June 23: "The Bells of Saint John - A Prequel" / "The Bells of Saint John"

And now we've reached 2013 (Doctor Who's 50th year!) and the start of the second half of series 7.  And of course we have another internet prequel scene to pique your interest.  This one is simple -- it shows the Doctor on a swing, talking to a little girl -- but it drives home just how fabulously good Matt Smith is with children.  They have a nice little chat about how the Doctor is looking for someone ("Well, the first two times I met her, I just sort of bumped into her, so I thought maybe if I just wandered about a bit, I might bump into her again.  You know, like destiny, sort of," the Doctor says.  "That's rubbish," the girl replies.  "Yeah, I think it probably is," the Doctor agrees.  "Hey, maybe I could find a quiet room and have a good think about it instead" -- which we then see in the main episode is exactly what he does), and then the girl walks off, with neither of them aware that she's in fact Clara, the person the Doctor's looking for.  A quick but charming scene.

The main event, however, is "The Bells of Saint John": a cheeky title (the "bells" are the TARDIS's phone ringing -- the TARDIS, as you'll recall, having a "St. John Ambulance" sigil on the door) that nevertheless leads to an action-packed whirlwind of a tale.  This is our first proper look at the companion version of Clara (other than a brief moment at the end of the previous story), and fortunately she's not quite as perfect as the last two versions had been -- fortunately because that gives "our" Clara a chance to grow and develop and not be completely boring.  The Doctor finally finds her, after both trying the "random chance" and the "sit in a room and think" approaches (albeit in a room in a monastery in 1207 Cumbria), by pure chance -- Clara calls the TARDIS's phone after being given the number by "the woman in the shop"²⁴⁵, trying to get help with the internet on her laptop.  (Although Clara seems really helpless here -- is it really likely that a woman in her mid-20s in 2013 would be quite so hopeless with connecting to the Wi-Fi?)

That's the (deliberately contrived) setup, but what follows is really quite wonderful.  "There's something in the Wi-Fi," the Doctor tells us, and while it does seem somewhat fanciful, everyone treats it with sufficient seriousness to make you believe in the idea of a company out there stealing people's minds/souls via Wi-Fi, all for a sinister client: the Great Intelligence (we learn at the end) has been feeding off these minds to sustain itself.  (It's a link that's hinted at earlier in the episode, as the walking base stations -- the "Spoonheads" -- repeat back what's said to them, much as the Intelligence did with young Walter Simeon.)  This means that it has a lot of "agents" out in London, and it's not happy that the Doctor has pulled Clara out of their network before she can be fully downloaded.

(Incidentally, we get a slightly different outfit for the Doctor: the basic feel is the same (coat, bow tie, braces, etc.), but we get a longer purple coat and a darker bow tie.  Nevertheless, it still feels like a natural fit for Matt Smith's Doctor.)

The Doctor rides a motorcycle out of the TARDIS, ready to take
Clara to breakfast. ("The Bells of Saint John") ©BBC

From there it's a mad dash around, with possibly the best bit being all of London going dark except for the area Clara's in, which has a big plane heading for a crash landing -- which leads to the Doctor materializing aboard the plane (in a really wonderful shot from director Colm McCarthy, as they head into the TARDIS, dematerialize, and rematerialize and head straight into the plane) and stopping it from crashing.  But there's also the Doctor's confrontation with Miss Kizlet at the coffee shop, with Kizlet taking over the bodies of everyone in the shop.  Or the Doctor's motorcycle ride up the side of the Shard.  Or the reveal that he's gotten a Spoonhead to confront Miss Kizlet and her gang, while he's comfortably still in the shop.  Once this episode really gets going, it never stops, and all the set pieces link together in a very satisfying way.

In some ways, "The Bells of Saint John" has two jobs: introduce the companion version of Clara, and provide the equivalent of a spectacular series opener.  At both jobs it succeeds admirably.  This is Doctor Who as pure fun, with little angst and a lot of entertainment.  "The Bells of Saint John" is a great, highly enjoyable episode, getting the 2013 run off to a fabulous start.







²⁴⁵ The mention of this convenient arranged meeting is largely thrown away here, but they'll finally explain it in the series 8 finale.