Doctor Who 9.8 – The Zygon Inversion

So the kid said that he enjoyed this episode and that it was “powerful,” and I think that’s an unusual word for a ten year-old to use to describe a piece of television. I think that he’s right, and I think that many people will agree, but I’m pleasantly surprised that we’ve raised a kid who, only ten, can see that television that challenges viewers to think more about the emotions and the reasons and the consequences for and of war might need different words than “cool” or “awesome.”

Many people seem – quite understandably – to think of the big climax, with Capaldi forcing his angry enemy to think about those consequences and change her mind, as the big moment to take away. But I sometimes come back to this scene in a small, closed supermarket, and think it’s one of the most amazing pieces in all of Who. Most of what happened before is left to our imagination, but we know that the rebel leader messed with this peaceful immigrant Zygon’s ability to hold a human form. He turned into an alien monster again in front of people, the video went viral, and hours later, there are dead people in the lobby.

The Zygon just wanted to live in peace. He had been a Briton for two years, living quietly in what looks to be a beat-up, aging council estate in south London. Nobody bothers him, and he’s happy. Then some young, violent meatheads do something terrible, and racists close ranks, and immigrants aren’t welcome. Every time that racists and white supremacists and nationalists do something even more disproportionately terrible in response to whatever’s pissed them off this month, this scene hits harder. It’s brilliant, brilliant writing.

In a much lighter observation, after the previous episode’s revelation that seventies – or possibly eighties – companion Harry Sullivan had worked on the team developing an anti-Zygon nerve gas, I made sure to remind our son of the delightful moment toward the end of “Revenge of the Cybermen” when the Doctor tells everybody within earshot that Harry Sullivan is an imbecile. 1300 or so years later, and the Doctor’s opinion hasn’t changed; he’s still “that imbecile.” And our son observed that cosplaying as Osgood probably isn’t that difficult, although his methods certainly are. He suggests that anybody who wants an Osgood costume just needs to go to the “BBC Costume Creation Department and take all their old designs and things for the Doctor that they’ve thrown away.” I think he might could build a better mousetrap if he thought about that a bit longer.

Doctor Who 9.7 – The Zygon Invasion

I’ll get the worst out of the way, because Peter Harness’s two-parter is otherwise extremely good, especially its second half. I don’t like the Zygons’ weapons turning people into blobs of sparkling hair because it looks ridiculous. It’ll be topped by an even dumber death visual in the next season, unfortunately. But what I really can’t stand is this absolutely unbelievable interlude where the Zygons shapeshift into copies of the family members of these crack UNIT troops.

Okay, sure, UNIT’s always been known to find soldiers of the “Holy Moses! What’s that?” variety, but you’d think that fifty years later, they’d have sorted out who gets to wear the blue badge. But no, we have an entire company of redshirts sent to Turmezistan, who know the Zygons pulled the “don’t kill my kid and his dad” trick with the drone operator, who’ve been told by their commanding officer to watch out for the trick, and a dozen soldiers nevertheless fall for it anyway, meekly walking along to their offscreen death by sparky-hair, in a scene that is utterly unnecessary to the plot. The story would have continued in precisely the same way if Colonel Walsh and the Doctor had gone in by themselves. It adds nothing except to say “Aren’t these heroes gullible idiots?” and “I’m sure the director thought that was dramatic; he was wrong.” It’s padding every bit as obvious and awful as that bit in “Timelash” where the Doctor shouts at Herbert for six minutes, and stands as one of the most breathtakingly stupid and misplaced moments in the whole of Doctor Who. That bad.

Whew. I mean, we understand and often love the fact that Doctor Who is frequently stupid, but it’s frequently lovably stupid. This one’s full of those moments, like the revelation that the two Zygon bigwigs in the UK have chosen to disguise themselves as two schoolgirls. Then there’s “Doctor Disco” and the Nixon salute and the great little revelation that the “hush-hush” business that Harry Sullivan had been up to at Porton Down was developing an anti-Zygon nerve gas, after his experiences with them back in the seventies or eighties.

