Review - Face The Raven

An old psudo-companion returns with some deadly new ink, and Clara's devil-may-care attitude finally catches up with her as she has to Face The Raven.

Season 9, episode 10 - Face The Raven

We jump into this episode at the end of an adventure, with Clara clearly having saved The Doctor in some kind of risky manner. The Doctor appears reluctantly impressed. This little moment is shattered as the TARDIS phone rings. Clara answers to hear Rigsy, last seen in Flatline, who claims to have woken up with a strange tattoo. A tattoo which is counting down.

The Doctor and Clara arrive to check things out, learning that not only does Rigsy have a baby, but he has lost the last 24 hours. His phone has been wiped, but it's screen has been cracked. The Doctor tries his best to be nice about it, but Rigsy is going to die. 

But at least he'll look fly doing it.

Despite initially seeming defeated, The Doctor does love a challenge, and the group set off to find a hidden street harbouring aliens. This naturally involves Clara leaning out of the TARDIS as it flies over London, scanning things with the Sonic Sunglasses. Before this turns into another case of Deus Ex Screwdriver, the team then have to wander around the target area counting and looking for areas where their concentration wavers. This is said to indicate the entrance to Diagon Alley. I mean the "trap street". 

After a bit of this wandering, Rigsy has a flashback to dropping his phone after seeing a body on the ground. This flashback has somehow broken the misdirection system that was disguising the entrance, and he is able to guide Clara and The Doctor in as well. 

Once inside, they discover the area is a refugee camp for asylum seeking aliens. The mayor of the camp is none other than Ashieldr, who has once again forgotten her name. It turns out she is responsible for marking Rigsy for death using a Chronolock which guides a Quantum Shade to the victim. When asked why, she reveals he killed one of the aliens sheltering in the street. 

After witnessing another alien killed by the Shade, which looks like the titular raven, Clara learns that the Chronolock can be passed on if willingly accepted by another. She convinces Rigsy to give the Chronolock to her in a bid to buy more time. Meanwhile, The Doctor discovers Rigsy had asked to call him when he was caught. Knowing Ashieldr must have ignored this plea, The Doctor becomes suspicious that she was using Rigsy to deliberately lure him there. Clara then realises that the only denizen of the street who isn't treating Rigsy as guilty is the child of the murdered Janus.

Clara's kid-wrangling comes into play again as she determines the Janus child isn't a male, but is in fact a female, and therefore has the power to see into past and future. Despite this she is unable to determine all of Ashieldr's motivation, because it involves The Doctor, who's own timeline is convoluted, to say the least. 

All this leads the team back to the murdered Janus' body, which is being kept in stasis. The Doctor realises she is alive, but the machine can only be switched off using his TARDIS key. With time running out, The Doctor does what is needed. The Janus is released, but not only does the machine take his key, it also locks a teleport bracelet on The Doctor's wrist. Ashieldr explains that in true Lando Calrissian fashion, she has brokered a deal to keep the street safe in exchange for The Doctor. Taking the key was simply a way of keeping him wherever he is to be sent. 

Ashieldr moves to remove the Chronolock from Rigsy, but is horrified to learn he has given it to Clara. On her recklessness, Clara failed to realise that transfer was one way, and removed any right of revocation Ashieldr had.

Not sure if dying, or curing the Warden's wife.

The episode them runs through an extended farewell ending in Clara's inevitable death. Ashieldr is genuinely remorseful that things turned out this way, but The Doctor is pissed, and throws out a pretty heavy threat before being teleported away to who knows where. 

In a nice little postscript, we see Rigsy finishing up a mural to Clara on the abandoned TARDIS.

This was quite a tidy little mystery episode. The investigation period was maybe a little rushed, but that's because they had two mysteries to solve. A lot of time was taken up with Clara's farewell, so both finding the street and clearing Rigsy needed to be quick processes. Of course the whole point is they are operating to a literal deadline, so although it was a little bit go, go, go, Geronimo, it didn't feel out of place. 

Clara managed to again hit that pet peeve of mine by dropping another reference to an ongoing lesbian relationship with Jane Austin. When will the In-Who-Endos stop? While we're on pet peeves, the denizens of the street were mostly generic aliens, but some were a bit out of place. I mean, how was there a Cyberman living there peacefully? That makes no sense, and has the whiff of Needlessly recurring monsters about it.

