Thankfully, that isn't the case, because, while this episode wasn't among the best, it was really good, and did a fantastic job picking up the themes from last week which actually worked, and expanding upon them.
The Series 8 premier did one thing really well, aside from give Clara something genuine to do, and include Vastra and the gang, and that was paint the morality of this newest Doctor with some uncertainty. In his confrontation with the Clockwork Cyborg, it is unclear if he talks the Cyborg down and it ends its own life, or if he pushes it and effectively commits murder (I have a new theory about this, but we'll get to that later). This episode picks up this theme of the new Doctor's morality and just runs with it, head down, through the opposing team's defensive line for a touchdown, and I not only love that the episode did this, I love how it did this.
To say that the Doctor has always been, for the most part, a hero is, again for the most part, true, but what makes the Doctor great is that he is very complicated, with many flaws. Rule one: the Doctor lies. The Doctor is a thief who stole his TARDIS from a museum, just because he was bored. The Doctor has a multitude of rules to govern his behavior, and in the Doctor's own words, "Good men don't need rules. Today is not a good day to find out why I have so many."
The Doctor has only remained a hero for so long because he has committed and re-committed himself to being one more times than he can count. The Doctor, at least in the more recent series, has always had a bit of humor to his character, but the observant fan could always tell that the humor was their to mask the desperation just beneath, because at any moment the Doctor could slip and become the villain that he knows he might really be. He has met villainous versions of himself on more than one occasion, the Dream Lord and The Valeyard being the two examples which come to mind.
The way that this new Doctor has been portrayed so far, in a somewhat darker, less humorous light, the viewer really begins to wonder if it has finally happened, if the Doctor has finally succumbed to his dark side. We even had a warning of the possibility in the Series 7 episode The Name of the Doctor, where the Great Intelligence tried to unravel the Doctor's history and destroy him, partly because of what he will become. Everything indicates that the Doctor will go dark, and I think everyone is waiting with frayed nerves for it to happen, including the Doctor himself, and between a scene in Deep Breath where the Doctor briefly, and rather coldly, seems to abandon Clara in a dangerous situation, and a scene in this episode where the Doctor seems to heartlessly allow a redshirt to die, Moffat obviously wants us to wonder.
Because I can't think of a good segue, let's just move right into the episode itself. On the surface, this is a Dalek episode, and by the end it manages to legitimately become one, and a pretty game-changing one at that. For most of the episode, though, this is a character-building episode for the Doctor, with a little character development for Clara tossed in. The episode starts with fighter pilots engaged in space combat with the Daleks. They're forces rebelling against the Daleks' relentless universe-wide mission to ethnically cleanse everyone and everything that is different from them. A young woman pilot, Journey Blue, is about to die in the destruction of her fighter when the Doctor materializes the TARDIS around her and saves her life, and then conveys her back to her mother ship, the last warship still in opposition of the Dalek forces. The soldiers on the ship decide that they must kill the Doctor despite his help, as he might be a Dalek sleeper agent, but they change their minds quickly when they learn his name and assume that he is a medical doctor.
See, the Combined Galactic Resistance has done something unheard of: they have captured a Dalek alive. Not understanding the Dalek's nature as a cyborg, they decided to crack the metal shell open and get at the tech inside, and ended up waking the thing inside. The Dalek, however, did not fight back. Instead is began to rant and rave, calling not for the extermination of all other life, but for the extermination of its own people. See, this Dalek had done something that no Dalek had ever been able to do: it had had a change of heart. Not wanting to lose the advantage of a potentially helpful Dalek ally, the Resistance wants the damage to the creature repaired, and so that's where the Doctor comes in.
Meanwhile, back in modern times on Earth, Clara is at the school where she teaches, forming the beginnings of a romantic relationship with a fellow teacher: an ex-soldier named Danny Pink. It isn't much, and it amounts to nothing in terms of this one, standalone episode, but it gives Clara something to do, and that's always appreciated. Giving Clara a romantic interest also may or may not have some relevance to the rumors recently that the ever-adorable Jenna Coleman is thinking of leaving the show soon.
