09 – Series Nine – Peter Capaldi

The Magician’s Apprentice

This is the first part of a two-part story, which concludes in The Witches Familiar. So there is a lot of setup of things that may or may not be clear later. In the Prologue, the Doctor is on Karn and there is a discussion of someone seeking him, and whether the Doctor will go. Then as the episode opens, there is a war scene on an unidentified planet, with soldiers running and a plane strafing them. The field is completely muddy, and it looks a lot like a World War I battlefield. Then a boy is running across the field, and soldier stops to help, before a hand comes up out of the mud and drags him under. Other hands popup all over the field. Then the Doctor appears, and tells the boy he will help him, but asks the boy’s name, and when he hears it is Davros the Doctor leaves and abandons the boy.

Missy meanwhile stops planes in mid-flight to get the attention of UNIT, who in turn tell Clara to report in. Missy and Clara find the Doctor, then an agent of Davros finds all of them, and takes them all to Skaro. Davros claims he has no control over the Daleks, which may even be true, since he said the same thing in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. But the Daleks kill Missy and Clara then destroy the TARDIS. Now we all know the TARDIS is not destroyed, and Missy and Clara will be back, so the question is whether these were fake to begin with, or if Moffat will once again press the Big Reset Button in the next episode.

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The Witch’s Familiar

And in the conclusion of this two-parter, Moffat does not pull out the reset button, thank goodness. Missy and Clara actually teleported away, using the energy from the Dalek weapons to power vortex manipulators. They are now outside the Dalek city, and have to attempt an entry through the sewers. Missy uses Clara as bait to catch and kill a Dalek, then gets Clara to climb inside . They then enter the city with Clara as a Dalek pretending to have captured Missy. When a Dalek questions why Missy was not exterminated, Missy tells him to send a message to the Dalek Supreme to tell him “The Bitch is back”.

Meanwhile the Doctor is with Davros who claims he is dying, and it does look like that. The Doctor then takes Davros’ chair away and goes to confront the rest of the Daleks, but is overcome by Davros’ henchman Colony Sarff (the guy made up of snakes) and brought back to Davros. They talk, and Davros says he wants to see the light one more time before he dies, and this is where it gets weird. The Doctor offers to give Davros a bit of his regeneration energy, but Davros tricked him and is taking a lot of regeneration energy to regenerate himself and all of the Daleks. Missy sees what is happening and comes to rescue the Doctor. But then the city starts to crumble because all of the dead and insane Daleks under the city have also revived, and they are pissed. Meanwhile the Doctor is looking for Clara, and is met by a Dalek. Missy tells him that Clara is dead, and that this is the Dalek that killed her. But the doctor sees through this, and rescues Clara from inside the Dalek shell. The TARDIS, it turns out, was not destroyed, but dispersed itself using the Hostile Action Displacement System. Then he goes back to your Davros and saves him as well, which in a timey-wimey way set up his ability to rescue Clara.

This two-part story answers a question first posed in the Tom Baker story Genesis of the Daleks, when the Doctor (Tom Baker) asked if you knew a young boy would grow up to be an evil monster, would you kill him? Think of having a time machine and killing Hitler as a 10 year old boy as an example. In this story, the answer is “No”. All through the story Davros has been ragging on the Doctor for having compassion, calling it his big weakness. But the only reason Davros was there is because the Doctor showed him compassion when a scared boy was caught on a battlefield. To the Doctor, compassion is never weakness, it is strength.

My own personal theory is that the Doctor is the Magician, and Missy is the Witch. And Clara starts off as the Doctor’s companion/assistant, hence the Magician’s Apprentice. But in this story she is really teamed up with Missy for almost the whole story, making her the Witch’s Familiar. It almost gets her killed, of course, and is never pleasant.

