Death Becomes Her (So Die, Already)

Doctor Who

Hell Bent

Series Nine, Episode Twelve

Welcome back to Finale Town.  It’s been a while since I looked forward to one of these.  Doctor Who has had an awful lot of practice, but it’s stuck in a downward spiral where they’re concerned.

Russell T Davies used to make them bigger and… well, bigger every single year, chucking in armies and other armies and universes and kitchen sinks until even he didn’t sound like he knew what was at stake any more.  Steven Moffat’s finales are (mercifully) on a smaller scale, though they still do the “all of time and space are dying” stuff, albeit with the vim and excitement of a court order.  Since he took over in 2010, Moffat’s end-of-year focus has been on the characters, which I would absolutely applaud... only he insists on asking bloody stupid questions about his characters and then not answering them.

No doubt you’re familiar with his greatest hits.  “Will the Doctor die?”  “What is the Doctor’s name?”  “Is he a good man?”  (That’s “duh, no”, “duh, we don’t know” and “duh, yes.”)  Series Nine seems eager to keep up the tradition, only the mystery bag is dangerously near empty.  The Doctor has a “confession dial” on his person, which a Time Lord has when they’re about to die.  So maybe he’s going to…?  Okay so obviously he isn’t, and you all know that, so what else?  There’s the mystery of his face looking a bit familiar… only we got that out of the way in Episode Five, and it was pretty obvious anyway.  There’s the story of Clara, The Increasingly Risk-Taking, which is also sort of done and dusted now, unless you’re the kind of unscrupulous cynic who thinks it’s impossible for a main character to die two episodes before the series ends.  And may I say, shame on you.

Oh hi Clara.  You're looking well.  Gasp etc.

I guess that leaves The Hybrid: an age-old myth that apparently scares the Time Lords (in a “we conveniently didn’t mention it until Series Nine” sort of way), that inspires… nothing, actually.  This must be some new kind of threat that doesn’t do any actual threatening until you know what it is, and right up to the last twenty minutes of Hell Bent (the Series Nine closer) the Doctor still doesn’t know what the bloody thing is.  Oh, there’s some talk of time or space being ripped apart because of it, but we don’t actually see any of that; we rarely do in Moffat’s finales, which are always so sure they’re solving mysteries that’ll redefine the show as you know it that they forget to blow anything up, or really say anything of note.

The Time Lords seem desperate to know about the Hybrid, anyway, which is apparently the reason they trapped the Doctor in his confession dial for billions of years.  Except hang on – what was it for again?  Surprise, it’s typical old Moffat mission creep: this was the Doctor’s personal confession dial, a portent of his death, until it became a Time Lord prison designed to wheedle secrets out of him.  And how is all that personal-hell mind-buggery supposed to work, since the Doctor doesn’t have the answers?  Didn’t the Time Lords wonder, say after the first billion years, if they were wasting their time and ought to try something else?  Like asking him?  Why, besides giving us something to cliff-hang about, were they going on the offensive in the first place?  If he kept dying and starting over, why does he seem to remember all of it?  If he doesn’t, what’s he moaning about, considering the Doctor who escaped didn’t have to die like the rest?  And if he’s in a tiny prison that’s presumably in a different dimension, like the TARDIS, how can he literally punch his way out of it?

It’s all an excuse to get the Doctor back to Gallifrey (hold that thought), as well as make him sufficiently mad that he won’t want to come back, thus keeping the show away from the place deemed so boring Russell T Davies had to blow it up.  Which works if you bear that in mind (although I dunno, you could maybe write Gallifrey as interesting?), but it also means all that excitement and jubilation we should feel now that Gallifrey’s returning is AWOL.  (And, release that thought.)  It’s Gallifrey!  This time last year, the Doctor was smashing the TARDIS with his fist because the Master lied about where he could find it.  Hooray and stuff!  But no, we’re sticking with one of the Doctor’s least appealing qualities, his I Am The Doctor And I Always Win-ness, so we’re glowering instead of celebrating.  On arrival he stands up to authority (so far, so Doctor), uses words instead of weapons (ditto, up to a point), and tells Rassilon to “get off my planet”, and the rest of the planet’s High Council that they’re “on the next shuttle”.  That bit’s… maybe not so in character.

He’s angry, which is understandable what with Clara dying, plus that billions-of-years-smacking-a-wall thing.  But Rassilon?  Bear in mind this is the top brass on Gallifrey, until he became Timothy Dalton and tried to blow up the universe.  How do we square that one with this one?  Why is he back in charge and not in Time Lord jail, or dead?  (Eh, I guess the Master survived.)  And how could you possibly talk that blow-up-the-universe nutbag into buggering off on a space scooter?  Yes, yes, The Doctor Is That Awesome, you don’t need to keep telling us, but considering they successfully trapped him for blah-blah-many years, isn’t it rather pathetic that a heated exchange is all it takes for them to give up and roll over?  I mean, are we absolutely sure they’re antagonists?  Or was Rassilon the only one to worry about?

Hey ho, the Doctor’s got an ulterior motive for all of that anyway: this Hybrid stuff is a handy excuse to go and see Clara, pluck her out of her timeline moments before her death, bluff the Time Lords and voila, off they go adventuring!  Just as soon as he shoots his friend, the General, so they can get away.  Because “Regeneration is Time Lord man flu,” apparently.  Yeah, hell no it ain’t.  Coming one episode after a script that brilliantly evoked the psychological and physical horror of going through regeneration over and over again, and in a series that regularly makes a song and dance about how devastating it is to change bodies, this is an utter slap in the face, for starters.  Say what you like about the Doctor being angry or pushed to the brink, but tossing away another guy’s regeneration is not something he’d have countenanced before.  He doesn’t dwell on it here, big surprise, and neither does anyone else.  Death, in the Moffatverse, just sanded off another one of its edges.  And the Doctor’s stance on violence continues to wobble all over the place.  (Of course, you could say this is the Doctor showing his resentment for regeneration, because after all, Clara didn’t get to regenerate.  He does say of Clara that when she dies, she stays dead.  But Heaven Sent makes it pretty clear it’s not as simple as saying the Time Lords don’t suffer and die, the bunch of jessies.  So no, sorry.  It’s just shit.)

Can't tell if representation or trolling.

Not optimistic.

