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.

The Woman Who Lived

Chapter the 256th, where the dandy highwayman grabbing your attention is old enough to qualify for this year's old age pension.

Plot:

The Doctor is searching for a powerful alien MacGuffin, which leads him to England in 1651. He bumps into Ashildr, who he'd saved from death but made immortal hundreds of years earlier. She is occupying a large house and styling herself as aristo Lady Me, but is secretly also posing as a highwayman called the Knightmare to aid her in her search for the same MacGuffin. The Doctor finds out all about the ups and downs of Lady Me's long life. She wants to escape the planet, and was expecting the Doctor to help her with this, but he's not keen (something about two long-lived beings not having the necessary perspective without a pet mortal with them, or something). He continues to scan for the MacGuffin, and Lady Me helps him find it. She is secretly in league with a lion creature from space called Leandro who says he needs it to open a portal to leave Earth, and has promised to take her with him. Unfortunately, the MacGuffin requires the death of a human to power it. Lady Me betrays the Doctor, and goes to the public execution of her rival highwayman Sam Swift to use his death to power the opening of the portal. When it opens, though, Leandro's people attack: he really wanted to open up a route for an invasion force. Lady Me rediscovers her lost humanity and uses a different MacGuffin that the Doctor had previously given her to save Sam and close the portal. As it closes, Leandro's people assassinate him for his failure. Lady Me tells the Doctor that she will use her time on Earth to look after the people the Doctor leaves behind.

Context:

I decided to watch this one on my own, from a disc in Complete Eighth Series box set. The disappointment of the reveal of a returning character, and how long they had been away (see First Time Round section for more details) resonated for the time I watched the story: it was the week that UK politician and former Prime Minister of the country Liz Truss staged a comeback after people had barely missed her. I briefly made a joke in the synopsis of the Asylum of the Daleks blog post last year about the leadership election that would appoint the new prime minister, comparing both the two remaining candidates to Daleks (apologies to all Daleks out there). That was published on the 12th August 2022. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the post on Castrovalva I mentioned that Liz Truss had taken on the role, and talked about how the cycles of politics and news were accelerating (I didn't know the half of it). That was the 13th September. By the time I blogged about Orphan 55 on the 25th October, she was gone and her predecessor had attempted his own brief comeback. It's now early February 2023, and Liz Truss's attempt at public rehabilitation after her disastrous tenure is already fading from memory. By the time you read this, it'll be completely forgotten and she'll no doubt be planning her third coming. Hollywood remakes seem to be on a similar accelerating curve (Tobey Maguire's Spiderman films still feel recent to me), as does Doctor Who. The Master used to have the decency to be offscreen for a good few years before returning with a new face, now new Masters seem to be popping up every couple. I'm not a young man anymore, and I'm not sure I can keep up at this speed.

First Time Round:

This is another time where I remember some online discussion in advance of a story more than I remember first watching the story itself. A teaser trailer was released mid-July 2015, a couple of months before the season was due to start. (I'd just started a new Doctor Who blog at the time, the one you're currently reading, which is surprisingly still going strong almost eight years later.) At the end of the trailer, post the BBC One logo and start date, was a clip from The Woman Who Lived, where Maisie Williams as Lady Me removes her mask in a close-up; the Doctor responds "You?!" in astonishment, and she replies "What took you so long, old man?". This led to weeks of fervent speculation from fans that the character was a new incarnation of Susan or Romana or the Rani (no woman can be cast in Doctor Who, it seems, without someone thinking that they will be a new incarnation of Susan or Romana or the Rani). At some point before the broadcast of The Woman Who Lived on the 24th October - which I watched on that evening with the Better Half, then again with my three children (aged between three and nine years old then) the following Sunday morning -  showrunner Steven Moffat went on record to say that Williams was playing a brand new character. Anyone who missed that, or just didn't believe it, was presumably very disappointed.

Reaction:

The DC comic The Sandman, written in the late 1980s / early 1990s by the later bestselling author and two-time Doctor Who writer Neil Gaiman, features a character called Hob Gadling. Hob cannot die, and lives through many centuries fighting in wars, losing people he loves, and enduring changing fortunes. In other words, he shares exactly the same situation as Lady Me / Ashildr in The Woman Who Lived. There's a reversal in that Sandman story that's almost a metatextual one, as Hob reacts to his predicament in a way that confounds obvious expectations: he stays positive about life and always wants to keep living. This avoidance of the usual cliché of the curse of longevity is not just surprising but life-affirming; Hob never gives up, and can always see the value in carrying on. Compare Hob to Lady Me, and the Doctor Who story unfortunately seems the poorer: it leans in to the cliché, and shows that 800 years of life has left Ashildr / Me jaded and petulant. I don't think this is a good or even realistic message: centuries of life have not given her an expansive perspective, she's instead moaning about how long it takes to get anywhere, desperate for a lift off planet. It makes it hard to side with her, and makes her distrust of the Doctor and his treatment of people seem disproportionate and hypocritical. At the end, she decides she's going to look after the people he leaves behind; but does he really treat people that badly? And wasn't Lady Me prepared to kill an innocent person just to power her transport only a few moments before?