The premise is that after the events of “The Day of the Doctor” two years previously, twenty million Zygons have resettled on Earth, agreeing to hide as humans and keep a peace treaty. I remember that some people baulked that twenty million is a huge number, but it’s also about the population of Cairo, spread out everywhere from Turmezistan to New Mexico, so maybe it isn’t that outrageous. UNIT’s Osgood has been concerned that some of the Zygons were not going to be happy with this, and now her predicted “Nightmare Scenario” has come true.

But at its core, this is an angry story that’s really well told and has a few very good twists in it. It’s a story about radicalization, using alien shapeshifters to talk about young, impatient jerks waging jihad. It goes out of its way to insist that there are good and evil in all cultures, but perhaps sadly this story is only about the radicals, who announce themselves with a spray-painted stencil of a black claw. The leader, who takes the name Bonnie, seems to have a following of a few thousand Zygons, possibly a drop in a bucket of 20,000,000, but more than enough to be one of the greatest threats the planet’s ever seen. After all, as Colonel Walsh asks, how can you actually count them?

Doctor Who 9.1 – The Magician’s Apprentice

Priorities. When “The Magician’s Apprentice” first aired in the fall of 2015, I was blindsided by the completely brilliant pre-credits sequence, revealing that the Doctor is helping a boy who turns out to be a Young Davros. It was one of a couple of times in Capaldi’s run that I swore out loud in complete surprise. Our kid, on the other hand, just said “Oooh, a Dalek story.” It turns out he’s even more in tune with them than I expected. Toward the end, he interrupted again to shout “Hey, I saw a Special Weapons Dalek!” I’m amazed he remembered them. They were only in one adventure and I didn’t think he rewatched that one. Guess it left an impression.

Otherwise, there’s a whole lot to dislike about this season opener. I think – and this is probably really nebulous – it starts with an elegant and simple plot and then it just gets bogged down in layer after layer of rewritten spectacle. The nonsense pictured above, in which the Doctor brings a big tank and some sunglasses and a guitar to the Middle Ages, is one that attracted a lot of derision, and I think with good reason. It reminds me of Moffat going overboard like he was doing in season six. It’s all over the place, even reintroducing Karn, last seen in the mini-episode “Night of the Doctor”, for all of sixty seconds. Moffat doesn’t let the simplicity of the plot breathe through the performances and the natural set pieces, shooting instead for distractions and buzz. Even Jemma Redgrave is here for more UNIT stuff and a big event with timestopped airplanes, snipers, and a jaunt to a plaza in Tenerife when Missy could have just shown up at Clara’s apartment.

It’s a story where Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez are by miles the best things about it. I love the way he says “Gravity” to her and she sneers/whines “I know” back at him. Something’s almost right about Gomez here. She’s almost perfectly the Master, but it’s just tiny little bits of the writing that get in her way. She still reminds me too much of Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in Moffat’s Sherlock, especially when she declines to explain how she survived her last appearance. In retrospect, producing both of these programs together didn’t benefit either of them.

Doctor Who 8.12 – Death in Heaven

At the risk of leaving our son out of these posts, I’ll start tonight by mentioning that while we were on vacation, the condo we rented had a previous occupant’s Hulu account logged in, so the kid sat down to a few hours of Animaniacs. I interrupted him to play him the notorious “Frozen Peas” tape of Orson Welles having a series of tantrums while recording commercials in the UK for Findus. Then we looked at the Pinky & the Brain installment “Yes, Always.” Famously, the Brain’s voice actor, Maurice LaMarche, perfected his Orson Welles impersonation by playing and replaying the “Frozen Peas” tape, and in “Yes, Always,” the Brain does an overdub session for some previous episode or other. The script is a mildly edited transcript of the “Frozen Peas” tape, ensuring that a generation of kids knows that a gonk is a bang from outside.

