The Girl Who Died

Chapter the 293rd, which is Rio Bravo meets Eric the Viking, plus angst and immortality.

Plot:
The Doctor and Clara escape from their last adventure in a big space battle, and arrive in the past on Earth where they are captured by vikings and taken back to a village as prisoners. The Doctor pretends to be Odin to try to escape, but someone else has had the same idea: a giant face appears in the sky claiming to be Odin and invites the warriors of the village to join him in Valhalla. This is really the leader of the Mire, one of the deadliest warrior races in entire galaxy. All the warriors are transported up to the Mire spaceship and harvested for adrenaline and testosterone, which the Mire consume. Clara and a village girl Ashildr are accidentally scooped up too, but they get away; unfortunately, Ashildr in the heat of the moment declares war on the Mire. Both Clara and Ashildr are returned to the village, but the next day the Mire will arrive to challenge everyone to combat. The Doctor has only until the next day to whip the remaining villagers into fighting shape. Luckily he discovers the vikings keep some electric eels, which gives him a plan. Harnessing the power of the eels they capture the helmet of a Mire battle suit, and plug Ashildr into it. Her imagination makes the Mire think they are being attacked by monsters, and the Doctor and Clara persuade them to leave or they'll release footage of this, which will destroy the Mire's reputation. They then discover Ashildr's mental exertions have proved fatal. The Doctor, remembering saving the Dad of a family in Pompeii whose face he now shares, uses Mire technology to resurrect her, but makes her immortal in the process.

 

Context:

The best laid plans of Mire and men gang aft agley and all that: towards the end of February 2024, I had to be in central Cardiff for a couple of days for the day job. It's a long train journey from the homestead down South, so I went up and stayed over the night before the event. This gave me a few hours potentially to explore the area. The last time I went to Cardiff for work, it was too whistle-stop a visit to do much in the way of sightseeing (see this blog post for more details). I left my hotel room with a plan to travel over to Cardiff Bay and see where exteriors for many Doctor Who and Torchwood stories were filmed, take a selfie at Ianto's Shrine, see Roath Lock Studios, that sort of thing. As I entered the lift in the hotel, though, a senior director from the day job was in there and invited me to go to the restaurant with a group of colleagues who were also in town that evening. I couldn't really say no, and it was obviously a nicer prospect than dining alone (even if I might have been at a table for one in an establishment where Christopher Eccleston and Annette Badland had once been). I hope to be back to the capital and its bay area before too long, when either business or leisure takes me in that direction. I'd downloaded onto my phone the next randomly-selected story The Girl Who Died, which was filmed at Roath Lock, so watched it on the BBC iplayer app in the hotel room when I got back after the meal.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 21st season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

It was not long after I started this blog that Peter Capaldi's second season, new series 9, was shown on BBC1. I have many times before wondered why I didn't start a viewing diary then and there to help with these entries in years to come, but I alas did not. Based on what little I can remember, the Better Half and I would have watched this on the Saturday night. On the following Sunday morning, I and probably the BH too would then watch again with the children if deemed suitably kid-friendly (as this one was).

 

Reaction:

On my first watch of this story, which I can't remember in much detail (see above), I must have had certain expectations based on its co-writer, Jamie Mathieson, who this time shared the writing credit with showrunner Steven Moffat. The previous year, he delivered two of the best stories of the season, Flatline and Mummy on the Orient Express. There was a certain anticipation at what he would bring this time, particularly in collaboration with the showrunner. Unfortunately, the story fell a bit flat by any measure, and compared to those lofty heights of anticipation it fell so flat it broke the ground beneath it and all its limbs. A story where some aliens and some vikings have a battle is a decent idea, as is the Doctor being forced into the role of whipping a ragbag band of misfits into shape so they can defend their village against attack. Vikings haven't been done that often in Doctor Who, so the setting is distinctive too. David Schofield, playing the leader of the Mire, is on fine form doing his best Tim Curry OTT villain impression. The monsters are a reasonably good design. Why didn't all that add up to something? Well, there's not much of any of that in the running time; instead from the - somewhat lengthy - introduction with the Doctor and Clara in the midst of a different adventure, and onwards, a theme is heavy-handedly highlighted: who can and can't the Doctor save, and what impact does that have on him? At first glance, this doesn't seem as fun as vikings versus spacemen, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt and go with it. Clara chides the Doctor when he's given up hope and is aiming only to give the villagers a chance to die in battle. That's not like him, we know that - we watch the show. We know he'll think of a plan, and he does.