The character conflict seems artificial and inflated. It also doesn't feel integrated enough into the main plot. The highway robbery and house breaking to find the magic amulet has to screech to a halt for long info-dump sequences where the Doctor learns about Lady Me's backstory. Now, it's probably the case that all involved in the production intended that the scenes with the Doctor and Lady Me about her last 800 years were the main plot, and the highwayman / amulet parts the distraction. If so, it's just not dynamic enough a narrative - it's just talk, talk, talk. The scenes of carriages and people being held up are at least well shot; the machinations of Leandro may be simplistic (it's a double-cross that can be seen coming a mile off) but allow a little bit of sci-fi spectacle where the portal is opened and the Earth is attacked, though it is done on the cheap. The make-up and prosthetics to create the leonine beast are a little bit panto too: is the issue throughout a lack of budget? I have a feeling that it might just be very difficult to make any creature that looks realistically like a lion be threatening rather than cuddly. The best part of the highwayman plot is Rufus Hound as Sam Swift, but he's barely in it. The most enjoyable sequence is the one where he effectively does stand-up comedy on the gallows, entertaining the crowd to put off the moment of his execution. It's life-affirming in a similar way to the Hob Gadling plot, and Hound provides the same wide-boy, ducking and diving energy as the comic book character.

I am conscious of my potential patriarchal bias here, by the way. Maybe Sam Swift and Hob were able to be happy-go-lucky because they were men, and Lady Me doesn't have the same luxury. She is shown, though, to have achieved mastery and power in a world run by men. Why couldn't she achieve resilience as well, without losing her zest for life? She loses her children, this is true, but such tragedies sadly happen to women with normal life spans, and those people still can and do learn to live with the pain, and move on. To make a big point of this being the event that made her shut herself off from her humanity, even though she has eternity to heal, maybe makes the opposite point than the writer Catherine Tregenna intended. It's very hard to be persuaded from the evidence here that the Doctor did anything except give her the most enormous gift, for which she is ungrateful. In general, and not just in this story, it's hard to root for the Lady Me character. I get the feeling that this could be different if I'd seen the previous work of Maisie Williams, the actor portraying her. I think perhaps there was a feeling that with that work "in the bank" as it were that there would be a short cut to audience empathy. Unfortunately (as I go into within the Deeper Thoughts section below) I hadn't seen that work. So, I was left feeling Williams was miscast, without the necessary gravitas for the character. And that's before the story's awkward tonal shifts into broad comedy detract further from any underlying sadness. Overall, the story stands as a brave attempt to tackle an interesting theme, but the final product is a mixed-bag, and ultimately - and sadly - not much of a success.

Connectivity:

In The Woman Who Lived, just like The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, a character performs before an audience and will stay alive only as long as he can keep that audience entertained; in both stories there is a search for a powerful artefact connected to opening up a gateway to another time and place. Plus, highway-people and hippy circus folk alike favour noms de guerre such as The Knightmare, Flowerchild, and so forth.

Deeper Thoughts:

I've never listened to I've Never Watched Star Wars. Perhaps I'd rate Maisie Williams more if I'd seen her performances as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones; I haven't ever, though, seen more than one frame of Game of Thrones (that being the one of Emilia Clarke doing a face that people often post as a meme). This has surprised a few people of my acquaintance over the years since that series debuted in 2011, as people assume it's the sort of thing I would watch religiously. I've picked up enough from references or jokes in other shows or online to know roughly what the show is like and about (including, after a few years of seeing it, that the meme of the blonde-haired woman was Emilia Clarke playing a character from GoT). I don't have any particular antipathy towards the series, but neither am I in any big hurry to see it. I think this is something that has become increasingly common as the availability of content has grown, and the means for engaging with such content diversified: significant and highly popular examples of media can be missed or ignored by individuals. Nothing will be so big that it can't slip below the radar. I've never seen Titanic or either of the two Avatar movies, for example, and they are three of the biggest selling movies of all time. The BBC made a radio programme about this phenomenon called I've Never Watched Star Wars, which took a celebrity and gave them the opportunity to close their personal gaps. Perhaps appropriately, I've never listened to a single edition of it; I probably never will, either, as like GoT it ended a few years back.

What about equivalent gaps within the world of Doctor Who? I've been a fan of the show for over four decades now, and watched every broadcast episode of the show and all the TV spin-offs. One would think I'd covered everything, and would have no surprising confessions. But there are a few things I need to get off my chest, don't judge me too harshly. First, I have never collected action figures; in fact, I've never purchased a single one. When I was first a fan, there wasn't anything to collect. I'd arrived too late for the Denys Fisher toys of the late 70s (dollies of the Tom Baker Doctor, Leela, K9 and a few others). A few years later, a company called Dapol started to release figures about the same size as the Star Wars figures that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, but I only ever saw them in adverts in Doctor Who Magazine and never in the shops (not that I had the money for them anyway). When the show came back, there was an explosion of merchandise available, including hundreds of action figures, but I still wasn't tempted. Perhaps more surprisingly, as someone who was a writer for a while, I've never written a piece of fan fiction, Not a single sentence. When I was writing semi-professionally, I wasn't ever writing prose, and I was serious enough about it to know that nobody was going to produce a Doctor Who screenplay written by an unknown, so I concentrated my efforts elsewhere. Before that, when Doctor Who was off air in the 1990s, Virgin Publishing would accept unsolicited manuscripts from new writers for their range of original Who novels. I did think about sending in something, but I could never think of an even half decent idea. Maybe it was because I didn't have any action figures to act my stories out.

