This TARDIS is Non-Operational

Due to being three weeks behind and now having no computer, The Horror of Fan Blog is on indefinite hiatus.

Safe European Home: An Overanalysis of "Knock Knock"

"Now that we have a black person, we're officially a Benetton ad!"

Once upon a time, in the Russel T. Davies era, Season 4, there was a plan for a Cops-style episode, where the Doctor goes on a reality show like Cops and solves a mystery while Donna watches the episode from home.  Davies, however, scrapped the episode because he felt like it was too similar in tone to "The Unicorn and the Wasp," even though the two episodes would have taken place approximately 82 years apart.  Instead, he quickly wrote "Midnight," his best episode, and put that in its place.  I tell you this story because I don't understand how Davies could see the similar tones in what sound like very dissimilar stories, and Steven Moffat (admittedly, one of my heroes) couldn't see that within three weeks he had two episodes with similar monsters with the exact same way of killing people.  In "Knock Knock," the monsters are tiny creatures that make up the very structure but can come loose to form a swarm that eats people.  Where have I heard of that before?

The two robots represent the old man

This was a pretty mediocre episode, with a lot of plot holes.  Why does he need to let the bugs eat people in order for them to keep his mother alive?  Those seem like pretty unrelated things.  As Shelley pointed out, why does the mother only restore this particular group of young people and not the hundreds of others that he's done this to?  Why do the bugs kill everyone else but for the mother they keep her alive?  Why did everyone accept the Doctor as Bill's grandfather without asking the inevitable racist question, which is easily answered by anyone with half a brain, but still would inevitably be asked in that situation?

This was an interesting to see, though, in the week before I move in with some new roommates.  Oh, and it was the week before Mother's Day.  Ew.

Is it my imagination or, when Bill claims to be the Doctor's granddaughter, it's on a day where her clothes and hair look rather Susan-ish?  They've been trying to remind us a lot of Susan this year.  Could they finally be hinting at some sort of return?

After this episode, I'm more certain than ever that the Master is in that vault, and it's probably Missy.  I mean, could that have been a more obvious hint?  It's someone whose company the Doctor enjoys who delights in the suffering of others.  That's Missy.  I know that John Simm is coming back to play the Saxon Master at some point this season, but I can't imagine Simm's Master playfully communicating with the Doctor through piano music.  I'm thinking that Simm is just back to film a flashback scene where we see his Master regenerate into Missy.  I don't want to see him steal Missy's spotlight.  He was a great Master, but his Master was very much designed to play against David Tennant's Doctor, and Missy was just made for Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor.

That's going to have to be it for now.  I've got packing to do for my move this weekend.  Next week we have an episode from Jamie Mathieson, so that looks promising.  Until next time:

Mercy Me: An Overanalysis of "The Witch's Familiar"

Maybe if I stand in the most effeminate position possible, they won't see me...

I guess I have some apologies to make.  I've got some catching up to do, which is partially due to some slight ambivalence about this blog, but also partially due to being somewhat busy with a new relationship starting up.  And I've been trying to get her caught up on Doctor Who as well so we can watch it together but, ironically, she kept falling asleep during "Last Christmas."  I spend the whole of my weekends with her, so I won't really be able to watch the new episodes on the day they come out until she's caught up, which she will be soon.  Until then, I'm going to play a little catch-up.  So sorry that this blog is about a week late.  I'll work on that.  For now, on with the show:

The Daleks have always been a moral quandary for the Doctor.  The Doctor is the ultimate pacifist, at least in his philosophy if not always in his actions. His goal is always to prevent as many deaths as possible, including the deaths of his enemies.  The Daleks have shown up to throw a wrench in this philosophy more than once, because if your enemy serves absolutely no purpose in the Universe other than destruction, should your pacifism extend to them? He's been fighting the Daleks for almost 2,000 years now, and he has still failed to come up with a definitive answer to this moral dilemma.  Each regeneration seems to attack the problem again and each regeneration comes up with a slightly different answer.  That can be expected, as there isn't an easy solution to the quandary that the Doctor faces.  But when the option comes up in the shape of the opportunity to murder a young boy who hasn't done anything yet, the Doctor finds the question even more troubling than usual.

Could you kill baby Hitler!?  Look at him!  He's adorable!

My new go-to question whenever I have the honor of meeting one of the actors that has played the Doctor is to ask them what they think is consistent across all the very, very different incarnations.  I didn't think of this question until after meeting Colin Baker, so I never got to ask him, and when I asked Peter Davidson and Sylvester McCoy the question McCoy copped out and avoided the question with a "Well, that's the writers' job."  (You do Shakespeare, McCoy, I know you give more thought than that to your characters!)  However, Davidson gave a very interesting and insightful answer about the Doctor's recklessness.  If you ask me, the two traits that are consistent to all of the Doctors are curiosity and compassion.  That second one is big, even with regenerations like 6, 9, and now 12 who are notorious for how rude and pompous they can be to other people.  Their compassion may not be the first thing you notice about them, and they may not be the kind of person to stick around and put a blanket around you after they've saved you, but it's still very important to them to rescue all living creatures and ensure their survival.  Even when the Doctor's not particularly nice, he's still full of love and compassion, even for someone as terrible as Davros.

I've said before that I think the 12th Doctor is embarking on the redemptive arc that the writers originally planned for the 6th Doctor, the one that was never carried out due to Colin Baker's era nearly getting the show cancelled.  The low ratings, combined with the fact that the average fans were starting to agree with the conservative fanatics who thought Doctor Who was too dark and violent, led the production team to quickly cancel their plans and scramble to find solutions to save the show.  Their first solution was the bizarrely nonsensical "Trial of a Timelord" story arc, which only made things worse.  The abrupt firing of Colin Baker and hiring of Sylvester McCoy bought the show a few years of mercy from the BBC, but not much, and the show only lasted a few more years.  In the meantime, the long redemptive arc that was planned for the 6th Doctor never got carried out.  At the same time, though, I wonder if Jonathan Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward had the talent to carry off such a delicate arc.  Steven Moffat, on the other hand, does, and "The Witch's Familiar" is the episode that really makes it clear that we've set off on that path.  The Doctor is really trying to figure himself out, what his morals are now, if he is a good man, and if he's stronger than the darkness in his heart.  Never is that put to the test quite as much as it is in this 2-parter, and thankfully, the Doctor passes with flying colors.

Missy is having a big ball of fun in this episode, and we finally get to see how she managed to survive the end of "Death in Heaven."  Considering her quick return, I can only assume that Steven Moffat has been planning this for quite a long time.  The only real complaint that anybody (anybody with taste, anyway) had about Missy in "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven" is that there wasn't nearly enough of her, especially considering that we got a chance to get to know John Simm's Saxon Master over a 3-part episode.  Granted, he only showed up at the very end of the first part of that episode, but it still means we got much more of him, as the reveal that Missy was the Master didn't even come until the end of the first part of her two-part introduction.  Finally, "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar" gives us some time to get to know Missy.

Doesn't she just look so inviting?  Don't you want to get to know her better?

