Warning: spoilers in this review
Now that Doctor Who (new) season 9 is underway, I plan to post my take on the episodes as they come out. Last week, however, as I was thinking what to say about the season premiere, I ended up deciding to wait until this week and the completion of the 2-parter, so that I could comment on the whole story.
To sum up my overall reaction: ambivalent. There were things I liked and things I didn’t. Both the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner were on display in this story. (I say “weaknesses” but nothing succeeds like success: Moffat has taken Doctor Who to unprecedented heights of international success, so things this fan dislikes about his era may not be seen as weaknesses by the enlarged audience he’s brought in.)
The story harks back to the classic Genesis of the Daleks, revisiting the moral dilemma posed by the Doctor in that story in the form of the present Doctor encountering Davros as an innocent child, and then having to deal with the consequences when the adult Davros remembers the encounter. You could say the new story makes that dilemma sharper: when the Fourth Doctor asked whether you could kill a child who you knew would grow up to be a ruthless dictator, the only choice he was really faced with was destroying Daleks who were already as fully evil as they’d ever be, just not that powerful yet. Sarah Jane Smith could rightly answer the Fourth Doctor’s hypothetical question with “It isn’t like that.” When the Twelfth Doctor finds a little boy Davros trapped in a mine field begging for help, he has to face that question for real.
The problem is this story isn’t actually about that. It’s all about today’s Davros having a scheme to lure the Doctor into a trap, and he only mentions in passing that he’s finally realized it was the Doctor he met so long ago. It has almost no bearing on the actual story at all— the scene bookends the episodes, including the cliffhanger to episode one— which turns out to be a complete cheat. It’s not the Doctor reacting to the apparent death of Clara and perhaps going over the edge, or facing the moral dilemma posed by the opening scene. It’s an epilogue to the whole story, just chucked into the middle for no reason except that I guess Moffat thought seeing Clara get killed wasn’t cliffhanger enough (it would have been: with the news Jenna Coleman is leaving the series carefully released right before the episode aired, fans would have spent a week wondering if this was it).
Don’t get me wrong: the Doctor pointing a Dalek gun at young Davros was an amazing cliffhanger. It was only after episode 2 showed it to be a throwaway red herring that I turned against it. Episode 1 promised us something episode 2 had no intention of delivering.
The story is really about the Doctor and Davros having a prolonged conversation, and here’s the pro and con: pro— it was an intensely dramatic prolonged confrontation, with twists and turns that kept me interested and led to a nice climax as Davros’ scheme is revealed and then the Doctor proves he’s an even better chessmaster than the Daleks’ creator. Both crisis and resolution were perfectly set up and yet completely unexpected. That’s some good storytelling there.
Con— as a long time fan, I want to see the Doctor having adventures with scary monsters, alien invaders, and an insane amount of running. I feel vaguely disappointed to have spent the entire story leading up to, and then watching, a conversation in a dimly lit room. The one scene where the Doctor goes scurrying around the Daleks’ control room in Davros’ chair for no good reason (and causing no progress in the story at all) feels almost like the Doctor’s chaotic spirit was rejecting the kind of static story Steven Moffat was trying to confine him to.
I saw an interview with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss about Sherlock a while ago, in which they said they had no interest in doing mysteries with Sherlock Holmes as the detective, only in doing stories about the character of Sherlock and his friendship with John Watson. It seems obvious to me that Moffat has exactly the same approach to Dr Who: he’s not much interested in the Doctor’s adventures, he’s interested in the Doctor’s character and his relationship with his companions. You can see that right from the start of his tenure with the introduction of Matt Smith’s Doctor. Taking this approach, Moffat has produced some good drama and some truly standout, amazing moments in Dr Who. But at what cost? The more we know about the Doctor’s character, however complex and conflicted, the less mysterious, alien and unapproachable he is. He may fit better into the needs of today’s TV drama, but the more he is The Doctor We Know, the less he is Doctor Who.
And anyway, as a long time fan of both Conan Doyle and Doctor Who, I do have an interest in mystery stories with Holmes as the detective, and adventure stories featuring the Doctor.
Meanwhile, so much else in the story was wasted. Start with the Daleks themselves: they spend the whole story standing around their control room, shooting characters who come into it (or trying to) but otherwise doing nothing. Remember the Daleks of Bad Wolf or The Stolen Earth? How about the ones that spawned “Dalekmania” in the first place, in the classic Dalek Invasion of Earth or The Daleks Masterplan? For that matter, even in their first appearance, where they were also confined to their city, they were busily engaged in a plot to exterminate the peaceful Thals just because they were there. If you’re going to do a Dalek story, have the Daleks do something! Taking a backseat to Davros was the hallmark of the worst Dalek stories of the late 70s and 80s. That only worked in Genesis of the Daleks, and even there it only worked because the Daleks didn’t really exist until the final episode: the moment they were on the scene, they went on a conquering rampage and overwhelmed Davros as well.
Then there’s Missy. Why is she even in this story? She and Clara wander around getting in and out of danger with no apparent purpose or contribution to the story except to fill time. I really enjoyed watching Missy on screen, and perhaps that’s justification enough since it’s all about entertainment, but couldn’t we have saved her for a story that’s actually about her, and the Master’s latest plan for universal domination? Or at least fixed up the ending a bit so that she was acting as an accomplice to Davros’ plan all along? Or something to make her relevant? The only relevance Missy and Clara had to the story was to show us the sewers beneath the Dalek city, so that the ending wouldn’t be a deus ex machina. An important storytelling point but I bet the Doctor and Clara could have seen that at some point on the way to the Doctor’s meeting with Davros, without needing Missy to be there for it.
The “hand mines” were a great creepy image in the trailers for the season, and if they’d been some sort of alien that was the principle monster of the story that could have been really memorable. Instead they’re thrown away on a brief and mechanical role in the story and justified only by a lame pun on the word landmine. I have a distinct impression that Moffat had this cool image in mind and just couldn’t think of a story for them, so he just tossed them in.
Ditto for Davros’ henchman “Colony Sarff.”
Please do not ever let the “sonic sunglasses” appear again. Not ever. Please.
And what do the two titles of these episodes even refer to?
Also: it’s time to let go of the callbacks to the Classic series. I love the Classic series; in fact I love it more than the new series, however much I like the new series as well. But following the 20th anniversary special back in the 80s, one of the problems that led to Classic’s demise was that it fell into what Doctor Who Magazine called “permanent celebration mode.” Don’t let that happen again. The 50th anniversary celebrations were amazing, but they’re also over.
So, up above I summed things up with the word “ambivalent” but all I seem able to talk about are my complaints regarding the episode. I’ve had this experience with Moffat-era episodes before: I like them while watching them but when trying to comment can only think of things that were wrong. The part about “I like them while watching” should not be discounted. Supposedly Alfred Hitchcock once said he didn’t care about plot holes in his movies so long as people only noticed them while standing in front of the fridge after getting home from the theater. If the current crop of Dr Who keeps me entertained while I watch the story— along with the enormous number of other viewers who’ve been won over by Moffat’s take on the series— then they’re doing something right.
I just wish the fridge logic held up as well.
