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Yes, I’m doing this one on its own. As I will
for “Heaven Sent” and “Hell Bent”: I think regardless of whether you like to
read them as a multi part story or three one parters, the best way to approach
what these episodes of television are doing from a critical perspective is to
read them one episode at a time. That said, just to record my position: they’re
one parters, that are linked closely enough to form a wider trilogy. Think “The
Hunger Games”: each part tells its own distinct story (The mystery on Trap
Street, The Doctor’s escape from the castle, and Clara’s goodbye to the
Doctor), while the three parts together form a wider story. It’s the natural
culmination of Moffat’s decision to make each part in a multi part story distinct from the
one before it: the individual episodes are now self contained dramas, in spite
of the “To be continued” at the end of each part.
·
And it’s an outright superb story, one of the
many high points in season that is full of them. It’s built around a clear three
act structure, switching to a new genre with each act, enabling Sarah Dollard
to show a lot of range over the course of one script. The first act covers the
search for trap street in act one, exploring a fun sci fi concept, and neatly
exploring how such a place could exist within London. The second act follows
the “whodunnit” mystery on trap street, exploring the culture of the street,
and building enough elements to maintain an interesting, engaging, and well put
together mystery. The third act concludes the episode with the “Doomsday” style
apparent companion departure. Each act and genres require a lot of skill, and
all are done very well. It’s fair to say Dollard can be added to the list of exciting
new writers who have emerged over the course of the Capaldi era, alongside
Jamie Mathieson and Peter Harness, as this episode demonstrates a range of
skills necessary to writing good Doctor Who in the mid 2010s: strong sci fi
concepts, skilful plotting, the ability to switch between genres, while grounding
these elements in very strong character work.
·
For all that “The Zygon Invasion/ The Zygon
Inversion” is known of as the big political piece of Doctor Who in 2015, this
episode is arguably even more politically engaged, albeit in a less overt way.
First, we have Rigsy, wrongly accused of murder and sentenced to death based on
incredibly flimsy evidence. He faces harassment from police figures, and is
used as a political weapon by a politician, something the population of Trap
street mostly widely accept, for complicated reasons. There are pretty heavy
implications come from giving that plot to a black man in the context of 2015:
one can fairly assume that Dollard had the events of Ferguson, other viral
filmed examples of street harassment, and outright murder by policemen in
America, and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests, in mind when she wrote
this part of the story.
·
The episode’s politics are also explored through
trap Street and Refugee camps, which raises another recurring theme of this
season: the difficulty of achieving cooperation between cultures, and the different
ways people try to achieve it. Mayor Me and the Doctor both explicitly
reference “The Zygon Invasion/ The Zygon Inversion”, with Mayor Me asking if
the arrangements the Doctor made for the Zygons are any better than the ones
she has made for the aliens on Trap Street, highlighting the return to the
themes of that story, and acknowledging that the arrangement with the Zygons is
not ideal, doing a little to help alleviate what seems to be the former story’s
slightly dismissive attitude towards the plight of the Zygons. The Doctor also
references tat story when he threatens to use the Zygons against Mayor Me’s
refugee camps, a nice moment that further evidences the thought put in to the
implications of the Zygons and Trap street living in secret on Earth, and what
could potentially happen. Most interesting of all is the portrayal of the
balancing act that goes into maintaining Trap Street. The idea that someone in
the street could commit murder, specifically the murder of someone as
empathetic as Anah, threatens the peace of the street, so the citizens latch
onto the opportunity to blame someone from outside of their society. This all
builds to create the sense of a makeshift society that addresses real world
issues through parallels, but has its own distinct identity that enables it to
work in the context of this story.
·
Also significant is the exploration of gender
politics through the character of Anahson. She has to present as male to
maintain her personal safety, as female Janus are more in danger of physical
attack due to their inborn abilities: Sarah Dollard’s script shows an
empathetic awareness of the kinds of things real women in vulnerable situations
(such as those living in a refugee camp) have to do to survive, such as
presenting as male gendered to ensure safety from assault and possible death,
but has the subtlety to address these issues through a particular danger only
faced by these fictional characters. This subtlety enables the thread of the
story to address other related issues: Anahson even claims she would rather
hide her gender, a note that has a slight “in the closet” subtext. Anahson is
reluctant to use her abilities against Mayor Me, as that would risk outing herself
as female, when she feels safer hiding her true gender, which rather nicely
captures the complexity of the closet for many LGBT+ people. Plenty of LGBT
activists have talked about the way the closet is often, though pretty much
only in the short term, a form of protection, something that takes its toll if
you are forced to go through it for too long, but that in certain situations, such
as being financially dependent on bigoted parents, or living in a society where
being open is to outright risk death, is an outright necessity. Ultimately,
Anahson does accept the Doctor’s request to use her abilities, making some
peace with her true identity, although it is unclear whether she will have to
live openly as a woman going forward: she doesn’t out herself to anyone on Trap
Street, and the script doesn’t argue that she is in any way obliged to until
she is ready.