As delightfully warped as Michelle Gomez's performance of Missy is, she also proves herself to be incredibly intelligent.  She has a very different moral compass from the Doctor, but that's about the only difference between them, as Missy demonstrates that she has as much intelligence and ingenuity as the Doctor.  Clara, in this episode, serves more as a companion to Missy than the Doctor, hence the title of the episode, making it the first time since the 1996 movie that the Master has truly had his own companion.  Missy's explanations of the Dalek homeworld and how it functions sound quite like the Doctor's explanations, but with the added danger of being willing to murder anyone without a moment's hesitation.

Michelle Gomez brings out a very interesting aspect of the Master that we've never really seen before.  We've known since back in the 3rd Doctor serial, "The Sea Devils," that the Doctor and the Master had been friends once at school, and we've seen glimmers of that friendship before.  There's been a begrudging respect between them, and a few temporary truces so that the two former friends can put their heads together to defeat a common foe, but Missy is the first version of the Master to make it absolutely clear how much the Doctor means to her, and is adamant that her multiple attempts to murder him over the years do not change how she feels about him.  Perhaps it's that her last regeneration (presumably) met his end trying to protect the Doctor (a long lost 3rd Doctor era plotline that Davies finally brought to fulfillment), but Missy genuinely cares about the Doctor.  In "The Magician's Apprentice" she expresses her friendship with the Doctor and explains why it isn't a contradiction to two people as ancient as herself and the Doctor, but it's only in "The Witch's Familiar" that she puts her money where her mouth is and mounts a rescue mission to save the Doctor.  In a way, she almost becomes a second companion in this episode, which is extremely refreshing.

Now, some people may have had a moment of hesitation that the Doctor is surprised at Clara's ability to get the Dalek tank to say the word "mercy."  Most notably because of this famous scene, which was also written by Steven Moffat:

This made me do a double take as well, because clearly, River gets the Dalek to say the word "mercy" a long time ago.  However, it occurred to me, the Doctor wasn't present for this scene, as he was busy wiring his vortex manipulator into the Pandorica.  (That might be the nerdiest sentence I've ever written.)  River is a brilliant woman, who knows a lot about the Universe, and certainly more than the average companion, but in many ways she is still a companion.  It makes sense that she wouldn't know as much about Daleks as the Doctor does, and that she would not notice that it was strange for a Dalek to know this word.  There's a good chance that she never got around to telling the Doctor about the time she made a Dalek beg for mercy, as whether or not he approves of this will largely depend on what mood he's in.  Even if she did tell him, it seems likely that he wouldn't have believed her.

The bigger discrepancy is this, which is also Steven Moffat's writing:

We don't actually see a shot of the Dalek from the outside saying the name "Oswin Oswald," but we do get it saying "I am not a Dalek" and a few other things which it seems, from Missy's demonstration, would be impossible.  Similarly, "Into the Dalek" features a Dalek saying a lot of things that "The Witch's Familiar" implies would be impossible for a Dalek casing to be able to interpret.  It's worth noting that Moffat is also credited as a co-writer on "Into the Dalek," although I do believe that's largely because Moffat gave himself partial credit for every episode in Series 8 where he threw in a little bit of story for the overall plot arc.

So yes, Moffat has created a bit of a plot hole here.  There are ways to rationalize this away.  We could say that this is a trait particular to the newly revived Daleks from after "Victory of the Daleks," but more likely than not it's just because Moffat decided that it was convenient to the plot, so fuck all those scripts he wrote in the past.  Personally, I think Moffat and Davies together have patched up almost every major plot hole leftover from the classic series, including the bizarre prophecy that the Valeyard would appear between the Doctor's "12th and final incarnations," and because of that I think Moffat can be forgiven for leaving a few very small holes of his own.

I got the distinct feeling that this episode was setting up the season-long plot arc for Series 9.  It would be very unlike Moffat to leave the series without a larger, overarching plot, and the stuff about the prophecy of the "Hybrid" sounded far too foreboding and interesting to leave it where it stands right now, especially considering that Missy continued to reference the prophecy after the Doctor had already defeated Davros.  At first, I thought the prophecy sounded too mystical for as scientific a race as the Time Lords, much like their "Visionary" from "The End of Time," but I decided that a time travelling race could have many non-magical or mystical ways to predict the future and see a "prophecy."  The fact that Missy said that she had just come up with a very clever idea once she was cornered by the Daleks seemed like it was also pretty clearly Moffat setting up a larger plot arc, with a return for a Dalek attack led by Missy later this season.  Remember, the Master has teamed up with the Daleks before, and last time the plotline was cut short due to the untimely death of the actor, Roger Delgado, so we never really got to see what comes of a Master/Dalek team-up.  Perhaps this is another lost plotline that Moffat intends to finally bring to fruition.

I've decided to do a little thing that's fun for me.  This series, I'm naming every Overanalysis after a punk song I like (that I think is appropriate) then putting the song at the end.  So, enjoy!

Song for Your Enemy: An Overanalysis of "The Magician's Apprentice"

I was done, guys!  I was done writing this stupid blog.  I'm not entirely sure that anybody is reading, that anybody cares, or that there's any point to writing this stupid thing.  But then Steven Moffat wrote this little present for me, gift-wrapped it, and just dropped it in my lap and dared me to understand it.  What he seems to have given to me, and to all of us, is the long awaited spiritual sequel to the 1975 Tom Baker serial, "Genesis of the Daleks," where a gentle retcon of the Dalek backstory introduced us to Davros, the creator of the Daleks.  Frankly, I'm shocked that Moffat thinks that fans who have never seen the classic series have enough understanding of who and what Davros is to be able to follow this story just from what they learned about Davros from "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End."  But like the handmines (such a creepy idea!) that rose up from the ground to trap young Davros, Moffat's most epic script to date grabs us and refuses to let go, and I felt compelled to give another overanalysis this time around.  Perhaps the Horror of Fan Blog will live on this season.

We're going to go over the plot of "Genesis of the Daleks," which is actually a good, if overly long, classic series serial, so if you want to see it and never have, you'll want to stop reading.  But I'm going into it, because it's an important part of what we're talking about here, and I know that some people who read this blog have not watched all of the classic series and may be a little lost.

Genesis!

In "Genesis," the Time Lords intercept the Doctor and his companions and give him a mission:  To go back in time to the creation of the Daleks to either keep them from ever being created, or to change their development so that they never become such destructive, brutal killers.  The Doctor goes back to the end of the war that created the Daleks, the war between the Kaleds and the Thals on the planet Skaro.  Davros, the head of the Kaleds' science division, has promised his army a great and powerful new weapon:  The Daleks.  What they really are are genetic experiments that Davros has created out of the mutated remains of Kaled DNA left behind after the war turned nuclear.  He considered them to be the ultimate life form, which I always thought was strange considering that they were made partially by accident, and are incapable of surviving outside of a large metal shell.  But he created them to be the ultimate, genetically superior life-form and designed them to believe that it was imperative for them to kill all other lesser life forms, including Davros's fellow Kaleds.  He didn't care about winning the war for the Kaleds, he only cared about creating his Daleks, and beginning his great war against all other life in the Universe.  Unfortunately for Davros, when he designed the Daleks to want to destroy all other life in the Universe due to its inferiority, he forgot to teach them to treat him as the exception to that rule, and his Daleks turned on him and killed him, for the first time.  In fact, almost every Davros episode ends with his death, only for the following episode to show him resurrected with a hastily slapped together explanation.  Anyway, at the end of "Genesis of the Daleks," the Doctor finds himself unable to halt the Daleks' creation, and explains it to his companions with the following speech:


"If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?"