I've never been to the Fitzroy Tavern, a London boozer where fans congregate monthly. I've never cosplayed (i.e. dressed up as the Doctor or another character from the programme). Like with Game of Thrones, I don't have any particular antipathy towards other people enjoying this pastime, but I'm not in any hurry to join them. I've never asked a Doctor Who star for their autograph (though I have got a couple of books with signatures in them because they came with the book or event where I purchased the book anyway). I'm struggling to think of anything else significant that I've never done. I've been to one proper Doctor Who convention in my life, but I have gone to at least one. I've listened to four whole Big Finish Doctor Who stories, a tiny fraction of their output over the years, but it's something. It shows what a broad set of potential activities are concealed within the summary "being a Doctor Who fan". This is probably why I bristle a bit at the cruder characterisations of Doctor Who fans in other media (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for more details) as there is no single, simplified type of Doctor Who fan. And I haven't even got onto the more niche fan activities like making fan films / videos (never done it), or recording a podcast (no), or doing a blog where you review every Doctor Who story one by one (okay, guilty as charged). Am I in any hurry to close my Who gaps? No, but it might be fun in Doctor Who's 60th anniversary year to try something new. I can't see myself cosplaying, but never say never!

In Summary:

Stands (as a brave attempt to tackle an interesting theme) but doesn't really deliver. 

Hell Bent

Chapter The 239th, the interminable conversation at the end of the universe. 

Plot:

The Doctor is imprisoned by the Time Lords for many billions of years, to force him to spill all he knows about a prophecy regarding 'the Hybrid' that's going to destroy the web of time. He resists and eventually breaks out; finding himself in the wilds of Gallifrey, he makes his way back to the barn where he lived as a child. Lord President Rassilon confronts him there, but the Doctor is supported by the Gallifreyan troops as a hero of the Time War, and Rassilon is banished. The vengeful Doctor says this is still not enough for him, but he doesn't actually do anything else against the Time Lords. Instead, he asks that Clara be extracted from time just before her raven death, as she has information about the Hybrid. It's just a ploy to bring her back to life, though, and he then plans to wipe her memories of him. They escape into the cloisters - I'd explain what they are, but nothing really happens there, even though they're supposed to be significant and scary - and capture a TARDIS. They travel to a reality bubble at the end of the universe, and the Doctor meets Ashildr / Me and has a conversation about what the Hybrid could be. They don't come to a conclusion: it could be Ashildr, the Doctor himself, or a combination of him and Clara. When the Doctor attempts to wipe Clara's memory with a Time Lord gizmo, Clara explains that she has reversed the polarity. It's a fifty-fifty chance which one of them will get the memory wipe, but they both go for it, and it's the Doctor that loses his memories of Clara. She pilots the TARDIS back to Earth, leaving the Doctor with his TARDIS. She then goes off with Ashildr in the other one for adventures in time and space, saying that she'll eventually go back to face her fate. The three contenders for being the hybrid are therefore still on the loose, but the unravelling of the web of time and destruction of millions doesn't happen. The Doctor creates himself a new sonic screwdriver.

Context:

As related in in the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post, the family were planning a holiday abroad for the first time since 2019. It was all a bit last minute, but we finally found a package deal for a stay in a resort on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura. As is something of a tradition, I then mused on what Doctor Who story I would take with me downloaded onto a device, to watch on the plane or on a quiet evening when away. I didn't think any filming had been done on Fuerteventura, so was surprised when I googled it and found that there had been three separate stories in Peter Capaldi's era that included footage shot there. This, and other revelations about just how many times Doctor Who had done overseas filming to which I'd not paid much heed prompted the content for that Deeper Thoughts section of Asylum of the Daleks, and meant that I could pick a story with a strong connection to my destination (assuming I hadn't blogged all three already). The three stories were The Zygon Invasion / Inversion, Heaven Sent (but just the bit at the end), and - the luckily still unblogged - Hell Bent. The location was used to depict the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey, and it was obviously exciting for a fan such as me to visit there (kind-of). In the end, I watched it on my phone on the second evening away, once everyone else had turned in for the night.

First Time Round:

I watched Hell Bent for the first time on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast, Saturday 5th December 2015, time-shifted to later in the evening, reviewing it (alone, I think) for suitability for the younger of my children; it was judged as suitable, and then watched again on the Sunday morning with the full fam accompanying me. It was the final story of that year's series, which was the first run of Doctor Who episodes to be shown after I started this blog earlier in the year. As such, I have an online diary from around that time to refer back to, sort-of: in the blog post for The Underwater Menace published a little after, I described how in Hell Bent writer Steven Moffat had "...staged a spectacular finale, returning to Gallifrey and presenting a moral quandary about how far one should go to save a friend" but that my two boys (aged 9 and 6 at the time) only remembered it two weeks on "because there was a new sonic screwdriver revealed at the end". I remember this, but think I might have been summarising the show a little more grandly than my actual feelings for it might have dictated, to make the joke of my children's single take-away work better. I remember thinking it was okay, but a bit of a come-down after Heaven Sent, which was my favourite story of the year. Before this re-watch, I noticed that the episode was an hour long and struggled to recall enough incident from the story that could have filled up this extended running time: there was a Western-style stand off, there was a bit where the Doctor and Clara are running around weird catacombs of some kind, there was a conversation with the Ashildr / Me character than I found a bit insufferable... a scene or two in an American diner, also? What else? Were there any monsters in it, aside from cameos? I was coming up blank. The story had not left much of an impression, but maybe - as I speculated in my Face The Raven blog post earlier this year - I might change my position after this viewing.

