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.

Season 9 titles????

What is with the beautiful, spooky, vaguely literary Doctor Who episode titles this season?

The Magician's Apprentice
Reminded me immediately of Narnia, but that's the Magician's Nephew. It's not quite the Sorcerer's Apprentice either (you know, with Mickey Mouse)

The Witch's Familiar
Doesn't remind me of anything, but it's beautiful. And what bearing does either have on the episode????

The Girl Who Died/The Woman Who Lived
Is, of course, from Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived 

Sleep No More
Is the title of the Punchdrunk Macbeth production in New York;  the full quote is 

I thought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth is murdering sleep.”

Face the Raven
Poe, obvs. For the rest of time, there can be no other raven which won't remind someone of Edgar Allen Poe's poem.

They also seem to be really into their clever pairs:

The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar
Under the Lake; Before the Flood
The Girl Who Died; The Woman Who Lived
The Zygon Invasion; The Zygon Inversion
Hell Bent; Heaven Sent

Look, I know fans can build a theory out of old string and something Christopher Tolkien found on the back of a fag packet, but...

This is unusual and new. Is it meaningful?

Under the Lake

Good god damn. That was brilliant. That was everything Doctor Who should be.

45 minutes of sustained tension and mystery. Problem solving. I love problem solving! But especially for this show, especially in a show about a travelling alien supergenius - and more broadly, a show about inquiry, endeavor and discovery.

When I saw the trailer for this, I rolled my eyes because it was clearly the series clunker. A crew picked off one by one by poorly animated villains. On a seabase! How very lazy. This episode excels because "who dies next" is only half of the tension. Most of the suspense came from wanting to know *what* they were. And the brilliant thing about that, is that we're following the Doctor's emotional journey - because nothing gets this Doc excited like knowledge.


I know who he is now. He's the discovery Doc. This episode tied together a lot of things for me, and I know what to look for going forward. The Doctor has always been the same twelve or so qualities mixed in different combinations, and this is his thirst for knowledge come right to the fore. He really means it, about wanting to know what death is - and that is his top priority.

He's otherworldly. He's tuned into the TARDIS when she's unhappy, and more clearly alien - more clearly struggling with passing as a human among humans. "He was our friend", the translator interrupts the Doctor's delight at investigating the ghosts. Clara's cue cards are an obvious plot device, perhaps, but it fits in with the "no hugs!". I loved the scene where the Doctor has identified that Clara maybe is thrill-seeking in an unsafe way, and struggles to put it into words. Beyond that, his bitchy comments are, often as not, his attempt to parse bizzare human foibles - like having a peanut allergy, or communicating via semaphore. (The semaphore gag - that the Doctor has forgotten BSL in favour of semaphore - was this episode's one crushing dud note. A++ for Deaf representation, having a signing character on the show! It's less cool to turn that into a gag about weird communication methods, and were I a Deaf viewer, I would have felt hurt that the Doctor did not know how to communicate with me.)

Despite his rather hamfisted understanding of human nature, manipulation he does know. He knows exactly how to get to his fan O'Donnell and ask her to switch off the lights, by praising her skills. Clara knows that he's guiltripping the crew into staying, but lets it go with a smile. Smiling less, of coure, when the Doctor is separated from them and leaves in the TARDIS. She's thinking exactly what I was thinking last week, which is - I don't trust this Doctor to save me. But all the same - when he talks to the crew about "choosing an anonymous and selfish life", that's real enough.



Clara and the Doc seem sweeter this week. I liked Clara a lot, but in previous episodes I've loved her because she was being the hero and main character in a way the Doctor wasn't. No problem with that this week - he had agency, ideas, drove the plot. Ahhhhhh the problem solving. Little touches like - they kill the money-grabbing moron (rich morons never live long in Who - a perennial baddie), but not the translator or the Doctor; they can't get into the Faraday cage or come out at night; they can interact with objects, but they do struggle to, say, lift the axe so they're not entirely corporeal either; they whisper, but what?

 I immediately liked the crew, which is always a good start - and was already upset when the captain died in the pre-title sequence (partly, I confess, because it left only pretty young things on the crew - what about some representation for the older gent, eh?). Quick sketches of people, people who act like a real crew. All of them, all of them managed to create a real human being from nothing, from a line here or there. I've already mentioned the new captain, but I liked her such a lot. A brilliant woman, accompanied by her translator, obviously reminded me of Joey Lucas in the West Wing, and she was no less excellent. *Her* first priority is saving her crew. The scene where her translator is trapped and in danger was terrifying, not because he was cute but because of her reactions in the control hub - facing so much more than the loss of a friend, but more than that, the loss of agency and control that might follow.

OK, so it lost it in the last ten minutes for me. I didn't quite buy the "dark sword forsaken temple" puzzle, nor the idea that the words somehow memetically rewrite your brain, nor the sudden "There's a flood! On the seabase! With the nuclear reactor!" - BUT, this was somewhat redeemed because it was the cliffhanger, merely setting up for part 2. I didn't know there was a part 2!

BRING ON PART 2.

Also.

Toby Whithouse for showrunner please.

Whithouse has written a number of stunning episodes. School Reunion handled the return of Sarah Jane with heartbreaking delicacy, and was a highlight of S2. The God Complex was a standout, scary, moving thing: there will never be another episode like it. A Town Called Mercy too was the best of its series. He has show-run Being Human, and I think he would be an excellent candidate to take on the top job when Moff leaves.

Other thoughts

• I don't understand the TARDIS logic. If they can't use it to pop over and grab Clara, because they're already involved in events etc, then why are they able to go back in time to when it all began? Surely that's also interference? 
• I love the submarine controler.
• Unusual level of violence for Who! You get to see the floating body, and the methods of murder are all very real - a gun, a knife, an axe and a spanner. We noted that due to Strictly, the last 15 mins of this show was actually post-Watershed.
• Has there been a chat about the women problem at HQ? It's been three episodes so far, and I've yet to feel uncomfortable. Also, there are two women writing and two women directing this season.
• The Portreve, who watched the episode with me, has already worked out why the ghosts didn't kill the translator. Have you? I didn't ^_^

Number of people the Doctor has rescued: 0