And yeah, Clara’s back.  Big duh.  Now, to be fair – oh, I am trying – this is almost a good way to end her story.  I’d be happier if it ended in Face The Raven, of course, since that was the point of Face The Raven.  (And I can’t believe we were still trying to end the story then, after she gave her life for the Doctor, considered leaving, left in a huff, left out of heartbreak and died but-it-was-just-a-dream.  Just be frigging gone already.)  But if we absolutely must dig her up and carry on, fine: have the Doctor “rescue” Clara and attempt, futilely, to convince her to carry on living.  Convince himself, almost, that she isn’t on borrowed time.  And gradually she realises that’s exactly what’s happening and that this is an illusion; she realises that death is something that happened to her because of her actions, she’s ready to accept that and in time he will be too.  Then she’ll go back to (literally) Face The Raven, die just like we already saw, and the Doctor will go off into time and space having learned that everything has its time.  You could have the Doctor come to terms with his grief in person, literally talking to his dead friend, and then they could end it with a big audience cry, if you like that sort of thing.  None of this is even a stretch: it’s clearly where the story is going for the most part, with Clara saying she “doesn’t want this”.  But then again, she could also change her mind, grab a TARDIS and go off on adventures, having learned nothing.

Guess which one he picks.

Zipping to the end of the universe to shake off the Time Lords, who want Clara dead almost as much as I do, the Doctor meets Ashildr again.  (She remembers him and Clara perfectly, which is odd as two episodes ago she relied entirely on diary entries to remember past centuries, and now she’s millions of years older.)  With little else to do, she’s got a theory about the Hybrid (who hasn’t?): it was the Doctor and Clara all along!  If the Doctor keeps her out of her timeline, time and space will go phooey!  So the Doctor decides on a memory wipe.  Even he points out that the show has done this before, but this time there’s a twist, sort of: Clara fiddles with the memory-eraser so it’s the Doctor who forgets her.  Then she gets to zoom off with Ashildr – having apparently forgiven the immortal’s part in her own demise – going back to Gallifrey (and her death) “the long way round”.  Which means she can take as long as she bloody well likes, living (on death-pause) presumably forever until she decides otherwise.  Which is a pretty gigantic advantage over most of the other people in the universe, innit?  Incredibly, there are people who consider this a sad ending for Clara.  Jackpot, more like.

Face The Raven was, tediously, all about the Doctor, but via Clara: you can live by his example but you can’t be him, or you’ll get yourself killed.  Except for Clara, though, because she’s awesome?  So what was that episode about, now that the rug has been pulled out?  What are we saying about Clara, other than here is yet another Moffaty woman in the Doctor’s life who can get one over on him?  She doesn’t seem remotely bothered about the universe tearing itself apart.  Neither does he, to be fair, but what does that mean?  Hooray, they’re both a dick?  Does Clara’s super-fan-dabby-dozy spin-offy ending come at the expense of all life in the universe?  Not so spiffy now, is it?

After an entirely expected change of scenery in the opening seconds, there is admittedly some intrigue about an apparently amnesiac Doctor stumbling into a diner to meet an apparently amnesiac Clara; as the episode progresses, we wonder which one of them is playing dumb, and it’s well played by Capaldi and Coleman.  The Doctor sits there and relates his story (i.e. the episode), seemingly unable to recall Clara.  Except we’re seeing the episode as it unfolded – with Clara in it.  We can only assume he doesn’t specifically remember what she looks like, and you can’t really show that unless she’s got a bag on her head in all the flashbacks.  But is not being able to doodle her really that big a deal?  How is it even a memory wipe if, apart from that, he remembers everything they’ve done together?  What’s to stop him searching for her and causing the whole damn universe-in-peril problem anyway?  At the end, when the diner (which is actually Clara’s TARDIS) noisily dematerialises around him, why doesn’t he twig?  When he sees his own TARDIS at last, which has a whacking great mural of Clara on it, aka the woman he’s been talking to all afternoon… well, “tada” then, surely?  Ultimately, if him remembering her is so bad, why is Clara getting him to run through these events at all?  Sure, she wants to say goodbye and all that, but she’s running a mighty risk.  But then, is the universe in trouble now or not?

THIS.

Come back, all is forgiven.

This all hinges on what you want from Clara, and what you consider a good ending.  If you want her zooming around Doctor Who land potentially having her own spin-off, no matter what, it’s probably a punch-the-air moment.  If you’re desperately sick of the show sticking its fingers in its ears whenever something warrants a consequence, worse luck.  Net result, Clara hasn’t learned anything and neither has Doctor Who.  Quite the opposite, with all that bollocks about Time Lord man flu, and the rest.

I’ve gone almost the entire review without discussing the other bits, like actors and action scenes, I guess because the episode’s focus is on all that character stuff (and throwing it in the bin).  So: it’s cool to have Gallifrey back, or it would be if they didn’t make it a huge anti-climax.  (Remember when the search for Gallifrey was a big deal?  I guess you can add Where The Smeg Is It Then to the list of big questions not worth waiting for.)  The “Cloisters”, an underground part of Gallifrey surrounding a database full of dead Time Lords, are suitably creepy at least.  In there are all the famous Who monsters, because um, but at least that’ll please the kids.  The best bit is the spooky soundscape.  (The “Wraiths”, aka faceless Time Lords zooming around on tracks, hover between eerie and hilarious.  Wheeeee!)

The guest cast seem pretty good on paper, with Clare Higgins returning as Ohila (one of the ladies on Karn in the first episode this series), pretty much just to scowl and tut.  Donald Sumpter makes a half-hearted Rassilon, now a daft old man shouting ineffectually, but he’s off to a bad start as the character doesn’t add up.  Peter Capaldi works his usual magic, only hampered by the bum notes in the script.  It’s much harder to separate Jenna Coleman from the absolute dog’s dinner they make of Clara’s departure.  And poor old Maisie Williams is handed yet another version of Ashildr, now with a decent memory.  Perhaps her personality changes as often as the Doctor’s face?  That hypothetical Clara/Ashildr spin-off is off to a rocky start; its heroes have had multiple episodes devoted to them but, through the magic of Moffat, still aren’t recognisably people.

And that’s the final irony of Clara.  For all the effort of telling us over and over that she’s the Doctor's equal, if not his superior, they’ve never once made her someone I can relate to or like on anything more than a superficial level, so she’s never been worth the effort.  So long. 

What else, er...  I’m glad Capaldi got his own screwdriver at last.  (And with a whole one year to show it off!)  He also gets to muck about with a guitar again, although having him play Clara’s “song” as literally the tune Murray Gold came up with is, though undeniably economical, also undeniably wank.  The Ye Olde TARDIS set is a beautiful treat, obviously.  But come on: if you want something substantially good to think about, go and watch the previous episode again.

Hell Bent mostly makes me tired.  It does the same old “big and small at the same time” combo as all of Moffat’s finales, and despite flashes of hope, it bungles them both; it delivers a bogus happy ending and in doing so, flushes away any hope of a point to this story.  Worst of all, that really comes as no surprise.  Something certainly needs to regenerate, and it’s not the Doctor.

Groundhog Doc

Doctor Who

Heaven Sent

Series Nine, Episode Eleven

Writing is hard.  It is the creation of something from nothing.  Of all the ideas and images swirling around your head, you’ve somehow got to pluck a precise sequence that complement each other and build, that go somewhere and hold together, that are entertaining.  Ideally this isn’t something you’ll aim to do just once, and every time you’re diving back into that maelstrom, making sense of white noise, returning with music.  Oh, and it can be quite fun sometimes.

