25 October 2015

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived


Review by Tom Newsom

The second in a two-part story - or is it? Regardless, it’s one of those uncommon episodes of the show - one where characters and themes and messages take over an otherwise standard plot, this time with magical results.

At first you might think you’d skipped an episode, what with the sudden change in setting. But this one complements last week’s “opening” part to the story rather more closely than you’d expect. The action-adventure strand in both is slight, but there are big discussions on life and death. Bravely, this episode is for the first half a lengthy two hander (no Clara!), before the action widens out. It’s great to have a smaller episode that still manages to be very compelling - I was captivated.

Much of it’s down to Maisie Williams’s character - what a part! The range is extraordinary - going from Viking girl last week to seventeenth century woman... probably because it’s basically two separate characters. It’s an inherent weakness that this episode doesn’t naturally follow on, and that’s the point. The character of Ashildr has grown up, hundreds of years older, and can’t even remember when she was born. Her morals have changed beyond recognition - as has her style! - and she’s become an interesting, headstrong figure who has run away from her past.

Oh, but it’s here where the best, deepest part of the episode is. Ashildr’s assumption that the Doctor has come back especially is undercut by the alien artefact plot; she’s just a coincidence, and plenty of adventures have happened since. But the Doctor’s well-meaning gift of an second “immortality charge” incase she meets someone she likes is undercut by the reality- she’s immortal, she doesn’t get close to anyone and she’s only got one patch; as she says, simply, “nobody’s good enough”. There’s plenty of touches here, quickly told to us - her mastering every skill through being alive longer; her disregard for her own species coinciding with becoming a highwayman; seeing her life through history culminating in tragic loss.

And then there are the parallels between her and the Doctor - it’s not particularly subtle by the end of the episode, but it makes the whole thing sing. The Doctor is advising Ashildr to notice the little people, the “mayflies”, an about turn perhaps from last year into the Doctor we know and love. He admits, though, he hasn’t made Clara immortal in the same way, even though he’s said he won’t bear to lose her. It all adds to the foreboding mood this series.

It’s a very handsome Doctor Who episode, thanks to some great imagery from the script (picking a very fancy period of history, and adding in a big kingly lion too). It looks stylish, with the night-time scenes lit blue with orange candles reminding me of Poldark’s house style, by the same director. But it’s not just the look - combined with the previous episode, Ed Bazalgette has managed to produce the ultimate Who calling card, with two perfectly paced adventures (in my opinion), telling a story on a grand scale.

The plots in both this and last week’s were admittedly slight - or simply a foreground to a wider canvas of the immortal, eponymous Ashildr. Leandro the Lion is both a cool monster and a fearsome foe, though his purpose sticks out more obvious than most this week - to provide a test of Ashildr’s character, as well as the obligatory monster of the week. He keeps to the shadows (unfortunately -the make-up is nice), and gets about as much screen-time in the end as the controversial Sam Swift the highwayman. I like Rufus Hound, and I like a rude joke as much as the next man - but I expect the “gallows humour” scenes will get some stick, in an otherwise grown-up episode. Personally I found it the best kind of silly jokes, even if it all goes on a bit too long, necessary to lighten the mood, with a performance containing all that sadness behind the humour.

If it invites comparison to Doctor Who of old - not that every episode does - then Enlightenment jumped out at me, and not just because it’s one of the increasingly rare examples of a TV episode written by a woman. Both are different from the normal stories the show tells, and curiously they both end up mixing poetic, immortal characters with history and aliens. Not that poetry and big ideas is limited to those two - look at Warriors’ Gate, Kinda, or Survival, or Vincent and the Doctor, Kill the Moon or In the Forest of the Night. The Woman Who Lived is one of those rarefied, unusual slices of Doctor Who that works on both levels - as a family adventure and a sweeping, engaging drama.

