Doctor Who – ‘Before The Flood’

Series Nine, Episode Four

CONTAINS SPOILERS

There is an introduction by the Doctor where he mentions the Bootstrap paradox, which is a theme in this episdoe. He then implies he arm-wrestled Beethoven before playing Beethoven’s 5th symphony on his guitar which then goes into the shows theme tune being played on the guitar. Well, as introductions go, it’s a fantastic one.

The Doctor, Bennett and O’Donnell travel back to 1980, before the village was flooded. It turns out to be a military base in Scotland, which was made to look like a Soviet country. The spaceship is there, but the strange text carved on its wall isn’t there yet. The group meet Prentis. He is the top hat wearing ghost, but at this point in history he is still alive. He is a Tivolian, and is an undertaker. The stasis pod is carrying a warlord known as the Fisher King.

In 2119, Cass lip-reading the Doctor’s ghost, thinks that the Doctor is saying something different to the other ghosts. It’s not the co-ordinates, but the names of everyone, and always in the same order. The list goes Moran, Pritchard, Prentis, O’Donnell, Clara, Doctor, Bennett, Cass. The Doctor calls Clara, and she tells him about his ghost appearing in their time. The Doctor says this means he has to die here, as this is a time where nothing can be changed. Clara does not accept this, and says he should find a way to survive.

In 1980, the Fisher King has escaped his stasis pod, killed Prentis and has written the text on the wall. He then kills O’Donnell. Bennett works out that the list the Doctor’s ghost was saying is the order people will die, and is angry at the Doctor as he must have worked that out himself earlier, and didn’t try very hard to stop O’Donnell’s death. The Doctor tries to use the TARDIS to go forward to 2119, but the TARDIS won’t let him, as it is too much of a change in his own timestream.

In 2119, the Doctor’s ghost has let the other ghosts out of the Faraday cage, so Clara, Lunn and Cass have moved themselves into there. They see O’Donnell’s ghost, who steals Clara’s phone, meaning she can’t contact the Doctor. After working out that Lunn is probably safe from the ghosts as he never read the carving, Clara suggests that he should go out and retrieve the phone. Cass is horrified at this idea, and says that Clara has become too much like the Doctor, and that both are uncaring about the lives of the people they meet. Lunn leaves the cage to get the phone. The ghosts circle him, but don’t attack him. He goes after the phone, but the ghosts lock him in the room it is in.

Clara and Cass decide to go out and look for Lunn, but become separated. Moran’s ghost goes after Cass, dragging an axe across the ground. It makes a scraping sound on the floor, but Cass can’t hear this as she is deaf. She begins to suspect she is being followed though, so kneels down and puts her hands to the ground. She feels the vibrations of the axe on the ground, and timing it right she runs straight through Moran’s ghost just as he is about to kill her.

In 1980, the Doctor confronts the Fisher King. The Fisher King says he creates the ghosts as a way of bringing a powerful army of his own species to Earth, where they will invade and conquer the planet. They will “drain the oceans and put humans in chains”. The Doctor says that he has changed the future by erasing the text from the wall. The Fisher King goes back to the spaceship, to find the text still there. But the Doctor has used a power cell to blow up the above dam, flooding the base and drowning the Fisher King. Sensing the danger, the TARDIS takes Bennett back to 2119.

In 2119, Clara, Cass and Lunn have found each other. The stasis pod opens, and out comes the Doctor. He stowed away in there. The Doctor’s “ghost” turns out to be merely a hologram, the same sort they used to create a fake Clara earlier. The Doctor traps the other ghosts in the Faraday cage once more, arranges for UNIT to come and collect them and he will erase memories of the co-ordinates from the survivors. Bennett deeply regrets that he never told O’Donnell he was in love with her, and says he doesn’t want Lunn to have the same regret, and should tell Cass he is in love with her. Cass kisses Lunn after being told this.