Now imagine you’re a TV writer, and you’ve got to do this over and over again, yearly.  (Well, on a good year.)  And now imagine the thing you’re writing over and over again has been written over and over again by countless other people already.  Having trouble coming up with something new?  Boo hoo, do it anyway.  No one-off guest writer spot for you.  Oh, you wrote Blink, did you?  Brilliant.  Now do better than that, and often.

Similarly, I've got to come up with a funny caption every time,

even with episodes I like.  #TheStruggleIsReal.

Anyway, the whole "Doctor's personal hell" thing is a bit irrelevant, isn't it?

(No?  Well, I tried.)

It’s perhaps kind to bear this in mind on some of Steven Moffat’s bad days, when things frustratingly don’t come together, such as his often barrel-scraping Specials and finales.  But the TV writer’s journey, particularly the Doctor Who When It’s Past Fifty writer, muttering “Oh shit oh shit oh shit” as the shoot approaches and the cursor blinks on a still-empty page and for god’s sake we’re on Series Nine already, has never been quite as apparent as in Heaven Sent, which metaphorically puts it on the screen for you.

The Doctor materialises in a castle.  He is alone, apart from a slowly approaching spectre that symbolises death, probably literally.  He’ll have to run around evading the creature, and the only way to find answers (and escape) is to rearrange the castle, which occurs only when he confesses something.  Each time he’s in peril, he has to retreat into his mind and frantically figure out how he’ll get out of this one.  And he’ll have to do this again and again and again to escape.

Well, I mean, there it is.  Practically a blank page to start with, nothing but hero and threat chasing each other, almost writing itself as it goes until it’s something clever, and the only way to succeed is to keep doing it.  Making Doctor Who in a nutshell.

And the meaning goes deeper than that.  Here be spoilers, but this is a popular episode so you’ve probably seen it: to get out of here the Doctor must literally punch his way through a wall that’s harder than diamond, and that would take an eternity, so when he’s exhausted or dead the only possibility is another Doctor.  So he returns to the teleporter that brought him here, which still houses a handy Doctor pattern from when he arrived, and beams him up.  But he needs energy, so he uses his own expiring body as fuel.  Thinking aloud to a non-existent Clara, he says: “How long can I keep doing this?  Burning the old me, to make a new one?”

Well, I mean, there it is.  The ongoing story of the Doctor, living and dying and living again.  It’s tempting to view the Doctor’s regenerations as a handy get-out-of-death-free card – you might as well, that’s what they are – but if you think about how that would affect an actual person over centuries, and certainly how David Tennant’s Doctor referred to it (as “some new man sauntering away”), it does involve actually dying in order to start again.  Time Lords: they don’t live forever, they just die and get born more often.  And whereas The End Of Time focussed on the toll this takes by making the Doctor sulk and drag his feet (which, to be fair, could be pretty compelling), Heaven Sent shows the determination he needs to keep doing this.  Quite often he wants to roll over and rest, or let’s face it, finally properly die, but that’s just not who he is.  There’s a mystery to solve, a villain to vanquish, and – in the long run – a death to avenge, so he doesn’t have the option to stop.  In character terms, as well as a possible window to the writer’s process, Heaven Sent is absolutely bloody wow.  Who knew he still had something like this in the tank?

And that’s just the writing.  Here is an episode, peeking indulgently over 45 minutes to about 53, of just Peter Capaldi.  Okay, there’s the thankless dude in the monster costume shuffling down corridors, and there’s an inevitable Jenna Coleman cameo (although she’s totally still dead, you guys), but it’s ultimately just him.  Many, many, many hims, but that’s not the point, and he held my attention absolutely from Minute #1 to the end.  Talking to himself like Spider-Man after too much coffee, this could easily run the risk of “Describe everything that’s happening” syndrome, but instead it naturally feeds the Doctor’s impulse to investigate (and his need to have someone to relate it to), as well as adding to all that natty meta writer stuff.  As the Doctor ruminates on how to cope with a death, tries to figure out why the stars don’t look right, and ultimately relates the whole situation using a certain Grimm’s fairytale, it becomes yet another performance full of light and shade.

We’re losing Peter Capaldi’s Doctor soon, and gaining goodness knows what instead, and looking back now, Heaven Sent almost rubs it in.  Series Nine reshaped the excessively crotchety Twelfth Doctor, sometimes poorly, adding cuddly nonsense like electric guitars and hoodies and trying too hard to sand off his edges.  But Capaldi also unearthed a real warmth, and held onto that vicious streak that made him interesting.  It’s all there in Heaven Sent as he longs for an absent friend and rages against an invisible foe, but this stuff is peppered through Series Nine as well, quality of the episodes be damned.  I’ll probably cling to each episode of the next series, good or otherwise, just for this guy.

Why does frying yourself leave the skull behind?

Isn't that the one bit you'd probably have less of?

There are nitpicks, of course, or it wouldn’t be Doctor Who.  He says the wall is made of something 20 times harder than diamond; well, your fist wouldn’t make a dent however many times you punch it, then.  Duh.  What kind of diamond isn’t immune to fists?  (And not that it would help, but shouldn’t he at least use the shovel he’s got lying around?)  Then there’s the question of how every room eventually resets to how it was when he arrived, except for the diamond wall (which is diminishing) and the painting of Clara (which is ageing), and quite possibly those chalky and scratchy messages left by, presumably, previous hims.  (And if he can leave messages, why is he buggering about with riddles?)

Rather more ominously, there’s this ongoing nonsense about the hybrid.  Not only is it very hard to believe that Steven’s got another really good arc story in the tank, even after a slam-dunk episode like Heaven Sent, but this episode makes it apparent that the hybrid is something that will change the Doctor’s past as we know it.  And that’s always disappointing.

Did the Doctor’s life story become richer from knowing that he needed Clara Oswald popping up over and over to help him out?  No, and we didn’t believe it because we’ve never seen her before.  Did we really believe the Doctor’s name was going to be revealed?  No, because we know they’d just be making it up 50 years later and it couldn’t live up to the hype, and in any case he’s been called the Doctor for about 95% of his life so who cares; it would be like revealing that his birth certificate had a typo.  And now we’ve got the hybrid, a “prophecy” (those are always terrible) which is apparently the real reason he left Gallifrey.  Dun-dun-DUN?  Moffat loves re-establishing the fundamentals, or at least dicking around with them, as it proves this was really his show all along.  The moment the Doctor starts talking about the real reason he left Gallifrey, a sinking feeling ensues.  Oh yeah, Doc?  Bit odd that it hasn’t come up in fifty-plus years, innit?  Ditto this prophecy in general, which apparently has the Time Lords shit-scared, but not so much that anyone has ever actually talked about it or been remotely troubled by it.  When it comes to ideas in a long-running show, you just can’t cheat mileage.