At the end, we have Maisie Williams - a very successful, commanding performance, even when it’s hyped beforehand - joining the pantheon of potentially recurring Doctor Who characters, and an immortal one at that. The sorts of people he considers to be his friends, who can pop up whenever and wherever the writer wants - Moffat’s a fan, of course. I didn’t quite buy the rather Torchwood-esque group Ashildr was going to set up, nor do I think it will be returned to any time soon. Because one of the clever things about the show, is that in following episodes, if a writer wants to feature her again, they don’t have to stick to the established events at all. Like the Doctor, the show can write its own history as it goes. Whether this episode sinks or swims in that history remains to be seen.

18 October 2015

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Died


In terms of eye-catching imagery, this one grabs your attention. “Doctor Who meets Game of Thrones!” says the Radio Times (slightly superficially, given the actual episode). “Vikings Vs Aliens!” cries another. And if you’re thinking that it sounds fairly typical for the series, this story takes a simpler plot, tells it well, and makes good use of the extra room for smaller, snappier scenes. After the spooky but rather scientific investigations of Under the Lake, I liked this one even more. It’s my kind of Doctor Who.

It’s also yet another take on an established genre. No, not Vikings, but the classic, Western movie trope of a village being under siege and having to train up the villagers to beat the invaders. Not that it’s the first time it’s been used in Doctor Who. Having the Doctor gatecrash another type of story is one of the show’s staples, as it allows everyone to have some fun, and it’s the only type of show that can get away with it so often. This episode has some fun with it, with the Doctor training up the villagers and doing his best army general impression. But mostly, it’s played for real. He knows full well that the villagers are going to die (he argues they have to die, using his logic, because otherwise it will cause too many ‘ripples’ in time). The odds are against him more than ever in this impossible situation.

If that sounds less action packed than most stories, you’d be right. The story breezes along rather nicely, with some steady direction. After a fast paced introduction where we’re (very) speedily thrown into the situation this week, the story settles down into... introspection. The Doctor isn’t a fighter - actually, there’s very little fighting in this story at all! - he’s a thinker. And when the enjoyable and especially funny quips die down, there’s a rare chance for the show to delve a bit deeper into the characters than they usually do in recent years. Or have the Doctor and Clara talk about weightier issues.

The standout emotional scene in the middle of the story is the Doctor ‘talking’ baby. It’s taking what was presented as a joke from previous episodes, and perhaps being inspired by Peter Capaldi translating the dinosaur in Deep Breath too. The sound of a baby crying alone didn’t work in sparking the village into action, so the Doctor translates it into language and it becomes sweet and sad and a glimpse into an unknown world. All of this in a few spoken lines - and it’s enough of a moment to hang the rest of the story onto it.

I feel sorry for the new aliens, though. The Mire look and sound pretty cool, and the design does a lot of the work for them. But they don’t get much of an outing in this episode, when most of it is devoted to the Doctor and Clara. Pitching them as Viking-like in morality makes them stand out from the rest of the show’s pantheon straight away, even though we know very little about them otherwise.

The episode strives to be entertaining, with the Doctor on fine form. This week Peter Capaldi is cast as a mad god and a rational thinker rolled into one, and a goofier side to some of his humour. As ever, he feels unpredictable - hell, this Doctor feels like Tom Baker, having that alien aloofness of not caring for human matters, masking the love of the trivial, and deep friendship with his companion. Clara, you could say, occupies some of the more traditional role as she’s becoming more like him - she can stand up to the aliens too. But also she’s definitely got that shared bond with the Doctor as they understand each other much better. (All the more important to keep those talky scenes rather than reduce it all to shorthand)

It’s Doctor Who on strong form - reminiscent in broad terms of last year’s Robot of Sherwood (down to some of the expansive sets and the sunny look), but even more successful, if a more sketchier drawn setting. The Viking setting is a catchy look, but populated with everyday characters, with more detail being sketched in with new girl Ashildr. She’s cleverly played as just a normal, quiet young girl, but cleverly written to make her more Viking and less modern and immediately likeable. Her strengths are slowly revealed, and they are in her character rather than in her funny quips: her heart, her storytelling, her innocence. It’s a good role to build a story around.

