Starring Matt Smith as The Doctor & Jenna-Louise Coleman as Clara Oswald.
"Danger. This is a warning. A warning to the whole world. You're looking for Wi-Fi. Sometimes you see something, a bit like this. Don't click it. Do not click it. Once you've clicked it, they're in your computer. They can see you. If they can see you, they might choose you. And if they do... you die."
Something in the Wi-Fi is killing people and The Doctor has taken up as a recluse in a monastery in Cumbria in 1207 whilst he mourns the deaths of Amy & Rory and tries to figure out who the heck Clara Oswald is as he keeps meeting her and she keeps dying. He seems to be a broken man when we first see him. A man needing the seclusion of his own mind to be able to work through the trauma’s life has given him up until that point.
Meanwhile, In London in 2013, Clara has reincarnated into a nanny / babysitter for her deceased friend’s husband and looks after his kids whilst he’s at work. She can’t connect to the wi-fi as it keeps disappearing so she phones the helpline a lady in the local shop gave her which just so happens to be the direct number to the TARDIS, hence when the monks rush into the Doctor’s sanctuary they tell him “The Bells of St John are ringing” meaning, the TARDIS which has a St John’s ambulance sticker on the front of it, is ringing. The end!! Or maybe not!
People all over the world are being killed as their consciousness and intelligence are being uploaded into a data cloud. The physical bodies are left behind and they appear on a screen looking scared not knowing who or where they are repeating the same thing over and over again. “I don’t know where I am” This reminded me a lot of the time Rose Tyler’s face was sucked off by The Wire and she appeared on a TV screen in Magpie’s shop. This is happening when the people are on their computers, trying to connect to free wi-fi. They see a weird looking link of alien looking symbols, click it and are uploaded and we find out later in the show that it was the handy work of the Great Intelligence, the man played by Richard E Grant who also appeared as the same character in The Snowmen.
The main villain at this point seems to be Miss Kizlet who is in charge of all the data uploads and the people around her who work for her but she isn’t just in charge of them, we see with the help of a tablet device, she is also in control of them and can affect their personalities using a slider scale to her own benefit, giving some of her workers more of a pushy personality than they might need or slowing them down to accept her control and commands over them. We see at the end of the episode when the data cloud is destroyed, that the people being controlled suddenly come to their senses and revert back to who they were with no recollection of what has been happening. One man says he was a delivery driver and only came into the office to use the toilet and it looked as though he’d been there a long time. Most if not all of the workers had been abducted from their normal lives and used as puppets to do Miss Kizlet’s work.
What made this episode great for me was Celia Imrie as Miss Kizlet. I’m a big fan of hers and she’s a great actress and it was especially sad towards the end when she reverted back to a child, lost and confused and stuck in a grown woman’s body, obviously taken by the Great Intelligence when she was very young and had her mind manipulated for all those years that she grew up thinking she was an adult.
I’m not a big fan of Clara Oswald. I don’t know what it is about her that I do not like, but I just do not like her character at all. She was pretty cool as Oswin Oswald, the girl who’s mind fractured into tiny pieces when she became a Dalek in order to protect her from reality by creating a fantasy world for her to live in until she could cope, but that was about it for me. Job done, time to move on to the next companion. Yet she turned up again in the Christmas episode called The Snowmen and annoyed me greatly, and again in this episode just to add salt to my wounds. If the writers had left it at those two appearances and tied up all her loose ends so she wouldn’t need to appear again then she could be tolerated, but miss bossy boots know it all, ain't fazed by nothing and no-one became a permanent fixture on the show and somehow became The Impossible girl, a woman who’s lived and died several 100 times and followed the doctor throughout history saving his life! Which small child came up with that bizarre twist?! Probably the same person who thought she deserved her own diner shaped TARDIS to roam about space and time in.
I digress. This episode wasn’t one of Matt Smith’s finest moments. I think he used them all up with Amy, Rory and River and in my mind it all seemed a little pointless. Obviously to reintroduce Clara back into his life using the Run you clever boy and remember me line but why here and why now?
He’d met her twice before and he remembered both those times, yet according to the future revelation that she is the impossible girl, how come he never remembered her before especially when according to her she’d been there the whole time, pointing him in different directions, and whilst I’m rambling about it, how come she didn’t remember all the times before when she was there? She was born to save the Doctor apparently and she did for 10 regenerations but if she didn’t remember any of it, how did she know she was supposed to do it? AND, why is she not supposed to be doing it anymore?
Whilst Clara isn’t that impossible to me, I do get that she needed a modern-day phenomenon to find her way back to the Doctor and nothing says modern day like issues with the wi-fi. We got to know a bit about her history in her present life, watched her interact with a man who knew her yet she didn’t know him and she trusted him a bit too quickly for my liking, taking off on adventures with him in his “Snog Box” after saving the planet with him, taking it all in her stride as if she’d been there before, which she apparently has but doesn’t remember.
I think The Doctor and Clara were such big personalities in their own right, that they never really fit right together. You always got the sense with Amy that although she was a feisty red haired ginger ninja, she was also quite vulnerable and needed the Doctor in her life which of course he had been there for all of her life, yet with Clara, she comes across as an adventure waiting to happen, as though she has all this energy for above and beyond the stars stored in her DNA waiting to take flight, waiting for the right ship to come along and take her away. Maybe that is the point of her, maybe she was born to be with the Doctor is some way, but to save him? If she had been a regeneration of Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, that could have worked. A Time Lady sleeper who had no idea of who she was until he came along and woke her up. I might have liked her a bit more then.
This episode warns of the dangers of wi-fi, yet seemingly encourages young girls to run away with a mad man in a blue box just because they can’t find anything decent enough about their life at that present time. There are a lot of trust issues and complications in this episode. The kids Clara looks after are not really that keen to have her around, the fact that she looks after them out of guilt, clicking open links in the wi-fi, running around with an alien just because he’s good looking and then leaving said kids she felt compelled to look after out of guilt.
Lots of holes in my opinion and it’s not
an episode I watch a lot of. Still, some great acting by great actors and it’s
always nice to see such big stars willing to take up roles in Doctor Who.
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