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Under the Lake

This is the first part of another two-parter, and it is the classic base under siege story. An underwater mining facility is operating in a lake that was formed when a town was flooded. They find something which turns out to be a spaceship and bring it back to the base where they investigate it. But there seems to be a ghost associated with it. Then the engine turns on in a fireball, and the Commander of the base is killed pushing another person out of the way, and he too becomes a ghost. But while they seem suitably ghostly and can pass through walls, they also seem capable of picking up and using weapons. One of the people in the group is an executive for an oil company that is helping to finance this base to get at the oil they have found. Thankfully, he is the next to die, and now there are three of these “ghosts”. The Doctor identifies the original “ghost as one of the Tivolians, a race of cowards last seen in The God Complex.

With the Commander now a “ghost”, the acting commander is a woman who is deaf and has a sign language interpreter to help her, but the Doctor quickly identifies her as the smartest one of the group. They try to figure out what the “ghosts” are trying to accomplish, and they send a sub into the flooded town and retrieve a suspended animation capsule, but cannot open it. But they figure out that the “ghosts” are trying to send a signal, and adding more dead people to the “ghost” population would boos that signal, so they are definitely dangerous. When they figure out how to flood parts of the base, the Doctor and Clara and the living people are separated. The Doctor’s plan is to take the TARDIS back in time to before the town was flooded and see if he can figure what happened, but in the cliffhanger we see the Doctor has died and turned into one of the “ghosts”.

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Before the Flood

To start this episode, the Doctor introduces the “Bootstrap Paradox” with a story about a time traveler who goes back in time to meet his hero Beethoven, but when he arrives no one has ever heard of this Beethoven chap. But the time traveler has brought with him a complete set of Beethoven’s works in sheet music form, and copies them all out thus producing Beethoven. So who really created those works? As you might expect, this is a plot point in the conclusion to this two-parter.

The Doctor and two of the crew arrive in this Scottish town in 1980, and find the spaceship. They are met by Prentis, a funeral director from Tivoli, who is the first ghost we saw, but he is very much alive at this point. The spaceship was a hearse, and Prentis came here to bury a dead Fisher King. Only it turns out the Fisher king as not dead, and killed Prentis, so now it is ghost #1. Meanwhile, the Doctor is talking to Clara via her telephone, and she tells him about seeing himself as a ghost, so the Doctor now knows he is a dead man walking. While running away from the Fisher King the party gets split up, and another person gets killed. The Doctor tries to escape, but the Cloister Bell rings and the TARDIS only takes him back a half hour in time, so now the Doctor has to avoid at all costs meeting himself. But in the end the Doctor is able to use the power cell from the hearse that we saw missing previously to blow up the dam, flooding the town and killing the Fisher King. He returns in the suspended animation chamber to the present time and comes out, explaining that he had created the hologram of himself as a ghost and programmed it to say the things that Clara had told him the ghost was saying. This is the bootstrap paradox in action.

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The Girl Who Died

This is yet another two-parter, but unlike many of these, this first part is a complete story. There is no mysterious cliffhanger leaving you waiting for part two to feel satisfied. The Doctor saves Clara in the cold open, where she is in a spacesuit drifting in space. Why she is in this situation is never explained. But when the TARDIS lands they are captured by Vikings who take the two back to their village. There they see Ashildr, played by Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones fame. For some reason the Doctor keeps staring at her, before telling Clara that premonition is just memory in the wrong direction. The Doctor tries to pass as Odin when suddenly a face appears in the sky and claims to be Odin, who says that the Viking warriors will join him in Valhalla. The face in the sky is a parody of Monty Python, who did the same thing with God. The warriors are then grabbed, as are Clara and Ashildr, to the alien space ship, where the warriors are all killed. It turns out this an alien race called the Mire who are known for being formidable fighters, and Ashildr proceeds to declare war on them. So Ashildr and Clara are returned to the village to tell the people they have 24 hours to get ready.