But frankly, most of that hybrid stuff – including the continued and depressing hints that the Doctor is so awesome that everyone ought to be terrified of him, which is an ongoing hubris kind of like Clara’s, only they probably won’t address it – falls on the next episode, which has the unenviable task of resolving everything.  And as for the niggles about how this world works, well, they’re not important enough to get in the way of what’s good about the episode.

Moffat finds time to come up with another “elemental” monster, this one representing the slow, inexorable march of death.  Bloody hell, that’s not for kids!  And he comes up with a way to genuinely threaten the Doctor, more so than just threatening to off him: this prison, much like the earlier Pandorica (which was great until they threw it away minutes later), is far more of a nightmare for a long-lived person than just death.  Deep down he must know he’ll always find a way out of that, and that in itself is something to regret (as sometimes, a long rest sounds pretty nice compared to the alternative).  Trapping the Doctor for good, though, in a way that regeneration won’t help, rings very true as his absolute nightmare.

There’s tons here to unpack, and yet Heaven Sent still feels like an economical bottle show.  Not every note of it is perfect, but it’s a pretty obvious step up for the show, and evidently it’s bigger on the inside.

Death Of A Clara!

Doctor Who

Face The Raven

Series Nine, Episode Ten

Oh bugger, it’s nearly time for Series Ten!  I’d better get caught up.  I wonder why I stopped?

Oh all right, it wasn’t just that I was bored senseless by Sleep No More.  (Slept quite well, thanks.)  I was also not sure whether to review the finale in three chunks or all at once, and by the time I’d decided, they had started disappearing from iPlayer.  So to recap: I reckon these episodes, though linked, are really separate beasts.

Beast #1: Face The Raven.  In a series made up of two-parters – and Sleep No More, in case you nodded off – it’s a breath of fresh air to have something standalone.  Sarah Dollard presents us with a tidy little plot: Rigsy (the loveable graffiti artist from Flatline) is back, sporting a sinister number tattoo that’s counting down.  The Doctor takes a look and quickly realises Rigsy only has 500 minutes to live.  Finding out why, and where he gained his tattoo, creates a natty and very Doctor Who-ey mystery, as the intrepid trio look for an invisible “trap street” in London.  (As someone who routinely gets lost in London, this isn’t too far from my average trip.)  The Doctor’s methods for finding it, such as counting your steps and looking for “glitches”, seem like just the sort of clever stuff kids can mimic after school.  With, y’know, supervision.  (“Hey look, I found a creepy alleyway!” might not end well otherwise.)

"Quick, Rigsy!  Hide!"

Good thing he brought his hoodie, hat and magic shadow.

It’s only a pity the trap street is so easy to find.  After a bit of character building with Clara, where she almost plummets out of the TARDIS but isn’t remotely worried about it because she no longer has any concept of danger, we’re in a mysterious part of London that looks uncannily like Diagon Alley.  Or what with the slimmer budget, Neil Gaiman’s London Below.  (I’ve yet to read Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London books, or Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police books set in a shadowy London, but suffice to say Unseen Magical Bits Of London are ironically easy to find in fiction.)  The street itself is still a lovely idea, with various alien life-forms hiding in peace, including certain familiar “monsters” who’ve sworn off violence.  We don’t meet many of them, which is a bit annoying as I’d love to know how a Cyberman could change his ways.  And the street really does look like a bunch of movie tourists will appear and take photos of it at any moment, only to get too close and break parts of it.  But top marks for the concept.

Running the street is Me, or Ashildr.  She’s older now, still looks the same, and relies on her diaries for ancient memories of things like the Doctor and Clara.  She protests that she’s the good guy, keeping the street safe from the Doctor, but I’m not so sure given her actions later on.  More on that soon.

Rigsy has been here before, been accused and found guilty of murder, and given a death sentence.  He was sent home to say goodbye to his family, which seems merciful except that his memory was wiped, so he had no idea what had happened or that he was dying.  (The Doctor points out that this doesn’t make any sense and, well, there’s no answer to that.  Moving on?)  The case against him isn’t exactly airtight either.  As per Ashildr, “He was found over the body.  My people were angry, I had to act.”  Guess we can send Poirot home, then.

We soon find out that the laws of the street are absolute, and it’s the only way to maintain peace, but even so that’s a pretty good case against capital punishment, since being in the same street as a corpse is apparently enough to convict you.  (He didn’t even pull out a blood-soaked knife!)  However, suddenly benevolent (hmm), Ashildr shrugs and says the Doctor and Clara can talk to anyone they like if they think it will help prove his innocence.  Off we go into the episode’s middle act.

Now, it’s very easy to pile on Sleep No More as the cause of my Series Nine forgetfulness, what with it being both boring and crap, but if I’m really honest there’s not much to this episode either.  After the intriguing start, with its topographical mystery tour, and before the talking-point ending, there’s not a lot of middle.  No one really has any information on what happened to the murder victim, and there isn’t any evidence that Rigsy did it, so there’s not a lot to investigate or do.  He was convicted, so they have to make him not convicted before the episode ends.

Maybe it’s worth mentioning that Doctor Who is pretty bad at murder mysteries even at the best of times.  They rely on logic and clues, but the world of Doctor Who means it’ll probably turn out that an alien wasp did it.  Face The Raven doesn’t even get that far: the murder is (spoiler alert) not a murder at all, it’s merely a ruse to get the Doctor to the trap street (the trap street, AHEM) for reasons they’ll explain in another episode.  All the Doctor, Clara and Rigsy do is figure out this is all about the Doctor (sigh), discuss how the death sentence works, and Clara figures out that she can transfer it to herself (and use Ashildr’s promised protection to weasel out of actually dying), hoping the Doctor will somehow sort it all out later.  All of this works well as character development for Clara, whose hubris has been growing steadily more irritating (and dangerous etc.), but as the actual plot of an episode it’s very noticeably lacking.  (There is a built-in excuse for this, i.e. they can pointlessly “investigate” all they want but they won’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late, and then the Doctor will have no choice but to volunteer for the trap.  But that doesn’t add any more substance to the wait.  They certainly don’t rescue Rigsy through cunning or guile: he would always have been let off the hook once they got to the final countdown, provided the Doctor obligingly stuck his head in the noose.)

At least it goes somewhere.  The time has come for Clara to bite off more than she can chew, and in her over-confidence she has sentenced herself – entirely pointlessly – to death.  She brought this on herself by trying to act like the Doctor, and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do about it.  For once, death takes its toll.  That doesn’t happen much in this iteration of Doctor Who, and it’s treated with solemnity here, as the Doctor (beautifully understated) asks her to stay with him while it happens, after raging at Ashildr to fix it or else.  Irritatingly sure of herself to the end, Clara wrests control of the situation away from everyone, tells Rigsy to shut up, tells the Doctor she knows what he’s going to say and does what she wants anyway.  Urgh.  I’d be lying if I said I was sad to see her go.  Her bulletproof overconfidence may be deliberate lately, what with her revealing the Doctor’s intentions to Ashildr without clearing it with him first, and giving away the TARDIS phone number without asking, but god she’s annoying anyway.

