Season 9 wrap-up

As Season 9 comes to a close, let's have a little look back.

My scores

Episode 1 - The Magician's Apprentice 9/10
Episode 2 - The Witch's Familiar          7/10
Episode 3 - Under the Lake                   8/10
Episode 4 - Before the Flood                 6/10
Episode 5 - The Girl Who Died             9/10
Episode 6 - The Woman Who Lived     10/10
Episode 7 - The Zygon Invasion            9/10
Episode 8 - The Zygon Inversion         10/10
Episode 9 - Sleep No More                    9/10
Episode 10 - Face the Raven                 8/10
Episode 11 - Heaven Sent                    10/10
Episode 12 - Hell Bent                           8/10

                              Season Average =  8/10

This season started off quite strongly with The Magician's Apprentice, but then again, I'm a sucker for Davros. Sadly this story fell short in the conclusion, as dos the next one. After this little false start, the season was very solid. The introduction of Ashieldr was a breath of fresh air. It's always fun when someone can challenge The Doctor, and Maisie Williams was superb in the role.

The loss of Clara was probably about due. As I've said before though, its impact was considerably lessened by the addition of two more episodes with her appearing, and the knowledge that she had what was likely a considerable life after that. Her death went from a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris to essentially showing her being rewarded for her arrogant behaviour with effective immortality.

For all that though, I know I would love to watch at least a little bit of the Clara and Ashieldr show. The things those girls could get up to.

Have fun, you crazy kids!

Ongoing problems

Thinking about my pet peeves, Season 9 had:

• A whopping 6 episodes with In-Who-Endos
• 3 episodes that resorted to Deus Ex Screwdriver
• 2 episode with problems associated with Needlessly Recurring Monsters
• 1 instance of there being Too Many Monsters
• 1 episode that got a little bit Go, go, go, Geronimo!

I'm not sure, but this could be a record with regards to In-Who-Endos. Most of them added nothing as well, like Clara's couple of references to a lesbian fling with Jane Austin. It's so frustratingly unnecessary.

I thought with the early loss of the Sonic that we'd get less Deus Ex Screwdriver this season, but the immediate introduction of the seemingly even more powerful Sonic Sunglasses kept it relatively alive. Still not as bad as some seasons for actual usage, but as a concept, the sunglasses annoyed me no end. I'm glad to see them go, even if the new design of the sonic is a bit... elaborate.

Add more glowing bits!

The large number of two-parters has all but eliminated Go, go, go Geronimo! as an issue. That said, a couple of those two-parters were probably more like loosely related standalone episodes. The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived could easily have been split up with no loss of coherency. Similarly, Face The Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent were only technically the same story because each picked up immediately after the last and were steps in getting The Doctor to Gallifrey. The stories themselves were reasonably separate.

I'll also point out that most of the stories showed The Doctor in his new Rock and Roll guise, playing the electric guitar for no real reason. I'm categorising this as his Annoying Catch Phrase, and very much got to the More of the Same stage.

Season Arc

The Hybrid arc was one of the most blatant since the reboot. Davros fully explained the prophecy in the second part of the first story, so it was out there early. This meant we had to have several stories that attempted to pile confusion onto the situation by adding a bunch of things that could be referred to as Hybrids like Ashieldr and Osgood.

In some ways, I felt this arc didn't have enough time to play out. Perhaps this is the one drawback of having so many two-parters. It would have been nice to see this arc play out over a longer period. There are a bunch of other things that could possibly be considered Hybrids that could also have been referenced here. River Song is basically a Hybrid. Rose Tyler absorbed the Time Vortex, so maybe that counts. Then there's the Doctor Donna and even Cyber-Danny. References to these as possibilities of being the prophesied Hybrid would have allowed a greater tease and more confusion.

Another way to fix this would be to reorder the episodes. Having Davros' story coming after initial teases of the Hybrid would allow more subtle references to possibly go over audiences heads, only to have Davros reveal the truth around mid-season. A good reordering of the season would be:

Episode 1 - The Zygon Invasion
Episode 2 - The Zygon Inversion
Episode 3 - The Girl Who Died
Episode 4 - Under the Lake
Episode 5 - Before the Flood
Episode 6 - The Woman Who Lived
Episode 7 - The Magician's Apprentice
Episode 8 - The Witch's Familiar
Episode 9 - Sleep No More
Episode 10 - Face the Raven
Episode 11 - Heaven Sent
Episode 12 - Hell Bent

There would of course need to be a couple of minor re-writes, but I feel like this would work quite well. We'd start with the very strong Zygon story which ends with The Doctor looking all shifty when Osgood refers to herself as a Hybrid (rather than him using the term). This wouldn't mean anything to audiences yet, but The Doctor's reaction would show it's important. I'd then downplay the reference to Ashieldr as a Hybrid at the end of The Girl Who Died by not actually using the term. Saying she is part Human, part Mire would be enough. By splitting up the Ashieldr stories, you give audiences time to forget about the Hybrid. Sticking the Fisher King story in there would add confusion by referencing the Minister of War, which I originally took as the season arc, coming as it did straight after the Hybrid thing seemed to be resolved.

