Doctor Who Series 9 First Impressions: Episode 4 (Before The Flood)

(This here is your spoiler warning: There are spoilers! Oh boy, are there ever gonna be spoilers!)

To quote the late, great Patrick Troughton, speaking as the Second Doctor in 1985's The Two Doctors: "Well, that didn't work, now did it?".

For my next song, I'd like to play a little ditty called
"Susan Foreman Appears At The End Of This Episode".

I suppose the best place to start is with the opening, as most linear things do. There are two things that are striking about both the previous episode, and the one before it. Under The Lake was all about the mystery of what the ghosts were and what rules they operated under, and pondering why. The Witch's Familiar was notable in that it had what could be the seeds of a season mystery arc, but done in a minimalist way. I ranted on this already, but Moffat's previous approaches of waving the mystery under our noses for eleven weeks... upset me. I'm going to cite from the Series 8 playbook here, because that's what I wrote up a month or so ago. As soon as Michelle Gomez started vamping it up at the end of Deep Breath, most of the Doctor Who fans pegged her as being a female incarnation of The Master. Eleven weeks later, surprise! Except not really a surprise because you called it! So it's not the fact that there is a mystery at all that bothers me; it's that Doctor Who fandom is too good at calling the mystery outright. (Or Steven Moffat is too bad at coming up with a surprise that we can't call immediately, if you want to go that route.) So what we get is eleven weeks of being teased to something we already know the answer to. Now, the ghosts in Under The Lake were a lesser version of that, but done better because it's not some obvious callback to Doctor Who lore. There are ghosts. They work under such and such a set of rules. I wonder what could be causing it? Well, the Doctor's going to go back and suss it out and oh no now the Doctor has a scary no-eyes ghost I wonder what is going to happen. We need to take stock here, before we dive into the resolution. I didn't mention it in the write-up, but I made my own educated guess about things based on elements of the episode. At one point in Under The Lake, they poke and prod at the casket that supposedly contains "the pilot" and it's deadlock sealed so it can't be opened. Earlier in the episode, the cloister bell of the TARDIS rings and the ship is visibly upset for some reason. On first viewing, the assumption is that the ghosts are actual ghosts and she's pissed because the laws of life and death have been broken. Once you realize the ghosts are just echos transmitting a signal, that loses some of its lustre. No, the real safe bet was that it was the Doctor in the casket, and that the TARDIS is getting pissy because the Doctor has now crossed his own timestream. That's a reasonable guess, yes? Okay, but you still have to hold onto that for a week while your cliffhanger is "The Doctor is now a ghost".

Playing from the "clever viewer of Doctor Who" playbook, we know goddamn well the Doctor is making out of this one just fine. Before The Flood is not going to end with Peter Capaldi regenerating, or God help us, dying outright and ending the series. That is absolutely not what a "The Doctor is in danger" cliffhanger is about. The excitement doesn't come from seeing if the Doctor will get out of this deadly situation, but how. Clever viewer has her educated guess about the Doctor being in the casket, yes, but that still doesn't explain what happens in the past that results in a Doctor ghost appearing in the future... so the excitement comes from the anticipation of what the Doctor is going to do to solve things. (Also, my own anticipation of Clara vs the Ghost Doctor, a no-holds-barred Mirror Of The Doctor mega-battle, but that's something we'll unpack in a bit.) So, with all that in mind, what do we open Before The Flood with? Beethoven and bootstrap paradoxes (or, as I'll be calling them since that's the name I know them better by, predestination paradoxes.). Now, take all of this from the perspective of your clever Doctor Who viewer, who by now is used to playing the puzzlebox game. She has her theory about the Doctor being in the casket because on her rewatch she picked up on the fact that the TARDIS getting pissed at ghosts makes no sense otherwise. Already her brain has picked up on that... and then the opening comes, and the Doctor ranting about predestination paradoxes. This all but confirms the casket theory for the clever viewer... but it also deflates the excitement immediately. The thrill of solving the cliffhanger of the Doctor in danger is in the if and the how. The if is invalidated instantly because this is not a regeneration episode and the clever viewer knows that Peter Capaldi is going to make it out of this one alive. The how that she was looking forward to for a week is instantly deflated when the episode devotes its entire cold open to doing everything but putting THE EPISODE WILL BE RESOLVED WITH A PREDESTINATION PARADOX in big flashing neon pink letters on screen.