Clara slips into a closet at the school and finds the Doctor and the TARDIS waiting for her. It would seem that she has been waiting for the Doctor to return for three weeks, since some point soon after the closing scene of last week's episode. The exchange that follows brings back some of the humor of the previous series, but it is more subtle, and the Doctor is more subdued. This allows the scene to shift quickly to a serious one that was featured prominently in the promos, where the Doctor asks Clara in a worried tone if he is a good man, and she answers that she doesn't know. This is a great scene, but not so much for this moment alone, but in retrospect during another scene later on, which we'll get to later, something that is quickly becoming the catchphrase of this review.
The TARDIS arrives once again at the Resistance ship. He and Clara and three soldiers, including Journey, are to be miniaturized via technology reminiscent of the miniaturization field of the Teselecta, and injected into the Dalek a la Fantastic Voyage. Once inside the Doctor is to repair the Dalek, though it is unclear if the Doctor will do so, or if he's only agreed to make the journey to learn how the Dalek's perfect mental conditioning has gone wrong.
Once inside the Dalek, one of the soldiers damages the Dalek's metal shell and is attacked by robotic antibodies, also similar to the antibodies on the Teselecta (hmm), and as he is surrounded, begging for help, the Doctor tosses him a small capsule. Everyone present, including the audience, believes that the Doctor is trying to save the man, but he lets the man die and reveals that the capsule was a radioactive tracker. Now he can follow the antibody which vacuumed up the man's vaporized remains back to the protein storage tank, where the Dalek stores the liquefied people that it plans to use as reserve energy, as, as he puts it, the Daleks have no reason to guard the dead, so the antibodies won't follow them there. It is a clever way of escaping the same fate as the poor redshirt, but the Doctor seems completely uncaring as it all happens. In fact, the Doctor rarely shows any outward signs of caring anymore. He had even referred to Clara earlier in the episode as his "carer", or someone who cares so that he doesn't have to.
I'll admit that this put me off. It was almost definitely meant to put me off, as well as the rest of the audience as part of the ongoing theme that I mentioned this episode explores. As a curiosity, I decided to run my DVR back and watch the scene again. I was curious if I could imagine the words that the Doctor spoke here coming from the lips of Ten or Eleven without the words sounding out of place, and I was surprised to find that I could. The only real difference was that Ten would have punctuated the words with oohs and ahhs and catchphrases, and Eleven would have punctuated them with grand hand gestures and clever quips. Twelve isn't out of character as the Doctor, he is just, as he said in the previous episode, crosser than the previous iterations were.
From inside the Dalek, the Doctor strikes up a conversation with the creature and learns why it changed its mind. It saw a star being born and realized that life would never cease, and it likewise realized that it is the Daleks who are flawed because they wish to do the impossible and extinguish life. It has become, as the Doctor puts it, a "good Dalek". The Doctor believes the Dalek and finds where it is damaged, and repairs it, but the Dalek then returns to normal and starts attacking the full-sized soldiers on the warship. The Doctor realized that the radiation from the Daleks damaged systems were interfering with the mechanical device in the Dalek's brain which prevents it from remembering the things that make it feel. The damage that was killing it is what was making it "good" to begin with.
Desperate, the Doctor sends Journey and Clara to restore the Dalek's memory of the newborn sun, while the Doctor goes to make sure that the Dalek comes to the same realization again. First, however, one of the people present must make a sacrifice to clear the way. It is the final redshirt, Gretchen Alison Carlisle, who makes this sacrifice. She believes in the Doctor, and as she is taken by the antibodies, she only asks that he do something amazing in her name, which the Doctor promises he will.
So Clara and Journey, chased by the antibodies, find the device in question and mange to reset the Dalek's memories, causing the Dalek itself, and its defenses, to reset, but things are still dire, as the Dalek has sent a message to the others, giving away the position of the ship. The Daleks are boarding, and the Resistance soldiers are dying all around. Desperate, the Doctor ties his own mind into the Dalek's, trying to show the Dalek the beauty of existence. To the Doctor's horror, however, the Dalek only finds hatred within the Doctor: righteous hatred for its own kind. The Dalek turns on the invading Daleks, who are so fundamentally incapable of even imagining the possibility of a Dalek turning on its people that they offer no resistance as they are destroyed.
