Tag: bonnie/zygella

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Essay

Face The Raven: You’ve Already Lost

Disguised as a sci-fi murder mystery, “Face The Raven” is about betrayal, addiction, and the death of Clara Oswald. Possibly the best showing of the twelfth Doctor.

How would time with the Doctor transform an Earthly child? While endangering his companions enough to land him in court at least twice (The War Games, The Trial of a Time Lord), the Doctor somehow empowered them. Most became braver (Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, Rose Tyler,) smarter (Leela,) more open-minded (Liz Shaw,) more compassionate (Vislor Turlough,) or more focused (Martha Jones). Others didn’t need transforming (Sarah Jane Smith, Romana, Ace.) In spite of having their lives threatened enough to qualify for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, most got away in good shape (perhaps there’s a support group). That’s an amazing track record.

Since not even Hank Aaron batted a thousand, other companions weren’t so lucky. Adric was killed, Donna Noble lost her memory, and Clara became a danger addict. Either she absorbed the Doctor’s worst personality traits by sheer osmosis, or her TARDIS time unlocked repressed urges (like Tegan in Kinda). Bonnie the Zygon felt pretty comfortable in Clara’s head in “Invasion of the Zygons.”

The first part of “Face the Raven” is formulaic at best: the Doctor is shown something weird, tracks down clues with new Who tech, and uses flimsy logic to find the alien refugee camp. It must be nice to write yourself out of trouble by dropping entirely new races and technology into the middle of the story. Actual whodunnits challenge us to solve the mystery before the hero does. Doctor Whodunnits are just stories to watch. The most compelling part is the second-half character journeys of Mayor Me, Clara, and the Doctor:

Mayor Me

Her Waterloo station reply is snide and vague. The original was built in 1848, the modern one in 1922.

Let’s take Me at her word, that some unnamed enemy is forcing her to give up the Doctor. Her solution is a flimsy mess, as Clara pointed out by saying “we barely got in.” Her plan is 100% reliant on the Doctor finding the refugee camp; if he didn’t, Rigsy would have died for nothing. Her plan is also overly elaborate. She should have summoned the Doctor directly, knocked him out, then slapped the teleport bracelet on him. Next season could be The Clara and Rigsy Adventures. Infinite lifespan and finite memory turned her into something far worse than the Mire she faced as Ashildr in “The Girl Who Died.” Me betrayed a friend (or at least an ally in protecting Earth). There’s no evidence that she even tried to resist. Perhaps she’s still angry about being made immortal without consent.

Please, no resistance. You’ve already lost.

Mayor Me

In this context, her apparent shock about Clara’s death is as unconvincing as everything else she’s said in this story. She showed no compassion for sicking the Quantum Shade/Raven on the old man, or presumably on anyone else in 100+ years. At best, she accepted the Raven as a public safety tax. The sudden concern for Clara is an awkward plot device to enhance Clara’s death scene.

With the exception of Clara compassion, Maisie Williams’ performance is as flat as Chuck Norris’. Her facial expression, vocal inflections and body language are exactly the same throughout the story. According to Kevin Smith and Spike Lee, directors are usually to blame when great actors look bad. Others say it’s the sole responsibility of the actor. Williams looks like like a hostage delivering her lines, hoping it’ll all work out in the end.

A better performance would have gone a long way toward understaing the refugee camp’s tense political situation; it reminds me of El Rey, the criminal village in Jim Thompson’s The Getaway. Thompson based it on his personal concept of Hell:

Doc and Carol McCoys’ half-million dollar fortune is worth relatively little with the extortionate cost of living. Their future looks bleak; nobody lives long in El Rey. Running out of money means getting banished to a village of cannibals. They’re finally inseparable, in Hell.

Casimir Harlow, reviewing “The Getaway” (1972 film) for AV Forums

Like El Rey, Mayor Me’s refugee camp is a tense détente among many enemies. The most violent space thugs in the Whoniverse have to surpress their instincts just to survive there. This agreement is more fragile than the Zygon truce built on a pair of empty Osgood Boxes.

