August 1: "Nightvisiting" (Class)

Now this is more like it!

If the first episode of Class was largely setting everything up, and the second was good but a bit disjointed, then this episode is where they hit the ground running, firing on all cylinders.  "Nightvisiting" is a good balance of the character stuff and the "problem of the week" stuff.

This time around we focus primarily on Tanya; last week we learned that her dad had died, and this week it's the two-year anniversary of his death from a stroke.  Tanya is still broken up about it (or perhaps the anniversary has caused all her old feelings to resurface), which is why this week's monster has chosen to try and latch onto her.  This week it's a weird plant-like creature called the Lankin²⁷¹, which is here to feed on people's grief.  But fascinatingly, the Lankin can't just grab people and force them to give up their grief; instead, people have to reach out to the Lankin, to be willing to surrender their grief to them.  This means that the Lankin has to convince people to do so, which it does by presenting people with dead friends and relatives, offering them a form of closure.

Tanya talks to her "dad". ("Nightvisiting") ©BBC

Effectively, that means we get little character studies between Tanya and her deceased father Jasper, as well as (to a lesser extent) Miss Quill and her dead sister.  We learn who Tanya is and how much her father meant to her, and we learn that Miss Quill (or Andra'ath, as her sister calls her) doesn't like her sister very much.  Oh, and Ram sees Rachel again, because apparently the poor guy hasn't suffered enough -- but he books it out of there pretty fast (although that allows the show to have a very effective scare, as Rachel suddenly appears in April's Skype window due to the video lag).  But that also means that not only do we get insights into these characters, but also that we get to see just how manipulative the Lankin is.  It's fascinating, watching it try to say just the right things, freely admitting that it's not actually the dead come back to life (although it does suggest that it possesses the dead's souls) but nevertheless trying to convince people that it doesn't matter, that they can give over their grief to the Lankin -- although it leaves out the part that it will kill the person.

But because this isn't your typical swaggering alien invasion, "Nightvisiting" gets to be a much quieter piece, about characters talking to each other -- whether that's interactions with the Lankin, or Charlie's interactions with his boyfriend Matteusz, who's been kicked out of his parents' house.  And since this is geared toward teenagers/young adults, you'd better believe we get a sex scene -- tastefully done, mind, but still there.  But ultimately it's the two differing conversations with the Lankin -- Tanya's and Miss Quill's -- that hold the most interest.  Miss Quill is immediately distrustful and is largely playing for time, while Tanya seems actually interested in the Lankin's proposition, even if still hesitant.  It's a fascinating discussion that makes for compelling viewing.

I said last time that Class didn't really have a handle on how to actually deal with anything coming through the tear (and thank goodness the characters are back to calling it that this week too), but that was partly because it seemed like the sorts of things coming through were going to be largely beyond their capabilities.  The Lankin, by contrast, is a clever idea that the team clearly can deal with, and while the final solution is to drive a bus through the Lankin and sever its link to Tanya and her dad, it feels like a reasonable solution, rather than a skin-of-their-teeth save.

So in "Nightvisiting" we get a clever, intriguing monster that leads to a whole series of character studies and even some character growth (including Tanya letting go at the end and Ram starting to open up to the others), and most importantly the balance struck here is near perfect.  This is an excellent piece of television and an encouraging sign for the series.  I suspect this might end up being the high point of the run, but if the remaining episodes can even come close to this then they'll have a winning show on their hands.







²⁷¹ This appears to be a reference to the old ballad "Lamkin", about a sort of bogeyman who murders a mother and her son.  Some versions call it "Lankin", hence the name here.  It doesn't appear to be a parallel to the Shadow Kin from the first episode (so it's not actually the Lan Kin, as some sources have suggested).

July 31: "The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo" (Class)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this episode.  It's ostensibly about a killer tattoo (well, sort of), but the story seems far more interested in examining the human cost of the events last episode, particularly with regards to Ram.  That's an admirable goal, but it does mean that this is shaping up to be a rather different show from what the first episode seemed to indicate.

Let's be clear: Ram's storyline is very well done.  It's good that we get an episode that isn't shy about dealing with the fallout from the previous week, and Fady Elsayed is more than up to the task of portraying Ram as someone who's hurt and confused and can't even take solace in football anymore, thanks to his new prosthetic leg that the Doctor gave him.  You really get a sense of the anguish Ram is going through, with his girlfriend dead and him unable to tell anyone about it, other than some weird kids he was only thrust together with because of the circumstances.  The only one he kind of opens up to is Tanya, and we do get the sense that their relationship is stronger than we might have otherwise guessed -- Ram might ostensibly be using her for tutoring help, but there seems to be a stronger connection beyond that between the two of them.

