It’s Doctor Who season nine! The Doctor and Clara are back! And so are a slew of familiar faces, so we best get this shindig underway….
Summary
The episode begins during a war on an alien planet. A soldier discovers a boy on the battlefield and attempts to rescue him. The ground moves, and the soldier scans for “hand mines.” When he looks down, there is a hand coming out of the ground, holding his leg. A moment later he is dragged under, leaving the boy alone with countless hands protruding up from the ground, searching for him. The sonic screwdriver flies through the air and lands at the boy’s feet. The Doctor is on the other side of the field, telling the boy that he has one chance in a thousand of surviving and encouraging him to do so. He asks the boy his named, and the boy answers—Davros.
A strange, snake-like alien is searching the universe for the Doctor, stopping by the Maldovarium, the Shadow Proclamation, and the Sisterhood of Karn. He is a servant of Davros and has a message for the Doctor: that Davros remembers, and he is dying, and that the Doctor must come to him.
Back on Earth, Clara is in the middle of teaching class when she notices that planes have stopped moving in midair. She is called in by UNIT and they try to puzzle out why anyone would want to halt all air travel. Clara realizes that it’s a message of some sort, trying to get their attention. A signal comes through on the Doctor’s old UNIT channel… Oh Missy, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind….
Clara meets Missy in a town square with eight UNIT snipers and a few guards in tow. Missy claims she has no idea how she survived (getting vaporized at the end of last season), but she has the Doctor’s will on hand, to be given to his best friend directly before his death. Clara tries to pick it up, but it zaps her; the will only opens after the Doctor is dead, and the will was sent to Missy, not Clara. Clara has a hard time believing that Missy is the Doctor’s friend when she spends half her time trying to kill him, but Missy points out an elderly couple walking a dog and insists that in the scheme of relationships, she and the Doctor are the couple and Clara is their puppy. Clara can’t understand why Missy would “turn good,” which prompts Missy to kill a few UNIT agents to prove just the opposite. Clara asks her to prove that she’s worried about the Doctor by releasing the planes and refraining from murdering anyone else. Missy acquiesces.
They figure that the Doctor would want to spend his last day of life of Earth, and use UNIT tech to pinpoint all the important eras and places where the Doctor made a lot of noise on Earth. Clara figures it would be a place without a crisis going on, which narrows down the field handily, and they wind up in Essex in the 12th century. There’s an ax battle about to go down, and the Doctor arrives on a modern tank playing an electric guitar (you know, an ax). He sees that Clara and Missy have arrived and seems quite pleased to see them, but also very off and emotional.
Then the snaky agent of Davros shows up and drops an old sonic screwdriver at his feet. Clara realizes that the Doctor is ashamed of something he’s done. A flashback of Davros as the child on that battlefield shows that once the Doctor realized who he was, he dematerialized the TARDIS and vanished. The Doctor gives himself up to Davros, but Clara insists that she and Missy are coming along, and they’re all teleported to a space station. Once they’ve gone, one of the peasants (a Dalek in disguise) finds the TARDIS and brings it along for the ride. The Doctor is brought before Davros, but not before mentioning the word “gravity” to Missy as he leaves their holding cell—to which she replies, “I knooooow.”
The Doctor talks with Davros about their age-old conflict as clips from their former encounters play on in the background. Davros insists that he was right to create the Daleks despite what the Doctor thinks. When the Doctor points out that this disagreement of theirs ultimately led to the Time War, Davros points out that this conflict has survived the Time War. In the holding cell, Missy mentions that the gravity on the space station feels a lot like normal planet gravity. She threatens to open the airlock on Clara, but when she does, they don’t get sucked out into vacuum. Missy steps out into space, but claims that there’s ground beneath her feet, and Clara follows. Soon the specter vanishes and they see the planet that was hidden from them—it’s Skaro, home of the Daleks.