A bootstrap paradox is when time travel causes a future event to create a past event, and therefore create the future event, which created the past event, which… It goes round in circles where there is no beginning or end, and so the origin of it is in question. In ‘Before The Flood’ the Doctor goes back to the past event which led to the events in ‘Under The Lake’, and both the past and the future end up communicating with and influencing each other. In the end of ‘Before The Flood’, the Doctor mentions to Clara that he only got the idea for the hologram and what to make it say because Clara told him from the future about seeing it. So where did the idea come from in the first place?

As with ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ and ‘The Witch’s Familiar’, the part two episode of this story had a different style and tone to part one. While ‘Under The Lake’ was a straight-up action-adventure story, ‘Before The Flood’ was more timey-wimey, dealing with paradoxes. It also had echoes of horror movies. It reminded me a bit of the Final Destination series, with the death order having a pre-determined list (even though in the episode this turns out to be false).

One of the most terrifying scenes in the episode is when Moran’s ghost is after Cass. It could easily be in a serial killer horror movie. Cass works well as a horror movie heroine, especially as the list order implied she would be the Final Girl who survives the slaughter and kills the monster. All of the guest cast were good, but Sophie Stone in particular was good as Cass.

The design of the Fisher King is great, a sort of insect-like Grim Reaper, with sharp spikes on him, with a bloodcurdling voice. Three different actors are used to portray him. He is played by Neil Fingleton, he is voiced by Peter Serafinowicz and his roar is provided by Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor. But given that so much work went into the Fisher King, it’s a little wasted, considering it turns out he doesn’t really do very much. He should have been a great villain, but he’s seems little more than a plot device. It would be good to see more of him and/or his species in future episodes.

O’Donnell mentions previous companions Rose, Martha and Amy, and also Harold Saxon (a former incarnation of The Master, who we currently know as Missy). She also mentions a Minister of War, which we haven’t met yet. Could this be important later?

‘Before The Flood’ is fine, but it all feels a little too easily wrapped up somehow. The Fisher King was woefully underused. The episode was a bit of a missed opportunity in some ways, but in other ways there are a lot of good moments. It handles the crossing timelines in the story well. For me, I think Toby Whithouse, the writer of this and ‘Under The Lake’ would be a great choice to be Steven Moffat’s successor as executive producer.

Doctor Who – ‘Under The Lake’

Series Nine, Episode Three

CONTAINS SPOILERS

It’s the year 2119, and we join an underwater mining mission. The location was once a village, but was flooded in the 20th century. The crew are examining an empty spacecraft with strange symbols carved into it.

The ship catches fire, killing Moran, the captain of the mission, in the process. But then Moran appears again as a ghost, along with a ghost which looks like an humanoid alien dressed in Victorian-like top hat and suit.

Three days later, the Doctor and Clara arrive, and the base seems empty. They encounter the ghosts, who more or less ignore them. Then the Doctor and Clara discover the spacecraft and find that the TARDIS didn’t translate the strange text. They then see the ghosts again, who pick up weapons to kill the Doctor and Clara with. We see that the ghosts can handle solid objects and can pass through walls and ceilings, but they can’t take the solid objects with them through the walls and ceilings.

The Doctor and Clara run away from the ghosts, and the crew we saw at the beginning of the episode let them into a Faraday Cage, which the ghosts can’t get through.

The crew already know of the Doctor’s existence. In fact one of the crew, O’Donnell, is a big fan. The highest ranking officer now is Cass. She is deaf, but can lip-read and uses sign language. She has an interpreter, Lunn. The rest of the crew are geeky scientist Bennett, and Pritchard, who represents the oil company financing the trip. He is only interested in the money that can be made. (“I imagine the power cells are pretty valuable… I mean powerful”).

