Doctor Who Series Nine Reviews: 9.02

“The Witch’s Familiar”

So overall, I’m glad I slept on it before writing up this review. My initial notes had phrases like “best opening story since “The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon”. And I could probably still make  a case for that statement: “Asylum of the Daleks” and “Deep Breath” are both good but not great, but then, my eventual feelings about this story were that it was… good but not great. It feels like “Deep Breath” provides the best comparison out of previous opening stories, as the contrast between that story and this one gets at my biggest problem with “The Magician’s Apprentice/ The Witch’s Familiar”. “Deep Breath” has pacing issues, and flails around for its first two acts, anchored only by its performances, and its strong focus on the Clara’s reaction to the Doctor changing. But from the restauraunt scene, the last half hour of the episode crackles with confidence and possibility, with the sense that something new and exciting, something filled with potential, has started. By contrast, “The Magician’s Apprentice/ The Witch’s Familiar” never quite captured the sense of surprise that drove the previous series opener, even though it felt considerably more sure footed than its predecessor (part one in particular). Ultimately, this was a story I liked, but never really a story that I loved.

Still, let’s start by focussing on what I enjoyed this week, because there was a lot that I enjoyed.

What I really liked about the episode was pretty much established in the opening scenes, which instantly change the direction the story hints at in the cliffhanger of “The Magician’s Apprentice”. That cliffhanger hints that the second part of the story will be a piece where a rage filled Doctor does terrible things to bring Clara and Missy, effectively made damsels distress, back from the dead. Instead, the episode immediately established that Clara and Missy were still alive, immediately giving them an active role in the story: instead of waiting to be rescued by the Doctor, they are head out to rescue him (and I was quite pleased that I guessed correctly about the explanation of their survival also being the way Missy survived her death in “Death in Heaven”). On top of this, the Doctor’s attempt at exacting terrible revenge to bring Clara back involves him zooming around in Davros’s chair, while delivering the episode’s funniest line: “Come on, you’ve all had this exact nightmare.” There’s a wonderful refusal to make the Doctor a brooding, Dark Knight-esque hero that I love about that sequence. As a result, the episode rejects the most boring, ugly story last week’s cliffhanger feints at setting up, and sets about telling a different one.   

So what sort of story ends up being told? Well, “The Witch’s Familiar” becomes an episode of two halves, the first being Clara and Missy’s twisted buddy cop movie plot thread. It remains as fun a pairing as it was last week, continuing the dynamic where Clara become’s Missy’s companion, only with the sense that Missy might betray or kill her at any moment. If I have one complaint about this dynamic, it’s that I’d like to have seen Clara assert herself against Missy at some point (like in the “make me believe” scene from “The Magician’s Apprentice” rather than basically being belittled by Missy for an episode. But Gomez and Coleman are a ton of fun together, and overall it was a pairing worth having.

The second half of the episode comes in the form of the story’s central draw the long conversation between Doctor and Davros. Having them in a room together for an extended amount of time produces some wonderful moments: my personal favourite is the subversion of the scene where Davros tries to tempt the Doctor to try wiping out the Daleks in cold blood. It’s a further echo of “Genesis”, where the Doctor and Davros debate about releasing a virus that would wipe out the universe, and Davros concludes “yes… I would do it! That power would set me up above the Gods!”. This time, the Doctor is tempted with that power, with Davros urging him to “Become a God”, but this debate is cast aside, rejected, in favour of the Doctor’s compassion, as he tells Davros that the Doctor is just a story he made up, that he didn’t come out of shame at abandoning Davros, but out of a desire to help him, and that it is that desire to help that makes him the Doctor. It is perhaps a shame that the scenes between the Doctor and Davros wrap up in the most obvious way possible: with Davros betraying the Doctor to increase his lifespan, and the Doctor tricking Davros back to gain a small victory (although I love the line “your sewers are revolting!”). But overall, the brilliant moments make the exercise a worthwhile one.