The Doctor does come up with a plan to defeat the Mire, and at one point while modifying a Mire helmet uses the phrase “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” which the Third Doctor famously said. But Ashildr dies in the course of this. The Doctor is moping when he looks into a tub of water and sees his face in the reflection. He suddenly recalls the circumstances from The Fires of Pompeii, where Peter Capaldi played Caecilius and was rescued by the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble, and realizes he picked this face to remind him that he must always save people. So he modifies a chip from a Mire helmet, and puts it into Ashildr, which brings her back to life. But in the end he thinks he may have made huge mistake since the chip will keep restoring Ashildr forever, making her immortal.

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The Woman Who Lived

800 years after the events of The Girl Who Died, the Doctor is on Earth on the track of an alien artifact, which he finds in the middle of a literal highway robbery. The robber turns out to be Ashildr, and it runs out she is also on the track of this artifact. The plot is really secondary here to the character interactions between the Doctor and Ashildr, who has now renamed herself “Me”. She is in league with an alien who wants this artifact to return home, or so he says, and Ashildr plans to go with him. She really wants out of the life she has and wants to see the universe, and to this end she is continually begging the Doctor to take her with him. But he will not do that. They get the artifact, but then Ashildr brings the alien face-to-face with the Doctor. They tie him up, and take off in a coach to where another highwayman is due to be hanged. The Doctor gets free, and takes off after them, with an eye to preventing the highwayman’s death. But at the last moment Ashildr places the artifact on the man’s chest, killing him and opening the portal. And at this the alien reveals he is an advance party for an invasion, and that Ashildr and everyone else will die. She ask the Doctor what they can do, and the Doctor points out that it was the man’s death that opened the portal, and that if the man is brought back to life the portal should close. And Ashildr can do that because the Doctor gave her a second chip at the end of The Girl Who Died.

Ashildr then tells the Doctor that she is going to look after the people the Doctor leaves behind. And of course a lot of this episode is about how the Doctor left her behind. I would call this an average story, but enjoyable.

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The Zygon Invasion

Yet another two-part story where this is the first part. This follows on the from The Day of the Doctor, where the War Doctor, the Tenth Doctor, and the Eleventh Doctor created a peace treaty between the humans and the Zygons, as a result of which 20 million Zygons were resettled on Earth in a disguised form as humans. But now a breakaway group of Zygons has decided to take over and launch all-out war on the humans and take over the planet. UNIT is of course involved, and Osgood is a central character. Since the events of The Day of the Doctor, there have been two Osgoods, but instead of one being human and the other being a Zygon, they are both human and Zygon hybrids. Of course, one of them was killed by Missy in Death in Heaven, so now there is only one Osgood.

The problem with fighting the Zygons is that they can take any form they like, such as in one case the form of the mother of a UNIT soldier, who lures him and his comrades to their deaths. And by the end of the episode both Clara and Kate Stewart have been captured and duplicated. In the cliffhanger ending, the Clara-copy launches a missile at the Doctor’s plane, while telling him on the phone that Clara is dead. It is a great setup for the following second part, with lots of action and suspense.

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The Zygon Inversion

And in part two we pick up where we left off. the Zygon “Clara”, who is actually Bonnie, has fired the missile at the plane containing the Doctor and Osgood. Then we see Clara in her apartment, but it is a dream sequence. But if she is dreaming, she is alive, and then the dream Clara starts to interfere with Bonnie, the Zygon “Clara”. They are psychically linked. And dream Clara manages to interfere with the firing of the missile enough to make it miss, and then to slow down the firing of a second missile, and this give the Doctor and Osgood time to parachute out before the plane is blown up. Then dream Clara manages to control Bonnie enough to send the Doctor a text message saying “I’m awake”.

The Doctor and Osgood then head into London to the location where a Zygon was revealed, and they meet Kate Stewart, who offers to take them to where the pod holding Clara is located. It’s a trap! But surprise, surprise, iti s the real Kate Stewart, not a Zygon. She explains that she killed the Zygon in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, with “five rounds rapid”, a phrase her father used. Finally everyone arrives at the UNIT Black Archive, under the Tower of London: Kate, the Doctor, Osgood, the real Clara, the Zygon Clara Bonnie, and a couple of other Zygons. They are looking at two boxes, called the Osgood Boxes, and each box contains two buttons, labelled Truth and Consequences.