Clara Oswald

Clara Oswald wasn’t written very well for adults until now. From her debut in “Asylum of the Daleks” through last season’s “Kill the Moon,” she was Moffat’s second Manic Pixie Dream Girl. “I always know” from “The Day of the Doctor” was especially excruciating. She wasn’t a credible teacher.

That begins to change, starting with “Mummy on the Orient Express.” Clara seems to have written off every non-Doctor element out of her life. She’s not even bothering to hide it anymore. Even the death of her boyfriend isn’t mentioned. From Clara’s point of view, the shocked reactions from loved ones must seem silly and over protective. Those feelings, like her ordinary human life, are meaningless. She’s as cut off from these emotions as Mayor Me is from Ashildr.

This is visible in her reaction to almost falling out of the TARDIS, hundreds of feet over London. It looked physically impossible, except for two fast-motion quick shots that seem like last-minute film edits. The first shows her left foot hooked around the left door (that must’ve been hooked open like a screen door), and the second shows her right thigh pressed against the closed right door. Clara’s leg split probably couldn’t be shown in a single shot without looking like she was showing off for Jane Austin.

Clara’s plan to save Rigsy was equally reckless, but not stupid as the Doctor and Mayor Me imply. She wasn’t aware of the Quantum Shade/Rigsy contract, so how could she violate it? Since Clara’s intervention caused the Quantum Shade account to be one death short, couldn’t the balance be rolled into the next death? That could surely be worked out in a refugee camp of Cybermen, Sontorans and Daleks. The Mayor’s negotiation skills aren’t very impressive.

Why? Why shouldn’t I be so reckless? You’re reckless all the bloody time. Why can’t I be like you?

Clara Oswald

That said, Clara’s death speech is fantastic. She’s finally allowed to act like an adult. Her explanation about why she took crazy risks seems like a lazy writer hack, but successfully bridges into an acceptance of death. In an unusual moment of clarity, Clara owns up to her actions. She’s more concerned with what she leaves behind. Her lectures about Rigsy’s guilt and the Doctor’s rage are compelling and selfless. With “we’re both just going to have to be brave,” Clara might have reminded the Doctor of his bravery speech for Codal in Planet of the Daleks. Sarah Dollard‘s script gives her insight, introspection and courage I wish she’d had since her debut in “The Bells of Saint John.”

Doctor Who under Steven Moffat has (perhaps not unfairly) been accused of killing off characters for dramatic effect only to swiftly resurrect them for when the script demands a fuzzy feeling deep inside.

Jon Cooper, reviewing “Face The Raven” for The Independent

The Doctor

This episode begins with the Doctor and Clara laughing about some danger they just escaped. Since last season’s “Mummy on the Orient Express” and “Flatline,” Clara transformed from perky fanboy fantasy to action addict. In 2,000 years of renegade time travel, he’s never seen this reaction. Usually they leave. The Doctor is genuinely surprised and feels guilty, but is at a loss for how to correct this “onging problem.”

The Doctor’s guilt and helplessness reminds me a moment in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Perhaps it’s on his reading list for understanding humans, as well as his own rebellion against the Time Lords. When recalling his criminal years as Malcolm Little, he expressed remorse about his wholesome girlfriend, Laura, becoming a herion addict. In reality, like Clara, she made her own choices.

It’s a very small universe when I’m angry with you.

The Doctor

Out of the three leads, the Doctor’s journey is the least compelling. Moffat’s Doctor is still the king of empty threats, bragging about his stats while being quite helpless. Perhaps he’s using this as a bluff, like Will Munny at the end of “Unforgiven.” But there’s nothing in the script or performance to distinguish this from similar Kirk-like bragging under Moffat’s reign. Does Moffat’s Doctor berate men this way?

In Summary

The first half of “Face The Raven” is an enertaining, but formulaic sci-fi murder mystery. Everything unique and interestsing about it is the character journeys of Mayor Me, Clara, and the Doctor. The major themes are betrayal, addiction, and the death of Clara Oswald. This is possibly the best showing of the twelfth Doctor.

TARDIS Bits

Late is better than not at all. Shut up.

