daleks – TARDIS Regenerated

"So why am I tied up?" — “So why am I tied up?”

The action starts right after last week’s cliffhanger “The Magician’s Apprentice“, where it looked like Clara and Missy were killed by Daleks. As it turns out, Missy faked their deaths with a Vortex Manipulator/Sonic Screwdriver hack. Introduced in this episode, it comes off as the deus ex machina plot bailout from the Russell T. Davies era. Steven Moffat pulled similar solutions from nowhere in “The Big Bang,” and “The Impossible Astronaut“.

The suspension bondage scene, however, hinted at Clara’s adrenaline addiction. Briefly hinted at last season, it gets a bit more definition in “Under the Lake.” Clara thinks nothing of waking up in classic Wonder Woman predicaments.

Get Out!

The red and gold Dalek is like Iron Man insecurity: a wounded, frightened nerd hiding in super powered armor. Dalek armor was orginally designed as protection from radiation, which came from their civil war with the Thals. This distinction is lost on most Doctor Who writers, who portray Daleks as generic sci-fi killer robots.

It was nice seeing humans stoop under doorways ergonomically designed for Daleks.

Seeing the Doctor in Davros’ chair was terrific, but Moffat cheated us of seeing how he did it. Did the Doctor forcibly yank him out, like Mr. Pink’s carjacking scene in Reservoir Dogs? If so, Twelve is the most two-fisted, film noir Doctor ever.

Daleks Have Sewers?

How does Clara fall 20 feet with no broken bones? How does Clara get out of that goopy Dalek suit without one stain? If you even think “just accept it,” I will jump through this computer or mobile device and punch you in the nose.

Missy’s in complete control, but even she initially freaked out when she found out she was on Skaro. Her scenes aren’t written well enough to tell if her sense of security comes from superior knowledge or delusional insanity. There simply aren’t enough calm moments in Michelle Gomez’s performance to judge. Like John Simm, she plays the homicidal Time Lord like Jack Nicholson’s Joker: a hammy, bloodthirsty cartoon. These funny-but-senseless scenes could be in an Avengers movie.

By the way, I’m not slamming the actors. Their performances are guided, controlled, and defined by the showrunners.

The Dalek graveyard is another deus ex machina plot device. Without it, Missy and Clara would have been killed by the living sewers of Skaro. I’m beginning to think this episode was ghost-written by Rose “Bad Wolf” Tyler.

I can’t stand the Doctor’s begging for Clara’s life, especially in context of Dalek’s killing and prison camps. It is, however, consistent with Doctor Who history. Jo Grant, Sarah Jane, both Romanas, Nyssa, Tegan, Peri Brown…even Mel got desperate pleas! Perhaps emotional connections to Earthlings shield him, and us, from typical Time Lord traits of detachment and violence.

For a witch’s familiar, Clara’s really frightened. She came off as a dominatrix last season. How is this “I’m going to die” moment any different than the others she’s faced since “The Bells of Saint John?”

Tonight, We Entrap a Time Lord

“You keep saying that; you keep not dying” reminds me of Hyman Roth in Godfather II.

When did Davros become such a smooth talker? It had to happen sometime after “Journey’s End.” Moffat seems to be confusing him for the Roger Delgado era Master. If Davros’ original plan was “tearing the Doctor apart to take his regeneration energy,” why did he waste all night stroking the Doctor’s compassion? Davros can only see compassion as a cancer.

The “we’re both the same” moral ambiguity reminds me of older, better examples. The theme was executed with more nuance by Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke ,) John Woo (The Killer, Bullet in the Head, Hard Boiled), Hayao Miyazaki (People of the Desert,) and just about any Toshiro Mifune/Akira Kurosawa film film.

The Doctor’s counter-plot isn’t any more convincing. He’d have died if Missy didn’t free him, oozing his new regeneration cycle on Skaro. Perhaps Moffat earned his cliffhanger serial writing degree from Republic Pictures.