Returning home, that led me to dusting off Tim Burton’s masterpiece Ed Wood, in which LaMarche was called to overdub Vincent D’Onofrio in the role of Welles himself, because no matter how much we love D’Onofrio in so many great parts, especially Detective Bobby Goren, no living actor can do Welles as well as LaMarche. So he and I talked about how and why overdubs like this work, and then I let him know that Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez performed the lines from the previous episode revealing the Master’s identity silently, so nobody in the crowd on location would learn the secret, and overdubbed them later. So see, I’m always looking for coincidences and connections. Narf.

Something really, really funny happened on November 8, 2014.

Did you know we have a food blog? There’s a link on the right-hand side, right down at the bottom of the page. It’s mostly dormant, in part from burnout and in part because we just don’t travel with food and old restaurants as our principal destination anymore, but we had lots and lots of fun and learned so many stories from 2010-2018. I used to be in the habit of taking off for two days of just driving around listening to loud music and eating barbecue many, many miles from home.

And so at 11 AM that November 8, I entered the Skylight Inn in Ayden NC for the very first time and had the best plate of barbecue I’ve ever had. I’ve taken Marie – and our son – back twice, in 2017 and in 2019. It was mindblowing and perfect, and, if I do say so myself, it resulted in such a delightfully quirky and silly blog post that it is, in all honesty, my favorite of all the hundreds of food posts I’ve written.

So there it was. At eleven that morning, I found my all-time favorite restaurant. And twelve hours later, back in Atlanta, at eleven that evening, I sat down to the encore presentation of Steven Moffat’s “Death in Heaven” and found my all-time least favorite episode of Doctor Who.

It is an absolutely appalling piece of television. It out-Timelashes “The Twin Dilemma” and it under-Underworlds “Fear Her”. It is a towering icon of terrible taste and absolutely brainless narrative decisions, of which, making the Doctor the president of Earth might just be the pinnacle. No, it’s the Cyber-Brig. No, it’s something else. It resolves the “Am I a good man?” and “the Doctor hates soldiers” storylines by swinging a sledgehammer around them so that they need never be discussed again. I’ll grant you that had this been Jenna Coleman’s final episode, then the farewell scene with the Doctor and Clara lying their goodbyes to each other would have been something new, but it ends up not mattering since she comes back in seven weeks.

But the weirdest thing actually showed up a few years later. Something about this, atop all its other misfires, really didn’t sit well with me that dark and disappointing night in 2014. It’s that now that the Master is a female, she reveals that she did all the evil things that she has done for the benefit of the male hero. She wants her friend back. I said that felt wrong at the time, that the female villain shouldn’t be reduced to needing a male lead’s approval. And then, on January 15, 2017, in the absolutely execrable final episode of Moffat’s Sherlock, which I swear I enjoyed nine out of thirteen times, we meet Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister Eurus, who reveals that she did all the evil things that she has done for the benefit of the male hero. She wants her brother back. The female villain shouldn’t be reduced to needing a male lead’s approval, and here it was again.

I’ve been back to the Skylight Inn twice and it was every bit as amazing as I remember it. I watched “Death in Heaven” for the second time tonight and it was every bit as terrible as I remember it. It was a funny day, that November 8.

Doctor Who 7.15 – The Day of the Doctor

Pew-pew lasers.

It’s 99% wonderful, but they finally give us the thing we should never have seen: the Time War. It should’ve been the epic crashing of centuries that never happened, waves of possibilities undoing the evolution of universes, Daleks decaying into dust because the metal of their casings had never been designed, Gallifreyans blinked from existence as Daleks slaughtered them in their Time Tot cribs before they joined the sky trenches, the home planets of the Zygons and the Nestenes ripped into nothing but half-forgotten memories shared by terrified survivors. Instead we got pew-pew lasers.

And what makes it infuriating to the point of madness is that Nick Hurran otherwise makes just about the strongest argument possible for being Who‘s very best director with this story. Every frame looks amazing, the lighting and the composition are perfect in every single shot. For Who‘s fiftieth birthday, they gave us an incredibly fun story, a mostly perfect script by Steven Moffat under rotten circumstances – for some weeks, they had zero Doctors under contract, with which people who whined that the story should’ve had more than three never sympathized – and a couple of surprising guest stars in Billie Piper and Tom Baker.

