TV Reviews - Doctor Who 0801: Deep Breath

First of all, two quick notes. One: yes, I'm reviewing individual episodes in this new series of reviews, particularly individual episodes of Series 8 of Doctor Who. This is something that I've never done before, so I'm a little nervous. Two: Regardless of what I think of these episodes, I will not be making these reviews into Something Awesome reviews. I'm trying to actually reduce the number of Something Awesomes that are reviews of movies or TV, as its starting to feel like I'm cheating.

That out of the way, let's move on.

Being out of town during the premier of a new Doctor Who episode that you intend to review is frustrating enough, but then the episode is a series premier, an introduction to a new actor playing the Doctor, and written by Steven Moffat, the show runner since Series 5, and a man who seems to write complicated scripts like the rest of us breathe. In the end, I not only got a late start on the episode, but it was also an episode that required more than one viewing before I could really form an opinion.

Now, having watched the episode twice, I think I can speak (or rather write) about it with relative certainty.



The episode begins after the prequel short, where, after the departure of Matt Smith's Doctor last series, Peter Capaldi's Doctor loses control of the TARDIS and ends up in the throat of an oversized t-rex. Attempting to escape, the Doctor accidentally drags the dino along with him through time, ending up in Victorian London, where he and his companion, Clara, once again meet up with the trio of Madame Vastra, her wife Jenny, and their nurse/bodyguard Strax. Even though Clara has been all through the Doctor's own time stream, she has never personally experienced the aftereffects of one of his regenerations, and so she's very distraught. It doesn't help, either, that the Doctor is not reacting well to this unnatural thirteenth regeneration, and ends up raving like an old man with memory problems in a scene that isn't at all funny, though it seems it is meant to be, and in fact comes off as quite sad.

Vastra and the others in her little band convey the Doctor and Clara back to their home, after providing the local police with the means to safely contain the t-rex along the Thames River until the Doctor can return it to its own time. They lay the Doctor down to sleep, hoping that he can shake the negative effects of the regeneration like one might a bad hangover, and then Vastra confronts Clara over the fact that she does not seem to be able to see this new, older-looking version of the two-millennia-old Time Lord as "her Doctor" anymore. Their conversation at least opens Clara up to the possibility, but Clara's absence from the Doctor's room allows him time to wake and escape, at first just to promise the dinosaur that he will get her home (he speaks dinosaur), and then to race to her aid when she is inexplicably set on fire and burned to ashes before his eyes. Clara and the trio run after him, but he is lost somewhere in London, a city vast enough that they cannot hope to find him themselves.

So Clara settles in with the trio, waiting for the Doctor to return for her and the TARDIS, which they have brought back to their estate. Meanwhile Capaldi continues to engage in stage five crazy-guy acting as he hobbles through an alley in his night gown ranting and raving to a homeless man about his new face and accent. He mentions, after looking at his face in a discarded mirror, that he knows it, wondering why, where from, and where the faces for his regenerations come from to begin with. This is referencing the fact that Capaldi once played a principal guest character in the Series 4 episode The Fires of Pompeii. This being a Moffat script, they can't just hand wave this as the new Doctor resembling this person by coincidence, it has to be a plot point, one which is referenced far too many times in this episode, and will likely persist through this entire series, if not the next as well. Seriously, Steven, I love your stuff, but you need to dial it back, man.

Finally the Doctor and Clara find each other again, drawn together by an ad in the paper that each thinks the other posted, leading them to a little restaurant nearby. While arguing over how the ad could have been placed if neither of them placed it, they realize that the restaurant is a trap set by clockwork androids which fell through time and crashed long ago, and have since been cannibalizing parts from humans, rebuilding themselves, hoping to reach their own time in the 51st century the long way around. They have been killing humans throughout London, taking what parts they can use, and immolating the bodies, and they are responsible for the death of the dinosaur as well.

Of course the Doctor, being the Doctor, he has to stop them. He calls in the cavalry, and confronts the only sentient droid out of the multitudes living beneath the restaurant. This one droid is the control node for all of them. Its destruction would mean the destruction of all of the droids. This droid, though, is more human now than machine, having replaced all of its parts so many times over the centuries that it isn't the same thing anymore. This ties back to the Doctor and his many regenerations, and how he barely recognizes himself now. The difference is that the Doctor is still the same person in his heart and mind, while the droid is something completely new. It's a living thing now, and so the Doctor cannot just kill it, as such a thing goes against his code. So he tries to logic the droid to death a la Captain Kirk and talk the droid into destroying itself. He can see that the droid really just wants everything to be over. We don't see if the droid ends its own life, or if the Doctor is forced to do it despite his deep hatred of violence, and I hope we never find out. Either way, the result is the same. The other droids shut down, and the Doctor and his crew, and all of London, are safe, at least for now.

Clara, along with the trio, rush back to Vastra's estate, but the Doctor has beaten them there and left in the damaged TARDIS. He returns not long after, though, to retrieve Clara, the TARDIS having itself regenerated. Clara comes onboard, but sadly she and the Doctor both realize that she simply doesn't see the Doctor anymore when she looks at him, and that she can't go with him on his adventures anymore. The Doctor flies her home to her own time, but as she goes to leave, she gets a call from the eleventh Doctor, shortly before his regeneration into Capaldi. He explains that no matter how he has changed, he is still the Doctor, and pleads with her to see him in the face of the man he has become. Clara hangs up the phone, and Capaldi asks if she is willing to do as the voice on the other end said, confirming that he now remembers everything, and driving home for Clara that the Doctor wasn't just on the other end of the call, but right their with her. She is able to see Capaldi as the Doctor, and agrees to travel with him again, despite how obtrusively Scottish he is now. Finally, at the very end, a mysterious woman in a gorgeous garden reactivates the dead control droid, calling the Doctor her loving boyfriend, and calling herself Missy. She is clearly the new arch villain, and it is heavily implied that she is the one who put the ad in the paper that brought the Doctor and Clara back together. Queue the trailer for the next episode.

Overall I liked this episode, but that isn't to say that there weren't some aspects of it that I thought could have been better. I mentioned that Moffat likes to make things overcomplicated. This episode was eighty-five minutes long, and it could, in my opinion, have easily been reduced in length simply by removing the many superfluous scenes of the Doctor contemplating his new face, and Clara refusing to see Capaldi as the Doctor. I understand why these scenes were here. Capaldi, being tied in age with the First Doctor for oldest actor to play the character, is a pretty far cry from the young men who have played him since the revival of the series in '05. The companion being the audience insert character, it fell upon Clara to come to terms with this "older" Doctor as a means of helping the audience become accustomed to him as well. As for the matter of the Doctor's face, Moffat is clearly trying to set something up, and I appreciate that. However, in both cases, I feel that too much time was dedicated to these things, time that could have been devoted to other things, or shaved off entirely to improve the episode's flow. For these reasons, Deep Breath earns an above average 6.5 out of 10, a 6, plus a 0.5 bonus for the inclusion of Vastra, Jenny, and Strax. Not a spectacular series premier, but one which nonetheless succeeded in wetting my appetite for what is to come.