I’m Helping a Little Boy I Abandoned on a Battlefield

Aside from seeking personal redemption by saving the cute white kid, how is maiming a bunch of Handmines humane? This is a 180-degree turn from understanding others. This also points to the Doctor’s hypocritical stance on revising one’s personal history. This is the same guy that lectured Rose Tyler about fixed points in time in “Father’s Day?” The Monk from “Time Meddler” looks better every day.

Stray Thoughts

Obviously, I ran out of time last week. Shut up.

Only on Doctor Who could sludge be a deadly weapon.
The callback to “Asylum of the Daleks” is pretty good.
On the Dalek’s concept of mercy, does Moffat even remember his own scripts?
“Your sewers are revolting” is a great line.
For reasons I can’t reveal yet, the TARDIS Hostile Action Displacement System is brilliant.
“The Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS” is just awful.
Does everyone on new Who speak fluent punch-line?

Series 9 of Doctor Who started off with a bang, delivering the good, the bad and the WTF we’ve come to expect. “The Magician’s Apprentice” is half of a 2-part story. Here’s what I got out of the season’s big premiere.

Have You Ever Seen a Hand Mine?

When done well, the time travel genre can express character transformation. Look what it did for Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. This might be the best example of the Doctor “making his own monster” since The Face of Evil.

Of course Kanzo, the compassionate black soldier, had to die saving the cute white kid. As a product of British culture, Doctor Who has always been tone-deaf to race. Tomb of the Cybermen has the big, dumb, black manservant Toberman. The Talons of Weng-Chiang (fourth Doctor) and Four to Doomsday (fifth Doctor) use the term “china man” as tool of oppression. Even in the Russell T Davies era “The Shakespeare Code ,” the Doctor dismisses Martha’s logical concerns about becoming a slave (which was later picked up in “Human Nature”/”Family of Blood.“)

“Hand mine” is a great pun. I thought the creatures were a copy of that child-eating monster from Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Turns out that was inspired by Tenome, a mythical creature from the Japanese picture book series Gazu Hyakki Yakō (“The Illustrated Night Parade of A Hundred Demons,” published in 1776.)

Davros Remembers

The Maldovarian bar scene is a sustained cliché. Was that Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes playing “My Angel Put the Devil in Me” in the background? Like Pepperidge Farm, Davros remembers. But why does he send Colony Sarff all over the universe like an intergalactic thug-a-gram? “Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll do something…cinematic!” He should’ve called the Twelfth Cyber Legion; they seemed to know everything in A Good Man Goes To War” (written by Steven Moffat). Davros could have delivered his cryptic message more efficiently with email, chat, or GoToMeeting.

Then there’s the “super powered servant” cliché. The earliest example I can think of is Silver Surfer (Fantastic Four #48–50, 1966). The Surfer, however, did reconnaissance for a real “destroyer of worlds.” Colony Sarff is more pointless than Luca Brasi.

Why can’t the Doctor have super powered companions?

What are Colony Sarff’s superpowers, anyway? They seem like the Mara from Kinda, who could manipulate the weakened Davros. How’d he get past those scary Judoon to break into the Shadow Proclamation? In typical new Who plot sloppiness, show runners hope the scene is too awesome for us to care how it happened…or that we don’t remember past episodes. It’s like they don’t know their audience.

It Saves Time

The banter between the Doctor and High Priestess Ohila was terrific. Although she wasn’t alive when the fourth Doctor met the Sisterhood in The Brain of Morbius, their personal friendship seems almost that long. She certainly isn’t fazed by his compulsive lying. Her plea shows a sad, helpless frustration of not being able to stop a loved one from self-destruction. Quoting a Rilo Kiley line, the Doctor seemed as “ready to go” as he did at the end of Planet of the Spiders. Moffat being Moffat, he almost ruined this with his sappy “you can never lose a friend” line.

