You know when you’re going along enjoying some Doctor Who, and then the show takes out a sledgehammer and smacks you across the face?
Yeah, it’s one of those weeks.
Summary
The Doctor and Clara have a grand old time getting kicked out of the most beautiful garden in the universe. When they get back on the TARDIS, the phone rings, and Rigsy (from last season’s “Flatline”) is on the phone. He has a tattoo on the back of his neck that is a number… which keeps counting down. They go to Rigsy’s place and discover that he has a partner and a baby girl, and that he missed work yesterday and doesn’t remember what he did, only that he came back with this tattoo. The Doctor explains that he had contact with aliens in that missing time (he’s been given Retcon to forget it), and that the tattoo is counting down to Rigsy’s death. Rigsy and Clara insist that the Doctor save him, so they work together to find out where Rigsy has been. They look for “trap streets” in London, places that the eye wanders over, and they end up stumbling onto an alien refugee camp run by Ashildr—now known as Mayor Me. She promises to keep Clara safe during their time on the street.
They’re told that Rigsy committed murder, killing a woman named Anah of the two-faced Janus species; the women of their culture can see into the past and future. This alien refugee camp has a precarious existence. The aliens are protected by light worms that cast a sheen over the camp, allowing people to see what they expect to see. Mayor Me keeps a very tight ship; Rigsy’s tattoo countdown in a chronolock that is linked to a shade (that typically appears in the form of a raven) who seeks out and kills whoever has the chronolock placed on them. The Doctor, Rigsy, and Clara witness one of these executions: an old man who stole from the camp’s medical rations to save his partner. Mayor Me refuses to lift the chronolock’s hold on him, doing so to keep the careful truce between so many different aliens intact. She admits that Rigsy was simply found standing over Anah’s body—there was no proof of his guilt. If the Doctor and Clara can convince the rest of the camp that Rigsy is innocent, she’ll release him. Clara finds out from one of the denizens that the chronolock can be passed to another person, if that person is willing to take it on. She has the idea to take it on herself, since Me promised to protect her, figuring that it will buy them more time in case it’s hard to convince people. Rigsy is reticent, but Clara insists.
They go to speak to Anah’s son, Anahson—who turns out to be her daughter. She was hiding as a boy to stay safe, since only the females of their species have the ability to see through time. Anahson knows that Me created this whole frame up to bring the Doctor to the camp, but she can’t see how this will affect the Doctor because his timeline is so confusing. They go back to the chamber where Anah’s body is being kept, and the Doctor realizes that she’s still alive, just being kept in stasis. The only way to release her is through the control panel, which has a keyhole for the TARDIS key. The Doctor uses his key, releasing Anah, and getting a metal band wrapped around his arm for the trouble. Me admits that it’s a teleportation bracelet, a bargain she struck with another species to keep the aliens on her street safe. She asks the Doctor for his confession disc, which he hands over. She goes to take the chronolock off Rigsy, so Clara admits her scheme. Me is shocked; the contract she has with the shade only allows her to lift the chronolock on the person she issued it to… she cannot lift it from Clara.
The Doctor threatens Me, demanding that she save Clara, but Clara talks him down. She tells the Doctor that this was her choice, and her mistake, and begs him not to be angry at others for it. She tells him that she knows he’ll do badly following her death, and asks him to not to seek revenge or hurt anyone as a result. She asks him to be proud of her bravery, for facing her death the same way Danny Pink did. She goes out to the street to face the raven and dies. The Doctor tells Me that Clara asked him not to be angry for her sake, not his, and tells her that she would be wise to stay out of his way from now on. Me activates his teleportation band, and the Doctor disappears.
Commentary
So, um. I binge-watched Jessica Jones this weekend and decided that I’d use Doctor Who as a recovery from that…
…haha.
We knew that this was Clara’s last season (she’s set to appear in the final episode, but knowing Who, that could mean anything; as a hologram, as a past version of herself, as a figment that the Doctor’s brain conjures up in a moment of crisis). And Steven Moffat promised that Clara’s exit from the show was going to be final in a way that no New Who companion has been so far. If this is truly Clara’s death, then it would seem to be true—the Doctor has lost many people, but Clara’s exit makes her the first on-screen companion to die since Adric, a Fifth Doctor’s companion, way back in 1982.
This episode sees the return of Rigsy, and that poor man cannot catch a break. There are a number of topical aspects to this episode that look very different when examined without the sheen of aliens and time travel, and the idea of framing a black man for murder to appease a tense community cannot be ignored in this context. Ashildr nearly kills an innocent man, robs his infant daughter of a parent, for nothing but her own agenda. Her ploy required that she pick someone the Doctor already knew, of course, it’s just so upsetting that it had to be him. One can only hope that Rigsy will make it back to the Doctor one day and get to have an adventure that doesn’t put his life and happiness in such needless jeopardy. (He’d be a great companion to a female Doctor, methinks. Having an artist companion would be an awesome change-up from the usual.)