  • The Doctor loves scaring Rigsy.
  • Nice seeing Retcon, the sleaziest drug in the Whoniverse.
  • It’s always weird seeing the TARDIS fly.
  • Why did Mayor Me take her scarf off so cinematically? She looked like Morris Day handing something to Jerome.
  • On her way out, Clara should’ve beat the hell out of Mayor Me. It’s not like she had anything to lose. What happened to slap-happy Clara?
  • I’m proud of myself for not making one Joe Flacco reference.
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Essay

The Zygon Invasion: Error of the Zygons

More than just nostalgia, “The Zygon Invasion” is a study of contrasts of modern and classic era Who. It follows Terror of the Zygons much better than “Day of the Doctor.”

Part of the show’s longevity is its ability to express its premise with different types of stories. Most of new Who stories fall into “soft” escapist space fantasy; the primary emphasis is action, humor, and romance. My preference is “hard” science fiction that speculates technology’s effect onour human condition. Rather than escape from reality, these stories mercilessly embrace political corruption, class warfare, race and gender roles, crime, violence, and more. Examples of classic Who stories include “The War Machines,” “The Enemy of the World,” “Inferno,” “The Robots of Death,” and “The Caves of Androzani.”

Right off the bat, Peter Harness rips the politically flimsy human/Zygon detente in “The Day of the Doctor.” For a sci-fi/fantasy show, this is as topical as Three Days of the Condor. It explores the consequences of allowing millions of the shape-shifting aliens to secretly settle among us. The tension between the “off the boaters” and younger Zygons is consistent with children of Jewish and Irish immigrants who saw a big difference between the American Dream and ghetto reality of the early 1900s. “The Zygon Invasion” covers the same human/alien immigrant theme of the 1980s show Alien Nation (without the harsher social indictment of District 9.)

The focus on real world events to tell a hard science fiction story is a welcome change from new Who‘s tear-jerking fairy tales. In execution, however, that realism is undermined by gaping plot holes and genre convention. The Zygon’s year-long campaign to neutralize UNIT seems to only affect the troops; technicians, administrators and managers are unaccounted for.

When compared to modern audience media access, new Who‘s politics—especially UNIT—are under written. Moffat, and previous show runner Russell T. Davies, gave nods to diversity by casting all women in authority positions. This seems progressive until the Doctor berates them like an angry, old, white man. The tenth Doctor deposes Harriet Jones, the democratically elected Prime Minister, in “The Christmas Invasion.” Here and in “Day of the Doctor,” Kate Stewart simply isn’t allowed to act on her own opinions. This approach certainly wouldn’t haveworked on the Brig. Part of what made “The Sontaran Stratagem” great was Colonel Mace using the Doctor as a scientific advisor, then beating the Sontarans with his own solution.

The wasted potential of Kate Stewart is disappointing. Showing her make tough decisions in chaotic situations would go a long way to defining her character. Classic Who usually got this part right; Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart always had someone to answer to, not enough resources, and wasin a constant love/hate relationship with the Doctor. In contrast, Kate doesn’t seem to have much character beyond speeches. And why the hell did she wear zebra-striped pumps? That’s more improbable than hunting for Zygons by herself in Mexico.

Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry

How did I miss that Doctor Harry Sullivan created Zee-67, the Zygon-killing nerve gas? He certainly looked angry enough to do it at the end of Terror of the Zygons. Either following orders or his own initiative to protect Earth without the Doctor, the Brigadier would have authorized UNIT to experiment on captured aliens.

Mundane realism got displaced by sci-fi adventure, but there’s plenty of room for both.

Sandeep, the lost boy in the hallway, is an example of new Who writing laziness. He doesn’t look frightened, sad, angry, or worried. He’s just an actor reading lines. If he was a Zygon participating in the trap to get Clara, his Zygon acting coach would be embarassed. Basing this scene on actual child behavior would not have ruined the episode. Like most new Who kids, however, he’s an adorable little device for Clara to look compassionate and get in the apartment.