It’s too bad Moffat decided the High Priestess couldn’t be Ohica, played by Gillian Brown in The Brain of Morbius. Hiring Ms. Brown to reprise the role would have been a nice touch.

#ThePlanesHaveStopped

Clara Oswald is still a horrible teacher. How would “Jane Austin’s a phenomenal kisser” not get her fired? A real teacher wouldn’t have time for Danny or the Doctor. In a credibility nose-dive from An Unearthly Child, last season’s portrayal of teaching is less believable than time travel and “little blue men with three heads.”

Without turning the show into Room 222 or The Secret Life of the American Teenager, this could have been fixed by giving each story a brief moment to Clara’s job preparation. She could have graded on the TARDIS, bounced ideas off P.E. over dinner, or confided with her grandmother (which would have made amazing for both generations of independent women).

UNIT is just as clumsy and indiscrete as they were under the Brig. Those morons outed Clara as a government operative. I’m beginning to think the MI6 passed on Kate Stewart’s resume. In an even bigger WTF moment, the woman who was ready to blow up the world in “Day of the Doctor” is insecure plot device, deferring to the worst high school teacher since Henry “Indiana” Jones.

We have Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to thank for the “gifted amateur” being smarter than trained professionals. In his world, police are incompetent, authority figures are mean, and women are mysterious at best.

Sherlock Holmes‘ super power was “Holmesian deduction, solving crimes with forensic science (fingerprints, anthropometry, toxicology and ballistics.) When the first novel was published in 1887, however, Scotland Yard was using forensic science for 60 years (chemistry in 1832, bullet comparison in 1835.) Perhaps this inspired the phrase “No shit, Sherlock.”

Kate should’ve applied the BBC’s 1960s archive policy to Clara’s memory again, and calmly lead the UNIT geeks into finding the Doctor.

I hope they show how Missy survived “Death in Heaven” in next week’s conclusion. “Not dead, back, big surprise, never mind” is just damn lazy. Worse, it took me out of the story. Even a lame, hacked-out super villain escape story is better than none.

On the positive, this might be the best exploration of the Doctor/Master relationship since the unproduced The Final Game. Missy’s definition of friendship vague, evades her love of bloodshed, but hints at just enough to be intriguing. Clara’s “I’m the tin dog” moment was delightful.

You Said You Wanted an Axe Fight

Guilt of creating Davros throws the Doctor into a downward spiral, much like Tony Stark in Iron Man 2. His emotional “party like it’s 1999” breakdown is jarring to watch, almost like a reality show. (Bors could have been played by Gary Busey.) In this context, especially with the “all of me” line, Capaldi’s electric guitar is a logical connection to Troughton’s flute.

Why are there no consequences for bringing 21st century technology and slang to the 12th century? Are the Reapers too busy chasing The Monk?

A Thousand Years of Fighting

The Doctor’s explanation of the Daleks is more compelling and human than past serials. Using footage from Genesis of the Daleks was a stroke of genius. Michelle Gomez’ Missy is a lot like Tom Baker’s Doctor: they both speak in riddles, have to prove their intelligence every moment, and delightfully infuriate the people they’re trying to help. Davros’ “Do you know why you came, Doctor” is reminiscent of the manipulative Oracle’s “…you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.”

Stray Thoughts

Yes, I ran out of time. Shut up.

Why would any modern action hero use the term “archenemy”?
Picking up from “Last Christmas,” someone calls the Doctor a magician.
The Skaro reveal is cool, complete with the “Stolen Earth” soundtrack.
The red/gold Dalek looks like Iron Man.
The Doctor panics over Clara…why? Why would he beg Davros to save Clara’s life? This seems like a repeat of “Stolen Earth.”
Missy’s sales pitch to the Daleks is consistent with the classic Who Master.
Why would the Daleks bring the TARDIS to Skaro to destroy it…why not destroy it on Earth in 1138?
Does every show runner get to create a dismissible black boyfriend?