The Doctor can now see the planet too, and he’s mortified. He watches as Clara and Missy are caught by Daleks and brought to another building housing the TARDIS. The Daleks plan to destroy it, which makes Clara scoff, since she knows they can’t. Missy is all-too-keen to correct her on that one. She proposes a counter-plan: that the Daleks use the TARDIS to their advantage and go wherever they want to kill whomever they want. All they need is her. The Dalek opt to kill her instead. Then they turn on Clara. The Doctor asks why he bothered to save Davros’ life, and Davros insists that it was compassion, his greatest weakness. As the Daleks prepare to kill Clara, he wants the Doctor to admit that compassion is wrong. Clara runs, and the Daleks gun her down. Then they destroy the TARDIS.
We get another flashback of young Davros. He turns around and finds the Doctor right behind him. He tells Davros that he’s there from the future because he has to save his friends—and he pulls the weapon of a Dalek on him. TO BE CONTINUED….
Commentary
So you’re all, oh, a creepy war on an alien planet, this is cool. Hand mines are scary. Hey, the Doctor’s going to save that kid! Awesome! Who are you, kid? You’re. You’re Davros. You’re Davros? Oh. Oh no.
It’s funny because this episode does a lot of things that are Moffat hallmarks by now, starting with what seems to be his favorite: “The Doctor is going to die shortly, so we best be ready for that one.” But the episode is a solid one all the same, and that’s largely due to the performances, and also due to the fact that plenty of other hallmarks go unused. Sure, snake-guy is new (and when he calls Davros a “Dark Lord” I’m suddenly wondering when Davros started reading Harry Potter and decided to assume Voldemort’s schtick and become the Heir of Slytherin), but rather than introduce us to seven unknown, “important” locations with characters we’ve never met before, we finally get the kind of continuity-building that Who was structured to take. We see places we’ve been to previously—the Sisterhood of Karn, the Shadow Proclamation (there’s a Judoon!)—even as we get a cool new alien bar to add to the list. The ’verse feels cohesive, the nods to the past are earned, undistracting, and clever. It’s a better long game set up than the sort we got in “A Good Man Goes to War,” for example. It would be great to get more openers that so seamlessly integrate different eras of the show together.
We get Clara in her classroom, absently telling her students that she’s made out with Jane Austen, which ultimately leaves us with a big Austen-shaped hole in Doctor Who that we could have remained blissfully unaware of were it not for that cruel line. Now I’ll just be spending my waking hours grousing over the fact that I never saw the episode where Clara and the Doctor hung out with Jane and her family. But then Clara gets called out of school on government business, and at least we get to imagine what her students gossip about her after she’s gone. “I heard Ms Oswald is an assassin for MI-6 during the holidays…”
Missy is back in the game right quick (of course she’s calling the Doctor’s UNIT hotline, she’s probably one of the few people who remembers it exists at this point), and Michelle Gomez is a vision in violet all over again. I feel like I’m getting a slew of birthday presents all at once, personally, because half of this episode is Missy explaining the complexities of her relationship with the Doctor and it’s everything I ever wanted and wrote about online and in fan fiction. Companions are puppies. Missy gets the Doctor’s will because of course he knows she’s alive, and of course she’s the one he would send it to. Fighting and trying to murder someone does not mean that you don’t love each other. Traps are for flirting! And then we get the introduction the Doctor gives her in the arena, calling her “The Wicked Stepmother” and telling everyone to hiss while she bows. They play parts opposite each other.
Clara and Missy arrive in 1138 and the Doctor is shredding his electric guitar atop a tank (I had hoped they’d use Capaldi’s rock background at some point during his run), and then has one of the best pun-versations to ever grace a screen of any size. And he’s taught everyone the word “dude” years ahead of schedule, which is questionable but hard to fault given the circumstances of his visit. You know, I’d have been game for an entire episode of the three weeks he spent in Essex. Less sentimental than the Tenth’s Doctor’s farewell tour, but too good to pass up. Of course, once he’s done punning about fish, he catches a glimpse of Clara and Missy, and his Time Lady pal makes eyebrows at him, and he starts playing the opening of “Pretty Woman” and JUST STOP IT, YOU TWO, ARE YOU KIDDING ME.