Let's kill Davros!

If Davros and Moffat were both being a little too subtle about the links between this episode and "Genesis," they both played back that clip from that episode, and even went so far as to make sure that it was the one and only clip that was played alone and was focused on.  The plot of "The Magician's Apprentice"was literally laid out in another episode 30 years earlier.

Absolutely no explanation is given for why Davros is still alive, when we last saw him die at the end of "Journey's End." This is probably for the best because, when I'm in the middle of a great episode like "The Magician's Apprentice," the last thing I want to think about is a masturbatory shit show like "Journey's End."  There may still be some cursory explanation given in "The Witch's Familiar," but I got the impression that Moffat is past caring at this point.  Considering how flimsy the explanations always are on this show when a character is brought back from the dead, why not just gloss over it entirely?  Frankly, Moffat has been glossing over a lot of the details about the Daleks.  After giving Gatiss the task of bringing the Daleks back on a more permanent basis than they had been in the Davies era, the Daleks re-established themselves as a power in the Universe quite quickly, and the fact that they had ever been gone from the Universe was pretty much forgotten.  In "Asylum of the Daleks," some of the Daleks in The Asylum were survivors of classic series episodes, which is impossible considering that the new Dalek paradigm is made up of a completely new set of Daleks made from The Progenitor.  The Seventh Doctor tricked the Daleks into destroying their own planet, Skaro, back in "Remembrance of the Daleks" in 1988, but yet it seems surprisingly in tact in the 1996 movie, in "Asylum of the Daleks," and now in "The Magician's Apprentice," and nobody seems to care to explain it.  Viewers can plug in their own explanations, whatever they may decide those to be.  This is postmodern Who.  We have no time left for explanations.

Besides, in a Universe where Rory, Clara, and Jack can all die over and over again, who cares anyway?

Missy's return, however, is a little bit more immediately on our minds, her death only having happened about two episodes, and Moffat made sure to acknowledge her surprise return from the dead, even if that acknowledgement quite deliberately refused an explanation, and an explanation was not immediately forthcoming. I think her explanation isn't going to get glossed over at all, and that there will be a real reason why she's come back.  Moffat has a pretty big long game that he's been thinking about for a while now, and I think that Missy is more than just a passenger on this adventure.  Moffat has a great grasp on the Doctor/Master relationship, and Missy's description of it being infinitely complex was pretty perfect.

Oh, and by the way, Moffat has made a lot of very every day things scary over the years:  stone statues, dust in the shadows, WiFi, etc.  I have to say, though, 80's one-hit-wonders were not something I thought he was ever going to try to make terrifying.  Oh boy has he, though:

To be fair, though, this video was pretty creepy to begin with.

But Missy is playing a game here that we're not in on, and I wouldn't be surprised if she has a lot more to do with this than we originally thought.  The last few moments of this episode felt strangely dreamlike, with a strange sense of impermanence to everything.  Maybe it's just because both Clara and Missy were killed off, and we all know that that Moffat won't let that stand by the end of "The Witch's Familiar," so something about their death felt unreal.  The fact that Missy practically invites her own death, as well, makes me feel like something strange is up, as that's largely out of character for her.  The larger point that Davros is trying to make here isn't that far from the point that Missy was trying to make to the Doctor at the end of "Death in Heaven."  I wonder if perhaps everything we're seeing here is an extension of the lesson that Missy has been trying to teach the Doctor, and that a lot of this is an illusion, or possibly just a situation she set up.  Maybe Missy got her hands on some dream crabs.  In all of these scenarios, though, I remain cautiously optimistic because, like I said at Christmas, I think Moffat knows he can't use the dream crabs and things like that to Dallas too much of the show (yes, "Dallas" is now a verb) without a pretty big fan revolt.

By the way, if anyone is wondering where I came up with the title for this blog post, it's from an album that I've been listening to lately with quite obsessive fervor, American Spring by Anti-Flag.  The particular song, "Song for Your Enemy," keeps playing in my head when I think of this episode, and somehow, they remind me of each other.  You can hear it for yourself:

In the season to come, we have the promise of an explanation for the Doctor's face that Davies thought up and never implemented before leaving the show, we have the return of Jamie Matheson (co-writing an episode with Steven Moffat!), a guest appearance from Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams, and an episode to feature the Doctor alone without another character appearing in the entire episode, as well as the triumphant return of River Song for the Christmas special!  Moffat promised that these episodes will bleed together in such a way that it will be hard to tell when something is or is not a 2-parter, which is exactly the way I want to see this show run.  The "no 2-parters" rule from series 7 has mercifully been thrown out the window.  I never thought that rule was really Moffat's idea, and it feels like he's finally returned to what he knows he excels at.  At the end of Season 7, I wondered if Moffat had lost his touch, but I no longer feel that way and I have a feeling that this season is going to be as epic as its opening.  So Geronimo! 

The Doctor is Seven: An Overanalysis of "Death in Heaven"

I don't know what to say about putting this out so late.  Other than to say, I did promise to, at least, get each blog out before the next episode airs, which means I've still technically got 36 days left to keep that promise.  But the truth is, as you've noticed, I've had trouble getting these blogs out on time.  Maybe I'm a little busy these days.  Maybe it's because I'm a bit depressed lately.  And, at least part of it is that, on some level, I've felt a little of what everyone else has felt about this season:  The episodes are great, and I can't find a lot of faults with it, but something did seem a little off.  It's probably the switch to such a more serious Doctor that makes the tone of the show a little less whimsical, and maybe I miss that.  But that's not a fault with the show.  But, maybe, it's why I had trouble getting these blogs out all season.  I promise to get the Christmas one out quick.  I mean, it's not like I'll have much to do.

So now, on with the show:

I'm a Rocket Man! Burning up his fuse up here alone!

Not too long ago, a friend of mine posted an article from The Onion AV Club called Fake deaths, cheap resurrections, and dealing with real grief.  The author of the article very recently lost his fiancee to a freak blood clot traveling to her chest.  The author goes on to talk about how Hollywood's treatment of death, since that incident, has bothered him.  He criticized movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Trek:  Into Darkness for their treatment of deaths.  He complains about death being used too often as a cheap motivator and, as a self described "death elitist," he feels this is insincere and insensitive.  While I feel sorry for his loss, and know where he's coming from--and I really do know where he's coming from--he's wrong.  I lost my mother when I was 23 to lung cancer.  It was the most traumatic experience of my life.  And I felt the way he felt for a while, but only about the really gratuitous movies, like Saw, that truly showed a disrespect for death.  But when death is used as a motivator for noble deeds, and fuels a powerful clash between good and evil, I do not fault it at all.  Death is the most powerful motivator in the human experience, and so colors so many parts of our lives, that I can understand the prominence of it in fiction.  So to those who call "Dark Water" and "Death in Heaven" disrespectful to the dead, I say, as one of your fellow "death elitists," I understand your pain, but you're being a little oversensitive.  This is a beautiful story, and it wouldn't be half as good if it wasn't so heartbreaking.

