July 12: "Flatline"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Flatline" (from
Exclusive Doctor Who Flatline poster revealed)

Ooh, another milestone: "Flatline" is Doctor Who's 250th story.  (This assumes the same things about what stories count as "Planet of the Dead" assumed, and further that "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Let's Kill Hitler" are separate stories -- not as uncontroversial a claim as you might initially think.)  Plus Jamie Mathieson's second script comes right after his first one -- which means he joins that small group of writers who've had back-to-back stories air.²⁶⁰  And just like "Mummy on the Orient Express", "Flatline" is very very good at providing a scary scenario with an implacable enemy.

There are, in fact, two things that are working in this episode's favor.  The first is the nature of the Boneless, as the threat is slowly unveiled bit by bit in a logical way, leading to them stalking our heroes through sitting rooms and atmospheric tunnels.  The second is the way the Doctor is trapped inside the TARDIS (yep, this is the Doctor-lite episode), which means that Clara has to step up and "be" the Doctor for this episode.

The first one is fascinating.  There've occasionally been stories dealing with the idea of two dimensional beings (although not really on televised Doctor Who), but "Flatline" takes the idea very seriously and provides us with a clever rendition of the idea.  The key thing about the Boneless is that they're totally unfathomable; we know that they're methodically working their way through people by pulling them into their two dimensional world, for some purpose that might be scientific, or might be malevolent, but that's about all we know.  Like the Foretold in the previous story, the Boneless don't speak with us, so we can only infer their motives, and that makes them more scary.  Do they really not know that they're killing people when they pull them into two dimensions, or do they not care -- or are even actively murdering people?  That's creepy enough, and it's aided by a lot of good artwork on walls, CG effects, and some fantastic forced perspective tricks (the one where George appears to be standing near a wall, and then the camera pans to show that he's been flattened against all the surfaces is the best one) -- watching the Boneless stumble forward in their borrowed forms is creepy and visually impressive.

The Boneless approach. ("Flatline") ©BBC

The second thing -- Clara being the Doctor -- is good because it not only gives Clara a chance to step forward and save people (with the Doctor's help, of course -- but the final solution is her idea), but it gives her the opportunity to see things from the Doctor's perspective.  She knows that it's up to her to keep everyone alive, and that she'll have to lie to them in order to achieve that, because, as the Doctor says, "it's true that people with hope tend to run faster, whereas people who think they're doomed—"  "Dawdle.  End up dead," Clara finishes.  ("So that's what I sound like," the Doctor remarks.)  So she has to keep herself composed while trying to save everyone from something totally bizarre, and all the while the group is fragmenting -- Fenton is depicted as a terrible human being, someone so close-minded that psychic paper doesn't work on him and who dismisses the deaths of his fellow workers as being those of "Community Payback scumbags".  (Incidentally, what is actually happening when Fenton knocks the TARDIS out of Clara's bag?  He suddenly yells, "Give me that machine!  Hand it over!" for no clear reason whatsoever (he might be going for the 2Dis, but it's not obvious) -- as if they needed a reason for Clara to drop the TARDIS and that was the best they could come up with.)  It's a testament to Clara's skills that she's not only able to keep her cool under pressure, but also to come up with the answer to get the Doctor back so that he can send the Boneless back to their own place.  It also means that she now has a better understanding of what it actually means to be the Doctor.

The Doctor, despite this being a Doctor-lite episode, gets quite a bit to do, as he looks through Clara's eyes to help figure out what's happening.  There are also some fun gags with the TARDIS -- the shots of him looking through the doors (which are now tiny for him) don't always work (there's just something slightly off about the look of the thing), but moments like passing her a sledgehammer or walking his way off the train tracks like Thing from The Addams Family are cute.  He may not be personally on the scene, but the Doctor is just as much a part of events as Clara is.

"Flatline" gives us a solid script with an imaginative concept, matched with excellent direction from Douglas Mackinnon and great special effects, which all combine with good performances to provide a tense, highly watchable episode.  I asked for more like "Mummy on the Orient Express", and Mathieson definitely delivered -- "Flatline" is an outstanding episode, content to work within its limitations but pushing them as far as it can, to great success.

(All that said, the most worrying moment in "Flatline" wasn't in the episode itself, but in a commercial that aired during the BBC America broadcast for a company called Fathead, which makes high quality life-size posters of people that you can put on your wall -- usually athletes, but they can be of anyone.  Watching a child attempting to hug the Fathead of his soldier father was, in the light of this episode, incredibly disturbing.)







²⁶⁰ The others are Ian Stuart Black (The Savages and The War Machines), Chris Boucher (The Face of Evil and The Robots of Death), David Fisher (The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara), Christopher H. Bidmead (Logopolis and Castrovalva -- although that spans a season break), Pip and Jane Baker (The Trial of a Time Lord Part Fourteen and Time and the Rani -- but that one's a bit of a technicality and spans a season break), Russell T Davies (various), and Steven Moffat (various).