Doctor Who Series 9 First Impressions: Episode 7 (The Zygon Invasion)

(As always, there is a spoiler warning: There are spoilers. So, you know. Go watch the show and don't be spoiled.)

"Clara, you're breaking up, what did you say?
Something about a rocket and a lawn chair?"

If there ever was a moment to pull the "temporal grace"card in relation to two-parters, it's here. Really, we haven't been in this sort of pickle since Under The Lake. That one, if you'll recall, was basically one half of a tale. The Girl Who Died/Woman Who Lived duo was also like this, but each half of that was its own coherent thing, with the link between them being Ashildr/Lady Me. Under The Lake, I at least managed to judge on the basis of it setting up a bunch of rules along with a neat premise. I had no idea at the time that Before The Flood would bone it, but I still managed to be confident about what I liked and where I figured things were going. The Zygon Invasion, on the other hand, is a slippery wet tentacle. Two viewings later, and I'm still not exactly sure how I feel about it, where it's going, or if it will be good. Still, in the post-Halloween world before I have to go and churn out 1667 words of creative fiction because I do NaNoWriMo every year and actively court the vomiting out of words, let me try and fire off some thoughts about this thing.

So. Zygons. What's the deal with Zygons? They must be the most popular one-off Doctor Who monster ever... and yes, they were a one-off. Terror Of The Zygons in 1975 was their sole Classic Series outing. I do intend to give that a rewatch some time soon, for perspective... but not just yet. I remember it being quite good, with lots of creepy imagery and bad CSO and the Brig in a kilt. Sure, the audios and the books had some Zygon stuff (I'm especially fond of the "Auntie Pat" stuff from the 8th Doctor Adventures) but they seemed like an obscure but good creature from the Classic show, right alongside the Axons or the... uh... er... Robots of Death? I'm reaching here but you get the point. Then, bam. The 50th happened and the Zygons came back. 'Cause David Tennant really liked them or something. That was fine, and they worked as a solid B-plot to Day Of The Doctor... but now they have their very own two-parter and it feels like we all went Zygon-happy in a short amount of time. This was one of the ones people were hyped about, and even I, who avoided the episode titles, somehow knew we were getting a Zygon two-parter this series. Now here we are, halfway into it, and I don't even know what the fuck. Part of it is that... the Zygons have a hell of a lot more nuance than they were ever given before. The show was content to make them mustache twirlers who wanted to conquer Earth because they didn't have any planet and they were going to take over this one just because. Day Of The Doctor had a nice resolution to that, with the mindwipe thing that made them sit down and hash out an agreement. This is the fallout of that, and now ostensibly there should be good and bad Zygons... except we don't know if we've seen any good Zygons yet. Every Zygon we've seen, aside from the little girls (and possibly maybe Osgood but more on her in a second), has been in full "kill everyone" mode. I'm hoping part 2 has some Zygons who are decidedly not on board with the "start a war and take over Earth because we can" thing, because so far it's very strange. The script wants us to think it's a Silurians sort of situation, where everyone save for the radical extremists is all for the whole "peaceful coexistence" thing and it's those bad apples who are fucking everything up by killing human and Zygon alike... but we've not seen any of that! Unless we really have, and we're being tricked and some of the people killed on our side were Zygons. This is some Red Scare level shit going down here, I'm not sure who's a person and who's a Zygon any more!

Which brings us nicely to Osgood, I guess. We always knew the possibility of an out involving Osgood and her death in Death In Heaven, due to her Zygon double. I really like Osgood in this one, for a number of reasons. One, she rocks McCoy's question mark jumper in the opening. Two, that wonderful bit where she refuses to answer the question of if she's the human or the Zygon Osgood. 'Cause it doesn't matter, both narratively and metatextually. It's right up there with "what's the Doctor's name?" in questions that will never be answered and don't mean all that much anyway. Osgood is Osgood, and her sister was also Osgood and then she died. They probably know who's who because of the inhaler swap from Day Of The Doctor, but it doesn't matter. Osgood is human, and Osgood is Zygon; a hybrid. (I shed a tear for having the arc shoved into my face again.) Third, the delightful way in which Osgood just straight up says "yeah okay we're changing the rules of Zygons now". Because it's more interesting this way. There are lots of interesting theories to be had, considering that Osgood is the only person in this episode to mention the new Zygon rules. I won't delve into it here 'cause it's not my theory, but still. You got a shoutout. It'll be real interesting if you're right.

What of Clara? Oh. Oh dear. This is almost just teasing now. Clara gets her own B-plot of the episode, teaming up with UNIT minus the Doctor and Kate Stewart to investigate shit going on in the UK. Yeah, she's Doctorish but also Claraish. Yeah, she does a good job of holding down the fort while the bosses are gone and taking charge. It was great. It really was. And then it's revealed that she was actually a Zygon for most of the running time. Shit. After sidelining Clara for so long, the episode gives us a proactive Clara... only to reveal that it wasn't, not really, and our Clara has been stuck in a pod for 40 minutes? FUCK! No disrespect to Jenna Coleman, her "evil Clara", aka Clara-gon, aka Bonnie, is great. Especially once she does her heel turn, the look on her face... mmm. She sells it. This is Clara as a mirror of... the darkened Clara. And she gets to fire a rocket launcher! Hot goddamn is Jenna Coleman good in this... but she's not Clara. I do so hope that Clara busts out of that pod somehow, early enough in the episode that she gets to do some good shit. While we're talking Clara... that bit with the UNIT soldiers at the church, where the guy's mom comes up to him... that shit was pretty chilling, huh? "I love you and I forgive you.". Jesus. When Clara (Bonnie) and the UNIT kids were walking into the Zygon lair, before she turned bad... I was expecting a Danny Pink Zygon to walk out. How much of a gut punch would that have been? I really want that shit to happen now in the next one. Not to give Clara grief, but to show her overcoming that grief in order to save the world. I want to see how much Clara Oswald has grown since Death In Heaven and Last Christmas. I want her to overcome the Zygon tricks and save the day from the extremists. I swear to God, this shit had better happen somehow or I'll be cross.

I'm gonna do stray observations and then wrap up here, I think:

-So Harry Sullivan made a Zygon-killing gas. They don't say his name, but we can put the dots together. Also, "70's or 80's." UNIT dating is an absolute joke and the show knows it. If you don't know what UNIT dating is, be thankful.

-Kate Stewart's American adventure reminded me way too much of Parasite Eve 2, in which a monster-hunting agent runs around an abandoned Southern US town to hunt monsters.

-Question mark underwear. Christ.

-My money's on Kate not really being a Zygon and having avoided getting zapped, and the Doctor blowing up the rocket mid-flight with his sunglasses. Please don't have him talk to the camera about Bach and the time the Doctor told him about the end of the Zygon gambit at the beginning of the next one. Please god.

So, here we are. On writing it out, I'm mad at it. I'm mad at it for promising things that sound really interesting and not delivering them... yet. The Zygon splinter group thing could lead to groups of ideologically-opposed Zygons fighting amongst each other to keep the planet from getting totalled, but it amounts to every Zygon on screen being evil and wanting to kill everyone they see because. Clara got characterization, but it was all a trick and the twist is that she was stuck in a pod for 85% of the episode. I can tentatively hold my breath here, because this is part 1 of 2. There's a chance that this is all for something, and it will all work out when the other shoe drops in six days. There's a chance of that, and I anticipate it. Until then, I don't think I'm entirely happy with the state of temporal grace we're in.

What we need is for this shit to be turned on its head. Inverted, if you will.

Next time: The Zygons do that, probably maybe.