The Master is my favorite villain in Doctor Who.  I was so excited to see the Master's return, and I was quite okay with her new appearance.  While I've said before on this blog that I'm okay with the idea of a female Doctor, I've often wondered if, when it happens, it will still make it feel like the same person.  Well, if there was any question, "Death in Heaven" answered it:  a female regeneration can absolutely feel like the same character as the previous, male regeneration.  Michelle Gomez plays a brilliant Master, with all the manic glee of John Simm's master, combined with the more condescending loftiness of the original Master, Roger Delgado.  The only complaint I have about her performance is that I didn't get to see enough of it.  John Simm's, after first being introduced in his own surprise reveal, got two full length episodes to show off his brilliant performance of the Master (even if the plot of those episodes was...flawed).  I wish Michelle Gomez could have gotten as much time, because her performance was so wonderfully unhinged, I wanted to get to know her better.

My girlfriend pointed out, when I first showed her the series and we got to "Last of the Time Lords," the obvious Christ metaphors of the Doctor in that episode.  The Doctor and the Master have a very obvious Jesus/Satan relationship, and this episode only further confirmed that.  If the scene in the graveyard where Missy offers the Doctor her army isn't The Temptation of Christ, then my Catholic high school should take back my diploma.  While it's not like that scene has never been done metaphorically in fiction before, this was one of the most compelling versions of it I've ever seen.

Although I don't remember this passage in the Bible.

I also liked that Moffat didn't feel the need to give us any explanation of why the Master has changed genders.  The Doctor Who Unbound audio series, which tells Doctor Who stories that are non-canon and which take place in an alternate Universe, claims the only way that Time Lords can change gender is when they commit suicide.  Some fans suggested that the Master technically committed suicide at the end of "The End of Time," and predicted that that would be the explanation.  I said I hated that explanation, and I hoped Moffat wouldn't do that.  I suggested maybe he had picked up a potion from the Sisterhood of Karn, who said in "Night of the Doctor" that they had perfected a potion that could cause a Time Lord to switch genders.  But, I said, I would settle for a simple explanation of "It's rare, but it happens."  Moffat didn't even give us that.  The implication here is that Time Lords can always change gender, we just haven't seen it happen.  Judging by the Doctor's 13 male incarnations (not to mention the Master's 6 male incarnations), I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, we're told that cross-gender regeneration is rarer than same-gender regeneration, but it seems like nothing special is required to cause a cross-gender regeneration.  So, to all those out there who are asking why the Master regenerated into a woman and the Doctor never has, think of it as being the Time Lord equivalent of having twins:  it's not that common, but it's not that uncommon either.  Really, I think that explains it all.

"Every time the Doctor gets pally with someone, I have this overwhelming urge to notify their next of kin" - Rory Williams, in "The God Complex."  And with that quote, we say goodbye to Osgood.  I understand Moffat's explanation that Missy needed to kill someone we care about to remind us that she's still a stone cold psychopath and truly evil, but I also understand those who called it a Whedonesque gratuitous death.  It was sad, but I think we're going to see her again.  Remember that in "Day of the Doctor," Kate has met Clara, but Clara hasn't met Kate yet.  I think we're going to pop in and see Kate and Osgood again, but earlier in their timeline.

Speaking of Kate, she is quickly becoming one of my favorite recurring characters.  You see, Kate Stewart was first introduced in Downtime, a straight-to-video movie that was put out in 1995 when Doctor Who was off the air, and, to satiate the fans, and a company called Reeltime Pictures bought the rights to certain characters from Doctor Who but not the Doctor itself to create some spin-off movies.  In Downtime, Kate is a very down on her luck single mother, estranged from her father, and is living on a houseboat.  When Kate was introduced into proper canon (most extended universe materials in Doctor Who can be assumed to be canon, according to the BBC, but fans often only trust the TV show as certifiably canonical) in "Power of Three," I assumed they were rebooting the character.  This version of Kate seemed like she was too attached to her father and had herself too much together to be the same Kate from Downtime.  I was glad to see this episode seemed to confirm that this was the Kate from Downtime, or at least suggested it:  "Kate Stewart, divorcee, mother of two, keen gardener, outstanding bridge player, also chief scientific officer Unified Intelligence Task Force..."  Kate's been an awesome character, and more than playing stand-in for her father, she's become a very important part of Doctor Who, as the show finally has someone to represent Earth's official response to global emergencies.

Not that we've seen that many global emergencies in the Moffat era.  One of the things I've always liked about Moffat is that, unlike Davies, he doesn't feel like every finale has to be about someone attacking the Earth.  Davies defaulted on a big invasion of or attack on modern day Earth in every single season finale, as well as every Christmas special.  With so many attacks in such little time, the Davies era's running joke became that Earth is invaded so often, people are starting to get paranoid.  And rightfully so.  How are there still people on Earth who don't believe in aliens?  Why wouldn't everyone clear out of London every Christmas?  Why doesn't every planet just have nukes pointed at the sky at all times?  Moffat has been really creative in trying to find other ways to create really interesting climaxes in his season finales and Christmas specials that take place on other planets, in other times, or that involve very personal battles for the Doctor, rather than big Earth-wide emergencies.  In fact, this is the first time in the Moffat era where either a season finale or a Christmas special has featured a Davies-like attack on modern Earth.  Moffat, unlike Davies, understands how to use something sparingly, so he's allowed to do things like that.

And the Brigadier returns as a Cyberman!  I actually watched this episode, for the first time, with my co-bloggers from the now defunct (and God do I miss it) 900 Year Diary, Kevin and Melissa.  We don't often agree about things about Doctor Who (which is part of why we were so good on a blog together), and somehow all three of us loved this finale.  But when the Cyber-Brigadier showed up, my first thought was "I feel like that was disrespectful."  Melissa turned to me and said "Why?  No, I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm honestly asking and I'm open to being convinced:  why is that disrespectful?"  I found myself unable to think of a real reason.  Ultimately, it was a very strange, but very sweet tribute to the late, great Nicholas Courtney, who passed away 3 years ago.  It's particularly Doctor Who-ish for the tribute to involve him saving the day, and saving his daughter.  In death, the Brigadier is still a hero.

And the Doctor never salutes?  Really?

I think he's okay with it.

The Doctor and Clara have one of the most dysfunctional relationships between any Doctor and companion in the show's history, second only to, possibly, the 6th Doctor and Peri.

If you read my blog regularly, you'll remember this particular dead horse.