The other nice thing that this episode does is actually examine what it would mean for these kids to be watching over the "bunghole of time" (as Tanya calls it).  "Even if something does come through, what are we supposed to do about it?" Tanya wonders.  "We're not superheroes."  But this is where the episode goes slightly awry -- because something has come through, and they don't really have any idea what to do about it.

Ram confronts the dragon's mate. ("The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo")
©BBC

That something is not actually the dragon tattoo that keeps moving around on Ram's coach Dawson's skin (which brings to mind the tattoo-like thing on Me in series 9's "Face the Raven"), but rather that dragon's mate, which kills people by skinning them alive and has Dawson reach into the corpse so that the mate can feed on the fresh blood.  Dawson is OK with this because the dragon made him stronger and more powerful.  What's notable about these scenes is how Class appears to be doubling down on the gore.  Ram is once again splashed with blood, and he witnesses the dragon kill one of the cleaning staff, as well as the aftermath of its killing one of the assistant coaches.  (Not that the others emerge unscathed, as they watch the dragon kill the headmaster, Mr Armitage -- which is actually pretty upsetting, given how much we'd seen of his character in Doctor Who, and how he seemed like a decent person.)  Writer Patrick Ness seems to really want to confront Ram with this awfulness, to keep reminding him of what happened to Rachel, but he does it in a rather sensational manner.  Which is fine, this is obviously trying to be a darker show, and it doesn't feel as pointless as it did in early Torchwood, but it is still noticeable.  And the good thing that comes out of it is Ram confronting the dragon's mate: "So she's trapped.  Maybe you'll never get her off his body.  That's the new reality. What are you going to do about it?  ...  Maybe you'll never have her back the way you want.  I'll never get Rachel back either.  But at least you'll have her.  Maybe you could find a way to make the new reality work."  But that means that they all seem to be largely accepting of Dawson's ultimate fate.  OK, fine, he was a murderer (or at least complicit), but it still doesn't sit right.

And this resolution is also where the episode falls down a bit.  Because the episode has made a point of saying that this group doesn't really know how to stop anything that comes through the tear.  (I'm gonna keep calling it the "tear", as I don't know that I can quite bring myself to keep using "bunghole of time" seriously.)  And the ultimate resolution of that is to talk to the creatures that come through, reason with them.  That's a laudable message, but I suspect it won't work that often.  (It didn't really work with the Shadow Kin last time, for instance.)  And so that means that they don't really have any more of a clue of how to handle things at the end of the episode than at the beginning.  And that's really unsatisfying, particularly because the episode seems to believe that they do have a better handle on things.  Maybe Miss Quill will be of more help next time (since here she gets her own subplot about being observed by a robot which has apparently been constructed by the Governors (aka the school board) which is clearly setting up something for later on in the series).  But as of right now I don't really buy it.

So I dunno.  If you were to judge this based purely on Ram's storyline, and on the growth he experiences, as he's finally able to (start to) confront his demons and his new reality and is even able to confide in his father Varun (Aaron Neil, doing an outstanding job), then this is a great success.  If you judge this based on avoiding characterization clichés and making our heroes actually confront what it's like living in this sort of world, then this is a success.  But if you were judging it based on the dragon/coach subplot, then it feels both a bit standard/unsurprising and a bit unresolved.  So that's probably the definition of a guarded success, then.

July 30, 2017: "For Tonight We Might Die" (Class)

Oh, hello again! Now where were we?  Ah, that's right, Class.

As noted last time, Doctor Who took a year off.  But it wasn't a completely Who-free time: in October 2016, Class, a brand new original spin-off, premiered on the online-only channel BBC Three, as well as in Australia.²⁷⁰  Class was the brainchild of author Patrick Ness (perhaps best known as the author of A Monster Calls), who expanded a Doctor Who pitch into a full-blown series, all about life at Coal Hill (the school seen all the way back in the first episode, and most recently as the school that Clara taught at).  Over the season's eight episodes, students would have to balance their personal lives with alien threats, much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  This was meant to be a show that spun off from Doctor Who but wasn't really tied to it, the way the previous spin-offs were.  Other than the setting (and the reappearance of Nigel Betts, from series 8, as the headmaster Mr Armitage), Class features a new cast of characters.