After the events of The Woman Who Lived, The Doctor gets depressed about the Hybrid, because he has realised (wrongly) that Ashieldr is it, so he goes on his bender, and we get the Davros story. A quick break from that whole thing with Sleep No More, then into the three-part finale to wrap the season up.

Another small benefit of putting the Davros story mid-season is that The Doctor doesn't lose his sonic, and therefore the Glasses don't need to exist for most of the episodes!

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.

Review - Deep Breath

The Doctor suffers the usual regeneration confusion in the first episode of Peter Capaldi's run, Deep Breath.

Series 8, Episode 1 - Deep Breath

Sorry for the delay on this one, but I've posted some initial thoughts over on Geek-O-Rama.net. Below is the same review, with my suggested fixes as always.

Much like previous regeneration episodes of the New Who, we spend most of the time seeing the doctor getting his head around who he is now. He spends much of the first half of the episode being confused and forgetful. At the same time Clara spends the first half of the episode not knowing how to handle The Doctor's change to an older form.

We touch again on the theme of Companion abandonment, both physical and emotional, as Clara comes to terms with The Doctor's wholesale change and later when he runs off, gets a taste of that "what now" feeling we've seen companions deal with before.

It's made clear fairly early on that there will be no hanky-panky with this Doctor, leading to the final scene in which he makes it emphatically clear that he is not Clara's boyfriend. Early on, Vastra lays it down wonderfully, putting Clara, and by proxy certain segments of the audience, in their place.

For all her protestations, much of Clara's issue with The Doctor's regeneration does seem to relate to physical looks, so that whole scene is quite gratifying in many ways. On the other hand, Clara's implication that she's into older blokes could be a worrying indication that we've not seen the end of Hunka Hunka Burning Doc.

But how could he possibly have adventures in space and time when he's so... grey?

Bringing the Clockwork Men back was an odd choice and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I always thought more could have been done with them, but this felt a bit ham-fisted. Why did they need to be from a sister ship? In The Girl In The Fireplace it was established that it was the destruction of the mission computer that caused the maintenance droids to start cannibalising the crew. Are we to believe this happened twice? I'd have rather seen this as the same group of droids that had all come through a time window and become trapped. I'd hesitate to file this under Needlessly Recurring Monsters as this was only their second outing, but they were clumsily brought back, which is a characteristic of that particular problem.

Sure, I could have harvested a whole face, but where's the fun in that?

The dinosaur was a bit of a nothingness though. It served almost no purpose in furthering the story, apart from a very public immolation. I suppose it did bring the Paternoster Gang there, but I suspect a blue box crashing into the middle of Victorian London would probably have done the same thing. Not exactly a Too Many Monsters type situation, but more of a red herring.

Don't look at me. I'm irrelevant.

This episode went to great lengths to show the parallels between The Doctor with his multiple regenerations and the Clockwork Man with the constant replacing of its own parts. The broom analogy was a good one, which coincidentally I had seen used only recently as I read Terry Pratchett's I Shall Wear Midnight. I'm not sure if the silver tray scene was taking this too far or not. I think I liked it though. I do worry that this "who am I" business will become a sub-plot that takes up too much of this season.

There are a few choice In-Who-Endos between Vastra and Jenny, but nothing excessively crude. I even chuckled at a few points. Sadly, by involving Clara in these, Vastra and Jenny's relationship is somehow marginalised. The cool thing about Vastra and Jenny's relationship was not that is was a cross-species same-sex one, but that it was seemingly strongly monogamous. By showing that Vastra is into other girls too, really ruins what was a lovely duo.

Please ignore my wife and get nekkid.

And finally The Doctor thinks to ask the question he should have done in The Bells of Saint John. Who gave Clara his number? This really is all the tease for the season arc that we need. Unfortunately that's not spoon-feeding us enough, so they elected to have an entire epilogue scene introducing Missy, the Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere. In a far more tragic turn of events, she refers to The Doctor as her boyfriend. Goddamnit!

A couple of other minor concerns, I noticed The Doctor said "that's not the question" a couple of times. I'm not sure if that's just a one-off for this episode, or if it will become his Annoying Catchphrase. If it does, it's not as bad as it could be, although I'll reserve judgement until I've seen it used a few more times. There was also a touch of Deus Ex Screwdriver with the revelation the sonic is voice activated now.

And I just need to take a second to comment on the new opening credits. Do. Not. Like. There's a hint of something interesting there, but all the cogs and clocks is just a bit too clichéd for me. There's nothing wrong with the good old time vortex with flying names. It's a classic for a reason.

As nice as it was to see Capaldi take on the mantle of The Doctor (and I think he did it well), this episode was just too riddled with issues to score particularly highly from me.