Ultimately, this is a solid companion farewell episode, with all the usual tearful goodbyes. If it somehow remains Clara's farewell and for the rest of the season she only appears in flashbacks or as a Zygon double or even more of her time-stream duplicates, that would be a great way of surprising us. We kind of expect companions to go in finales, and although Amy and Rory technically went mid-season, it was a split season, so it equates to the same thing, so doing something different would be great. 

That said, I have no doubt that Clara will somehow survive or be brought back. Either way, having this farewell only to have her appear in subsequent episodes in any capacity significantly lessens the impact of her farewell. 

But, putting aside the potential impact of future episodes, this one is quite enjoyable. 

8/10

Can we fix it?

Not too much wrong here. The pacing could do with a bit of a tweak though. The bit of investigation where they were trying to solve the actual mystery and clear Rigsy seemed a good length, but finding the street itself did feel a bit rushed, and Clara's farewell seemed overly drawn out. I'm not sure if it would ultimately be the right thing, but trimming her farewell scene in order to make the finding of the street itself less hectic would be an interesting experiment at least.

Extending this period a bit runs the risk of going through a bit of a boring patch, but as long as we spice it up with some tense or funny moments, it should tick along nicely. I'd like to see a bit of Monster Vision from the Quantum Shade here. If it kinda stalked the victim waiting for the time to run out, it'd be creepier than just chilling in it's cage. We could also get full shots of it in the background etc, and it could go relatively unnoticed.

Some comedy could break it up too. For example, Rigsy could get increasingly frustrated, loses count due to his frustration, and then run into a wall thinking he's found the entrance. Hilarity ensues.

The other side of this is a reduced farewell from Clara, which could be seen as a bit of a rip off for her character. That said, Amy and Rory didn't get farewells. Their sudden absence is part of what gave their departure so much impact. Of course, as I'm like 99% sure Clara will return somehow, I don't think we'd be robbing her of anything to trim that scene a smidge.

Also, nix the Jane Austin gag. It was barely funny the first time, so dragging it out is just poor.

Fixing Missy

I've been thinking about Missy for a little while now. The big reveal that she was The Master was all well and good, and I'm happy to roll with it now that it's happened. However, it's not exactly an ideal situation from my point of view. I will probably get jumped on for this, but I'm still not fully on board for gender-swapping regenerations. For good or ill, they have been part of the canon since Neil Gaiman's otherwise great The Doctor's Wife. But it's not just the gender swap that disappoints me about the Missy reveal. It is the missed opportunity that came with it.

Yes, I'm talking about The Rani. Radio Times reported on how Steven Moffat tried to trick people into thinking Missy was actually The Rani, and I must admit, she was actually my first thought when we met Missy. Moffat clearly had Rani front of mind at the time, so why default to The Master? He had already featured prominently in a season arc in season 3, and as the main protagonist in the Christmas / New Year special The End of Time in 2009-10.

The casting would have been perfect too.
(image from Following the Nerd)

With such a huge existing Rogue's Gallery and nearly infinite possibilities for new villains, there really is no need to recycle enemies at this rate. Also, it's rather questionable as to why you would gender swap a male villain when there is already a perfectly serviceable female one ready to use. Rani would arguable have fit in with the Death In Heaven season arc better than The Master does too. Her cold, calculating nature would easily see her team up with the Cybermen if it meant she could somehow further her research. The Master's motivation seems to be purely to taunt The Doctor and prove him to be a bad man.

That said, it's actually not too late to turn this whole thing around. Allow me to explain:

The last time we saw The Master he was burning up his life force to attack Rassilon and company at the climax of The End of Time. We all assume he is then either time-locked with the rest of Gallifrey, or his unstable body disintegrates. Either way, he is never to be seen again. But The Master has survived without a body before. He's also a big fan of possessing other people's bodies. It's not unreasonable for his disembodied essence to somehow escape the time-lock and wander the galaxy stealing bodies.