The crux of the matter that this has been building up to is that both Kate and Bonnie want to commit genocide, and the Doctor has to talk them out of it, which he does in one of his epic speeches, where he reveals that he once had a box that would destroy his own people, and thought he would be in the right if he used it, a reference back to The Day of the Doctor. And that it was Clara who made him find a different solution. Eventually both Kate and Bonnie stand down.

This was a good story, no doubt about it.

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Sleep No More

The Doctor and Clara are for some reason on a science station orbiting Neptune in the 38th century, and are met by a military mission sent to find out why transmissions from the station have ceased. They then find what are called Morpheus pods, which allow people to get month’s worth of sleep in 5 minutes. And in one of them they find the scientist Rasmussen, who invented these pods. But there are monsters on this orbiting station, and the Doctor analyzes the remains of one that attacked them, and decides that they are made of the stuff that collects in the corner of your eye when you sleep. One by one people die, and it is revealed that Rasmussen created these monsters and wants them to take over as a new form of humanity. The Doctor defeats him, of course, sending the orbiting station crashing into Neptune while he, Clara, and one soldier escape in the TARDIS.

So far this is the least interesting episode of the season, possibly ranking with Fear Her from the second season, with David Tennant. If you never get around to it, you haven’t missed much.

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Face the Raven

Rigsy, who we last saw in Flatline, calls the TARDIS using a number Clara gave him, to say that he now has a tattoo. But he does not have any memory of getting it, and it is counting down. The Doctor recognizes this is not Earth technology, and they go searching for a hidden location in London, which ends up being a bit like Diagon Alley from Harry Potter: it is in the middle of London, and no one knows it is there. In this alley they find Ashildr, now Me, who is the “mayor” in this place, which is a refuge for aliens. It turns out that Rigsy was found over the body of an alien woman, and the “tattoo” is counting down the minutes left in his life. Clara learns more about this, such as that she can take it from Rigsy, which she does, thinking that Me had promised no harm would come to her.

But it turns out that Me has gotten into a relationship with unknown forces she is afraid of, and it was all a trap aimed at getting the Doctor. The alien that Rigsy supposedly murdered is actually alive, but to open the stasis lock the Doctor has to use his TARDIS key, and in doing this a teleport mechanism is placed on his wrist. That is the trap, which at the end sends the Doctor somewhere else. But when Me goes to remove the counting down tattoo from Rigsy, and finds it is now on Clara, she is very sorry, but there is nothing she can do. Once again, someone dies a death of dramatic necessity. But overall a fitting end for Clara. Her arc has been building up to this as she tries to be more and more like the Doctor, but in the end she isn’t the Doctor. And the Doctor is now somewhere else with a “To be continued” message at the end of the episode. Will we find out who those unknown forces are that wanted to trap the Doctor? We’ll have to see.

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Heaven Sent

The Doctor arrives in a glass-walled teleportation chamber inside what appears to be a castle. He finds a skull there, and sets out to investigate. A hooded figure begins to stalk him through the castle, and it sure looks like Death Personified, but it moves slowly, so the Doctor can run to the other side of the castle and then have 82 minutes before the figure catches up. The Doctor escapes the figure one time by diving through a window, and intro some water where he finds a bunch of skulls on the bottom. Then there are interludes where the Doctor appears to be in the TARDIS, and Clara seems to be there, but it looks like this is all in the Doctor’s mind. He gets a message “I am in 12”, and finds a room number 12 in the Castle. Inside there is a wall made of Azbantium, a mineral harder than diamond, and he thinks the TARDIS is behind it.

