TV Reviews - Doctor Who 0805: Time Heist

Another week, and another episode of Doctor Who. Not for the first time this series, this episode has me divided. On one hand, it is again a Moffat episode, but on the other it is co-written by Stephen Thompson...who hasn't really written any Doctor Who episodes that I've actually liked very much. He wrote Curse of the Black Spot, which I'm completely indifferent about, aside from the cool pirates, and Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, which I'm pretty much completely indifferent about with no exceptions, as almost everything in the episode contradicts what the rest of the franchise has established about said vehicle, and felt like it only existed to add another layer to the "Clara is strange" plot that had already started to get old. I have long since felt that neither of these episodes needed to exist. Did I think the same of this episode? Perhaps. Read on to find out.

 

 

This episode is...different. On one hand, it feels like a typical Doctor Who episode, with adventure and cleverness and helping people, but on the other hand, it really feels like...I dunno, something different and not altogether welcome. Once again the Doctor feels off. In a crisis he seems cold, detached, and a little too slow to think on his feet, but on the other hand, at the end of the episode we do get to see his reaction when he realizes that some people who he thought had died are alive, and that he gets to help someone atone for their mistakes, and set a captive creature free. This short collection of scenes reminds us that the Doctor still has a heart.

 

So what was this episode about? Well, a heist, of course! Just like the pirates in Curse of the Black Spot elevated that episode, the heist elements elevated this episode. There also weren't too many of the typical Moffatisms present here. Danny Pink and his budding relationship with Clara was brought up again, but only briefly. I'm sure that Moffat was only credited for his contribution of these few elements. The rest of the story was trademark Stephen Thompson. Does he have a trademark style, with only three episodes of the show under his belt? Well yeah.

 

In Black Spot the Doctor and his companions meet an interesting and capable group of guest characters who team up with him to rather ineffectually resist a dangerous situation that seems to be picking them off one by one, until the Doctor comes to a clever realization, and it turns out that everyone is actually okay. In Journey the Doctor and his companion meet an interesting and capable group of guest characters who team up with him to rather ineffectually resist a dangerous situation that seems to be picking them off one by one, until the Doctor comes to a clever realization, and it turns out that everyone is actually okay. In this episode the Doctor and his companion meet an interesting and capable group of guest characters who team up with him to rather ineffectually resist a dangerous situation that seems to be picking them off one by one, until the Doctor comes to a clever realization, and it turns out that everyone is actually okay. It is literally the same episode three times, each with slightly different packaging, and I just don't like that on a base level.

 

The unique packaging for this episode is, I'll admit, a bit more complex than in Thompson's previous episodes. The Doctor, a hacker with a computer enhanced brain, a woman who can become the people who she touches, and Clara are brought together by a mysterious figure called the Architect (who is totally not the Doctor) to break into the most secure bank in the universe, but they have their memories of the plan and their motivations to carry it out erased from their minds to minimize their thoughts of guilt, in order to evade the creature who works for the bank, who has the power to lock onto peoples' minds by reading their guilt, and then liquefy their brains. They succeed in using their unique skills, under the assumption that each of them is to receive a particular object that they covet from the vault. However, by the time that they reach the vault and open it, the two spares (I don't remember their names, which really speaks volumes about how interesting they are) have been forced to use the "escape plans", or rather painful suicide disintegraters (which are definitely not teleports) to escape the creature.

 

Then almost as soon as they die, the others reappear in disguise. Turns out those not teleports were actually, and you aren't gonna believe this, teleports! There is a ship in orbit waiting to take them away. They make their way back to the vault, and on through to the really secure super secret vault to recover...whatever it is that they are supposed to recover, the Doctor pondering how all of this could have worked out so perfectly, and realizing that the Architect must be a time traveler (still not the Doctor, though). They reach the super vault, and find the owner of the bank: a heartless woman who leaves them to the creature, but not before the Doctor realizes that, and this one is gonna really be surprising, the Architect is actually the Doctor! We see him realize how he planned the heist, in a really sloppily cut way that is admittedly hard to follow. Then he realizes why he came in the first place.

 

He was asked to rob the bank by the bank owner, later in her life, because on her death bed she has come to regret what a heartless biatch she was and wants to atone by freeing the creature, but the only way to do that is to also free the creature's mate, who is locked in the super vault, before a solar storm destroys the building. The Doctor gives the woman his number, hinting that it is from her that Missy later gets the Doctor's number to give to Clara in "the shop", as Clara herself puts it, and then frees the two creatures and relocates them to a new home. Clara, the Doctor, and the spares celebrate and go home.

 

I will admit that I was hard on this episode in this review, harder than I could have been, because I really didn't think that this episode was too bad. It was exciting, interesting, and while the guest characters were not very interesting, they were likeable and quite capable, and will probably return just as the pirates from Spot did in A Good Man Goes To War. However, the story was formulaic, and like Spot and Journey, it isn't an episode that I see myself re-watching often. Overall I think that it's absolutely middle of the road, and I give it a halfway decent score of 5 out of 10, but no, I don't really feel that is needed to exist, though I guess we'll see down the road, won't we?

 

Do you agree? Let me know in the comments below. Don't agree? Tough, this is my blog. Still, leave a comment too, if you have the time, thanks. Either way stick around, because there's another review coming in one week, with other content in between (hopefully).