Whowatch Part 18
Fell behind on getting this one formatted and out the door, such that there were enough news items to discuss that'd usually go in the 'misc. upfront' bin I'm gonna make a whole separate bonus post about those.
Face The Raven
Heaven Sent
Hell Bent
The Husbands of River Song
Sean: And so here we are, at the Apotheosis of Clara Oswald! And joining us for this special occasion (written on my birthday) is Veronica Jane!
Veronica: That’s right, it’s me, the human equivalent of The Lodger; not particularly intelligent or funny but somehow back for a third time.
David: Veronica, we would never compare you to what ultimately ends up a Cybermen episode.
Sean: Besides, if any of us is the human equivalent of The Lodger, it’s me.
David: Terrifying that I’M the Whowatcher with a healthy sense of self-esteem, but I suppose now that we’re all down in the dumps, it’s as fine a time as any to face…the raven!
Sean: Caw! Caw!
With this episode, we see the debut of the third breakout star writer of the Capaldi era, Sarah Dollard. Dollard only gets one more story after this one, and it’s probably one of the iconic Doctor Who stories of the 21st century. For a debut though, it’s not half bad. Even if an anti-vaxxer is a major player in it.
David: It’s an extremely important episode that does an excellent job of pretending to be a regular episode until the last minute; a perfectly enjoyable mystery to unravel bringing back a few loose threads from across the last couple series where even Clara’s undoing seems like the sort of thing that’ll inevitably be more complicated than she expects, but still perfectly solvable. It isn’t stellar until the last several minutes, but you could argue that in a way that only serves to heighten the brutality of the switch - Elizabeth mentioned in a chat I had with her that Who’s schlocky roots make its heights pop all the more, and this is a fine example of that within the course of a single episode. I’m not surprised to hear Dollard does a truly gangbusters episode later on, the ‘capstone’ to Clara’s arc here is one of the best scenes the show’s had to offer as she gets the awful, merciful chance to head off every ‘here’s what happens with The Doctor when they lose a companion’ development at the pass.
Veronica: Extremely funny that it takes the Doctor about five seconds to go “Fuck that, I’m gonna spiral even harder than ever before!” in response.
David: Hey, he at least did it differently than usual! That’s kind of like progress!
Veronica: The two things that jump out at me about this one are 1) Are either of you DnD players?
Sean: I’ve tried it, but I think I’m more into Dimension 20 than actually playing. We’ll see if I can get a group going that lasts longer than a month or two.
Veronica: Because Clara has intense 'trying to meta-game your way out of the GMs puzzle and fucking everything up worse' vibes.
Sean: This is a woman who memorizes Trivial Pursuit cards. Of course she does.
Veronica: And 2) and speaking of loose ends, do we actually find out what happened to the woman? Did Rigsy actually attack her? Did Me do it to set up the trap? I know the actual answer is 'It doesn’t matter to the larger arc' but that kind of…bothers me a lot about it. Like it makes it feel more like a mechanical list of plot points that have to be hit instead of a natural story.
David: I absolutely think we’re supposed to take it as Me having subdued her in order to set everything in motion at the behest of the Time Lords, hence why she’s in stasis rather than dead.
Veronica: I will say that’s the only thing about it that bothers me (well…Janus face effects aside) in what is otherwise an episode where I go “Oh…this one.” and then ten minutes in I remember “Oh this one is great actually, why do I always forget that?”
Sean: I think it’s because it’s the relative weak link in one of the greatest sets of Doctor Who stories ever. It literally has the unenviable task of setting up Heaven Sent, the episode everyone claims is the single greatest Doctor Who story ever, as well as Hell Bent, the one where the fans get pissed because it wasn’t about Gallifrey Lore Bullshit!
David: Aw god of fucking course they threw a fit about that
Sean: Still do, to this day.
Veronica: Truly Raven is the spiritual successor to…whatever that YANA one was called.