He then attacks this Azbantium wall with his bare hands, while the hooded figure comes up and kills him. For some reason, this does not trigger a regeneration, but he describes how slowly the Time Lords die, and crawls up to the room he first entered via the teleportation chamber. He explains that the Castle seems to reset itself over and over, returning to the state it was in when he first arrived. He hooks himself up to the Castle, pulls a lever, and dies, but as that happens the Doctor appears in the teleportation chamber again, and everything starts over. He realizes that all the skulls he has seen are his own skull, and that he has been through this many times, but slowly over centuries he wears down the Azbantium wall until it shatters, and he walks out into Gallifrey. And now we know who the unknown forces are: they are the Time Lords. But why did they do this? We’ll no doubt find out next time, but for now, the Doctor is on Gallifrey, and he is very angry.

This is considered one of the best episodes of Doctor Who. It was nominated for a Hugo award, and voted the best episode ever of Doctor Who by the readers of Doctor Who Magazine.

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Hell Bent

Now on Gallifrey, the Doctor first goes to the barn we saw in Listen (when he was a child) and in Day of the Doctor, when he is planning to end the Time War using the doomsday weapon known as the Moment. The Time Lords come for him, and the Lord President Rassilon orders the soldiers to shoot him, but they refuse, and the Doctor banishes Rassilon. The Doctor now assumes the Presidency of Gallifrey, and uses Time Lord technology to pull Clara out her time stream just a moment before she dies. He claims it is so he can get advice about the Hybrid. The Time Lords had kept him captive for 4.5 billion years in the castle (see Heaven Sent) to get him to give the information about it, but it is not even clear that the Doctor has this information. But in any case, he didn’t need to consult Clara, he is trying to keep her alive.

They steal a TARDIS and go forward in time all the way to the end of the Universe, and in the ruins of Gallifrey they find Me (Ashildr), who is of course immortal, and she has been sitting there watching the stars die. The Doctor has a plan to wipe Clara’s memory, which will somehow keep her alive (shades of Donna Noble), but Clara overhears him telling this to Me, and quickly reverses the polarity of the device. This is a a catch phrase started by the Third Doctor, and it is nice to have it pop up again. In any case, it is the Doctor’s memories of Clara that are affected. He doesn’t forget everything, but he can’t remember what she looks like. He wanders into a diner in Nevada, which is the same one we saw in The Impossible Astronaut, and is waited on by Clara, but he doesn’t know it. In the end, we learn that the diner is actually the stolen TARDIS, and Clara and Me take off in it to return to Gallifrey “the long way around”, another catch phrase. And the Doctor finds his TARDIS standing there in the Nevada desert.

The thrust of the story is that the Doctor has broken all of his own rules to save Clara, and he is the one who is Hell Bent.

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The Husbands of River Song

The Doctor lands on another world colonized by humans in the far future, and meets a servant Nardole, who is looking for a surgeon. But when he asks “Are you the doctor?” we’re off an running. The Doctor goes along, and then we meet River Song, who has contracted with a famous surgeon to operate on her husband, a bloodthirsty tyrant who happens to have a very valuable diamond lodged in his brain. What River really wants, though, is the diamond, the husband she can do without. But he overhears and now they have to run for it. They have the head of this tyrant in a bag, and Ramone, who is also the husband of River, teleports them out. They head for the TARDIS, but can’t take off because of safety protocols in the TARDIS. The tyrant’s head is inside, and his cyber body is outside, and they are linked somehow.

So the cyber body has to come inside, then they can take off, and they land on an interstellar ship, where River has arranged a buyer for the diamond, but it goes wrong when the buyer is a group of people who worship the tyrant and wanted the diamond as a present for the tyrant. Then the ship is hit by meteors, and the TARDIS crash lands on the planet Darillium. There is prophecy that the River spends her last night with the Doctor on Darillium, and the Doctor tells her that some things cannot be avoided. But then he tells her a night on Darillium lasts 24 years.

This brings, for now, the story of River Song full circle. We first met her in The Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead, where Darillium was mentioned. And as a Christmas present the Doctor gives he a sonic screwdriver, which we saw in her first story.

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Season Review

Clara Oswald Reviewed

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