Clara knows that something’s off about the Doctor, and their hug makes it all the more disconcerting for her. In fact, Clara spends this entire episode killing it, just being generally sharper and sparklier than everyone. And she teams so well with Missy that I find myself praying that the entire season will be like this. Can we have a whole season of this trio? Please? Pretty please? It would be hilarious and so good for intrigue. You’d never know when Missy was going to sell them out. (Though I was amused that the Doctor was so devastated over her offer to partner with the Daleks by the end of the episode; it’s nothing she hasn’t done before, plus it would have been a great time-waster if they’d bought it.)
At the heart of the episode, we have the long-standing conflict between Davros and the Doctor. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen the guy, which makes his resurgence exciting, and having those clips playing in the background featuring all their former battles really brings the point of this opposition to the forefront. (Plus, any chance to have clips of multiple incarnations of the Doctor is always a plus.) But perhaps more interesting is how true to form this face-off is: His showdown with the Doctor in this episode is entirely a battle of philosophy, which was always what made Davros one of more unique and complex Who villains. Getting into the head of a guy who created a race of genocidal monsters is rough work, but it plays perfectly opposite Capaldi’s Doctor. Even Davros makes note of how well they are matched up.
When the reboot of Who started, the big guns were always reserved for finales: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, Davros, they were all waiting in the shadows for the big ka-bang at the end of the season arc. Moffat turned that on its head when the Daleks showed up at the start of season seven, but too many new rules and reset buttons made that opening too desperate to function in the show’s overall narrative. Bringing Davros in for a season opener is a gutsy move here, and so far, it seems to really work, which is more impressive than anything. It’s hard to guess what the end game for this two-parter is, but I’m optimistic with what we’ve already been given. I suppose the real question is, are all these two-parters self-contained stories? Or will there be a season arc playing to play out that begins here?
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that despite the cliffhanger, the Doctor will not be killing tiny Davros. I’d initially assumed that the title of the episode—“The Magician’s Apprentice”—was going to pertain to Clara and her journey to become more of her own Doctor, as we saw last season. But it seems more likely now that the apprentice in question is Davros, and that the Doctor’s journey is going to be teaching him the value of compassion. Because as we know, the Doctor will never say it’s wrong.
Emmet Asher-Perrin just really needs Missy to be a companion this season. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
By the way, there’s a prequel called “The Doctor’s Meditation” that was aired the night before this on BBC America, and released theatrically even earlier. I happened to catch it. It shows about six minutes’ worth of the Doctor’s time with Bors at the monastery, including the building of the well. It can be watched here.
Moffat’s execution is brilliant, but his concepts are limited. He keeps doing riffs on the same few ideas. How many times has he repeated the premise of the Doctor facing the end of his life and trying to hide from it? Shouldn’t we have gotten past that after Trenzalore? (And why didn’t he give someone his confession disc the last two or three times he thought his life was ending?) And most of Moffat’s plots are driven by bad guys trying to find, capture, or destroy the Doctor. This is no longer a show about the Doctor exploring the universe, it’s a show about the universe obsessing over the Doctor.
Still, when the boy in the minefield gave his name, that was a shock-inducing moment. Even more so when they played the “Genesis of the Daleks” clip and I realized that Moffat had taken that hypothetical and made it literal — which is at once inspired and deeply contrived, i.e. typical Moffat. Now that I think about it, he’s done the same thing with the Doctor’s relationship with the Master/Missy. It’s always been implicit that they were old friends, but now Moffat has Missy actually come out and discuss the fact that they’re friends in great detail. The choice of words and presentation is masterful, but it’s just so blatant and unsubtle. All the subtext gets turned into text.