And it's here, three paragraphs into a spiel on the opening of the episode, that I fire off a gonzo theory: Before The Flood has a secret ghost in it. Toby Whithouse is, whether he intended to or not, channelling the ghost of classic Doctor Who writer Robert Holmes. There are two things to note real quick about Robert Holmes. One is that he was absolutely brilliant and worked on some of the all-time best episodes of the classic series. The other is that he could hide intense and scathing cynicism in his scripts when given briefs he didn't like, and he corrupted the wishes of the people commissioning him. I'm going to defer to Phil Sandifer here if you care to read more about two such serials with Robert Holmes bitterness embedded deep within them, so do please read about The Space Pirates and The Two Doctors. Right. So Before The Flood is Toby Whithouse infusing a two-parter with bitter cynicism at the critique against Moffat-era puzzleboxes and mysteries. I've taken a few jabs at these sorts of people in the Series 8 writeups; the types of people who get incensed at the fact that Moffat doesn't explain every part of his interconnected, dare I say, "timey-wimey" twisting plotlines and resolutions, and leaves chunks of them up to audience interpretation. Though the plot holes can be easily filled in by a clever bit of rationalization and the real important bits (for me anyway!) are the emotional beats, there are many who get mad at the Moffat era for not being explained well enough. Well, here's Toby Whithouse to Monkey's Paw your wish! Now you get everything spelled out to you! Twice, even! The episode is bookended by this predestination paradox talk, when really it only needed the end bit. The puzzlebox is opened up, dissected, and put out in the open immediately, and thus the tension of wondering what is going to happen is diffused and you just sort of sit there, waiting for things to work out exactly as have been implied they will work out. The sad thing is this shit worked. Going back to Phil for his own Before The Flood review, he ended it with a "funny quote from the #moffat hate Tag on Tumblr, which I will repost here."

“Before the Flood was pretty bloody great. A completed narrative!!! With explanations!!!!”

Christ almighty. One last thing about the predestination paradox, courtesy of Something Awful poster "Open Source Idiom" that gives it a redemptive reading of sorts:

"So the Bootstrap Paradox stuff. It's the Doctor talking straight to the audience so that we know beforehand what's going on. It's clever, actually, a little mini-paradox in itself. We're told that the episode is going to involve this kind of mechanic before it happens, so we know what the Doctor's going to do before he does it -- but only because he's already told us. Cute. "

So that's a neat little meta-moment when you think about it, sure, and I kind of like it. It still doesn't change the fact that the episode is basically just marking time until we get to the part where the Doctor did solve everything, as opposed to the Doctor solving everything on the cuff. Which, to be fair, his past self still has to suss out all the clues his future self has been leaving in order to perpetuate the predestination paradox, like why his ghost is saying more than just the co-ordinates, or what the hell the Fisher King's deal is. Yeah, let's talk about the Fisher King, why don't we? Pro: What a marvelous monster design! He's creepy and spooky and whoever did his voice is fuckin' fantastic and I adore it. I'd say he's the best new monster design since... hmm, the Boneless back in Flatline? Con: His plan, and thus the entire resolution to the mystery of the ghosts and their rules and whatnot? "I'm gonna call all my friends here and then fuck up the Earth! Because I'M EVIL!". This on its own would be inane. As the capstone reveal to what was, in Under The Lake, actually a really neat concept with the cool conceptual horror of the alchemical words? Gross.

Oh, but I ain't done. Nobody besides the Doctor really does much of anything. O'Donnell gets a few giddy moments and good lines and then she dies. Last episode, the black man died first. This episode, the only human casualty is one of the women. Ugh. Then Bennett gets to get mad at the Doctor in the same old "YOUR ADVENTURES GET PEOPLE KILLED AND YOU ONLY CARE ABOUT YOURSELF" argument we've heard time and time again in Doctor Who. Then Bennett gets to bring up the possibility of changing the past, just so the Doctor can waffle about time being fixed once you see how it turns out or whatever. Then he goes to hide in the TARDIS and does nothing for the rest of the episode. Lund exists to sign for Cass, get a phone, and get smooched at the end. Him getting the phone doesn't actually enable anything, like Clara calling the Doctor and getting the final clue needed to save the three of them from the ghosts. He just gets tricked by the ghosts so Clara and Cass will come look for him. Cass... well, she did get that scene where she senses the vibrations of the axe and dodges Moran's attack. I love goofy shit in Doctor Who. I love it. Going into Daredevil hyper-sense mode took me right out of things and made me audibly go "WHAT?". The point of Cass was she was a competent leader who also happened to be deaf, I thought. Everything else around that scene, especially how it went into silence when cutting back to Cass's perspective, worked well, and I like the idea of Cass sensing the vibrations. Just, could have done without the implication that she has tremorsense superpowers because she's deaf. If it didn't have that one effects shot of echolocation mode, it would have been fine. Oh, and then she smooches Lund? That... came out of nowhere? Weird.

