The Lie of the Land

The best thing about this week's episode of Doctor Who, The Lie of the Land, was regular cast's performance. The standout among them was Pearl Mackie. Bill was again placed at the centre of the story and she gave another excellent performance. At this point surely she has to be considered the best companion of the Moffat era¹? She feels like a real person where Amy, Rory and Clara did not. Part of this is down to Moffat creating a character that doesn't seem designed to function primarily in a sitcom, but the casing of Pearl Mackie is just as key in it. She makes more of her opportunities to act (as opposed to just delivering funny lines) than Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill and Jenna Coleman did.

Peter Capaldi had a probably the best material he's had all series, certainly the best since The Pilot. His affection for Bill was highlighted and played perfectly. His friendship with Missy was explored surprisingly efficiently considering she only appeared in two scenes. The closing scene in which the Doctor was shown casually reading with her³ was an insight into their comfort with each other. Meanwhile his description of her as being almost as clever as him was a nice way to bring out a little pomposity in the Doctor while also underlining that Missy is not only intelligent but a potential threat. 

Of course the most interesting thing for the Twelfth Doctor in The Lie of the Land was pretending he'd sided with the enemy. The fairly lengthy scene in which the Doctor and Bill were reunited allowed Capaldi to get back to what his Doctor was known for in his debut season: being unpredictable. As a characteristic it was dropped after that season, probably because it would be hard to sustain that approach indefinitely. Capaldi's Doctor has mellowed across his second and third seasons. But that first season and the scene on the prison ship here demonstrate that Number Twelve works best when his alien nature is emphasised and you can't be sure of how he's going to react to any given situation. It also has the pleasant side effect of contrasting him with the ultimately very reliable Tenth and Eleventh Doctors², who were always very reliable and predictable in terms of the route they'd take to save the day. The detached and aloof aspect to Capaldi's Doctor side is something I wish had been reduced rather than removed completely. 

Maybe the biggest surprise of TLotL was Nardole not being the irritant he has been up to this point. I would still have preferred him not to be involved but Toby Whithouse found a way to make him work, seeming less concerned with giving him things to do so that he was freed up to function as the sidekick he is so clearly intended to be. He also leaned into Nardole's geekish nature more than any other writer has done, keeping him talking for a little longer than is comfortable about tedious matters. In short, Whithouse seemed more at ease with casting Nardole as an full-on nerd than anyone else and it worked well.

The sets, monsters, score, supporting cast, and so on? All fine (although the lighting seemed a little dim in the Missy scenes), I particularly liked the Doctor's white prison room. But then that's to be expected at this point. The team that makes this show has been doing so long enough that a certain base quality in terms of presentation is all but assured.

Finally, this episode can't really be talked about without mentioning oppressive police states and fake news. Obviously the world presented in the show was an exaggerated take on right wing leanings going too far but it should still be taken as the cautionary tale it was intended to be. It's important that real world concerns get reflected in our escapist media because it's all too easy to forget them, or for younger viewers to simply accept them as "the way things have always been" (a particularly on-the-nose warning this episode gave us numerous times). Doctor Who is a very useful vehicle for exploring things like this and it's nice to see it doing so.

Being the closing part of a loose trilogy meant The Lie of the Land was always going to struggle in some respects. It had to wrap things up started across the previous two weeks by other writers and tell a self-contained story of its own in a satisfying manner, with the additional wrinkle of reintroducing Missy. It also had to tell its own self-contained story in a satisfying manner. It managed these things and balanced them well to boot. It didn't excel at anything in particular but it also didn't fall to pieces fifteen minutes in as it could have. Chalk it up as a win, on average.

***

¹ Not that that's saying a great deal.

² Not that this approach is a problem. It worked very well with Tennant for a couple of reasons: it hadn't been done with a Doctor before and he had his Lonely God and Time Lord Victorious approaches (elements of both being present from his first full episode) approaches that could be implemented for variety. It worked less well for Smith because the approach had become familiar during Tennant's years in the role and Tennant was better at it to boot.  

³ "You read? You read on the show?"

Before the Flood

Ahhhhhh so it was all about free will versus determinism. How disappointing.

Not that it had to be disappointing (which is in no way a clever, or an attempt at clever, joke). That's actually a rather interesting subject for a programme prominently featuring a time machine to tackle. The trouble is that paradoxes and time travel as plot device have been massively overdone by the show over the last five years, leaving it an all too familiar topic now, and one that a writer like Toby Whithouse doesn't have the chops to broach in interesting enough ways.

But even if Moffat hadn't run those ideas into the ground this episode wouldn't have been great. It dealt with its chosen paradoxes in a convoluted manner, spending too much time trying to be clever than clearly establishing what the paradox was and where the Doctor's ability to change things (or lack of it) lay. Things may have been better had this been a single part story. That would have forced Whithouse to concentrate on the twists he felt compelled to hang his story around and be tighter with what he gave his swollen cast to do.

That said this was an improvement on the story's opening half, last week's Under the Lake. The biggest weaknesses here were the scenes with Clara and the guest stars running around in the base had no point to them. Well, not in terms of plot at least, they existed only to keep Clara in the episode. Ducking in and out of safe zones to rescue phones and guest cast members placed into peril for no reason? That's not something anybody needed.

There's also a rare criticism of the production team (a wonderfully all-encompassing, broad term) to be had. The Fisher King. Despite having one of the richest, most evocative names (which wasn't capitalised on) in the show's history The Fisher King was given possibly the most Power Rangers design in the history of Doctor Who. At first it seemed like the director realised the shortcomings of the suit and wisely decided to shoot it only in shadows. But then we were treated to shots of the thing chatting to the Doctor and wandering about in broad daylight. I accept that bad monster designs happen from time to time but the show should be at a point now where it knows when to cut its losses and work around something that's not turned out well. This was clearly one of those times but nobody seemed to realise it. Also the King's "mouth" had a bit of a Vervoid look to it and we all know what they look like.

There were glimpses of goodness to be had here though. The abandoned Russian town with a big dam sitting ominously on the horizon was a cracking visual (shame they didn't do anything interesting with it). Prentis the Tivolian undertaker was a far more engaging character than I'd expected. It was interesting to see his desire for subjugation played with such open pervertedness, a contrast to the repressed portrayal David Walliams went with when he was cast as a similar character in 2011's God Complex. Even the idea of Doctor Who tackling ghosts remained interesting for part of this episode, until they went with spelling out the nature of them (electromagnetic echoes created by The Fisher King, whatevs) instead of leaving things open ended. A lack of definitive answer can work nicely, as The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit so nicely demonstrated years ago.

In short Toby Whithouse gave us two workmanlike scripts, the production team turned out a shonky monster but did themselves proud on finding a location and creating some (absolutely pointless) Russian trappings, and the episode was ultimately about an argument that's been done to death already and didn't actually play out fully here. There have been better episodes.

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.