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.

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.