Sean: Utopia. It’s better than that one by virtue of not having John Barrowman in it. And also being better written and more fascinating. I mean, in what other show can you have “a trap street where all the Doctor Who monsters hide out in a refugee camp” as a throwaway idea in an episode that, for the most part, is pretty good? That’s a show premise right there!
David: I would like a whole show just about the Cyberman who lives there and isn’t constantly destroying everything, and is therefore by default the most interesting thing that entire species ever produced.
Veronica: It’s very Jack Kirby in it’s “Whoops, it’s been ten minutes, time to throw in another cool idea offhandedly”
…god damn it, I just got that it’s a Trap Street that is literally a trap. I said I was the unintelligent one.
Sean: MOTHERFUCKER! I didn’t get it until you said it.
David: Hahahahaha damn, that’s great
Sean: So we move on from that to Heaven Sent, where–
>>KRSCH!<<
Justin: So this episode re-uses almost part and parcel the gimmick of Mummy on the Orient Express – unstoppable but normal-speed timewraith – to do what, hot take incoming, hasn’t been done in the history of nuWho before or since, namely making a finale that’s both a conceptually brilliant, watchable episode and an emotional climax for not just a companion but a whole era and style of Who. No disrespect to the coming Bill, who’s incredible, but there’s always been a part of me that considers the Doctor’s time in his Confession Dial to be the final bow of the character.
What Heaven Sent does so brilliantly – other than providing a showcase for set designers clearly having the time of their lives at the peak of their talents, because as previously noted I love it when there’s a little lever or button – is to directly address and then totally redefine the psychology of regenerating.
What verb has The Doctor been defined by, jovially or pitifully, for pretty much the entirety of nuWho [what do we always picture them about to do, before executing some brilliant plan]? Run. And for eight and three-quarters seasons now, run and regenerate have been synonymous. Just keep swimming. Keep scheming. Move forward. Never grieve.
No, no, says the Capaldi era. Regeneration isn’t running. Your new guise is always a bit more honest than your last, a bit less precious. Time Lords get new faces to force themselves to face old things. Your pain, your grief, your delusion is a diamond mountain an eternity thick, almost impossible to even think about facing: and without a way to trick yourself into a new face, a new facing, you probably wouldn’t even try to crack the frozen ice within you.
Regeneration isn’t running, and that also means a puzzle box – one more flourish of fancy gears – isn’t a distraction, isn’t, as so many of Moffat’s critics used to charge, a smokescreen for a lack of character development. The puzzle doesn’t show the Doctor off, at least not anymore: the puzzle, like his departed companion and his consuming grief for her, keeps the Doctor honest.
And in case all of that organ music I just banged out doesn’t make it clear: this is the best episode of modern Who by a mile, or would be if it built a world to visit, and Capaldi is simply the best to ever do it.
>>KRSHH!!!<<
Sean: Sorry, we went on a bit of a tangent there. Anyways, Heaven Sent.
David: Heaven Sent: The episode where Doctor Who can, in fact, punch his way out of a problem.
Sean: Duggan would be so proud!
David: I dunno that it’s the actual best Doctor Who episode of all time -
Veronica: Spoilers, and extreme hot take: That’s next season!
Sean: Agreed.
David: - though it’s up there and the case can be made - but I can see how it’d get that reputation because it is, overtly and proudly, The Concept Of Doctor Who boiled down to its most archetypal extreme.
Their adventures as both their “Christmas” and “bespoke Hell” forever rearranging itself into new configurations on the same theme, an eternal struggle they choose for themselves made on the bones of their past selves, squeezing out a little bit more about them with time but never too much, where they can be as clever as they please but what wins at the end is that because of the people in their corner, they simply refuse to lose. It’s showily brilliant as a showcase for everyone involved and would probably be The Doctor’s own favorite.