We learn that the base artificially creates “day” and “night” (as otherwise there would be no way to tell from way down there, as its too far down for daylight to reach), and that the ghosts only come out at “night”. With it being “day”, everyone leaves the Faraday Cage. However, soon after the computer switches back to night mode. The ghosts are responsible. The TARDIS’ cloister bell sounds, so the Doctor goes back. The TARDIS wants to get away. She often is wary of anything that doesn’t make sense as far as timelines are concerned, and the ghosts really do not. As they have died, their time should have ended. The Doctor decides he is simply going to switch the cloister bell off, and continue solving this mystery.

Unfortunately for Pritchard, he chose this time to go out into the water looking for a missing power cell. He arrives back and removes his underwater protective gear. Moran’s ghost opens the airlock, drowning him. Pritchard is now a ghost, and picks up a chair, using it as a weapon. O’Donnell tries to reprogram the computer to get the ship back into day mode, and she succeeds. Prichard’s ghost disappears, and the chair he was holding drops to the ground.

Cass sees the safety of her crew as her top priority and wants them to abandon the base as soon as possible. As she puts it, the Doctor and Clara can stay “and do the whole Cabin In The Woods thing” if they want to, but as she’s responsible for the crew, she doesn’t want any more of them to die. But it turns out a distress call has already been made and a rescue team is on the way. The Doctor tells them to call it back. As nobody there made the call, it must have been the ghosts, so for whatever reason they want a rescue team there.

The Doctor comes up with a plan to trap the ghosts. Clara, Lunn and Bennett all run through corridors to get the ghosts to go after them. Eventually, using a hologram projection of Clara, the ghosts are trapped inside the Faraday cage. Using the Doctor’s sonic sunglasses to see them better and as a camera, Cass, viewing on a monitor, lip-reads what the ghosts are saying. It’s the same phrase over and over again, “The dark, the sword, the forsaken, the temple”.

The Doctor realises these are co-ordinates, and the “ghosts” are killing people as the more people they kill, the clearer that message becomes. They want the message to reach across the universe. But where specifically do the co-ordinates lead to, who are the ghosts targeting their message to, and why do they want them to go there? The co-ordinates refer to a church in the old village which was flooded. They go to look there, and when they find a stasis pod, which they can’t open. The Doctor looks at the space ship and says the strange text is the co-ordinates. This is why the ghosts didn’t try to kill the Doctor and Clara until they had read the text, and why one stopped trying to kill Lunn after finding out he hadn’t read the text. Even though people don’t understand the text, anyone who reads that text will have it imprinted on their brain, so when they become a “ghost” they’ll repeat that phrase over and over again.

Suddenly, the base becomes flooded. The computer has malfunctioned because of ghosts tampering with it, so everyone has to run to the TARDIS to escape. The group become separated when the automatic doors are locked. The Doctor, Bennett and O’Donnell are on one side, with Clara, Cass and Lunn on the other. The TARDIS can’t rescue Clara’s group, as they are too close in location to the ghosts. The Doctor tells Clara that he’s going to use the TARDIS to go back to before the flood, but he’ll soon return. Clara is optimistic that the Doctor will solve things easily and be back before they know it… but then she sees another ghost through the window. It’s the ghost of the Doctor!

Well, what a cliffhanger! It’s both a shock and leaves you desperate to find out what happens next.

The episode is peppered with funny lines. The Doctor is dismissive of the idea of ghosts existing at first, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t ever exist, because “There was no such thing as socks or smartphones and badgers until there suddenly were”.

There’s also Clara saying the reason that the Doctor doesn’t have a radio in the TARDIS is because he “took it apart and used the pieces to make a clockwork squirrel”.

Clara has speech prompt cards for the Doctor so he knows what best to say to the people he meets. My favourite was “No-one is going to get eaten/vapourised/exterminated/upgraded/possessed/mortally wounded/turned to jelly, we’ll all get out of this unharmed”.

We know the crew mostly by their surnames, but the first names of some of them are revealed during the course of the episode. Jonathan Moran, Alice O’Donnell, Tim Lunn, and … Richard Pritchard!