For all the build-up to this particular episode, overthinking fans might feel a bit underwhelmed by the result. Sure, Maisie Williams’s casting is exciting, even when you discount the theories as to her character - cue the inevitable list of old friends and foes. But the episode itself (titled The Girl Who Died!) acknowledges that her character will be important right from the start, even if it cheekily puts the Doctor’s interest in her down to a premonition - “remembering in the wrong order”. Looking back, it’s pure mystical foreshadowing, but at least we can be comforted in the knowledge of another 45 minutes continuing the story next week.

11 October 2015

Doctor Who: Before the Flood


There’s an argument – probably raging, as we speak, on one of the forums – that time travel has become an over-used plot device in modern Doctor Who. Outraged fans will point to the fact that the TARDIS was barely used as anything but a means of transport in the classic series, whereas nowadays it’s all too often the means to solve the plot.

Up front, I have some sympathy with the argument: if the Doctor can just go back and rewrite history, or worse still, rewrite people to make them his puppets, the show instantly loses a big chunk of drama and instead becomes an exercise in joining the dots. Hence my reservations about ‘going back’ at the end of Under the Lake.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the way Before the Flood directly addresses those reservations – and the audience. Starting off with a brief, Listen-style lesson on the bootstrap paradox (with a grin-inducingly audacious guitar riff into the opening titles), this episode becomes less about how the Doctor saves the survivors of the underwater base, and more about the morality of tinkering with time.

It threatens to be at its least effective when it’s confronting the Doctor, yet again, with his inevitable death. Having seen him wriggle out of it at Lake Silencio and again on Trenzalore, my eyes did start to glaze over. But again, Whithouse was ahead of me: it’s merely a prompt for the Doctor to become genuinely outraged at the Fisher King for bending the rules not of time, but of life, and for robbing his victims of their deaths.

Ultimately, the episode resolves into a quietly furious excoriation of going back to ‘cut tragedy off at the root’, because to do so robs life of meaning. In Before the Flood the dead characters stay dead, and this gives the episode its most emotional beat: ‘There is no point wasting time because things happen and then it's too late.’ Sometimes Doctor Who has forgotten this truth, and become glib about death. Before the Flood is a necessary correction.

It’s also an episode that plays resolutely fair with the audience. Aside from highlighting the bootstrap paradox at the start – and holding its hands up to the same at the end, everything else was set up in Under the Lake, from the idea of the TARDIS hologram projection facility, to the Doctor escaping in the suspended animation cabinet, to the missing power cell that blew up the dam. The Doctor doesn’t even need to rewrite time to win, he just needs to convince the monster that he might.

Understandably, given last week’s cliffhanger, this is Capaldi’s episode, and it’s my favourite of his performances to date: that slight awkwardness of movement and around people, and a strange, spiky run that’s as distinctive as Pertwee’s arms-in-tight dash. This regeneration might be a clerical error, but it’s one that’s working in our favour. Against this, the Doctor’s dedication to Clara is again shown to be not entirely healthy, with Bennett calling him out on caring more about her life than O'Donnell’s, and the Doctor admitting that Clara’s name was the prompt for him to act against the Fisher King. What this devotion might mean in the future – like the dark hint about the ‘Minister of War’ – remains an intriguing mystery.

Not so mysterious is the Fisher King itself. It is a charmingly trad Doctor Who monster, by which I mean it’s most effective when glimpsed in the ruins of the Soviet ghost town, or lurking in shadows and close ups than when shuffling, in long shot, across the grass. Also, I guiltily admit to not really noticing the Slipknot ‘roar of the Fisher King’. But since the episode isn’t about the monster, that doesn’t really matter. The really scary thing about those scenes in 1980 is the sense of looming threat, which is doubly reinforced by the dam towering over the village, and the iconography of Cold War Armageddon. Daniel O’Hara’s choice of an icy, washed-out palette is a good one: these scenes are really chilly, and neatly counterpoint the sickly green corpse light of the underwater base.