Reaction:

Reader, I did not change my position after this viewing, except maybe a little for the worse. When the classic series visited the Doctor's home planet, the first couple of times were special and exciting, but the more often various production teams dipped in to that same well, the more the returns precipitately diminished. At some level, the production teams for the new series must have understood this, as the planet was kept offscreen for long stretches, with the narrative explanations given ranging from it being time-locked, presumed destroyed, actually destroyed, or hidden off in another dimension. Nonetheless, post 2005 the temptation was there, and Gallifrey and Time Lords eventually featured. Thereafter, the new series followed the same pattern as the old. Big stories like David Tennant's swansong and the 50th anniversary story brought back the Doctor's planet and people in their handsome but impractical collars. At the end of the second of those stories, though, a decision was made. The Doctor discovers that his planet still exists out in space/time somewhere, and that he did not cause its destruction after all - hooray, he's not got that sadness and guilt anymore; but, he's going to go out there and find it. Hmm. That made a nice ending to The Day of the Doctor from an emotional and character sense, but probably was a mistake in terms of the long-running series plot arc. I half expected (hoped?) it would be dropped with only vague mentions on occasion thereafter, but it wasn't. Gallifrey was back by the very next story, and the search for its physical location was a theme for the following series. Things came to a ridiculously collared head with Capaldi's second season that finished with Hell Bent - the whole year's run was about the intricate workings of Timelord mythos.

The trouble is, none of this mythology is particularly interesting. The people of Gallifrey are not very interesting.  Rassilon's confrontation with the Doctor doesn't feel that tense; there's never any threat as their face-off is in the first fifteen minutes of a big finale, not the last fifteen. From the character point of view, it doesn't make much sense either. The Doctor has one plan on Gallifrey, and it's to engineer Clara's extraction from time so she can cheat death, so why waste time hiding out and waiting for Rassilon to turn up, just so the Doctor can humiliate the Lord President? He's bitter about Clara's death and his imprisonment, no doubt, but that isn't so great a look. The Doctor's been thinking about what he'll do for billions of years (in Heaven Sent it is explicitly stated that he can eventually remember all the time he spent trapped, at some point in each cycle of his imprisonment) and the best he can come up with is vengeance and cheating? I know it's kind of the point that he's forgetting himself and acting outside his usual ethical code, but it doesn't come over in a convincing way. Capaldi plays it so stoically, doing the retired gunslinger coming out of retirement bit without any speech or betrayal of emotion, when it really needs a roaring and raging and petulant performance for his betrayal of his principles to land with the audience (like Tennant in The Waters of Mars, or Matt Smith in A Good Man Goes to War). The script and direction both portray his actions as heroic in that moment, so any hand-wringing later about his being cruel or cowardly won't wash. He doesn't follow through anyway; once he leaves Gallifrey partway through this story, I don't think he so much as mentions the place again, and he's certainly not in any hurry to return there and sort out any remaining business; he clearly wasn't that impacted by the Time Lords' machinations.

The Sisterhood of Karn are not very interesting; they don't have anything to do. Poor Veronica Roberts as Ohila just gets to do thankless feed lines and exposition throughout. Ashildr  / Me is not very interesting, and Maisie Williams's performance is just not strong enough. The cloisters are not very interesting: they're talked up as a hugely dangerous place where you'll get attacked and driven mad, but the Doctor and Clara are in there for simply ages and nothing happens to them at all. The cloister wraiths are nice visually, but are just for show as they don't do anything that impacts the plot one jot. The prophecy about the Hybrid is so abstruse that it can't be interesting. It's just not tangible enough to ever seem threatening to anyone. Something born of two warrior races will come along to destroy Gallifrey and time itself, blah, blah, blah. But we never see any of this happen, it's only talked about. It's also hard to get too bothered about the threat of a universally destructive force, when the story takes place at the end of the universe when nobody but a few Time Lords and immortals are left alive anyway. This is the fundamental flaw of Hell Bent, it's not a threat to Earth or humans or anyone with whom the audience can identify. The most grounded character is a ghost, and the most grounded location is a mystical diner out in the desert, which then vanishes. If one is alienated by this, all one can see is a lot of strange people in silly outfits spouting overcomplicated techno babble. Even if one can identify with the characters somehow, there's then the confusing matter of timing. Why are these activities, including the build up with the death of Clara, happening now? The prophecy is old and so important that it's part of the reason that the Doctor left Gallifrey when he was William Hartnell, and it keeps the fearsome Rassilon himself up at night, but it's not been mentioned before in 50+ years of the programme, and it's never touched on again. What changed to make it suddenly become relevant for this brief period?