The sonic sunglasses seem to be gaining a substantial hatedom, and while I wasn’t keen on them at first they were used to better effect in this episode, with the Doctor using them to view objects rather than as a kind of teleportation device.

‘Under The Lake’ is an episode which fires on all cylinders. It is a very good story, with lots of plot. It’s an exciting action-adventure episode. The crew all have quite distinct personalities and aren’t just faceless cannon fodder. It’s a strong episode which does a lot right and ends with a great cliffhanger.

Fried

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Fast food restaurants have often been used in comedies. There have been episodes of The Simpsons, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, My Name Is Earl, Shameless and others where the characters have to work in one, but it’s rare there’s been a sitcom to have one as its main setting. Here we have one in Fried, a sitcom on BBC Three.

There was a pilot episode last year before this full series. There were a couple of changes to the casting. In the pilot Derek was played by Simon Greenall and Shontal was played by Llwella Gideon.

It centres on Seriously Fried Chicken, a cheap rip-off fast food place in Croydon. As one of the employees Amara puts it, Seriously Fried Chicken is like “The weird, fat mutant cousin of KFC”.

The staff have shifts ranging from early morning to late at night. The “morning rush” is a tramp coming in and pissing on the floor. Then there’s “Drunk o clock”, that is pub closing time, when drunks come in like zombies.

They find stuff like a trainer covered in batter, and at one time had a mouse that they named Vinny, plus two rats, which the store manager doesn’t think counts as an infestation.

Speaking of the store manager, she is called Mary Fawn (Katy Wix) and is hopelessly out her depth, with an equally disastrous personal life after her boyfriend Gareth left her. In ‘The Second Coming’ she tries to set up a date with a customer by getting his contact details after him doing survey, and the guy goes as far to pretend he’s died so she won’t call again. She’s prone to terrible portmanteaus like “frygiene” (fried chicken hygiene) and “frolleague” (friend + colleague) and has been known to accidently deep fry her phone. She has an ‘egg system” in how she rates her staff, on whether the staff are “good eggs – I’ll egg you on” or “bad eggs – egg on you”. It’s completely arbitrary and also completely useless.

Then there’s Derek Wom (Matthew Cottle), the camp, sneaky,  middle-aged deputy manager, who has got that position more because of long service than merit, he has “worked here since it were a Wimpy”. He keeps reporting Mary to Head Office as he wants her to be sacked so he can get her job. He used to have a band called the Wom Trick Ponies. But nowadays the rest of band is either wanting to spend time with their grandkids, on dialysis or dead.

Ed (Imran Yusaf) is the mascot and dresses up in a chicken costume handing out flyers. He’s a bit of a nutter, to put it mildly. He carries a bag of his own pubes around, and constantly gives fellow colleague Joe unwanted and terrible dating advice. One including delivering a Big Sausage Pizza with meat balls, which is putting your privates in a pizza box. Ed believes his chicken costume makes him a babe magnet. “Girls look at me and they think ”massive cock”. Which they likely do, but not in the way he thinks.

There are three people frying the food and serving the customers.

Amara (Mandeep Dhillon) really couldn’t care less about her job, and doesn’t even bother trying to hide it. She’s usually texting on her phone. She didn’t even want the job in the first place, she tried to make sure she wouldn’t get hired in the interview, but got it because Seriously Fried Chicken will hire pretty much anyone. She somehow manages to make chicken nuggets that are burned on the outside and raw on the inside.

The very grumpy and no-nonsense Shontal (Lorna Gayle) isn’t the type to say “have a nice day” to customers, more likely she’ll say “shut your face”. Even when she delivers compliments, there is a sting. She tells Mary she’s the best boss she’s ever had… because Shontal turns up late and goes home early and Mary never has the guts to tell her off. She tells Joe she likes him, because she knows at least there’s someone who’s even more of a loser than her “dickhead son”.

