There are so many things to say about “The Zygon Invasion,” and that’s without even talking about the mystery box above… which remains a mystery. Can the second part be now instead of next Saturday? Give it to me. Also give me more episodes like this, please and thank you.
Summary
We flash back to “The Day of the Doctor,” when Ten and Eleven and the War Doctor forced a treaty between humans and Zygons. Then we discover a tape left by the two Osgoods, detailing that the Doctor left them a special box, to be opened only in a “Nightmare scenario” if the ceasefire between humans and Zygons is ended. We find out that, following the death of one Osgood at Missy’s hands, the other goes underground and later gets captured by a Zygon splinter sect—but not before she gets a warning out to the Doctor that their Nightmare scenario has come. The Doctor calls Clara, asking her to call back soon. He finds two Zygon commanders—both disguised as little girls—and asks them to accept his help resolving the conflict, but they are adamant about taking care of the situation themselves. A moment later, they are kidnapped from the playground.
Clara notices the Doctor’s messages, but halts when she runs into a neighbor’s child on the staircase of her building; he can’t find his parents. Clara goes into his apartment and finds them there, but the father carries the boy in screaming, though the mother insists everything is fine. Clara leaves the apartment and goes to meet the Doctor and Kate Stewart. The two Zygon leaders the Doctor previously talked to are vaporized by the splinter sect in a video sent to UNIT. Clara deciphers one of the things mentioned in the video to be the name of a town in New Mexico called Truth or Consequences. Kate Stewart goes there to find out what she can while the Doctor heads to Turmezistan, where he suspects the Zygon base and Osgood are.
The UNIT commander in Turmezistan is Walsh, and she has a brief period to raid the Zygon base before an incoming military strike levels the area. Her soldiers head to the chapel in town, but all of the Zygons are disguised as people beloved by each of the soldiers, and they find they cannot shoot them. The Zygon lure the group into the chapel and murder them, leaving the Doctor and Commander Walsh to search the base. The Doctor finds Osgood under the floorboards, and they head back to the U.K. In Truth or Consequence, Kate finds no one in the town but a single police officer, who tells her that the Zygons living there killed all the human residents.
Clara goes with Jac to her apartment building and sees the neighbors carrying their son into an elevator in a bag. They try to meet the family on the ground floor, but they’ve disappeared. It turns out this has been happening all over—the elevators are under control of the Zygons, and they’re bringing people down below, under the earth. Clara and Jac bring a squadron down below to view the Zygon lair, where they discover a copy of Clara. But Jac works out the truth: Clara was replaced when she was attacked by her neighbors, and the woman in the pod is the real Clara. She advises the squad to run, but Zygon Clara (named Bonnie) orders her comrades to kill them. Kate Stewart find out that the police officer is not a human, but a Zygon, who attacks her and takes on her form. Zygon Kate gets a call from Bonnie, and they confirm that UNIT has been neutralized in the US and UK. As the Doctor is flying back into the country with Osgood, he questions her about whether she is the human or Zygon version, but Osgood maintains that she is both, that she and her sister Osgood were a manifestation of the peace between their peoples. They get a call from Bonnie, who tells them that Clara and Kate are dead. She fires a missile at their plane.
Commentary
Wow. This episode.
This season has already had praise heaped on by numerous publications, many calling it a sort of Renaissance of New Who, a reinvention that was desperately needed. I confess that I haven’t been feeling it much myself, aside from when Missy shows up. These serials are smart and well-done, but they haven’t grabbed me emotionally the way I’d like, until this episode. If the Twelfth Doctor’s reign is destined to be marked by stories with real weight to them, then this is what I’d like to see more of.
To begin, this whole storyline is a stark commentary on terrorism in so many pointed, intelligent ways. We begin with two Osgoods, who make the central point in their video; that neither species is inherently bad, but that they both have the ability to churn out individuals who can do great harm. It’s a plea for understanding, the fact that the actions of a small group do not reflect the beliefs of the entire group.
What’s impressive is that we get a good look at both sides of this conflict, even from the extremist perspectives. The allegory is fairly thick here; given the current atmosphere surrounding any talk of terrorism in general, it’s hard not to notice commentary like UNIT suggesting that they keep Zygons out of the UK, only to be told, “We’re already here.” But there are other moments as well, like the officer telling Kate Stewart that one of the reasons that the humans in Truth or Consequences started panicking about the Zygons was due to a child Zygon who wasn’t capable of keeping her human form. We hear the Zygon extremists demanding to be seen in their true forms, while they malign the Zygons who would chose to conform to humanity and their way of life, and demand their obedience to the new order. We’ve got Walsh telling the Doctor that her paranoia over the Zygons is completely founded, and the Doctor trying to stop humanity from starting a full-scale war by pointing out that the group they’re dealing with is just a fragment, not representative of every Zygon on Earth. It’s an episode designed to teach, and does an excellent job of making the parallels without coming off too preachy or wishy-washy on the subject.