Moffat’s writing is essentially professional fanfiction. It’s all an expression of his deeply felt fandom for the character and the mythology — both here in and in Sherlock — and the problem is that he gives all the characters in his stories the same fixation on the hero that he has. Not only that, but he writes stories that are basically dramatized essays about the franchises he’s writing in, with the characters analyzing and deconstructing the leads and the basic tropes. I noticed that way back in the Sherlock debut episode, where the villain discussed Sherlock Holmes in a way that more fitted a literary critic analyzing an iconic character than a real-world criminal doing research on some private detective. Sometimes Moffat’s deconstructions can be brilliant, but sometimes they’re more self-indulgent, and he tends to repeat the same ones over and over.
I did think Missy was handled better here than last season — her obnoxious and goofy qualities were toned down a bit, though not as much as I’d prefer. I found her more or less tolerable, which is a great improvement. I hate the broad, goofy, campy approach of both modern Masters, Simm and Gomez. There was an element of camp to Delgado and Ainley, but in a more regal and menacing way. They weren’t making goofy faces and hopping around like cartoon characters and singing pop songs.
I also like it that Moffat dialed back on the flirtation and “boyfriend” talk from Missy toward the Doctor, and had her spell out their relationship as a friendship transcending human carnal desires. That was one case where I didn’t mind him actually spelling out the text in laborious detail. Moffat hasn’t handled female characters all that well as a rule, and I didn’t like the implication that the Doctor’s relationship with the Master would have to be presented as overtly romantic the moment the Master became female. (Some would say it was overtly romantic between Simm’s Master and Tennant’s Doctor, but that at least was kept subtextual and non-campy.)
It was nice to see such a variety of Dalek types in the Skaro scenes, drawing from all eras of the classic series as well as the new models — just about everything except the much-hated redesign from “Victory of the Daleks.” I read that “Asylum of the Daleks” had some of the vintage types, but I never could spot any of them. Even in the scene where we saw the survivors of the Doctor’s past battles with the Daleks on planets like Exxilon and Spiridon, they still used modern Dalek designs. This time, though, we got some vintage Daleks right up front, and that was cool.
One thing struck me during the finale, when the Daleks were disintegrating everybody. Namely: Dalek weapons don’t disintegrate people. They leave bodies. So I think something else is going on there. Maybe something like the disintegration fakeout in “Bad Wolf”/”The Parting of the Ways.” I bet Davros faked Clara and Missy’s deaths to make the Doctor angry enough to abandon his morals and sink to Davros’s level. (Although I’d think abandoning a kid to die in a minefield would mean he’s already done that.) Though why he’d fake Clara and Missy’s deaths to do that, rather than killing them for real, is unclear.
As for that final shot, my guess is that the Doctor will use the gun to “exterminate” the hand mines and help Kid-Davros escape. Maybe he’ll try to change Davros like he did with Kazran in “A Christmas Carol,” though there’s no way he could succeed, because then there’d be no more Daleks. (And I read a good question someone raised: Wouldn’t Skaro’s past have been time-locked during the Time War to prevent the Time Lords from assassinating Davros as a kid? So how could the Doctor have just stumbled into it?)
Not all the time:
By the way..
– How did the Doctor fit the tank through the TARDIS doors?
– Who was driving the tank?
ChristopherLBennet@3
Obviously the TARDIS doors are bigger on the inside.
:-)
@4/mikeda: I refer you to the events of last season’s “Flatline.” The Doctor’s ability to get things in and out of the TARDIS is constrained by the exterior dimension of the doorway.
I suppose he could’ve made the police-box exterior much larger than normal, but how could he do so inside the castle?
He has shown before the ability to materialize the TARDIS around other objects, such as the spaceship in “Into the Dalek” that was obviously also too large. (He says he materialized around it 1 second before it exploded, and there was wreckage visible in the background in the console room.)
Quoth Christopher: “There was an element of camp to Delgado and Ainley, but in a more regal and menacing way.”