But pew-pew lasers. And Osgood. Everybody else likes Osgood more than I do, which is fair, but I can’t believe anybody’s satisfied with Doctor Who taking the route of conventional sci-fi action instead of something with imagination and power.

I think this story underlines the discrepancy between the two quite harshly. It’s such an intelligent script even before the wit and the putdowns and the Doctors sniping at each other. It features some of Moffat’s very best timey-wimey stuff as the action moves from the National Gallery to the Tower of London, and one character gets a phone call from the Doctor about two seconds after the Doctor leaves the room, and a big painting that we saw in one location ends up in the other, which looks so odd that I honestly thought it was a continuity error on that magical afternoon in 2013 until they explained it.

Our son, who was thrilled by the Daleks and the Zygons and all the other Doctors, noted that there really wasn’t a villain “for the main part,” which is why this works so well. It’s not about saving Earth from Zygons or saving Gallifrey from Daleks. It’s about the Doctor dealing with his decisions, and forgiving his past, and changing history without changing his memories or his guilt. It’s a really remarkable script, and as much as it would’ve been nice to have had Paul McGann and/or Christopher Eccleston in this story, John Hurt is amazing and perfect.

Other kid notes: I quickly covered his eyes just before David Tennant’s name appeared onscreen to preserve the surprise, which worked wonderfully and he loved it. I also neglected to find an occasion to casually remind him of the Zygons, who hadn’t shown up in this show in a very, very long time, but he remembered them. “It’s hard to forget big red monsters with suckers who brought the Loch Ness Monster,” he assured me. I’m not going to hold my hand over my heart and swear that he knew that was Tom Baker playing the Curator – I’m afraid of that heart breaking if I ask – but of course he’s going to remember the Loch Ness Monster.

Doctor Who 7.4 – The Power of Three

The most important thing is, as always, that our son completely enjoyed this story and laughed throughout most of it. Chris Chibnall’s “The Power of Three” really is an oddball and unusual story, and I think that it’s the best of this season’s first five by miles. It’s really only the ending that brings it down. It’s not as though this is the first Doctor Who adventure to start terrific and end on a nebulous threat, a miracle finale, and a lot of sonic screwdriver magic, but it just rings particularly hollow this time out.

What makes this one really weird is that they booked a pretty famous actor called Steven Berkoff to play the villain, and by all accounts – quiet and discreet accounts, but all of them – the experience was an unhappy one, so they brought Matt, Karen, and Arthur back in to reshoot the ending without him, and with his character turned from an in-the-flesh baddie into a hologram. They did some script rewrites around the footage they had, suggesting that the budget must have been amazingly tight since they didn’t get a new actor in, anybody, even at scale, to just remount the scene entirely. But none of it worked even before Berkoff arrived for his costume fitting; the story suggests that perhaps a third of Earth’s population suffered heart attacks and everybody was successfully revived several very long minutes later, which, even for Doctor Who miracle magic, is silly.

It’s kind of funny that for me, Berkoff remains best known in my memory as playing a character in Octopussy who, for years, I thought was played by Frank Gorshin, when his Who experience ends up like a strange new version of a different Batvillain, Otto Preminger. When the producers of Batman decided to do a new Mr. Freeze story, they didn’t ask Preminger back to play the character since everybody had such a miserable time working with him earlier.

Also, this episode introduces Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart, the current leader of UNIT. She appears in five TV adventures across series seven through nine and in a whole heck of a lot of audio adventures from Big Finish. Honestly, I think it’s really odd that Chris Chibnall wrote her television debut episode and then swept her and UNIT offscreen completely in “Resolution” seven years later. I’d have thought once that situation finished, the Doctor would have flown straight to Kate – and Osgood, I suppose – to find out what the heck happened. Or maybe Big Finish has a script waiting for Jodie Whittaker to approve.