This first episode, "For Tonight We Might Die", is very much an establishing episode, as it takes the time to introduce all our main characters, but in a natural way.  So we get April, who seems to be the nice girl; Tanya, who's actually been moved up a couple years; Ram, who's a star athlete but needs tutoring help from Tanya; Charlie, a strange new kid from Sheffield; Matteusz, an immigrant from Poland who's Charlie's love interest; and Miss Quill, a fairly mean and sarcastic teacher who is connected to Charlie in some way.  The episode immediately sets out the series' stall in terms of diversity, if nothing else; Tanya's black, Ram is Sikh (or at least his father is, which therefore suggests Ram is too), Matteusz is an immigrant, and Charlie's gay.  But other than a brief mention from Matteusz, which is played for laughs rather than commentary ("Everything all right?" Charlie asks.  "Oh, yeah," Matteusz replies.  "My deeply religious parents are very happy I'm going to dance with a boy.  This has been an evening of love and warmth."  "Great!" Charlie replies brightly, missing the sarcasm), this is all treated just as a matter of course.  As it should be.

But yes, this episode is full of set-up.  We discover that Charlie is the last member of an alien race called the Rhodia, while Miss Quill is the last member of her species, the Quill.  The Rhodia and the Quill were involved in a war on their planet that the Rhodia won, and Miss Quill was sentenced to become the slave/servant (depending on who's speaking) of Charlie, who was the prince of the Rhodia.  But both races were wiped out by a third race, the Shadow Kin, who wiped out both races in a single day.  Charlie and Miss Quill only survived because they were rescued "by a figure of legend out of space and time itself" (aka the Doctor).  But because there's a rip in the fabric of time at Coal Hill (now an Academy instead of the School it used to be), the Shadow Kin are able to come to Earth to finish the job -- and because they want something Charlie has called the Cabinet of Souls, which they believe is a powerful weapon.  They can't just take over the planet, though, because the leader of the Shadow Kin has gotten his heart linked with April's; they both need to be alive in order to survive.  As I said, lots of set-up.

It's to the episode's credit, though, that all this set-up is handled fairly well.  Other than one big infodump speech to April about Charlie and Miss Quill's real origins, everything else comes up organically.  All the relationships are sketched out by showing rather than telling, which is really nice, and the threat of the Shadow Kin (who literally travel in shadows -- a bit like the Vashta Nerada from "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead") is clear without being oversold.  The way they come in and casually kill Ram's girlfriend Rachel just as a matter of course is horrifying but isn't fetishized.  It is surprisingly bloody though, as Ram is liberally splashed with Rachel's blood and subsequently loses half a leg attacking the Shadow Kin.

Tanya, April, Matteusz, Charlie, and Ram look as the Doctor tells them
they'll be protecting Coal Hill from the tear. ("For Tonight We Might Die")
©BBC

Really, somewhat surprisingly the downside of "For Tonight We Might Die" is that the shadow of the Doctor hangs over the whole episode.  Usually the presence of the Doctor enhances things (as in the two SJA stories he shows up in), but here he's a distraction.  Peter Capaldi's name is right there in the opening credits, and you just keep waiting for him to show up.  The Doctor does show up, of course, but not until the climax of the episode.  This unfairly shifts the focus off the main characters as a result.  It also means that the resolution of this episode feels off, somehow; the Doctor knows there's a tear in time here and that all sorts of potentially dangerous aliens are going to be attracted to it, and more importantly in a way much of what happens here is his fault.  The tear in time is because there's so much artron energy around Coal Hill (in other words, the Doctor keeps visiting) that time has worn thin.  And yet he decides to leave it in the hands of these teenagers, with a rather lame excuse that even he can't fix everything.  It's the sort of situation that the Doctor would fix as a matter of course in his own show (especially since it's his fault), but because this is a spin-off he has to hand it over to someone else.  This wasn't a problem in something like Torchwood (which this episode frequently looks like it wants to emulate, with the tear being a lot like the Rift) because the Doctor didn't really know about it.  But here he does, and he chooses to leave it.  It's weird.

Still, it's the first episode, and there's time to adjust the balance of things, particularly once Class can get a chance to stand on its own, away from the Doctor.  Its influences are clear (and overt, as the characters mention Buffy, Once Upon a Time, and The Vampire Diaries at the end as parallels to their own situation), as is its goal to be a somewhat dark, supernatural show aimed at teenagers and young adults.  They have a strong cast and some sparkling writing, and while it's not 100% successful in the first episode, there's enough here to be encouraging.







