Tony’s flying high.
Moffat In Kickass
Capaldi Christmas Shock.
The Return of Doctor
Mysterio is on the one hand not remotely Christmassy beyond the pre-credits
sequence. But on the other hand, it’s the kind of episode you couldn’t really
justify on any occasion other than Christmas, because Christmas episodes have
to be predominantly for family audiences, rather than necessarily main run Doctor
Who audiences. They have to be heavy on fun, heavy on believable danger, and
have a threat level which is both grand and yet not universe-threatening.
They’ve been highly varied in the past, but this episode also pulls off another
odd balancing act – as well as being a non-Christmassy quintessential Christmas
episode, it’s both entirely family-accessible, while at the same time being
written by a geek, for geeks, as a love letter to that most geeky of geek
art-forms, the comic-book.
Four big ticks right off
the bat, then. Quintessential Christmas episode, no forced Christmassy
snowflakiness, geek-heavy and yet family-accessible. If it managed to do just
those four things, The Return of Doctor Mysterio would have knocked its responsibilities
out of the park.
It does those four things
before the credits even roll, so we’re in for a roller-coaster ride of
Christmas coolness.
The idea of the Doctor
being inadvertently responsible for the creation of a Proper Comic-Book
Superhero, protecting New York, while living a double life and pining after the
girl he wishes had been his high school sweetheart works well – it’s alien tech
as superhero food, which is not a million miles away from a classic superhero
backstory in the first place, but for the geeks in the audience, there’s an
added bonus, in that Grant draws the energy for his superpowers from what is
effectively ‘Earth’s yellow sun’ – a cute nod to the Superman origin story.
The villains here are part
classic superhero comic-book, part classic Doctor Who, and it’s a fusion that
works in Steven Moffat’s script – brains that are actually sentient creatures
in their own right and part of an intelligent plot to replace humanity has
something of Superman’s ‘Hfuhruhurr’ enemy, and a large dose of any number of
Doctor Who villains, from Daleks to the Brains of Morphotron in The Keys of
Marinus to Arcturus in The Curse of Peladon to a host of others. The synthesis
of the story elements is given a CGI helping hand with the brains growing eyes
unexpectedly – an arrestingly creepy moment – and the idea of their human-suits
being essentially little more than wallets for all the handy things they need
to carry around, including guns.
There’s a heaping helping of the Twelfth Doctor’s growing cynical, if
honest, appraisal of humankind too – one day of terror and all the people are
in a panic, as ‘the rich old men run to the safest place to hide, while they
send their young people to die.’ Oof – heavy, harsh, and depressingly accurate
social commentary over your turkey sandwiches, but as the world moves into a
phase of idiocracy, it’s by no means unwelcome, acting as the sort of catharsis
that the Seventh Doctor was in the days of Thatcher and Reagan – the Doctor is
increasingly becoming again the voice of fictional, objective rebellion against
humanity’s stupidity in choosing its leadership. Yes please, more of that.
The storyline of the Ghost, and Grant’s love for Lucy Lombard (for which of
course read Lois Lane) is absolutely standard comic-book superhero stuff from
the pre-cynicism, pre-modernism era, and while in movies, superheroes have been
getting darker for many a year, the success of DC villain-of-the-week fodder
like The Flash and Supergirl in recent years suggests a return to palatability
of such simple heroism. More to the point, while some may see the
straightforwardness of the super-love story as being unchallenging, here it was
interwoven with classic Doctor Who toing and froing, and there was enough
realism in both Grant and Lucy’s characters to anchor it in modernity despite
the simplicity of their goodness.
For the geeks, and for families wanting a giggle, there were plenty of
rational questions raised about superhero comics, questions every geek has at
some point asked themselves, but brushed aside for the sake of drama – if Peter
Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, why didn’t he just get radiation
sickness, lose his hair, throw up and die? If Superman’s got X-ray vision, how
come he can not use it sometimes, and
how the hell did he survive through puberty? How come every reader knows Clark
Kent and Superman are the same person, but Lois Lane, who works with the one
and loves the other, and is not a brain-dead moron, can’t quite figure it out
because her colleague wears glasses? Funny stuff that hits harder on the funny
bone for geeks, because it pretty much ‘belongs’ to us, and we’ve known it for
years. Having it raised in Doctor Who allows us to chuckle at our own geeky
love for stories like this.
Matt Lucas as Nardole, one
of the episode’s biggest question-marks going in, worked better than any of us
had a right to expect based on his role in The Husbands of River Song, and
importantly, his nature as an alien was firmly established. His flying the
Tardis, having a few unscheduled stop-offs en route to rescue the Doctor (can
we say ‘spin-off book, a la The Tales of Trenzalore, Melody Malone, Diaries of
River Song etc’?) gave him a unique alien vibe that we hadn’t realised how much
we’d missed till he showed it to us. There was a touch of (and here, feel free
to wail in derision) Romana about his dialogue and his equality of interaction
with the Doctor in this episode that absolutely acted as a screen-wipe of the
Husbands nonsense and earned him our attention going forward.
Most of all though, this
felt like a Peter Capaldi Doctor growing more and more thoroughly into himself.
After his series of immediate post-regenerative soul-searching about whether he
was a good man or not, and his series of going too far to try and keep Clara
Oswald safe, this feels like a Twelfth Doctor more secure in his nature. The
dialogue given to Capaldi here, and his playing of it, feels both new and like
coming home all at once, his talks with the young Grant given the time to
breathe, his dialogue with Nardole somehow freer than it ever was with Clara,
as though he doesn’t have to restrain himself for human comprehension any more,
but can be as odd and incisive as he naturally is.
The Nardole narration at
the end, telling us that for a while the Doctor’s going to be sad, but that
Nardole will be working to make sure he’s alright in the end, while a slightly
crowbarred expectation-hook for Series 10, felt reasonably right – more or less
denied the ability to mourn for Clara, he can mourn River instead, giving him
an emotional journey on which to go, and a useful alien friend to help him
through it.
And finally, the peek we
got of the ‘soft reboot’ that Series 10 has been marketed as looks like it
continues this trend of the Doctor being more and more himself, free of
existential demons, but learning it’s OK to have his own emotions while still
being a universal hero. The introduction of Bill as a chip-server who learns to
see the universe in a whole new light sounds like classic ‘start again from
scratch’ Who that will bring us something new in the chemistry between the
Doctor and his companions, and in the chunks of universal chicanery they have
to fight.
Beyond all the analysis
and the geek-think, The Return of Doctor Mysterio was Christmas Special FUN,
which is more than could be said for either of the previous two Capaldi
Christmas Specials. In fact, for general audiences, it was probably the best,
most engaging Christmas Special since at least The Time of The Doctor, without
an over-forced Christmas reference or a stupid robot anywhere in sight. The
Return of Doctor Mysterio – big ticks all the way down the list. The Return To
Form of the Doctor Who Christmas Special? Yes, it was that too.
