Malcassairo - Doctor Who blog

Practically perfect in every way.

What an admirably low-key choice for a penultimate episode. This is true Peak Moff - clever, intricate, logical, with a clever time-travel concept and the best ideas this show ever had.

Here, it's one idea, done really well. 
  
I like how this Doctor's despair was so specific. He's the Discovery Doc, so of course his hell is a puzzle to be solved, and his cry for release "do I have to know everything?". This is not the first time we have seen him explain survival through logic, and it works for him. Intriguingly, this is also not the first time Eleven has taken on nightmares - it was there in Listen too. I loved the visuals of his memory palace - the lights of the TARDIS flickering on and off as he comes in and out of consciousness, and the sound of chalkstick as the sound of thinking. And the sound of the flies too (someone buy the sound mixing team a beer, it was a beautiful episode)

I also liked how the confession dial itself looked like a TARDIS - cloisters, and corridors, very like Eight's TARDIS; and how the castle rotated, one of those throwaway bits of brilliance Moff can just dash away over his morning toast.

TANGENT TIME:

It would be egotistic to assume that Doctor Who's showrunner has been reading my criticisms, but somehow he has taken them on board. This has been a great season.

First: he's calmed it down a bit, or maybe he is running out of ideas, and creating better episodes because he is rationing them more thoughtfully - allowing us non-Timelords to focus on merely one or two at a time, and allowing him to explore them more fully.

Second: Both Clara and the Doctor have had one single character note to explore, and far richer characters have come of it. The Clara we see this season has been shaped by her experiences in the previous one, and it seems genuine and organic - the sort of development I always wanted Amy to have.

More than that: Clara had the sort of small-scale drama that RTD excelled at, putting the universe and chips side by side. It was small and understated, and not...your boyfriend dies then comes back then becomes an immortal Roman auton and your imaginary friend is real and married in the future to your daughter who was also your childhood friend but you never knew you were pregnant so you're not really fussed that she was geo-engineered as a weapon also she's a timelord, and you never get a scene in which you emotionally process any of that. 

Clara's first problem was living in London and being too busy to fit everything in - we've all been there - and her second problem was that her boyfriend was dead, and she was struggling to deal with it. We've all been there too. It was nice, and so quiet. Clara's increasing recklessness has been handled so delicately throughout this series. This is solid and subtle character writing, very wonderful indeed. 

Third: no sex comedy and weird obsession with gender-essentialism. I don't know where that went this series, but I'm glad it's gone. I'm a six year old boy and I'm here for SPACESHIPS and DINOSAURS, and not bizzare heterosexual jokes about how much men and women hate each other. Maybe this is a function of the acting rather than the writing: I hear that Peter Capaldi was firm about not having romances with his co-star on account of his age; in any case, he does not play those opportunities for laughs.

All the same, the usual criticisms I have about his female characters (only existing in lady-centric plots about marriage and children/repeated scraping-the-barrel 50th Birthday card jokes about the "difference" between men and women.../bawd)...just didn't show up this year. I don't have words for how relieved I am. That kind of comedy makes me uncomfortable. 

Additionally, this series had two women writing, and two directing making it the best female representation to date in the new series. (There were no women creatives in series 1, 2, 6, 7 or the specials; only one in S3, 5 and 8; and two in S3. This is an embarrassment.). Also, this series had the best female representation of any season of Doctor Who since 1963.

Look I know I've been throwing shit at Mr Moffat's writing for over 5 years now, but if he keeps writing like this he can stay as long as he likes. This was a wonderful season in every way, and I really feel like he found...almost a courage in his own voice. His early seasons were overachiever seasons - they had so many good ideas that they were an utter mess, and which for me at least, were too busy being clever to connect emotionally. This season felt confident by comparison. He's found a way of translating his skill at the small episode across the whole season, and I'd happily watch three or four more of them.

Back to the article. I'm delighted that someone had the courage to dedicate Saturday night kids television to pared-back existentialism. From the start, I was totally revved to see a solo Doctor adventure, but you know not many actors could have pulled it off. One of my frustrations with the series so far has been - you've got Peter Capaldi, use him. I first became a fan in Children of Earth, where he knocks it out of the park in a two-hander against an empty fishtank filled with smoke. I cannot picture any other Doctor so brilliant, left alone in a room with skulls and intimations of mortality.

Now. About the next episode. Please don't have traded-in all the noise from this episode to have extra noise in the next one. The smartest thing Lawrence Miles ever said was in his uncharitable review of The Ancestor Cell:

It's a novel which seriously believes itself to be a world-shaking, cataclysmic epic, but which in its "middle act" largely consists of drab Time Lord supporting characters running up and down corridors being chased by spiders, combined with exposition scenes so massively over-inflated that they make Julia Sawalha's arse look small. What we've basically got is THE INFINITY DOCTORS  with all the good bits missing, a desperate attempt to do something big and important which can't tell the difference between "epic" and "just happens to be set on Gallifrey".

I feel like 100% of episodes set on Gallifrey have this problem. Gallifrey's a boring place (even if the Doc now insists he didn't leave because he was bored...)

I've got that quote all prepped for next week's review. Pray Rassilon I do not need it...

Other thoughts

"My day can't get any worse, so let's see what I can do about yours"
"Rule one of dying: don't. Rule two: slow down"
"I finally ran out of corridor."


Can we talk about how Who always hires women to direct the surrealist-lyrical episodes? This is a tradition spanning back to Fiona Cumming.