Now that's more fucking like it.
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| "Doctor, I thought there weren't any more Mire." "They mostly live in Minnesota, Clara." |
Where do we begin? Well, the beginning. Goodbye, sonic sunglasses I guess. All of this was filmed months ago so there's no way this is a hasty reaction to how poorly the world reacted to Capaldi opening locks with his sunglasses instead of his magic wand. Still, you guys win. The stupid goddamn sunglasses are snapped now, he can go back to waving his magic wand around like a big buzzing vibrator, all is well in the Doctor Who Universe. I mean, I don't care either way but I woulda liked to see them last a little more. This was how they were always going to go out, though; snapped in half by some imposing person. Better a Viking than, I dunno, an Ogron. Of course this will all be moot if the Doctor just, you know, decides to make a new pair. Or sonic his electric guitar, which would be a bit much. Whatever, this is mentioned for the sake of mentioning it and it ain't why this episode is so good.
How about those villains? Mire-Odin showing up in the sky is a bit Monty Python and the Holy Grail, sure, but then after he liquefies a bunch of Vikings, something amazing happens; something that's not happened for ages in Doctor Who. Clara stands up to Mire-Odin, calling him out on his shit and whatnot. Clara... takes initiative? Clara... acts Doctorish, like the mirror she is? Clara... is competent? I raved when it happened. This is about all I ask for in my Doctor Who; the whip-smart companion facing down danger and actually being whip-smart. Not getting abused by sadistic Mary Poppins, not fucking hiding away from ghosts in a room and getting sassed for being callous. This is Clara in her element, Clara coolly facing Mire-Odin and basically calling him a fucker to his face. If it wasn't for Ashildr here, Clara very well might have defused the entire plot with talk and gotten the Mire to fuck off and drink some Sontaran coolers. Since we have to have a Doctor Who plot, though, Ashildr tells the Mire to fuck off because they're Vikings, goddamnit, and they don't take any shit from anyone, even if they've got body armor and spaceships and literally drink distilled testosterone. So it is that we have our plot; the Doctor has to keep these reckless honor-bound Vikings from getting slaughtered, and he's got no time machine, sunglasses, or magic wand to do it with. They won't run because they're Vikings, goddamnit, and Vikings never run and always fight with honor. Well, that leads to a baby's cry and one of the two big instances of why this episode sings so much; continuity as an emotional core.
Look, Doctor Who has 52 years of a backlog to work with here. We've been playing with this already in Series 9; going back to an argument the Fourth Doctor made against killing the Daleks and contrasting it with the current Doctor's decision to abandon Kid Davros to the hand mines. This is the best use of the stuff; as a template to frame new stories in light of the new series. You know, rather than the 80's approach of LOOK, CYBERMEN, YOU AUTOMATICALLY CARE BECAUSE THAT'S A THING YOU REMEMBER. Sadly, that sentiment isn't going away anytime soon; not just in Doctor Who but in anything. (Get me started about the Angry Video Game Nerd video game again, I dare you.) Here, and admittedly I'm pulling on a thin string of continuity here, we have the old "The Doctor speaks baby" joke that we used back in the Matt Smith era a few times. Except instead of silly jokes about Stormageddon, we have a frightened and scared child crying about how frightened and scared she is while the adults are all shouting about how WE'RE VIKINGS, FUCK YOU! It is at once a continuity reference to something from a past episode, and a pillar of the emotional core of the episode. There's a much bigger one of these at the end which we will get to, but let's talk more about emotional cores.
Clara, admittedly, doesn't get much more "cool" Doctor-ish stuff to do after telling Mire-Odin off. She does, however, get lots of great scenes opposite Capaldi. Being the Doctor doesn't always mean puffing up your chest and giving big speeches to aliens who are trying to bully Earth. It means caring and trying to do what's right. The Doctor is unsure he can really do anything here; the villagers are too headstrong to run, and not skilled enough in battle to win head-on against the Mire. Everything suggests that these people are going to get slaughtered... and the stakes are both low and high. Low because the planet or the human race aren't in danger, but at the end of the day these are still people and they deserve help. They deserve a clever plan to save them from the Mire, and it's Clara who helps to spur the Doctor on and make him realize that he can make a difference. Capaldi, to his credit, gets some great scenes as well, mostly musing on mortality and the stubbornness of humanity to put themselves in mortal danger for what's right. Then, thanks to baby talk, he gets a clever idea.