Can we talk about the Twelfth Doctor and his way of handling children? Because I know everyone loved Eleven and Stormageddon, but I think I prefer Capaldi with kids. His simultaneous wonder and daddy instincts make him seem so much safer than recent incarnations. Which is particularly funny since he’s supposed to come off a bit edgier than his predecessors… but try and convince me of that when he’s tying some random kid’s shoe, and getting all awed of Rigsy’s baby.
This episode is the second of the season to be penned by a woman—after a long deficit in that regard—and Sarah Dollard had some excellent credentials to recommend her to the show (including Merlin and Being Human). It’s a sharp script, layered and full of many new ideas that I hope become staples of the future. The use of trap streets made me assume that the Doctor was about to find Diagon Alley, and has endless possibilities for hidden aliens communities on Who. That said, the fact that Me is running a refugee camp is extremely topical right now, something that the show could not have predicted when the episode was in production. And to Doctor Who’s credit, these aliens are not demonized for their plight, distrusting as they are. We see how hard they must work to survive, how carefully their lives are policed.
Mayor Me is trying to do something good with her influence and endless experience, but she is essentially wielding martial law over these beings, with no recourse for unacceptable behavior aside from death. It will be interesting to find out who she made this bargain with, protecting her little colony in exchange for the Doctor. If she doesn’t appear for the rest of the season, we can count on more from this community again.
And then there’s Clara. The instant it was made clear that the chronolock could be transferred, you knew she was going to take it on for herself. The question was only how bad the outcome could possibly be, which didn’t become obvious until Me’s usual resolve cracked.
I expect that there’s a contingent of fandom that will be upset that Clara’s exit was not more dramatic, on par with Rose or Amy’s big bows. But this is a better call for Clara; her recklessness has been a theme this season, and yet she never apologizes for it, not even here at the end. Rather, she poses the question to the Doctor that every companion deserves to ask—if he is allowed to be reckless, then why can’t she? Clara was in it for the danger, for the mystery, for the ability to be hero. She got her wish. It doesn’t seem like a punishment for her choices, merely a logical outcome, one that she accepts because she’s always known it was coming. It is a logical outcome for the Doctor as well—the only difference for him is that he is, as he put it, slightly less breakable.
I’ve also noticed that there has been some commentary by viewers this season on being aggravated at Clara’s prolonged goodbye. This season has telegraphed her impending departure pretty heavily, giving us a fake-out death scenario in practically every story. And again, I’m not bothered by it. For my part, the surprise factor is never key to my enjoyment in a companion’s swan song. Every single costar on the show has announced their exit beforehand, and every single Doctor for that matter. It’s not the unknown that gets me—it’s the emotional impact of the goodbye. So far, every single companion has delivered in that regard. In fact, Clara’s reckless behavior this season made it all come together; allowing the audience to become accustomed to her cavalier attitude makes us complacent, unconcerned. By the time that it’s clear Clara isn’t going to get out of this particular scrape, the inevitability of it is painful in the extreme. We lost Clara Oswald a long time ago. It’s just taken a while for her number to come up.
Perhaps most important of all, she died saving the life of one good friend. Because we’re so accustomed to companions doing extraordinary things in the Doctor’s name or their own, that we forget how important it is for them to do the subtle, smaller things that good people do. Her farewell is a perfectly constructed scene, allowing the two of them only enough time to say everything that matters without filters. Every second has to count.
And because Clara is a companion that has seen so much of the Doctor’s life, she’s one of the few who can ask him not to rail at her death and become the worst version of of himself. She echoes the words that she said to him back when he wore a different face: “Don’t be a warrior. Promise me. Be a Doctor.” And we know from the look on his face that it might be too much to ask of him, but you know those words will matter down the road. For all that Clara Oswald was on the TARDIS to fulfill her own desire for adventure and excitement (a noble cause indeed), when it’s over, she takes care of the people who matter to her. She has every right to ask the Doctor to be proud of her, and is every bit as brave as she asks herself to be.
If I had a single nitpick, it’s with the editing; the shots of Clara’s final cry from multiple angles replayed is gratuitous, and does nothing to make the scene more impactful—if anything, it makes it seem more like a parody. But other than that, it was extremely well done by everyone involved.
Bits and bobs of note:
- Rigsy was given Retcon, the same amnesia drug popularized on Torchwood.
- Among the aliens we see in the camp are a Sontaran, two Judoon, and an Ood fixing up a Cyberman. (Can we get an episode about their friendship? I had so many questions.)
- Clara name-checks her kissing pal Jane Austen again.
- The Doctor pulls out his response cards that we saw in “Under the Lake” when he’s trying to break Rigsy’s impending death to him.
Emmet Asher-Perrin gave herself a tear-induced headache. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
martial law, not marshall law
Otherwise, great review.
“Martial” law, please.
I really thought, following up on the “why do they always run?” during the death of the shade’s original victim, that the shade had no power over those brave enough to “face the Raven.” I still wonder if that isn’t going to have some further implication, particularly since it seems odd for the Doctor to leave Clara lying in the street and going immediately to face off with Ashildr.
