Review Category: Doctor Who TV

Survival, Rona Munro’s last brush with Doctor Who back in 1989, is a story about the rise and fall of civilisations set against the coming of age of a group of self-dependent teenagers, with a great deal of metaphor threaded throughout its science fiction script. To some people, it’s one of the original run’s all-time classics, while for others, its clash of the literal and the figurative and its reliance on an adolescent cast make it rather problematic. In truth, Survival is made up of striking ideas and imagery, but doesn’t quite fit the Doctor Who mould; it’s the format of the series itself that has to bend to absorb it, rather than the story fitting the programme.

Much the same is true of The Eaters of Light, Munro’s return to Doctor Who some 28 years later. Munro, just as Frank Cottrell-Boyce had in his debut script In the Forest of the Night, sets up a delicate balance between the lyricism of her story’s ideas and the rather more prosaic science fictionism of its execution. In order for the plot to work, the audience has to suspend its disbelief for a number of elements that are without much persuasive explanation, such as the physical appearance of the “locusts” that were appearing through the dimension portal – not a million miles away from the Magma Beasts of Peter Davison’s regeneration serial, in that their inclusion was a necessity that robbed what surrounded them of some of its dramatic rigidity – or indeed the temporal properties of the portal itself. The idea of time running at a different speed in the gateway didn’t only give rise to one of the episode’s great comic moments (Nardole informing the Doctor he’s been away for two days), but was also crucial to the construction of the resolution (and its mythical overtone, as highlighted in the pre-titles sequence), and while it didn’t necessarily feel out of step with the rest of the story, neither did it feel quite integrated with the physical reality we were presented with. There was a lot of telling the audience the way things were, without really being able to explain why – just as there had been in Smile and In the Forest of the Night.

The result was a frustrating blend of the absolutely wonderful marred by minor irritations; fortunately, in this instance, the little things mostly didn’t get in the way of the story’s main themes and preoccupations. And some of those preoccupations were delightfully odd, like the talking crows who began the story behaving like a Greek chorus on its ingredients – “Doc-tor!” “Mon-stor!” – and ended up forming its most moving moment; “The crows are remembering,” Nardole tells the Doctor, in a scene that both serves to undermine the Doctor’s superiority in a way that very gently reminds us that the Time Lord’s arrogance has been increasingly a theme throughout Series Ten, but also highlights the manner in which Munro has been using The Eaters of Light to create her own folklore in the truest sense – as a way of explaining the inexplicable and making it comprehensible: folklore exists to make the unexplained less frightening, to humanise it. From the cawing of crows to the hint of music floating over the moorlands, The Eaters of Light answers questions those of us who live away from the barren open spaces would never think to ask.

The plot itself derives from the series’ occasional need to solve an antique mystery for which there has never been a satisfactory explanation; much like Agatha Christie’s temporary disappearance or Nefertiti’s more permanent one, the fate of the Roman army’s Ninth Legion in second century Scotland has never been explained. It’s a bit of a leap of logic to imagine the hitherto sci-fi obsessed Bill also having a predilection for two-thousand-year-old puzzles, nevertheless it gets us into the story and circumnavigates the obligatorily clunkiness of the companion having to be brought up to speed on the TARDIS’ destination. Thereafter Munro’s story thinks itself through and arrives at a lot of logical junctures that help in serving its trajectory, rather than feeling like impositions upon it; the ages of the survivors on both factions, for instance, enable Munro to concentrate her efforts on that crossroad between impressionability and certitude that she mined so well in Survival, the conversation about Bill’s sexuality illustrating the point that learning doesn’t stop when knowledge is attained. The wrongfooting of Bill over her attitudes to the past reflects the Doctor’s appeal to both parties to set aside their imposed and assumed differences in favour of a common goal. To have made each side in the battle so ostensibly similar creates a situation in which it’s as easy to see why the Romans and Pictish would struggle to come to terms just as much as they ought naturally to do so. It’s simple, intelligent storytelling.

And this episode is filled with simplicity and intelligence – and crucially, by comparison with Cottrell-Boyce’s debut offering, creates new mythos around undefined ideas rather than seeking to bring established mythology, such as the Gaia traditions, into the Doctor Who canon. It’s mostly very believably accomplished, but for the odd Magma Beast-alike and its light-eating properties; it’s a shame more wasn’t done with things like the introduction of the black paste that infects Bill – a reference back to Planet of the Daleks maybe? – but overall The Eaters of Light was probably greater than the sum of its parts.

It was also cast brilliantly, the imposed cynicism of the surviving Romans and the willing dedication of the remaining Picts both feeling like natural developments and played with honesty; once again, there was a hint of a reflection of our own times in the story’s concerns. Brian Vernel was a standout as Lucius, but the entire cast was fantastic. And Peter Capaldi was at his best and most Doctorish this week; between Munro’s dialogue and the distinctively Scottish flavour of the story’s themes, he was absolutely in his element. There won’t be another episode in his entire run in which he will have been better than he was here.

The Eaters of Light was also a little reminiscent of The Girl Who Died, in its subject if not its execution, with its concentration on ostensibly unenlightened characters coming to terms with and overcoming scientifically defined issues. Doctor Who has tended to mine our more relatively recent past throughout its history, but lately these trips further back have given it a new texture. And if its solution revolving around an invading force becoming friends with those they were seeking to invade was somewhat similar to last week’s Ice Warriors episode – and reminiscent of the kind of story you might have found in Class or The Sarah Jane Adventures – then at least Rona Munro’s lyrical, thoughtful script was a country mile away from Gatiss’ clunky, predictable adventure.

The coda (presumably an insertion courtesy of Steven Moffat himself) leaves us looking forwards to the two-part finale on a bit of a knife-edge; could Moffat be about to tell a story we’ve perhaps had tucked away in the back of our minds but never thought to actually see, that of the Doctor and his one-time best friend actually enjoying something of that unhindered relationship? Gomez certainly seems to be playing her rehabilitation for real – and the preview of World Enough and Time suggests that Series Ten’s themes, for example, a surrogate Doctor exploring a simulation in Extremis, were no more haphazard than they ever are under this showrunner’s regimes. It’s hard to believe we’re here already, but the pieces that will initiate the twelfth Doctor’s final hours are falling into place.

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 10: ‘THE EATERS OF LIGHT’ / DIRECTOR: CHARLES PALMER / WRITER: RONA MUNRO / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MICHELLE GOMEZ, REBECCA BENSON, BRIAN VERNEL / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 17TH JUNE)

A few weeks ago, we learned about the discovery of a prop Ice Warrior helmet that had originally been used in the Martians’ eponymously titled, fifty-year-old debut story, and that had then been “missing” since presumably sometime around the early 1980s. Mark Gatiss’ script for Empress of Mars feels like something he has unearthed from the bottom of a dusty drawer from perhaps about a decade later, having had it turned down by the publishers of the Wilderness Years’ Virgin New Adventures original fiction series for not being “relevant” enough. Other than a brief pro-union twist at the story’s conclusion, Gatiss’ story harkens back to the post-colonialist commentaries of the Barry Letts era of the mid-1970s. Coming immediately after the terribly modern Monks trilogy, a wildly inconsistent yet thoroughly contemporary collection of analogies for current world politics, Empress of Mars is a throwback to simpler times in almost every possible respect. Just like Gatiss’ 2015 story Sleep No More before it, it feels completely out of step with the rest of the recent series.

But is it any good?