Those bodies, however, aren't good enough. Much like the 1996 Movie, they quickly degrade. He needs a Time Lord body. He searches the galaxy for The Doctor, but is always a step behind. He eventually decides to lie in wait on Earth, The Doctor's favourite backwater. He just misses The Doctor on several occasions, such as turning up at Craig and Sophie's place just after their Lodger left, or the time all those cubes showed up.

By chance The Master stumbles across The Rani, who has also somehow managed to escape the time locked Gallifrey, and is working to perfect a way of storing the essence of sentient creatures indefinitely, using the same basic technology as the Chameleon Arch. Perhaps she plans to use this technology to transfer the Time Lords minds off of Gallifrey, if not their bodies. Perhaps she has other plans for it. Either way, she is now using the resources of the Cybermen to further this research.

The Cybermen have had issues with strong personalities overriding the emotional suppression of the upgrade process. This is their attempt to make a better Cyberman by testing the personalities within the Nethersphere and placing only the most desirable ones into the strongest bodies. While the personalities can survive in an artificial neural network, which is essentially what The Nethersphere is, they can't bond with a purely robotic vessel, and require a bio-organic link.

The Rani is able to develop the basis for an upgraded Cyber chassis that can use a relatively small amount of organic material from the same species to create the required neural link, but her plan is always to dump the entire contents of the Nethersphere into these new bodies, even those strong enough to overcome the emotional suppression. She wants to use the tech for her own ends, not create an unstoppable Cyber Army. Just let them fight amongst themselves while she makes good her escape.

Unfortunately for Rani, The Master manages to use her own tech against her, pushing her out of her body and storing her in her own personal version of The Nethersphere. The Master is then able to possess her body, again getting the Time Lord (or Lady) form he desired. Naturally The Master (now Missy) uses the existing partnership and technology to her own ends, but being unaware that Rani had bypassed the selection protocols in the Nethersphere, she dumps the strong personalities as well. These include Danny and The Brigadier, and things play out as we have already seen.

Now that was a lot of back-story to get through, but it tidies up a couple of issues I have with that story, namely the fact that Cybermen can suddenly use corpses to create new Cybermen. Previously they have always been upgraded living beings, so justifying this new evolution would be nice. From here, you can see it sets up a situation where The Doctor can find out about this, and be forced to choose between leaving Rani in a lonely limbo state, or essentially killing his friend. Obviously we'd find a way to save both, but then we've got two antagonists out in the field ready to clash with The Doctor again in the future.

Oh, man! Can you imagine The Master in a Cyberman body?

Review - Sleep No More

Giant blobs of eye-crusties terrorise an orbital base in the very interestingly shot Sleep No More.

Season 9, Episode 9 - Sleep No More

The episode opens with Professor Rassmussen telling us not to watch the following video, which he has pieced together from CCTV footage and the helmet cams of the soldiers. I'm not sure why they elected to eschew the standard opening credits in favour of the matrix-style green code with the words "Doctor Who" highlighted. The episode only ran 45 minutes, so it certainly wasn't a time issue. I really did miss them though. Anyway...

Rassmussen introduces the rescue team that have been sent to investigate why the base has fallen silent. They hit the usual tropes; the leader, the hot-head, the clown and the muscle. The team explore the seemingly deserted base, eventually running across The Doctor and Clara. Before long the group is attacked by monsters composed entirely of sand. 

The team gets separated from one of their members and takes shelter in a room filled with Morpheus sleep pods. After Clara is dragged into one of the pods and needs to be freed by The Doctor, The team tells them all about the pods and how they replace the need for sleep. 

464 the clone discovers another occupied pod, inside of which is Rassmussen. After he explains how Morpheus works, The Doctor guesses that the Sandmen are made up of the "sleep dust" that builds up in the corners of your eyes when you sleep. I'll just keep suspending my disbelief because that's not really making a lot of sense just yet.  

Meanwhile, Deep-Ando, the team-member who got separated from the rest, is running from Sandmen. Suddenly he has some trouble with a door computer which claims to have been reprogrammed so that users have to sing Mr Sandman to operate it. Unfortunately for Deep-Ando, the song seems to attract the Sandmen.