So it makes sense that they lie to each other at the end of the episode.  It's their attempt to be nice to each other, combined with the fact that both of them are severely damaged people.  Lying comes easily to both of them.  But, had I put this blog out on time, I wouldn't know for certain that Clara was coming back.  Yes, she was already confirmed for the Christmas special, but from what I had read, so had Samuel Anderson (who plays Danny Pink), which seems hard to believe right now (or maybe not, I'll get to that later).  I might have thought it a lie, except now we've seen a clip from the Christmas special that the BBC has released, which clearly shows Clara (and the Doctor's questionable choice of wearing a suit jacket with a hoodie).

But, as many have pointed out, Danny being dead, while a perfectly heartbreaking ending to the finale, leaves "Listen" completely unexplained.  Orson Pink was not directly confirmed as one of Clara's descendants, but the implication had all the subtle innuendo of a dim-witted frat boy asking a sorority girl "Can I put my penis in you?"  I don't think a lot was left to the imagination.  And, had "Listen" and "Death in Heaven" aired in different seasons, I'd chalk it up to poor planning (like the truth field in "Time of the Doctor), but clearly Moffat knew where he was going with the show when he wrote "Listen."  He has a plan for this, that's obvious.  A lot of people have suggested that Clara is somehow already pregnant with Danny's baby (the family value brigade that complained about Vastra and Jenny kissing back in "Deep Breath" would have a field day with an unmarried companion becoming pregnant on a kids show).  My co-host on the Mile High Who podcast, Somer, suggested that the Christmas special is going to involve Santa bringing Danny back to life somehow.  I want the events of "Listen" to be resolved, but I do hope it's in a way that leaves that sad ending of Danny's death without cheaply bringing him back from the dead comic-book style.

And Santa's appearance was so much fun to see, especially played by, amazingly, Nick Frost.  I wish Simon Pegg hadn't already appeared in Doctor Who, because he could have made a perfect elf next to his old friend and common co-star.  And the scene we've seen from the Christmas special shows us that the Doctor is suspicious of Santa (Father Christmas to the Brits), thinking he's secretly the villain of the piece.  Santa suggests that the Doctor is mistaken, and as much of this season has been about the Doctor actually being wrong, it's possible that Santa is telling the truth.  The special seems to combine the reality of the North Pole (a place where a small handful of scientists occasionally set up a little shack to study things) with the fantasy version of it (Santa!).  I'm looking forward to seeing where the special is going, despite most people's skepticism from the trailer and clip.

I'll probably post at least once or twice before Christmas.  I'm looking forward to where the Christmas special is going.  The Christmas specials, so far, have always featured one of the happy-go-lucky, life-is-wonderful type of Doctors (10 and 11) who can freely indulge in a child-like love of Christmas.  This will be our first Christmas special with a more grumpy, crotchety type of Doctor.  More Scrooge than Tiny Tim, I'll be interested to see how Moffat writes a Christmas special around a meaner Doctor.  I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with!

The Devil is Six: An Overanalysis of "Dark Water"

I wasn't able to say this on Facebook because I don't want to spoil things for people who haven't seen the episode, but since this blog has a spoiler warning on it:




I called it and, not only do I have this blog to prove it, but I also mentioned back in the last episode of my Podcast that I thought Missy was the Master.  Now that I've gotten that out of my system, moving on...

I call it the Unholy Trinity of Doctor Who villains.  The Daleks, The Cybermen, The Master.  If you threw out all of the other villains of the show--The Zygons, The Ice Warriors, The Silurians, The Weeping Angels--you'd have a far less interesting show, but you'd still have Doctor Who.  They are the main pillars that hold up the show and they will continue to come back no matter how many times they are seemingly destroyed.  In the history of the show, almost all possible combinations of any two of these three villains have been seen:  The Master and the Daleks teamed up (however briefly) in "Frontier in Space," while the Daleks and the Cybermen presented a dual front for the Doctor back in "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday."  However, up until "Dark Water," we had never seen the Master team up with the Cybermen.  It's a simple, cheap gimmick to bring together two of the most popular villains, but it's one that makes me positively giddy every time I see it.  And never has it been done in quite so imaginative a way as this.

Now, if only Radagast the Brown had kept his damn mouth shut, it would have been a much bigger surprise!

"Ain't I a stinker!"

Not that it was too hard to come up with the idea that Missy was short for Mistress, the female version of Master.  I may have brought it up in my last blog, but I wasn't the only person on the Internet who made the exact same guess.  Also, I can't believe that the BBC released what was essentially the last scene, revealing that the Cybermen were behind everything.  Not that that was the only way in which that information was let out early:  The trailer last week showed a Cyberman in a room with Clara (in a scene that it seems is from next week's episode).  On top of that, there was a photo that came out even before the season started that showed one of the final scenes of this episode with Missy, the Doctor, and some Cybermen.  It felt like those first two seasons of the revived series, where far too much was given away in the damn trailers at the end of episodes.  A lot of things were poorly kept secrets about this episode, to the point where I was pretty sure that Missy was the Master, but I still kept jumping up and down as I heard the slow reveal, so excited to see my favorite villain return.  Also, as she started describing herself ("two hearts, both of them yours") my mind started to go to the Valeyard, and I was beginning to be excited about that possibility as well.  But, ultimately, Missy being the Master is so much more exciting.

The Doctor and the Master have always had a weird respect for each other, on top of their hatred for each other.  The Third Doctor, back in "The Sea Devils," says that they were old friends from back in their school days.  And, as I mentioned in my last post, according to the expanded Universe, The Doctor and The Master were part of the same elite clique at the Time Lord Academy.  I've always wanted to know what made them turn against each other.  (But, no, I've never wanted to know so much that I wanted to see a spin-off about it.  Please don't make that spin-off!)  However, it seems that friendship ran a little deeper than I had thought.  Apparently all it takes for the two of them to jump on top of each other is for one of them to switch genders.  I suppose it's true what the Tenth Doctor said to the Fifth Doctor back in "Time Crash":  "No, no beard this time.  Well, a wife."

And Michelle Gomez (of the Scottish Gomezes, apparently), who we've only gotten to see tiny little glimpses of throughout the season, finally came out to shine in this episode as our first ever female Master, and boy did she shine in the role.  While John Simm will probably always hold a special place in my heart for his particularly manic Master, Michelle Gomez's Mistress is at least on par if not a little bit better.  Her evil is buried just ever so slightly below the surface.  Where Simm's Master unleashed his full fury at almost all times, Michelle Gomez's Mistress harkens back more to the restrained sadism of the original Master, Roger Delgado.  Only, you know, in a dress.

"What?  I look good in a dress, too!"

Funnily enough, while researching this, I discovered that Michelle Gomez is married to Jack Davenport.  For those of you who don't know the significance of that, Davenport was pretty much the star of what was probably Moffat's second most famous show, Coupling, where he more-or-less played a slightly fictionalized version of Steven Moffat himself.  Besides the fact that Davenport's character was named Steve, and his girlfriend's name was Susan (the name of Moffat's real life wife), I take the character of Steve to be based on Moffat himself due to Moffat's explanation about what happened to the characters after the show ended:

"Steve and Susan have two children now, and have recently completed work on a sitcom about their early lives together. They’re developing a new television project, but it keeps getting delayed as he insists on writing episodes of some old kids show they recently pulled out of mothballs."