You are seriously misremembering Delgado and especially Ainley. The latter was completely over the top and campy, and the former, as phuzz pointed out, had his moments, too. The Master has always been an over the top bad guy, whether played by Roger Delgado, Geoffrey Beevers, Peter Pratt, Anthony Ainley, Eric Roberts, Derek Jacobi, John Simm, or Michelle Gomez.
(Let us have a moment of silence for the Derek Jacobi Master, who had all of six seconds to play the role, and still nailed it better than any of the other seven.)
As for spelling out the subtext, after 50 years, I think it becomes necessary to spell it out. Honestly, one of the hallmarks of 21st-century Who — and this was just as true of Davies’ run — is to spell out a lot of what the 20th-century series implied. And it’s for the better, I think. There’s only so long implications and hints will carry you, and that sort of mysteriousness wears out its welcome after a while.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@#5 – In “Flatline” the TARDIS was malfunctioning. Who knows what the doors can accommodate when it is functioning properly?
FYI, MIssy and Clara’s disintigration. Just my guess but remember the time bracelets both were still wearing…
@7/krad: But there are different kinds of over-the-top villainy. Delgado and Ainley played the Master as the kind of villain who’s over-the-top to us viewers on our side of the screen, but seriously menacing by the standards of the heightened reality he occupies. Simm and Gomez play a version who’s knowingly acting goofy and juvenile, who’s actively trying to avoid being taken seriously. It’s like the difference between Ming the Merciless and Jim Carrey’s Riddler. They aren’t equivalent.
And, yes, not keeping Derek Jacobi around as the Master was a terrible decision. (Didn’t he also play the Master’s robotic duplicate in the continuity-orphaned animated webcast The Scream of the Shalka?)
I really enjoyed Missy’s reaction upon the Doctor declaring Davros his arch-nemesis.
I think we were meant to believe that the Doctor was trying to run from his death again, but I’m guessing that it will actually turn out that the Doctor has been putting off actually making the decision on whether or not to save Davros. One of the benefits of having a time machine, I suppose. (Though, sometimes they do say that’s not an option because “Now we’re caught up in the flow of events,” as I recall.) My first instinct was that the Doctor should save Davros, try to teach him compassion, and then drop him off on some planet where he’d never have the chance to create the Daleks.
Overall, I thought this episode was a strong start to the season and am interested in seeing how they follow it up. I agree that Missy and Clara’s apparent disintegration has got to be a fakeout.
@1/CLB: Who plays fast and loose with its own rules, and probably most of all Moffat, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the events of “Day of the Doctor” (specifically, the Moment) somehow changed the way the time lock works. Maybe it undid it entirely, and since everyone just assumes that everything’s still time-locked, no one’s bothered to try it. That could also explain how Clara was able to pay young Doctor a visit in last season’s “Listen.” But I might be forgetting times since then that it was affirmed that the time lock was still in place.
-Andy
One thing that is not clear to me is whether the time locks were something done by the Daleks and Gallifreyans as a defensive measure to prevent the other side from changing their history, or whether they were a result of both sides mucking around so much in each other’s pasts that time travel there was no longer possible. In fact the whole Time War was rather undercooked in execution — an example of mythologies don’t always stand up to explanation. When Eight crashed on Karn, the sisters told him the whole universe was dying. I take that to mean that both sides were using time travel so much, — on each other, on allies, pre-neutralizing strategic worlds, etc — that the fabric of spacetime was unraveling. But the only parts of the Time War we actually saw were conventional space fleets and soldiers shooting at each other with conventional weapons.
I mean, the possibilities are quite fantastic. Start with Rassilon’s legendary demat gun, that erases someone from history like they had never existed. Every time you fire it you’re taking a terrible chance. Shoot a Dalek general and suddenly some event in its future where it time-travels to the past and does something important is undone. “The Sontarans switched sides again? Who fired the demat gun this time?”
Putting it on screen was rather disappointing.