"Oh no, not again!"

(This will be hilarious if I actually remember to review The Snowmen...)

Buuuut... while it’s temping to view Clara’s (still bloodless and gentle) death as the show finally holding itself to account, for a companion who never needed the Doctor anyway, or for far too long treating death like a glib inconvenience you can wish away, this still doesn’t actually work.  Face The Raven is Episode 10 of 12.  It ends with a To Be Continued.  It’s not even the first time Clara has “died”.  (Even ignoring Oswin Oswald and Victorian Clara, this is at least her third time on the deathy-go-round.)  And it’s Doctor Who under Steven Moffat.  I mean... seriously, if you looked at this and thought “Oh, bye Clara, see you never,” then welcome to Doctor Who, since this is obviously your first episode.  What kind of concussion does one need to believe this?  People actually cried at this?!  (And spoiler alert: it works even less well in hindsight.)  While the plot ultimately revolves around the Doctor, the actual episode, all beginning, checking-of-watch and end is really about Clara paying the piper; since we all know she probably won’t have to, what’s it for?  A murder mystery with neither a murder nor a mystery?  Not one that it resolves, at any rate.

Hey, it’s not egregious or anything.  The few people we meet in the trap street are suitably scared and engrossing, arguably including the one with an unconvincing plastic face stuck to the back of her head.  They could all do with more development just as we could do with more answers, but considering Hallard originally wrote the episode sans Clara death, it might be fair to assume they originally got it.  The deathly raven special effect is pretty neat.  And Peter Capaldi, unsurprisingly, works wonders: the last ten minutes see him ping-pong between heartbreak and fury, and you’ll probably rewatch it a few times.  There’s also some nice little moments, and even some fun banter with Clara.  “Can I not be the good cop?”  “Doctor, we’ve discussed this.  Your face?”  “Oh yeah.”  It is disappointing that the episode turns out to be all about the Doctor, as every series must be these days; Face The Raven seemed like it might be a nice, self-contained little mystery at first, but no, it’s yet more rampant obsessing over the Doctor, in case you had forgotten the laughable prospect of his impending death, again.  For better or worse, Clara just falls in the cross-hairs.

Crucial yet somewhat oblivious to all this is Ashildr, who I’m less keen on this time.  Maisie Williams had a good excuse to show off between The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived: she added centuries to her character and it was chilling and sad.  She’s become a bit of a different person here, ruling her own little kingdom with an iron fist (or throne, heh), and it’s not really clear how she should play it.  She spars with the Doctor at first, then lets them all get on with their “investigation,” and when her trap is rumbled and Clara mucks it up she’s honestly mortified and all with the puppy eyes.  Yeah, but “I never meant for anyone to get hurt” doesn’t really fly when all you wanted was to summon the Doctor (and send him to his probable doom anyway), and you used a trumped-up death sentence to do it.  Wasn’t it quite likely someone would get hurt?  Especially since she mind-wiped her chosen patsy, who might never have called the Doctor at all and just stunk up his flat in a few days.  And speaking of people getting hurt, the entire street is up in arms about a human murdering one of their own.  How are they going to take the revelation that Ashildr faked the whole thing?  The “victim” probably has some choice words on the subject.

Ehhh.  Face The Raven is passable enough, with a few neat ideas and some good acting.  Also it ends on an intriguing note, with the Doctor teleporting off to who knows where.  But it is still a lot less than the sum of its parts, and not just because there’s two more to go.

Nightmeh

Doctor Who
Sleep No More
Series Nine, Episode Nine


Hark at this – it's a Mark Gatiss episode!  What a totally unexpected pleasure, in that parallel universe where the quality of previous episodes has anything to do with the commissioning of new ones.

Steady on, Captain Sassypants: this time it'll be different.  Sleep No More is a Mark Gatiss episode in space, so at least there won't be any clumsy (or bafflingly justified) historical stereotypes.  Okay, there will probably be just as many clichés, if not more, but... it's also a found footage episode!  Something that's never been done in Doctor Who before!  All right, so it has been done in an awful lot of horror films, some of which have been pillars of pop culture for almost twenty years, and it's been the go-to template for horror and action video games for ages, but "It's Already Been Done" shouldn't bar you from having another go.  You just put a new spin on it.  And this one does: as well as being found footage, it's narrated!  Like Love And Monsters!  Except that means you don't actually have to piece together the narrative for yourself, which renders the whole "found footage" thing obsolete.

Oh no, we forgot to say she's a Geordie!
Quick, end every other sentence with "pet"!

Oops.

Okay, the script does get something out of the format eventually, but you'll have to slog through The Overly Familiar Episode In Space to get there.  We have an abandoned space station, irritable space marines, strange noises just out of shot, the Doctor and his +1 showing up... not only is this boringly reminiscent of sci-fi-action movies, it's boringly reminiscent of other Doctor Who episodes that are boringly reminiscent of sci-fi-action movies.  What is there to even say about this stuff?  You'd be massively better off watching Alien or Aliens instead?  Well, yuh.

The narrator tells us not to get too attached to the characters.  Not for the first or last time, he needn't have bothered: they hover between "nonentity", "really annoying" and "are they dead yet".  And heaven help the cast with dialogue like this: "Morpheus, Mopheus, Morpheus!  Sleep's the one thing left to us.  The one thing they couldn't get their filthy mitts on.  Now they're even grabbing that – colonising it!"  "Spoken like a true Rip!"  Not quite Alien-esque banter, is it?  Then there's "May the gods look favourably upon you", which they irritatingly staple onto every other radio call.  And one of them's a clone soldier, meaning Gatiss can write deliberately annoying dialogue and then point out how annoying it is, which just make it even more annoying.  "Maybe they play Hide Seek."  "It's hide and seek.  Why do they miss out words?"  "Chopra!  Don't be anger!"  "DON'T BE ANGRY!"  DEAR GOD!  Time out, both of you!

You can see Gatiss trying to give this world a flavour of its own, and that's admirable in itself.  Unfortunately all he's really done is sprinkle some weird and annoying bits on some bog standard space shite.  Like Mr Sandman: yes, it's appropriate in an episode about sleep, but that doesn't mean we want to hear it half a dozen bloody times, or have the characters roll their eyes when it comes on again.  Being annoying isn't funny.  It's just annoying.