This episode is fully of heavy emotional moments, and every single one of them lands. The weapons officer who can’t fire on Zygons who look like her family, the soldier who can’t help but accept the pleas of his mother, the commander who is desperate to keep her people alive. While the actions of the splinter group is clearly wrong, there are no broad brushes here. Everyone feels the way they feel for a reason, and the good guys make plenty of bad decisions too.
But you want to know what else astounds me about this episode? What goes utterly unremarked upon, and is therefore exponentially more spectacular? Practically every single speaking role in this episode, excepting the Doctor, is played by a woman. All of them. Every leader from UNIT, the soldier’s pleading mother, the Zygon leaders, the officer in New Mexico, all of these vital roles are played by women. Practically every relevant line is spoken by a woman, all the heavy emotional moments are delivered by women, every role needed outside of the Doctor himself is filled by a woman. (Notably, at least half of the UNIT task force is female as well.) Hopefully it’s not the sort of thing that will get explained away in the second episode because if Doctor Who does this without comment, if that’s just the way it is, that sets precedent for every show/movie/book/comic that claims that it’s “just not realistic enough” to have women all over the place, in every conceivable role.
In fact, if we count this down, all of the central characters of this season have been women. We have Clara, of course, but there was Missy, then there was Cass, then Ashildr, and now we have an entire episode where the majority of the cast is female and honestly, that alone is cause for all the celebration the show is getting. It’s sad that we’ve only gotten this far in the general landscape of things, but I’ll take it, all of it, with another 8,000 helpings if they’ll give it to us.
There are a few places where the episode is a bit shaky—I’d argue that unless they don’t care that the audience knows, it’s pretty obvious that Clara has been taken over by a Zygon. (Clara Oswald would have never left a screaming child in that apartment.) Also, the cliffhanger seems too much to ask the audience to believe. Being able to buy that both Kate and Clara are dead, and then having to wonder how the Doctor will possibly save/get off that that plane? The tension of the episode is plenty high without tossing around multiple character deaths as a carrot to get people back for part two. Also, I’m going to assume that the virus that could wipe out the Zygons that the Doctor stole from UNIT is going to come into play in the next episode? That was the giant carrot to leave dangling—could it be the thing in Osgood’s box?
Yet even with all that, there’s still so much to love outside of story-for-story’s-sake, like the Doctor getting all into his presidentialness on the stairs of his airplane, or the exciting character arc that Osgood has been given, elevated so far from a fandom stand-in into her own fully realized person. Having Kate Stewart as a semi-regular on the show is still a blessing, and checking in with UNIT makes the whole Who universe that much more cohesive. Also, the Zygons are being treated as an intricate species, rather than funny rubber suits with growly voices! It’s so easy for shows with campy bits of history like Doctor Who to shirk everything that was once deemed silly, so this is a considerable upgrade for the Zygons.
Notable continuity bits:
- Osgood and the Doctor talk about her question-mark lapels, which is something that the Fifth Doctor was quite fond of. In the opening video we see one Osgood wearing her Fourth Doctor scarf and the other wearing the Seventh Doctor’s question mark sweater vest. Number Twelve is laying claim to question-mark underwear, which is a whole different fashion show.
- The Doctor realizes that Osgood is a sort of hybrid, echoing the theme of the season. How is this going to play out going forward? Is it just an understanding of hybrids that will be useful to the Doctor going in the future, or will the specific hybrids he knows all play into the finale?
Emmet Asher-Perrin wonders if Osgood creates her own Doctor outfits, or if there’s a supplier in UNIT somewhere. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I just haven’t fell any “oomph” from any of this season’s episodes, beyond the first two. And I felt that this episode’s “war on terror” metaphors were very heavy-handed and obvious. But that’s just me.
The question mark underpants were worn by the 8th Doctor in a comic story.
About the hybrids… could it be that the Osgood box contains the virus, but modified to make every zygon a bit human and every human a bit zygon? Changing all of humanity could be a bit too much for their status quo, but something along these lines might happen.
Regarding the quote on how this article appeared in my facebook feed: “We are officially in the Renaissance of New Who.”