Some will be thinking I've missed the point of the story, that it's all about Doctor's and Clara's care for one another, and the emotion of it comes from the sadness of their final parting. The trouble is, they've already done the sadness and parting two stories earlier, when the character died, but it's undercut by her being back alive and even breathing (out of habit) a short while later. There's a nice moment between them in the cloisters where she realises the extent of his sacrifice, spending billions of years imprisoned, but it's very brief. The coy moment a la Lost in Translation where they exchange heartfelt words but the audience doesn't get to hear them is a cop out. There was nothing that Moffat could have written that wasn't a rerun of similar moments they've had before, and not just in this series. There's emotional scenes between them throughout her time (e.g. The Name of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor) and lots of fake goodbyes (e.g. Death in Heaven, Last Christmas). This is also a character that was conceived to die over and over again. To be a convincing final end, it would have to be explosively grand and sweepingly dramatic, but it's just small and quiet. There's no heroism as there's no threat. The nearest is when Clara distracts everyone to allow the Doctor to escape, but there's no evidence that they wouldn't have let him go anyway, they were hailing him as a war hero minutes earlier. Another problem is created by the framing device where the Doctor retells these events to Clara, this makes the action even less immediate. Overall, there just isn't enough incident here to fill up 60 minutes. It's a failing of Moffat's that often when he has a big emotional episode to do, he overestimates how much that emotion will get the audience through the running time, and his usually detailed and intricate plotting deserts him. Almost nothing happens for huge periods of Hell Bent. There are some superficially impressive moments (the male to female regeneration, the original TARDIS control room) but mostly it's a frustrating let down.

Connectivity: 

Like Asylum of the Daleks, Hell Bent is another Steven Moffat penned single-part story (some people lump it in with Face the Raven and Heaven Sent as a three-parter, but I'm not one of them - each of those three are distinct enough to stand-alone despite the cliffhangers leading in to one another). Both stories feature at least one Dalek and a time fragment of Clara / Oswin Oswald that ends up dead - they are in fact, and coincidentally, the bookends of Jenna Coleman's time on the show, featuring her first and last regular appearance.

Deeper Thoughts:

Gallifrey? No, I've not heard of it. Perhaps it's on an island? We arrived on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands in mid August of 2022. We only had a narrow week-long window in which to book, which was one of the factors dictating the frantic quality of our holiday search - there were UK-based things members of the family had to attend either side. With only a week on the island, would there be any chance for location spotting? It's not that big; one could drive the length of Fuerteventura in under two hours. On the other hand, the family had been very busy before we travelled with school, work, and exams; so, nobody was looking for anything too active from our break. To this end we had - for the first time as a family - booked all inclusive. We'd get full board and as many 'free at the point of use' drinks as we wanted at the hotel. We are lucky that we're comfortably off enough that this is an option for us, but we aren't so comfortably off that we didn't mentally keep our tally - we wanted to get our money's worth (this went double for the children - the 16 year old boy got a minimum of three teeteringly heaped platefuls every meal, including breakfast). This puts a pressure on any outings to be doubly worth it, as you're not only paying to travel somewhere else, but also for anything you consume while you're there. It's much more cost effective to sit by the pool and relax. There was a gym, lots of activities and entertainments, and interesting people to meet in the hotel too, so there wasn't much chance to get bored even if we hadn't brought some books to read and downloaded movies and TV shows to watch. Plus, to be perfectly frank, there's not much to do in Fuerteventura. One of the excursions advertised at the hotel's front desk was to visit Lanzarote, as if they'd risk running out of things to list without suggesting hopping over to the next nearest lump of volcanic rock in the archipelago.

Don't get me wrong, there's shops and bars and waterparks and all those great tourist things, and there are some unique and striking natural areas. It was the latter that presumably attracted the production crew making Hell Bent. Like all the bigger Canary Islands, Fuerteventura has areas that feasibly look like the surface of an alien planet such as Gallifrey - volcanic rock, desert, sand dunes, empty, rolling landscapes of dusty valleys and hills. I don't know whether there's that much that they couldn't have got from a quarry in England and a CGI matte, but they know their business better than I do, and must have thought it was worth it. As quarries are working areas and the Canary Island areas are mostly just barren national parks, it might even work out almost as cheap, as you're not asking anybody to down tools for the shoot. They'd tried other islands in the archipelago - Tenerife, and the previously mentioned Lanzarote - for location shoots for previous stories and wanted to give another island a go presumably. Of the big four tourist destination islands in the Canaries, Doctor Who has now only not filmed in one. I've racked up the lot now, though. I visited Gran Canaria in 1986, a month before Trial of a Timelord's broadcast, holidayed in Lanzarote nearly thirty years after the Doctor did in July 2002 (a couple of weeks before the webcast of  Doctor Who audio story Real Time, fact fans), and stayed on Tenerife in 2018, as recorded here, a couple of months before Jodie Whittaker's era began. This latest trip, a couple of months before Jodie Whittaker's era ends, completes the quartet.

Whatever else I could say and have said about Hell Bent, it certainly looks good; Fuerteventura provides a great landscape for the Gallifrey exterior scenes and also doubles well for Nevada in the brief shots set near the diner. Could I persuade the Better Half and kids to come on a location scout where these images were created, putting aside their soft drinks or cocktails or beers for a few hours? (Side note: I'm easily pleased, but was very excited that they had cervesa on a tap in the hotel's bars and restaurants that one could just operate for oneself; I spent a week perfecting my pouring style.) I supposed that it would depend on how far away those locations were; so, I got online to do the research and quickly ran into a problem. Doctor Who is by no means an unexplored phenomenon; in fact, it's potentially one of the most written-about things (not just TV shows) in existence. An army of amateur and professional analysts have scoured every available scrap of reference material available, and the depths of detail into which they can go would amaze. (A case in point: while I was abroad, I enjoyed a tweet thread including contributions from Matthew Sweet about the situationist graffito glimpsed for a frame or two of the second episode of Patrick Troughton story The Invasion - niche!) Individual making-of articles and dedicated Doctor Who location guides proliferate online, but none of them specify where the Hell Bent filming took place; they all just say Fuerteventura. How can this be? Can there be a fact about Doctor Who, not from its distant past but from less than a decade ago, that is unknown? The best I could find were some behind the scenes photos, a couple of which are shown here. These don't give anything away about the location though, and of course no landmarks are visible in the clips in the story itself.

