It has taken us a whole week to get out from behind the sofa following last week’s terrifying Doctor Who Episode “Listen” and so we welcomed this fun and enjoyable episode of Doctor Who, “Time Heist.” This time the action revolved around a robbery of the greatest bank in the galaxy, a riff on the classic Heist movies with echoes of Ocean’s Eleven and Mission Impossible.
It was great to see an episode where the Doctor takes centre stage at last (as both hero and villain), but for us it was his two extra companions Saibra and Psi who really stole the show. But what did Tor UK’s resident Whovian Paul Cornell think?
In Tor UK’s regular weekly feature, Paul Cornell shares Five Brilliant Things about this week’s episode. Let us know what you enjoyed in the comments below!
1: Following last week’s astonishing episode, this was ‘only’ an excellent, precisely-crafted and professional adventure. The bar’s set that high this season. This efficient script where every meaningful question was answered would be the high point of many other years of Doctor Who.
2: The story specifically builds on a character moment for the Doctor from “Into the Dalek”: this time, he’s learned, and is much more compassionate about offering someone who’s ‘already dead’ a way out. Every script this season has been about the resonance of that particular adventure for the Doctor’s character. Here we’re meant to complete the equations ourselves: the identity of the Architect should be obvious because the Doctor hates him, so he feels his self-hatred should be obvious to Clara.
3: Except that, and he doesn’t mention this, but does become the jolliest we’ve ever seen him as soon as he realises, it turns out that ‘what he most wants’ is to give the ‘monsters’ their freedom. Again, we’re left to draw the conclusion as to whether he’s a good man or not.
4: The direction is excellent, Douglas Mackinnon making it all seem more filmic with the quality of his little inserts, like the previous victims of the bank.
5: Psi and Saibra were very nicely defined for guest heroes, and played just as well as they were written. We were made to feel relieved and pleased at their continued existence.
This article originally appeared on the Tor UK blog.
Paul Cornell is a TV screenwriter for Doctor Who, as well as one of our favourite authors on the Tor UK list. His latest novel, The Severed Streets, is out now.
I don’t agree that every meaningful question was answered. There were a few glaring ones raised in the other review thread, including the two that occurred to me: 1) Why couldn’t the heisters be told in advance that the “shredders” were teleporters rather than suicide pills (which seemed like a gratuitous fakeout for the audience), and 2) Why wouldn’t the most secure bank in the universe be built in a system with a more stable star?
1. Because they would have used the device before they were supposed to (it was meant to save them at the final moment, not when the character wanted to get away).
2. Is there such a thing as a stable star for all eternity? Remember our time traveling Doctor mentioned this was the only moment this caper could have worked.
someone read Warren Ellis Planetary
@2: Yes, there essentially is such a thing: A cool M-dwarf red star past its flare period. Such stars have projected lifespans in the trillions of years.
And really, that star had to be unusually unstable. We saw the plasma storm scouring the surface of the planet — that means it must’ve blown the whole atmosphere away and rendered the whole world uninhabitable. That’s a truly enormous eruption for a main-sequence star, far worse than anything our mildly variable star has ever spat out. So this was hardly a typical star; it must’ve been an intrinsically volatile and unstable one. And a star like that is going to give off warning signs of such instability well in advance — like, millions of years in advance. So the people surveying sites for the Karabraxos Bank certainly should’ve been able to consult with an astrophysicist and find out that this was not a very safe place to build the most secure bank in the universe.
I was having a problem accepting the constant reassurance that this bank was the most secure in the universe when it has, apparently, no security cameras anywhere, no living guards monitoring sensitive areas, nothing preventing easy access through huge ducts, and nothing stopping the Doctor himself getting through the bulk of the security so he can leave briefcases everywhere. Seriously, the ATM at the gas station has better security than this bank.
@2 – “for all eternity” is a bit much, but red dwarf stars have stable ‘lifespans’ measured in trillions of years. The second part of your statement stands (being a specific moment of weakness/instability), however.
@5: I had the same concern, but I think the idea is that the security is mainly on the outside, so that it isn’t needed as much in the inner levels. Still, I agree that it wasn’t sold very convincingly.
But then, if a security system really were as effective as possible, the heroes couldn’t actually break in anyway and there’d be no story. That’s why, for instance, everyone in fiction uses laser grids that acrobats can twist through, even though nobody in real life uses laser grids precisely because they have gaps.
@1 – I still say that the robbers couldn’t be told the shredders were teleported in case one or more of them were interrogated by the monster…
OK, the shredders can be explained both by interrogation/they would runaway thing.
Lack of security inside was probably because of the monster – it made the bank “impregnable,” so if they put a lot of cameras and guards inside, customers would have said things like: well, the monster is not such an absolute security system, then, if you still need all that.
Doctor may have put the suitcases in using the Tardis – he obviously could have go inside before the flare, just not inside the vault, which is odd – if they had a Tardis-proof vault, why not all bank?
The two big plotholes for me remain:
1) No solar-flares warning? Really? We get those now on Earth, Karabraxos looked very future-high-tech-ish not to have such thing.
2) When Doctor and Clara were caught, Ms Delphox was all “ready for your close-up?” and then just walked away and left them to guards? Why?
@1 They couldn’t be told about the shredders because they would have known that they were transporters and the monster could have read their minds. I don’t think the monster cared that they thought they were killing themselves.
@5 I think the security of the entire place was the monster being able to read everyone’s mind and see their intentions. There was “supposedly” no need for anything else. The clone even says that intruders are okay from time to time, I guess because it allows them to show off that infalible security system.
… or everything @9 just said.
