Doctor Who Series 9 First Impressions: Episode 1 (The Magician's Apprentice)

(Yeah, so of course I'm gonna do this stuff. I don't need many disclaimers, other than the fact that I'm gonna shift my writing style a bit to talk to people who know what this Doctor Who shit actually is. Also, spoiler warning; there are spoilers to all sorts of things here so you should probably go watch this!)

FREE THE FISH PEOPLE! [rad guitar solo]

Well. Here we go again. 9 months of patient waiting, rewatching all of Series 8, diving headlong into Classic Who and the Big Finish audios. All of it to keep one entertained, and then one magical evening in late September, some television producers cast a spell upon the world. Just like that, Doctor Who is back. It's a kind of magic; whether you invoke it on your computer screen at home, or on a television far far away, the magic remains. These are exciting times, and in a way we are all the Apprentices; all us bloggers and vloggers and podcasters, and just plain old Doctor Who fans, sitting down for a lesson in the ways of magic from a madman in a blue box. Let us then take stock in what we have here. I know I ran the mirror thing into the ground in my revised Series 8 thoughts, but it bears mentioning; Series 8 ended with a two-part finale, and Series 9 is now opening with one. In between we had the hazy undefined zero point, in which we had bad dreams about facehuggers and The Thing and motherfucking Santa Claus was there for some reason. Point is, in the Dark Water writeup of old I made reference to being in a state of temporal grace. We're back again. History will remember this as a leadup to something, but for the next 4 days we have no goddamn idea what that is. So, then. This is The Magician's Apprentice. What do we got?

Motherfuckin' Davros, that's what. Boy howdy did my jaw drop, even though I should have pegged it. Blame a noisy room with a television far far away, but I didn't catch the line about clam drones. That would have pegged me, but then a guy shooting a bow and arrow at a plane kind of made me wonder if this was the Kaled/Thal war of old. Yep, we've got ourselves a lil Davros in the opening. Surprise! Having pored over the Davros documentary on my Remembrance Of The Daleks DVD, I gotta wonder how well this gels with those I, Davros audios that Big Finish puts out. Not so I can complain or nothing, just genuinely curious. After all of that we get a snake man. Here's where things appear to be interesting from our temporal grace. In the leadup to Series 9, we all assumed that the fucker in a hood with lines on his face was Important. We all had our theories on who it would be, as we often do. It's Moffat-era Doctor Who, this is how the game is played. We get teased for eleven weeks and then we check our answer at the end and it's usually our first guess because fandom is too goddamned good at this game. So, here I went into it expecting this fellow to do something and hiss about how everything is going just as planned and soon the Doctor will be no more and cue the 9 pages of thread arguing over whether or not he's the goddamn Meddling Monk (which, incidentally, was my guess when I was pressed on it.). Then something incredible happened. We didn't get that. The guy in the hood was just some asshole sent by Davros who also turns into snakes. Even if he dove into a shitty Doctor Who cantina, and hit up the Shadow Proclamation (itself last seen in the last Davros story!) and even Karn of all things, all the guy is? A messenger. Quite why Davros has a snake man in his employ is beyond me, or why the snake man didn't immediately go to Earth. Hell, Davros knows that's his pet planet. Snake man, or Colony Sarrf or whatever in fuck his name is got there in the end though so what's it matter? I suspect someone's going to seriously complain about that in the near future.

Well, next up we've got Clara! Hooray, do I ever love Clara! She's moonlighting for UNIT now in the Doctor's absence, using all that power she gained from becoming his mirror last series, and susses out that the mystery of the frozen planes is a message. From who, though? None other than the most dreaded woman in the universe, Toni Basil  Missy. So it is that Missy, the original dark mirror of the Doctor (in at least four incarnations; guess which ones!) meets up with the substitute dark mirror she created last series for tea. Oh, and she pops open a compact mirror. I am never going to shut up about mirrors. There are a lot of concepts here I like; the way Missy refers to her "friendship" with the Doctor as older than human civilization. Clara taking charge of the situation after Missy vaporizes a few UNIT thugs, talking her down and making her focus on the problem at hand. That wonderful little classic Who joke about three Atlantises (and timely, too, as The Underwater Menace is coming to DVD next month!). Jenna Coleman and Michelle Gomez do great together, and if the title of the next episode is to be taken the way we think, we may get more of that. Let's wait before we decide that for sure, though.

And then Capaldi's playing a guitar, while riding a tank during the Renaissance, and wearing Patrick Troughton's pants. How gonzo. I love it, especially the riffs of Pretty Woman when he notices Missy and Clara. This segment is full of callbacks to Series 8; the Doctor makes an offhand reference to teaching maths. The line about hugs being a way to hide your face comes back. Even the revelation that the Doctor, upon realizing he was about to save little Davros from hand mines (which were creepy enough to spook my uncle, by the way!) took right the hell off again? An invocation of Into The Dalek. That is the hatred that Rusty saw in the Doctor's heart; the hatred of the Daleks that leads him to abandon a child in need, because of what that child would become... and even that gets a callback later, when Davros plays back part of Tom Baker's "Have I that right?" speech from Genesis Of The Daleks. Notably, the Doctor already decided he had the right to stop the Daleks; both as the 7th Doctor and as the War Doctor. But here the Doctor has truly reversed from the man he once was; he has become his own dark mirror, a twisted reflection of that guy with the teeth and curls and the long scarf. Even if he said he wore the scarf again in preparation for his last meeting with Davros, he cannot reclaim the past. He cannot lighten. As such, it all goes to hell. Skaro is back (how, exactly, I dunno. It hasn't been explained yet, so naturally people are probably furious at Moffat for that blunder) and the Daleks are in full force. Missy gets zapped into oblivion, and so does Clara. This is especially cruel, given the longer game. In the context of just the show, it's ambiguous. I'd bet money on Clara and Missy being just fine when the next episode airs... but then you add in that other wrinkle. The Magician's Apprentice aired on Saturday evening. On Friday morning, the news broke that Series 9 would be Jenna Coleman's last. The timing could not be more perfect to make us doubt Clara's survival. The public knows that she's out of here, but not how... and then it comes. Clara Oswald, the girl who survived fragmentation and could have left so many times before, be it in anger or via lying or old age... she goes back to adventures in time and space and gets zapped by a Dalek, her supposed last moments spent running in fear of them. It's a cruel move to play, and one that only our faith saves us from despairing over. Faith in the Doctor, our magician. So what does he do, after begging?

He holds a ray gun to a child's head and yells "Exterminate." The Doctor has fallen. He has become little more than a Dalek. What now?

Next time: The Witch's Familiar.