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.
No comments:
Post a Comment