard as to whether The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived should be done separately or together. Series 9 was made up of several two-parters and this set up in a similar fashion. However unlike the others, these two had no real plot tie-ins other than that they featured the character of Ashildr and showed the Doctor doing a follow up to her story. I thought that a loose enough thread that it would be better to evaluate each story on it's own merits rather than trying to weave it together as a single narrative, despite The Girl Who Died trying to shoehorn a "To Be Continued" at the end of the story.

Plot Summary

After taking a short side trip, the Doctor rescues Clara floating in space with a brain sucking spider roaming in her suit. After stomping on the spider, he lands the TARDIS on Earth to wipe his shoe. The two of them are then apprehended by a group of Vikings. The Doctor tries to impress them with his sonic sunglasses but the lead warrior snaps them in half. They are then taken back to the Viking village.

In the village, the Doctor tries to pass himself off as Odin but is interrupted by an image of Odin in the sky. Several armored figures appear and transport the warriors away. Clara notices that one of the Viking girls was given half of the Doctor's sonic sunglasses and she rushes forward, telling the girl how to activate them. This registers with the armored warriors who transport the girl and Clara as well before transporting back themselves.

The group finds themselves on a ship in space, trapped in a holding room. One of the walls pushes the group to a second room where the warriors are broken down into their chemical essence, which is consumed by the aliens. However Clara and the girl, called Ashildr, are spared as the leader of the aliens is curious about the technology of the sunglasses. Clara starts talking and bluffs the warriors into thinking that they are opposed by a race of much stronger aliens. Ashildr then jumps in and challenges the warriors to combat, pulling the aliens out of their second thoughts. They accept her challenge and promise to return the next day to fight.

Clara and Ashildr are returned to the village where Clara relates what happened to the Doctor. The Doctor in turn tells Clara that the aliens are known as the Mire, a strong warrior race who will destroy the village without a second thought. The Doctor urges the villagers to flee, letting the Mire declare victory and leave the rest in peace. But the villagers refuse to abandon their homes and vow to fight, despite none of them having any combat experience.

Clara asks the Doctor why he won't fight and the Doctor responds that he is worried about upsetting time, for if he defeats the Mire, it will increase the standing of Earth in the minds of other Mire raiding parties and bring further invasions. But the Doctor changes his mind after listening to the cries of a baby, who can sense the danger coming.

The Doctor takes command of the villagers and attempts to train them in basic swordsmanship. The results are poor and the Doctor feels discouraged. Clara urges the Doctor to stop trying to be a soldier and instead think of something else.

The Doctor follows Ashildr into a barn and watches her put on a shadow puppet show to distract herself from her fears. The Doctor is amused and joins in but is distracted by the baby crying again. He sees her father taking her to a building near the water and Ashildr tells the Doctor that watching the fish in barrels amuses her. The Doctor is puzzled at first but then puts together her "fire in the water" comment and comes up with the plan.

Clara sees his excitement and follows him into the building. The Doctor shows her barrels filled with electric eels, giving off the surges of current: the "fire in the water." He then pulls the villagers together and creates a plan with various props to defeat the Mire.

In the morning, the Mire transport to the village and find it strangely deserted. They enter the great hall and find the Doctor and villagers dancing. They are confused by this, also finding no weapons. The Doctor asks if they will kill unarmed people and Odin responds that it wouldn't be the first time. The banter distracts the Mire while a villager from above lowers a wire on to the Mire soldiers. The Doctor gives a signal and the villager excites the eels, sending electric current down the wire and stunning the soldiers.

The Mire recover and advance on the scattering villagers. As a group walks to another part of a hall, the eels are excited again and the electricity is used to make a magnet which rips the helmets of a couple of the Mire soldiers. The Doctor grabs a helmet and puts it on Ashildr. The villagers then open the doors of the hall and the Mire see a dragon-like serpent advancing on them. Immune to their weapons, the serpent advances and the Mire retreat and transport back to their ship, leaving Odin behind.

The Doctor then kills the signal from the helmet and the "serpent" is revealed as a puppet made from the prow of a longboat. The Doctor also reveals that Clara had recorded the whole attack on her phone but without the images transmitted through the helmet to the Mire, it appears the Mire are retreating before a wooden prop. The Doctor tells Odin that they will leave and never come back or he will upload the video to the universal hub and every species wronged by the Mire will attack them as being revealed as a race of cowards. Odin vows revenge but the Doctor grabs his transponder and sends him back to his ship. The ship then flies back into space.

The villagers celebrate but when they take the helmet off Ashildr, they find her heart has given out from the stress of using the helmet. The villagers mourn her while the Doctor mopes in the fish house. Clara comes to comfort him. While she does so, the Doctor suddenly realizes that he chose the face of Caecilius to remind him that he saves people. He runs out and pulls a chip out of the Mire helmet. He modifies it to adapt to human physiology and places it on her head. The chip is absorbed and repairs the damage to her heart, bringing her back to life.