I didn’t like this episode too much. In my opinion, the best season openers for Doctor Who are the ones that reintroduce the concept and the characters, and serve both as a reminder for continuing viewers, and as an entry point for new viewers. This episode didn’t do that. If you didn’t remember the name Davros, you would have been lost, having no idea why the Doctor was so conflicted about the young boy. And if you didn’t recognize the name Skaros as the planet of the Daleks, again, more confusion for you. Not to mention the nods to pre-New Who episodes, which probably a minority of current viewers remember.
And there was a lot of gratuitous stuff going on. If Missy wanted to talk to Clara, why stop all the planes in the world? What purpose did that serve? If all of time and space are open to you, why not just drop in on Clara? And while it was a grand entrance, what did the Doctor riding the tank and playing the guitar do to advance the plot? And why was Clara donning a leather jacket and riding to Unit HQ, as if she is now some sort of super secret agent? The episode felt padded with stuff that was only peripheral to the story.
And why does Missy have to explain her relationship with the Doctor? Moffat has a nasty habit of telling, not showing. And why show the ‘killing’ of Missy and Clara, when we know they will be back?
Oh well, to look at the bright side, since I disliked this episode, there is a good chance that I will like Part Two better.
Worst episode yet.
This show needs writers who can craft a story based upon ideas. What we have here is a story built around a couple of visuals. Sad Doctor, Crazy Missy and gungho Clara. A tank, electric guitar and Dalek/human hybrid at the Doctors’ location thus making the Snakeman’s search for the Doctor meaningless.
The show was edited to evoke Starwars (and they even copied the Cantina scene) and the dialog straight out of Harry Potter. Davros the Dark Lord of Skaro? Really?? Davros is dying. He has been dying since 1975 when he first appeared and has been presumed dead numerous times, yet somehow now it bothers the Doctor so much he allows both Missy and Clara to be “exterminated” right before his eyes. Moffat has become as bad a Davies ever was.
@1 You summed up Moffat nicely, that’s just it! Couldn’t agree more.
Few notes though: I believe Daleks weapons can disintegrate people, if they use „maximum extermination“ instead of „ordinary“ extermination. Since we’ve seen Clara’s and Missy’s skeletons as they were hit, I doubt it was last second teleportation, as Missy used with the cybermen. Plus, Davros doesn’t control his Daleks. He said so.
Bors (it’s funny, when I heard the name, first I thought of Bors from WOT and second of the knight of the round table… ) was OK, until the snake bit him, so I think the Colony Sarff’s venom is full of those nasty Dalek nanites.
Colony Sarff could be interesting character/s, given more space. I want to know more about his (their?) culture, visit his (their) planet… the democratic snake-nest in a suit!
And yeah, if Doctor kills the tiny Davros, he sort of is no longer the Doctor and there’s no point in watching this show, so I didn’t buy it for a second. He can only save Davros and try talk some sense into him. Which can lead to two things: 1) He fails, Davros is still a bad guy and it’s all of sudden Doctor’s failure, the whole thing, Daleks, Time war, all of it. At least he will think so. Not good. 2) He succeeds. Davros becames a better person. Won’t ever create Daleks. – Would Moffat dare? Hit a reset button on the whole thing? Can it even be done?
Skaro’s past really should be timelocked.
Now I’m a bit tired of hearing this episode is a nod to Classic-Who fans and New-Who fans won’t understand. For one, I have a habit of discovering series by stumbling over the worst possible jumping-on point ever, and I love it, because I always still get it.
As a fan of classic series, I kind of hated the reference – made me remember, how brilliant Genesis of the Daleks was, and it made me dislike this one even more.
Loved the Doctor playing guitar though.
“Clara meets Missy in a town square”
When UNIT calls Clara, she cleverly remind them that sending her an helicopter would be pointless. I wonder how they got to Missy, and how long it took?
