Review - Flatline

Clara takes a turn at being The Doctor, investigating some extra-dimensional creatures in Flatline.

Season 8, Episode 9 - Flatline

In the cold open we see a terrified man trying to report to the police some knowledge of who is behind some unspoken plot. He claims whomever "did it" is everywhere, before promptly vanishing. As the person on the other end of the phone line keeps trying to talk to him, we see he appears to have been sucked into the wall and stretched out of all proportion.

We join the TARDIS crew just after another jaunt through time and space, as Clara is set to be dropped off in London in time to meet a still unsuspecting Danny Pink. Unfortunately due to some external force, the TARDIS gets stuck in Bristol. Quite apart from that, it begins to shrink as the unknown force begins leeching dimensional energy from it.

BBC budget cuts take a disturbing turn.

Naturally The Doctor gets stuck inside, leaving Clara to investigate what's going on. This leads her to a community service maintenance team who are painting over graffiti. Local graffiti artist Rigsy fills Clara in on a recent spate of disappearances, including that of his aunt. All of the vanished people have been painted on the walls of a pedestrian underpass by an unknown artist.

Clara has fun teasing The Doctor by pretending to be him, but pretty soon things take a serious turn when a Police Officer vanishes from the next room by being sucked into the floor. All that is left when Clara and Rigsy arrive is a tree-like pattern on the wall. The Doctor quickly identifies it as a human nervous system, and the creatures attack again.

Clara and Rigsy manage to escape as Clara takes a call from Danny. A call that sounded highly suspect from his end. Not sure if I'm being a bit sensitive to In-Who-Endos here, but that seemed crafted to sound sexual. Danny was pretty cool about it though, almost as if he already suspects Clara is still hanging out with The Doctor.

Eventually we end up back at the underpass where the mural of the victims comes to life and menaces the community service work crew, sending them fleeing into the rail tunnels. Working through Clara, The Doctor tries to communicate with the entities, believing (or maybe hoping) that they aren't malicious, but jut misguided. It was nice to see him take this angle, as it shows he is still compassionate and understanding, even if he is curmudgeonly.

Obviously he is wrong, because the creatures continue to attack, and eventually take on Three-Dimensional human forms. That's where this episode loses it a bit. In their Two-Dimensional form, they are much scarier and far more threatening than when they take on human form and become yet another lot of shambling zombies. If it wasn't for the fact that their victims had already managed to get trapped down a network of tunnels with one exit, they would be easily escapable, despite their ability to remove the third dimension from things.

"Advance slowly and act menacing."

They do continue to leech power from the TARDIS though, which eventually takes The Doctor out of the equation altogether. This leaves Clara to come up with a plan to help get The Doctor back all on her own. Naturally this involves using the special skills of Rigsy to help turn the monsters' power against them. The Doctor is then able to banish what he suddenly decides to call the Boneless to their own dimension, warning them not to return.

After everything wraps up, we are subjected to yet another clumsily added season arc teaser with Missy. At least this one was appended rather than breaking the action to cram it in.

The pacing of this episode is good, managing to hit all of the major stages I outlined in Go, go, go, Geronimo! without feeling rushed. Keeping The Doctor trapped in the TARDIS was an interesting way to do a Doctor-Light episode. Shrinking the exterior of the TARDIS also allowed us this little moment:

Creepy and kooky. Mysterious and spooky.

I liked the evolution we see in Clara here. With The Doctor absent, Clara became him in many ways. All Companions are changed during their time with The Doctor, but to see one start to so closely resemble The Doctor without somehow absorbing part of him like Donna did, is a fun experience. Is Clara becoming more selfish, arrogant and cocky because of her time with The Doctor, or was she always like that, and being around someone who is the same way has simply allowed those traits to flourish?

Anyway, overall this was a fun episode only slightly hampered by what I see as a lessening of the monster when they became 3D.

8/10

Can we fix it?

Not really much needs doing here, so I'll concentrate on trying to fix the shambling zombie version of the 3D Boneless without a total re-write of the final act. I think the best way to achieve this is maybe just alter the way they behave, which will not only make it seem a bit more realistic, but also provide a gradual ramp-up of their threat level.

So when the Boneless are 2D, they move around freely as indistinct blobs slithering over surfaces and flattening out objects. Their first attempt to take human form is when the mural comes to life. Here we see fairly smooth movement along the 2D plane. As they become 3D though, they need to act more like babies learning to walk, stumbling and moving clumsily, rather than shambling like zombies. They dip into 3D and jerk about trying to work out how to get around in this new dimension before falling back to what they know and sliding along surfaces again.

In the early stages, this will allow the group to escape them by, for example, swinging across a gap on a chain or even just jumping over, much like Clara and Rigsy escaped on the convenient suspended chair. This forces the Boneless to take a long way around, because being unable to move through the third dimension, even a tiny crack is a huge obstacle.

This trick could ultimately be what forces them to move fully into the third dimension. The group think they're safe on the other side of a gap, when one of the Boneless pulls itself out of the floor or wall and unsteadily steps across. The Boneless' proficiency in the third dimension increases as the chase continues, and they spend less time stumbling back into 2D, and move more smoothly. They eventually start exhibiting the ability to project their dimensional power, rather than needing to touch or crawl over something to flatten it. This shows them rapidly learning how this new dimension works, and stops them from being just another shambling monster.

Everything else in this episode is okay, although I probably would have made sure it didn't sound like Clara was having some bedroom fun when Danny called her during the attack scene.

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.