Doctor Who Series 9 First Impressions: Episode 3 (Under The Lake)

(Spoiler warning: there's spoilers ahead. I always like to cover myself like that. On with the show, and it may be brief because I am fighting off a cold to yammer about new Doctor Who. So that's fun. Let's get into it.)

Hey, how's it going? Ah, y'all are just hangin' out?
That's cool.

This was a pretty good episode, this "Under The Lake". It had spooky imagery, which is good because Doctor Who runs at its best when it's trying to scare you. Yeah, this one has ghosts. Scary ghosts with no eyes who try to kill people and can somehow grab blunt objects with which to presumably bash your head in... at which point you also become a creepy no-eyes ghost and try to bash the heads of all your friends in. For reasons that we'll get into. In a mad way, this episode is a ghost of its very own. Temporal grace means that we're writing this in that in-between space, so we don't know what the ghosts are yet... but consider where we are. An undersea base, under siege by scary monster ghosts. On paper, it almost sounds like a callback to something like Warriors Of The Deep, a story which was itself a callback to the base under siege era of the Second Doctor's tenure. Except... it's not. All of two people have died and are now scary no-eyes ghosts, and the rest of the people are working together to solve the mystery of why the no-eyes ghosts want them dead. So, no, it's not a base under siege. The episode is a ghost of its own, a hazy and dim reflection of a bygone era of Doctor Who. Or a hazy and dim reflection of the moment when the show doomed itself, resigning itself to being a ghost of good television for about 16 years or so. Either way, this one isn't about the monsters so much as it is trying to figure out the rules of the monsters. I know this isn't a Moffat script, but we are in the Moffat era and that's how monsters work nowadays.

The Doctor and Clara are on form, as ever. Clara didn't do too much this time, other than running down a corridor, but she did get to be part of the plan so that's more than I can say for her role in the last episode. Next week should be better, because she'll probably be taking a Doctor-ish role in keeping the people she's stuck with alive... and oh, do I got a point about that to make later. The Doctor is rad as well, and I do like the joke about the cards (And the sly Sarah Jane reference on them). As for the rest of the base members... eh. They don't have too much character, so to speak, aside from Cass. A nice, proactive, leader type lady. Who also happens to be deaf. 10 points for representation, but some get taken back due to the black guy dying first. As has been mentioned. So it goes. So the base members don't add much, other than the black guy and the dude who's in it for profit dying and becoming scary no-eyes ghosts. And the runaround. And helping the Doctor figure out the rules of the ghosts. Actually, since we're talking about the Doctor and no-eyes... let's talk about those sonic sunglasses again. Moffat put out a little video explaining why he changed it, and the why is pretty much "well why shouldn't we change it?" The Doctor should not particularly be "wedded" to a sonic screwdriver, so changing it up is a bit fresh. This has upset a great many people, to the point where there's a petition 650 people strong demanding it be changed back. This annoys me. The only valid critique I've seen of them is from Phil Sandifer, who objected on the grounds that if Capaldi had the things on constantly, it would hide his eyes and take away from Capaldi's ability to visually perform. Fair enough, and as a good point Capaldi only used the things for about 20 seconds in this one. It's not like he's constantly walking around in shades, scanning everything. No, I'm afraid I can't see this as anything more than entitlement and outrage at Moffat daring to tinker too much with the lore again. Yeah, the sonic screwdriver's iconic. To us. There's no narrative difference between the Doctor waving a screwdriver around, having it make a bzzt noise and then things happening... and the same, except instead of a screwdriver he's wearing sunglasses. It might look a little sillier, but I don't particularly care. I might be a little more inclined to disagree if Moffat meddled with the TARDIS chameleon circuit, because that blue box is just a bit more iconic, but we'll cross that bridge if we ever come to it. (Though, given Moffat's penchant for toying with series lore, I suspect we will come to it at some point.)

So. Back to scary no-eyes ghosts. Turns out they only try to kill you if you read the runes in that abandoned spaceship... thing the base members found. Said words are imbued with power, and they stick in your head. Thus, if you read the words and then get killed, you become a scary no-eyes ghost who further transmits the power of the words (which are co-ordinates to a thing) and attempts to kill as many people as possible who have seen the words in order to make even more word transmitters, We're not dealing with ghosts any more. These are some kind of alchemical word zombies. The words, the co-ordinates, have power, and these things kill and make more of themselves to further that power. A deadly memetic. Wow, that's actually kinda brilliant. So now the Doctor has to go back in time to figure out what the deal with the ship and the words are. Oh, and Clara and two other base members are stuck in the base. And there's a scary no-eyes Doctor ghost zombie. This is some Meglos-level imagery, having the Doctor as this scary thing... but thinking on it, I'm really excited for the next part now. Presumably the A plot of the episode will be the Doctor, in the past, uncovering the mystery. The B-plot, then, will be Clara and the others attempting to not get killed by the scary no-eyes monsters. One of which is the Doctor. So we have Clara, mirror of the Doctor, who will likely be using her mirror powers to keep everyone alive and be terribly clever while doing so... while an actual dark mirror ghost of the Doctor is menacing them and trying to kill them. Holy shit, I'm stoked.

One last fun little observation before we go. I have made it a point to avoid most of the episode titles, but I know enough to know that we have a lot of two-part episodes this time around. We had one last time, and we're in the middle of one now, and there's probably two more on the horizon. We have a Doctor who's callous enough to need cue cards to tell him to say "Oh, shit, sorry your friend died" to a group of people while he's ranting excitedly about ghosts. He also doesn't have a sonic screwdriver any more. In this, a story about ghosts, I submit that Moffat has summoned back the ghost of the Colin Baker era, an era of the show in which the Doctor was not a nice and kind fellow who didn't carry around a sonic screwdriver... and was comprised entirely of two-parters, each part 45 minutes long. Considering that one (one being Phil Sandifer) could argue that Season 22 was a magical exorcism of everything that was killing the show up to that point, and Season 22 was when the actual killing blow of the cancellation struck... doesn't make all that talk about low ratings and Doctor Who in 2016 seem very good. I'm a little worried, but we're gonna forget all that.

Next time: Before The Flood.