Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Deep Breath"

·      I love Deep Breath. I absolutely love it. It didn’t win me over straight away, but it’s one of those stories that really gets better and better on every viewing, as all the brilliant bits of writing, top notch acting, and thematic depth become more and more apparent.

·      This episode takes the exact opposite approach to the way “The Eleventh Hour” does a new Doctor story. Where The Eleventh Hour” took the charm offensive approach, this story takes the Power of the Daleks approach, making it quite clear this is the Doctor (compare the scene from “Power”, where the Daleks clearly recognise the Doctor in spite of his new face, to Capaldi telling Half face man “those people are never small to me.”), but also refusing to let the audience be completely reassured by his new persona. We get an unsettling take on the “that’s okay, as long as you remember the people you used to be” approach to personal identity seen in “The Time of the Doctor”: what if the Doctor doesn’t remember who he is? The echoes of “The Girl in the Fireplace” are not lazy writing - Deep Breath is a completely different story, in content, tone and setting, a similarity in the monsters’ plot doesn’t make the two stories in any way the same. Instead, they are very thematically relevant: the Doctor is stuck in a plot that has some striking parallels to an adventure he just can’t remember. He’s forgotten the name of the ship, and as he smells some flowers, he still can’t remember his feelings for Madame de Pompadour. And, most significantly, he can’t remember where he’s seen his face before.

·      Because faces and sight are at the heart of this story. Once again, Moffat gives us a post regeneration story that is deeply preoccupied with what we see.

·      This theme is first explored through the motif of veils, a fact highlighted by Vastra wearing her own in scene in her garden. Veils are vital to her lifestyle: some out of necessity, as the appearance of her relationship with Jenny to Victorian society at large (save for a few police officers and villians she likes to mock) is very different to its reality. Others are actively imposed on her: people call her appearance a “facial disfigurement”, instead of facing up to the uncomfortable reality of another intelligent species living on Earth. The veils she wears are not just an item of clothing, and they say more about the nature of the social norms of the people she needs to use them around than Vastra herself: a point she emphasizes to Clara: Vastra stops wearing her veil when Clara stops seeing it.

·      Significant in all of this is the scene where the sleeping Doctor translates the dinosaur’s monologue, and we see the parallels between her and him: “No one sees me” says the Doctor, and Clara responds “All of London can see it”, showing that she doesn’t recognise the significance of the Doctor’s words, and reflecting her own struggle to accept the Doctor in this story. Which brings us to the logistics of Clara’s attitude towards the Doctor’s new regeneration, something that is often criticized in this story as being out of character due to Clara knowing the Doctor can regenerate, and having met his past personas. But to me, Clara’s behavior makes sense: plenty of people understand death, and know it’s something that happens, but that doesn’t mean they respond calmly, or rationally when they go through the process of losing a loved one for the first time. Plenty hope that they will see said loved one walk through the door at any moment, or demand that they get brought back to life, just as Clara asks how they can get Eleven back (Heck, she saw Eleven “Reset” back to his younger appearance in “The Time of the Doctor”, you can see her logic). Plus there’s the simple fact that she hasn’t experienced post regenerative trauma before: she’s met other Doctors before, but they’ve been nice to her: they haven’t forgotten her name, confused her with Strax, or seemingly abandoned her in Victorian London. It’s understandable that she thinks this regeneration might have gone wrong. Moffat is not just discarding previous characterisation to make Clara an audience avatar: the issue is not that she doesn’t understand regeneration, but that she doesn’t understand this new Doctor.

·      Another motif throughout the story is that of eyes: “I have bad eyes” says the Half Face man, before murdering a man for his “Good Eyes”. Later, he steals the optic nerve of the Dinosaur to further his plan: he is always in search of things that help him see better, perhaps a reflection of his religious search for the “promised land”. In the restaurant, the Doctor tells Clara to “look without looking” to see the trap they are in: a slight parallel to “The Eleventh Hour”, when the Doctor tells Amy to see the extra room in her house by looking in the corner of her eye.