My photo of the Parque Natural de Corralejo

So, I was at a loss. On stepping off the plane, we had already visited the filming locations of Hell Bent, at least to the level of precision that they were recorded in any available reference. Fuerteventura suddenly seemed a lot bigger: it takes nearly two hours to drive the length of the island, after all - it wasn't going to be possible to search looking at a freeze-frame of the story on my phone until we found a sand dune that matched. The family got to stay by the pool and drink their drinks, and we all relaxed and had a good time. It wasn't likely that we would just stumble on the right location. Or was it? The hotel was in Corralejo, and both town and hotel were on the very edge of the Parque Natural de Corralejo, a large-ish (2.5 by 10.5 kilometres) tract on the coast with a stretch of sands on the North side and an orange-red volcanic landscape to the South. It would provide everything the story would require accessible in one place near to roads and hotels, and not far (transfer took about 35 minutes) from the airport. It's got to be a contender. If you're reading this and you know the full details of the individual locations for Hell Bent's filming then... maybe keep them to yourself, so I can continue to live in blissful ignorance imagining that I got lucky this time!

In Summary:

Disappointing? Hell yes. 

Face the Raven

Chapter The 218th, wherein I just can't face it - I just can't face Face The Raven.

Plot:

Present day England. Ashildr, a rather petulant and ungrateful person whom the Doctor saved from death but inadvertently made immortal hundreds of years before, is running a refuge for aliens in a so-called trap street in London. The street is hidden using a telepathic field, which also makes the aliens appear to be human. Persons unknown (it will later turn out to be the Time Lords) approached Ashildr and threatened the street unless she contrived to capture the Doctor. She somehow found out that the Doctor and Clara had briefly met graffiti-artist Rigsy once before, and somehow got Rigsy to visit the trap street. She then framed him for the murder of a popular resident, wiped his memory, and sent him home. Before that, though, she applied a chrono-lock to the back of his neck - a tattoo that's continually changing, counting down. When it gets to zero, a Quantum Shade - a cloud of black gas that sometimes manifests as a raven - will kill him, no matter how fast or far he runs. Rigsy contacts the TARDIS using a number that Clara had given him in case of emergencies. The Doctor and Clara help Rigsy to investigate, and find the street. The Doctor confronts Ashildr, who grants him time to clear Rigsy's name. He eventually finds that the supposedly murdered person is still alive in a status pod, but when he tries to free her, he's trapped with a teleport bracelet on. Ashildr then says she'll take the chrono-lock off Rigsy. Unfortunately, Clara has agreed earlier to take on the chrono-lock herself, and Ashildr can't save her. The Raven kills Clara. The Doctor is teleported to location unknown, and he's not happy.

Context:

January's been a bit of an exhausting time, back to the day job after the Christmas holidays with much work to do and cold, dark days outside. I had a brief break from watching Doctor Who stories for the blog after a couple of intensive marathons watching every story on the recent season 17 Blu-ray box set including Nightmare of Eden, and then before that watching all of Flux in one go; refreshed, I felt ready to watch and blog something new (and preferably involving less of a time commitment), so figuratively rolled the many-sided die (actually an online random number generator) to decide which story to cover next. When this dictated that the story was Face the Raven, I have to admit that my heart sunk a little bit - it wasn't a story of which I had fond memories, and sitting through it again felt like a bit of a chore. I put it off for a little while longer, instead choosing to watch the last special feature I had left to view on the last Blu-ray box set but one. Yes, at that point I preferred to watch six hours of different takes of scenes from Delta and the Bannermen (the location footage from a disc in the Season 24 set) than watch a 45-minute story from Peter Capaldi's middle series. Finally finishing that set after so many months, I considered going back to season 17 (I still have info text, commentaries and a couple of extras to watch), but decided to buckle down and get Face the Raven over with. How bad could it be? I watched from the Blu-ray on my own on a Saturday afternoon.

First Time Round:

In November 2015, I sat at a desk at my day job next to a woman from North Wales whose name I sadly can't remember any longer (it's only been six years, but I'm coming up blank, sorry Whatever-your-name-was). I can recall, though, her telling me on the Monday after Face the Raven had been first broadcast in the UK (Doctor Who's 52nd anniversary, November 23rd, after the episode was shown on Saturday the 21st) that she'd seen it and that it had been "pretty weird". As is usual for me in these events, I got bashful and changed the subject - I'd had enough of defending my favourite show as a youngster; if adults had problems with it they were on their own. I'm not even sure that she didn't like it as the following Monday she told me that the episode that week, Heaven Sent, had been "very weird" - her experience the previous weekend clearly hadn't stopped her from watching. Maybe weird is good. One person who had given up on Doctor Who around this time was the Better Half. So, I would have watched Face the Raven alone late on the Saturday night to judge its suitability (at that point, my three children's ages ranged from 3 to 9 years old); it was fine for them, so we four watched it the following morning. The Better Half had got bored with the series after the Zygon 2-parter, but watched Face the Raven retrospectively after she'd seen Heaven Sent the following week (she'd watched Heaven Sent as I'd nagged her to, based on its quality). To this day, she has not ever watched Sleep No More. 