It’s difficult to say. If your notion of decent Doctor Who is the predictability of Colonel Godsacre’s eleventh hour show of bravery – a very Terry Nation-esque character development – or the surprisingly gruesome outcome of the Ice Warriors’ weaponry – a logical extension of the original Mirrorlon effect the production created back in the 1960s – then Empress of Mars ticked a lot of boxes. This was, with its reminders of the Peladon stories (especially the latter, with all its standing around in caves and a lot of watching a huge, Gravitron-like mining device blasting chunks of polystyrene out of studio walls), possibly the most “old school” the revived series has ever dared to be. The characters felt less like people than they did story archetypes, and reminders of other stories of a similar vintage – the politics and setting of The Silurians, visual cues such as the ossified Empress straight out of The Hand of Fear – were legion. Gatiss promised an Edgar Rice Burroughs meets Jules Verne meets H.G. Wells feel, and space-faring Victorian soldiers meeting Martian warriors on the Earth’s nearest planetary neighbour certainly ticks those boxes.

But those stories were written at a time when the British Empire had reached its pinnacle and was looking down the slope on the other side. Great science fiction marries the implausibility of the fantastic with a credibly speculative side; it looks forwards both figuratively and literally. Empress of Mars, unlike for example last week’s episode The Lie of the Land, is all about looking backwards. Taking somebody else’s great idea and reproducing it a century later isn’t an act of either art or vandalism, not if it’s a reproduction without purpose. Empress of Mars felt like an empty vessel, a pretty enough visual spectacle that closer inspection revealed as echoingly empty.

There’s nothing wrong with entertainment for entertainment’s sake, of course. And kids will probably love the stompy Ice Warriors (all three of them; the representation of the tip of the army was similarly classic Doctor Who in execution), the red-jacketed soldiers and the hissing Martian queen – not to mention the aforementioned crushed-body death rays. There were some satisfying moments, in that old-fashioned you knew it was coming way; Godsacre’s redemption and Catchlove’s comeuppance. But the peace is better than war rhetoric was a little clunky and repetitive, and slightly undermined by the story’s evident delight in shouting and shooting; every story beat was there because that’s where it was supposed to be, rather than because it developed naturally out of the characters. Watching the twelfth Doctor sneaking up the Gargantua while Bill diverts the Empress’ attention with a bout of wittering was incongruous and anachronous, a situation thrown in because the stories the writer was referencing would have demanded it, rather than because this one did.

And what of the cast? Director Wayne Yip had been responsible for two of 2016 spin-off series Class’ most striking instalments, the bottle episode Detained and the philosophical journey The Metaphysical Engine, and had made of each of them a visceral, engaging, and “real” experience. Last week he’d just about kept The Lie of the Land on its feet, but for a slight fumble with the climax, and Empress of Mars feels very competent. But neither episode has really received the lift this latter one in particular quite desperately needed; the entire cast are no doubt enjoying themselves and everything looks very professional, but there’s little in the way of sparkle or surprise. Yip ought perhaps to have had the cast overplaying just a touch, to give the episode the outlandish feel that served The Crimson Horror so well – something to make this feel more like a genuine throwback to a bygone screen era. And, but for one element, both Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie felt a little underserved, the story of their developing relationship taking a break for a week to be replaced with a story about an established Doctor Who duo going about their general business instead. We didn’t really learn anything about either of them, and we didn’t get any opportunities to get involved with them either; one thing the modern series always keeps its eyes on is the emotional bond between programme and audience, here we had Doctor Who by numbers and the regulars were just going through the motions. It was like watching the series through a sunblind. You could see that everything that was supposed to be there had been included somewhere, you just couldn’t see why. There was very little “why” with Empress of Mars, just a lot of “what”.

We did, thanks to a repetition of the TARDIS flying off by itself motif that last turned up in, oh, Mark Gatiss’ last Ice Warriors story, get that extraordinary – if easily spotted – last scene with Missy though. Michelle Gomez is really selling the character’s penitence and potential redemption; an explanation for the TARDIS’ actions must surely come and it’s clear that Missy’s story has been the underlying theme of the series, the initial focus on the Vault itself something of a red herring. Gatiss provided little clue elsewhere as to the direction the story will take, his episodes often happening in a bubble outside the ongoing narrative, but at least this week’s wasn’t entirely disconnected from the stories around it. The possible return to a genuine companionship between the Doctor and Master is a tantalising and unprecedented route to take. It’s been an uneven series, but such a turn of events in the last two episodes would make it worth it.

And despite the lack of originality, and the rather fanfic way in which Gatiss slotted his episode into Ice Warrior continuity at the expense of making it feel pertinent to the rest of the modern series, the brief appearance of Ysanne Churchman as Alpha Centauri at the episode’s end almost made Empress of Mars worth it too.

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 9: ‘EMPRESS OF MARS’ / DIRECTOR: WAYNE YIP / WRITER: MARK GATISS / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MICHELLE GOMEZ, ANTHONY CALF, FERDINAND KINGSLEY, RICHARD ASHTON, ADELE LYNCH / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 10TH JUNE)

This writer came home at midnight tonight, fresh from having watched this weekend’s Doctor Who and recording a Blue Box Podcast about it, only to find out about the terror attack in London. It seems strange to be writing about a “children’s” television series when nine people lie dead and the nation is once again in shock at the horror of what our species is capable of doing to itself. But there’s a strange symmetry between the two subjects and one that it is impossible not to notice or remark upon.

There is no way that Steven Moffat, Peter Harness and Toby Whithouse could have known that we’d be heading into a snap General Election, or that the United Kingdom would be reeling under its worst spate of terror attacks for many a year, when they sat down to write this trilogy at the heart of Series Ten sometime last year. And yet, despite the extended story of the Monks being speculative and analogous to perhaps other things, it works almost perfectly as a commentary on the right here and now. The focus of Whithouse’s concluding chapter, the brilliantly titled The Lie of the Land, is continuity. “However bad a situation is,” Nardole tells Bill, “if people think that’s how it’s always been, they’ll put up with it.” The Monks are brainwashing humanity into believing that their particular brand of oppression is the status quo, and people are being executed for Memory Crimes.

It’s obviously inspired by the recent Amazon Originals success, The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s story of an alternative history (recently revisited by the BBC themselves as SS-GB) in which the Allies lost World War II and the United States is under the rule of Japan and Germany. Here the revisionist version of history is an imposition, something the Monks themselves have created in order to keep Earth’s population subdued, making The Lie of the Land less of a fantasy, perhaps, than the Dick story which inspired it. A scary thought. It’s also a return to the themes and format of the climactic three episodes of Russell T. Davies’ Series Three, and an improvement upon some of Davies’ logic. But most obviously, it’s one of the very few times (suchlike as The Macra Terror and The Happiness Patrol forerunning it) that Doctor Who has taken the opportunity to imitate Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the dystopian future fiction designed to circumlocute any possible potential dystopian reality. With the current obsession concerning “Fake News”, terrorist atrocities occurring in the hearts of our two major cities designed to uphold the non-appeasing current government, a paranoid President and an isolationist populace, Orwell’s warning is closer than ever to becoming an actuality. A proximity that Whithouse plays upon in The Lie of the Land. 

The central conceit, of course – just as it was last week – is about self-justification. The Monks can’t be “evil”, because we invited their particular form of tyranny. They’re only giving us what we asked for, and we’ve only ourselves to blame. Metaphorically, the idea of stability is more important than its consequences. It’s a shame that, thanks to the One Love concert being held to mark last week’s act of terrorism, the television schedules were juggled such that this week’s Doctor Who will have been seen by fewer people, because the home truths it contains deserve and require being seen by as wide an audience as possible. Still, you can only hold up the mirror, you can’t force people to look in it. And even when they do, like as not they’ll simply think, “they were just like filming something here or something.” 

