Flatline

The TARDIS lands at a train station on the edge of what looks like an industrial estate. It starts shrinking. The Doctor gets trapped inside and Clara The Companion has to save the day with wit, ingenuity and pep talks. She manages this in spite of a group of two dimensional beings and that may or may not be invading the planet (or Bristol) and having to deal with a particularly surly council employee.

It doesn’t sound like it should be a particularly good episode of Doctor Who. In fact it actually sounds pretty basic. Modern day Doctor Who hasn’t shied away from council estates in British cities and alien invasions have been around since William Hartnell’s second story. And while episodes that see one of the starring actors in a reduced role can work very well (Midnight and Blink for instance) it’s not the most promising sign that an episode will be of high quality.

But Flatline works. It starts by featuring what is probably the most interesting alien creation the show’s had since the Weeping Angels: sentient artwork that can disassemble three dimensional objects. They provided plenty of memorable visuals for the episode: a human nervous system spread across a wall looking like a painting of a pond; a woman being sucked into the floor; and a perspective trick that revealed that a man was not standing and staring as we thought but had actually been absorbed into a wall and bits of bric-a-brac in front of it are just three examples. The latter is likely to be the shot this episode is most remembered, although my personal favourite was a couch being taken apart in front of Clara and forgettable but inoffensive guest companion Rigsy. For the required action scene the creatures learned how to mimic human forms and started moving about. It was shot in a particularly eerie way, heavy on lurching and with a buzz of activity where faces should have been.

They are a creation too good for just one outing. There are so many things that could still be done with them and their ambiguous origins and motives are a refreshing change for the programme. Part of what made them so interesting is that they were written as a race that puzzled the Doctor, leaving him unsure of whether they were aliens, a new life form, or creatures from another dimension (a concept that gets floated astonishingly rarely in Doctor Who) and with no idea of what their intention was. By the end of the episode it was getting tough to take them as anything other than aggressors but it was left open ended enough for them to come back for a different use.

The episode also benefited from not being as Doctor Lite as it could have been. Capaldi was shunted onto the TARDIS set to cut back on the amount of work he’d need to do for the episode, freeing him up to put in more time on other episodes. But being on the show’s lone standing set meant his absence from the episode was minimal. He entered what has become his usual strong performance and played his banishment to the TARDIS with a delightful array of reactions. Matt Smith would have gone with bad children’s TV levels of ham acting for the scenes with the Doctor peering and reaching out of a miniaturised TARDIS. Capaldi showed restraint, making the humour about the situation rather than his gangly limbs. It was another reminder of what a welcome change of pace he’s been in the lead role.

Jenna Coleman put forth another good performance too. Probably the best thing that can be said about her is that she didn’t feel out of place as the lead, and when you’re essentially guest starring in place of Peter Capaldi, as opposed to co-starring with him, that’s quite an achievement. She was particularly good in the investigative scenes in the episode’s opening third. Meanwhile the closing scene in which she asked the Doctor why he couldn’t tell her she was good was one of her best performances on the show. Previously I’ve been unimpressed with her angry, affronted routine but here it was very good.

On a character note it was interesting to see Clara lying to Danny about her adventures with the Doctor again. It’s clearly going to lead to something, though I’ve no idea what. It didn’t do much for Danny though. He heard his girlfriend crash through a window and then disappeared from the episode. Would it really have been that much trouble to drop in a line to explain Clara’s phone had been turned off or lost after that call? Unless the point of Danny is for us to not feel fully invested in him as a creation (and I don’t think it is) then I don’t understand the role he’s been placed in in the last two episodes.

Flatline will inevitably be remembered for the visual trickery employed for the Boneless but it achieved a lot more. It gave us what deserve to be returning monsters, the best episode with a mostly absent lead actor since 2008’s Midnight, and another strongest, possibly the strongest, performance from Jenna Coleman. After a hit-and-miss opening half series eight is shaping up to be pretty good.