So, this particular (annoying) abandoned space station houses Gagan Rasmussen, aka Reese Shearsmith.  Our narrator is the lone survivor of The Horrible Thing That Happened, and he invented Morpheus, a thing that lets you get a whole night's sleep in five minutes.  This is apparently controversial (see that incredibly complex dialogue above), and the Doctor and Clara are disappointingly quick to judge as well: she calls it "insane" and "horrible", while the Doctor complains that us "filthy" humans have gone and tampered with the natural order of things.  Simplifying the issue isn't new for Doctor Who, but it's wincefully obvious with such clumsy dialogue.  Filthy?  The Doctor called us filthy?  Seems legit.  (The script also has him portentously quoting Shakespeare and awkwardly doing bits from Oliver! songs.  Random Doctorly quirks are a fine art; this is more like "I am the Doctor and this is my spoon" all over again.)

"She's a grunt, Clara.  They're bred in hatcheries."
"That's disgusting."
Ahh, lazy moral indignation.
It's Bog Standard Companion 101!

Yes, Morpheus is being used for monetary reasons – boo, hiss, obviously – but the technology could be used for anything.  Think of what you could do with your time.  Think of all the people who haven't got time to sleep, and could really benefit from an accelerated snooze pod.  You miss out on dreams, but then do you, since time moves differently in dreams?  Maybe you can have just as much dream-filled rest in five minutes as you would in a night?  Would that be okay, Doctor High And Mighty?  I mean, there's more to discuss here, right?  Ahem, no, because this ain't a think piece; the real problem is that some of the pods turn your sleepy eye crud into monsters.  Which is one of those sentences that ought to ring alarm bells, isn't it?  Sleep crud?  Was there an earlier version about murderous toilets?

The whole thing's just frown-inducing.  "The longer you're in Morpheus, the more the dust builds up."  Eh?  Why would that matter if you're only in the pods for five minutes?  When people get out, can't they just poke the crud out of their eyes before it grows arms and legs?  Even the other characters think this is a bit random – there's that "point out your own annoying bits" thing again – and the script covers itself by suggesting the Doctor's just taking a wild guess anyway, but then he goes the whole hog and assumes they eat people as well.  It's a monster story, why not?  I mean, apart from the total lack of evidence.  The Doctor just assumes things all over the place here, and then he's invariably right.  That's a lazy way to progress a plot, but it may have been the only way to progress this plot.

If it all seems suspiciously shoddy, hold that thought: in the closing moments, just after the Doctor heroically points out that "None of this makes any sense!" (ahem), Reese Shearsmith takes a mighty info-dump to tell us this whole ordeal has been a trap for you, the viewer.  All those little bits of video static you took for granted were sending a Morpheus signal to your brain and turning you into a sand monster.  (Although he kind of suggests the monsters were fictitious, so... maybe the rest of it is?)  He then suggests you show this video to your family and friends, which is one way to boost ratings I suppose, and incidentally is that sleep crud I spy in thy eye?

For a lot of kids, this will be their first unreliable narrator.  That's pretty cool, but a few things prevent it from being a good one.  One, it's massively corny.  Like popping a sheet over Reese's head and making him go "WoooOOOOoooo!"  I know it's predominantly a kids' show, but jeez.  Two, the narrator is so unreliable that you've just wasted forty minutes on a story that is deliberately less than airtight.  Is it his fault the characters are so flat, then?  Three, the twist is not well expressed.  Maybe it's the stupor of sitting through Monsters In Space, Volume: Infinity, but I barely followed what he was blethering about, especially his reference to "a proper climax with a really big [monster] at the end".  (Was it hiding behind all the normal-sized ones?  Deleted ending, I guess.)  Four, so much of this episode is dull or clumsy that I just couldn't shake the thought of Mark Gatiss writing a boring, spacey episode and hitting the It Was All A Dream button out of desperation.  Together with the coy "I'm warning you not to watch this" at the start, it's like he's trying to make a Steven Moffat episode.  Good luck: I suspect even Moffat might shy away from a script that purports to be "found footage", and then has a narrator clumsily tell you what you're looking at.

"Good luck mum and dad, getting the kids to bed tonight."
Wouldn't a good night's sleep keep the bloody things from appearing?

Oh right, the found footage thing.  I kept forgetting it was there until the characters looked at the camera.  Another twist incoming: there are no cameras on board, so this "footage" is all being recorded by sleep crud as part of Rasmussen's nefarious plan!  Dun-dun-DUN!  It takes the Doctor ages to spot this, and almost as long to laboriously spell it out to the others.  And he fails to ask why, on finding out that they have crud-cameras in their eyes, they do not simply poke it out like we all do with sleep crud every day.  Gah!  Again we have an idea that could make a clever point about clichés and narrative expectations, but it's mired in a confused, dull-witted episode about walking porridge.  If this is clever, it is wearing a very good disguise.

Unfortunately for Sleep No More, subverting clichés is about more than doing them all over again and saying "I meant to do that" afterwards.  Unfortunately for us, if Marky G wants a sequel, he will probably get one.

"Subtext" Of The "Zygons"

Doctor Who
The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion
Series Nine, Episodes Seven and Eight


Well, no prizes for guessing what this is about.

Doctor Who is often allegorical, because it's sci-fi and that's a handy way to show real world issues from a different angle.  See 1950s B-Movies, Cold War paranoia, Star Trek in general.  But Doctor Who isn't all that subtle.  It can be painfully obvious when it's telling you Drugs Are Bad or War Is Bad or Slavery Is Bad.

Above: no prizes, etc.

Part of the problem is telling you something that's completely obvious in the first place.  Slavery Is Bad?  Well, paint me pink and call me Percy – why didn't anyone say anything sooner?  The rest of the problem is taking said obvious thing and smashing you round the head with it, like in Midnight, when the Doctor's fellow passengers decide he's an outsider, "like an immigrant".  Would you like a crash helmet with that?

Well, these episodes are allegorical.  And they are blatant.  Check out the dialogue – you won't need to be a Where's Wally champion to spot the subtext.

*  "We can't tell who the enemy is any more, we can't count them and we can't track them."
*  "We will die in the fire, instead of living in chains!"  "Most of your own kind don't want that!"
*  "Isn't there a solution that doesn't involve bombing anyone?  This is a splinter group.  The rest of the Zygons, the vast majority, they want to live in peace.  You start bombing them, you'll radicalise the lot.  It's exactly what the splinter group wants."

It's a bit of a stretch to even call that subtext, what with the cast all but making quotation marks every time they say "Zygon", barely restraining a lean-in and a wink.  And yet to my surprise, I don't hate this.  Yes, it's blatantly Doctor Who does ISIS, terrorism in general, the xenophobic fallout from all of the above.  But this particular blatant thing hasn't been done in Doctor Who before.  (You might call that semantics and you might be right.  Shrug.)  It's also not a subject, or rather a viewpoint, that's already been tiresomely drummed into us.  Millions of people are worried about it right now, and many are very vocally small-minded about it on a daily basis.  Both points deserve recognition.  I honestly felt more impressed that they were going there than annoyed that it was obvious.  It's topical.  They-wouldn't-have-got-it-on-the-air-if-it-had-gone-out-one-week-later topical.