The only thing I didn’t like was that it was presented as this Ocean’s Eleven specific heist, but how did the doctor get all of those other cases into sensitive areas without anyone else’s help? A lot of what I like about a good heist story was sort of skipped over. Maybe he had Psi’s and Saibra’s help, but then went for a quick mind-wipe to clear the secruity before going for all the loot.
I loved how they used the Die Hard ending for the opening of the last time lock on the safe.
The only truly brilliant thing I can find in Doctor Who is convincing people that sloppy writing, paradoxes and handwaving are perfectly acceptable by inventing a really cute, catch-all name for them, like “timey-wimey.”
Now that is brilliant.
@11, no one explains things with Timey-Wimey all the time. Sometimes it is spacey-wacey or sciencey-wiencey instead. Because most fans don’t carey-warey or get uptighty-wighty.
Unanswered question: what did Clara get out of this? What was her reward for being there?
Maybe I’m just thick but, if it was answered, I didn’t get it.
I kind of like this additional different view of the show, and hope it becomes a regular feature. Mr. Cornell certainly has a positive view of the show!
@13 She got to see the Doctor unequivocally actually be a good man again by saving the Teller’s true love.
Solar flares have two components. There is an EM component (visible light, xrays, gamma, UV) that travels at – ta da – the speed of light, and even if you have a monitoring satellite in between your planet and the star, the warning would get there at exactly the same time as the radiation (unless you have an FTL communicator, in which case a few minutes warning at most).
Then, there is a bucket load of charged particles that can take up to three days to cross one AU.
So, depending on the nature of the flare, lack of warning is not necessarily a plot hole.
However, they could have been more sciency, and accurate, if they made it a gamma ray burst. GRBs are thought to originate from stars collapsing into neutron starts or black holes. They are highly focused beams of radiation and it has been estimated that if your planet gets hit by a GRB even a few thousand light years (!) away, the radiation could strip way the atmosphere and sterilize the side of the planet facing the beam. GRBs would be largely unpredictable and unwarnable, unless you did a survey of every star within several thousand light years.
But, much more complicated to explain to the audience in a few lines of dialog.
Did anyone else think that the hibernation chamber looked awfully like the chamber that housed the 4-5-6….and didn’t those aliens (which we never got a look at) get high off the minds of children…
Is it also a coincidence that Capaldi starred in those episodes as well….
(sorry, my question mark key on my keyboard is broken)
@17: The Teller’s hibernation chamber was much smaller, and the atmosphere within was much more transparent. Sure, they were both clear-walled rectangular boxes, but that’s about it.
@17, TV shows often recycle props to save money. Which admittedly makes it hard to distinguish between a deep arc and stinginess.
The in-episode explanation of lying about the teleporters is that the remaining people could not know, and thus warn the bank (via the Teller). As mentioned in the dialogue after Saibra ans Psi show up again.
The shredders were reffered to an ‘exit strategy’, and strongly implied to be leathal, but ‘exit strategy’ has a more prosaic meaning.
Let’s not forget that The Doctor had the aid of the (very old) bank owner to help with some of the automatic security stuff that may (or may not) have existed. I agree that it isn’t completely explained, but it is something that is plausible.
However, I agree that the solar activity is a bit of a hand-wavey thing. On the other hand, so much of Nu-Who’s space technology is so badly engineered that it always seems about to break down, or explode, or be taken over by killer robots, that the Tardis is the “best ship” by default as much as anything, IMO.
@10. davhahn
Building the vaults and security systems to be dependent on one living creature’s abilities would be very, very insecure. As was demostrated in the episode.
Also, the creature was the “last of its kind”, (aside from its mate).
But Kaster* was routinely cloning herself. Why not clone the Teller so she has a squad of them? That would be secure.
Answer: then there wouldn’t be a robbery.
The solar flares: Would be obvious years, millennia in advance. In any case, the bank is surely shielded from attack by energy weapons which would be much more intense than anything short of a supernova. Any radiation intense enough to disable the security systems might not be lethal biologically (maybe it’s just magnetic) but it would destroy the life support, (air, light, temperature controls in the bank) and incidentally fry Psi’s implants, probably rendering him a vegetable.
And what about the rescue capsule in orbit they were transported to?
Totally exposed, it would be fried by the first pulse of the flare.
If that could be shielded, why the hell wasn’t the bank’s systems shielded the same way?
How absurdly convenient that this initial “flare” had no effects at all other than opening the vault.
The only rules this followed was “the rule of cool”.
@22 Nik–Thanks for reminding us that the Doctor had the help of the bank owner in planning the heist–which explains a lot of the subsequent “plot holes” people are pointing out. This is not made explicit because all involved have had their memories voluntarily wiped to facilitate their ability to accomplish the plan with a mind reading security staff in the mix. By extension it may be worth noting that it is the owner’s regret for her imprisonment of the Tellers that is the inspiration for the “heist”. We see the Doctor give her his phone number under the heading “time traveller”, and warns her that she will have future “regrets”, in an episode which starts with his recieving her call…here we see the Doctor manipulating over time to achieve his own inclination to do good.
With this in mind then this implies that this episode is the ending resolution of a Dr. Who Ground Hog Day, a day he previously lived several times until he finally worked a solution that met his needs and hers. That to me is a lovely plot construct, and while I know people like to complain about Moffat–kudos to you Mr. Moffat.
Something not addressed in the comments yet.
Was Clara’s ‘reward’ already granted? The ‘woman from the shop’ gave Clara the TARDIS’s phone number. Thus Clara and the Doctor 11 meet. Now she’s there for 12’s adventures and him giving the shop woman his phone number.
So was this an episode planned way back when, or just became a great time to tie that lose end up?
@25: No, Mme. Karabraxos was not the woman in the shop. I think that the mysterious Missy revealed at the end of “Deep Breath” that she’d been the one to bring the Doctor and Clara together, for reasons still unrevealed.