As for Clara? Well, the disappoint here is on me. 'Ol "Mini-Mirror Symbolist" Frezno here assumed that we'd be getting the Mirror Match of the Century. In the red corner, Clara Oswald, competent mirror of the Doctor, attempting to keep herself and two innocent people alive while also being clever and figuring out the plot in her own way while the Doctor did shit in the past. In the blue corner, the Scary No-Eyes Doctor Ghost, not an actual dead Doctor but still his dark mirror, haunting the episode and attempting to impose the entropy of undeath and ghost transmission on Clara and Cass. I hyped myself up by assuming that, even if the Doctor wasn't dead, his ghost would still be hostile. Instead it just walked around and did shit on its own, mouthing some cryptic clues. Then the reveal is that the ghost was a hologram (which, okay, they established the Doctor can make holograms in Under The Lake, fair shake there of leaving a clue we didn't pick up on.) made by the Doctor in order to leave the clues to solving the mystery to his past self so he could make the hologram and leave those same clues in it so his past self could make the hologram and we are all together goo goo g'joob. So, like I said, everything was solved already in a sense and it only took the Doctor picking up on the clues he left behind to solve everything. A bit less thrilling, but what it also meant was we were denied that confrontation, or Clara doing too too much. She gives the Doctor some of his clues, arguably enough of them that he figures out that he's been played by his future self in a predestination paradox. That should thrill me because it's the kind of shit Sylvester McCoy would pull on himself, and I'm a huge McCoy fan. At least in the McCoy era, Ace got to beat things up with a bat. Clara doesn't even throw a punch here.

Nevertheless, in the automatic Mario level that is Before The Flood, there are glimmers of Clara characterization. The moment where she snaps at the Doctor and tells him to wait for his next companion before dying, for instance. That's the real Clara coming in, raw emotion firing at him. She lost the love of her life, and now in the face of her best friend facing his imminent death and throwing up his hands because of the rules? Fuck that noise. You're the Doctor, and you break the rules every day in your big dumb box, so you break them this time because I'm not losing another person I love. She gets to be a Doctor mirror, if nothing else, by sending Lund out to get the phone because he hasn't seen the words. Then the episode mirrors Bennett yelling at the Doctor by having Cass yell at Clara. Well, metaphorically, I mean. I did like the very human moment of Clara calling out to Cass before realizing how silly of an idea that was. The setting of 1980 was neat, even if it didn't do much Cold War stuff. I remarked to a friend that a secret military training ground for a Soviet invasion honestly seemed more like something the USA would have, rather than the UK. Still, I guess in 1980 Reagan and Thatcher were Capitalist Pals who were allied together against them Russkies so I can accept it. My issues with the cold open aside, the Doctor rocking out on the guitar followed by a rock version of the Doctor Who theme is the kind of awesome I expect and love from this show.

So that's Before The Flood. It failed to stick the landing for me, and I went really in-depth on it. Where most people would just yell about how Toby Whithouse is a fuckin' hack and this is the worst shit they've seen since Time And The Rani. I think I gave it a thorough rundown on why it didn't work for me, and the few moments where it did work for me. Notably, I don't hate it. There are very few episodes of Doctor Who that are worth hating for me, really. Hate requires effort. I was just let down by this one, is all. Let down because of my own lofty expectations and the bigger picture of what I want out of Doctor Who in regards to mysteries and plots. Under The Lake had a great premise, but the reveal got bungled. What a shame.

Next time: The techno-Viking doesn't dance to the music. The music dances to the techno-Viking.