Joe (William Melling) is the most sympathetic character. He’s quite sweet, geeky and nervous with an unrequited crush on Amara, who just sees him as a friend. He gets put through a lot while working at Seriously Fried Chicken, being held up with a knife three times in ‘Hold Up’, gets coins thrown out him from performing outside to advertise the shop in ‘Poulet Etc’, and getting a nosebleed from a ball to the nose with ‘In The Beginning’. His catchphrase is “I really need to get a new job”. He generally means well though, going out of his way to help Amara and Mary keep their jobs on separate occasions.

Also occasionally appearing is the emotionless regional manager Clive Bagshawe (Jonathan Watson).

The first episode ‘Carlos From Spain’ is funny, and introduces the shop and characters well, they all get a moment to show themselves. It’s main storyline is Mary finding out someone has been sending complaints about her to Head Office, so she goes undercover disguised as a Spanish man named Carlos. It fools absolutely nobody except Derek, which luckily for Mary is the one who is sending complaints about her. Meanwhile Ed meets a girl in a crocodile costume and wonders if they’d end up having half-chicken, half-crocodile babies with feathers and big teeth. (So a bit like velociraptors really!)

‘Hold Up’ the second episode is a remake of last year’s pilot. It’s the weakest episode, which perhaps is a good thing, as it shows that things have improved since the pilot. In that the Seriously Fried Chicken store gets robbed by a thug, though he wants chicken nuggets rather than money. Joe has to deal with it while Mary locks herself in the freezer. As Shontal puts it when Mary calls a meeting the next day, “What you giving us advice for? You ran and hid in the damn freezer. We nearly had to defrost your cowardly arse”. Mary then arranges a fake robbery so she gain respect from her staff (it doesn’t go well) while Derek keeps sending gifts to Clive Bagshawe hoping he’ll be given Mary’s job.

‘Poulet Etc’ sees a rival chicken shop park a van just outside Seriously Fried Chicken, taking away all their customers. Poulet Etc is a lot classier and the food is tastier. Ed gets a free cap from going there after eating 20 of their burgers in just three days.

One of the workers there, JoJo (Erin Armstrong) starts to go out with Joe. She’s pretty, and seems smiley and sweet natured at first, and Joe thinks it’s too good to be true… which of course, it turns out to be. JoJo steals money from another customer’s purse to pay for a dinner she and Joe are having, also steals from her own work till, yells at a poster of Ben Fogle, threatens Amara and smashes Joe’s guitar. Going out with JoJo does make Amara temporarily attracted to Joe however.

Mary ultimately decides to burn down the Poulet Etc. van. She’d had a rivalry with the manager Margot (Katrina Bryan) throughout the episode. Margot tells her she got a big insurance payout, so they could buy a new store in a permanent location in a better area, before being picked up by her doctor husband in a convertible to take her on a spa weekend.

In episode 4 ‘The Second Coming’ Ed finds a chicken nugget with a face that looks like Jesus. He found it under the bin and had already been there a while. He displays it as “Chicken Jesus” in the restaurant for a few days charging 5 quid for people to worship it. Nobody pays for it though, so he puts the now mouldy chicken nugget back in the deep fat fryer!

Amara and Joe’s arc goes through a well worn path. It’s a standard “dorky boy fancies cool, pretty girl” story which we’ve all probably seen at some point. Amara wants to date a busker, seeing him as rebellious bad boy who her dad will hate. Joe is in the friendzone, but he loves Amara and wants her to be happy even if it’s with someone else and tells her this, saying he’d like to still be friends. But his timing couldn’t be worse. Immediately after saying that, Amara finds out the busker is quite respectable and from a well off family, so Amara dumps him!