I hope Ashildur doesn’t get to walk away from this. While it’ll be good if the Doctor doesn’t go all Family-of-Blood on her, she still put an innocent man’s life in danger just to get the Doctor’s attention. That’s pretty close to big-bad territory. She’s repeating the same mistake that she made before, not respecting the intrinsic valueof mortal lives. She could have just dropped the Doctor a line and replicated the lock trap without threatening to kill someone. I’d think a TARDIS lock would be mysterious enough on its own to sucker him in.
The climax didn’t really do much for me somehow, perhaps because I’d been spoiled that this was Clara’s last episode and so it was very predictable that she’d end up taking Rigsy’s fate onto herself. The farewell was nicely written and acted and all, but it didn’t really move me.
But Rigsy’s TARDIS shrine… that brought tears to my eyes.
I wonder if there are still countless copies of Clara scattered throughout the timeline, or if undoing the Doctor’s death on Trenzalore undid her fragmentation as well. If it’s the former, it’d be easy to bring Coleman back at any time, just not as Clara Prime, as it were.
Anyway, I’m getting a little tired of how every modern companion except Martha has had to be forced to leave the Doctor through some contrived and tragic twist of fate. That rarely happened in the original series; usually companions left because they wanted to go home/settle down (Ian, Barbara, Dodo, Ben, Polly, Victoria, Harry, Tegan, Turlough, and apparently Ace judging from an allusion in The Sarah Jane Adventures) or because they fell in love (Susan, Vicki, Jo, Leela), or because they found some other calling (Steven, Liz, Romana, K9, Nyssa, Mel). Discounting the short-lived companions Katarina, Sara Kingdom, and Kamelion, Adric was the only major companion who died; and only Jamie, Zoe, Sarah Jane, and Peri were made to leave involuntarily (and I just realized that in all four cases, it was because of the Time Lords’ actions in one way or another). So the majority of companions left the Doctor by choice. In the new series, though, Martha’s the only one who did so, and everyone else was determined to be the Doctor’s soulmate forever and ever and ever until cruel cosmic fate ripped them away in some extremely convoluted and arbitrary way. Sure, it’s more dramatic that way, but it’s become kind of a cliche by this point. I liked it better when Clara left the first time.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the Doctor now has perfect control over the TARDIS, unlike the original series, where for his first four or five lifetimes his control was inconsistent at best. So people tended to get swept away in the TARDIS because they had no other choice, so when a rare opportunity to return home arose, they tended to take it. But now the Doctor can go anywhere and anywhen he wants, and Clara represented a new kind of companion who’s basically commuting between everyday life and TARDIS life. The Ponds did that to some extent, but it defined Clara’s companionship from the start. She didn’t have to stop traveling and go back to her cozy life, because she was never away from her cozy life for more than one trip at a time. And even if she or the Ponds had a falling-out with the Doctor, he’d still drop back in on their lives sooner or later and they’d make amends. So with either the Ponds or Clara, the only real way to write them out is to kill them. Still, I’d like to see another Martha situation, where the companion leaves but still occasionally appears as a guest star.
I felt Clara’s exit was far too overdone to have any sort of emotional impact on me. That very-very long speechifying followed by the slo-mo sequence. Good grief, cut it down by half and then half again and it might have worked; swift deaths make for more heartwrenching moments. Between Clara starting her speechifying and her finally going you could have had time to go make a cup of tea and come back and she’d still not be dead. In short, too much Clara love not enough Clara death. The rest of the episode I enjoyed more in the book Return of the Living Dad. This could have been so much more than it was.
I though the episode was basically sound but it felt a little too rushed. There was such gold in the idea of the alien refugee street but what with Ashildr’s plot and having to find the street and reintroduce Rigsy, it just felt like we didn’t get enough of it. Really, I feel like we should have ditched the awful “Sleep No More” and either made this a direct two-parter (maybe with part one ending on the revelation of Ashildr running the street and Rigsy being under a death sentence for murder), or an indirect one like Ashildr’s earlier one – maybe another adventure with Rigsy that establishes them as in touch so that at the start of this one we can save some minutes by just having asking for help.
The Ood’s choice in the refugee street is interesting because humanity enslaved them in the 39th century (I wonder if it happened as a means to increase the workforce after the “let’s do away with sleep” experiment in the 38th century failed spectacularly)… before that, they were free-living Ood with only their brain in their hands, and I believe the Ood here, in the 21st century refugee street, had an Ood-sphere… which means it was a time-displaced Ood. Wonder how it got there. Or it was just another case of people in charge of the episode not thinking things through.
@@.-@: I’d prefer they ditch the “commuting companion” idea altogether, and yes, leave room for ones who leave and aren’t expected to show up again. Whether they do that by making the Doctor have less control of the TARDIS (which would be welcome in my book, the Doctor needs some nerfing), or just by making the Doctor’s personality (through regeneration or just trauma) more towards not being interested in a “special buddies” relationship, you’re either a fellow traveler or you’re someone he might occasionally run into again but not make a special effort to see all the time). I don’t like this new mold of the Doctor who’s like a cosmic Kramer, the next door neighbor who bursts into your normal life with wackiness and then leaves until the next time. Travelling with the Doctor should be a choice with a price to it.