Also marvellous is the scene where the Doctor confronts Clara while she is in the Dalek. While shoving Clara in a Dalek for the majority of an episode isn’t the most interesting thing you can do with her character, Coleman plays Clara’s desperation brilliantly. And the scene lifts the story by giving its conclusion some genuine emotional weight: Clara’s attempts to tell the Doctor how much she means to him being twisted into words of hatred really captures the terrifying nature of the Daleks. And it makes their friendship key to the episode’s resolution, which is nice.

Because the resolution to the story doesn’t come in the form of the Doctor starting a revolution with the Sewer Daleks, but through the episode’s final subversion of last week’s cliffhanger. The invocation of the “Do I have the right?” speech at the end of “The Magician’s apprentice” was ultimately misdirection to hide the true nature of the cliffhanger scene. This story is not ultimately about whether it’s right to kill a child who will become a Dictator, but is instead about the moment where the line between friend and enemy doesn’t matter, where mercy and compassion can save something precious.

The serial wasn’t without flaws for me: Clara felt underutilised, particularly in the second part of the story: she started off well, but by the end of the two parter, I couldn’t help feeling that this is the first time since series seven where Coleman has had to outperform the material she was given. Also not quite working was the “Doctor facing his death” plotline. I don’t mind as such that this is a bit of a repeat of the plots from season six and Matt Smith’s regeneration. The doctor does face deadly danger a lot, so he’ll naturally come close to death more often than most, but this episode never sold me on the idea the Doctor was facing his death. The plot thread mostly felt used for the sake of introducing the Confession dial, which will doubtless be vital to the Season’s overarching plot, but nonetheless felt a bit tacked on here. Finally, I still feel nagged by a general sense that the subversion of last week’s cliffhanger was a bit too obvious, that confronting the question of whether it is right to kill a child who would grow to kill entire civilisations is pointless when we know what the answer will be: Doctor Who is never going to show its protagonist killing a child. Even if they sidestepped it neatly, I can’t help but feel like there was a more interesting story to tell here without raising the question at all.

Overall, however, I enjoyed this opening two parter. It has some interesting ideas, uses most of its characters well, and is brilliantly acted: all the main cast give a top notch performance. For all that it had an interesting central conceit and some great character interactions, I was left wanting something a bit fresher, a bit more vital and surprising. But nonetheless, it was fun enough to make me excited for the rest of this season, and intrigued to see where they go from here. It’s not a perfect beginning, but this season’s still shaping up nicely.

From the South Pole Iceberg to the Republic City Portal: A Critical Study of the Avatar Franchise: Part Fifteen

ATLA Book One: Water

Chapter Sixteen: The Deserter

In which Aang Squats and breathes, Sokka goes fishing, and Zhao gets a little hot under the collar.

First and foremost, this episode is about Fire. It is a story about the fire nation, about the face of their military and the people who defected from that army. It is about fleshing out Fire Nation culture, getting a sense of how a Fire Nation town will act out their culture. It is about Aang’s desire to learn firebending, and the question over whether he is ready. The themes of the episode are woven together to tell a story about the uncontrollable, dangerous nature of fire, and how leaning too heavily into that nature has corrupted a nation.

We start the episode by heading into a Town, an Earth Kingdom colony, in a sequence that allows for more fleshing out of the fire nation, building a sense of just how deep rooted its invasion is in some places: this is a town filled with Fire Nation culture, celebrating one of its festivals. We see more of their propaganda in the fire lord puppet show, and we see some added foreshadowing when Aang worries about Katara getting burned in the firebender’s performance, which highlights the perils of fire without control, even if the performer’s loss of control is feigned.

This episode also increases the sense of a redeemable fire nation with Jeong Jeong and his group of deserters, although unlike the innocent townspeople of “Jet”, these people are on the fringes of society, living as vagabonds in a way that Zhao considers “savagery”, something beneath him.