²⁷⁰ But not in the United States, despite the show being a BBC America co-production.  BBC America chose to hold the show back to air directly after new episodes of series 10 of Doctor Who.  In October, US viewers were instead provided with a new adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency -- a show that somehow manages to take a Dirk Gently-esque plot and put a title character who bears only the most fleeting resemblance to Douglas Adams' original conception inside it, with very mixed results.

July 29: "The Husbands of River Song"

Stuart Manning's poster for "The Husbands of
River Song" (from Design by Stuart Manning)

For the first time since, ooh, "The Runaway Bride", we get a Christmas special that's designed to be a comedy.  There's a sense that, after saying goodbye to Clara, the show wants to shift gears and do a nice, fun romp this time around.  And, on the whole, it largely works.  That's not to say it's perfect, mind, and parts of this are in fact deeply silly.  But what makes this work is the underlying tone of, "Let's just have a laugh", which means that this might be one of the funnier stories Steven Moffat has written for the show.

The opening stuff, with the TARDIS in a redressed Trap Street set, might actually be the weakest moments, but this is quickly addressed with the introduction of River Song.  I know some people aren't fond of her character, but I don't mind, and this story makes a virtue of her, showing us how she behaves when the Doctor isn't around.  And the answer isn't as virtuous as the Doctor might expect -- we get lots of back and forth between River and the guy she doesn't realize is the Doctor (since she doesn't know he got a new set of regenerations) as she tells him to kill King Hydroflax: "Is this what you're like when I'm not [around]?  ...  You're talking about murdering someone," the Doctor protests.  "No, I'm not," River replies cheerily, "I'm actually murdering someone.  Cheer up!  Get a saw, I'll kill the lights, you kill the patient."  The chemistry between Peter Capaldi and Alex Kingston is really quite good, and even while it's perhaps slightly uncomfortable to see River so morally ambiguous (she must put up more of a front while the Doctor's around), it's still great fun.  And interestingly, the Doctor largely just rolls with this, even if he disapproves -- it's like he just wants to see where this goes.

The rest of the guest cast aren't exactly slouching; Greg Davies seems like he's having a good time ranting as King Hydroflax, even though he was probably rather uncomfortable with his head stuck through tables and such (and apparently his head is so heavy it's distorting the TARDIS telepathic circuits -- aka the foam rubber is rather obvious here), while Matt Lucas does a cheery job as Nardole, who always seems to realize what's going on just a bit too late.  (His best moment is probably with the Doctor, starting to wail like a modern-day Stan Laurel in Hydroflax's chamber after the Doctor says to him, "This might be an alarming question in the circumstance, but you really do think I'm a surgeon, don't you?")  And Phillip Rhys walks just the right side of the slightly dim pretty boy line as Ramone, another of River's husbands.  Really, it's only the subplot of the robot who keeps cutting people's heads off to upload them that threatens to tip this over into pure silliness, but even that is handled fairly well -- although the bits with Nardole in the robot (like "It's really very whiffy down there") are the moments that threaten to unbalance everything.  Still, this is a cast clearly enjoying themselves.

Flemming takes the Doctor and River to the onboard restaurant.
("The Husbands of River Song") ©BBC

But no, it's Capaldi and Kingston who steal the show -- from Kingston's revelation that she's frequently borrowed "Damsel"'s TARDIS without his knowing to Capaldi's deliberately overacted reaction to entering the TARDIS for the "first" time to the two of them trying desperately how to figure out how to explain to the buyers of the Helassi Androvar diamond that said diamond is lodged inside the disembodied head of the king they worship, they're having so much fun that we do too.  And even when things get a bit more serious (as when River explains that the Doctor doesn't love her and isn't around to save her), they quickly shift back into a lighter tone:

DOCTOR: Hello, sweetie.
RIVER: (after a moment) You are so doing those roots.
DOCTOR: What, the roots of the sunset?
RIVER: Don't you dare.
DOCTOR: I'll have to check with the stars themselves.
RIVER: Oh, shut up. I was just keeping them talking till it kicks off.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Husbands of River Song)

It's nice to see River be the hero of her own story, with the Doctor relegated to companion status for most of this, and even when she learns that this is the Doctor she's still largely the one calling the shots ("I'm an archaeologist from the future.  I dug you up").  But ultimately this is a story designed to be nothing more than a romp (the script even goes to pains to say that literally everyone aboard the ship Harmony and Redemption is a killer of some sort, so that we won't feel bad when they die in the crash), purposefully shallow and something to smile at without too much trouble, and at that it largely succeeds.  Which is why it's a bit odd how the story suddenly takes a hard left in the last 10 minutes or so into a melancholy drama, as we see that the Doctor and River have finally made it to Darillium, where we learned way back in "Forest of the Dead" was the last time River saw the Doctor before she died.  It's a bittersweet moment, and it's handled deftly, but it doesn't really match the previous 45 minutes in content or tone.  But I think that's OK; it's a chance to give River's story some closure (even if it seemed we'd already done that in "The Name of the Doctor"), and the cheeky reveal that a night on Darillium lasts 24 years lessens the sting a bit.