Reaction:

Face the Raven is a story where one of the Doctor's friends, a character played by a regular cast member, one of the TARDIS crew, dies. This had happened only a few times previously in the history of the show - a couple of short-lived companions in the 1960s, Adric, Peri (sort-of), and no one after that, no new series companion before Clara. Each time it had happened before, it had had a considerable impact. I liked Clara as a character, and I liked the way Jenna Coleman played her. I should have felt something when she died, but there was no impact. The music and the slo-mo of her death scene is supposed to jerk tears, no doubt; the effect of the black smoke pouring out of her mouth is supposed to be grim and scary. I felt nothing, apart from mild disappointment, both when viewing in 2015 and 2022. Why might this be? Maybe the scenario is just too unreal. This one 45-minute story contains so many concepts that have no readily graspable scientific explanations: a tattoo on someone's skin that's counting down, a mystical raven that steals people's souls and will follow them to the ends of the Earth, a woman that can live for ever, a race with heads looking in both directions who can see the past and the future, a hidden street in London where people who are different from the general populace can go. That last one is pure Harry Potter (the trap street is essentially Diagon Alley), but all of these concepts belong more to the world of magic and mythology than Doctor Who's normally much less fantastical science fantasy. That wouldn't usually be a problem - Doctor Who's flexible format can sample any tone or subgenre - but it's hard when the narrative is expecting me to believe in finality. In this magic world, will death really prove to be the end? It doesn't feel like it.

As well as being unreal, the set-up in the story is convoluted. A simple ending where Clara sacrifices herself in place of Rigsy would be easily digestible by the audience. Instead, it's framed clumsily as a contractual negotiation. Ashildr has a deal with the Raven / Shade (how exactly one would go about brokering an agreement with a cloud of gas or bird is not clear, but never mind) that it is owed a soul, but she can somehow avoid that for Rigsy but not for Clara. Ashildr has a long bit of dialogue that's whizzed through at speed but is worth dwelling on: "I made a contract with the Shade when I put the chrono-lock on Rigsy - I promised it a soul and only I can break that contract. When you took it from him, you changed the terms, you cut me out of the deal." This doesn't make any sense. If Ashildr indeed has an obligation to provide a soul - a position that's reiterated multiple times with dialogue like "You can pass it on but you can't cheat it" - then why would she be able to break the deal? Why would it make any difference whose soul it was? Why can nobody else make the same deal she did originally? Why can't the Doctor take on the countdown from Clara, just as she did from Rigsy? Given the intended drama of the moment, the logic has to slot together perfectly for the audience to suddenly realise the trouble that Clara is in at the climax, but it just leaves one scratching one's head. It also is the culmination of a plan that's massively overcomplicated. The Doctor needs to be separated from the TARDIS and then teleported off somewhere. Yes, just asking him to come along might have aroused suspicions. The plan as shown, though, is so far the other way it's ridiculous.

Ashildr has to arrange for someone that the Doctor's met only once before to be in a specific place at a specific time to be framed for murder, then wipe his memory and send him back home while the clock is ticking. What if Rigsy had slept in the following day? What if he'd lost the Doctor's number? What if the TARDIS team and Rigsy had taken longer to find the trap street? Rigsy wanted to call the Doctor as his advocate when he was first accused, so why didn't Ashildr let him? It doesn't make any sense for her to risk her plan by wiping his memory; it only happens to give the first 15 minutes of the story some mystery. There isn't any narrative-world purpose to those first 15 minutes at all - the story could start with Rigsy calling in the Doctor directly to the trap street; the Doctor would still get the investigation to do that's meant to flatter his nature and entrap him. It wouldn't set up Rigsy's partner and child, of course, but I'm not sure that's very well handled anyway. Presumably a scene was cut from the script or final show introducing Jen, the mother of Rigsy's baby, as it looks in the final product like they're leaving the baby alone with nobody to look after it. A TV-literate viewer will immediately be alerted when a character has a new baby and a scene dwells on it, it's like a character saying they're one day away from retirement. Perhaps that was misdirection as to who was not going to make it to the end of the story. Any TV-literate viewer, though, will be very suspicious of a main character disappearing when there's still two episodes left of the season; it was almost certain that Clara would be back in either or both (both as it turned out). It's also a trick that's been pulled before: Clara had pretend leaving scenes at the end of the last series, and again in the last Christmas special. Face The Raven's ending, already questionable for the reasons above, is further undermined by these metatextual factors.