The episode also provides us with more backstory for Zhao, so this essay seems like a suitable time to do what I’ve been promising since his introduction, and discuss his status as a problem character. The First, and perhaps most obvious problem, is that he is the villain used most sparingly throughout the course of this season, the one who (to paraphrase Bryan Konietzko) comes along to show “Poop has gotten real”. But in his first appearance, he is defeated by Zuko, who at that point is apparently still struggling to master the basics of Firebending. While this is beneficial to Zuko’s arc, it does nothing to help Zhao as a villain: he cannot be the villain used to show “Poop has gotten real” (to paraphrase Bryan Konietzko) in anything more than a superficial sense, as he doesn’t convince as a genuinely imposing threat. Heck, here the episode makes a point of the fact that Aang beats him without having to throw a single attack.

Furthermore, Zhao fails because Zuko takes the traits that define his villainy, and makes them far more interesting. For example, when we get the story of how Zuko came to be chasing Aang around the world in “The Storm”, we are given the backstory of a multifaceted, complex character. When we get backstory for Zhao here, we learn he is reckless and power hungry. It works in the context of the episode’s themes, but generic doesn’t begin to cover it. Aang’s taunt that he thought Zhao would be better than Zuko takes on a particularly meta quality here: Zuko is the defining antagonist of Book One in a way Zhao simply cannot be. Zhao does have his moments, such as in this episode, where he feeds the theme around the uncontrollable nature of fire pretty well. It’s just that these moments are few and far between, and the show will ultimately come up with a much more threatening and compelling villain to replace him, very shortly.

Fitting into the theme of the danger of fire is Aang’s encounter with Jeong Jeong. This encounter start of Aang’s pattern of finding a traditional “old male mentor figure” who seems to be set up to teach him their separate element, only to instead learn from one of his peers, someone who is marginalised or rejected by the wider world. Each old mentor figure is not able to mentor Aang for subtly different reasons. In Jeong Jeong’s case, Aang doesn’t learn from him because he isn’t ready to learn firebending: he can’t control the danger of fire, and isn’t patient enough to deal with this danger, as he gets too saucht up in in his natural aptitude for the element.

However, the problem doesn’t just lie with Aang: it also lies with his prospective mentor: Jeong Jeong is ultimately too afraid of the element himself, loathing the fact he is a Firebender. This self-loathing is clearly an unhealthy approach the intrinsic part of the self bending has been shown to be multiple times over the course of the show so far, with the line “eventually it tears you apart” showing the internal chaos caused by Jeong Jeong’s feelings about his own identity as a Firebender. If he is to learn firebending, Aang’s mentor will have to be someone who understands, and can move past, that fear of fire, and the sense of internal chaos and self-loathing that fear causes.

As well as being the thing that means he cannot learn from Jeong Jeong, the accidental burning of Katara is a significant obstacle in Aang’s hero’s journey. The event is a sign of Aang’s impatience, as he once again shows a natural aptitude for the element he is learning, but lacks the discipline necessary to understand and respect the danger of fire. Hurting someone he loves is a major cause of shame for Aang, and a major mental block that lasts through most of the rest of the show.

However, being burnt allows Katara to learn about her healing powers, thankfully meaning her pain is not just a cause for Aang’s male angst, but a chance to move her own hero’s journey forwards, as she recognises powers in herself that are only granted to a select few gifted waterbenders. Jeong Jeong’s discussion of healing with Katara sets up a binary opposition between the natures of water and fire, a dualism that will play heavily into the Book one finale, and Katara’s part in the Book Three finale. It also further expands on Jeong Jeong’s characterisation: the healing, soothing power of water is something Jeong Jeong longs for desperately, but cannot have.

The resolution shows Aang better understanding the self destructive nature of fire, but refusing to use the element as a result of this understanding. It’s an incomplete resolution, one that speaks to the fact that this problem will exist until the resolution of the series. At the moment, the fire nation characters can only be redeemed if they reject the nature of their nation, whereas the resolution of the series will hinge on redefining the nature of their nation, and their understanding of the element of fire.

End of Part Fifteen.

 

Doctor Who Series Nine Reviews: 9.01 - “The Magician’s Apprentice”, by Steven Moffat

Isn’t it nice to have new Doctor Who again?

