Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Zygon Invasion/ The Zygon Inversion"

·      Series nine continues its incredibly strong run with another high quality pair of episodes. We see Doctor Who doing what it has threatened to do throughout the Capaldi era, returning to the explicitly political mode of storytelling it hasn’t engaged in for years. And I do have problems with the way the episodes approach aspects of their subject matter, the decision is, on the whole, a very good one: these two episodes make for absolutely electric pieces of drama, filled with superb set pieces and engaging character work, as well as a plot that feels incredibly relevant to its immediate cultural context, giving the story a unique vitality and bite.

·      In his review of episode one of Class, Adam Riggio discusses the philosophical idea that the face is the foundation of human ethics: “In the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, he identifies the experience of the stare of another person – particularly another face – as the foundation of ethics itself. The face is itself a plea for recognition, its living presence a call for consideration and an absolute demand on you”. “The Zygon Invasion/ The Zygon Inversion” explores this concept through the Zygons, and their literal ability to take on the faces of other people. It first comes up in the drone strike and church steps scenes: the humans are unable to attack Zygons when they are wearing the faces of their loved ones, which is something of a dark twist on Levinas’ philosophy: the Zygons are sentient beings with faces that force us to recognise that sentience, but the humans have no qualms about bombing them until they see them wearing the faces of their families. Their’s an implicit critique of Western foreign policy here: these scenes parallel the way Western governments and militaries quash any moral qualms about bombing civilians in middle Eastern countries by turning them into faceless masses, or pretending they don’t exist. This critique is paralleled and contrasted to the Doctor with Bonnie and Clara, where Bonnie taking on Clara’s face is another source of connection and understanding between characters. After winning Bonnie over, the Doctor admits: “I had you at a disadvantage, Zygella. I know that face”. Here, the recognition of a known face becomes a key source of empathy, as understanding the emotional cues you have learnt from becoming familiar with that face enables one to know what they are feeling, and better understand them.

·      Bonnie sharing Clara’s face leads to another key point of the episode. Once again, Clara is endangered, leading to a further exploration of the Doctor’s paternalism towards her. As in “The Witch’s Familiar”, she is trapped and restricted by the narrative, and has to fights her way back in, this time through her connection to Bonnie: the cliffhanger resolution revolves around Clara, who is apparently damselled by the cliffhanger, rescuing the Doctor. His words “Apparently this plane isn’t gonna land, but let’s see what we can do about that” seem to be him talking about how he’s going to do something clever to escape, but actually foreshadow Clara saving him: his use of the word “we” sets up the way him escaping is a shared effort on the part of himself and Clara. And once again, the Doctor is confronted with the possibility of Clara’s death, and unlike in “The Witch’s Familiar” or “Before the Flood”, this time he seems to have given up on the possibility of being able to save her. This means that the episode becomes an exploration of the scale of his grief, emphasized by his comment that the five minutes he spends thinking Clara has died were “the longest month of [his] life”.

·      This subversion leads to Clara’s interrogation with Bonnie, which has a similar dynamic to her confrontation with half face man, or her other villain confrontations, but this time, Clara is facing a villain who shares her mind, so she is unable to lie to her, and has to work around this. This double role enables Jenna Coleman to give an absolute tour de force performance, selling the nuances between Bonnie, Bonnie pretending to be Clara, and Clara superbly: it’s incredibly easy to forget the two characters are being played by the same actress. Seriously, she’s the best actor to play a companion, without a doubt. The confrontation itself, taking place entirely in Clara’s mind, serves as a nice symbolic confrontation with the self: a suitable note as we approach the final stages of Clara’s story.

·      Then, of course, it’s impossible to discuss these episodes without covering the Doctor’s speech, undeniably a tour de force set piece of writing on the part of Steven Moffat and acting on the part of Peter Capaldi. It is, of course, rather long, so I think it’s best to break it into sections, in order to properly give it its due. The speech opens with his rant at Bonnie, a useful lens through which to look at the uncomfortable aspect of the story’s politics. “We’ve been treated like cattle” says Bonnie. “So what?” the Doctor responds blithely, while comparing her problems to his lack of a personal tailor, and ignoring her point that he is using a false equivalency. There is a pro assimilation subtext to the story that doesn’t do its attempts to be pro treating immigrants like people any favours: the Doctor dismisses the idea that forcing the Zygons to appear human is treating them cruelly, and the episode does take on the subtext that “good” refugees are the ones that assimilate perfectly into a new culture, and erase their previous identity to do so. The story is also held back by the inherent awkwardness of seeking to metaphorically compare actual groups of humans to weird looking aliens with suckers, pointy teeth, and venom sacs in the tongue, even if the point is that these are sympathetic aliens with suckers, pointy teeth, and venom sacs in the tongue. Ultimately, middle Eastern immigrants are still “othered” through their implicit comparison to an alien race.