It’s hard to say definitively because we’re still in the middle of it, and I just don’t have the distance to judge it fully rationally yet, but I feel like this is shaping out to be the best series of the revived Doctor Who… with the possible exception of 5 (Matt Smith’s debut) which still holds a dear place in my heart. If Clara’s personality and story was as compelling as, say, Rose or Amy’s then this year would check every one of my boxes. The writing isn’t falling into nearly as many of Moffat’s quirks as some of the worse stretches of his tenure (*cough* series seven *cough*) and Capaldi is consistently knocking it out of the park. I think in 20 years will be considered one of THE definitive Doctors. Probably the one from New Who alongside Tom Baker from Classic.
I haven’t been impressed with this season. Too much doom and gloom. This episode was also filled with doom and gloom, but handled extremely well. So it stands as the best episode of the season by far. It is always good having Kate and Unit back, as they help ground the show in our world. I loved having Osgood back, and all I could think of was the fact that she is kind of a “Schrodinger’s Zygon,” neither fully human or Zygon until the box is opened.
The terrorism analogy was easy to see, but sometimes hammered home just a bit too hard. I didn’t care for the scene where the Doctor stalked the two little girls through the playground equipment–there was a definite ‘creepy old guy’ vibe to the scene that I felt was unfortunate. The scene with the soldiers and the church played out very effectively–their paranoid, murderous commander, while unsympathetic, turned out to be right all along. I saw the NM cop being Zygon well ahead of her transformation, but didn’t catch on to Clara being a Zygon until we actually saw her body in the cocoon.
We don’t see that either Clara or Kate are dead, in fact, in Clara’s case, quite the opposite, as we have seen her body in a cocoon. I suspect Kate is also captured in the same way. And I don’t believe that the Doctor is on the jet Clara fired at–earlier in the episode, he boarded the plane on a runway where many similar planes were waiting.
I too am looking forward to seeing how this all pans out next week!
Oh, the playground scene was very creepy, even my son commented on it. I mean, I’m glad he saw it as creepy too. :)
I like to think that Kate took out her Zygon attacker and received the call herself. A human pretending to be a Zygon pretending to be a human
@5 – human pretending to be Zygon pretending to be human – Elizabeth I did this in the 50th, so it would be a nice nod if that is the case, plus also nice to not have every human overwhelmed by a Zygon if attacked.
Y’all are assuming we’ve been seeing the “human” Kate all along. But remember that there weren’t just two Osgoods in that initial peace conference. There were two Kates, as well…
This script should be required creative writing curriculum. It epitomizes the problems inherent with treating your characters not as people, but as plot devices – the narrative becomes overcrowded with characters who are only present to serve a singular purpose, and have nothing of importance to do or say outside of their pivotal scene – a glaring problem which is only magnified when the writer goes one step further and literally clones everyone. This detached approach to storytelling results in a script that feels less like an organic story, and more like a series of disjointed scenes which only exist to tick boxes required by the predefined narrative. The only “glue” that holds each scene together is a mess of token dialogue and a lot of needless running about, which gives the impression that we’re watching actors get rushed from set to set, rather than watching characters explore a naturally emerging narrative world. The characters’ actions are not dictated by any sense of logic related to their actual, you know, character, but merely by whatever mildly feasible reason the writer stumbles over first in getting from plot point A to plot point B.The erratic cadence of such a script destroys any sense of realism or continuity, and gives the characters a sense of weightless irrelevance. It felt as though everyone was just along for the ride, and that no one was driving. I don’t particularly care where this abysmal story crashes.
Osgood was awesome here. I love how far she’s grown from her goofy beginnings. Leave it to a cosplayer to be so flexible about her identity.
Did you note that the nerve gas was said to be invented by a surgeon lieutenant who encountered the Zygons in the ’70s or ’80s? That’s a nod to Harry Sullivan, whose last story as a companion of the Fourth Doctor was “Terror of the Zygons.” I’m not comfortable with the idea that he invented a nerve gas, since we know from The Sarah Jane Adventures that he developed vaccines that saved thousands.
Still, given that the nerve gas reputedly turns Zygons inside-out, and that the second half of the 2-parter is called “The Zygon Inversion,” I’m uneasy about what’s in that doomsday box. Given what a great job this episode did fleshing the Zygons out as people rather than monsters, I really hope they find a better solution than to kill them all.
And speaking of good solutions, it feels like a bit of a cheat to have the peace break down so easily, given all the talk in “The Day of the Doctor” about how it had to be the most perfect, most foolproof treaty ever devised. What’s revealed here about the treaty doesn’t seem to fit that description at all.
For the record, I was watching “The Keeper of Traken” (the next-to-last Tom Baker story) recently and noted that in that story he was wearing the question mark on his collar-wings (or whatever they are called) which he did not do earlier. So Osgood could be continuing her homage to 4 with this addition…
Yeah, I agreed it’s Kate who received the call from the Zygon Bonnie. The resolution happened off-screen, so it seems pretty obvious who won that throw-down.