The Doctor got sick of this quicker than I did

After the base's gravity shields go down, the Sandmen attack again killing Rassmussen. The Doctor fixes the shields and takes shelter in a freezer along with Nagata and Clara while Chopra and 474 make a break for the ship. After becoming trapped between Sandmen and a wall of fire, 474 walls them both through the fire, burning himself severely. As Chopra bolts for the ship, 474 makes a classic sacrificial charge to buy him time. Not that it matters, because Chopra is killed as soon as he gets back to the ship.

I'm not sure what the point was of the little attraction thing Gatiss threw in between these two. It doesn't serve the story beyond a bit of cheap humour. Both of them die without either resolving the attraction or growing from it. And beyond all that, it doesn't really make sense to genetically engineer a soldier to be strong, stupid and retain sexual urges. That's pretty much a recipe for disaster. The majority of other fictional military forces that have been engineered to be perfect soldiers, from the Imperial Space Marines of Warhammer 40,000 to the Unsullied from Game of Thrones, are generally asexual. I would slot this in as an In-Who-Endo.

While all this is going on, The Doctor works out that a bunch of video transmissions are floating about which are seemingly from the soldier's helmet cams. Nagata points out that they aren't wearing helmet cams, and The Doctor confirms there's something dodgy happening by finding a live feed from Clara. The Morpheus machines have somehow reprogrammed people and turned them into the Sandmen.

As they return to the rescue team's ship, they find Rassmussen there, unharmed. He reveals he is helping the Sandmen escape the base and spread to Triton where they will be able to feed on the local populace. Rassmussen attempts to lock them in with a Sandman, but they escape, and Nagata does the sensible thing and shoots him, much to the disappointment of Cara and The Doctor. 

As the three of them pile into the TARDIS and escape, The Doctor shuts off the gravity shields, sending the base plummeting towards Neptune, presumable destroying the Sandmen.  However, in a little epilogue we see Rassmussen is not dead, and is finishing off his little video. It turns out the Sandman infection doesn't require physical contact, only an electrical signal. This signal has been woven throughout the video, ensuring all who watch it are now infected. He ends the video by crumbling to dust in a delightfully creepy way.

A season highlight

This was a nice little twist ending and it kind of leaves things open for the Sandmen to reappear at some point. Clearly The Doctor will work out how to remove the infection from Clara and Nagata, but while he's not around, infection could well spread quickly. It's also implied that the Sandmen are still evolving, so any subsequent appearances could see them more human-like. 

This was a solid episode with a fairly interesting if improbable monster. The episode was structured perfectly, going neatly through introduction, investigation, escalation and resolution. Pacing was spot on, which can be tough in a standalone episode, with a solid escalation of threat level and peaks and troughs in tension. I also enjoyed that the solution wasn't really anything The Doctor did. All he was able to do was contain the threat. Or at least he thought he did.

9/10

Can we fix it?

The only thing I'd do here is remove the completely out of place "Chopra pretty," from 474. It added nothing and just seemed forced in. 

Other than that, top notch. 

Review - The Zygon Inversion

The events of The Zygon Invasion come to a head in this story's quite brilliant conclusion, The Zygon Inversion.

Season 9, Episode 8 - The Zygon Inversion

After last week's missile-laden cliff-hanger, we pick up this week with Clara trapped in her own mind watching helplessly through the Zygon mind link as her duplicate, Bonnie, tries to shoot The Doctor's plane down. Of course, Clara is made of stronger stuff, and is able to hijack Bonnie's body through sheer force of will. Not only does this allow her to foil the initial missile attack, giving The Doctor and Osgood time to escape, but eventually she also manages to blind-text The Doctor.

As The Doctor and Osgood determine that Clara is still alive, Bonnie begins fostering conflict between the humans and the Zygons. To this end, she forces a Zygon to revert to his natural state in front of humans and uploads video of the event to the web. She then sets about trying to secure the Osgood Box which as we learned last episode, is the ultimate sanction should the Zygon treaty fail. Having learned from The Doctor that Clara knows where the box is kept, Bonnie uses their mental link to interrogate her. Despite Clara's best efforts at double-talking around the questions, Bonnie learns the box is in the Black Archive.