·      However, there is good in the the story’s politics, too, best shown in the “It’s not a game, Kate” section of of the Doctor’s speech. The story is willing to speak truth to power. As remarked above, the soldiers only feel unable to act out a drone strike when they see their loved ones in the villages, with the episode highlighting the horror of that mindset. It also exposes colonel Walsh’s racism “This place is infested with them”, she says, a step away from David Cameron warning about “swarms of migrants” entering Britain, and it’s clear the audience are not meant to sympathise with her, she bombs the village before the end of the ten minutes she gives the Doctor to find Osgood due to her bigotry. And the Doctor’s condemnation of Kate’s actions a part of this episode’s strengths: it is willing to acknowledge and condemn the West’s role as military aggressors in the creation of the world’s current political climate. And finally, there’s Bonnie’s redemption, really as bold a move as the story can make. The central problem with the story is that Doctor Who is limited by the need to keep present Earth as relatively similar to our own time, so it can’t bring about a resolution whereby the Zygons are able to exist on Earth in their true form. As a result, the episodes have to find other ways to challenge the status quo, ways that don’t undo the problematic subtext of the story, but do offer a positive alternative to mainstream narratives about war, terror, and immigration alongside the problematic acceptance of aspects of that narrative.

·      The next major turn comes when the Doctor compares Bonnie’s guilt to his own survivor’s guilt from the Time War: “I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you could ever imagine” he says, in a speech that is filled with potent ideas about the Time War that haven’t been addressed on screen before. The first is the implication that undoing the Doctor’s double genocide doesn’t change the fact that he fought in the Time War, and had to commit many acts of war in a long period of violence, undermining the claim that “The Day of the Doctor” lets the Doctor off or makes him too perfect. And really, this story is the best case so far for reversing the end of the Time War, enabling a new take on the Doctor’s attitude to its ending. Instead of being his greatest defeat, and the source of somewhat tired, and repetitively explored angst, it is the time he redeemed himself from his greatest moral failure, a fact he is determined to maintain by living up to that redemption, and never letting his failure happen again.

·      The final section of the speech is set up by the Doctor’s explanation of the nature of thinking: “You know what thinking is? It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind” he says to Bonnie. And this is marked by the way Bonnie steps away from the button: she realises the box is empty, and recognises the futility of continuing to escalate to all out war, which is why she is allowed to remember, while Kate, who just refuses to press the button, has to forget. The Doctor calls the Osgood boxes a scale model of war, and war, the episode argues, is ultimately as useless for solving problems as pressing buttons on empty boxes. Bonnie understands the true nature of the tensions between the humans and the Zygons, and in doing so, understands the Doctor’s attitude to peace. “You’ve started to think like me” says the Doctor: empathy, here characterized as the ability to take on another person’s mindset, is the key to solving any conflict. The Doctor relates his own experience of empathy enabling him to end a war: “I let Clara Oswald get inside my head”, he tells Bonnie, continuing another key thread of the season. The Doctor suggests that Bonnie was influenced by Clara sharing her mind, but beyond convincing Bonnie to take her to the Black archive, Clara does little to influence Bonnie in their confrontation. In many ways, the Doctor’s line does more to highlight the fact that thinking like the Doctor isn’t any different to thinking like Clara, now, as the Doctor and Clara have become so alike, and have influenced each other so much.

·      Finally, it’s worth focusing on Osgood. In the context of the season as a whole, her story marks another subversion of the woman in refrigerator trope for season nine: her death at the hands of Missy in “Death in Heaven”, fairly criticized as a fridging at the time, instead of being reversed or averted, ultimately becomes a crucial part of her story, defining what the character becomes. It’s subtly different to the fridging subversions so far, which have averted or undone the apparent demise of a female character, instead finding a way to make a female character’s death a part of her own story. This is useful and important set up for “Face the Raven”, and the finale arc as a whole.

·      So, what is Osgood’s story, and what does her character become? Ultimately, she represents the centre of the story’s morality and ethics. First, she represents another riff on the power of known faces: the two Osgoods share a face and an identity, leading to the grief of one when her sister dies. She is also the inspiration for the Osgood boxes: repeatedly saying “if you haven’t guessed why it’s called an Osgood box, then you haven’t been paying attention”. It’s a nice act of foreshadowing for the reveal of the true nature of the two boxes. It doesn’t matter if Osgood is human or Zygon, she will always be a guardian of the peace. Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether the boxes are designed for the humans or Zygons, they have the same effect: nothing. What matters is that there is always mercy and forgiveness.