So that's pretty cool, but enough about the real world.  

How the hell did "The Mistress" get here?  She tells the Doctor he left her (him? The pronouns are getting confusing here) for dead.  Well, yeah.  He had good reason to.  The Master was pretty far gone by the end of "The End of Time."  After Lucy ruined his resurrection, he was hemorrhaging energy, and even if the Doctor had just done nothing, it looked like the Master was ready to burn out anyway.  I knew he was never done for good, as he never is, no matter how dead he seems to be.  But I would appreciate an explanation next week, and perhaps one better than "His DNA was left on his ex-wife's lips years later" or "The Time Lords just brought him back from the dead for the hell of it."

Okay, enough about The Mistress, as there are other things that happened in this episode, after all.

Funny story, I've actually heard that metaphor about babies in the womb before.  I went to a Catholic school and, every morning, we had a morning prayer over the school's intercom system that usually involved the speaker telling some sort of story that turned into a moral fable.  One of them was about two babies in the womb and one of them insisting there was no such thing as life after birth, while the other one was a firm believer that there had to be something more than that.  The obvious point of the story was to teach us that non-belief is silly.  It may have sold me at the time, but as a 30 year old with a lot more world weariness, not so much.

"There is one, simple, horrible possibility that has never occurred to anyone throughout human history," says Chris Addison's character, with the strange name plate that just reads SEB.  Actually, Mr. Moffat, while I've never actually had a nightmare about anything grabbing me from under my bed, I have had horrifying thoughts about the possibility of the dead being fully conscious.  It's actually why I consider being cremated, because I always thought it might actually be better than the true horror of being forever conscious in a box that I can never get out of.  Thank you, Moffat, for a whole new set of unendurable nightmares.

For the love of God, no!!

Clara and Danny's fight finally did come to something, and boy was that painful.  She's finally ready to stop lying and be honest, and that's exactly when he dies.  But that did lead to probably my favorite line Peter Capaldi has delivered thus far:  "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"  The Doctor has struggled so much this season in trying to remember how to be a good man, and I wasn't entirely sure that he was going to be that good to her after what she pulled.  In the moment where she tells the Doctor that Danny is dead, his underreaction is just so cold.  "And?"  The Eleventh Doctor wouldn't have been that cold.  Neither would the Tenth.  And I'm not entirely sure the Ninth would be so heartless, at least not by the end of his season.  The Doctor has lost his way, and that coldness felt like further proof of it.  But that one line where he tells Clara how much he cares about her, even after her betrayal, is a reminder that somewhere inside, the Doctor is still the Doctor.

It looks to me like Missy must have had something to do with Danny's death.  We never saw the actual accident (probably at least in part because the BBC wouldn't let them, it is a kid's show after all).  But Missy obviously wanted the Doctor to find her from the beginning.  All the people she's been targeting all season have all ben people the Doctor has come into contact with.  And she mentioned the Doctor when the half-faced man showed up in "heaven."  I mean, she is the Master, and the Master can hardly pull off a big scheme without making sure the Doctor is watching.  But is that all that's happening, or is there a specific reason she wanted the Doctor there?

I also can't figure out, for the life of me, what's supposed to happen when Danny presses that button on the iPad.  So, that just disconnects him from his body in the real world?  Why?  What would be the upside of that for The Mistress?  And I don't know how that kid is going to come into the plot later on, but he's going to have a pretty huge role pretty soon.  Possibly, he's going to save Danny, showing the kind of forgiveness only a small angel could show.

Oh, and also, you have Steve Jobs in the afterlife, so that's why you have iPads?  So, Steve Jobs talked some other inventor in the afterlife into creating them for everyone?  Because Steve Jbs never invented shit, he just marketed other people's shit.

DELETE!  DELETE!  DELETE WINDOWS!

In an interview with MTV, Michelle Gomez said, when asked what she could tease about the second half of this episode: "Oh, just watch it, it’s very good. You wont be disappointed – and nothing that you think is happening is happening… Nothing."  So now I have no idea, because I thought I had a really good idea of what was happening.  The Mistress (I'm not sure she insists on using "The," but I'm going to insist on using it for her) has teamed up with the Cybermen to use all of the dead people on Earth, turn them into Cybermen, and use that to battle the human race.  So what else is going on?  I'm not sure.  Davies probably would have left it at that, but it makes sense that Moffat would have another clever little twist up his sleeve.  And I can't wait to see what it is!  Like I said, I do think Moffat is eventually going to start catching some hell for giving us a female Master before he gave us a female Doctor, but I don't care.  He's given us this version of the Master who is truly creepy.  I'm just ecstatic to see my favorite villain in the Doctor Who universe back again!  Welcome, Michelle Gomez, to one of the most important roles in Doctor Who cannon.  I can't wait to see where this is going!

Little Miss Scary: Speculations on the Identity of "Missy"

The big question of the moment right now in Doctor Who is "Who is Missy?"  Even the trailer for the big two-part finale, which starts this Saturday, involves Missy asking if the Doctor knows who she is.  This reminds me of the very enjoyable mystery of who River Song was.  Some say that Moffat's payoffs aren't satisfying in the end.  Personally, the only one I found remotely unsatisfying was "The Name of the Doctor," so I feel confident that he has something really creative up his sleeve for this one.  But, of course, we have to remember Moffat's resistance to reusing classic series characters and species.  That's not to say that he refuses to use them altogether (Silurians, Sontarans, Daleks, Zygons, The Great Intelligence), but that he usually prefers to make up his own villains.  So there's the possibility, of course, that Missy is a completely new character that Moffat invented.  But the way that her identity is couched in mystery leaves us with the suggestion that she's someone important from the Doctor's past, so perhaps, as Moffat has now used some of the classic series characters and villains a little bit more in the past year or so, Missy might be a character returning from the classic series.  For a long time, we weren't sure if Missy was good or evil, as she seemed to primarily be concerned with looking over the dead.  Earlier today, the BBC released a scene from the upcoming finale which confirmed that Missy was, quite clearly, evil.  It showed that she was working with the Cybermen, and it pretty much revealed her entire plan:


















So, here are a few possibilities about the identity of Missy, listed in, what I consider to be, the order of their likelihood:

Missy is a Female Regeneration of the Master:  I brought this up earlier this season that this could be a distinct possibility, and it remains, to me, the most likely possibility.  The first reason is the rumors that came out that the main villain of this season would be the Master.  I still think there's something strange about Sylvester McCoy having inside knowledge about the show after all these years, and I realize I was highly skeptical about it when the rumor first came out.  But believing this rumor is just so...tempting.  Also, Moffat has been slowly laying the groundwork for the past few years to introduce the idea of a regeneration across genders.  Add to that the fact that the Master has a penchant for choosing aliases that spell out "Master" if you rearrange the letters, translate it into English, etc.  Missy, as many pointed out, could easily be short for Mistress, the female version of "Master."  It wouldn't be the first time that the Master teamed up with another one of the Doctor's most famous foes, as the Master struck up an alliance with the Daleks back in "Frontier in Space."  Still, I do think that Moffat will catch hell (once again) if he gives us a female Master before we get a female Doctor.