The final reason why Clara's death won't be the end is it's not heroic. She's very brave facing her fate at the end, but the action that she's taken is dumb. The script, and various moments in the previous stories of that year, have been sketching in a motivation that Clara has become reckless thinking she's invincible, but that doesn't quite sell why she makes such a foolish decision. She says it will buy them more time, but she knows it won't - the countdown doesn't restart when it passes to her. She also says, somewhat contradicting the buying more time thing, that she can't die as Ashildr has promised her absolute protection (which is set up earlier, but comes to nothing as Clara still dies). Again, it's just confused and not precise enough to be any kind of twist. More than that, though - and channelling Lalla Ward in some interviews on the season 17 boxset who makes this point - Doctor Who is a melodrama, and melodramas have rules. One is that a hero can't do something knowingly unheroic. As such, it seems obvious that Clara will be back before the end of the series to redeem herself. (An aside: when she does return, Clara doesn't really redeem herself, which makes the year's finale Hell Bent somewhat underwhelming too, but I'll review that - and who knows maybe change my position - when it comes up to blog.) The execution of the story is not that bad; the production design and pacing is fine, the mystery of the first 15 minutes is effective, even though it's fake. There's some great visuals like Rigsy's painted TARDIS memorial to Clara shown in a post credits scene. The performances are mostly good; Maisie Williams is okay, but she just doesn't have the heft to be a credible antagonist versus the forceful presence of Peter Capaldi. That he's beaten by her ruses, at a terrible cost, is not that satisfactory or heroic for him either, but it ends 'To Be Continued' so he can maybe do something about that in the next story...

Connectivity: 

A tough one this; both Face the Raven and Nightmare of Eden contain references to a drug (Vraxoin and the Retcon amnesia drug respectively) and both contain creatures that are not quite what they seem (the Raven is a Quantum Shade, the Mandrels are the source of Vraxoin). That's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Golden Age Myth Ballooning. The narratives of Doctor who stories in general encourage looking to make the future better rather than dwelling on some perhaps glorious but now faded past. There are many stories with ex-imperial villainous races trying aggressively to recapture past glories and coming a cropper, and one story explicitly calls out "There never was a golden age... it's all an illusion." Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped commentators (both amateur and professional) from harking back to golden ages they have perceived in the show itself. For example, as part of my intensive and extensive quest to consume all the material on the season 24 boxset (sorry if it's dominating this blog post, but it has dominated my life for many months), I listened to the Time and the Rani commentary, recorded in the first decade of this millennium when the returned post-2005 Doctor Who was a few series in; the late writers of that story Pip and Jane Baker both bemoaned the return of the sonic screwdriver in the new episodes, as it was the equivalent of a magic wand and made the Doctor into a wizard rather than the scientist he's supposed to be. They are not alone in those involved in the making of Who in thinking that things had got a bit silly or too easy compared to previous times. Does this stand up to scrutiny, though? Was there ever a golden age of Doctor Who? Many people will have their favourite periods of the show, but agreement as to which will never be anything even approaching 100 percent even amongst the smallest group of fans.

I do not think there's ever been a particular golden age of quality. No matter which year from 1963 to 1989 and from 2005 to date, there will be classics and there will be clunkers. And different people will put any one story into those two categories differently. Many people like Face the Raven a lot more than me for example, but I'm not silly enough to think that they're wrong and I'm right. I'll go one step further, though: never mind quality, there's not even a golden age of tone, approach or detail. All is fluid, and anything could happen - it's exciting. For example, I don't think the Doctor has ever consistently been portrayed as being a scientist, no matter what the Bakers thought. In the early days, he was a curious dilettante who liked to go off exploring and was very proud of his synthetic food machine, but he wasn't depicted using scientific methods; but then, in the early days he wasn't the hero, Ian was, and the science teacher, who'd on paper be much more likely to used his applied knowledge to solve problems, was more of an action hero. The Doctor tended to talk his way out of tight spots (his oratorial skills are to the forefront in stories like An Unearthly Child and The Keys of Marinus in that first season). Later he's seen tinkering with the odd bit of engineering here and there. The only couple of times I can think of that the Doctor ever used a truly experimental approach was when trying to find antidotes to diseases in The Ark and Doctor Who and the Silurians; the former is just a quick montage to ramp up tension, and the latter is one section of a seven-episoder, where they clearly wanted to fill up the story time any way they could. Daleks have never been able to shoot straight, and the sonic screwdriver has always been able to open any door in the universe, except when it can't. Everything else is propaganda.

It's forgivable that Doctor Who fans fall for the golden age myth, though, as it's endemic in many walks of life. Politicians and the media are particularly susceptible, always hankering for imagined times when people knew their place, or when there was no crime, or when nobody had to pay a licence fee for their TV (a recent and particularly egregious example in the UK). Perhaps it is this fertile ground that grew a rumour that's blossomed recently, that the next actor taking over from Jodie Whittaker to be the incumbent Time Lord will be none other than David Tennant. I don't think this is likely to happen. The returning showrunner Russell T Davies has always tended to demonstrate that desire to push for the new rather than dwell on the past. It's the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, of course, which might lead to some celebratory celebrity shenanigans - I could see Tennant making a guest appearance (though I'm not even sure that's a good idea) but not taking over the role for good. This rumour, taken as fact, is also being used by the usual clickbaiters as a stick to beat the current show. What's interesting, though, is that this didn't happen the last time an actor made an indelible mark on the role. If the equivalent of David Tennant for the classic series is Tom Baker, I don't remember any time during the 1980s that there was hope or even speculation that he'd come back. Perhaps this is a good sign. Towards the end of the classic series, rightly or wrongly, Doctor Who was not seen as the sort of successful venture that would tempt back a star who'd already made their mark. That it is currently seen as something that a busy and popular TV actor like Tennant would want to re-do is testament to the good shape that the series is in. The only golden age therefore is right now.

In Summary:

I've watched it a couple of times, and I'm not feeling the love, so I'm afraid I now shall watch this story... nevermore.