Ahem.  Sounds like a different show, doesn't it?  And there are times when these episodes feel more like Spooks, although they feature aliens and time travel so are marginally more plausible.  But ultimately, Peter Harness and Steven Moffat simplify the issues.  Of course they do – it's Doctor bleedin' Who, not Panorama, so the "bad" Zygons (aka terrorists) are equated with troublesome children.  Their victims are killed in the time-honoured (and all-importantly bloodless) sci-fi means of disintegration.  Into straw blobs.  (Okay, how far down the list did they get before straw?  Perhaps the chance to make tumbleweeds look scary, or even noteworthy was too good to ignore.)  In the end, when the episode reaches its potentially embarrassing goal of Arguing Against Terrorism, it does so in a quintessentially Doctor Who way.  I was... quite impressed, actually.

What's this?  More clips?  It's The Clips Agenda!

And I'm getting ahead of myself.  There's plenty of other stuff in here for the less allegorically minded.  Scary bits, funny bits, a doozie of a cliff-hanger... in a series not already stuffed with two-parters, this would be an easy win for the once traditional, middle-of-the-series, actually quite good one.  It's certainly the pick of Series Nine thus far.

Right, time for the plot: following on from The Day Of The Doctor, humanity (or more specifically, UNIT) is housing 20 million Zygons in disguise.  Despite the plots of previous Doctor Who episodes (like, for example, The Day Of The Doctor), they're not all bad.  "Subtext" incoming: "Every race is peaceful and warlike, good and evil.  My race is no exception."  The whole shape-shifting thing is a survival mechanism, not an invasion tactic – that is until some Zygons get angry at having to live in secret and launch an attack.  Cue ominous talk of the ceasefire breaking down, the one remaining Osgood (yay, we get to keep her!) being kidnapped, and the Doctor being summoned.  He's desperate to keep this from escalating.  With ominous kidnap videos sent to UNIT and small towns taken hostage, war seems inevitable.  Not to mention we already lost Osgood once.

First off, it's always a pleasure to drop in on Kate Stewart's increasingly-female-led UNIT, especially when you actually give them something to do.  Jemma Redgrave is crushing it here, as the generally peace-loving Kate inches closer to her father's legacy.  (They even throw in a "Five rounds rapid".)  She's keen to avoid a war but intends to win it if necessary.  The expression she pulls when she thinks Osgood #2 might have been killed... well, I wouldn't mess with her.  For me, it's a rare pleasure to see a recurring female character in the Moffat era who doesn't make me want to bash my head against a wall.  I'd even, dare I say it, support a spin-off.  (And she's got one, so I can!)

She's not the only example of wow-isn't-she-great in this.  Ingrid Oliver has some lovely material as Osgood, who may or may not be a Zygon.  (Don't bother thinking about it – there is no answer, that's the point.)  She's a very good actor, heightening what began as an affectionate sketch of a Doctor Who fan into, well, an adult, who cares passionately about her job and grieves deeply for her "sister".  (A death which, though sneakily cheated because Ingrid's still in it, also still resonates.)  She's great when she's with the Doctor, sometimes gazing at him with quiet awe, or asking him simple-yet-practical questions about his silly outfits and daft gadgets, or firmly putting him in his place when he asks The Zygon Question.  When he (inevitably) offers her a place on the TARDIS, it feels less like ticking The Obvious Box than simply and adroitly putting two brilliant people together.  (Of course she's too busy so she stays behind.  Boo!  She might be a cosplaying fangirl or a Zygon or both, but she's still more of a rounded person than Clara.  And hey, we all know there's a vacancy coming up.)

"Of course we greenlit a spin-off!  She did the look!
You don't say no to the look!"

So UNIT are compelling, although they're not actually doing very much even with ISIS – er, the Zygons wreaking havoc.  Kate investigates the abandoned town of Truth Or Consequences (that's what the terrorist group is called), Osgood waits for the Doctor to rescue her (but that doesn't mean she's a useless waif – she was out there doing important work in the first place), and Walsh, a no-nonsense army figure, just waits for an excuse to bomb the bad guys.  In spite of that she's refreshingly not painted as a villain, in that now traditional boo-sucks-the-military style of Who.  "Any living thing in this world, including my family and friends, could turn into a Zygon and kill me any second now.  It's not paranoia when it's real."  Well, fair enough.  Rebecca Front fills her scenes with weary determination.  (Also it's nice to watch her roll her eyes at Malcolm Tucker, since he was very rude to her in The Thick Of It.)

Okay, the scene where she tragically fails to talk her troops out of going to their deaths (as the Zygons have taken the forms of their loved ones) is almost disturbing enough to overcome how ninny-headed they're all being... but not quite.  Even Walsh sheds IQ points on the spot: "Ask her questions only your mother would know."  Duh!  They read your mind when they copy you!  Somehow, they still fail to answer any questions.  Bit of a giveaway, innit?  And not one of those army dudes thinks this is a little bit fishy?  Or opts to keep the doors open while they go in and investigate?  So long, then, Sergeant Wally-Brain.  Where's Admiral Ackbar when you need him?

Bringing up the rear UNIT-wise is Jac (aka Roz from Bugs, glimpsed in the season-opener).  It's a perfectly adequate performance but, eh, she's just filling in for Osgood.  Specifically, she's investigating a series of disappearances with Clara, who finally shows up after a mysterious delay.  There's almost a really cool reason for this except – huge spoiler incoming!  Seriously, spoilerspoilerspoiler!  This is your last chance!  S. P. O. I. L. E. R.!... – her Zygon body-snatching doesn't happen until after she gets 127 missed calls from the Doctor.  I mean, dude, pick up your phone already.  I think the twist would work better (and make a smidge more sense) if Clara was just a Zygon from the start.  But then, I'd happily keep Zygon Jenna instead.

Come back Jenna, all is forgiven?  Kind of.  As the fundamentalist Zygon leader – curiously and adorably named Bonnie – she reveals acting reserves she's presumably been using as paperweights since 2013.  Bonnie's interesting, and Jenna does loads with a sinister turn of the head, a furious dip in the voice, and that determined Terminator-ey stalk of hers.  Much of the performance is even more enjoyable the second time around, as you notice big stuff you may have missed ("Clara" deliberately operating the Zygon lift controls), or little stuff like her curious apathy in the face of danger and death.  You might point out that this is how Clara always reacts to danger and death, because she's a vacuous composite of Doctor Who companions with a load of other characters telling us how awesome she is instead of ever actually proving it, but that would be very mean of you, you mean old so-and-so!  (Don't feel bad if you didn't spot the difference at first.  Weirdly, neither does the Doctor.)  In any case, Clara's usual blasé-ness works wonders for Bonnie.

