The Magician's Apprentice

Last year I wrote a chunk of stuff about two parters in Doctor Who, spurred by the two part story that ended Peter Capaldi's first series (read that here). This year we're getting at least three two part stories and there are hints that the remaining six may be connected pair. This makes writing about each episode trickier because you're looking at half of a story but I'm going to give it a go anyway.

Moffat has done this to spite me by the way. Add it to his list of crimes. 

The Magician's Apprentice was less about plot and more about setting things up for the second part. It kicked off with a pre-credits scene in which the Doctor realised a kid he'd somehow stumbled across on a muddy battlefield would grow up to become celebrated geneticist Davros, creator of the Daleks. After that we were shown the unsubtly villainous Colony Sarff visiting the Maldovarium (sadly there was no cameo from everyone's favourite blue git Dorium Maldovar), the RTD era Shadow Proclmation, and Karn in search of the Doctor. He didn't find him and returned to Davros, his employer, and was told to concentrate on the Doctor's friends. Luckily for Sarff he would end up picking the right friends from the dozens available.  

Clara was introduced being a Capable And Unphasable Teacher™, noticing planes were frozen in the sky and running off to be the boss of UNIT. Yeah seriously, a secondary school teacher is the boss of UNIT now. Clara strutted into UNIT HQ, barked out orders and was obeyed without question. She also made some astonishing leaps of logic to figure out what was going on with the planes. You want an example? She just knew planes being frozen in the sky wasn't an alien invasion because that was "too obvious. "

It turned out Missy was behind the planes and that she was chilling with a coffee in a village square somewhere. Clara was flown to have a chat with her, Missy killed some UNIT lads cplaying as FBI agents and was let off because she's a link to the Doctor or something. They finally located the Doctor in the twelfth century, using UNIT computers (I've no idea how that was meant to make sense) and Missy used a vortex manipulator to travel to him. After the Doctor was introduced in a fashion that people who find the non-word squee to be acceptable probably thought was just about the best thing ever (it involved a tank, an electric guitar and some stand-up comedy) the Colony Sarff turned, revealed himself to be a democratic pile of snakes, and teleported the Doctor, Missy and Clara into a handy spaceship. From there they were flown to a planet, the Doctor was confronted with an apparently dying Davros, and Missy and Clara were both seemingly killed minutes after the utterly unshocking revelation that the planet was Skaro, origin point of the Daleks. 

The episode ended with Missy preparing to betray Clara and the Doctor (natch) before she and Clara were killed (exterminated, if you will) and the Doctor somehow returning to the battlefield from the start of the episode to point a gun at young Davros.

I've been a little sarcastic above but I liked this episode. It felt like the sort of thing Moffat had always wanted to do with Smith's Doctor but hadn't quite worked out how to. He had time to let things develop naturally and made the world (or universe, whatevs) of the show eel bigger than it usually does by taking us on a tour of locations. He did lay it on a bit thick trying to make both the pre-credits and end of episode cliffhangers dramatic, making Missy seem deranged and the Daleks The Biggest Threat Ever but those were minor things. The good outweighed the bad.  

Although he was little more than a generic henchman Colony Sarff was an interesting new villain thanks to his fascinating design and the way he moved. He'd stepped straight out of an episode of Buffy (which is intended as a compliment). Credit to Jami Reid-Quarrell for putting in a performance that stood out despite him being in the same episode as Michelle Gomez's Missya and Julian Bleach's Master.

Missy was as good in this episode as she was in Dark Water and Death in Heaven. In fact she was possibly better. In the series eight finale she was written as mad and convinced that she and the Doctor are best mates, with a standard issue Delgado era crazy plan to her name. Here there was more to her as she actually got to work alongside the Doctor and Clara for a while, something I got the feeling Moffat's wanted to write for a while. It worked nicely thanks to a combination of Moffat's script and the pairing of Gomez and Capaldi. The swerve turn from Missy in the closing moments, which saw try to convince the Daleks to keep her alive so she could help them "burn" the universe before they shot her, would have been irritating applied to any other character but it fit with the Master's history here.

Beyond this the set design was typically on point, Murray Gold's music was as apt as it always is and was less oppressive than it can be, and the supporting cast was inoffensive. Plus we got the return of Julian Bleach as Davros. It's possible that this was something people knew about before the episode aired but I didn't and it was a really nice surprise, an argument in favour of not reading spoiler sites. Bleach made a nice counter to Gomez, playing Davros as contemplative and exhausted while she made Missy eccentric and extroverted. I'd be interested in them sharing a scene in next week's episode, especially if Bleach got to show some of the mania he demonstrated in The Stolen Earth and Journey's End. Y'know, that story where he gleefully ranted about destroying reality itself.

In short I think The Magician's Apprentice was Moffat's best overall script since 2010's The Eleventh Hour. The show finally felt like it was taking the approach people expected from Moffles as executive producer. I hope next week's episode, and the rest of this series, can maintain this standard.