Am I the only one who finds Ashildr/Me an underwhelming character? She’s been tossed in this season as this important recurring figure who keeps turning up in the Doctor’s life and having this epic saga behind her — sort of like River Song without the flirty stuff — but it’s all just too cursory to really feel earned. Maybe if her appearances had been spread out over a couple of years before we got to this point, rather than being crammed into just a few episodes, she would carry more weight. Though part of it is that I’m just not impressed by Maisie Williams. I hear people talking about her as if her casting were some great coup, but I find her acting rather bland.
This episode was impressive. It’s starts with lots of clues and little time to solve the mystery, then suddenly everything… stops. Every question has been answered (except for who asked Mayor Me to do it of course), and we get to the real subject, with the episode taking the time to say good bye to Clara. And her death feels true. Nine and Ten also died by sacrificing themselves to save a single person, so it’s true that’s what the Doctor would have done, and even he admits it. In fact he did the exact same thing in Mummy on the Orient Express; the difference being that the Doctor has a better plot protection than the companions. And her plan was actually clever, and felt far less risky than hanging from the TARDIS high above London: there wasn’t even any need for so much foreshadowing of the consequences of her risk taking behaviour. There was no way she could have guessed this wouldn’t work, and then she faced her death with dignity. Her impassionate speech forbidding the Doctor to avenge her was great. You can’t blame Mayor Me either. Actually you can, for the death of the man who just stole drugs for his wife. But apart from that… It’s just teleporting the Doctor far away from the TARDIS, he has seen worse, and that’s enough to save her city. And contrary to her first adventure, this time it would have been much harder to just move everyone, so it’s easy to believe that she had no choice, and the cost was actually very low. And then we get to the Doctor’s final speech, and… it’s clear there’s really no point in him playing good cop. I liked the memorial on the TARDIS, it’s good that the episode doesn’t forget Rigsy at the end. He would indeed be a great companion, if it weren’t for his daughter.
It’s the end of episode 10, and we still have no idea who the Minister of War is, or how those hybrids will come into play…
@@.-@: Clara was supposed to leave in Last Christmas, in which case she would just have grown old. It’s not impossible for a companion to leave their life with the Doctor, and maybe the next one won’t need a tragic death.
I hope we’ll see more of that refugee street. Especially having them interact with the Zygons, as Mayor Me seemed to be envious of their position compared to the rest of her aliens. There could be an interesting story there.
This episode was impressive. It’s starts with lots of clues and little time to solve the mystery, then suddenly everything… stops. Every question has been answered (except for who asked Mayor Me to do it of course), and we get to the real subject, with the episode taking the time to say good bye to Clara. And her death feels true. Nine and Ten also died by sacrificing themselves to save a single person, so it’s true that’s what the Doctor would have done, and even he admits it. In fact he did the exact same thing in Mummy on the Orient Express; the difference being that the Doctor has a better plot protection than the companions. And her plan was actually clever, and felt far less risky than hanging from the TARDIS high above London: there wasn’t even any need for so much foreshadowing of the consequences of her risk taking behaviour. There was no way she could have guessed this wouldn’t work, and then she faced her death with dignity. Her impassionate speech forbidding the Doctor to avenge her was great. You can’t blame Mayor Me either. Actually you can, for the death of the man who just stole drugs for his wife. But apart from that… It’s just teleporting the Doctor far away from the TARDIS, he has seen worse, and that’s enough to save her city. And contrary to her first adventure, this time it would have been much harder to just move everyone, so it’s easy to believe that she had no choice, and the cost was actually very low. And then we get to the Doctor’s final speech, and… it’s clear there’s really no point in him playing good cop. I liked the memorial on the TARDIS, it’s good that the episode doesn’t forget Rigsy at the end. He would indeed be a great companion, if it weren’t for his daughter.
It’s the end of episode 10, and we still have no idea who the Minister of War is, or how those hybrids will come into play…
@@.-@: Clara was supposed to leave in Last Christmas, in which case she would just have grown old. It’s not impossible for a companion to leave their life with the Doctor, and maybe the next one won’t need a tragic death.
I hope we’ll see more of that refugee street. Especially having them interact with the Zygons, as Mayor Me seemed to be envious of their position compared to the rest of her aliens. There could be an interesting story there.
I am so sad about Clara departing the show (and yes, dying. But…) I will be the first to admit I didn’t enjoy the way she’s been written at times – audience surrogate, weird and forced character arc – but Jenna Coleman was always a bright spot in the show for me from her first appearance on.
That said, I had to watch the episode a second time to feel the emotional weight of the death scene. It didn’t really work for me on the first viewing, and I wasn’t even spoiled for it (except in the general sense of knowing the actress was leaving the show.)
That is, if it even was a death scene. (That uncertainty, I think, was largely why it didn’t work for me, emotionally, the first time.) It’s difficult to think that the Doctor, who went in with a fairly good understanding of the mechanics of the trap, wouldn’t try harder to save Clara, or pull something out of thin air at the last minute, as cheap as that might have seemed. That he’d let Ashildr, who has shown herself to be a very creepy tyrant, win.