Jenna as Clara as Bonnie
Jenna as Clara as Bonnie

After watching a second time, there are clues to Clara being a Zygon after the apartment scene. The Doctor and Jac look horrified by the execution of the Zygon High Command; Clara looks bored. Wanting to “swing by home and grab a couple of things” seemed odd even to Jac. In the elevator, her hand position is way too deliberate. Jenna Coleman turns in the best evil twin performance since Patrick Troughton in “Enemy of the World.” These behaviors, however, would have been more jarring if the real Clara were written better. The Doctor had no trouble spotting imposters for Martha (“Sontaran Stratagem”) and Amy (“The Almost People”).

When did the Doctor become an expert on political revolutions? He normally takes off from a battle, usually surrounded by destruction and bodies, leaving reconstruction to others. The Doctor’s aftermaths usually look like Team America: World Police. Whenever asked to stay, the Doctor runs to that TARDIS so fast his feet kicks his own behind. His constant running is a theme in the classic and modern eras…and even this season. Perhaps 2,000 years of conflict have given him “back seat driver” ideals. “…radicalize the lot. That’s exactly what the splinter group wants” is an accurate assessment, but should have been said by Jac.

Twelve is still trying to resolve Three’s losses with Silurians, who were killed by UNIT in Doctor Who and The Silurians. Three called it murder, but the plot was logistically complicated. The Brig couldn’t see that the Doctor’s solution didn’t work, and the last Silurian was about to revive the others to launch a full-scale attack on humans. That situation was closer to Japan not surrendering until getting bombed. The Doctor who said “Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose” in “Mummy on the Orient Express” would understand this.

How did the Zygons extend the elevator shaft below the apartment building basement? They don’t have TARDIS-like transcendental dimension technology, so this extension would be 100% physical. It would take months, be loud, and shake the building. Perhaps there were enough militant Zygonsto infiltrate local government, disguising the task as replacing water and sewage pipes.

In Summary

“The Zygon Invasion” was entertaining, thoughtful and ambitious. The cinematography was outstanding, especially the outdoor Mexico scene and Zygon interiors. Considering the padding needed to get to the cliffhanger, director Daniel Nettheim paced the story he had extremely well. He certainly made the most of Jenna Coleman, who must’ve channeled her Christina Ricci as Wednesday Adams. Her portrayal of feminine evil is more effective and less exaggerated than Michelle Gomez as Missy.

A more realistic setting would have made it even better, pushing the Doctor into ethical conflict. How would he react to his advice being ignored, or to the possibility of being wrong?

TARDIS Bits

Since this is a week late, I obviously ran out of time. Shut up.

  • Why do the letters of USA have long pauses between them in the typewritten intro?
  • The family trick doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t’ve worked. Hitchley’s “mother” deliberately evaded his questions. Benton would have fired.
  • The Doctor still preaches peace, while benefitting from guns and bloodshed.
  • Finding Osgood was too well timed. So is the bombing. How the hell did Osgood and the Doctor survive but the Zygon get killed?
  • The Zygons evolving their powersis fantastic.
  • “My name is, well, you can call me the Doctor” perfectly exposes his hypocrisy.
  • Did evil Clara deliberately reveal the real Clara’s pod? She looks sadistically gleeful at the deaths.
  • Why is evil Clara called “Bonnie?”
Categories
Essay

Zygon Inversion: Break the Cycle

War, what is it good for? Whether it be between two people, entire countries, or between races of beings…absolutely nothing. “The only way anyone can live in peace, is if they’re prepared to forgive.”

Clara has found herself within a dream before. She knows what to do. “Dream checks” we hear her saying as she flips through an unreadable paper where she finds a message from the Doctor and the ominous words that have been with us since last episode — truth or consequences. Those words may have added psychological weight to every fan in the Whodom. Who among us will not carry them within?

Following Clara’s dream check she turns to see Bonnie ready to blast the Doctor’s plane from the sky. She is able to knock her off balance and the shot misses. Despite Clara’s attempts to manipulate the trigger when Bonnie reloads and takes second aim, Bonnie was able to overcome the mind meld and hit her target. Short and surreal, the opening sequence left us wondering how the Doctor would manage to get out of this fine mess.