Huh.  I kind of want her to play other roles now.
Wait, I mean it in the nice way!

Coleman's perfectly okay as Clara too – it's not exactly a stretch, but then that's sort of the problem.  Bright, plucky, little bit witty: tick, tick, yawn.  Her highlight comes after the cliff-hanger, when Bonnie (now unmasked, so to speak) blows up the Presidential plane with the Doctor and Osgood in it.

As Part Two (The Zygon Inversion – I am loving the Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee titles this year) begins, we cut straight to Clara in her bedroom.  This one's co-written by Steven Moffat, so it's business as usual to subvert your cliff-hangery expectations: Clara bumbles around and notices something off about her surroundings, and we're treated to some rather slick continuity as she falls back on her Last Christmas Inceptioning.  She looks for dream clues, figures out she's not in Kansas any more and quickly learns to affect Bonnie's movements from within the dream world.  This is a neat little revamp of that unnerving dream stuff Steven Moffat loves so much.  I mean if they have to repeat themselves (see also: Forest Of The Dead), thank goodness there's a few new spins left.  And it keeps Clara neatly in the loop, although I still don't think she's barnstorming enough to deserve all the credit at the end.  Why yes, it's Clara what solved terrorism, although the Doctor technically did all the work.  I mean, if you want to be picky about it.

With Jenna providing the human face of the Zygons, and Zygons looking like humans wherever possible, it's strangely easy to forget there are Zygons in this.  (To be fair, the sledge-hammering allegory does a lot of the work.)  It's ostensibly a good story for them, as it shows them as being not-all-violent-all-the-time – kind of like some people in the real world, now that you mention it – but most of the actual Zygons on display are the "bad" ones.  With the possible exception of Osgood (I told you not to think about it!) and a couple who cark it at the beginning, there's approximately one harmless blobby alien in this, and he does not get a happy ending.  It's a shame there isn't more diversity here, which seems ironic when you consider what the story is about (heads up, it's topical), and that it's a two-parter.

Looking at them more as cool Doctor Who aliens than as people, since it was their scary blobbiness that has made fans go on and on about Zygons since 1975, this one's all about moving the goalposts.  The Zygons have developed fatal hand-lightning (I forget, they may have had that in The Day Of The Doctor – they weren't exactly the memorable bit!) and the ability to pluck body-prints out of your memory, apparently across great distances.  (Don't ask.)  They also don't need to keep you alive unless they want information, which the Doctor cleverly uses to keep Clara alive.  As for the Loch Ness Monster, which is totally a thing they came up with, there's no sign of that whatsoever.  Boo!  ("But we can do it on a proper budget and everything!", says Peter Harness.  "Okay, but it means cutting a whole episode," says Moffat.  Guys, there's a Mark Gatiss one coming up.  Let's do this.)

What could have been.  :'(

Apart from the monsters, what you're really here for is the answer at the end.  This is an especially big deal when the whole thing is a sock puppet for a real world problem we haven't solved yet, and tellingly there's not a huge amount of plot besides.  Kate spends a suspicious amount of time waiting in an abandoned town; the Doctor and Osgood run about; all that business with people disappearing in lifts goes half-unexplained.  (What about all the places without lifts?)  I guess it's a tension builder, and oh well, we're there now: how does the Doctor make it all go away?

He's been in similar situations with Silurians, who were doing the whole not-all-of-us-are-monsters bit long before there were even Zygons.  And it usually comes down to killing them off and uttering a sheepish "There should have been another way", avec shrug.  Well, you can't have aliens sticking around, can you?  Think of all the extra prosthetics.  But these are Zygons, and they can roam all over the place without affecting the budget, so we can have our cake and eat it!  Huzzah!  (Hardly anyone knows the Zygons are there, but that's a point for another time.  At least, it had better be.)

As for how the Doctor achieves all this, simply enough: he talks.  Okay, he speechifies, raging about the horrors of war and having to live with the consequences.  It teeters on the melodramatic, but it's perfectly in character so it flies.  Remember that line from The Girl Who Died: "Do babies die with honour?"  And, uh, the Doctor's entire stance on war over the years.  This is absolutely a logical progression of blowing up bad guys and feeling terrible afterwards.  And yes, it's enormously optimistic and romantic in-the-broader-meaning-of-the-word to suggest that talking to a terrorist will change anything, but that's largely what science fiction is for, isn't it?  Presenting a version of the world in which we can solve that problem we've been having?  (Okay, That Problem usually gets radioactive and smashes all the skyscrapers, but not always.)  It is pleasingly like Doctor Who to suggest that in the end, talk is the instrument of change.

And this isn't even my favourite bit.  Presenting the villain with exactly the sort of Impossible Choice he's had in the past (usually with a disappointing cheat for a solution), he asks Bonnie a simple question: what do you actually want?  And that's something I always want the heroes to ask the villains.  Look at Sauron or Voldemort: yes, they have a short-term goal to accomplish, next stop, Ze Vorld, but then what?  Paint everything grey and cackle loads?  It often seems as if villains want to burn things and pinch people because deep down, they're just really mean.  Feh.  Picking up on that kind of narrative lameness to de-construct the vicious circle of terrorism is dangerously close to inspired.  It's clever without getting smug – apart from the Doctor saying "Gotcha", which is a rather rubbish coda to all that "when I close my eyes I can still hear their screams" stuff.  Niggle aside though, it's a neat piece of writing and it's worth the wait.

Yay optimism and everything, but... really?
Bonnie completely reformed before the end credits?

In the middle of all this is Peter Capaldi, who is so utterly, Doctorishly adept that he can randomly call himself "Doctor Disco" or "Doctor Funkenstein" for no reason and still... well, no, those bits do stick out actually, along with the horrifying (for all the wrong reasons) American accent he does at one point.  A friend of mine wondered if the Doctor was a Zygon all along (hey Alex!), and even I wonder why he's suddenly so keen to "ponce about on a big plane" when last year he unequivocally wasn't.  Isn't this all a bit... Matt?  The grouchy misanthrope from Series Eight certainly feels further and further away.  Is it the hair?  No, wait, the guitar!  There, he got a guitar and instantly became The Cool Doctor.  (No need to tell us Guitars Are Cool, because duh.)  I honestly think he's better this way, so never mind, but Series Eight is looking more and more like an awkward false start next to it.

Anyway.  Zygons standing in for Muslims, Zygons standing in for ISIS, the Doctor standing in for the magical peace fairy that irritatingly does not exist.  It's about as subtle as writing "ISIS" on some knickers and pulling them over the actors' heads, but I still felt like they accomplished something meaningful here, and kept it firmly within the bounds of Doctor Who.  Well, apart from Nessie.  Boo!