Sean: If I’m being honest, it’s a tad bit overrated. I mean, it’s pretty damn good, but the best parts are the fact that it sets up Hell Bent, which is amazing and I love it. Here though, we have the most exquisitely constructed puzzle box where the answer is “Doctor Who is the only one in here forever.” There’s fun to be had, but I’m more likely to put on Hell Bent or The Husbands of River Song than this. In some regards, it’s akin to a significantly less shit version of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s The Tempest, where it’s taking a formal device to its absolute limit. In this case, a single actor and one of the great directors of the age and of the great writers of the age working in tandem.
Veronica: Hey now, let’s not forget MVP Murray Gold here.
Sean: Quite right, the baroque soundtrack from him is an absolute highlight, elevating the episode even more by going against a lot of the things Gold was known for. There’s no orchestral choirs, no trumpeting booms, not even a ooooOOOOoooOOooOooO. The understated nature of the accordion makes the music amazing.
David: So good. It’s easy to talk about this as almost a blunt object of an episode - a ‘simple’ mechanism for delivering Capaldi being good at his job that counts on bowling you over at the end - but the work it puts in to keep you invested without fully recognizing the mechanism of the story in all its implications until the end must’ve been exacting, and for that matter, yeah, I’ve rarely had an emotional reaction to the show more intense than the reveal of what was really going on here. Bonus points for the unspoken, agonizing detail that it must’ve gotten worse for The Doctor with time as, over billions of years, the way back got slightly longer.
Veronica: Just to reassure everyone that I was not joking about being the dumb one, it took until my third viewing to realize that Doctor Who actually remembers the entire thing, even though he directly says that to the camera.
This episode reminds me a lot of that episode of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye gets a concussion and has to talk to himself to keep himself awake so what you actually get is a 30 minute Alan Alda monologue of 'look how good this performer is' except risen to a Super Saiyan God Blue level.
Sean: This is actually quite common with a lot of shows. All in the Family, for example, had Archie in the Bunker, where the titular Archie was stuck in the basement for an entire episode. Family Guy, likewise, had Brian and Stewie, where Seth MacFarlane talked to himself in a single location. This is often referred to as a bottle episode. Doctor Who typically skips these through having Doctor Who/Companion light episodes that are significantly cheaper than the rest of the Series. Love and Monsters, Midnight, The Girl Who Waited, to name a few. But here, Doctor Who has opted to go all in on the Bottle nature of the story, perhaps in contrast to the grandeur of Hell Be–
>>KRSCH!!<<
Justin: …which is why it’s so weird that Hell Bent does so little for me. All of the parts are there for a heart-demolishing arson of an episode, and Coleman sells the hell out of it, but I’m more convinced of the depth of Twelve’s grief when he’s stumbling around in pure sorrow like the rest of us would, not waving around a sonic like a wand trying to Moffat Miracle his way out of the death of a friend. I’m on record as not giving two shits about Galifrey and the concomitant Time War stuff, so I was predisposed not to care for this one, but it felt at the time and still feels like some combination of the BBC, Capaldi and Moffat lost confidence in the sparse end-note of Heaven Sent and had to tack a re-tread of the same ethical issues we’ve been dealing with since clear back in Father’s Day. I’m not heartless, and the episode does hit me in the emotions, but it often gets there by saying what Face The Raven and Heaven Sent left so wildly and achingly unsaid. I didn’t need to close the loop of Clara’s unnecessarily complicated origins as a living puzzle-box anomaly, but Moffat and a good number of fans did. It’s weird but I guess fitting for so much of what worked for me and didn’t in this era to be so close together.
>>KRSCH!!<<
Sean: Anyways, Hell Bent is the best thing ever and I will fight the boring people what don’t like it! It’s an extremely mad story about the single most fucked up TARDIS team being told by the entire universe that their relationship is toxic and making everything worse. It’s full of amazing ideas from the recreation of the Matrix into a gothic basement haunted with the undead screaming for a merciful end that will never come to the way Rachel Tallallay demonstrates time is frozen not simply with everyone standing still, but also an RBG effect around Clara as she moves. Just an amazing story. Oh god, Four and a Half Billion Years! Clara’s speech, which echo’s River’s all the way back in The Wedding of River Song. The script description for what Doctor Who is doing in the classic TARDIS. So good!