I’m more familiar with Delgado’s master (I haven’t seen Ainley’s yet), who was utterly evil, but always in order to reach his goal; I can think of people he murdered that he didn’t have to, but none that were just for the evulz. In season 3, the Master decimates the population (literally), but this is cancelled later, and only the Doctor forgives him (I can accept the Doctor having alien morals, and being ready to forgive the only remaining Time Lord). Here Missy kills three people just to show how evil she is, and in the next scene, Clara is quite comfortable working with her. I really didn’t like that part. It’s understandable that viewers would like Missy, but not characters who are at the forefront of her insanity (once again, apart from the Doctor. I do believe in their friendship)
“one of the peasants (a Dalek in disguise)”
No just one of the peasants, Bors, who is one of the candidates for being the titular Magician’s apprentice (though I doubt it: Davros is indeed more likely, and I’m hoping for an ending similar to Into the Dalek: Davros will learn from the Doctor, and yet remain genocidal monster). I wonder if Bors transformation will lead to anything? By the way, it seems Bors was converted by Colony Sarff. How that work, I have no idea, but he wasn’t a Dalek before Colony Sarff got there.
What really makes the verse seem cohesive is when Stewart references three versions of Atlantis. The continuity of Doctor Who is that there is no continuity, or rather that everything belongs to it, and it’s great that it’s repeatedly acknowledged.
I loved the “dude” part. When Bors calls the Doctor that in the beginning, it’s a funny anachronism. But when it’s justified later, I couldn’t stop laughing.
@1: “This is no longer a show about the Doctor exploring the universe, it’s a show about the universe obsessing over the Doctor.”
Especially after “The Inforarium“, the whole point of this arc was to get past that story.
I think the Daleks rebuilt Skaro rather than take it out of the time lock.
I really enjoyed this episode, but the first half of two-parters are usually very good, it’s the next one I’m worried about. Moffat has done good sequels in the past (Forest of the Dead), let’s see if the next episode will be one of them.
@15/Cross777: I assume it was Colony Sarff who turned Bors into a Dalek puppet after he followed Clara and Missy to the castle.
And the reason the Doctor cares more about Davros’s death now is obvious: Because it’s only recently that the Doctor encountered the child Davros and abandoned him. So he feels responsible now for turning Davros into the frightened and bitter person he became. He didn’t have that before.
@16/Tessuna: Just because Davros says something, that doesn’t make it true. If their deaths were faked, then there’s clearly some dishonesty involved on someone’s part.
@17/Athereen: Missy said she would open a travel corridor for Clara and UNIT, presumably a gap in the time field that would allow air travel.
And I’m sure Clara isn’t comfortable about working with Missy, but she accepts the necessity of it.
As for Skaro, its survival shouldn’t be a surprise; it was established as still existing in some form as far back as the ’96 movie. It was referenced as having been devastated in the Last Great Time War, and the Doctor visited its ruins in the opening scene of “Asylum of the Daleks” just three years ago. This seems like one more case of the series’ continuity being whatever it needs to be at the moment.
@18 Christopher L Bennett: Well, yes, I was a bit ironical there, sorry, I do that all the time and assume people can spot it. But as for the faking deaths, if so, I suspect Missy and her vortex manipulator (her and Clara’s were linked somehow and the way she said it was like standing up and waving: hey, watcher, notice this, this’ll be important later on!). But the visible skeletons is an effect used only when Daleks kill, so I bet on a time-can-be-rewritten scenario.
Bors: I said so earlier, Dalek nanites in Colony Sarff’s snakes venom. Makes me wonder if Colony is an alien from some other planet or one of the Davros’s creatures – he did some genetical experimenting on animals before creating Daleks, as I recall.
And ad the time-rewriting: I thought about Moffat undoing the entire destruction of Gallifrey in “Day od the Doctor” – could he…? The Daleks? Or would the time unravell and universe end, if tiny Davros became a better person? Is creation od the Daleks a fixed point or one of those grey areas?
The ending reminded me of The Killing Joke. Davros just wants to be RIGHT.
