August 7: "The Return of Doctor Mysterio"

It's been a full year since a new episode of Doctor Who has been on our screens, and while some exciting stuff has happened in the meantime (including currently-missing story The Power of the Daleks getting an animated reconstruction for its 50th anniversary and David Tennant doing a set of tenth Doctor audios for Big Finish), this still feels like something of an event: Doctor Who is finally back, with the punning title "The Return of Doctor Mysterio".  ("Punning" because Doctor Who is frequently called Doctor Misterio in Latin America (dating back to the '60s), and Steven Moffat has recently learned this from his 2015 Doctor Who World Tour.)  And so our very first shot of the episode features...Comic Sans?!  No!  The bane of typeface fans everywhere!  Although it does appear in a comic book, so maybe it's more forgivable.  And that's here because Doctor Who has decided to tackle the current trend of superheroes.

And so we get an affectionate opening, with the Doctor and a young boy named Grant Gordon who, as befits a young boy, is into superhero comics.  (Although the adult Grant doesn't seem to have lost that interest -- note the modern Superman comic on his bedside table -- despite being an actual superhero himself.)  There are some fun little gags with the Doctor, such as him working out that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person ("Everyone knows they're the same person," Grant scoffs²⁷⁴), or inquiring about Spider-Man:

DOCTOR: Why did they call him Spider-Man?  Don't they like him?
YOUNG GRANT: He was bitten by a radioactive spider, and guess what happened?
DOCTOR: Radiation poisoning, I should think.
YOUNG GRANT: No, he got special powers.
DOCTOR: What, vomiting, hair loss, and death?  Fat lot of use.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Return of Doctor Mysterio)

This is all ultimately in aid of two things: having Grant call the Doctor "Doctor Mysterio" (thus justifying the title) and having the Doctor give Grant a special crystal that he inadvertently swallows which grants him superpowers (so that there can actually be a superhero in the Doctor Who universe).  It's all setup -- fun setup, but still setup.

No, what Moffat is interested in is looking at how having superpowers would actually affect a person.  As he kept noting in interviews, he was more interested in Clark Kent than in Superman.  It's not a bad move, but there's frequently the feeling lurking in the background that Moffat thinks he's being very clever by doing this, which rather ignores the fact that he's by no means the first person to consider superheroes in this light.  Consequently, moves that look like they're intended to subvert the superhero genre end up looking like they're aping it instead.

The Ghost in Harmony Shoal. ("The Return of Doctor Mysterio") ©BBC

This leads to a rather curious episode.  One of the strengths of Doctor Who is that it can essentially be any genre, but placing the Doctor in those genres tends to subvert them, to send them off into new and interesting directions.  But since Moffat thinks he's already subverting the genre, he sends the Doctor off to deal with the other side of the plot, leaving the adult Grant to balance his life as both the Ghost and as a nanny for the baby of the girl he's crushing hard on, reporter Lucy Fletcher.  And so what follows basically just is a superhero movie (albeit a condensed one).  We get Grant switching rapidly back and forth between his two roles, trying very hard not to let Lucy figure out that he's the Ghost while rescuing people from fires and such.  He even manages to get pulled into a rooftop interview/date with Lucy (yes, just like the movie Superman) that goes more or less the way you'd expect.  None of this should be construed as being tough criticisms, mind; Justin Chatwin has an easy charm as Grant and does a reasonable job of being the tough guy as the Ghost, and Charity Wakefield does a good job as Lucy, providing the foil to both Grant and the Ghost (and watching her interactions with each, and the differences between the two, is nicely played).  And crucially, there definitely is chemistry between Chatwin and Wakefield that really helps sell the storyline.  It's certainly an enjoyable superhero tale -- it's just not a groundbreaking one.

The Doctor instead is far more concerned with the goings-on at Harmony Shoal.  That name might have rung a bell with some people, as in the previous episode it was the Shoal of the Winter Harmony who were buying the diamond from River Song -- and if it didn't ring a bell, then people peeling their heads open to reveal blue insides should have.  In some ways this plotline resembles another comic book, the seminal Watchmen, with Harmony Shoal planning on faking an alien attack on New York City -- although instead of averting a nuclear war, Harmony Shoal want all the world leaders to take refuge in their buildings and then convert them into vehicles for their brain hosts to use, thus controlling the world.  And Harmony Shoal want to use the Ghost as one of those vehicles (thereby tying the two plots together).  Oh, and look!  Nardole is back!  It seems the Doctor cut him out of the Hydroflax robot body and reassembled him, because, in the wake of River's death (or at least the last time the Doctor saw her), "you were worried you'd be lonely."  Matt Lucas and Peter Capaldi have a fun and easy relationship here, with Nardole being both comic relief and the Doctor's conscience, to a degree.  It works really well.

So this isn't perhaps the deepest episode ever, but it does take a stab at providing a look at the human side behind the superhero, and at that it's largely successful.  You could, after all, imagine a version of this where the Doctor and the Ghost team up to stop Harmony Shoal, with the focus on the superpowers side of things, and that just wouldn't have been as interesting.  I can see how people who are sick of superheroes would find this more of the same, but as long as you're not one of those people you should find plenty to enjoy here.  It's not the most original story ever, but it is well told and acted, and there's the confidence that's typical of the current Doctor Who production team on display to help power through any of the weaker moments (such as the weird bit with Mr. Huffle the squeeze toy).  This in fact may be the smoothest and most confident of certainly the Moffat era Christmas specials, and possibly even of all the Christmas specials.  "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" might be a tad familiar, but it's undeniably fun.







²⁷⁴ Having taught classes where Superman and Clark Kent have come up, I can in fact inform you that no, not everyone knows that they're the same person.  That made for an interesting conversation...