As we’re starting a new season, it is worth beginning by looking at the challenge faced by series nine. It’s a challenge similar to that faced by series Six: both seasons start with an unchanged, successful TARDIS team that works really well together, and come off the back of a really good season (for me, seasons five and Eight are personal favourites of mine), and have to try and build on the success of the previous series. Series Six, while entertaining, wonderfully ambitious, and full of great bits, ultimately didn’t quite live up to its initial promise (although I remain incredibly fond of it).

However, season eight opens with a similar approach to one of the most successful parts of that Series six: its barnstorming opener “The Impossible Astronaut”. Both that episode and “The Magician’s Apprentice” are the first part of a big kitchen-sink two part story that in some ways feels more like a finale than a season opener. And the episode really makes use of the double-length story time by focussing on various pairings of the regulars and recurring characters brought into these episodes, really working as a piece of drama that allows big Doctor Who characters the chance to interact with one another, at length, in unusual and entertaining ways.

The first of these pairings comes with in early scenes of UNIT and Clara, which start to lay out the season’s mission statement for Clara. These scenes really follow through on the Coleman and Moffat’s promise to portray her as a more reckless, hyper-confident adventurer loving her travels with the Doctor. They form a fascinating contrast to her line from season Eight’s “Into the Dalek”, where she tells the Doctor “You’re not my boss, you’re one of my hobbies”. When she apologises to her boss that she has go, and runs off to help UNIT, it becomes quite apparent that this dynamic has now reversed: while she still keeps her school life and her Doctor life separate, and insists on having a life outside of the Doctor, working at Coal Hill school is now her hobby, saving the universe is practically her day job (albeit one that she loves). It’s great to see her taking on the Doctor’s role in her interactions with UNIT, figuring out the ominous meaning of the planes in the sky, and working out the Doctor’s present location in Earth’s history. In particular, the scene where Missy starts viciously killing members of the public, and Clara persuades Missy to work with her on her terms, making her unfreeze the planes instead of doing what Missy wants and “say[ing] something nice” is where she most shines in the episode. It’s not quite new material: we’ve seen her pushed into desperate situations and responding with aplomb quite a few times in series eight. In some ways this stuff felt fresher and more exciting in her confrontation with the half-face man in “Deep Breath”, and in the second half of “Kill the Moon”, but the way the episode establishes this type of situation as the norm for her character instead of new territory is an interesting statement about where the show plans to go with Clara this season, really selling the idea that she is a confident adventurer who thrives in high-stakes situations.

After the café confrontation, Clara takes a back seat, being paired with Missy makes her role in the episode feel less prominent, although “Missy’s companion” is another wonderfully fresh role to give her character. It’s also a pairing that really sells the idea of Missy as a twisted mirror of the Doctor. Just as Clara takes on the Doctor’s role in her interactions with UNIT, Missy spends the back half of the episode with Clara as her companion, doing “doctorish” things figuring out that they have not been taken to a space station, but instead an invisible planet (I loved her “gravity reading”), and mocking the Daleks while apparently being at their mercy. But she feels more dangerous than the Doctor, she could be doing the exact things he does, only to start ruthlessly killing members of the public, possibly throwing herself and the people with her out of an airlock, or selling out her best friend to try and form an alliance with the Daleks. It’s a dynamic that gives the interactions between Clara and Missy a real edge, and Michelle Gomez remains a massive scene stealer.

We then move on to The Doctor’s goodbye party, a sequence where the episode feels most bloated, its excesses most in evidence: this is undeniably a self-indulgent piece of television at times. But it’s still packed with ridiculously fun moments, and when the self-indulgence is this much fun, I’m not inclined to complain too much. Frankly, who doesn’t want to see Peter Capaldi playing Electric Guitar while riding into an axe fight on a tank? Or playing “Pretty Woman” when he sees Missy and Clara? This sequence also marks the section of the episode where we get to see The Doctor, Clara, and Missy working as a larger team, which is a delight: particularly lovely and nuanced is the moment where Clara realises the Doctor knew Missy had probably survived her apparent Death in the Series Eight finale, and demands that the Doctor survive his encounter with Davros so that he can make it up to her.