The Lie of the Land wasn’t perfect Doctor Who. It was dystopia on a budget, but mostly successfully conveyed, albeit the entire episode was stuffed full of a small number of very lengthy scenes. And the soppy RTD-like ending was probably too schmaltzy, too stuffed with exposition and too RTD. It did, however, add up to make perfect sense, the Monks’ lie being exposed by a single image that was outside of the view of the world they imposed upon it. The “reset” that allows the series to continue onwards in something resembling our own universe was also brilliant, an extrapolation of both the themes of the story and the sci-fi that was used to convey them. This was deceptively very clever stuff. It even included a line of dialogue explaining how the few who spread the terror maintain in illusion of being a majority, a line that shouldn’t be lost on those condemning a faith for the contradictory actions of the tiniest fraction of its membership.

The biggest issue was perhaps the Monks themselves, like the Silence and the Weeping Angels defined by their mode of operation but less specific in their manifestation, and less purposeful in their intentions. They look scary enough, and the vagueness of their characterisation actually helps in keeping them remote and enigmatic. Helps make it easier to impose an analogy upon them, perhaps. But the lack of definition also meant the threat never seemed to achieve its full impact, as if the problems humanity were undergoing were as much of their own making as they were an imposition of the Monks’. Ah but of course, that was the point. 

The fake regeneration was perhaps a trailer moment too far, although Bill’s trial of solidarity was again a reflection of one of the themes of The Man in the High Castle and justified in its inclusion. And as brilliant as Capaldi and Lucas – and an understated, genuine and repentant Gomez – undoubtedly were, this was Pearl Mackie’s episode and she absolutely owned every last second of it. Her performance this series never ceases to increase in potency and authenticity, and during the moments when the narrative wavered in its forward momentum, she was enough to keep the viewer glued to the storytelling. 

The attacks in Manchester and London appear to have been targeted at the young, those less likely or capable of visiting the polling stations, yet those most in need of change, and to engender a sense of outrage among those older and more likely to take a hard line. Because terrorism is an act of self-fulfilment; the response to an atrocity is the cause of the atrocity itself. It’s a bit of a shock to see Doctor Who, a programme written months in advance of its broadcast, addressing this head-on in the last days before a crucial snap election that asks a single, basic question: continuity, or change? And just as much as Moffat, Harness and Whithouse should be commended on their foresight and the vitality of their message, we really need to take a good long look at ourselves and ask why such a message is either necessary or even remotely relevant.

And then do something about that.

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 8: “THE LIE OF THE LAND” / DIRECTOR: DANIEL NETTHEIM / WRITER: TOBY WHITHOUSE / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MICHELLE GOMEZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 3RD JUNE)

Sometimes the slightest shift in emphasis or tone, or the slenderest over-reliance on something which looked great on the page but doesn’t quite translate to the screen, can upset the balance of an episode. The Pyramid at the End of the World has a fantastic conceit at its heart, a script stuffed with memorable moments and quotable dialogue, and is positioned in Series Ten so as to achieve maximum impact; this is Doctor Who, just as it was in Oxygen, finding new things to do with the format and the characters, even after fifty-plus years of telling stories.

 

But it didn’t quite work.

 

It’s hard to put your finger on just why. There were any number of minor instances of directorial and authorial decisions which didn’t quite seem to come home, but which in any other episode might easily have been forgivable and quickly forgotten about. The Monks stepping in time through the desert back to their pyramid looked silly, but not that silly, for example, but coming off the back of a tremendous and joyously audacious effects sequence this one simple shot served to underline the ridiculousness of the spectacle in a way that undermined rather than complemented it. Or the image of the three most powerful military leaders on Earth discussing the future of humankind, with barely an aide or second-in-command to be seen, was just about acceptable in that Doctor Who, all-the-cast-you-can-afford kind of a way, until the moment the Doctor thrust them in front of Google and suddenly they all looked implausibly ludicrous rather than pleasingly preposterous. Peter Harness’ first Doctor Who, 2014’s Kill the Moon, had several similarly improbable moments but rode them on a wave of incredulity that worked for some and staggered others, but Kill the Moon never hit the middle ground that The Pyramid at the End of the World seems to occupy, wherein the suspension of disbelief is stretched beyond breaking point but in a manner that forces you to keep wanting to make up for it.

 

The point at which it became apparent that something was afoot was when Peter Capaldi, hitherto nicely subdued due to his blindness but counterbalancing that by being extra playful in public, made a very ostentatious first contact with the aliens in a scene that imparted some vital information but played out so inconsequentially it felt almost like he’d just delivered them their mail. There was a huge, tension-packed build-up to the interaction, entirely punctured by the “Not ready to talk yet” / “Okay, fair enough” moment everybody involved noticed it wasn’t yet time for the story to begin proper. Thereafter, all the suspense the episode might have mustered was dissipated either by the sense that everything was being spelled out too much in advance of developments, or that the episode was wilfully trying not to ride its clichés to the extent that many of its situations lost any sense of authenticity.

 

Of course, what all of this was building to was Bill’s surrender to the Monks, a resolution that would have been brilliantly intense and filled with righteous, frustrated compromise, if on the one hand the Doctor’s predicament hadn’t felt so deliberately mundane that the lack of a more banal solution to it became ridiculous, or if Bill’s ignorance of the Doctor’s blindness hadn’t by this point begun to make her look rather foolish. It’s not out of character for someone who initially thought the TARDIS was a kitchen to exhibit a lack of awareness about the most obvious things while picking up on much less obvious things much more quickly, but it is becoming an issue that there are certain ways in which she’s demonstrated herself to be an entirely inappropriate travelling companion for someone who is, as they put it a few weeks ago, on the business end of an intergalactic helpline. It’s more than likely that Toby Whithouse’s incorporation of The Man in the High Castle into the series’ repertoire next week, will both address and/or redress Bill’s shortcomings, but The Pyramid at the End of the World ultimately presents her as a hindrance, and a fatally dangerous one, and while that might be an interesting place to take a character – particularly as Pearl Mackie plays the dilemma just as well as she performs absolutely everything else – it’s still an odd one. Our hearts are supposed to go out to Bill, that’s the emotion the scene is drawing on, but instead there’s the feeling that everybody on set is wearing an “I’m with stupid” t-short under their costumes, and that all the arrows are pointing straight up.

 

The notion that Steven Moffat has deliberately dumbed down his final series of Doctor Who, in order that those who might not have cared to keep up with the last couple of series might be welcomed back on board, is also having a negative effect on the episodes, particularly noticeable here. We saw far too much of Douglas and Erica, his hangover and the biological agent angle were made far too much of, for there to be any surprise as to how the episode would progress; those sleights of hand and moments of revelation that Moffat has become so associated with were all there in the plot, but all too obviously forewarned of to really work. There were also unanswered questions – that may yet be addressed next week, but currently look like ill-thought through plot conceits – left dangling; why a pyramid? Why the need to be invited? Conceits that undermine the Monks’ position as a legitimate adversary.

 

All of which is to say that The Pyramid at the End of the World was an episode with the potential to be extraordinary. It took Doctor Who by the scruff of its neck and led it to the very edge of its capabilities. This was a story in which the bad guys won, and did so thanks to the writers giving the Doctor’s companion an impossible and emotionally wrenching predicament. It was, in many ways, what The Sound of Drums perhaps should have been; a very personalised end of the world scenario, Moffat’s vision of the series laid bare.