So no, it's not a perfect episode, and depending on how you feel about River Song her inclusion in a pretty shallow story might not make this your cup of tea, but I don't mind it.  It's not the best Christmas special ever, but it might be the jolliest.

And that brings us to the end of series 9, which really has been an impressively strong run for the show; I'd wager this is the best run of stories since Matt Smith's debut in series 5.  I noted at the end of series 8 that, while I generally enjoyed that run, I sometimes felt you had to work a little harder at it, even if there wasn't as heavy a reliance on the overarching plot to deal with.  But series 9 offers no such reservations: the overarching plot is minimal (you could have missed every previous "Hybrid" comment up to "Hell Bent" and have been just fine), the stories are interesting, and the Doctor here seems far more accessible than he did.  In series 8, he was a bit prickly and brusque, but it seems that that epiphany at the end of "Death in Heaven" really did have an effect: he's so much more relaxed and comfortable this series, playing guitar, wearing sunglasses, and dressing in less formal-looking versions of his series 8 outfit.  This is on the whole a good thing, as it makes us that much more happy to be in his presence.  These things, combined with all the other things I've mentioned over the past couple weeks, makes series 9 a really outstanding run.  It makes you look forward to series 10.²⁶⁸

And once again, thanks for joining me on this little trip through space and time.  I'll be back on July 30, 2017, most likely discussing the latest (still upcoming) Doctor Who spinoff, Class.²⁶⁹  See you then, and cheers.







²⁶⁸ Even if they did delay it a year, with some handwavy explanation about there already being enough big events going on in 2016 that they wanted to delay things to 2017 to give Steven Moffat's final series a bigger impact.  My guess is the real reason was scheduling (maybe incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall wasn't going to be free until then) and/or budgeting.
²⁶⁹ OK, yes, technically speaking I haven't discussed "Friend from the Future", the quick 2-minute introduction to brand-new companion Bill, played by Pearl Mackie, but that's because we don't yet know where or how this scene fits into series 10 -- it might be part of an episode for all we know.  Bill looks like she'll be fun, though.

July 28: "Hell Bent"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Hell Bent"
(from Design by Stuart Manning)

It starts in a diner that the Doctor walks into, carrying a guitar and playing Murray Gold's Clara theme on it.  The diner is being run by Clara (although I have to admit, my first reaction upon seeing this was, "I wonder if that's one of Clara's splinter selves from 'The Name of the Doctor'?"), and the Doctor doesn't appear to recognize her, as he tells her the story of his final adventure with Clara Oswald.  That's the framing narrative that "Hell Bent" takes place in, but after the opening credits we pick up where "Heaven Sent" left off, with only an occasional interjection from the diner into events.

It's a great scene, as the Doctor returns to that old barn from "The Day of the Doctor" and "Listen", while Rassilon (played by Donald Sumpter, who takes from Arthur "The Dominators to 'The Eleventh Hour'" Cox the title of longest time between appearances on Doctor Who, as Sumpter's last appearance was 43 years ago, in The Sea Devils) tries to figure out what it is the Doctor wants.  "We could talk to him," says the General (last seen in "The Day of the Doctor").  "Words are his weapons," Rassilon replies, but what's noticeable here is that we don't actually hear the Doctor say a single word until Rassilon appears; this is a Doctor who's so angry that he's gone beyond words, who now wields silence as a weapon.  And when Rassilon does personally appear, the Doctor's first words to him are, "Get off my planet" (even though Rassilon is Lord President of the Time Lords), and the Doctor's able to convince the Time Lord troopers to move to his side and lay down their weapons without saying a single word to them.  It's an impressive moment, and the way director Rachel Talalay frames it like a Western (right down to a whistled version of that Time Lord theme, à la Ennio Morricone), is an inspired move.  This is the Doctor facing off against his opponent and winning without firing a shot or uttering a word.  "There was a saying, sir, in the Time War," the trooper, Gastron, tells Rassilon.  "The first thing you will notice about the Doctor of War is he's unarmed."  And that's proven true here.

