Doctor Who Series 9 First Impressions: Episode 8 (The Zygon Inversion)

(As always, there are spoilers to follow. You know better than to read this before seeing the episode for yourself. Unless you don't care about spoilers and somehow just like to read me yelling about Doctor Who you haven't seen, which... well, I'm flattered but I also would really rather you watched it as well. If you're out there. Well, let's talk about Zygons some more.)

Press the right button and all the Zygons are revealed.
Press the wrong one and they all permanently become Colin Baker. With coat.

It was, through and through, a Peter Harness episode. The reaction to this one, both from myself and others, is just about the same as it was over a year ago when Kill The Moon happened. Lots and lots of people were thoroughly disappointed by the political implications of the episode, and have taken to the Internet to voice their concerns about it. This time it is immigration and xenophobia, and last year it was pro-choice debates. I here, on the other hand, am both dumb enough to not know much about political climates and yet smart enough to know that I shouldn't be writing about them. You'll note that I took The Zygon Invasion to task not for the implication that many took from it, that all foreign immigrants are pissed off radicals who will kill everyone in the way of their ambiguous revolutionary goals, but rather the fact that, for all the talk about the Zygon radicals in the episode being the minority, we never actually saw any Zygons who weren't murder-happy revolutionaries who kill both humans and Zygons alike on sight for Reasons. My issue was that the subtext was there for a "both sides" thing but it utterly failed to show both sides. The second reason this episode is a repeat of Kill The Moon for me is that Peter Harness is unable to hit "okay". He either hits extreme disappointment (see: political themes, giant space dragons, moon eggs) or "jaw-droppingly phenomenal" (see: Clara's outrage at the Doctor and storming off). Now, I like my Doctor Who with lots of emotional meatiness and whatnot, so the fact that Peter Harness can write really really incredible and passionate speeches for people like Jenna Coleman or Peter Capaldi to knock out of the park allows me to forgive him for all the political bits that don't work. Many will disagree, and in fact there are even political bits in the jaw-droppingly phenomenal speech in this episode that many have taken it to task for! I'm not one of them.

Part 1 may have faltered, but Christ almighty did Part 2 do its damned best to elevate the material. This is The Zygon Inversion, and here is why it's very good and I loved it so much.

Let's start with Jenna Coleman/Clara Oswald/Bonnie Zygella. You know, since the episode did. I didn't call the cliffhanger resolution. I talked about this in Before The Flood, but the guessing game isn't the if but the how. I pegged the how as being the Doctor looking at the rocket incoming, and staring at it with his sunglasses to make it blow up early. A plausible cliffhanger resolution, but not one a lot of people would have liked because half of fandom already hates the godforsaken sunglasses. What we got instead was far more clever and preferable to me and... oh, people still complained about it kind of. Well. Shit. Okay, so. Clara, our Clara, the one who was actually comatose in a Zygon pod for 85% of the last episode? She's still stuck in it, but pointedly she's in her own little mental landscape; her apartment. (Which ties in nicely to Last Christmas, incidentally!) She sees the cliffhanger playing out on her TV, from Bonnie's perspective... and manages to influence Bonnie's hands to veer the shot away a bit. Bonnie still hits in the end, but yes! Even in a Zygon pod Clara can be proactive and take charge! This is a better cliffhanger resolution because Clara got to do stuff. This is the most stuff Clara has gotten to do since Magician's Apprentice, arguably. The bit where she calmly faces down Bonnie when Bonnie goes looking for information is rad. Of course, Bonnie being a mirror of Clara (and there's lots of mirroring in this one, with Clara's clock and her bathroom mirror and the mere act of Clara looking at "herself" [aka Bonnie] in the TV and vice versa makes the budding third-rate Jane Campbell in me very happy) means that Bonnie is able to turn the tables on Clara and be just as proactive and clever in getting what she wants. It's a great scene, and though there isn't much for Clara to do beyond stand around for the big bit of the episode, we're not done with Bonnie Zygella by a long shot. But more on that when we get to the big bit.