 

And it was very entertaining to watch, a surfeit of unforgettable images bound together by the apprehension that for once things wouldn’t turn out well. There was a foreboding about the situation from the very start, and as events progressed, that sense only increased until it became manifest. It goes without saying, Capaldi, Mackie and Matt Lucas were incredible, they always are, and the guest cast met them and matched what they were doing. It was incredible to look at, a motion picture on a television budget, deceiving the audience into thinking more of it than the production could possibly afford to put there. And the pre-titles sequence was filled with hilarious and largely unexpected moments.

 

But it took an extraordinary story and did its damnedest to make it feel ordinary, and that’s a real shame because this episode was very close to being one of the highlights of Series Ten; as it is, it’s a more than acceptable juncture in the ongoing narrative, but one that has somehow conspired to be a little less than the sum of its parts.

 

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 7: “THE PYRAMID AT THE END OF THE WORLD” / DIRECTOR: DANIEL NETTHEIM / WRITER: PETER HARNESS, STEVEN MOFFAT / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, TOGO IGAWA, RACHEL DENNING, TONY GARDNER / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 27TH MAY)

Steven Moffat has never been one for taking the easy way out. He’s been setting challenges for himself pretty much his entire writing career. His philosophy seems to be, push yourself, make yourself work harder as a writer to take your writing into places you’ve never been before, and – this being the tricky bit, maybe – don’t forget to take the audience along for the ride. Of late, he has been getting better at telling the viewers at home what the resolution is, as well as showing it to them on the screen, even if occasionally he slips back into making them work it out for themselves (having provided them with all the clues); Hell Bent was guilty of this, with its multiple potential explanations for what the Hybrid could be (of course the real answer was provided via clues throughout the rest of the episode), while Listen had been its ultimate expression. Extremis, in common with the rest of this year’s experiment in simplifying the format, took the lower example of the higher road, and pushed the envelope as far as Heaven Sent last series, while keeping things easy to follow for beginners. You only really needed a passing acquaintance with The Matrix, or maybe Tron or even Carnival of Monsters, to be able to understand what was going on in Extremis, and even if you didn’t, the entire premise was spelled out in dialogue and action quite well enough for you to get it.

 

The starting point for all this was, very loosely, the same as that of 1975’s The Android Invasion; an alien race run a simulation ahead of a planned invasion of Earth. Here it was a very modern simulation, however, being run inside a computer programme with exact copies of everybody and everything on the planet, from a series of hubs reproducing strategically important locations. The way into the mystery was perhaps more interesting than the way back out; whereas in 1975 the Doctor and Sarah pitched up in an apparently deserted English town, only to discover even stranger things happening around them, here it was Dan Brown who led the way into the story, producing an ostensibly ancient text that was so heretical everybody who read it immediately took their own lives afterwards. There were shades of everything from Castrovalva to The Ring in the set-up, with the modern ancient text and its read-me-and-die nature, but the plot was rigorous and thoroughgoing in making sure all these elements made sense (it even gave us an example of the TARDIS translation function not working inside the simulation, a clue as to that we weren’t any longer in the Real World). The resolution, in fact, was so far removed from the mythical promises the story seemed to be making about the book, that although it was a very gradual reveal rather than the usual single moment of rug-pulling, it still felt properly sinister. A sleight of authorial hand that made Extremis unique and distinctive, despite its many debts to popular texts of the last couple of decades. Steven Moffat took some very ill-matched ingredients and out of them whipped up something immensely satisfying.

 

And immensely dispensable. It’s unlikely the Doctor learned anything here – even the fact that the alien invasion is on its way – that he mightn’t have learned just as easily next week. So this episode might well not have happened at all – and in a sense it didn’t – for all its impact on the trajectory of the series. And that was what was beautiful about it. Extremis took a dialogue about the nature of life and its relationship with religion as its playground, and was very deferential – if a little playful – towards both, while only pretending to really be interested in either. Typical Doctor Who, in other words, wearing its influences on its sleeve while at the same time bending them to fit its own agenda. And in its irrelevance it made itself compulsive. It kept you glued to the screen by constantly shifting in front of you, despite also giving the impression of something contained and leisurely paced, and its impact upon the principals was profound in its superficiality.

 

Pearl Mackie was back to her shining best, unaffected and funny and proactive this week after a slight blip in her willingness to get involved in Oxygen. And Nardole was a much greater presence, both in the main plot and the wraparound side-story, not just because of his engagement and problem solving, but also because of the deliberate nods, played with a sense of mischief, about his true nature. Capaldi was simply brilliant, quietly and subtly immersing himself in his character’s blindness while simultaneously driving the plot and making it light enough to want to follow. Extremis was very funny, but almost always in order to elevate the tension rather than to puncture it. The Doctor’s final entreaty to Bill to have a night of fun before the soldiers head into battle against possibly their most dangerous enemy yet, was a fine moment both of character development and of establishing the severity of the situation.

 

We mustn’t forget Missy. Underplaying to the point of ambiguity, Michelle Gomez revealed herself the apparent answer to the puzzle of the Vault, while setting up a new mystery – why the Doctor might want to keep her there and how she might subsequently figure as the rest of Series Ten unfolds. The revelation itself wasn’t unexpected, the manner of its revealing was completely out of left-field. The interpolation of the scenes in which this happened was occasionally a little jarring, although the use of actual flashbacks within a simulation with no real past was quite a bold move, a further experiment in pushing the limits of Doctor Who’s conceptuality.

 

It’s difficult to say until their true nature is revealed, but the Monks themselves felt a little incongruously matched with their methods, albeit they were an unsettling presence in an already disconcerting narrative. Physically, they look like the primitive cousins of the Silence from Series Six, something slightly unformed but with plenty of potential for spookiness. They’re less the classic Doctor Who monster as we understand it of yore, but they are a nagging reminder that Steven Moffat’s approach is to create monsters out of half-remembered bad dreams and misappropriated playground games rather than stuffing animals in boiler suits and giving them gruff voices.

 

Extremis is a turning point in Series Ten. The simple, character building narratives of the past few episodes were left behind in favour of giving Bill a truly abstract, multi-layered event to contend with. And it was this year’s spiritual successor to Heaven Sent, a densely-plotted but affecting puzzle box of a story that essentially leaves its characters and the wider narrative untouched while quietly advancing them in unseen ways. It’s very much a signature piece for Steven Moffat’s vision of the series, outwardly respectful of institutions that might be open to criticism, but very ostentatiously critiquing of the institution of Doctor Who itself. It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that Moffat has made his stock in trade. It’s compulsory but immaterial viewing, an episode that will divide fans in their appreciation of it. But nevertheless brave, essential television for Saturday evenings.

 

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 6: “EXTREMIS” / DIRECTOR: DANIEL NETTHEIM / WRITER: STEVEN MOFFAT / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MICHELLE GOMEZ, CORRADO INVERNIZZI / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 20TH MAY)

Five episodes into Series Ten, with almost half the run now over, and we’re still being introduced to Bill Potts. There was a moment during Oxygen where Bill would have been happy to turn tail and flee, but the Doctor stops her. “Crew of forty,” says the Doctor. “I’ve got 36 records of life signs terminated”. This should have been Bill’s moment to prove what she’s learned over the course of the last four adventures, to have recognised the Doctor’s position as the policeman of the universe, to have registered what happens when the Doctor and his friends don’t step in and help – to at the very least have acknowledged that there might very well be four people still alive and breathing on the Chasm Forge. But when Nardole claps his hands together and says, “Okay then, back to the TARDIS!”, it’s all Bill can do to agree.