But while that's impressive, what's more fascinating is the lengths he will go to to save his best friend Clara.  All that time spent in his own confession dial ("We think [he was in there] four-and-a-half billion years," Ohila states), trying to convince the Time Lords he knew all about the Hybrid (whether he actually did or not), was just so he had a bargaining chip that he could use to rescue her.  He's willing to get rid of Rassilon and the High Council (although, admittedly, the Time War stuff is also part of the reason -- "The Doctor does not blame Gallifrey for the horrors of the Time War. ... He just blames you," Ohila tells Rassilon), to break the rules and bring Clara back through the use of an extraction chamber (a Time Lord thingy that pulls you out of time right before the moment of your death) just to save her.  That's his entire goal.

Gorgeous TARDIS, by the way, with the new stolen TARDIS having the classic Hartnell theme, right down to the plate under the console and the sound effects of the door opening and such.  (Although I wonder why they made the walls and doors so much smaller in scale than the original.)  And it's a great backdrop for those climactic moments, after the Doctor goes to have a chat with Me, who's apparently the last person in the universe, sitting in the ruins of Gallifrey and watching the universe die.  Here Me seems far more accepting of things, and while there's a core of steel present she no longer seems cold or bitter -- indeed, she seems to enjoy challenging the Doctor as to the identity of the Hybrid.  "That's very very easy," he tells her, "the Hybrid is you," but Me is having none of it.  "By your own reasoning, why couldn't the Hybrid be half-Time Lord, half-human?" she wonders.  "Tell me, Doctor, I've always wondered.  You're a Time Lord; you're a high-born Gallifreyan.  Why is it you spend so much time on Earth?" (One can imagine Steven Moffat giggling to himself, slipping in that reference to the controversial half-human thing introduced in the McGann TVM.)  The Doctor pooh-poohs that though: "That's your best theory?  I'm the Hybrid?  I ran away from Gallifrey because I was afraid of myself?  That doesn't make any sense."  Ah, but Me has a better theory.  "What if the Hybrid wasn't one person, but two?" she says.  "... A dangerous combination of a passionate and powerful Time Lord and a young woman so very similar to him.  Companions who are willing to push each other to extremes."  After all, they were brought together by the Master, "the lover of chaos."  "Clara's my friend," the Doctor protests.  "I know," Me replies.  "And you're willing to risk all of time and space because you miss her.  One wonders what the pair of you will get up to next."  It's an interesting conversation, even if it ultimately doesn't tell us anything at all about the Hybrid or why we were supposed to care this series.

The Doctor begins to feel the effects of the neural block.
("Hell Bent") ©BBC

But you know what?  That doesn't really matter.  Because the best thing about "Hell Bent" is the resolution of Clara's storyline with the Doctor.  The BBC Wales version of Doctor Who has had a tendency of making its companions more and more like him and then not knowing how to say goodbye to them, and so Rose gets shunted off to another universe, while Donna gets her mind wiped, denied all the growth she'd experienced.  But when the Doctor tries the same mind-wipe trick with Clara, she's having none of it: "These have been the best years of my life, and they are mine," she tells him.  "Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past.  I am entitled to that.  It's mine."  And so it's the Doctor who forgets, while Clara gets to essentially graduate.  (And although the neural block thing is treated as a toss-up, one does wonder if the Doctor knew that it would wipe his memory, if he decided to sacrifice himself to allow Clara to continue.  The dialogue certainly points in that direction, as the Doctor starts talking about the neural block maybe not being reversible after he admits to Clara that she's right, that she does have the right to her past.)  Clara gets a TARDIS and a companion and is allowed to go off and have adventures, and while she'll have to go to Gallifrey at some point, to make sure she dies at the right moment, she doesn't have to do that right away.  She gets to be the hero of her own story.  I have to say, I haven't been the biggest fan of Clara's "increasingly reckless" storyline this past series -- it's sometimes felt like they didn't quite know what to do with her character after the Danny Pink storyline last series -- but this was absolutely the best way to resolve it.  There's something wonderful about the idea of another TARDIS out there, exploring the universe and doing the right thing.  Fantastic.

So "Hell Bent" provides the cap on a story that's been affecting and astonishing, and even the bittersweetness of the diner scenes, where the Doctor doesn't know he's talking to Clara (although, after the diner dematerializes around him and he (presumably) sees Rigsy's portrait of Clara painted on his TARDIS, he surely must know that was Clara, right?), is tempered by the knowledge that everything worked out in the end.  (Well, except for the Rassilon bit -- I wonder if that'll come back to haunt the Doctor...)  "Hell Bent" is an excellent end to an excellent story.