Together, Under the Lake and Before the Flood comprise my favourite Capaldi story to date. It pulls on some of the style of classic base under siege stories, while drawing on and explicitly critiquing some of the modern show’s clichés. Dramatically satisfying and clever, it’s ideal Doctor Who.

04 October 2015

Doctor Who: Under the Lake


Review by Matt Michael

What a joy, after Series Nine’s opening two-parter, which took almost as long as Eric Saward to get the Doctor to the plot, to see Under the Lake achieve the same outcome within four minutes. Of course, ten times faster doesn’t automatically equal ten times better, but it’s not far off.

This speed is achieved with some neat shortcuts. For example, there’s a clever economy with the characters - Pritchard is the money-grabbing annoyance, O’Donnell is another UNIT fan in the style of Malcolm and Osgood, Bennett is a bit cowardly, and Moran is the dependable base commander. The only surprise there is that the commander gets killed off first, whereas normally they’re the gruff and suspicious one the Doctor gradually wins over. Instead, the Doctor uses the psychic paper to bypass all that routine stuff, and the commander’s role is given over instead to Cass, whose deafness thankfully hasn’t, so far at least, become the solution to the plot in the way Daphne Ashbrook’s character’s disability was in the ‘worthy’ Deep Space Nine episode Melora.

It seems counter-intuitive to be focusing on the speed of Under the Lake when modern base-under-siege stories such as Cold War and The Waters of Mars have managed the whole deal in a single episode. Again, Daniel O’Hara’s direction emphasises the pace even when the characters are confined to a handful of sets. There’s an outrageous amount of running through corridors, particularly during the central ghost-hunting sequence. But even the exposition scenes move with an unusual energy helped by touches such as the Doctor’s visual representation of the Dark-Sword-Forsaken-Temple coordinates, and the ability to bounce the dialogue around lots of characters.

That pace makes two slower scenes stand out, and both of them have a similar point: Clara’s increasing recklessness. Inside the TARDIS (nice touch up, by the way) the Doctor warns her off becoming too much like him. And then later, Bennett contrasts himself with Clara – more of a ’bleeder than a fighter’. Clara, however, has become a danger junkie, desperate for ‘monsters and blowing things up’ and always wanting to go ‘where the action is’. There’s the implication she’s running from a life without Danny. I’d be surprised if this theme wasn’t leading, in some way, to her departure later in the year

For the time being, though, she’s well paired with Capaldi, whose performance has lightened. Given he’s the oldest of the modern era Doctors, he plays it like he’s the youngest, rushing about like an excited teenager, constantly thrilled by the latest new thing. Watching the two of them, I was reminded of the irrepressible energy of the first Doctor and Vicki in The Romans, which can only be a good thing.

It’s this energy that saves Under the Lake from becoming too dark. Whithouse is an effective horror writer – Being Human, The Vampires of Venice and The God Complex and the traumatising pre-credits sequence of School Reunion are obviously testaments to that. Here we’ve got legitimately creepy ghosts who play on the old myth that the eye retains the last image it saw after death. We’ve also got a fairly graphic drowning and a man being burned alive. Then there’s that cliffhanger, with the Doctor’s spectre, made up to look like Peter Cushing in Tales from the Crypt, floating through the lake.

It’s a good place to end the episode, although five years of timey wimey have conditioned me to expect the very much alive Doctor to turn up inside that deadlocked suspended animation chamber next week. My one big reservation about the story so far (the little reservation: how did the sonic specs transmit from inside the sealed Faraday Cage?) is the time travel at the end. A change of scene for the second episode is probably necessary in the modern two-parter, but I always look askew at using the TARDIS to solve the plot – if he does it this time, why not every time?

That said, Under the Lake definitely whet my appetite for Before the Flood. After the opening diptych felt like a good two-hander for the Doctor and Davros with a lot of flabby padding around it, Whithouse has raised the game with a much more compelling piece of work. All that water, and not a damp squib in sight.