Bonnie threatens to kill Clara, but is warned that she will soon find out why it's called the Osgood Box, and will then want to talk to her again. Clara's pod is packed up and Bonnie trots off to the archive, but not before telling her freshly returned US counterpart, now disguised as Kate, to deal with The Doctor.

The Doctor and Osgood have meanwhile found the place Bonnie filmed her video. Here they discover the Zygon she reverted who is now terrified he has destroyed all hope of a peaceful life for Zygons on Earth. In a scene that reinforces the opening of the previous episode, we see a good and peaceful Zygon just wanting to live his life in his new home. Unable to live with what he may have done, the poor bloke elects to kill himself.

Kate catches up with The Doctor and Osgood, taking them to the Zygon base. When they get there they realise that Clara's pod has been removed. Kate's UNIT guards transform and advance menacingly only to be cut down by Kate, who turns out not to be a Zygon. She reveals she escaped by the excessively complicated method of blowing the attacking alien away with the gun she was shown to have on her earlier. Crazy, I know. At least she apologised to The Doctor for killing them.

It's not Sonic, but it gets the job done.

The real meat of this episode comes in the final act as Bonnie enters the Black Archive and finds not one, but two Osgood Boxes, each with two activation buttons. Turns out this is The Doctor's plan all along. The buttons of one box will either revert all Zygons on Earth to their natural forms, or make their human forms permanent. The other box will either release a Zygon-specific nerve gas, or detonate a nuclear warhead large enough to destroy England.

As both Bonnie and Kate struggle to decide which buttons to push, The Doctor tries to convince them not to push either. Capaldi delivers a fantastically impassioned speech, which could have been made directly to the heads of most terrorist organisations worldwide (and a few governments too) with barely a changed word. 

Of course it all works out in the end, and as a bonus twist, The Doctor reveals this isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. Bonnie, now reformed of her radical ways, takes the place of the missing Osgood and the pair get on with the business of keeping Earth safe.

All whilst rocking some epic cosplay.

This one was pretty much a near perfect episode. I seem to recall one small In-Who-Endo at one point, but it obviously wasn't bad enough for me to remember what it was (EDIT: Oh that's right, it was the winking thing. Fairly harmless I suppose). The pacing was perfect, the resolution was wonderful, and it really gave Capaldi time to shine with a solid monologue to sink his teeth into. 

The one thing that didn't happen which I hoped would, was some kind of justification for changing the Zygon rules last episode. With a big room full of people in pods, it seems like there is no solid explanation about when they do or do not need to keep the humans alive. I really feel like this change was made so that we could be faked out about characters being dead when they weren't. Previously we would know they were still alive somewhere if there was a Zygon version of them.

Despite that, I'm ranking this one the best of the season, and definitely the best from Capaldi's run.

10/10

Can we fix it?

Nope. Nothing to fix here.

Review - The Zygon Invasion

The Doctor revisits the events of the 50th Anniversary Special as he and Clara team up with UNIT to deal with The Zygon Invasion.

Season 9, Episode 7 - The Zygon Invasion

We begin this episode with a little recap of The Day of the Doctor, confirming there were two Osgoods and showing us that The Doctor had a contingency should the Zygon colonisation ever go bad. It's apparently called the Osgood box. Then we catch up with Osgood desperately fleeing a Zygon and attempting to contact The Doctor. She is caught, but not before getting a message off. The Doctor receives the message in the TARDIS while he is yet again randomly jamming on his guitar. I'm going to go ahead and call that as his version of an annoying catchphrase.

This must be the only thing he does in his down time.

The Doctor goes out to find the Zygon High Command and find out what is going on. I tried to ignore the creepy undertones of an old man hanging out in a playground watching the kids before doggedly pursuing two young girls through the play equipment. Happily for The Doctor, so did every other adult human in sight. I suspect that scene would have ended very differently in real life. Before The Doctor can get any information from the Zygon girls, they are kidnapped by some other Zygons.

Meanwhile, Clara finds her neighbour's kid sitting in the stairs of her building. He says he can't find his parents. When Clara goes into his house to investigate, she is confronted by some creepy people who assure her everything is fine before forcing the struggling child into another room. All of this doesn't appear to phase Clara though, as next thing she is seen exiting the flat and tying her hair back. This struck me as a very deliberate act, and whilst my first thought was that it was a "things are about to get real," move, I now suspect it will become an identifying trait later in the story.