Missy is The Rani:  Since Doctor Who returned to air in 2005, most of the key villains from the classic series have been reintroduced very slowly, allowing new viewers to get to know them slowly, so as not to overwhelm anyone.  First the Daleks, then the Cybermen, then the Master, then the Silurians, the Great Intelligence, the Ice Warriors, and the Zygons.  At this point, almost all of the really central ones from the classic series have made a reappearance in the new series.  However, there's still one villain that the fans continue to clamor for:  The Rani.  The fans' desires to see her return is way out of proportion to how important she actually was in the classic series, as the Rani only ever appeared in two classic series serials.  Part of the clamor for the Rani's return is probably the fact that she clearly has a long history with the Doctor that we still don't know about, and I think people would really like to see that explored further.  The Rani and the Doctor don't go into their history much on screen, but the expanded universe material says that the Rani, the Master, the Doctor, and an assortment of other Time Lords who have popped up in the classic series were part of a very exclusive clique of students at the Time Lord academy who were head and shoulders above the other students.  The fact that the Rani and the Doctor are old friends supports the theory that she is Missy, as Missy, back in "Deep Breath," refers to the Doctor as her boyfriend.  The Rani is a scientist, a bio-chemist to be exact, and her defining trait is her complete lack of scientific ethics, often using intelligent creatures as test subjects.  The fact that Missy seems to be able to bring people back from the dead lends some credibility to the theory of Missy being the Rani as well, as her background in bio-chemistry might explain how she's discovered how to do this.  However, while the Rani is a Time Lady (stop laughing, that's what they're called), and therefore can be played by anyone, the one downside to this theory is that Moffat might consider it a little insensitive to introduce a regeneration of the Rani only 7 months after Kate O'Mara, the actress who played the Rani in the classic series, passed away.

Missy is a female regeneration of the Valeyard:  The Valeyard was the main villain of Colin Baker's last season, a season-long arc known as "Trial of a Timelord."  He was said to be an evil version of the Doctor, made up of all the evil aspects of the Doctor's own personality, formed between his "twelfth and final incarnation."  This always seemed strange back when we thought there would only be 13 Doctors (to quote my friend Patrick, "integers don't work that way"), but now that we know that there will be more than 13 Doctors, anytime between now and the end of the series (which may never come) could be between his twelfth and final incarnation.  The season ended with a cliffhanger, as the Valeyard was revealed to still be alive and had infiltrated the Time Lord high council.  The cliffhanger was never followed-up on because the "Trial of a Timelord" plotline was so convoluted and unpopular that a memo was actually released to the writing staff instructing them to, under no circumstances, revisit the Valeyard or even try to explain the million plot holes in that story.  Still, much like Jason Todd in the Batman comics was far more popular after he was killed off than when he was actually in the comic, the Valeyard has found his largest fan base since his run on the show ended.  I would estimate that about 50% of the fan fictions written about Doctor Who are about the Valeyard.  People really do want to see the Valeyard again.  In fact, back in "The Name of the Doctor," the Great Intelligence mentioned that someday the Doctor would be known as the Valeyard.  As some of my co-hosts on my podcast mentioned, one of the main things that lends this theory credence is that, in "Deep Breath," Missy says of the Doctor " I do like his new accent, though. Think I might keep it."  She seems to be talking about the Doctor as if she both is and isn't somehow a part of him.  The fact that the Valeyard is, essentially, the darker side of the Doctor's own personality would make for an interesting explanation of why Missy called the Doctor her boyfriend, but this still remains a very outside possibility.  I don't think Moffat really wants to muddle into the murky waters of "Trial of a Timelord."

Missy is Mercy Hartigan:  I don't blame you if you're now asking "Who the hell is Mercy Hartigan?"  Her obscurity is the main reason I put her so far down on this list.  I actually had to look her up to remember her name myself.  Mercy Hartigan was the woman who worked for the Cybermen back in "The Next Doctor."  This theory came to me earlier today when I saw the scene that was released, and what I immediately thought of was the last woman who worked with the Cybermen.  We last saw Mercy as she was piloting a giant, steampunk Cyberman and, having been set loose of their influence over her, caused the Cyberman to slowly self-destruct as it fell into a parallel dimension.  She was presumed dead, but we never saw it actually happen, so who knows?  Also, "Mercy" and "Missy" sound pretty similar, don't they?  Still, the fact that she's pretty much the only person on this list that's not a Time Lord, making her change of appearance difficult to explain, and that she's a pretty obscure character makes her a pretty remote possibility.

Missy is Susan, the Doctor's Granddaughter:  On the most recent episode of my podcast, my co-host and co-worker, Scott, brought up this theory that he had read online and that he said had immediately been batted down.  Myself and my other co-hosts also batted this theory down pretty quickly, but now I don't know if it's the most absurd idea anymore.  While I still think this is only a remote possibility because there are so many holes in it (Susan is the Doctor's granddaughter, so calling him her "boyfriend" is, to say the least...icky), I still stand by the fact that I really feel like the show has been hinting for years that the Doctor's role as a father is coming back around in a big way sometime soon (that damned cot!).

Missy is Jenny, the Doctor's Daughter:  See above, re: Susan.

Missy is River Song:  Literally the only thing that keeps this theory alive is Missy calling the Doctor her boyfriend.  Now that we have confirmation that Missy is, indeed, evil, there's little hope left that she's going to turn out to be River, unless Moffat has decided he's tired of having fans anymore.

-------------------

Other than that, I'm really intrigued to see what this who exactly Missy is.  The other interesting thing is that, from the trailer, it seems that we're going to see Kate Stewart and her trusty sidekick, Osgood, once again.  Judging from the scene in "Day of the Doctor" where Kate Stewart says that she's already given Clara security clearance because of her last visit to UNIT, I'm guessing that this episode is actually going to take place earlier in Kate and Osgood's timeline than "Day of the Doctor."  I also think that my friend Dawn's theory that Osgood is actually Clara's long lost sister is going to eventually turn out to be true.

But what I'm possibly most intrigued about, other than Missy's identity of course, is why Clara is acting so odd in the trailer, taunting the Doctor, and telling him that Clara Osborne never existed.  Clearly, Missy is the woman from the shop who brought the Doctor and Clara together, and the one who placed the ad in "Deep Breath" that brought them back together.  Does she have some sort of hold over Clara that's causing her to turn on the Doctor?  Or has she just become so infuriated with the Doctor's actions from this season that she's snapped and turned on him?  Frankly, I wouldn't blame her if she did.  And why does Missy so want Clara and the Doctor to be together?  Seeing as how she seems to be evil, and Clara saved the Doctor's life, putting the two of them together seems to be counterproductive.