How do the Daleks remember the Doctor now? Is it because young Davros met him and created new memories? I really wanted Clara to be less afraid of the Daleks after we saw her as one of them (Oswin was a different character but Clara is a lot like her so it is hard to shake the idea)
@21: I seem to recall that they got information on who he is from Tasha Lem’s mind when they assimilated her in “The Time of the Doctor.”
Usually I’m one of Moffat’s defenders, and I rarely am terribly disappointed. Even the episodes I regard as kind of weak are OK. This time, I’m really irritated with how much I disliked this episode. I really hope part 2 is better.
In the beginning I was pleased–and man, did I get chills when the kid said he was Davros. But after that… starting at about the point the tank started rolling in, I got irritated. Really, how many times do we need to see the Doctor lose his beans because he thinks he might die? And why did he only start doing this now? In the old days, he’d see his death looming, gird his loins, so to speak, and get on with it. Now he has to have a “end of life crisis” every time.
The Daleks “killing” Clara and Missy is absurd. Setting aside the meta-reality of it being a TV show where we know the characters will be back, this kind of fakeout is coming too often. And the Daleks destroying the TARDIS? While I appreciated the line from Missy about men and vehicles (reminded me of my dad, who knew far less about his cars than he pretended to), we’ve seen the Daleks try to destroy the TARDIS with their guns on numerous occasions–not just when they were weak remnants of the Time War–to no effect. The TARDIS has shrugged off Dalek guns, Cyberguns, etc. time and time again, and NOW some Dalek pea-shooters are enough to destroy a relic of one of the most powerful civilizations in the universe? Even at the height of their power, they couldn’t do that; they tried to destroy the TARDIS in The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, but they didn’t use their individual weapons to do it, and they shut down the TARDIS first, which they didn’t seem to do here.
I want my thoughtful, funny, and amazing Doctor Who back. This glorified fanfic is boring me.
@22/JohnstonMR: I agree about the “end of life crisis.” I could understand him being more maudlin about it in “The End of Time” and on Trenzalore, because he knew he was running out of regenerations. In “The End of Time,” he may have known, or at least suspected, that his next regeneration would be his last, which would justify his hesitation to sacrifice himself. And on Trenzalore he definitely knew his death would be final. But this Doctor is at the start of a brand-new regeneration cycle. It’s a clean slate. He shouldn’t be reacting the same way. (Not to mention the question of why he didn’t use a confession disc on the occasion of his previous impending deaths.)
ARAGORN: You have my sword.
LEGOLAS: And my bow.
DOCTOR: And my AXE!
:-D
Something doesn’t add up though. We are meant to believe that the shameful thing the Doctor did was abandon teenage Davros in the minefield. But Davros is gloating about how compassion is the Doctor’s weakness and undoing. How is abandoning him in the minefield compassionate by any stretch? Is Davros is remembering the full encounter that we haven’t seen yet, in which the Doctor leaves, comes back with a gun, and at some point leaves again (leaving Davros with the screwdriver)? And how did the Doctor return to Davros with the Dalek gun if the Tardis has been destroyed? (I tend to think that Missy and Clara are truly dead and the Doctor needs to rewrite time to bring them back, but how does he do that without the Tardis? Maybe Missy and Clara are dead but the Tardis did a fakeout.)
I also wonder if we’re going to see some intermediate future in which the Doctor kills or stops Davros but then somehow himself become creator of the Daleks, and he has to go back one more time and re-do it again.
@25/StrongDreams: But maybe that contradiction is Davros’s point. The Doctor prides himself on his compassion, but Davros believes it’s a lie because he betrayed the principle with young Davros in the minefield. So Davros is trying to get the Doctor to admit that he’s not such a good person after all.
I have a prediction. We’ve all heard that line in the trailer where the Doctor says “I am the Doctor, and I save people!” with great urgency. We don’t yet know the context of that line. I suspect we may hear it tonight as his justification for choosing to save young Davros after all. Like a medical doctor, his job is to save lives, regardless of whose lives they are or what they’ll do with them afterward. That’s the role he’s assigned himself, the one who saves people, and so that’s the role he’ll play.