The last pairing comes in the form of the Doctor and Davros, a pairing that frames the episode through the Doctor’s encounter with child Davros. This framing makes “The Magician’s Apprentice” feel like a cohesive episode of television on its own, while setting up a cliffhanger that seems to set up a part two that should be distinct in tone from the first episode, while still being tied in to the key themes and questions from the first part of the story. Moffat really gets how to do two part stories in that way, arguably more so than any other New Who writer, which is why I’m delighted this series is willing to be made mostly of longer stories (even though, personally, I think one part stories have suited New Doctor Who better than two parters). And the dying, bitter Davros, desperate to really get the Doctor where it hurts, is a fantastic take on the character, being simultaneously pitiable and still threatening. His confrontation leads to an invocation of “Genesis of the Daleks” that in many ways provides the thematic meat of this episode: the past of the show a big part of this story, both in the way it revels in its continuity, but also (thankfully) in a more substantial way, through its very particular focus on “Genesis”. We begin by visiting Skaro, and Davros, before they appeared in Genesis, and the clips from “Genesis” get more focus than any other clip in the montage of past Doctors, with particular attention drawn to the fourth Doctor’s question:

“If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?”

The cliffhanger confronts this question directly, with an enraged and grief stricken Doctor holding a young Davros at gunpoint. And while the Doctor killing a child on Saturday teatime television is pretty much certain not to happen (grim aesthetics aside, the Daleks won’t written out of Doctor Who), I am intrigued to see what the Doctor will do instead.

In terms of the story’s other big theme, Steven Moffat called this two parter a story about “friends disguised as enemies and enemies disguised as friends” (I’m paraphrasing), and you can see that written all over the story. We have the Doctor reaching out to his arch nemesis Davros due to the shame he feels at leaving him as a child. We see Clara in an uneasy alliance with Missy, working together for common interest of saving their best friend. We have the Doctor’s ancient, terrible, and ridiculously complex friendship with Missy that is, in effect, based on a giant game of intergalactic chess where the pieces are the lives of entire civilisations (also, that confession dial has got to come up again next episode). Even the Doctor’s friend Bors turns out to be a dalek slave, and becomes the character who captures the TARDIS for the Daleks. In the midst of this, we have a Clara and a Doctor who now rely on and trust one another more than ever before: it seems quite possible that their relationship will be key to the resolution to this story. The episode titles “The Magician’s Apprentice/ The Witch’s Familiar” do seem to refer to Clara and her relationship with The Doctor and Missy respectively. Certainly she’s had something of a backseat role this episode, so I would love her to come to the fore this episode: my biggest qualm with the cliffhanger is that it could reduce her role in the next episode to “dead and waiting to be resurrected by the Doctor”, but there’s so much potential for it to be taken in a far more interesting direction, so I remain hopeful.

Overall, this episode was lots of fun, though obviously I will have to reserve judgement until next week’s resolution to properly decide how good it was. I suspect, and in all honesty hope, that newer, more surprising and interesting stuff will come later on in the season. With that said, “The Magician’s Apprentice” is still sold with confidence and verve, in spite of its excesses, and if “The Witch’s Familiar” really follows through on the most interesting ideas presented here, this could be a very good story in its own right.

Did I mention that it’s great to have Doctor Who back?

Stray Observations

•  Colony Sarff and The Hand Mines are delightfully creepy.

• There’s a real sense of Globetrotting through the big locations of the Doctor Who universe in this episode we flit from Skaro, to the maldovarium, to the Shadow Proclamation, to Karn, to the UNIT headquarters, and back to Skaro. I’d agree with people who felt this was a rather excessive and gratuitous use of continuity, but it’s also a lot of fun.
• Jane Austen’s an excellent kisser, according to Clara - bisexual Clara would be some great LGBT representation on the show's part, so I really hope they expand on the hint of that line (well, it's a lot more than a hint) - just seeing her on a date with another girl before the doctor picks her up for her latest adventure would be wonderful.
•  Quick speculation – I do wonder if Missy being vaporised by the Daleks won’t just give us a chance to find out how she survived being blasted by Cyber! Brigadier. If so, that, and not the Doctor’s desperate attempt to change time, may well be the way Clara survives the Cliffhanger.