Returning to normal size, the Doctor speaks to the Dalek. It has faked the Dalek ship out by creating a signal mimicking the warship's self destruct. The Dalek no longer hates humanity, or the Doctor, but it still hates its own kind and so decides to return to them and continue its mission. Though the Doctor has not succeeded in making the Dalek good again, in a way this is a victory. It does not feel like one for our hero, however, as, just before leaving, the Dalek turns to him and says that it is not the Dalek, but the Doctor, who is a "good Dalek", indicating that the Doctor's hatred for the Daleks is itself Dalek-like. The Doctor has, for all intents and purposes, become just like his worst enemies. The Doctor makes a brief, potentially continuity-breaking comment about being unwaveringly anti-soldier, and then he takes Clara home. She is prepared to step off of the TARDIS thirty seconds after she left, but she sees the depression on the Doctor's face and she tells him, once again, that she doesn't know if he is a good man, but that he tried to do what was good, and that's what matters, and he is shown to visibly feel better.
I love this closing scene. It shows the true worth of the Doctor's companion. More than anything, the companions are there, more so in the modern series, post Time War, to keep the Doctor from going to far, and to remind him of the person who he has resolved himself to be. It is likely that, without a caring companion, the Doctor would have already, by this point in his life, have succumbed to his dark side at some point during his travels. This wraps up the theme of this episode, and reminds us that, no matter how alien the Doctor seems to us now, he is really no different than he has ever been.
Into the Dalek is, for all intents and purposes, another Moffat episode, though this episode was co-written by Phil Ford. This episode is a great example of how all future Moffat episodes should be handled, with another writer there to temper Moffat's more annoying habits. For example, this episode still has little tidbits with Moffat's fingerprints on them, like a very obvious Chekov's Gun in the form of a wristband that is worn to keep a person who has been miniaturized small, and another scene with the mysterious Missy, where she this time resurrects Gretchen Alison Carlisle, but they are subtler, and no more than the minimum required time is devoted to calling them out. The episode is still complex, but not annoyingly so.
Between the tempered writing style, some great action and guest characters, fantastic performances by the main cast, and a really amazing story dealing with the Doctor's psyche while shaking up the dynamic between the Doctor and his most hated adversary, this episode is in every way (save Vastra-less-ness) superior to the previous one. While not the greatest, as I said before, it is really very good and does a great job of showcasing how this new Doctor will work out while still building intrigue for the series' overreaching plot, and I wholeheartedly recommend it, awarding it an 8 out of 10.
Now that the review is over, I want to take a second to touch on some things. First, I want to talk about the Daleks and their use in the modern series, post 2005. In the episode Dalek, which reintroduced them to the modern audience, it was outright stated that it was virtually, if not completely impossible for even one Dalek to be alive after the war. Then in the two-part Series 1 finale, the Daleks had begun to rebuild, but they were weak and flawed, and Rose killed them all. Yet the Daleks keep coming back, in bigger stories, with bigger stakes, like each new appearance is meant to be the last, and the Doctor beats them every time. They are becoming the embodiment of diminishing returns on threat level in this show. While I love the Daleks as much as the majority of Who fans, I really do think it is time for them to either go away, or become a villain which only appears on very rare and special occasions.
I also wanted to discus some theories that I have regarding Missy and whether the Doctor pushed the Clockwork Cyborg at the end of Deep Breath. At the end of Deep Breath, when Missy revived the very clearly dead Cyborg, she not only showcased an absolutely ridiculous power to seemingly raise the dead, but she seemed to be raising people who had been enemies of the Doctor. In this episode, however, she raises Gretchen, who was not the Doctor's enemy, and who definitely wasn't killed by him. It is for this reason that I now think that she isn't raising his enemies, or people who he has killed, but people who believed him or believed in him, who he let die. Imagine that the Doctor didn't push the Cyborg, but made it believe in his words and then allowed it to take its own life. It all fits.
What is your theory regarding Missy? Is she really, as she has said in both episodes now, the gatekeeper of the literal Heaven, or is she, as some fans suspect, River Song, an avatar of a malfunctioning TARDIS, or maybe a female regeneration of the Master? Or is she something new entirely? Why does she think of the Doctor as her boyfriend? Leave your guesses and theories in the comments, and come back next week for the next review.
No comments:
Post a Comment