 

It was a moment of clumsiness that threatened to unravel what was in most ways an otherwise exceptional episode. Because we’ve seen Bill face mortal danger and survive and want to continue travelling with the Doctor, and we’ve seen her come to understand that facing terrible threats and yet still doing the right thing is what the Doctor does; she’s basically told people as much. Here, what was obviously planned to be a moment of doubt given the gravity of the situation, played instead as the Doctor testing a new potential companion, the one who said, “I thought we were going home”, halfway through Smile, only to find her unsuitable. And not just on account of the maths.

 

And here we are, five episodes down and seven to go, with a companion who feels natural and ordinary and all the things the fans who didn’t like Clara were hankering after. Yet but for a couple of obvious moments of recognition – “Didn’t we just fill this place with air?” – she felt like a passenger in this episode, there to be a victim in need of rescuing, rather than somebody who’s come along in order to be part of the rescue party. It’s Nardole’s job to be the victim (a role he essays very well); if Bill isn’t enthused into helping out, you have to wonder why the Doctor would keep wanting to bring her along. In the modern series, it isn’t enough to be ordinary – even if that ordinary includes bright and questioning and able to understand situations the Doctor can’t; other episodes have given Bill every reason to be part of the TARDIS team. Oxygen has her pointing things out the Doctor or Nardole should have noticed already; things we’ve noticed from the comfort of our sofas. The companion has to be somebody the Doctor needs to have around. But this week, she wasn’t. And that undermined the episode almost fatally.

 

The temperature of Oxygen was very much the temperature of classic Doctor Who, and it seemed designed to appeal as much to fans of the original series as it did those of the revival. Following such a very cheeky opening line, the rest of the episode checked its playfulness in at the airlock (Nardole didn’t get the memo) and instead went full-tilt for Import and Message. This was Doctor Who in prime Sci-Fi as Real-World Analogy mode, and for those who’d missed the anti-capitalism messages in recent weeks – although particularly in the case of the on-the-nose Thin Ice they weren’t especially difficult to spot – here the allusions weren’t so much insinuated throughout the plot, as bludgeoned into your face in a way that surely only preaches to the already converted. And that’s fine, Doctor Who does that from time to time. The Doctor is one of television’s most blatantly liberal heroes after all. But the notion that a future society might have learned so little from the slow crawl up from the prehistoric slimes of survival of the fittest to the shining peaks of humanist values, that it would be allowed to get away with programming its equipment to do away with the human components should they prove unprofit-making – a deliberate ignorance of Asimov that also nagged away at Smile – left the suspension of disbelief feeling slightly beggared. This was very much the sub-text of the Alien movies and the relationship between the expendable crews and their corporate paymasters writ large into the uber text, and it felt just a bit too obviously designed to invoke a response. The notion that unions by this time exist only in myth was inserted to make a point in an amusing way, but wasn’t enough of a surprise to invoke much in the way of a response. All subtlety was surrendered to a sermon.

 

In common with the classic series, but in deference to the revival, the characterisations favoured verisimilitude over entertainment value, with the odd allowance for making emotional connections. “As soon as my radio’s fixed,” was a smart way of introducing not just tension but also urgency and humanity into an opening scene that might otherwise have felt very by-the-numbers, and the survivors’ desire to visit Head Office at the conclusion was a nod to the notion that humankind wasn’t without hope despite what the rest of the episode was apparently trying to say. But there was little in the way of characterisation of the Chasm Forge crew between times, with the notable exception of Peter Caulfield’s wonderfully blue Dahh-Ren. Everybody else felt very real and the actors did an excellent job of giving everything the appropriate amount of gravity, but nobody was having a lot of fun this week. Doctor Who can and should try on different outfits every week of course, but in spite of the involving nature of the plot we would imagine an inverse ratio between the amount of love this episode gets from the hardcore of fandom – those that value Seasons Seven and Eighteen and The Caves of Androzani above Sylvester McCoy and Terror of the Autons and Donald Cotton – and its final viewing figure. This was Malcolm Hulke as rewritten by Christopher H. Bidmead, a story that dwelt more on its plot than the people who inhabited it, and that revelled in its ideas almost at the expense of connecting those ideas to its audience. It was the antithesis of Mathieson’s previous script The Girl Who Died, a story about the people overcoming the odds rather than the odds they were overcoming.

 

Which is where the three regulars come in, of course. Matt Lucas was exactly what we would have had if Skinner had stuck around after Mummy on the Orient Express, and the peril that Bill underwent served to distract us from the seriousness of the sacrifice the Doctor was making. Because for once, this was an episode that didn’t just nip at the margins of having an effect on the Doctor – albeit this being the Doctor whose character has undergone the most fundamental, gradual and deliberate change, that over the course of three years though – rather, it was an episode that left him with a huge, physical disability that will no doubt have massive consequences over the coming week or weeks. It would be a shame if, now that Capaldi’s Doctor has finally arrived in a place where it’s become easy to fall in love with his portrayal, this new addition (or subtraction) were to unsettle that.

 

Oxygen also continued in the vein of the rest of Series Ten in that it appeared to foreshadow the Cyberman story later in the run. Whether any of what we’ve seen will actually be instrumental in bringing the finale together remains to be seen, but there’s no question there’s been a running theme of humanity subserving itself to technology. It might just be that Moffat’s constant “clues” to Bill having a hidden identity as the Doctor’s granddaughter are simply put there as red herrings, a distraction from the real work he’s undertaking in re-establishing the Cybermen and their origins – or it might be the other way around. Or it might, of course, be neither, we’ll just have to wait and see.

 

In the end, Oxygen was a consummate exercise in fulfilling its own ambitions, and in this respect it succeeded absolutely. Tense, thrilling, dangerous, it threatened its regulars and for once neither cheated nor pulled back from the precipice, and at something much more than a superficial level it was Doctor Who taking itself to its outer limits and examining how far those limits could be pushed. As such, it was far from “standard” fare for the programme, and if it allowed itself some slack in other respects, in that one at least it should be lauded.

 

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 5: “OXYGEN” / DIRECTOR: CHARLES PALMER / WRITER: JAMIE MATHIESON / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, KIERAN BEW, JUSTIN SALINGER, PETER CAULFIELD, MIMI NDIWENI / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 13TH MAY)

One thing that fairy tales and usually short-form horror fiction have in common is that they will both often take place in a world that, while it might resemble our own, exists within its own rules, which very often don’t. Wolves can talk, for example, or vampires really exist. They require the reader to suspend their disbelief in a slightly different place than they might have to for something a little more mundane. 

Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who has often made use of this notion as, while Russell T Davies’ version of the series mostly took place ostensibly within a (caricatured, maybe, but nevertheless) rational depiction of our universe, Moffat has located it somewhere within the realm of classic children’s literature, its storylines rubbing shoulders with the likes of The Wizard of Oz and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There’s something “ordinary” underpinning it all, in other words, but often you’d be hard-pressed to see it for all the magic pervading the realism. 

Mike Bartlett’s first – and perhaps only, if Mark Gatiss is correct and next year Chris Chibnall uses a team entirely composed of writers new to the series – Doctor Who story is a fairy tale about a house that gobbles up children in order to feed the Rapunzel figure trapped at the very heart of it. It’s also a horror short story, befitting Moffat’s ideal of telling smaller plots that expand to fill the space through a greater concentration on the characters, about a mother who has cheated death through supernatural means. It does, of course, being Doctor Who, have a science fiction explanation at its core, albeit one that isn’t explored especially thoroughly. And it’s also that point in the series whereby during the RTD years, the programme would relocate back to modern day Earth to introduce the audience more thoroughly with the new companion’s family.