6/10

Can we fix it?

First up, some easy fixes. We dial back the innuendos from Vastra and Jenny a bit, and remove any hint that Vastra is hot for Clara. There's enough comedy in this episode without it. Also, completely remove the final scene with Missy. It was unnecessary and the episode was already significantly over time.

I've already alluded to some of the changes I'd make to the whole Clockwork Men thing. Replace the reference to them being from a sister ship of the SS Madame De Pompadour. It didn't help The Doctor to learn this, and was only there to explain their reappearance to the audience. I'd make them from the same ship, but they got caught outside a time window (or even halfway through) when The Doctor shut things down. This would mean they were hanging around, not for thousands of years, but only a century or so. Enough time to wear out and begin the process of replacing their own systems with human parts, but still retain some clockwork.

Their origin could be revealed during The Doctor's dialogue with the Control Node, removing the need for the naming of any ships. If it was scripted well enough, things could be relatively obscure, whilst at the same time making the audience aware of the link to the previous episode.

"We were seeking replacement parts to repair damage to our ship. Our time windows were destroyed, but our ship still awaits us. We determined to wait."

It makes little sense for the clockwork robots to harvest human parts to make anything when they are trapped in a resource-rich environment. It worked when they were trapped in space, but on Earth in any timeframe they would have access to raw materials they could fashion parts out of. By highlighting that they are attempting to remain hidden until such a time as they can return to their ship, they sort of justify this behaviour again.

This would also mean the Control Node would have to have a whole face. If he absolutely needed to have half a face to show his mechanical nature, he should have a reason for that such as damage to the skin, as well as try to conceal it. To this end, I'd have his first on-screen victim be shown to claw at his face tearing some of the skin off. After that he would be seen wearing a Phantom of the Opera style half mask, which would harken back to the original appearance in Season 2.

With some further explanation from the Control Node about how over time they found their systems began failing. They originally manufactured mechanical replacements but started using human parts in order to blend in. Stories had begun to circulate amongst the lower classes about murderous and ghoulish nobles who would steal your flesh and couldn't be killed. At this point they fled France, but it didn't stop the revolutionaries cutting the heads off of a lot of nobles. But the human bits have a short lifespan, and need more regular replacement., leading to the harvest restaurant.

Everything else could play out the same way, even the flying escape pod and the cheesy impalement on Big Ben.

Honestly though, these guys better not show up again. They are supposed to be unique enough to make The Doctor geek out over them. Let's keep them that way.

Annoying Catchphrases

The Doctor has had a catch phrase or recurring idiosyncrasy off and on throughout the entire run, such as Two's recorder, Four's constant offer of jelly babies, or Three's scientifically impossible recurring suggestion to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. I suspect this is a way of giving fans something else to differentiate the Doctors. In much the same way as Roger Moore's first outing as James Bond in Live and Let Die saw concerted efforts to distance him from Connery, such as different clothing and swapping the Vodka Martini for a bourbon, each Doctor has his own unique costume, Sonic and sometimes catchphrase. This gives the fans something to discuss when comparing these Doctors, and conveniently opens the door to merchandise licencing for sonic screwdriver toys and official bow-tie / fez combos.

This is a thing that exists.

It seems to me that recent seasons have made a big point of ensuring The Doctor has a catchphrase. "Allons-y" seemed particularly forced from the mouth of Ten. Its introduction in Army of Ghosts was awkward, and the fact that The Doctor made such a big deal about it and how he should say it more often speaks volumes. "Geronimo" for Eleven was slightly more tolerable, perhaps because, for me at least, it was a more familiar term that worked in the context it kept appearing.

Of all the recent Doctors though, Nine had the best "catchphrase" with Fantastic! When I say best here, I mean the most flexible. It is able to be worked into conversation relatively easily especially as most of the stuff The Doctor deals with can be described as fantastic. Allons-y and Geronimo on the other hand are limited by their rather contextually specific natures. Just check out this video:

Season 7 not shown

Nine uses "Fantastic" in a variety of situations and delivers it in a variety of different ways.  Some of them I would hesitate to include as examples of catchphrase use because they fit so naturally. You can also see that relative to the number of episodes they appeared in, Ten and Eleven pulled out their catch phrase far less than Nine did. I'm not sure if they actively eased off this or just found it difficult to work it in. They even gave Eleven a second catch phrase of "[Nouns] are cool." This one was far more annoying than Alons-y and Geronimo combined, requiring a lot of work to jamb into the script. But it sure gave the fandom something to work with.

A catch phrase is all well and good, but it's best if it is used sparingly and can be worked in naturally. As shown above, a general or flexible exclamation is best. Something like "Great Gallifrey!" could work well, as it would fit equally for shock, frustration, awe and numerous other emotions. Rather pessimistically though I expect Twelve to be spouting "Whoopty-doodle" or some other meme-friendly sound bite at semi-regular intervals.