The villagers thank him and the Doctor gives Ashildr's father a second chip to give to her with the instruction that it is for her to give to someone special. Walking back to the TARDIS, Clara asks about the second chip and the Doctor tells her that the Mire chip may continually repair Ashildr, rendering her unable to die of natural causes. Immortality is a curse of watching others die while you live and the Doctor gave her the chip to give her companionship should she find someone she can't live without.

Ashildr is then seen watching the sky as time passes around her. Her expression of hopeful innocence turns first to tired sorrow and then to cold cynicism.

Analysis

The Ashildr stories got a lot of attention when Series 9 debuted, mostly due to the prominence she got in the trailers and the crazy theories that came about due to her. Being removed from the hype and just watching this story for what it is, I have to say that it is a bit thin. It's got some entertainment and can be fun at points, but it feels like there should be more.

In addition to being a bit thin in plot, there's something slightly off about this story and I think it's the tone, both in the writing and in the acting. The story can't quite decide if it wants to be a full bore comedy or drama and I think that pulls the story and the actors in different directions.

The Doctor is one of the worst sufferers of tone. Much of dialogue is clearly meant to be funny, either in that "guy talking nonsense out of his butt" way or just his general treatment of the Vikings. But peppered in are these dark, dramatic moments where the Doctor speaks of the baby's fear and his lashing out at the consequences of time in deciding to save people. The lashing out especially is reminiscent of the Time Lord Victorious (The Waters of Mars) which took a suicide to bring the Doctor back to humility. Here he just rails, makes his decision and then leaves with no one to challenge him on his actions until his own conscious starts to gnaw at him.

I enjoy his performance for the most part but the swings are a bit hard to latch on to. I also have to admit that I'm not a fan of humiliation comedy where a character is going off, like the Doctor with the yo-yo, claiming to be Odin, when you know he just looks like a fool. I always found that rather painful to watch but that's a limitation of my own taste rather than anything wrong with the show in particular.

The character who actually came out the best here is Clara. There is an interesting conclusion to a previous adventure which has her both a full participant but also with the wherewithal to be scared. During the main adventure, she is bold and Doctor-like with the Mire but not to the point of arrogance which develops later. She uses the Doctor's reputation as a sword and it would have worked had Ashildr not intervened which shows both cunning and intelligence.

Yet when reunited with the Doctor, she takes a backseat to him, knowing that he will turn and come up with a plan. She prods him when she knows he's going down the wrong path and encourages him when he feels discouraged. Even after Ashildr's death, she doesn't drive him to fix it. She offers comfort instead, noting that the plan worked. Her compassion does prompt him to make the decision to save Ashildr but she doesn't hammer on him that that is what needs to be done. It is a restrained performance and one of her better outings.

The Vikings themselves, and I would even include Ashildr in this, are pretty non-descript. The warriors act like warriors and the villagers are used mostly for comic relief, being shown mostly as near incompetents in anything not involving their actual craft. Ashildr herself gets very little development as well. She is shown as an imaginative yet pessimistic girl who serves only to both thwart Clara's deception of the Mire and to be the driver of the mental dragon. The screen time and development she gets is actually rather minimal and it is a bit strange that the Doctor regrets her death any more than if one of the other villagers had been killed. Perhaps it's guilt since he put her in the situation that killed her.

The Mire are also a rather non-descript villain. They pop in, kill a few warriors, disappear while the Doctor and the villagers make their plans and then retreat after their battle in less than five minutes. The Mire are functionally just not on screen enough to offer any particular opinion. Any race of aliens or even human could have been put in and it would have had the same effect. The two things that you needed from the Mire, prompting their insertion is that they need to have a sense of self preservation (as opposed to Sontarans) and the use of a projected screen that could be hacked. Use of natural vision would have thwarted that plan as well. But the Mire feel like they were created for their flaws rather than developed independently.

One of the complaints I remember people making about the resolution was how much it reminded them of Three Amigos in that the villagers are working at a deception rather than any meaningful fighting skill. I didn't think it was quite that bad but I could see how some would find it disappointing. The Doctor did point out that their victory needed to be deceptive because an actual military victory would only encourage the Mire to send more ships as humans would be seen as a worth foe. So I didn't have any problem with the resolution there, except for the underdevelopment of the Mire as an actual threat.

The direction and setting were nice though the voice work on Odin was a bit strange. At the very least the story looked like it was set in a real village with real considerations for the limitations of the time. It was pleasant on the eyes and most of the problems I had were with the writing.

If it wasn't for the use of Ashildr later in Series 9, I think this would have been a very forgettable story, along the lines of The Eaters of Light in Series 10. Its most memorable aspect outside of her is that it can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a farcical comedy or a cautionary tragedy. That gives inconsistent writing and poor character development. There is nothing overtly bad about it and the comedic points are legitimately amusing. It also has decent acting from the Doctor and Clara which gives it a little extra boost. But it's a story that slides off the brain very easily. Easy in, easy out.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5