After finally calling The Doctor back, Clara meets him and Kate Stewart at UNIT HQ. There they are filled in with all the details of the Zygon situation. A splinter group of younger Zygons is discontent with remaining in hiding, and is demanding the truth of their nature is revealed. The whole thing plays out as a nice allegory of the whole Islamic State situation we have going on now, where disillusioned young people are being radicalised to the cause. The Doctor even warns that bombing the factional Zygons will only help to radicalise the rest of them.

After visiting the site of the Zygon High Command and some completely unnecessary In-Who-Endos around the way The Doctor operates the Zygon computer, this episode takes on a nice international feel. The Zygon threat is present across the world, with main plot points occurring in the UK (naturally) as well as the US and a fictional Middle Eastern country called Turmezistan. The group divide their efforts amongst these countries, with Kate going to the bizarrely named town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, The Doctor leading the UNIT strike team in Turmezistan, and Clara staying behind in England.

These multiple fronts allow each character to shine nicely. It was particularly fun to see Kate out in the field. She certainly seemed capable as a field agent, as befits the daughter of the great Brigadier. She meets a beleaguered town Sheriff in the now deserted Truth or Consequences who reveals some info on the Zygon uprising there. 

Not just a bureaucrat.

Meanwhile, The Doctor manages to stop UNIT from bombing the Zygon compound in Turmezistan, but during a ground operation the Zygons manage to fool the UNIT frontal assault team and wipe out the lot. The Doctor finds the captured Osgood at the last minute, and manages to capture a Zygon prisoner to boot.

Everything is looking good until we figure out that Clara is a Zygon, and the British contingent have captured and replaced a large portion of the population. Not only that, but the sheriff that Kate has met in the US is also revealed to be a Zygon double, and attacks. Zygon Clara speaks to The Doctor on the phone and reveals Clara and Kate are supposedly dead. Then she shoots a missile at his plane and we get a face full of "to be continued."

"Say hello to my little cliff-hanger!"

This was a top notch episode, only mildly tarnished by a tasteless joke near the start. Despite my early fears that moving to glasses form seemed to have yet again upped the power lever, they have avoided hitting the Deus Ex Screwdriver thing and only used them for opening locks.

The same can't be said for the Zygons though. They've only appeared once before since the reboot, but somehow they're already suffering from power-creep. Osgood even mentioned their previous restrictions as "the old rules." I've said before, if an established monster needs changing to stay scary or whatever, maybe reconsider using it.

In this case it could just be that this was changed to keep things mysterious around which Osgood still exists, or make it more believable that Kate and Clara could be dead. If so, there are better ways of going about it. More likely it was an excuse to make another Hybrid reference. I kind of respect that they are trying to keep the nature of the Hybrid obscure, but this is starting to look clumsy. 

Anyway, this was enjoyable, and I really am loving the large crop of double-parters we have this season. It really gives the story room to breathe and helps avoid the issue of Go, go, go, Geronimo! I look forward to the next part.

9/10

Can we fix it?

First and foremost, drop the sex jokes in the Zygon HQ. They were just too much of a jump at that point considering things are quite serious until then. If we absolutely need something light-hearted there, cut the joke in half. 

"Should we give you some privacy?"
"This is a bio-organic interface. This is how it works."

That's it. The follow-up joke about him enjoying it is unnecessary and dragged it out too far. The word "titillating" was chosen for The Doctor's response even though "stimulating" is almost as suggestive with the bonus of being more appropriate. The fact they went with the slightly more obscure term speaks volumes here.

I was going to offer a solution to what I see as an unnecessary change to the Zygon canon by tweaking the "new rules" scene with Osgood. On reflection though, I'd rather wait until part 2 to see where they are taking it before going down that path. 

It could all turn out to be a fake-out and Osgood is another Zygon decoy made from the surviving Osgood who is the human Osgood who is being kept somewhere like Clara is, and she spun all that to The Doctor to lead him astray. 

Anything is possible.