Under the Lake

Under the Lake was a more traditional episode of Doctor Who than either The Magician's Apprentice or The Witch's Familiar. With the eye-catching two part opener of series nine out of the way it was free to be, not having the pressure of incorporating returning villains or hooking people in for a twelve week run. This could have been a good thing, a celebration of the show's more successful tropes and storytelling devices. That would have been apt given that it's been ten years since the show's revival. Unfortunately it was given to Toby Whithouse, the writer with perhaps the most alarming hit and miss rate in all of New Who.

Whithouse's previous work on the show has run the gamut on quality and engagement. He started off with the inoffensive but also uninspiring School Reunion. In fairness that was a bit of a JNT-style shopping list in which Whithouse was tasked with reintroducing Sarah Jane Smith and K9 and utilising the then-underdeveloped Mickey in addition to giving us forty-five minutes of thrills 'n' spills but it's still noticeable that Whithouse never wrote for the show again while RTD was in charge.

A fair counter argument to that would be that he had something of a hit on his hands during the Davies eras. Being Human, the dramedy about a werewolf, a ghost and a vampire living together and sharing some good times and lols while also hiding their true nature from Joe Public. And okay, that was a popular series which took up a lot of time and could easily be the only reason he didn't return to Doctor Who sooner. But it was wrapping up when he wrote his first script under Moffat, and the later series of Being Human demonstrate my point as well as looking solely at his Who work does: Whithouse is a writer of inconsistent quality. Seriously, watch the first half of series one and the last half of series five. The difference is astonishing.

Under Moffat Whithosue has penned The Vampires of Venice (better than School Reunion but still a little band), The God Complex (one of the very best episodes Matt Smith's era produced), and A Town Called Mercy (one of the worst). Giving him a two part series was a gamble. His track record indicated that he'd either write something very dull or really quite engaging and good.

It was the former. Tasked with writing a ghost story Whithouse went to great lengths to play to some of the most well established ghost tropes, writing his spectres to phase through (most) solid objects, only come out at night, hover, and be generally inhuman and creepy. None of this was a bad idea. It made sense to write stereotypical ghosts given that this was Doctor Who Does Ghosts but he could, and should, have done unexpected things with our expectations. There were glimpses of something good, the computer controlled day-night mode, the ghosts wanting to kill to "amplify their signal and get attention", and the hints dropped about the spaceship were all very promising, but the episode never really felt that it accomplished anything beyond successfully reaching its cliffhanger and setting up the concluding half. I've discussed before how two part stories have to be viewed as a whole, making opening parts tricky to look at in isolation, but the way they're essentially written to essentially be two single part stories connected by a theme should ensure that each part is satisfying in its own right. This wasn't.

There's also that cliffhanger. The Doctor going back in time to find out what happened when the ship crashed. That's just yet more time travel as a plot device stuff that the Moffat era is already far too heavy on. It's okay occasionally but if the Doctor simply nips off in his time machine o sort things out in every episode then it eventually leaves people asking why he's not doing it in other episodes. And there's no easy answer to that beyond "Well that would make the episode rather boring or short or both."

The cliffhanger also showed as the ghost of the Doctor. Which is just utterly boring because it takes a lot of drama out of the story's central threat and the episode as a whole. We know now that anyone who becomes a ghost can also stop being a ghost, because we know the Doctor as played by Peter Capaldi not in ghost makeup, is fine later in the series. Perhaps Whithouse will find a way to pay off everything he set up, and in fairness I think there's a lot he included that will seem far more obvious come Before the Flood, but it's not a definite thing. And it won't make Under the Lake any more tolerable as a piece of television.