If there’s an issue with Knock Knock, it’s that the realism of Bill’s new student life doesn’t necessarily make for a perfect fit with the other influences Moffat and Bartlett are bringing to bear. Placing your suspension of disbelief has been an issue during the Moffat era, in a time when the companion’s boyfriend might spend 2,000 years as an automated Roman soldier before turning back into a regular person at the end of the story, or when your companion finishes the season with a TARDIS and companion of her own, having been snatched from the moment of death. And so it proves here, with Bartlett’s script fighting hard to impress upon us the danger to the group of six students who have thrown themselves together in order to find somewhere to live, from what in the end turns out to be a swarm of magic cockroaches granting a terrified child’s wish for his dying mother. 

Bartlett does a terrific job, given the limited time available, of convincing us the students are real people, helped no end by some terrific if not overly experienced actors. Ben Presley is very funny as the gangling Paul, his relief when he realises Bill isn’t reciprocating his desires being both very funny and very true. Alice Hewkin is also tremendous as Felicity, a very likeable character it’s disappointing to see gone so soon. In a manner that’s pretty traditionally old-school, Bartlett splits up the Doctor and Bill and then pairs them up with new characters, the Doctor with the excellent Colin Ryan as Harry, a very engaging young actor, and Bill with Mandeep Dhillon’s Shireen, the most accomplished of the junior guest cast and a decent foil for Pearl Mackie. With Harry being the grandson of the fourth Doctor’s early companion Lt. Sullivan (albeit confirmed in a line of dialogue that was cut), it’s tempting to think that Shireen might be the friend Billie Piper’s Rose often used to quote, but for the differences in spelling and age. All four of the students we really get to spend time with are engaging and enjoy a peculiar kind of chemistry that’s appropriate for new acquaintances attempting to become friends, and it’s notable that Bartlett creates investigative pairings aligned by gender rather than cross-matching as you might expect. It keeps the dynamic of the episode feeling fresh where it might be predictable. 

Bartlett also has some fun with the trappings of the haunted house genre, the inaccessible tower at the building’s heart playing a fundamental role and the “knock knock” sequence midway through proving just as frightening as the unseen banging in Robert Wise’s version of The Haunting, perhaps one of the most terrifying scenes in all of cinema. As the knocking escalates here, the shutters slamming shut unbidden and the house sealing itself off, there’s a tangible sense of things spiralling out of the students’ limited control and another possible and very effective visual allusion to Japanese horror as Felicity disappears through a window, only to be captured moments later by, well, a tree. There’s as little relief outside the house as within. We have however, come a long way since The Mark of the Rani.

The Japanese horror influence extends to the thoughtful way in which Bartlett includes the surroundings as part of the mystery. The house isn’t just the place within which the plot unfolds, it’s a fundamental part of what’s happening. The comprehensive manner in which the clues are provided even includes Pavel being trapped, Earthshock style, in the panels of the wall, before being freed once the music stops. The “everybody lives” ending – well not quite everybody, simply this latest batch of victims – feels consistent with Eliza’s shock at discovering who she is and what’s been happening to her.

But it’s here where Bartlett’s story runs a little adrift, the fairy-tale aspect taking over at the expense of believability. We can accept the lack of an explanation for the insectoid dryads, but it stretches credibility to imagine Eliza not remembering what her relationship is with the only person she’s had any contact with for the last seventy years, or at least to have found anything suspicious in her situation. There’s a huge emotional punch, of course, and David Suchet – both brilliantly creepy and persuasively compassionate – is entirely convincing in selling it, but the scene’s effectiveness rests on whether the audience can swallow the circumstances.

Whether we do or not, the first half an hour or so of Knock Knock is a terrific exercise in applying and intensifying tension, the first properly scary story of the series and just as accomplished a production as the previous three. We’re off to a good start, and now that we’re just a week or so away from discovering who’s in the vault, things might be about to go up another gear. We’re also possibly getting an indication of a wider narrative trajectory, the mention of regeneration and the references to “grandfather” potentially clues as to where Series Ten is heading…

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 4: “KNOCK KNOCK” / DIRECTOR: BILL ANDERSON / WRITER: MIKE BARTLETT / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, DAVID SUCHET, MARIAH GALE, MANDEEP DHILLON, COLIN RYAN / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 6TH MAY)

Given that the only example of such a thing between January of 1967 and the end of the series’ original run 22 years later was Black Orchid, an inconsequential Peter Davison two-parter with a reputation that might best be described as mixed, it could be considered surprising that one of the things Doctor Who fans have been clamouring for since the programme’s return in 2005 has been the return of the “pure historical”, a period-set story in which the only science fictional elements are the Doctor and his accoutrements. Unfortunately, Russell T. Davies was told in no uncertain terms in the wake of the Christopher Eccleston series that his trips back into history should be “sexed up” with strong monsters, lest the audience at home might forget they were watching Doctor Who. And so every journey to the past the Doctor has made over the last twelve years has involved some form of alien intervention, a mode of storytelling the fandom has dubbed the “pseudo-historical”.

 

Under Steven Moffat’s tutelage, second-time writer – her first Doctor Who was 2015’s Face the Raven, the strong but not unproblematic first round of the three-part Series Nine finale – Sarah Dollard has beaten the odds and found a way to combine strong, “sexy” monsters and the “pure” historical format, granting fans’ wishes as nearly as the modern series is ever likely to. She’s also produced a deceptively simple story shot through with the kind of idiosyncratic moral codes that set Doctor Who apart from its usually more gung-ho sci-fi brethren. Despite strong competition, particularly from The Pilot, Thin Ice is the best of Series Ten so far.

 

Set during the final hours of the last London Frost Fair in February 1814, the Doctor and Bill’s first foray into the past sees them visiting a frozen river Thames, an obvious but nevertheless very effective metaphor for the persecution that can hide beneath the cold exterior of Regency society. One-time Nathan Barley Nicholas Burns’ Lord Sutcliffe is as heartless as they come, and the crux of the episode is the continuation of his dynastic tradition, the subjugation of a magnificent wild beast that resides in the river, and that has been chained and grown for one purpose alone: to provide fuel for the Sutcliffes’ family business.

 

As a story, there were shades of The Beast Below and The Empty Child among other things, albeit mostly superficially, but whereas Smile borrowed from the past without really enhancing upon it, Thin Ice merely took a familiar enough situation that could be presented without the need for too much explanation, and used it as a point of departure to tell the story that really drove its engines; the moral complexity of a life of getting involved. In some respects the episode it most resembled then, was Time Heist, although while Stephen Thompson’s story simply reinforced the idea of Doctor Who by showing it from an unfamiliar perspective, Dollard made the lack of alien intervention the position from which she could examine and comment upon the Doctor’s apparent detachment from the people he gets called upon to save.