Because of all the soul searching, there's not much time for the plan nor even the battle, so the defeat seems too easy. The vikings have a tank of electric eels, which is - if one is very generous - just about plausible: some historically unknown raiding party must have brought them back from somewhere in South America. There's no evidence for such a thing, but nobody can prove it didn't happen, just as nobody can prove vikings didn't ever have horned helmets as they do in this story. Many Doctor Who stories, of course, particularly those set in Earth's history, have been built on shakier foundations of accuracy. And the defeat of the Mire -  using trickery, theatre and ridicule instead of violence - is fun in a light-hearted way. It's all instantly undercut, though, by the revelation that Ashildr is dead. Cue: more soul searching. It's a little bit sad, yes, but people die during the Doctor's adventures, and there's nothing to make this one particularly stand out compared to the deaths in the underwater vessel in previous story Under the Lake / Before The Flood or in the Zygon invasion 2-parter to come, or any other story. The script gives no reason for the Doctor to overreact, but he nonetheless does. It's momentarily exciting, because there's a flashback montage to the Fires of Pompeii story which featured Peter Capaldi in a guest role, and to scenes in his first ever story Deep Breath where he wonders why he's picked this particular face. It's startling because it's unexpected, but was it necessary to provide such an explanation?  Anyway, it galvanises the Doctor into an uncharacteristic - and as it turns out hasty - action.

The reason given for his choosing his face is to remind him that he must save people (as the Doctor saved the character played by Capaldi and his family in Pompeii). But when exactly was he supposed to have forgotten that, such that he needs a permanent reminder? Just before acquiring this face, he spent centuries defending a bloody village from bloody aliens exactly as he does in The Girl Who Died. He saves people every week; he also loses people every week, however hard he tries. None of this is news, and there is no particular motivation for him to save Ashildr above anyone else. She's not that special. She's loved by the village, and is a storyteller, okay. But what else? If she'd perhaps been the mother of the baby that is referenced every so often throughout it might make more sense (the Doctor, who speaks baby, gets crucial clues from listening to the baby crying). Or if there was anything else in the script to make this death atypical in any way, but there's nothing, The only thing that's special about Ashildr is that she's played by a guest actor who's a bit of a draw because she appeared in another fantasy genre show (Game of Thrones). The story is damaged by insufficient motivation for the Doctor to save her at all, let alone do so in such a way as to make her immortal, which is something consistently shown in Doctor Who to be an issue (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). The mini-cliff at the end hints at this, in a very well realised circling shot of Ashildr, who stays still while the days pass time-lapsed around her, and her expression changes, her stare becoming hard and cold. But I just didn't buy it. Unfortunately, the remainder of the season will develop Ashildr's story in an arc-plot, so I couldn't buy that either. 

 

Connectivity:

Both The Girl Who Died and Wild Blue Yonder have a pre-credits scene that's unconnected to the main action, and both see the Doctor, and his one female travelling companion, separated from the TARDIS early on. The Mire's combat suits have a certain look in common with Jimbo the robot from the later story - rusted industrial chic, with big head / helmet.