Episode 5 ‘The Chicken Awards’, deals with the Seriously Fried Chicken Awards, with Mary hoping to win the Most Improved Restaurant Award. At the ceremony there are a lot of boring speeches, and we meet Mary’s often mentioned ex Gareth (James Bachman) for the first time. He is there because, as he puts, there has been a merger between Seriously Fried Chicken and the company he works for, but what he really means is that the stationary shop he’s working for is doing the printing. Gareth is incredibly smug and likes laughing at his own awful jokes, but Mary is still desperate to get back with him. Ed suggests that she makes Gareth jealous by getting off with Clive Bagshawe. However it turns out Clive is gay, and is seeing Gareth! This revelation wasn’t much of a shock, it was heavily signposted with Mary mentioning Gareth liked her to dress up as a man and that he “always admired” Clive. Gareth mean-spiritedly then tells Mary he’s grateful he was with her and not someone “younger, more attractive, more intelligent”, as he might not have come out as quickly. “You’re mediocrity gave me wings”. Mary knees him in the knackers, just as it’s announced they’ve won the Most Improved Restaurant. By this point she is hopelessly drunk and while accepting the award the bitterness at devoting her life to work spills out of her mouth… along with vomit.

Meanwhile Joe and Amara are locked in a freezer by Ed who then closes and locks the shop, hoping they will get together. They huddle together for warmth. Amara laments at how badly guys treat her, and Joe tells her he doesn’t understand why any guy who is with Amara would cheat on her. “That’s sweet Joe.” Amara replies. “What’s less sweet is you getting a boner while you’re hugging me”. Joe thinks Amira smells like apples, but it actually is apples. Why on earth Mary would be keeping apples in a freezer is one thing, it turns out that Mary was trying it out as a side dish in an attempt to win an award. It also blocked the emergency door release.

Worried at how long they’ll be stuck in the freezer, (Amara says she keeps thinking of everything she hasn’t done yet “Like that nail appointment I had at the weekend”) they open up to each other and we find out both of them are virgins. They kiss, but it doesn’t go much further as Ed lets them out of the freezer. Amara tells Joe she loves him…. as a friend. Mary is back from the awards and she and Joe share a bottle of tequila… and the next day Joe wakes up in Mary’s bed, having slept with her 3 times last night!

‘The Chicken Awards’ advances a few storylines and there are a lot of revelations, so it’s odd that it is the end of the series in a way. There is an episode after that, but strangely it is a flashback titled ‘In The Beginning’, before Mary got the job.

It opens with a Star Wars style intro. The former manager Tony is a drug addict who pisses in the deep fat fryer, shits in a burger bap and drops condoms in the food, so he got sacked. Mary was sent as a temporary replacement, so Derek began sucking up to her in hope she’d recommend him for the manager’s job, even though he hates her pretty much from the off.

After Amara finds out her current boyfriend is cheating on her, Ed advises Joe to be Amara’s shoulder to cry on and then she might go with him soon after. Then when Joe sees Amara has a text from the boyfriend asking for another chance, Ed advises Joe to delete it.

All of this comes out when Mary holds a team building session…. at 1 in the morning after the shop is closed. Mary becomes upset at what a disaster her attempt at being a manager has become, so Joe, feeling sorry for her, decides to get everyone to make sure they give excellent customer service the next day, resulting in this branch of Seriously Fried Chicken getting no complaints for the first time ever. Amara likes that Joe tried to help Mary, and forgives him for deleting the text, but says she doesn’t want to go out with him as he isn’t her type.

Mary goes back to Head Office to be informed that the HR department runs better without her, and she’s doing so well at the chicken shop Clive wants her to stay on as the permanent manager. “This isn’t a demotion. It’s just a lower ranking job which you’ll be paid less”. The big question with this episode is, why wasn’t this the first one? It’s decent enough, but it doesn’t really reveal anything we didn’t already know. If they repeat this series, I think they should put this one at the beginning rather than the end.

