In the most recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine, which arrived in my mailbox just a few days before Deep Breath aired, Steven Moffat described his approach to the Twelfth Doctor’s premiere. He’s been saying for a while he plans to have the whole style and tone of the series change along with the new Doctor, marking a distinctive new era, but in the case of Deep Breath he said it would be basically a Matt Smith episode except for Peter Capaldi’s different performance. In the article, he compared it to Tom Baker’s premiere, Robot, which was quintessentially a Jon Pertwee story except for the eccentric new Doctor in the middle of it.
Watching Deep Breath, I see exactly what he meant, but there’s a touch more nuance to it: it begins with both the story and the new Doctor firmly in Eleven’s territory, but as the Doctor starts to find his new self, the style of the story changes right along with him.
Deep Breath opens with the kind of frantic, breathless speed that characterized much of Matt Smith’s run. From the Doctor babbling nonsense on the shore of the Thames, “speaking dinosaur”, to not understanding the concept of a bedroom, to the slapstick comedy of the tree-climbing/horse riding scene— accompanied by Murray Gold’s score getting loud and chaotic and distracting— all of this is firmly in Eleventh Doctor territory, and I wasn’t particularly happy with it. There were times during several Matt Smith episodes that I wanted to grab my TV screen, give it a shake, and shout “Stop flailing about and pause to tell us a story! Please!” I had the same feeling at several points in the first half of Deep Breath.
And then it changed. Somewhere around the scene of Peter Capaldi talking to the tramp in the alley. He opens that scene still in Matt Smith mode (it’s telling how much “completely disoriented” and “like the Eleventh Doctor” turn out to be the same thing) but it’s during that scene the Doctor finally starts to find his new self. By the time he meets Clara in the restaurant everything has changed. The Doctor has settled down and with him the storytelling: the rest of the episode centers on longer scenes of quiet suspense, several of them nail-bitingly tense. Clara holding her breath to try and avoid notice by the droids was marvelous and so was her verbal sparring with the lead droid. At the climax, there’s a frantic fight scene going on but the quiet and intense conversation between the Doctor and the droid is where the story really finishes.
In describing the new style, Moffat uses words like “darker,” “slower,” and “more serious”— to go with a Doctor who will be from the non-comical side of the Doctor’s spectrum of styles. I’ve had my doubts whether he meant it: he’s said one thing and done another often before, but at least so far he seems to be heading in that direction. By the end of Deep Breath I not only know this new Doctor, I also see the new style for the series Moffat was talking about. Of course it might not last, we’ll have to see how coming episodes go on, but for now I see it— and I like it.
There were some things I definitely did not like:
I really dislike the recurring trio of Vastra/Jenny/Strax and I wish very much never to see them again. Judging by most reviews I’ve seen since they first appeared, I gather I’m in a minority about that. But this blog is about what I think. So there. The three of them push Dr Who too far into absurdist comedy, undermining the horror/SF/adventure of the stories. I did not laugh when they had the car alarm sound on closing the hansom cab door: I rolled my eyes and thought, give me a break. Internal logic is vitally important in science fiction, even science fiction with a humorous vein, or else it lapses into pure unbelievability. Steven Moffat has never properly understood that, going back to his earlier habit of using the word “bonkers” as his highest term of praise for a Dr Who story. (Thank goodness he’s stopped doing that, but I don’t think he’s changed the underlying sentiment.)
The dinosaur in the Thames turned out to be completely gratuitous. It’s hard not to conclude the only reason it was there was to be the source of clips for the previews and commercials promoting the story: they certainly were careful to make it look like it was the main point. It was also around ten times the size of a real T-rex, which went unexplained and only just barely mentioned, and there’s a big gap between “do you know how to fly this thing?” and “we’ve just come from an unseen adventure in the Cretaceous period during which neither myself nor Clara made any progress from the moment of my regeneration.” And by the way, the droids cause spontaneous combustion to conceal the fact they’ve stolen body parts from their victims, so exactly when did they remove the optic nerve from T-rex-zilla? For that matter, if they’ve been on Earth harvesting body parts from the local fauna ever since the Cretaceous period, why is it only now that there’s been a rash of spontaneous combustion?
Clara was fragmented into different incarnations scattered all over the Doctor’s timeline, and even if her memories of that are vague, not two stories ago she was running around with three Doctors including one very old one. I know the companion’s supposed to reflect the audience’s uncertainty with a new actor, but I do not believe her reluctance to accept this new Doctor as the Doctor. She should be the best able to handle regeneration of any companion other than Romana (who was herself a Time Lady).
Clara and the Doctor both had moments of wondering “where did this face come from” which I suppose represent Moffat trying to head off fans asking questions about why he looks exactly like that guy from The Fires of Pompeii. It was entirely unnecessary: actors play more than one role in their lives, we get that, no one was going to ask. I also don’t like Vastra’s lecture to Clara trying to talk about the nature of the Doctor. She’s meant to sound wise and deep but she just sounds smug and for me anyway all she reveals is that she really knows far less about the Doctor than any of the countless people he’s met over the centuries.
Finally— the appearance of Matt Smith on the phone at the very end. I cannot tell you how much I hated this, and thought it was a gigantic mistake. Smith did a fine job of it, nothing against him. But he shouldn’t have been there. First of all, as I said above I didn’t believe Clara’s reluctance to accept the Doctor in the first place. But given it, she was already clearly convinced by the end of the main story and then she gratuitously falls back to “Nope, sorry, don’t know you, I’m leaving” for no good reason except to set up the phone call. More importantly, the Doctor was convinced. No only had he settled into his new persona and deployed it brilliantly in the final conflict with the droid, but he’d managed to warp the entire style and tone of the story around himself (see above). The story and the actor had both succeeded completely. He is the Doctor— and then he’s suddenly “I’m so afraid, I’m not sure, will you help me?” Moffat should have had more faith in his own writing, and in his new actor.
Doctor Who Magazine observed (back when Matt Smith first came on board) that the first job of a new Doctor is to make the viewers forget anyone else ever played the part. Capaldi did the job, but the story didn’t trust it. Compare it to Smith’s comparable scene: he gets the Atraxi to call up pictures of all the previous Doctors, then at the end steps through the projection, blowing it to pieces around him, and declares “I’m the Doctor.” By contrast, Moffat gives Capaldi: “Maybe if the real Doctor says it’s okay then you’ll believe me?” No. That’s horribly wrong. Peter Capaldi is the Doctor. The show has to say that with absolute conviction.
Colin Baker’s era, which I’m just getting into over in my “from the start” series, is widely maligned, but I’ll take his line in the same position over Deep Breath’s any day: “I am the Doctor— whether you like it or not.”
So I’ve spent a lot of words enumerating the things I didn’t like, because I’m a fan and we love to complain, and anyway it doesn’t take nearly as many words to say “that bit was great.” All the nitpicks I list above are minor except for the Matt Smith cameo— that’s a major problem but it only happened as a tag to the episode. I liked the story itself. I liked it more and more as it went on, shifting away from the old style to (what I hope will be) the new one. I hope the series goes on in the tone that Deep Breath finished with: if so, the new era of Dr Who is going to be good.