And while that's technically the end of series 9 proper as it was broadcast, we still have a Christmas special left -- one that's coming up so soon that there's even a "Next Time" trailer at the end of this episode...

July 27: "Heaven Sent"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Heaven Sent"
(from Incredible set of retro Doctor Who
series 9 posters)

The clues are there fairly early on.  "When I was a very little boy, there was an old lady who died," the Doctor says.  "They covered her in veils, but it was a hot, sunny day, and the flies came.  It gave me nightmares for years.  So, who's been stealing my nightmares?"

Of course, if you've seen the episode then you know the answer (and if you haven't, you should go do that now), but "Heaven Sent" gives us a Doctor trapped in his own personal hell.  (Incidentally, am I the only person who thinks it would have been better if they'd swapped the titles of this episode and the next one?  What exactly does "Heaven Sent" mean in the context of this particular episode anyway, other than as a cute parallel with "Hell Bent"?)  He can't really rest, he has no one to interact with (and therefore no one to persuade or impress), and there doesn't seem to be a way out -- just a series of odd puzzles instead.

And so we're treated to something unique in (televised) Doctor Who.  We've had episodes without the Doctor (such as the various ones in the '60s where Hartnell or Troughton were away that week -- or "Mission to the Unknown", if you want one without any of the TARDIS crew), but this is the first time we've gotten an episode that only has the Doctor.  (Well, all right, there's that quick cameo from Clara, but as that's in his head anyway that's still technically the Doctor.)  Just the Doctor and the Veil, a silent, slow-moving, implacable force, trying to get the Doctor to confess something or die.  And what this means is we get an astonishing and incredible performance from Peter Capaldi.

I mean, to be fair, it's not necessarily that Capaldi is doing anything that different from other episodes, but he definitely has to do a lot more than normal.  "Heaven Sent" is focused solely on the Doctor; there are no cutaway scenes to other locations, no sinister figures outside monitoring his progress.  Every scene involves the Doctor; there are no moments (save the opening ones, which bear witness to the aftermath of the last go-round) that don't include him.  That's a hell of a burden to place on an actor, but Capaldi is magnificent.  He makes a 45-minute monologue as compelling as anything else, and it's a tribute to his skill that the audience is never bored by this.  And the range of emotion on display (such as anger, puzzlement, and fear) give us a fascinating insight into the mind of the Doctor.  We see him use the TARDIS as his own mental palace²⁶⁷, where he shows off in front of an imaginary Clara as a way of figuring out how he's going to get out of his current predicament.  We see him confess things to the Veil ("I didn't leave Gallifrey because I was bored!  That was a lie!  It's always been a lie!  ...  I was scared!  I ran because I was scared!"), but only as a way to make the puzzle-box castle move.  We see him try to figure out the prison he's inside, with copious notes in his notebook.  And that's how he slowly works out what winning actually means, and what he's endured: going through this whole process for 7000 years, just to punch at a wall 400 times harder than diamond a few times, and then doing the whole thing again.

The Veil kills the Doctor once more. ("Heaven Sent") ©BBC

That of course leads to the completion of the circuit as the Doctor burns himself up to provide the energy to bring himself back, his pattern still in the "hard drive".  And that leads to the montage as the Doctor gets further and further through the azbantium wall, in a process that takes over two billion years.  It's an impressive, affecting montage, seeing how long it takes.  It also makes you wonder what the first few (thousand?) times were like, before he left himself clues like "BIRD" in the dust, or "I AM IN 12" in the grave -- indeed, how long did it take him to discover that the way out was in room 12 in the first place?  When did he paint the picture of Clara?  What was it like, those first moments of the first second of eternity?

And that, I think, is the true brilliance of "Heaven Sent".  It's not just Peter Capaldi's performance, or Rachel Talalay's direction, or even Steven Moffat's script.  It's the fact that, despite the fact that Moffat has provided us with another puzzle box storyline, where all the pieces have been aligned to fit just so in order to make everything make sense (such as "The Girl in the Fireplace", "Blink", or "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang"), he's provided us with so much canvas to fill in the details around this particular cycle for the Doctor that you can't help but be impressed by the sense of scale and scope.  And so taking a script like that and then putting Peter Capaldi in the middle of it, with Rachel Talalay supervising the look?  That's brilliant.

(And this doesn't even address the final moments, as the Doctor steps out on Gallifrey and announces that "The Hybrid is me."  Or possibly, "The Hybrid is Me [aka Ashildr]."  That's another hell of a cliffhanger.)







²⁶⁷ A technique that also shows up in Moffat's other big series, Sherlock, which was written not terribly long before this series of Doctor Who.