But more, nothing this season has been what it seemed. And Clara’s died before.
(And with the glowworms, was the Doctor just seeing what he expected to see? Although I’ve learned not to read too much into details here or in Sherlock the last few years.)
I thought the script was clever enough and well-paced for all the lifting it had to do, and I think Sarah Dollard is clever in that way Neil Gaiman is clever – there isn’t much that’s truly original, but the familiar and the fabled are put together into an interesting collage: here with notes of Harry Potter, weird history, old gods and monsters, ravens (Poe?) and Death Note.
I stopped watching Game of Thrones a long time ago but remember Maisie Williams as being good beyond her years. I thought she conveyed Me’s ancient weariness well and was believeably shocked and sorry and a little scared.
As far as Companion deaths – I’m still not over a recent-ish one in the Doctor Who Big Finish audios (I won’t spoil it), so I’ve had more than enough myself.
Edited to add – another great review, Emmet Asher-Perrin! Thanks for your insights and a good and safe place to discuss these ideas.
@7 In the commentary to the first season Game of Thrones episode ‘Lord Snow’ Maisie Williams talks about how, when she was working with Sean Bean, she noticed that he was achieving great affect without visibly appearing to do anything, and that she tried to learn from that. I think that that explains why her acting might seem too understated to some people, but I think it works, with subtle facial expressions and the eyes.
I liked this episode, but the biggest problem was that, in the rush of everything going on, there was no reason to care about the street. All we saw of them was that they were willing to let an innocent man die to protect the cohesion of their community (and Grump says this straight out, to Claria’s face), which isn’t very sympathetic at all, so it was hard to have any sympathy for Me putting Rigsy’s life at risk to trap the Doctor in order to protect this community of jackasses.
I though Me was intentional played flat. It makes sense to me that someone who’s memories are mostly in diaries and can expect everyone around them to die soon wouldn’t be very lively.
To be honest, this one left me underwhelmed. I picked up on the same things that JanKafka did. Why did the glow worms make the Doctor and Clara see humans? I didn’t buy cybermen and Ood in the camp (how do you get a refugee cyberman, and what is the Ood doing there?). Why put the countdown timer to your death on the back of your neck where you can’t see it? It didn’t make sense the Ashildr would stage this elaborate setup to get the Doctor to come visit since she obviously had the ability to send him messages by less intrusive ways (picture on Clara’s phone). The level of magic also seemed high (glow worms and shades and seers, oh my).
These feel a bit nitpicky. I usually can shrug off most of these things. I am usually on board with the Doctor Who as mythos that Moffat seems to follow, but the number of incidents of sloppy thinking in this one just seemed a bit high.
I could possibly have let that go if it weren’t for the ending. I absolutely didn’t buy that the Doctor would just stand there having a conversation instead of trying to do something. Earlier in the season, it was a major point that the Doctor always came up with some way out of any corner he has been backed into. It was jarring to see him not even trying. Heck, at the very least I would have expected him to ask Clara to transfer the chronolock to him. She wouldn’t have done it, but that would have made a braver choice.
Emily described this as Clara dying to save a friend. But that isn’t what happened. She took the chronolock because she thought she had a clever loophole. There was some acknowledgement that it was a risky strategy, but one of the central points about Clara is that she no longer really seemed to believe in risk. She didn’t even accidentally save him, because Ashildr was about to revoke the lock if it was still on him (and how contrived is it that it can only be revoked if it hasn’t been passed on?).
In the end, it just all left me cold (which wasn’t at all helped by the slo-mo and artificial gravitas). It wasn’t a completely arbitrary Tasha Yar death, but it didn’t seem particularly meaningful either. Danny died saving the world, and then passed on a second chance to save a child. Clara died because she didn’t know all of the rules, and no one was really the better for it. It really felt like they started with four boxes to tick (show Clara getting more reckless, give Clara the opportunity to tell the Doctor to be a doctor not a warrior, kill Clara based on her recklessness, move the Doctor to next episode), and then tried to write the story around that. I’m sure that those were actually the goals, but of done well it shouldn’t feel that way…
@8/Athreeren: The Fifth Doctor also sacrificed himself for one person, Peri, in “The Caves of Androzani” (which is widely considered just about the best serial of the classic series, or at least the best regeneration story).
And I can totally blame Mayor Me. She could’ve easily thought up a way to draw the Doctor into a trap without dooming Rigsy to a death sentence. She could’ve found a way to keep the peace that didn’t rely on insta-murder for any and every infraction. (Clearly she never saw Star Trek: TNG‘s “Justice,” or she’d know what a lame idea that is.) Hell, she didn’t need to trap the Doctor at all. She claims she’s trying to “protect” the world from the Doctor, but her methods are far more cruel and murderous than his.
