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

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The Zygon Invasion

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The Zygon Inversion

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Sleep No More

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Face the Raven

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Heaven Sent

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Hell Bent

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The Husbands of River Song

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Season Review

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