 

A number of ostensibly distinct themes were interwoven throughout the episode; Bill’s allusion to the butterfly effect calling into question whether the time travellers’ arrival could change things, before the Doctor’s intervention – after a slightly uncomfortable call-back to Kill the Moon demonstrated this twelfth Doctor’s insistence upon his human companions’ authority in making decisions that might affect the moral well-being of their species – foregrounded the series’ core concept, that it’s only through trying that we can make a difference. Bill’s ethnicity was also underlined as Dollard linked the elements of the narrative together, the creature’s slavery and the urchins’ predicament lightly contrasted by asking what accident of birth makes some of us “superior” enough that the freedoms of our inferiors are of less value. While it’s never really desirable to see the Doctor using physical violence to solve a situation, the instance of him using fisticuffs on Sutcliffe – ameliorated by being written as the pay-off to a joke – was instead the release of a building sense of injustice, entirely deserved by the recipient and a valuable moment in ensuring the episode didn’t start taking itself too seriously.

 

Not that there was too much risk of that. Through bright, entertaining dialogue and consistent, engaging character interplay, the serious undertones of Thin Ice were never allowed to tip its balance towards lecturing. Instead, Bill’s journey of learning who and what the Doctor is all about – and by extension our own re-examination of what makes good Doctor Who – was at centre stage, and more so perhaps than last week, we really got to learn about the Doctor while concurrently the Doctor got to learn about himself. This was a rare example of genuine character development for the eponymous Time Lord, that didn’t involve the kind of pyrotechnics that come with a series finale. Of course we know that he’s the “good man” this latest incarnation began by doubting, but even after fifty years of living among humans and learning our ways, this much more approachable newest model still had a thing or two to understand about detachment and compassion. The latter half of Thin Ice included a number of very lightly played but nonetheless quite moving character interactions between the Doctor and Bill, that much more subtly than we’ve been used to since the series’ revival, gave us a companion partnership that felt genuine and earned without telling us what we were supposed to be seeing. It’s like watching the seventh Doctor and Ace, reprised with feature-worthy talent both in front of and behind the cameras.

 

It goes without saying that both Capaldi and Mackie were pitch-perfect, an outstanding association with chemistry to burn. They’re electric in one another’s company, two magnetic presences in perfect accord. With just this single series together to shine, we need to cherish every single moment.

 

Which made it all the more surprising when Matt Lucas turned up moments from the end; he was sorely missed last week but Thin Ice was so good it made you forget to expect him. By the time he becomes more of a regular later in the run, Mackie will be established enough that the three should make for a formidable team. As for what’s in the vault, is there any doubt? The four knocks that once echoed the rhythm of the Doctor Who theme arrangement might have become three, but surely that’s just a subtle way of counting down to the reveal of a certain someone at the end of the series…? Or maybe it’s just Peter, demanding to know why everybody except Nardole seems to have forgotten about him.

 

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 3: “THIN ICE” / DIRECTOR: BILL ANDERSON / WRITER: SARAH DOLLARD / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, NICHOLAS BURNS, ASIATU KOROMA / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 29TH APRIL)

The thing about doing an episode that unashamedly harkens back to the likes of The Sensorites, The Wheel in Space or Four to Doomsday, stories wherein you get to spend a little time with just the Doctor and his companion(s) as they explore a brand new and rather futuristic location, is that eventually in all of those stories the time travellers have to meet the local population in order for the threat of the week to mean anything, so the audience at home have someone (or something) other than the regulars to care about. That was something that Smile spectacularly failed to provide – even the non-regular characters it did introduce were barely characterised and failed to elicit any kind of empathetic response – and so unfortunately, in spite of some incredible visuals and despite the always welcome company of Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor – Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s second attempt at a Doctor Who fell rather flat.

 

Cottrell-Boyce’s script was almost a cover version of showrunner Steven Moffat’s works, replacing “Don’t blink!” with “Keep smiling!” but retaining the theme of technology misinterpreting its surroundings, albeit with a much-simplified version of Moffat’s occasionally impenetrable plotting. It also consolidated the themes of the 1966 William Hartnell story The Ark, giving us Emojibots in place of Monoids and an outbreak of grief instead of the common cold – and a glimpse of an elephant just to make sure we didn’t miss the allusion. There was a Med-Tech straight out of The Ark in Space (Smile very deliberately positioned itself as a remake / alternative to both The Ark and The Ark in Space, as well as Moffat’s own The Beast Below) and the “glumness kills” motif from The Happiness Patrol. It was a bundle of influences and archetypes, the biggest of all being Samuel Butler’s 1872 technophobic satirical utopia Erewhon, wherein illness is treated as criminality and machines develop consciousness, but Cottrell-Boyce failed to provide much in the way of suspense, surprise or even sympathy to keep the viewer interested. He raised lots of ideas, many of which might have been interesting to explore, but rarely expanded upon any to the degree whereby they might have made an impact.

 

Instead, the one purpose of Smile appeared to be to convey to new companion Bill, the Doctor’s role as intergalactic policeman, a realisation that came after a lovely if somewhat contrived mid-episode retreat to the TARDIS, the contrivance of which was undermined by the demonstration fewer than three minutes into the cold open that the tiny nano-robots would have been perfectly capable of following the Doctor and Bill out of the city. As a continuation of Bill’s introduction to the Doctor and his travels, Smile hit a single – if continuously amusing – note of addressing its purpose, that rather ran out of things to add once the mid-point of the story had been reached. The vast majority of the episode was an exercise in treading water between instances of “So that’s what this is all about!”, the lack of anybody worthwhile by which to illustrate the Doctor’s adoption of worthy causes selling his activities a little short. Smile was all about telling us who the Doctor is and what he does, rather than necessarily showing us instead.

 

The low point of this approach, was the sheer amount of essentially unwarranted expository dialogue given to Peter Capaldi. Much of the episode consisted of him entering a variety of environments and telling us – and Bill – exactly what was going on, rather than discovering these things as we watched. And while occasionally it’s a good thing for the audience to be ahead of the regular characters in this regard, the pre-titles sequence placed us so far ahead of them that the moment that ought to have been a big revelation for everyone watching – the reason Gliese 581d was so deserted – happened as the apparent result of the Doctor reading a mind that had already been removed. It was an approach that eliminated most of the tension that the script might have been aiming to build. The resolution, which amounted to the Doctor rebooting the system, would have been fine if we’d been given an opportunity to care about where that would lead. But his subsequent “negotiation” with the Emojibot, while attending to one of the oversights of The Ark (that of the humans taking over the Refusians’ homeworld with little thought given to consent or co-operation), relied on the idea that the Emojibot had both a prior claim to Gliese 581d and some semblance of sentience, neither of which was really sold to us during the course of the 45 minutes. Capaldi’s brief entreaty instead came across as superficial and unjustified.

 

The robots’ misapprehension about how to deal with grief was a gross overreaction that might have worked better if the story had fashioned itself more as pulpy b-movie sci-fi than gleaming philosophical Science Fiction. Lawrence Gough’s direction, so beautifully judged in last week’s The Pilot, was prone to tonal inconsistencies that created disengagement with the episode’s ambitions, huge claustrophobic low-angled close-ups distracting from the empty spaces, and poor acting choices from the under-served non-regulars destabilising the suspension of disbelief chief among them. The drama lacked coherence.

 

Peter Capaldi himself was left to flounder a little as the story progressed, almost as if the actor was forced to enlarge his performance to offset the lack of input elsewhere. If he was evoking the ghost of Tom Baker’s fourth Doctor, there were moments he risked slipping into Season Seventeen mode, especially during the sequences where he was acting by himself. That he never reached the levels of frustration Matt Smith endured during Nightmare in Silver is a blessing, but the introduction of a group of grief survivors from the first wave of Emoji-killings would have mitigated against that ever becoming a possibility.