I quite like Fried. It is a bit predictable and clichéd, but it is quite funny and easy to watch, and it has a good cast. The sitcom it reminds me most of is Channel 4’s Phone Shop, which also dealt with a shop in a town centre high street. It’s not known if Fried will continue with the future of BBC Three itself being uncertain at the moment, but it would be nice if there was a second series.

Doctor Who – ‘The Witch’s Familiar’

Series Nine, Episode Two

CONTAINS SPOILERS

‘The Witch’s Familiar’ is part two of a story started in last week’s part one ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’. Though the titles are similar, and it is a continuation of the same story, it is a very different sort of episode altogether.

Missy and Clara are still alive and well despite seemingly being killed by the Daleks at the end of the last episode. We learn how they survived, and at the same time how Missy survived being shot by the Brigadier in ‘Death In Heaven’. The explanation is simple. She used her vortex manipulator to teleport at the exact right time.

They enter a Dalek sewer. The Dalek’s don’t produce much waste, but what they do use it for is horrific. For Daleks, a sewer is the same thing as a graveyard. Even worse, none of the Daleks that are put in this place are actually dead. Daleks can in theory live forever, but they still age and decay, becoming a black liquid eventually, and at that point they are just shoved into the sewer/graveyard, but still alive and conscious.

Missy comes up with a plan. They have to trap and kill a Dalek, and she uses Clara as bait by handcuffing her to a wall. A Dalek approaches and Missy punches holes in it. The Dalek says this damage is minimal, but as Missy puts it, it’s “A puncture in a bad neighbourhood”. The Daleks in the sewer have sensed it, and ooze around the casing hoping they can take possession of the casing themselves.

After removing the mutant from the casing, Missy puts Clara in. We learn that the Dalek machine is powered telepathically, not only that but it translates what the creature is thinking. Anything emotional, such as “I love you” for example, comes out as ”Exterminate!”, anytime they say their name it comes out as “I Am A Dalek”.

Meanwhile, the Doctor forces Davros out of his chair and goes into the main Dalek room. This doesn’t last for long, as Colony Sarf’s snakes grab the Doctor, but we learn that Davros’ chair is immune from the Dalek’s deathrays.

The Doctor is bought back to the infirmary, with Davros back in his chair. The reason of Davros’ long life is that he is connected by cables to every single Dalek in Skaro. He is feeding off their life force. Davros tempts the Doctor to kill all the Daleks… he can do it simply by using the cables, and nobody would ever know. The Doctor will not do this, and tells Davros he didn’t come to see him out of shame because of a guilty conscience, but out compassion because Davros is ill.

Davros says to the Doctor he is pleased for him that he has found Gallifrey, and wants to see him with his own eyes rather than the mechanical eye in his forehead. He turns his central eye off and opens his real eyes. The Doctor realises that Davros genuinely is dying. Davros replies to him with a quip. “You didn’t think I was dying? Then […] you are not a good doctor”, which makes the Doctor laugh.

Davros says he wants to see one last sunrise before he passes away, but cannot open his eyes again. The Doctor uses some Time Lord Regeneration energy to allow Davros that little extra stength. This turns out to be a trap. What Davros actually wanted to do was to drain all the energy from the Doctor to prolong his life and power up the Daleks. He was inspired to do this from an old prophecy of a powerful half Timelord half Dalek hybrid. Missy breaks into the infirmary, saving the Doctor.

However, the Doctor was a few steps ahead of Davros all along. He knew his plan, and allowed him to do it as Davros forgot an important thing. The energy reached every Dalek on the planet, including the ones in the sewers. They are coming up and attacking the main Daleks.