Though I am confused as to the whole charade with the police officer. Bonnie (and how threatening is that name? It’s like Death’s pale horse being called Binky) practically sent Kate to Truth Or Consequences.
Truth or Consequences is a lovely small town. The Rio Grande flows through it and is refreshing to swim in after bathing in the hot springs that give the town its original name. It even has its own museum, mostly of the town’s history but has a room devoted to the history of barb wire.
And looks nothing like the generic shots the show included. I hate the way TVs and film specifically state the location, only to not depict it accurately. What’s the point?
As for the other threats… You mean to tell me the Presendential Jet has *no* defences?! And Clara is obviously going to be rescued.
I found the whole terrorism allegory far to blunt and a bit racist. The Zygons leave the UK to travel to Foreign-a-Stan to a training camp to then sneak back into the UK? Really?
And if I was in charge of UNIT I’d be completely freaking out that this splinter group could identify my drone operator and take the forms of her loved ones, then later could almost instantly take the forms of my the loved ones of my crack team I sent in with the Doctor. That kind of intel means your entire organisation is compromised.
but if you know they are going to try that kind of strategy, why not arm your troops with non-lethal weaponry? Tazers aren’t 100% non-fatal, but your troops are more likely to pull the trigger. And we know Zygons take on the weaknesses of their shape from good Queen Bess herself: “I may have the heart and stomach of a weak and feeble woman… But so did she when she took my form!” <brandishes dagger>
and the the really good thing about most of the speaking cast being women? They didn’t feel the need to lampshade it, so I was to caught up in the story to notice… And didn’t realise until I read it in this article
Padding, pure padding and nothing else. You could have set next week up in a five minute pre-titles sequence. Clara is a Zygon, the Doctor is on a plane, and UNIT has got dumber again (honestly, it is like UNIT has Homer Simpson symptom, every season they lose ten IQ points). That was it. This was so painfully by the numbers in how it tread water that it felt like every generic third episode from the seventies series. Not to mention that while they were trying to be anti-racist and anti-xenophobic they were still too closely tied to the tropes of alien invasion and UNIT that they failed miserably and just plonked directly into straight up racist, anti-Islamic and xenophobic territory. So far this season has been a total wipe, apart from the comedy Vikings.
It’s an episode about shapeshifters, so I just took as a given that any character was one (in fact I was waiting for this to happen; sadly it didn’t). So when Clara leaves a child being kidnapped, and then enquires about weapons of genocide, there was no doubt she was a Zygon (by the way, Bonnie’s plan was one of the most needlessly risky I’ve seen on this show, which is saying something. Was there really no better place to ambush UNIT than in the middle of the Zygon’s HQ?). Same thing when there is exactly one person left in Truth or Consequence.
I can’t believe that UNIT doesn’t have helmets with a head up display for augmented reality. That way you know that the people around you are who they say they are because you can see they are properly identified on the screen (well, unless they infiltrated UNIT before that of course). It can’t help with the civilians, but I can’t think of a reason not to arrest them rather than following them in the church, since apparently their ability to change shape doesn’t allow them to escape.
Personally, I thought that the commentary on terrorism was heavy-handed. Out of the 20 million Zygons, the only “good” Zygons we’ve seen are the two little girl (who immediately get killed), and Osgood, who could just be human. I loved the introduction, because so many times, cohabitation would have been the perfect solution, but couldn’t happen because it would have upset the status quo. It finally happened in ‘The Day of the Doctor’, but without that scene that shows how this situation can work, it felt like a plot hole. So we finally see the video that shows peace is possible when we know it has failed. I hope the second part will bring a bit of subtlety in the depiction of the conflict.
@9 – Chris: Osgood is the only high point of the episode. But why would a cosplayer be flexible about their identity? It’s one thing to enjoy dressing up and performing, another to be flexible about your identity. “Flexible about her identity” sounds like something that’d happen to a deep cover spy or someone like that.
Plus, she’s not a cosplayer, she’s a nod to cosplayers and whovians in general.. she’s not dressed as the Doctor, she just wears one or two things in her outfit (a normal outfit in general) that have been worn by different doctors, the same way I might wear a Starfleet hoodie or someone who’s a fan of a musician might wear the same kind of sunglasses, jacket, etc.
@14/lordmagnusen: Cosplay is about putting on a performance of being someone else. That’s essentially what Osgood and her sister did — they knew which one was which, but they put on an ongoing performance of ambiguity in order to serve their purpose.
