Oh look, surprise, still not dead, says
Tony Fyler.
As false cliff-hangers
go, there are those that make you genuinely wonder, and there are those that
overplay their hand.
The
Magician’s Apprentice…well let’s just say at the end of the episode, my
non-Whovian but long-suffering wife turned to me and said ‘I don’t buy that for
one second.’ The Moffatty timey-wimey no-one’s-ever-really-dead-ness is strong
in this one.
When you
push the stakes too high, you’re left with either an RTD-style deus ex machina,
or something enormously convoluted and clever, or you’re left with ‘I’m the
Doctor, just accept it,’ as a way of carrying on beyond the point of ultimate
cliff-hangery.
So Missy’s
not dead, Clara’s not dead and off they jolly well pop, allies with a pointy
stick against the heart of the Dalek empire. The pre-credits sequence of The
Witch’s Familiar has a sense of existing merely so Missy can be
enormously…Missy about things, and in terms of drama, it’s not a patch on The
Magician’s Apprentice’s pre-credit sequence, but it does at least take the
trouble to explain both the deus and the machina not only of why she and Clara
are not dead from Dalek weapon fire, but also why she didn’t die at the end of
Death In Heaven. And with that, and with the weirdest alliance forged, off they
skip, with nothing but a pointy stick and some self-belief, to take on the
Daleks.
In the
heart of the Dalek city, the Doctor and Davros are reaching a crisis point,
showing us something new – for all he’s got a reputation of being a grumpy
Doctor, Capaldi’s Twelfth hasn’t done outright rage very often, but here he’s
pointing a Dalek gun at Davros’ head, not solemnly as the Fifth Doctor did it,
but angry, furious, demanding – leading to one of the best sequences in recent
years, which will probably be forever known as the “Anyone for dodgems?”
sequence. Ultimately though, the Doctor’s faffing about in Davros’ chair
doesn’t achieve much in story terms, and it’ll be interesting to see whether
Capaldi’s favourite scene of the two-parter stands up to the test of time.
There’s a sense in which the whole “Of course the real question is where did he
get the cup of tea. Answer: I’m the Doctor, just accept it” could be taken as a
one-finger salute from Moffat to all the fans who take life too seriously,
and/or those who demand there be some logic in the storytelling. So – that’s us
told, then.
Before
long, we’re back in the dinge of Davros’ chamber, where the prevailing mood for
the rest of the episode is confessional.
By contrast, Missy and Clara’s ‘hero quest’ into the Dalek city is
mostly played for laughs, albeit sometimes, dark laughs with some solid
characterisation, particularly of Missy – the face she makes while Clara’s
hesitating to kill her channels at least Ainley and Simm, and possibly a little
Delgado too, into the uniqueness that is the Gomez interpretation. The throwing
of Clara into a potentially bottomless pit is telegraphed just a little too
much to deliver the crisp laughs it’s looking for, but still, it underlines how
Missy sees the universe. “Every miner needs a canary,” indeed.
Before it
was open to the world’s scrutiny, those who’d seen the two parts tended to
agree that most of the things that stopped it from ending up on the All-Time
Classics list were in the second part, and for me, the whole Dalek sewers thing
is one of them. It feels not only like convenient creation, but also a slightly
unfortunate re-writing of Steven Moffat’s Curse of the Fatal Death, with the
Master spending centuries crawling through endless sewers while the Doctor
hopped back in time to assure his own ultimate victory. This time though it’s
played for drama, rather than outright laughs. It’s also slightly unfortunate,
when dealing with sewers, for the liquid that occupies the Dalek you murder to
be brown. You can call it ‘decayed Daleks’ all you like, but on the playground,
The Night of the Dalek Poo-Storm will be played out up and down the country.