In the Mix

Bonnie is on a mission to convert all Zygons back to their original form. We find her following an unfortunate shape-shifted Zygon to make him the first that humans will see in Zygon form. Still, if he is going to be the first to “make the humans see” why is it that the four unsuspecting young people who are confronted by the Zygon act as if they cannot see him at all? There is no reaction, no movement, no recognition of anything out of the ordinary as the Zygon stumbles off. In the background we can see a mother and father with a baby carriage who are also still as statues. I’m making the assumption that Bonnie had this set up for video purposes. One would think, however, that a video would have been more effective if the “normalized” Zygon would have caused panic to the bystanders. At this point all that was missing was a white, corded earpiece for Bonnie and my flashback to Agent Smith in The Matrix would have been complete.

In Clara’s stuck-in-her-flat lucid dream, she is able to zoom in on the television screen and see two parachutes drifting away from the in-air wreckage. It’s a good thing that time is timey-wimey because I’m not sure how the Doctor and Osgood got their parachutes on so quickly. But they’re lucky that they did as they appear to be the only survivors. They touch down on a beach and the Doctor climbs from a Union Jack parachute, ala James Bond, and hands over his sonic glasses for Osgood to use since hers were broken when she landed. He warns her not to look at his browser history. Of course we all want to know what is in the Doctor’s browser history now. If only we could get a peek through those sonics.

Osgood speculates at Bonnie’s misfire, certain that her connection to Clara’s mind would instill the knowledge that there should be no hesitation in killing the Doctor. The Doctor, still in “hope phase,” doesn’t want to talk about Clara, doesn’t want to think about the possibility that she may be dead. Without the stereotypical romance aspect of relationship, we are, perhaps, better able to see loved stripped to the bare core — deep, still unexplainable, and always present. Yet, isn’t that in its essence romantic? Maybe…maybe romance is more than our attachment to the concept of a relationship that includes sexual intimacy.

Clara is busy focusing on a mind meld that will allow her to contact the Doctor. The Impossible Girl is always, of course, successful and texts a message to the Doctor stating that she is “awake.” He is sharing his view of the revolutionaries with Osgood, describing them in this way: “Don’t think of them as rational, they’re different. They don’t care about human beings. They don’t care about their own people. They think the rest of Zygonkind are traitors,” when his text sound is heard. He doesn’t believe that it could really be Clara, but Osgood does. Ok, it’s a theory, but Osgood believes it.

What Bonnie hasn’t yet understood is how mentally strong Clara is or how Clara has been able to infiltrate her. She does a double-take when walking by a mirror where Clara’s reflection appeared. Bonnie is in search of the Osgood box to break the ceasefire and finds a video. The video reveals that the Osgoods have lied and the box is not at the location it was thought to be. “There’s a reason it’s called the Osgood box,” they tell us. How many of you had, by that point, figured out that there were two boxes?

Bonnie throws a childish temper tantrum and smashes the computer. Doctor John Disco is flashing psychic paper at unresponsive people until he figures out that something is not right and he and Osgood walk away. Osgood calls Bonnie on Clara’s phone, which is a set-up to get a message to Clara. The Doctor refers to Bonnie as Zygella, a name that she denies. The strange, unresponsive people are closing in on the Doctor and Osgood, and since a van just happens to be parked on the deserted road, a car theft via sonic sunglasses seems to be exactly what the Doctor ordered. Before you continue to groan at my phraseology, at least I didn’t call myself Dr. Puntastic.

Set-ups

At first it appears that Bonnie/Zygella seems to have no idea that the Doctor is communicating with Clara. He becomes blatant when he tells Clara not to let Bonnie get to her memories. After he hangs up, Osgood reminds him that Bonnie heard everything he said. “The mind of Clara Oswald, she’ll never find her way out,” The Doctor says and smiles.

The Doctor used the non-verbal communication he talked about to find Clara and set up Bonnie, and Clara understood. She knew just what to do again. Now that’s a companion. Bonnie goes straight to Clara’s pod to get to the memories. Clara plays her like a fiddle. It’s likely that potential protocol for the nightmare scenario had been discussed previously. The Doctor’s no dummy.