·      Also adding to the exploration of sight and vision are the Mirrors seen throughout the script: the Doctor looks into a blurred, dirty mirror when trying to figure out where he’s seen his face before, the mirror becoming a visual representation of his clouded memory: he knows the face is familiar, but cannot remember meeting Caecelius. Incidentally, another aspect I like from this scene are the Doctor’s interactions with the tramp: the Doctor unwittingly intimidates the poor man, rambling unstably about his attack eyebrows and the fact that he gets to be cross now, but then begins to adopt him as a pseudo companion, explaining his sudden realisation that the newspaper has a clue he needs to follow, and prompting the questions he needs the tramp to ask him. It balances the mix of tone very nicely, as we see the Doctor through the tramp’s eyes: wild, unpredictable, and scary, but we also follow the Doctor’s thought process quite clearly (I think he might miss Clara). We get another mirrior shot in the episode’s climax: when confronting Half face man, the Doctor shows the cyborg his reflection in a dinner plate, but ends up seeing his own face in the other side of the plate, and realises that his words about half face man also apply to him: the mirror shows him an uncomfortable personal truth by enabling him to empathise with the villain he is fighting to save his friends. Once again, it is a distorted reflection that the Doctor sees, but in a way, all mirrors are distortions. We see our faces in reverse, not as they truly are, and similarly the Doctor cannot yet see himself as he truly is.     

·      And faces are all over this story: Half Face Man, obviously, has half a face, half human, half robot (like a hybrid…) that’s a lovely bit of inventiveness, that he’s not a human turning himself into a Robot, but a robot making itself human. The other Robots wear human faces, which the Doctor places on Clara to demonstrate his point, and the Doctor wears himself to impersonate a cyborg to save Clara. Finally, the story is deeply preoccupied with the Doctor’s new face, and its features, drawing attention to his eyebrows, and the fact that he has an older face again. Vastra comparing the Eleventh Doctor’s younger appearence to her veil, his way of ingratiating himself among people who might reject him for his old age as he neared what seemed to the end of his life. The faces we wear are all veils, affectations, ways of hiding our true nature, as Eleven did, or trying to take on a new nature, as half face man does.

·      Also significant are the parallels drawn between the Doctor and Clara in the restaurant scene: the “egomaniac needy game-player” line is not just a dig at Clara, but highlighting the way that description can apply to both Clara and the Doctor: the point of the scene is Clara and the Doctor are both perfectly reasonable to think the Doctor is talking about the other when he uses that description.

·      Clara’s increased Doctorishness is further highlighted in her confrontation with Half-Face man, a sequence that is up there with Clara’s best moments on the show. She takes on the role Courtney played in her flashback, using the words her student used against her by recognizing their use: she talks her way out of her situation by empathizing with her student in a way she couldn’t on her first day teaching at Coal Hill. And we see her thinking like the Doctor does once more figuring out that Half-face man is from prehistoric times because he understands the tyrannosaurus’s optic nerve, not only bargaining to get him to answer her questions, but deducing further information from his answers. This is story where Clara started to get a better reputation amongst fandom, and for all that I disagree with the assertion that she was bad in series seven (as my previous notes on her character will attest), I’ll definitely agree that this is the best material she’s had so far.

·      There are some more nice parallels between the Doctor and Half-Face man, one of which is emphasized by the Doctor, who says “you’re trying to get home, the long way round” when referring to Half Face man’s quest for the promised land. I like that the question surrounding half face man isn’t whether he’s become too human, but that he’s become more human than he ever intended to be, and that that is what causes his eventual downfall (whether he was pushed, or whether he fell).

·      The episode’s story culminates in the sequence where Eleven talks to Clara on the phone: a nice idea for a new Doctor story. In many ways, the sequence highlights the fact that Eleven can be quite emotionally manipulative, and that Capaldi, for all his apparent prickliness and perceived lack of safety, is a much more honest character. The basic content of Eleven’s phone call is him telling Clara that he knows that Clara will be scared and confused by the new Doctor’s actions, but that he will need her help, and that she should give him that help regardless of her feelings. By contrast, the Twelfth Doctor gives her a reason to trust him, pointing out that he knows what Eleven just asked her not because he was listening in, but because he remembers having the conversation with her, and asks her to see that, tying the themes of veils, sight, memory and identity together beautifully. He may may not remember Cacaelius or Madame de Pompadour, but the Twelfth Doctor does, in fact, remember the person he used to be. The Doctor’s plaintive “Just see me” is an ideal culmination to the episode, as the twelfth Doctor shows Clara who he is, with no more affectations or veils, wanting to know that this man is still good enough to be the Doctor, and in an act of affirmation, she finally sees him.