 

The ongoing introduction of Pearl Mackie as Bill, despite the fact that after ninety minutes of screen time she still hasn’t had any substantial interaction with any character other than the Doctor, was the episode’s brightest note. There’s no doubting the chemistry that exists between the two actors, and Mackie continues to be fresh and natural in her role, a real – and realistic – audience identification figure. Once her adventures are properly underway, there’s every possibility that she’ll ultimately prove the most likeable and comprehensible companion we’ve had since the series’ return.

 

And Smile was far from a poor production. Its story was clear and coherent, and the visuals – other than some murkily lit sets in the Erehwon’s interior – were spectacular and evocative. It was like an early period “future”-set Hartnell story given a motion picture budget and going to town on it. In terms of what Doctor Who is capable of on the kind of money Hollywood blows on its stars’ trailers, it was sumptuous to look at and sensually scintillating. Even the music managed to invoke a pleasing sense of displacement, Murray Gold’s authentic orchestrations mixing with synthetic textures to produce something distinct and unsettling. Fans of classic Doctor Who had plenty to take to their hearts.

 

It’s just a shame that as a story with so much potential, a few possibly ill-advised decisions and the lack of emotional credibility meant it landed somewhere south of a Terence Dudley script from 1982.

 

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 2: “SMILE” / DIRECTOR: LAWRENCE GOUGH / WRITER: FRANK COTTRELL-BOYCE / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS, MINA ANWAR, KIRAN L. DADLANI, RALF LITTLE / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 22ND APRIL)

Steven Moffat’s introductions to both Amy Pond and Clara Oswald were of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, in the former case an extraordinary circumstance that had been created by the unusual manner in which she’d met the Doctor, and in the latter because of something she would go on to do but that – in the time paradox nature the series allows for – we as an audience had already been able to see the results of. Indeed Russell T. Davies had a habit too, of creating “ordinary” people and then fashioning something entirely extraordinary around them; Rose became the Bad Wolf and Donna the Doctor-Donna hybrid. Martha was Davies’ only companion who didn’t undergo some kind of supernatural metamorphosis during his tenure. Even Captain Jack got killed off then made immortal…

 

With The Pilot, Steven Moffat has fashioned a back-to-basics approach to introducing the Doctor’s new companion. There’s no doubt that further down the line, extraordinary things will happen to Pearl Mackie’s Bill – although whether that will involve some kind of physical transformation remains to be seen, but if the sudden focus on the photograph of Susan, when Bill was introducing herself is a clue, then it’s not impossible… – but for the moment she’s the epitome of the ordinary girl who is meeting the extraordinary man. The brilliant thing about this debut episode, is that Moffat has provided a premise and then extrapolated his plot logically out of the character he’s presenting. The “space engine oil” might be a fairly typical technology-going-wrong idea, but the way in which it operates comes entirely out of the potential relationship Bill might have built with its new pilot, Heather, and its focus on Bill – and the narrative deviations as it follows her around the universe – are extensions of that.

 

Pearl Mackie proves herself a delightful, natural, unaffected, engaging and very watchable actress, and the chemistry she has with Peter Capaldi was obvious from the moment he walked into the very first scene. In fact, the relationship she builds with Capaldi and Matt Lucas is already suggestive of one of those “defining” TARDIS teams that impose themselves on fan consciousness, like a nascent Sarah, Harry and the fourth Doctor, or Jamie, Zoe and the second. The three actors – and, crucially, their three characters – complement one another with divine ease, gently undermining any possibility of superiority within one another, while reinforcing the qualities that make each of them individually appealing. It’s small wonder that Nardole’s initially minor role at the beginning of Series Ten has been expanded and extended through the rest of the run; in some ways he’s Bill’s key to understanding what’s happening to her, while also being a foil for over-confidence. He’s K9 to Bill’s Leela, but in a way that humanises that very alien TARDIS trio and makes the current bunch the most likeable and most easy to feel affinity with for a long while.

 

Moffat also gave Mackie a lot to work with, in an episode that eased her in by putting her through her paces. At every juncture she was called upon to produce charm, while simultaneously undergoing all the usual reactions a modern Doctor Who companion can expect – including the beautifully understated scene with the photographs, and the recognition of what it must signify.

 

Using Bill as a way of reintroducing the concept while rooting it in a university was a stroke of genius. It’s unlikely that anybody watching would have been too unfamiliar with what to expect, so instead Moffat toyed with those expectations in a very playful but again entirely rational manner. “It’s bigger on the inside” was of course present and correct (and no faffing around with the wording this time either), but the hoops we jumped through to get there were both amusing, and illustrative of Bill’s character. She is, as we’d been told, someone who asks the sensible questions that anybody else might be expected to ask. But she does so with a slightly skewed view of her environment that demonstrates the difference in what she notices of it, and yet the clarity with which she does. Bill sees the world in the same way a poet does, she understands how everything fits together without getting bogged down in the nuts and bolts. It was refreshing.

 

There was a good deal of the familiar about The Pilot too. From the Japanese horror imagery of the watery pilot to the occasionally too knowing dialogue, this did feel like typical Steven Moffat Doctor Who given a slightly new set of priorities. The campus setting isn’t a million miles away from the regular appearances of Coal Hill School in Series Eight. And some of his reveals are becoming easier to spot (the face in the reflection being the right way around, for example). On the other hand, there were still surprises in store, like the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from the Movellans – about whom there’s got to be a disco-robot story worth telling – or the sight of the same Doctor who struggled so badly, albeit with supreme confidence that he was indistinguishable from the real thing, as The Caretaker’s fish out of water, energising an entire lecture hall’s worth of students by imparting the knowledge that TARDIS stands for “joy.” Just one of many delicious moments that peppered the episode, creating an anticipation of what small but striking moment might happen next. The Pilot was an accumulation of small but striking moments, adding up to a considerably greater whole than its relatively modest parts might have been expected to assemble.

 

This being Steven Moffat, there was also a considerable amount of ground-laying with an eye to the rest of Series Ten. In the spirit of mentioning things in passing that don’t need addressing, but coming back to fill in the detail anyway (Chips Girl being the obvious example), I wonder if we’ll eventually get to discover who the original pilot of the time – and spacecraft that leaked engine oil all over the plot was? It’s possible that’s something to be picked up later; it’s certain that the Vault will be. This year’s Bad Wolf is a hunking great treasure chest hidden in the depths of the university, and which the Doctor and Nardole have been empowered to protect. What might it contain? If Time Lord technology is involved, and given the references to Susan and the Movellans, and looking forward to a Master meet-up and the Mondasian Cybermen, then surely it’s another extension of the Matrix somehow, just as the Confession Dial was, and it’s the Doctor’s past that’s contained within it.

 

Well, probably not. Although this breezier version of Steven Moffat is bound to get wrapped up in continuity-baiting narrative complications somehow, but for now it’s just fine seeing him letting his hair down and having a little fun with the subjects of the series rather than its format for a change. Pearl Mackie is already well along the road of proving herself the most likeable companion possibly since first-series Rose, and that’s a feat that’s been achieved out of a combination of actor, character, and author all bringing a sense of not bogging themselves down in either expectation or history, but instead creating something new for the sheer enjoyment of doing it. And that’s what The Pilot was, in the end: the sheer enjoyment of doing it.

 

DR. WHO SERIES 10, EPISODE 1: “THE PILOT” / DIRECTOR: LAWRENCE GOUGH / WRITER: STEVEN MOFFAT / STARRING: PETER CAPALDI, PEARL MACKIE, MATT LUCAS / RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW ON I-PLAYER (AIRED 16TH APRIL)