He is, however, fixated on whether Osgood is human or Zygon. In fact he feels that it’s important. Osgood maintains that she is just…Osgood. Osgood with a first name of Petronella (rock, solid), which she revealed after the Doctor threw out that his first name was Basil. Basil is a Greek name that means royal or kingly — fitting, yes? But is it really his first name?

We last saw Kate Lethbridge Stewart in Truth Or Consequences, NM. We thought she was dead. But is she? When she shows up, it appears that the Doctor thinks she may be a Zygon shape-shifter too, but he and Osgood follow her to find Clara’s pod. Once there, they find the pod missing. Bonnie finds two Osgood boxes. Kate contacts her to say she has the Doctor and Bonnie tells her to keep him alive, which Kate questions. When the Doctor and Osgood realize that the guards who had been with Kate were Zygon, Kate reacts by shooting them dead after Bonnie issues an ultimatum for the normalized guards to bring the Doctor to her. In answer to the question of how Kate survived, we see a flashback to Truth or Consequences — she shot the Zygon there, too. Kate apologizes, knowing the Doctor doesn’t approve. “Why does peace keeping always involve killing?” he asks. So far, it appears that the set-ups are all around. Either the Doctor, Kate, and Clara are amazingly good guessers or they’re brilliant strategists — or both.

The Final Countdown

“This is war. You pull the trigger. You may the price.” Now we have two boxes, one Bonnie, and one Kate, and Kate and Bonnie are on opposite sides of the issue. The Doctor, as usual, is in the middle. He launches into an approximately ten minute speech on the horrors of war — and he’s damn good at evoking emotion. “When you’ve killed all the bad guys and when it’s all perfect and just and fair, when you have finally got it exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you — the trouble makers? How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?” He asks Zygella. After her response that they will win, he concludes:

“Maybe you will win, but nobody wins for long…break the cycle.”

Basil has put the ultimate set-up in place, showing small-scale warfare contained in one room. The Doctor wants so desperately to be able to stop people from making the same mistake he did. I flash back to “The Day of the Doctor,” where both ten and eleven keep the double Kate’s in a room, waiting for one of them to call off detonation of explosives.

Then, this man who professes that he is not in touch with emotions, shows how well he can read eyes and expression, how much he recognizes Clara’s emotions when he sees them in Zygella’s eyes and on her face.

Following her surrender to logic and emotion, Zygella takes Osgood form and the Doctor tries one last time to figure out if one of the Osgoods is human. Their response is that they’ll tell him one day…”when nobody cares about the answer.”

Back in the TARDIS, Clara asks him how he felt when he thought that she may have been dead. His response: “Longest month of my life.” Clara is surprised and says that it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. “I’ll be the judge of time,” he replies. Minutes of loss can easily drain us of days, weeks, or longer.

End Notes

Why does the Doctor wipe Kate’s memory clean but no one else’s, with the exception of the Zygon soldiers? Why not Zygella’s memory as well?

Jenna Coleman puts in a superb performance as Bonnie/Zygella and as Clara Oswald in this two-parter. Peter Capaldi is more than on point with his performance. The war speech is long, but it is commanding, intense, and thought-provoking.

The depth of care between the Doctor and Clara deepens with each episode this season. We know that Clara is leaving; therefore, it makes sense, on the one hand, that the writers would build on this emotion progressing toward a profound loss. On the other hand, why wait until this season to punch this home? We are shown the potential for loss when the Doctor thinks Clara may be dead. What we see is love. Fiction mirrors life and, unfortunately, many may never realize their  love or the potential pain of its loss, until loss actually happens. In the Doctor’s case, “luck” reversed the probability of death. In reality, most of us don’t get that reprieve. Care now.

Both “The Zygon Invasion” and “The Zygon Inversion” make global statements that relate to current events, the macrocosm. That is a clear and necessary point. Yet, we’d likely be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn’t also see the microcosm. Every day we interact interpersonally, relating person-to-person, frequently fighting our own mini wars and/or mini cold wars. One of the most poignant speech quotes is this: “The only way anyone can live in peace, is if they’re prepared to forgive.”

Sit down and talk, the Doctor demands of the characters (and, in truth, of us). Otherwise, “You will die stupid,” he says to Zygella. Why do many of us not yet realize this?