As for when Clara was “supposed” to leave, I read a quote from Moffat saying that this was how he’d always planned for Clara’s story to end eventually, but he changed plans when it seemed that Coleman wanted to leave. Once she changed her mind and decided to stay, that’s when he restored the original planned ending. But that just goes to show — a writer’s first idea isn’t automatically the best one. That’s why so much of writing is rewriting and rethinking and making serendipitous discoveries along the way.
@12 & 13: I’ve seen other actors do subtle, understated performances very engagingly, putting a wealth of subtext into it — Leonard Nimoy wrote the book on it, and Richard Eden did it so well in RoboCop: The Series that he made Peter Weller’s RoboCop performance seem crude by comparison. Capaldi himself did some marvelously subtle work as Frobisher in Torchwood: Children of Earth. But I just find Williams dull.
Whether they are played well or not, shell shocked characters are not fun to watch. So I am not a big fan of Mayor Me, even though I have liked Maisie Williams’ work on Game of Thrones. Mayor Me is a tragic character, warped beyond recognition by the weight of her long life (which is not exactly a rosy view of human nature). And not very sympathetic.
Not only did the use of Retcon remind me of Torchwood, but so did the ‘light worms,’ or whatever they were called. They reminded me of the perception filters that kept people noticing the comings and going of the Torchwood crew as they used the monument near the harbor to access their secret base. But I have no idea why those worms had any effect on the Doctor and Clara–to them, Sontarans, Oods, and Cybermen are just as everyday as humans, and should have appeared in their normal form.
To call the leadership of Mayor Me ‘martial law’ is an insult to the very idea of what law is. This was not law–it was rule by fiat, totally dependent on the whim of a cruel and heartless dictator. The people of this street had truly traded any shred of liberty for security.
While Jenna Coleman is a pleasant actress, I will not miss Clara. The character has mutated considerably over the three seasons where she appeared. She was originally more of a plot device than a character (The Impossible Girl). Then she was a teacher. Then she was an irresponsible thrill seeker. I never felt that she was written very consistently. It would have been more fitting, and have had more of an impact, if she had died back on the planet Christmas, when she sent fragments of herself throughout the Doctor’s timestream. And since all of time and space is basically simultaneous for the Doctor, this was far from a final death for Clara–they could bring her back more easily than any other departing companion, which cheapened her demise. (While the show hasn’t presented it, a recent comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine dealt with the Doctor and Clara meeting one of her dopplegangers–you probably can’t swing a dead Schrodinger’s Cat without hitting a Clara somewhere out there.)
The episode was well crafted, and cleverly written, but I am afraid it didn’t really do much for me. I am, however, very intrigued to see what happens next week, with the Doctor alone and at the mercy of a strange (and probably malevolent) opponent.
Please explain to me this portion of the article: “…the idea of framing a black man for murder to appease a tense community cannot be ignored in this context.” Is the race of Rigsy truly a part of the story’s plot? Does the race of Rigsy matter in the grand scheme of this story? Would this story have significantly changed if an Indian woman was framed for murder by Me? Seriously…
@17/otb4evr: It’s not about the relevance to the story itself, it’s about its resonance with real-world issues of racism and scapegoating. We have a situation where a white authority figure accused a working-class black youth of a violent crime and the community just presumed his guilt and sentenced him to death without bothering to learn the truth — sounds like a pretty clear allegory about racial profiling.
I liked the premise of the story, but the last few minutes were so completely underwhelming.
The goodbye speech went on too long. Didn’t they say she had 2 minutes left, then she went on to talk for about 10 minutes? But even if that weren’t the case, CUT CUT CUT. Make it short and poignant. Not even Zhaan could make a proper long goodbye speech work, and she was a much better character than Clara.
And the Doctor, just standing there, not even trying to save her life, with a stasis pod and two immortals in the room? That’s so wildly out of character for every incarnation of the man, but even more so for the one who had condemned Ashildr to immortality rather than let her stay dead, and tried to give even frakking Davros a few extra minutes.
If you want to leave Clara behind or kill her that’s fine (though I’m quite tired of the “all companions have to die/lose everything” trope), but at least try to make it work in a way that doesn’t sound stupid.
I had Clara’s death spoiled accidentally, and I watched the episode under what could be less than comfortable conditions (a lot of noise in my house, etc), so I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have, but I found it to be a good episode. I loved the post-credits scene, it was very touching.
As for Ashildr, I wouldn’t say it’s for her “own agenda”. I believe it when she says she did this to protect the camp; she’s keeping true to her word of cleaning up the Doctor’s messes on Earth (many of those aliens are probably there due to fallouts of the Doctor’s adventures), but she’s doing it in the way her twitsted, broken morality allows her to do it. More proof that the Doctor made a mistake, and that humans are not meant to be inmortal like this: infinite lifespan with finite mind.
Rigsy, I’d love to have him as a companion, but since he has a daughter, I don’t think he would even risk a one-off trip with the Doctor. And I agree that Capaldi’s Doctor is awesome with kids… although sometimes he’s a bit creepy.
I loved all the little details we saw about the camp, how there was even a Cyberman, and how the cops were Juddoon.