Holy shit, this bit. Okay, so after some clever plotting involving electric eels, the Mire drop in to kill everyone because they literally drink testosterone and want to shoot things in the face. To which they find a happy party where everyone's unarmed and dancing. Then all hell breaks loose, and half the Mire robots get zapped by electric currents, there's electromagnets made out of anvils, and the Doctor snags a Mire helmet and slips it on Ashildr, who likes to make up stories and play with puppets. That's just what happens here, as she uses the helmet to make Mire-Odin and the rest of his robot pals think that one of Ashildr's puppets is actually a dodgy CGI snake. So, as has been remarked already in other corners, the day is saved by invoking the shitty special effect that brought the Mara to life in Kinda. After all of that, the Doctor comes in and starts talking about how they won by telling a story, and how they're going to undermine the story of the Mire as scary testosterone drinkers by uploading a goddamn video of them freaking out over a Viking puppet set to Yakety bleedin' Sax. Stories and fiction are what save the day here, and not raw power. It's beautiful and it's brilliant. Everyone's happy and the day is saved, but the cost is that Ashildr has died from becoming super-powered storyteller. How very tragic. The Doctor runs off to be morose about it, as he does whenever he loses someone. The battle is won but a price is paid, we know this score. Capaldi gets some great lines about how he hates losing people, and how eventually when he loses Clara he'll try to run from it, just like he's done with all the other companions he's lost over the years. Standard stuff, really. A sobering cap to a triumphant episode.
And then they go and explain why the Twelfth Doctor looks like that Roman guy who David Tennant saved in Pompeii. I'm going to be honest here. In Deep Breath they had inklings of this; inklings they called back to here involving why the Doctor chose that face. In any other context, I'd say "who cares?". Nobody explained why the Sixth Doctor looks like Maxil the Gallifreyan guard. Romana chose the face of Princess Astra for her regeneration 'cause it looked kind of nice or something. The reason these incarnations look like other people is because the people in our world wanted to cast those actors again. Sure, we had a one-off line for why Martha Jones looked an awful lot like some poor Torchwood clerk who got killed, but nothing about why Amy Pond was a Roman soothsayer. I mean, in any other context, what does it matter in-universe? The Doctor looks like a guy from ancient Rome now because they wanted Peter Capaldi to play him. That should have been all the explanation we needed. If you had spoiled for me, an hour before this episode aired, that they would bother to go and explain this shit... I would have been dreading it. It seems like the most unbearable answer to a question nobody asked, the sort of loud shouting those people I make fun of for complaining about plot holes in their Doctor Who would engage in. Imagine my surprise when they manage to take this, and not only does it resonate with the episode's plot, but it anchors the emotional core of the Doctor. He chose to look like that Roman guy because he saved that Roman guy, and he needed to remind himself that he saves people sometimes. Hell, we even have a mirror shot of him looking at his reflection in water to realize it! This situation is, in itself, a mirror of Pompeii. In Pompeii he couldn't save everyone, but he saved some people just because that's what he does. In the Viking village, he was clever enough to save everyone but Ashildr, and he now realizes that he can save her.
Admittedly, he bungles it. I don't even need to see next week to know that he's bungled it. In his haste, he makes Ashildr immortal. As he says at the end of the episode, immortality is a hell of a curse because you get to watch everyone around you die. At least he had the foresight to leave a second immortality chip in case she found someone she liked, but still; the next time he meets her, she's probably going to be awfully sore about the whole immortality thing. At once you can consider the implications of her living forever; having to change identities, move to new places, watch friends grow old and die while she never ages. How much does the repair chip actually repair? If she loses a limb would it grow back? What if, God forbid, she got buried alive? Terrible things to consider, but then think of the spinoffs. If she truly lives forever, she could meet the Paternoster gang and have adventures with them. She could subtly fuck around with the Third Doctor behind the scenes in the 70's. She could have adventures with Captain Jack and Torchwood, or work with 2010s UNIT. There are a million Ashildr stories you could tell, only limited by the fact that Maisie Williams is just a little busy with that Throne show. The final shot of her with the 360 degree pan is a thing of beauty, and the way her face changes emotion speaks volumes. Holy shit. And she's the Hybrid! This is the way to seed a series arc! I can only imagine Moffat doing it the usual way; Maisie Williams behind a mask or something, showing up at the end of The Witch's Familiar, brooding and telling herself (and us) that soon you will pay for what you did to me, DOC-TOR. Cue all the threads and Twitter feeds yelling about how she's Susan Foreman/The Rani/Romana, only for it to be Susan all along because of course it would be the easiest guess. Admittedly, if Moffat had gone with this and then done the same reveal he did here, it would have worked. The guessing game shit only works if you, again, make it obvious. Nobody would have been able to guess "Viking girl who hold a grudge because the Doctor made her immortal in an attempt to save her life". Still, I like it better this way. Maybe it will mean shit for the Doctor and whatnot later down the line. Maybe it won't! We'll have to find out.
Wow. What an episode. Clara was competent, the Doctor got great bits, it had a solid emotional core, it played with continuity in a way I never would have expected to work, and it has implications for the future. It's a solid episode, and one I adore simply because it's so goddamned good in what it does. Mathieson, you're brilliant. I love it. I love this. I hope the show can keep it up.
Next time: Silly masks and pistols. And immortal girls. Oh my.
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