Veronica: Actually honest to god laughing out loud over here. Full on wheezy chuckle.
David: So when I was 13 or so and reading Watchmen for the first time, about two issues from the end, I suddenly remembered reading in Wizard Magazine years earlier that Ozymandias was the killer and at the end blows up Manhattan.
A bit into Hell Bent I unwillingly remembered people talking about The Doctor forgetting Clara.
Veronica: That sucks but also it’s been like ten years.
Sean: Roughly eight and a half.
David: And it was twenty when I read Watchmen! Doesn’t change the experience!
I don’t know how much it was because of that that I loved Hell Bent but wasn’t totally knocked out, vs. that as much as binging Who in one go helps me see a lot of macro-scale character and thematic work that I understand missed people at the time, it means I spent about two months rather than three years with Clara and this is my fifth companion turnover in about a year. Plus that, well, this was hyped up to its title and back.
Still though, Jesus what a good episode. The little touches like the TARDIS symbols on a military craft’s HUD screaming ‘THIS is how fucked up Gallifrey is’. The Matrix, I realize as I write this, being parallel to the Dalek underworld we saw at the start of this series. The actual best moment in, I have to believe, the entire franchise of the completely casual, almost confused “I had a duty of care.” And how that’s ultimately turned around into what feels like a successful version of what was attempted way back with Martha as The Doctor and companion come to a purposefully anticlimactic admission that this isn’t working out, except instead of playing as a cop-out it’s in genre terms that make it the knife in the gut it feels like the whole idea of companions has been building to all along. If I ever do some kind of big rewatch of key Whos in the future I’ll be particularly excited to rewatch this again with the chance to better appreciate it on its own terms, because in a less obvious way than its immediate predecessor that’s no less true, it’s a Perfect episode.
Sean: I have a duty of care might as well be Capaldi’s Doctor Who’s catchphrase, in that it breaks down his essential ethos as a character. Someone who wants to do good, to help people. And, as Clara has noted every single time he’s said it to her, she never asked for this. She never asked for him to care about her so much, the entire cosmos would collapse and he’d spend four and a half billion years in a torture chamber!
Veronica: It’s a damn sight better than “Geronimo” that’s for sure
David: Love that this ends with the two most ‘...okay they’re ‘good’, but holy shit they are TERRIBLE’ women of at least this era sailing off into eternity to go continue being terrible together with essentially zero consequences.
Sean: Of course, it will come to an end. As Me notes, “Summer doesn’t last forever.”
Veronica: Everything ends and it’s always sad.
David: But sometimes it’s beautiful too. And in the meantime…they have a time machine.
A time machine that looks like an American diner.
Veronica: Also, “Crimson Horror is proof that Moffat supports gay conversion therapy” Motherfucker is sending Clara off to have eternal bisexual space adventures in her own TARDIS! Don’t start with me on your terrible takes, tumblr!
David: I’m sorry what about Crimson Horror
Sean: I guess the bit where Matt Smith ad-libbed forcefully kissing Jenny? But that’s– I mean… Wha???
David: I mean that’s not great on The Doctor’s part but given The Doctor is immediately punched in the face for it I don’t think we were supposed to consider it as such. Which I suppose could open conversations: RE the limits of sympathy for our protagonist and how the show chooses to frame that, but that’s…a different thing from that other thing you just said.
Veronica: Also Moffat didn’t even write or direct that scene! Tumblr man, what a place.
Sean: Yeah, it would be weird for the openly queer Mark Gatiss to be pro-conversion therapy.
So I guess if we don’t have anything else to say, besides Doctor Who is totally half-human on his mother’s side, we can move on to A River Song Ending!
Veronica: I have three things to say! 1) The Doctor sitting with the peasants while all the other Time Lords ponce about in their dumb robes is extremely on the nose but also extremely good 2) I was expecting Leon S. Kennedy to show up and shoot those peasants 3) As good as Hell Bent is…don’t we all agree that it would have been a lot better if it turned out The Hybrid was, in fact, that guy from Daleks Take Manhattan?