And yes, Osgood is a cosplayer. Moffat said as much in the behind-the-scenes interstitial that BBC America showed during one of the commercial breaks. He chuckled at the idea that fans who cosplay as Osgood are “cosplaying as a cosplayer.”
But put on a show is not the same as being “fluid about your identity”. I get what you meant, though. And I saw that Moffat video; he says “she’s a cosplayer”, but that doesn’t make her one (not even with him being the showrunner). He’s using “cosplayer” as shorthand for “fan”, saying that he finds it cute the metatext of cosplayers wearing her outfits to emulate her when she wears her Doctor accesories to show her adoration for the Doctor. But she’s not a cosplayer, because cosplayers seek to copy the outfit of characters they are cosplaying (or create new versions, such as “steampunk cylon centurion”).
osgood isn’t doing that. Even when we first meet her, Osgood is not pretending to be the Doctor… she’s herself, wearing a Fourth Doctor scarf. There’s a difference between that an a cosplayer. She’s just a fan, like I am when I wear my TNG hoodie or a bowtie, or people I know wear a DW scarf.
That said, let us not digress into a round of comments where you say “she’s a cosplayer” and I say “she’s not”. :)
@9 ChristopherLBennett: I too noticed the nod to Harry Sullivan, but I believe he would never create something like the anti-zygon nerve gas. Just no. Maybe it does something else than it says on the box. What else could the word “inversion“ indicate? How about the paintings the zygons came out of – what if the “doomsday box“ can somehow, I don’t know, make them 2D again? Anyway, I doubt that the solution will be killing all zygons. This is Doctor Who we’re talking about, not Game of Thrones.
#9: I’ve seen a fannish speculation about this — the theory is that while Harry Sullivan would never deliberately invent anti-Zygon nerve gas, he might very well have stumbled on the formula for anti-Zygon nerve gas entirely by accident while trying to concoct something else.
On the whole I quite liked the episode, but it was a little tricky to follow for me in particular, The trouble is that I have only just this week finally acquired cable after decades of holding out (long story), and so this was my first actual video exposure to many of these characters — such that I was slightly confused at times as to which of the secondary female characters was which. (This was not helped by the aspect of the present story whereby anyone might be a shapechanged Zygon.)
My main takeaway from the cliffhanger is that obviously neither Clara nor Kate are actually dead — and I remain hopeful that we may actually end the arc with two live Osgoods back, although that would clearly be trickier.
Moffat’s been a fan long enough to know the difference between being a fan and cosplay.
And I’d say Osgood cosplays the Doctor, with an emphasis on play. She’s not the sort of cosplayer who tries to exactly reproduce the original costume, she’s the sort who does theme and variations. In her case, adapted to be appropriate for her job at UNIT. She’s certainly serious about her cosplay, incorporating it into her daily wardrobe.
I don’t know that this would affect her acceptance of the Zygons, except that it indicates she takes the Doctor seriously, and his instructions to be fair to Zygons.
What is more of a mystery is what motivates the Zygon who takes her form and who becomes her “sister.” We know nothing of who that Zygon was before, only that the Zygon bonds closely to Osgood.
(And what about Osgood’s other sister? How does her odd relationship with her Zygon double affect her family life?)
@19/Ursula: That’s Osgood. Oswin was the Clara echo/Souffle Girl from “Asylum of the Daleks.”
@20 Christopher – Thanks, I’ll fix that!
@7 I like your line of thought. If there have been two Osgoods running around, there could have been two of anyone who was in the room negotiating the treaty back in the “Day of the Doctor.” Not sure if that is where they will go, but it is fun to speculate…
@9, @18 The idea of Harry Sullivan having been involved in development of the anti-Zygon gas appears to have been a reference to a line in the Fifth Doctor story, “Mawdryn Undead,” where the Doctor asks the now-retired Brigadier what’s become of the rest of the UNIT staff he used to know. The Brigadier says that Harry’s been “seconded to NATO” and doing something “hush-hush” at Porton Down. Porton Down is a top-secret British military science site notorious for its research and development of chemical and biological warfare agents dating back to World War I.
You know, if I wanted to be annoying, I could interpret this episode as an anti-immigration screed. (Although I’m sure it was not intended to be one.)
“all of the central characters of this season have been women”
Davros?
Aside from that, the episode was marginally better than the fairy tale “moon is an egg”, “trees are god” stuff. I’m not interested in how well a show scores on the Bechdel test. Doctor Who has been putting women in power for a while, back in the 70s (or was it the 80s?) Pertwee’s UNIT answered to a female prime minister, which was a shocking idea in the pre-Thatcher era. We never saw her on screen though.
.