The Doctor runs into Clara, still inside the Dalek casing. She tries to tell him who she is, but it only comes out as “I am a Dalek”. Missy arrives, and after making sure this “Dalek” is Clara… she tells the Doctor Clara was killed by this Dalek and he should kill it to avenge her! Clara tries to tell the Doctor this isn’t true, but it only comes out as “I am a Dalek”, and being frightened and in tears only comes out of the Dalek as “Exterminate!”. She begs the Doctor not to kill her, which partly comes out as “Mercy”. The Doctor says why would the word “mercy” be in a Dalek’s vocabulary in the first place. He tells the Dalek to open its casing, which Missy didn’t tell Clara how to do, but you simply just have to think it and say “open”. The casing opens, revealing Clara, and the Doctor advises Missy to run away. She does, but ends up surrounded by Daleks. She tells them she’s just had a brilliant idea…

The Doctor and Clara escape, but the Doctor can’t help wondering why Davros would give the Daleks a concept of mercy at all. He decides he has to make sure it happens. He goes to the battlefield where the young Davros is surrounded by the handmines, and uses his sonic screwdriver to destroy them. He says he wants Davros to remember the importance of mercy and that it matters more than which side of a battle you are on.

I liked the way of doing a part two episode by essentially rewording the title of part one. The title is likely referring to Clara. She’s the Magician’s Apprentice, the Doctor’s companion. Here she is the Witch’s familiar, Missy’s companion. The names also reflect how the dynamics work. The dynamic between Clara and this incarnation of the Doctor is something like a teacher and student. A witch’s familiar is also an assistant of sorts, but is usually a bit like a pet, such as a cat or an owl. Missy treats Clara more like an animal than a human. Even that’s probably a bit generous, she mostly treats her as a pawn for her own games.

After all the action in last week’s episode, this is mostly the Doctor and Davros, two sworn enemies, having a long discussion. Missy has been compared to a female version of the Joker, and this episode was intentionally inspired by Batman and the Joker, specifically the hero laughing at one of the villain’s jokes. Davros mentions that he greatly admires the Doctor. There is the idea that the Doctor and Davros have quite a lot in common, that they are two sides of the same coin. They are both very clever scientists who have, temporarily at least, experienced the loss of their entire race and home planets. In this episode, they are both trying to pull a similar trick on each other.

Julian Bleach has been good in all his appearances as Davros, but he is great here, very compelling . Davros is pitiable, especially seeing how ill and close to death he is. But he is evil and twisted enough to exploit that, all in the aims of his even more evil and twisted ultimate goal.

Missy has some great lines again. Calling the Doctor a swot, and how the teamwork with Missy and Clara works, “Every miner needs a canary”, when they trap and kill a Dalek “You’re the bait, I’m the hook”. When she presents Clara in a Dalek casing to the Daleks as “Giftwrapped. Better – canned”, and trying to pass off her attempt at tricking the Doctor into killing Clara in the Dalek casing as her making a point of “The friend inside the enemy, the enemy inside the friend”. A new thing we find out in this episode is that she mentions having a daughter.

Another version of Clara, Oswin in ‘Asylum Of the Daleks’, also suffered being converted into a Dalek. In that episode the horror and sadness came from Oswin realising what had happened to her, but in this episode it comes from the fact that Clara is helpless to tell the Doctor who she is and is trapped inside the casing, and that he may end up killing her thinking he’s taking revenge for her death.

It shows how awful it would be to be a Dalek. What they say might not be exactly what they truly mean or what they’re even trying to say, and any individuality they have is lost, they are simply “a Dalek”. They never die, they just rot forever. The Daleks themselves come off as quite tragic in this episode, as well as Davros.

This was an interesting episode, and I think a better attempt at making us feel some sympathy for the Daleks than something like ‘Into the Dalek’ from last year’s series. While it wasn’t as varied and jam-packed as ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ there was still a lot going on, which made the ending seem a bit rushed. (We have to get home. Oh yeah, almost forgot the Daleks have destroyed the TARDIS in the last episode! Oh never mind, it turns out the TARDIS was just pretending to be blown apart). If I’m going to nitpick, like a lot of people I’m not a fan of the Doctor’s “sonic sunglasses” acting like a new sonic screwdriver. But all in all, another decent episode.