Sean: Fuck off!
Veronica: You know those baby kittens from Gridlock were also Hybrids…
Sean: Everybody’s a hybrid! Are you not a hybrid of your mum and da?
David: ‘Maybe the Hybrid is a metaphor for how much you two suck’ is incredibly dumb but I do love it, so who is to say if it is good or bad
Sean: Doctor Who fans. They’ve decided that anything that isn’t a Spider-Dalek made out of Time Lord DNA is a dumb idea that shouldn’t be a thing. Because Doctor Who fans have the exact same brain rot comics fans have.
Veronica: Is it dumber than “The Hybrid…is me/Me!” the biggest “fuck you, audience” since Demon’s Run faked out the Doctor being the father of Amy’s baby? Twice!
David: Oh now I feel silly because I was still confused by what he said at the end of Heaven Sent. That’s the trouble with doing clever things! Idiots like us have to parse it!
Veronica: Don’t worry, the people doing the subtitles didn’t get it either.
Complete tangent: I watched these episodes with my wife who has hearing damage so I had to put the subtitles on and WOW are the Official Doctor Who DVD subtitles absolute trash. I don’t know if they’re having problems with Capaldi’s accent but my favourtie is “Physics of a triangle! You lose!” being subtitled as “Fifty-seventh time! You lose!”
Sean: Oof.
The Husbands of River Song marks the final story in the Moffat era, wherein he would leave to be replaced by the only sensible choice, the showrunner of the highly successful crime drama series Broadchurch, Chris Chibnall. And, as an ending, I love it. It has an air of an epilogue where the majority of the dramatic tension came from the ending of the Clara relationship, so it feels fitting for Moffat’s time on Doctor Who to end here with Doctor Who meeting River one last time before she’s off to the Library where we met her all those years ago.
And I find the farce kinda funny. Doctor Who being utterly amazed at the TARDIS being, in fact, bigger on the inside is a laugh riot.
David: ONE OF THE BEST SEQUENCES TO COME OUT OF THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE
Veronica: There is not enough appreciation for now genuinely, laugh out loud funny Capaldi Doctor is. I hope you both spent time praising “I bought it…ONLINE!” in the previous installment.
Sean: He’s so good. The way he plays jealous Doctor Who and “I’m sure this Doctor Who feller is dangerous and would notice you stealing his ship” are spectacular. The moment he realizes no one is actually doing a bit and they genuinely think he’s a surgeon is amazing. And River remains as horny and delightful as ever. Just the absolute best. Playing off and matching an actor like Capaldi is no easy feat, but Alex Kingston makes it look effortless.
David: It’s a final episode by Moffat about the unifying touchstone of the Moffat era being confused that Doctor Who continues past them, in the form of Mr. Warhammer 40K getting his head heisted. Not perhaps one of my absolute favorite episodes, great as it is, but one that works just as capital-P Perfectly for what it is as the preceding three and one that feels truly special. The end is here, but the night before lasted as long as it needed to.
Veronica: It is a beautiful, possibly too sweet if the portion was any bigger, dessert to cleanse your palate of the bittersweet meal of Face the Heaven in Hell
Sean: The Apotheosis of Clara Oswald, for short.
Veronica: …please pretend that meat is bitter and/or sweet in this metaphor and not, you know, savory.
Sean: No. Anywho, we come to the end of the Moffat era with this one, and the start of the… I’m sorry, what? Another two years? But this is the… and NO CHRISTMAS!!! Well, I guess we have one more Series of Moffat left to cover.
Veronica: Every season finale is last season finale
Sean: Every epilogue is a prelude.
Veronica: Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
David: And summer isn’t over just yet.
Next Time: A place that is no place. Superman and Clark Kent are one and the same person. It means life. All traps are beautiful, that's how they work. The rhythm and, and vocabulary, quite outstanding. What is this, Scotland? The end point of capitalism.