Osgood is temporary companion here, and she works fine. I could have done without them pressing the question of "but which one are you?" over and over again, but Osgood keeps dismissing it with a smile. Hilariously, her actress had an AMA on Twitter yesterday, and one of the questions I saw from a viewer was actually, legitimately, whether or not Osgood was human or Zygon. For fuck's sakes, Harry, ambiguity. Petronella Osgood is Petronella Osgood. There might be one human and one Zygon at the end of this. Or two Zygons. I don't know. It doesn't seem to particularly matter. She absolutely is who she says she is, and that's all I need to know. As for everyone else... well, geez, Kate's going to need to conduct a hell of a lot of job interviews because all of UNIT is kind of dead. We don't see a single UNIT person besides Kate and Osgood; there's some soldiers but they're revolutionary Zygons in disguise. Kate, on the other hand, is not. I called that one because of simple televisual literacy; we never actually saw Kate get zapped in last week's cliffhanger. We pointedly cut away from the moment of zapping, and only had the assumption that the Kate saying UNIT was neutralized was a revolutionary Zygon. Even the reveal of how Kate got out of it is a smug Classic Who reference, and those are all over the place here. The aforementioned "five rounds rapid" line. The portrait of William Hartnell. The Z67 gas referred to as "the imbecile's gas". Lots of toying, and-- ah shit, I forgot to talk about why people got mad at Clara this week. She fought back against Zygon control and made little subtle body moments happen in Bonnie. Winking, finger gestures, whatnot. I've seen complaints about how this makes no sense because nobody else who got put in a Zygon pod ever fought back. Well, it can be justified by Osgood's line about them making a live link to her head to get information. The Zygons made a two-way connection, and Clara quickly gets how to use it as well. Also, she's the companion. She got to do shit in this episode. I'm not about to complain and really neither should you because I don't think anyone honestly gives a shit about Zygon rules. If they did, they'd be complaining that the Skarasen isn't involved with this lot at all. They don't even have a throwaway line explaining that, so get mad at that. Get mad for them not explaining why the Zygons don't drink from the teat of a cyborg alien dinosaur any more.

Right, here we go. The big bit. Once again, in a Peter Harness episode, we have women standing over a control box with two options; no mercy kill kill kill, or pacifism that may spell the end of everything anyway. The tricky trick of the Osgood Box is revealed, and everyone is in place in the Black Archive where all this shit started two years ago... and then Peter Capaldi does it. He doesn't just knock this out of the park. He knocks this performance into orbit around Mars. Holy fuck. The monologue about the meaning of war, the consequences of causing untold death and destruction to right perceived injustice, and the often lack of plotting out what to do after the war... mixed in with the most moving and passionate "Time War guilt" acting yet seen, is genius. The Doctor, ever the pacifist who one day went to war and has regretted it ever since, is all but begging and pleading Kate and Bonnie to make peace and call off this ridiculous fearmongering. In particular, I want to focus on his critique of Kate. We did see exactly one non-murdery sympathetic Zygon in this episode, a poor man who Bonnie forced back into Zygon form who now can't maintain his disguise. I suppose he's meant to represent the majority Zygons who are perfectly fine with living out their lives among human beings. It does help give the conflict depth, and it makes sense why they wouldn't be helping so much; they want to live in peace, and they don't think it's their fight. I disagree a little, but I understand. Then you have Bonnie and the other radicals, whose grand plan is to unmask every Zygon on Earth, stoking the prejudices of humanity to incite fear and violence and make all the Zygons go to war against the humans. When Clara, in her confrontation with Bonnie, points out that 20 million Zygons against 7 billion humans isn't a battle they can possibly win even with their technology, Bonnie's reply is a simple "Better to die by fire than live in chains.". Well, fuck you. You don't get to make that choice for the majority of your species. What I love about the later bits with Capaldi talking down Bonnie are how they address my concerns about the Zygon conflict. All the "mustache-twirling" I talked about with every radical Zygon killing left and right is revealed to be nothing more than an ill-thought out revolution. Bonnie doesn't even know what she wants, other than to see Zygons and humans go at it. In her ideal scenario, when Zygonkind stands among the ashes of humanity, and the Earth is theirs... then what? What do they do then? Bonnie has no plan, no strategy, no motivation beyond "But I don't like being disguised as a human!". The leader of the Zygon revolt is revealed to be little more than a child having a temper tantrum... and it's worth noting that at two points in the episode, Bonnie is visibly throwing temper tantrums when she isn't getting her way. Watch how, when Osgood's laptop reveals that she lied during her interrogation, Bonnie snarls and smashes the laptop. Or how, when the Doctor refuses to tell the secret of the Osgood Box, she hurls her phone at the wall. This isn't a military leader. This is a pissed-off teenager, and the Doctor talks both her and Kate down by making them think. Truth or consequences? Neither of them know the truth, or the consequences, of war.

So the Doctor talks Bonnie down. He forgives her, because he's the Doctor and he can. The Zygon revolution ends with peace talks and a few memory wipes just to make sure the status quo remains. Bonnie becomes an Osgood, and will work with the other Osgood to maintain the secret peace between humanity and Zygonity. The ill-thought out revolution ends. Some have said this is infantilizing of Bonnie, just treating her as a spoiled child. Others may say that the Doctor's dismissal of revolutions as being run by spoiled brats who don't think the status quo is "fair" is tonally wrong. It's not for me to judge. I loved the speech, I loved the peaceful way everything resolved, and I loved how it addressed all my concerns with the Zygon's motivations by ideologically tearing them down as a impassioned but flawed ideal. God damn. This might be my favorite episode of series 9 so far. It'll be interesting on rewatch to see how The Zygon Invasion holds up, but for now I'm all for this. It's been a rocky road, and not quite as good a road as Series 8, but it's had its moments.

Also, please god don't let that "longest month of my life" thing be a confirmation of the Clara Is Already Dead theory. Fuck's sakes.

Next time: Doctor Who does found footage. I dig found footage. I might dig this.