July 26: "Face the Raven"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Face the Raven"
(from Incredible set of retro Doctor Who
series 9 posters)

Our second female writer for the series -- this time it's newcomer Sarah Dollard, who's provided a really well-scripted story about hidden streets and refugee camps, in what sort of appears to be the first part of a three-part finale.  ("Sort of" because this installment is written and directed by people different from the last two parts, but the story really does seem to carry on directly into the next part (which is itself very distinct from the final part, and those two are generally accepted as being the same story), and with repercussions that will be addressed in the final part.  And even Steven Moffat notes that this feels like part 1 of 3 in the Doctor Who Extra accompanying "Face the Raven".)  And while we're here, can we just take a moment to acknowledge how gorgeous that dark red jacket the Doctor is wearing is?  That color fits him to a T, with a slight Pertwee vibe to it.  It may be my favorite look so far for the twelfth Doctor.

We also get to say hello again to Rigsy from last series' "Flatline" -- and now we see he has a wife and a baby that the Doctor seems completely enamoured with.  But it's not a social visit; no, Rigsy needs help with a mysterious tattoo on the back of his neck that's slowly counting down.

I have to say, the idea that a trap street is real is quite clever, and the efforts to find such a street in London are nicely entertaining.  And we get some more evidence that Clara's starting to be a bit too cavalier about what she and the Doctor do, as she enjoys herself despite nearly falling out of the TARDIS as it hovers above London.  "She enjoyed that way too much," Rigsy remarks.  "Tell me about it," the Doctor replies; "it's an ongoing problem."

But once the trap street is located the emphasis shifts to the alien refugee camp inside, hiding from the humans and being governed/ruled over by their mayor, Ashildr/Me.  (She keeps calling herself Me, the Doctor keeps going with Ashildr -- and this time around the credits agree with the Doctor.)  What's notable here is that, 365 years after the last time we got to chat with her, Ashildr seems less bitter but still just as cold.  Now, part of this might be an effort to seem like a proper mayor, above it all and such, but she still comes across as uncaring and still blaming the Doctor for several of the world's woes.  So while she's not exactly the Doctor's enemy, she's hardly his friend either.

What's clever about this part of the episode isn't just the way the tension mounts as time begins to run out, as the three of them begin to unravel the mystery of what Mayor Me is really up to.  It's the way Clara's actions, the way she believes she's acting just like the Doctor would when she takes Rigsy's chronolock tattoo, ultimately lead to her downfall.  But we don't know that until it's too late; here it's just another matter-of-fact move, a way for Clara to laugh in the face of danger.  Only this time it backfires.

The Doctor realizes Clara is going to die while Me and Rigsy
look on. ("Face the Raven") ©BBC

It's a hell of an affecting eight minutes at the end, as the Doctor realizes that Clara has signed her own death warrant ("Clara, you didn't!") and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.  Ashildr was trying to hand the Doctor over to some unseen party (ostensibly in order to protect the trap street), but Clara's actions mean that the mayor can't remove the chronolock, like she would have done with Rigsy.  "You cut me out of the deal," Me tells her; Clara is going to have to deal with the Quantum Shade, to face the raven.  ('Cos the Shade takes the form of a raven, remember.)  "This is my fault," the Doctor says.  "...I let you get reckless."  "Why?  Why shouldn't I be so reckless?" Clara demands.  "You're reckless all the bloody time.  Why can't I be like you?"  "Clara, there's nothing special about me," the Doctor replies.  "I am nothing, but I'm less breakable than you."  (And more knowledgeable too, although he doesn't say that.)  And so the Doctor can do nothing but watch as Clara decides to face her death with bravery ("Well, if Danny Pink can do it, so can I") and tells the Doctor not to be a warrior.  And so she dies, facing the raven.

And it's a very strong ending moment from the Doctor right after.  "What Clara said about not taking revenge," he says to Ashildr, visibly furious.  "Do you know why she said that?"  "She was saving you," Ashildr says.  "I was lost a long time ago," the Doctor replies.  "She was saving you.  I'll do my best, but I strongly advise you to keep out of my way.  You'll find that it's a very small universe when I'm angry with you."

"Face the Raven" is an impressive début for a writer who clearly understands Doctor Who and can easily write for these characters.  It's smart and sad and affecting and brilliant; thank goodness Sarah Dollard is writing for series 10, because if it's anything like this it'll be a knockout.  This definitely makes you want more -- not just from Dollard, but from the next episode as well.

(And the final tag scene after the credits is sweet.)