It’s a
concern that resonates of course in the ending, as the whole Dalek city is
consumed by Dalek sewage. There are some really interesting lessons on the way
– the incapacity of a Dalek to see anything outside its species as anything
other than an enemy to be exterminated, the idea of them continually screeching
“Exterminate!” as a way of recharging, which is genius. Missy’s goading of the
Doctor to kill the Clara-Dalek is gloriously mischievous, and her notion of
Clara being ‘the friend within the enemy, the enemy within the friend’ should
be enough to start the fan theories roaring, particularly as regards the way
she ultimately leaves the Doctor. But sewage – even Dalek sewage – still feels
like an unfortunate image as it vanquishes the greatest pepperpots in the
galaxy.
The meat of
the episode, the conversation between the Doctor and Davros, is a pure fangasm
in celluloid, and contains some of the best moments we’ve seen in New Who so
far – including a quiet moment of self-definition by the Twelfth Doctor (“If I
try, very hard, then on good days, I’m the Doctor, I’m not just some old Time
Lord who ran away,”), and most surprisingly, Davros’ rationale for being happy
that the Time Lords are back in the sky somewhere. That’s masterfully written,
because it takes us back to Davros the man, Davros the Kaled, before the Daleks
were even a reality in the cosmos. These two, talking like ageing citizens of a
scarred and battle-weary cosmos is a thing of wonder, Bleach more than holding
his own against Capaldi, and investing the scenes with a true equality, these
two old men of the stars sharing memories and philosophies that no-one else
would really understand. But along the way, there are unfortunate – if
necessary – moments. The prophecy from Gallifrey is mentioned in about two
lines, but it comes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing whatsoever, and turns
out to be the rationale behind Davros’ plans. The opening of Davros’ ‘real
eyes’ is a moment that’s made more than some fans go ‘hold on a freakin’ minute
– Davros has always had EMPTY sockets, hasn’t he? Not just closed, working
eyes!’ We understand why it was necessary – it’s a sentimentalist game-changer,
the old man, looking at his sunrise through his own eyes once more, and his
being unable to do so works as the spur to the Doctor’s compassion – but it’s pretty
much re-written for the sake of that moment what most fans have always
understood about the anatomy of Davros. Presumably the angry mob is already on
the march. But most of all, there’s the lost opportunity for impact. If Davros’
story had been true, all that wonderful work that was put into the conversation
between him and the Doctor could have stood as a testament to the man who
invented the Daleks. But having it all be a ploy to get the Doctor to
re-invigorate him and the Daleks feels not only weak, but ever so slightly
cheap as a way of ending the story. What’s more, we’re not really sure what it
says about the Doctor – the Doctor who claims he wouldn’t die of anything but
compassion, but yet was really masterminding a plan to destroy all the Daleks.
It works in the context of storytelling, but there’s always going to be that
after-image of the story that this could have been – the Death of Davros, the
confrontation of age, and mortality, and philosophies and compassion standing
as a last testament to the creator of the Daleks. As a grand strategy by
Davros, and an even grander one by the Doctor, it actually loses quite a lot of
its lasting impact.
Is The
Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar absolutely great Doctor Who? Yes,
undoubtedly. Will it attain all-time classic status? That’s a little more
questionable, and it’s questionable for the most part because of elements in
The Witch’s Familiar. It still bowls along, delivers plenty of thrills and fun
and quiet wonder, but there was an opportunity in The Witch’s Familiar to turn
the two-parter into something that could never be ignored, in the same way
Genesis of the Daleks can never be ignored. The death of Davros would have made
all the conversation between him and the Doctor honest, legitimate, the last
hopes of a desperate, dying man, recorded and recognised by the closest thing
he has to a friend in the universe. By choosing the path of clever planning,
and delivering an ‘Aha! I knew your clever plan was a clever plan, and planned
even cleverer!’ solution, what this two-parter ends up as is cracking Doctor
Who and a great series-opener, but just slightly less immortal than it could,
and perhaps should have been.
Still
though – sonic shades? The Twelfth Doctor – what a dude!
