Season 9, Episode 3, Under The Lake
Deep under a Sottish lake, a research facility has salvaged an alien craft. Scrawled inside is a mysterious message which glints menacingly in the eyes of all who look at it. Soon after, the mission commander is incinerated when one of the crew is startled by a dapper looking ghost and accidentally fires the ship's engines. No need to grieve though, as he's back pretty soon, only with fewer eyes.
I see dead people. But they can't see me.
The Doctor and Clara arrive, and the first thing we learn is that the TARDIS is not happy being there. Despite this, or maybe because of it, they choose to investigate, and it doesn't take them long to run across a pair of ghosts, who are intimidating, but non-violent. The ghosts lead them to the ship, but turn nasty after The Doctor and Clara have seen inside. They eventually run into the crew sheltering in a lead-shielded Faraday cage, and learn the ghosts only come out during the facility's artificial night cycle.
The Doctor spends some time trying to puzzle out what these entities are and how they work, but soon things start escalating and we lose another crew member to the ghosts. Of course, as is traditional, the first victim has been established to be utterly loathsome, so we don't really feel bad about it.
We are treated to a little explanation about how the ghosts are using the facility to try to kill the remaining people, but the why of it is the pertinent question. There is only one thing for it; catch the ghosts. After a thrilling game of cat and mouse to lure the ghosts into the Faraday cage, our resident deaf character Cass is able to read their lips to decipher what they are saying. Sadly the way she is able to do this is through The Doctor's freaking Sonic Sunglasses.
Why?
I had hoped those things were a once-off. When The Doctor got rid of his sonic in the previous story, I wanted to believe they were going to run without one for a while, thereby eliminating the issue of Deus Ex Screwdriver. Sadly, with the inclusion of these damnable sunglasses, it seems the Sonic will be able to do more things now.
Anyway, The Doctor figures out what the ghosts are up to and what their message means, allowing the crew to salvage a stasis pod that was missing from the alien craft. The Doctor decides to travel to the past to discover what happened to cause this and maybe what is inside the pod, but before he can get everyone to the TARDIS, the ghosts manage to overload the facility's nuclear reactor, causing the automatic safety systems to flood the base in an attempt to cool the reactor.
Despite their best efforts, the crew are split up. With The Doctor unable to pilot the TARDIS to the other side of the flooded hallway due to the presence of the ghosts, Clara and friends settle in to wait for his return. The episode comes to a bit of a killer cliffhanger when another ghost emerges from the murky depths of the lake, resolving into the figure of...
How's that regeneration going for you then?
The pacing of this episode was pretty good, which is no doubt due significantly to the fact that it's a two-parter. It was about as far from Go, go, go, Geronimo! as you can get, if anything feeling a little too slow in parts. It was great to give The Doctor some time to puzzle things out, and as an added bonus, allow the other minor characters to be more than just cannon fodder, or substitute audience members to explain things to. The inclusion of Cass was a nice touch, but it kind of did telegraph that she would end up reading the ghost's lips. Still, great to see minor characters adding their skills to solve the mystery. The ghosts themselves are mildly creepy, and their attempts at physical violence are threatening, but the scarier bit is them using the base itself against their victims. I am genuinely curious as to what's going on here, although I have some theories. Again, my score may want revising after part two, but on the face of it, this one is pretty good.
Apart from those freaking glasses.
8/10
Can we fix it?
Not a lot actually needs doing here. Originally I was going to complain about how the base floods itself to cool the reactor, and how little sense this made, but on second thought, Vector Petroleum has already been established as a fairly heartless company (it is an oil company, after all). So with that in mind, I think it's easy to imagine them killing the crew in favour of losing the facility.
The only change then becomes those bloody sunglasses. We clearly need a video link so that Cass can read the ghosts lips, but there is any number of bits of tech that would conceivably be in this facility to establish a video link. The scuba suits could all have GoPros on them, for example. Bing, bam, boom. No need for sunglasses.
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