And about Clara… I don’t think we’ve seen her death for real. I think she’ll be back and die some other way. The way the shade killed her wasn’t the same as how it killed the other guy… yes, it could be because artistic license, or because she faced it bravely, or because she’s human, but still..
I think the Doctor’s “one it’s bound to you, you could flee across all of time and all of the universe and it would still find you” speech was meant to be a cheap way to say “Yeah, there are no alternatives here.” I mean, if you could defeat (or even postpone) a quantum shade with something as simple as a stasis pod, it wouldn’t really be something to fear, would it? Similarly, even if the TARDIS was right there (and it wasn’t), jumping in to escape it wouldn’t work. It’s got quantum in front of it’s name, by the rules of technobabble, that means it breaks all other rules and has no restrictions.
Of course, it loses it’s power somewhat considering the Doctor’s found exceptions to “no exceptions” situations… pretty damn often, actually, but I’m personally willing to let it slide considering the short timeframe.
@21/ghostly1: “It’s got quantum in front of it’s name, by the rules of technobabble, that means it breaks all other rules and has no restrictions.”
Yeah… Really, if it is bound to her by quantum entanglement, then all you have to do to defeat it is measure it. :D
And the short timeframe was definitely a problem. This and “Sleep No More” were the only one-parters in the season — they should’ve skipped the stupid found-footage sandman thing and done “Face the Raven” as a 2-parter so the concepts and characters had proper room to breathe. Yet another reason to dislike “Sleep No More.”
I know that my perspective is different from many that have written here, so I wish to add it to the discussion. And rather than addressing the arc of 50+ years of storylines, characters and roles or even the entirety of this episode, my comment is rather about one scene that has already been critiqued, criticized or praised in previous comments.
Absolutely it’s important to remember that Doctor Who is written as entertainment and as such it brilliantly stretches the limits of our experiences, taking our minds in new directions. It captures our imagination, bringing us to those farthest reaches of the universe and the future. When it also grabs our heart and soul is when it exceeds fiction and draws the real world into the story.
The last minutes of this episode portrayed the real life story of my Companion and the incredible strength and bravery that she possessed. My own brilliant, beautiful and adventurous wife saw that her time was ending and she gave me a similar summary, knowing how bad I am at being alone and an order to not let this event change me, but to remain who I am and who she loved. In a similar manner, we had already told each other everything we wanted to say, that had been our way for almost thirty years. Everything except goodbye; we could never say goodbye to each other even as we knew the raven circled. We agreed that we would both be brave and then she stepped forward alone, as we all must, to accept her fate with a courage and grace that left me humbled. In the nine months since the passing of my amazing Maureen, I have never seen a script that so beautifully displayed the strength she possessed during the 33 days after being told her cancer was incurable. If you’ve travelled that path with someone you love, then perhaps you know some of why I am writing this.
It’s just a story, another chapter in the fiction that is Doctor Who; stories that have been a part of our world for the lifetimes of my love and I. Together we enjoyed years of Doctors and stories. But when the script contains our story, Doctor Who is reality.
@23 I am sorry for your loss, and thank you for sharing your story–it put the episode in a whole new light.
What I got from the multiple camera angles, and draw out final scene/death of Clara was – a pregnant pause. There was an expectation that perhaps she was different, it wouldn’t work, she wouldn’t die.
Up until her mouth opened and the black smoke came out.
As symbols of death, it was certainly one of the more poetic than any other of the ways characters have been shown to die.
This, for me, was an excellent episode, and an excellent farewell to Clara (and I do think that her death here was her real death.) She died because she tried to think like the Doctor and almost got it right; the “almost” was inevitable, because she can’t be the Doctor, but her try was also inevitable, because she really was pretty clever for a human. And in the end it was compassion that killed her. That, too, is Doctor-like, as both he and Davros agreed back at the beginning of this season.
I ended up feeling terrible for Ashildr; she was turned into an immortal when she was a teenager from a medieval Viking village and despite all her years of living, I wonder if some of her shortcomings – her only vision of a safe place being a tiny one with an inflexible rule of law, her only thought about the Doctor being that she had to trick him into helping her – stem from that.
All of which musings are very Watsonian; from a Doylist perspective, though, I thought the story was well crafted and written (with the possible exception of the Janus aliens – a cool and sad idea, but the design was … uh … uninspired), the acting stellar, and Clara’s exit beautifully underplayed.
@18/ChristopherLBennett I don’t think there was a social statement here. My thoughts: #1. The Doctor had a black companion, Martha Jones, who turned out to be quite the superhero after she left him. #2. Clara loved a black man, Danny Pink, who was also a decorated soldier that reached a rank of Sergeant and helped save the world at the end. #3. Rigsy was in a prior episode where he worked with Clara to defeat the enemy, in return gaining the phone number of the Tardis to use in case of emergency. #4. Ashildr used the fact of a prior relationship with Clara and the fact that Rigsy could get in touch with the Doctor anywhere/anytime as leverage. #5. The cultural differences between the UK and the US are quite different with regards to race. So, to see a racism issue where there is nothing but a plot device, likely planned for quite a while knowing Moffett, is nothing but injecting one’s own social insecurities into a review where it doesn’t belong. Especially considering everything that the series (Doctor Who) so far has revealed through its 50+ years. There is no racism by the lead characters, nor even the writers calling out a difference in race of any of their characters. I know it’s real hard sometimes, but people need to step outside the echo chamber to get a better view of the real world.