·
The story’s political threads and themes
surrounding gender culminate in Clara’s death: as Janine Rivers brilliantly
points out, the increased political engagement of the Capaldi era reaches its
clearest expression hen we get a story in 2015 about a young woman dying in a
refugee camp. And as has become common for the Moffat era, and season nine in
particular, the episode is aware of the gendered tropes surrounding Clara’s
death: fridging very nearly explicitly referenced in the text by Clara, who
basically instructs the Doctor not to turn her story into a fridging when she
tells him not to turn her death into a reason to take revenge. “Don’t insult my
memory” she says, memory of course having already been discussed as a key theme
throughout the Moffat era, particularly in Clara’s story. Only here, it’s not
about what Clara remembers, but how she is remembered: she doesn’t want to be
remembered as the prompt for the Doctor’s revenge, but for the way that she
lived, to “die right”, like Danny Pink did. However, the value Clara places on
her own memories is also stressed here: her dislike of memory wipes is, made
clear through the juxtaposition of her and the Doctor’s reactions to Rigsy’s
retcon: the Doctor is quite casual about it, while she is clearly deeply
angered at the thought Rigsy has had twenty four hours of his life stolen from
him. Similarly, she reacts angrily to Mayor Me’s suggestion that her memory
will be wiped to: both these moments are important foreshadowing for “Hell
Bent”.
·
At the heart of the episode’s conclusion is, of
course, the relationship between Clara and the Doctor, something underpinned by
both the text and the visuals of their final exchange. El Sandifer has argued
the direction is blatantly trying to hide the limited amount of time they had
to get Maisie Williams for filming, but I’m less sure of that argument. Mayor
Me is present throughout the scene, even in shots towards the end. However, as
the scene moves from the Doctor and Clara’s desperate bargaining with Mayor Me
to their goodbye, the camera moves towards close ups of their faces. As the
scene becomes more about the two of them, the visual focus moves towards the
two of them.
·
The core of their exchange is rooted in Clara’s
claim that she “never asked” for the Doctor’s protection, and the Doctor’s
response that she “shouldn’t have to”. Once again, the season focuses on the
Doctor’s paternalism towards Clara, and her desire to not be defined by that
paternalism, even if she understands the genuine love and care that motivates
it. Clara does not want to let him make her death about a perceived mistake on
his part when it is her death, and she wants it to be about her: she has always
looked for control in her life, and her story, and as such, tries to gain as
much agency as she can have in the way it ends. The story is built to make sure
that Mayor Me’s plan wasn’t meant to hurt anyone, that none of the characters
in “Face the Raven” are truly villains, and that Clara’s death is something
that comes out of decisions Clara made as an active agent in the plot, and then
faces on her own terms.
·
What’s really telling about series nine’s
attitude to fridging is its determination to show the range of alternative
stories to just killing a female character to give a male character some angst.
In “The Witch’s Familiar”, Clara gets a faked death to show the folly of the
Doctor’s grief fuelled reaction while she and Missy come to rescue him. In “The
Girl Who Died”, Ashildr has her death reversed, and gets a character arc where
we see the consequences of that reversal. Osgood, meanwhile, really does die,
but that death becomes part of her story, and her legacy in the world, her name
living on through other Osgoods after her death, which becomes about more than
Missy’s petty attempt to mess with the Doctor: the character dies, but lives on
due to the way she acted in her life. This episode shows how a female
character’s death can be a part of her own story, and a genuine ending, instead
of something that turns her into a prop in someone else’s story.
·
Except the imbalance in power between the Doctor
and companion means that this ideal isn’t fully possible for Doctor Who in this
scenario. “Why can’t I be like you?” Clara asks, and the Doctor responds by
pointing out that he is nothing special, he is just “less breakable” than her:
he can regenerate. But the phrase “less breakable” is a telling one for the
Doctor to use, and has metafictional implications: the narrative can afford to
kill off the main companion, because the show can keep running with a new character
in her (because the main companion is usually female, even in the Classic
series) place, but even if the Doctor regenerates, he can remain the same
character with the same history, and set of experiences. The structure of
Doctor Who’s narrative is built to favour the Doctor over the companion. The
underlying issue here is not that killing female characters is always bad
storytelling: this episode has just shown how to do so with respect to the
character in question. But the power imbalance (and as the Doctor has always been
male, it is a gendered power imbalance) between the show’s two leads remains.
And that is something the remainder of the season will seek to address.
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