Deeper Thoughts:

What - live forever, never die? That is what the word means... As I discussed in the blog post for the linked story that followed this one The Woman Who Lived, it isn't mandatory for a story about someone becoming immortal (or losing "the ability to die" as the Doctor puts it) to portray this as a miserable fate, but Doctor Who rarely strays from such an approach. Striving for immortality is definitely something risky in the Whoniverse. It's no picnic if you've always been immortal either. Beings like the Eternals or the Toymaker aren't shown to be miserable exactly, but they are both extremely bored with eternity and have to find often dubious pursuits to entertain themselves. The Time Lords too originally came into the same category. In The War Games, the story that first properly introduced the Doctor's people and some of their backstory, they were said to "live forever, barring accidents" (a piece of dialogue used again to describe Ashildr in The Girl Who Died) but they "hardly ever use [their] great powers". The Doctor grew bored of this and rebelled. Later, when Tom Baker had taken over the role, the introduction of a limit to regenerations side-stepped (at least for a while, anyway) any potential implications for the show's leading character. Elsewhere, immortality and immortals were generally shown in a negative light, so it was probably best not to dwell on the fact that our hero was one of their number. Likely it was not entirely deliberately, but The Brain of Morbius sets out the slightly amended approach comprehensively: "Death," says the Doctor in that story, "Is the price we pay for progress". He claims there's a big difference between Time Lords' regeneration and the longevity of the Sisterhood of Karn in that story, who use an elixir of life that leaves them unchanged, and so nothing on Karn ever changes.

It's probably no coincidence that the Sisterhood were brought back for the second Capaldi season of which The Girl Who Died was part, where immortality was going to be interrogated somewhat; but, it's anyway a topic that keeps coming up in all periods of the show's history. It's often used as a motivation of a character to clue us in that they're a wrong 'un (like Joshua Naismith in The End of Time attempting to use Vinvocci tech to help his daughter live forever, or Queen Xanxia in The Pirate Planet leaving a trail of devastated planets in her wake, trying to extend her life indefinitely), or it is gained as the result of foolhardy ventures and proves to be a prison and a torment (Mawdryn and his fellow scientists in Mawdryn Undead, Borusa in The Five Doctors). I struggle to think of any positive aspects of immortality expressed in the classic series (all 26 years of it). The new series was mostly a misery-fest too, but intriguingly it has used immortality in a not entirely negative way when writing companion characters out of the show. At first, this was only related to one character, Captain Jack Harkness. At the end of the first season of the revived show, he is resurrected by Bad Wolf Rose after being killed by the Daleks, and thereafter he cannot die. In his later appearances in the main show, he seems to have made his peace with this situation. That is mainly, of course, because he had his own spin-off show aimed at an older audience to be broody and tormented in. The final (to date) series of Torchwood had an arc-plot that explored the terrible ramifications of everyone in the world gaining Jack's ability, so it wasn't by any means a wholly positive take.

A few years after Jack's resurrection, there's some echoes of what happened to him in River Song's final fate. Just like Jack, she appears to die bravely, but then is brought back to life, a life that will last forever, without any say in the matter. In Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead that eternal life is as a consciousness plugged into a computer-controlled dreamscape, which could be a fate worse than death if one thinks for any length of time about it. The character was at that point only intended as a one-off not a regular, though, and that's possibly why there were no qualms about presenting this as if it is a wholly happy ending. The writer of that story, Steven Moffat, then pulls the same trick later on for companion Clara and then again for Bill. The pattern is similar again: a regular character is killed, which the audience watching - presuming they're invested - does not like to see, so they're forgiving when an episode or two later, it turns out they haven't quite died at all, and in fact exist in their last extended second of life, or as a free-floating consciousness. Again, these were presented as happy endings, and again it wouldn't take much to see them as the opposite. Indeed, it didn't take long for the series to see a little negative there. In The Giggle, the Doctor is confronted by the consequences of his actions, and there's strong hints that he has some residual guilt about how Bill and Clara are now "living" "happily" ever after. Showrunner Chris Chibnall put a stop to endings where the Doctor's friends become immortal. Everyone who travelled with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor came home in one piece, and got to continue living a normal life-span. Who knows what fate is in store for Ruby Sunday, though? Only a couple of months to go before we start finding out...

In Summary:

Disappointing, probably because of a poorly motivated action that lies at its heart.