@27/otb4evr: Nobody’s saying the characters in the story are racist. The suggestion is that the situation works as an allegory for similar real-world situations, even if the nominal intentions and motivations of the characters are different. That’s how allegory works. It’s not about being the exact same thing, it’s about being an analogy or having a resonance with something in reality.
I wonder if they could have made it work as a two-parter where Clara died at the end of part one. They could have called it “Face the Raven” and “Nevermore”.
@27, 28 I’d have said it was an unsubtle bit to drive home how problematic Mayor Me is being but I completely missed it. It must have been a little subtle then.
This may be just me, but I would have preferred it if the other characters identified Clara’s compassion as the thing that killed her, not her recklessness. It’s Clara’s humanity that changed a Zygon who got into her mind. It’s her compassion that makes her tell the Doctor not to seek revenge. It was her compassion, even more than her recklessness, that made her put her life on the line to save Rigsy.
Then, instead of Mayor Me not guessing that Clara would do something so reckless (something most of us figured she’d do five seconds after we learned it was possible), Mayor Me didn’t get that someone would do something so risky to help another. It could have been tied into the earlier death. Where most of us saw a husband willing to die to save his wife, Mayor Me, she could have seen it in selfish terms, a small group of aliens putting themselves above the community of the street. This would be because she has lost much of her ability to understand compassion. She can only see Clara’s decision as monumentally stupid and reckless because the underlying motive is one she no longer understands.
@30/Ellynne: I didn’t really see Clara’s action as one of compassion, because she assumed she wouldn’t really be in danger, that Me’s guarantee of her protection gave her a Get Out of Raven Free card. So she wasn’t making a noble sacrifice, she just thought she was outsmarting the threat, because that’s what the Doctor does and she’d become convinced that she was just as good as the Doctor. But because she was only human, she overlooked the one key detail that would keep her plan from working. (As Athreeren pointed out, she was basically mimicking the Doctor’s action in “Mummy on the Orient Express,” taking the death mark onto herself — the difference being that the Doctor didn’t actually assume he’d survive, but concluded that he needed to take the risk in order to gather enough information to have a chance at solving the problem. What Clara didn’t get was the difference between believing you can always win and assuming you will.)
The compassion didn’t come into play until afterward, until she realized there was no way out. That’s when her focus became truly selfless.
@27: Yes, Rigsy was in Flatline. And the only purpose of the character of Fenton in that episode was to underline the racial and social aspects of the character: although Rigsy is as brave as any companion and saved them all, Fenton never sees past his racial and social background. I’m sure Mayor Me could have used, for example, any of the characters from Last Christmas for her plot (I know, they dreamt the whole adventure. That just means the episode would have to establish that they got that phone number somehow, exactly like it was done with Rigsy), or a character from an older episode. After all, Rigsy is from Bristol, and there probably were characters from London who made more sense for the story; so I think an important reason for choosing this character is to make it an allegory of racial profiling.
@28/ChristopherLBennett & @32/Athereen: Perhaps allegoresis would be a better term.
Regarding the editing of Clara’s last moments, I think it was a choice done to emphasize the similarity of her death to the Doctor’s regeneration. Arms spread, head back. She even exhales black smoke, in a mirroring of Eleven exhaling gold light in “The Eleventh Hour.”
Which is the culmination of how Clara has gradually grown more Doctor-like as she traveled with the Doctor. Which was emphasized by bringing back Rigsy as her companion, from the first time she explicitly took on the Doctor’s role.
Given that this is how Moffat always planned for Clara to die, and that Clara performed a Doctor-like act in taking on the chronolock in an attempt to find a loophole, I’m wondering whether there was some kind of connection or foreshadowing between “Death in Heaven” and this episode when Clara called herself the Doctor — and Jenna Coleman’s name appeared ahead of Peter Capaldi’s in the opening credits.
@35/richf: No, “Death in Heaven” wasn’t foreshadowing, because Clara claimed there to be a future incarnation of the Doctor, which pretty clearly isn’t the case. Putting her name first in the credits was just a particularly cheeky joke, a way to make us wonder, just briefly, if maybe she was telling the truth.
I cried, I’m not ashamed to admit it, and since I didn’t realize this was her last season, it hit me with a ton of bricks. Life is a terminal condition, and what we do between now and the final curtain is what makes character. We are all being toward death, even if we don’t admit it. Clara has cared less about living and more about helping and experiencing life since Danny Pink died, and this is a good way to do it; dramatically, unexpectedly, in the service of another, and with tremendous courage. She will always be the Impossible girl, and this ending proves it.
Shawna, like Christopher L. Bennett said, Clara did not put herself at risk selflessly, to save Rigsy. Yes, she wanted to save him, but she didn’t think she’d die, she thought she was as clever as the Doctor and would find a way out of this.