I've been told that, in the UK, Halloween is celebrated, but that it's not as big of a holiday as in the US, hence why there are no Halloween specials or Halloween themed episodes of Doctor Who.  But, in a way, this feels like a nice Halloween-ish themed episode.  The Cybermen are back, they have a mysterious new leader, and they're harvesting the graves of the Earth.  Sounds like a big, fun, rollicking, scary Doctor Who adventure!

Thy Fearful Symmetry; or A Series of Catastrophes: An Overanalysis of "In the Forest of the Night"

Into the woods, then out of the woods, and home before dark...

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

        -The Tyger by William Blake

This season has been one hell of a ride so far.  Last season was, by and large, a dreary, muddled mess of a season, and a seriously lackluster season with which to say goodbye to as brilliant of a Doctor as Matt Smith.  The injection of a new Doctor (despite being the one who replaced my all time favorite Doctor) has been just what this show needed.  A rip-roaring, fun, exciting season, this year we've been through one of the most imaginative years of the entire Doctor Who franchise.  This episode, though, felt much like a throw away.  It reminded me of what happens when I leave my blog to the last minute on Saturday morning and I want to make my self-imposed deadline of posting my blog before the new episode airs:  I don't really always get to put as much into it as I really wanted to.  This episode lacks any real peril.  Even the other episodes I criticized this season ("Into the Dalek," "Mummy on the Orient Express") were, at the very least, far more ambitious than this episode.  Trees taking over the Earth is hard to make scary unless the trees look like the Ents from Lord of the Rings or Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, but even still, I feel like a little more effort could have been made to make this story more interesting.  Even the animals that had escaped from the zoo, apparently, and were now loose in the worldwide forest didn't make this "crisis" feel scary.  But, as someone else pointed out to me online, it's a testament to the quality of this season that the season's obvious lowest point was still pretty entertaining.  While the plot remains rather uninteresting, the episode is peppered with some truly brilliant dialogue and one-liners.  As we barrel ever faster towards the big 2-part finale, the high quality of the episodes from this season give me a lot of hope that we're heading into something really special.

This episode reminds me of an old episode of almost everyone's least favorite (but my favorite) Star Trek series, Voyager.  In the episode called "Twisterd" (one of the show's most notoriously ill-conceived episodes) a strange green gas overtakes the ship, and everything it passes over gets dimensionally distorted, causing the whole ship to be geographically rearranged into new patterns that the crew can't navigate.  At the end of the episode, one of the characters comes to the realization that it's possible that the phenomenon is not actually dangerous, and that the best action is for them to do nothing.  He turns out to be right, and the strange phenomenon leaves them without harming them, the lesson of the episode being that, sometimes, inaction is the best solution.  If you haven't seen the episode before, don't worry that I've just spoiled that for you, because it's one of the worst episodes of the entire Star Trek franchise.  Ultimately, "In the Forest of the Night" comes down with a somewhat similar lesson, that, in certain situations, inaction is the best course.  However, much as Star Trek: Voyager showed us, to teach that lesson in a compelling way in an action-adventure story is very difficult, and this episode does only a slightly better job than Voyager's "Twisted."  Even the solution of the episode is unexciting.  Seriously, that's all it took to stop the governments of the world from burning down the forests?  Think of all the things that we've tried to explain to governments and businesses over the years that they need to stop doing for the sake of the planet and the human race, and think of how many of those things they've actually stopped doing.  The ozone layer is going the way of Limp Bizkit's fan base, but all we had to do to stop that was to get a little girl to ask everyone nicely?

Danny and Clara's fight over her traveling with the Doctor is certainly interesting, but moving at an annoyingly slow pace.  Danny first found out about the Doctor and expressed his vague disapproval of him in "The Caretaker," and every week this conflict between them seems to threaten to come to a head and never does.  Two weeks ago, Clara claimed to be ending her travels with the Doctor, last week she was caught lying about ending her travels with him, and this week there seem to be no consequences to that lie.  Clara keeps lying, and Danny keeps failing to react.  What's more, Danny made it quite clear weeks ago that he doesn't care if she keeps traveling with the Doctor, as he told her in "Kill the Moon" that he thought it was obvious that she still cared about him and wasn't about to leave him forever, and in "Mummy on the Orient Express" he told her that leaving the Doctor forever sounded silly and she should keep the door open to spending some time with him again from time to time.  Even in this episode, Danny says point blank that he doesn't care what the truth is, he just wants to know what it is.  So why she's struggling so hard to cover up something from her boyfriend that he clearly doesn't care about remains...unclear.  My best guess is that she's mad at herself for not cutting ties with the Doctor like she said she was going to back in "Mummy on the Orient Express" and is projecting her own disapproval of her own actions onto Danny and imagining that he's the one who's upset about it, not her.

I had to ask some British friends online about this, but I wasn't aware that young children in London ever wore New York Yankees hats, as the kid in this episode clearly does.  It's not like I've seen anyone in the US wearing any sort of soccer gear unless it's World Cup season or they were clearly not born in this country.  I was told that Yankees caps can be seen in England sometimes, but that it's mostly a fashion thing, and most people who wear them don't follow the team or even baseball, for that matter.

That gruff, American, New York bravado gets...lost somehow

The very ending of this episode felt cheap to me.  This girl's motivation for most of the episode was her lost sister, in a back story that was never really convincingly or satisfyingly set-up, and the payoff for that poorly set-up story was even weaker, as she's magically found alive and well.  So, this girl was gone for a year?  Where'd she go?  Was she kidnapped?  Did she run away?  How did they find her again?  Did the trees help her find her way home as a thank you?  If so, does that mean the trees always had her?  If so, why, since they seemed to be the good guys in this episode?  Or was she just hiding behind that hydrangea bush the neighbors planted for the past year?  If you're not going to take the time to really set something up, just spare us the payoff.

"It's the trees!  The trees did it!"  Shut up, M. Night Moron!

Speaking of unsatisfying scenes, Missy's appearance here seemed entirely unnecessary.  She watches a video of the Earth not getting destroyed and says that that was surprising, and that she likes surprises.  It's possible that the finale is actually going to explain this reference a little bit and it will actually turn out to be a unique and highly relevant moment, but what's more likely is that, with the big finale coming next week, they just wanted to remind us that Missy is out there, waiting, biding her time.  It was bad enough back in Season 5 when the cracks in time showed up everywhere, whether it was really relevant or not, but at least that was a much faster little nod in each episode, and it didn't require bringing in a particular actor every time for no good reason.  I'd rather have no reference o Missy than one that's blatantly phoned in.

So now, going into the finale, we are left with Danny and Clara who have repeatedly avoided the fight we all know is coming, and Missy watching sinisterly at the Doctor and companion she was clearly responsible for bringing together.  I thought, in this blog, of speculating about what's to come in the finale, especially considering the excellent trailer we saw at the end of the episode, but I thought that maybe that might be something for its own blog later in the week.  Until then, feel free to come up with your own theories about the answer to the question we've been wondering about all season:  Who the hell is Missy?