Sherlock: "The Abominable Bride"

Breaking up with the Joker.

An abominable episode of an abominable show, "The Abominable Bride" surprised me by not wholly falling into every prediction I'd outlined in my 2015 article disclosing my fears. That's not to say it wasn't pretty uneventful television, but it could have been worse. It could have been infinitely better, but it could have been worse. It's still pretty bad, like almost all Sherlock is, but in this case largely for different reasons.

Correct Holmes attire: the bow tie inexplicably tucked under the collar.

The overall premise of "The Abominable Bride", if you didn't know already, is that it takes the Sherlock characters and actors and places them in the setting of the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who seems to get a rather begrudging credit at the end of the title sequence after the "Written and Created By Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss" credit has made its rather doubtful claim - it's not as if they created the most important elements). Thus Holmes is a pipe-smoking sleuth who wears dressing gowns at home and a deerstalker and Inverness cape abroad, Watson is a moustache and bowler hat sporting Second Afghan War Veteran, Mrs Hudson is a housekeeper as well as a landlady, Lestrade is, well, Lestrade still but with mutton chops (this special overlooks his penchant for peculiar and affectedly fashionable outfits which Watson remarks upon in the original stories) and Mycroft is a fat bastard (actually in the original stories he was just a tall man of large build, probably overweight but not obese). To add their own flavour, Mary Morstan actually has a role instead of disappearing after The Sign of the Four, and Sherlock-specific character Molly Hooper works as a coroner disguised as a man.

Having a flashback to the Crimea.

This all works reasonably well and the characters can take on Victorian roles, that mainstay of British television drama alongside Jane Austen's era, quite competently. It is a little jarring to the trained ear, however, to note when the characters switch between the precise Victorian English of Conan Doyle's own writing, which is referenced heavily in this, and a flippant modern idiom which writers tend to use these days for the sake of humorous juxtaposition, which is to say characters in a historical setting speaking like modern people. Thus Holmes and Watson tend to slip into modern vocabulary to crack jokes, which doesn't particularly appeal to me. Nonetheless it's all presented reasonably convincingly, but to be fair Victoriana is very safe territory for the BBC.

T-shirts with these outfits printed on them soon for the BBC online store.

The plot, as is typical with Sherlock, is quite perfunctory and rather secondary to the main interest of the piece. Essentially, Holmes is investigating a woman who apparently committed suicide before coming back to life and murdering her husband. The resolution to this is all fairly predictable: a fake body was used during the suicide, then the woman actually had a friend kill her because she was dying anyway (which seems rather implausible for the time) and then a secret cabal of suffragists teamed up to enact vengeance on the evil men in their lives using her spectral reputation as a cover. This is more or less all stuff we've seen before in Sherlock, and it's not very surprising, but it's also not really the point.

"'But Holmes!' I ejaculated."

Time and time again I've outlined the fact that Sherlock has been constipatedly straining over two endlessly repeated points of dramatic interest for its entire existence: what is Cumberbatch's Sherlock really like? Are Holmes and Watson really friends? And of course the answer is always "An eccentric man, but fundamentally a good one" and "Yes." You'd better believe that this is once again the area of interest of this special, with time spent dwelling on Holmes' asexuality, his drug use and his isolation from the world. One particularly bizarre point is an inexplicable conversation Holmes and Watson have while staking out the mysterious bride in which Watson insists that Holmes must have some kind of carnal urges and bugs him about it until he is forced to utter one of Moffat's meaningless fake aphorisms: "I made me," whatever that means. Furthermore, in the final confrontation with Moriarty, Holmes is not alone - despite everything (like drug abuse and so on) Watson is there to help him. Hurrah.

Stop right there criminal scum.

So really in terms of character drama it's just the same old song and dance, apart from maybe a bit more affirmation of Mycroft Holmes' genuine interest in his brother's welfare and Holmes having some kind of unnecessary realisation that he and Moriarty weren't really equal and opposite and bound to each other and so on because he has friends whereas Moriarty was just some weirdo who shot himself. But it really doesn't leave one with much. The plot's simplistic. The characterisation is repetitive and simplistic. As such, the whole thing has to rely on gimmickry in order to do something interesting. Thus we truly enter spoiler country, in case you weren't already there.

"There are now parking spaces reserved for Spider-Man,
Doctor Bollocks and Rosemary West."

It turns out in the course of events that the entire Victorian scenario is just a sort of vision in the drug-addled Holmes' head as he returns on the plane from the end of Series 3, because he needed to re enact a cold case about a woman shooting herself and apparently surviving to see if Moriarty too could have survived. Surprise surprise: he can't. Moriarty's dead, but there's some postmortem plan or some other party is using his image or something. In any event, the entire thing takes place while Holmes is having some kind of hallucinogenic dream experience in a plane seat while Watson, Mary and Mycroft sit around berating him for his bad habits. Did you know that in the original stories, Holmes only ever used drugs when he wasn't on a case? The idea that they would assist him in a case is pretty ludicrous.

"Can I be shipped with someone other than Mycroft please?"

Thus, much like the 2014 Doctor Who Christmas Special, there are dreams within dreams, such that Victorian Holmes is in a dream of Modern Holmes in a dream of Victorian Holmes in a dream of Modern Holmes, before the ending establishes that there's also a Victorian Holmes imagining the modern day just as the Modern Holmes is imagining the Victorian era. Not only does this make the whole thing feel rather pointless - it's all in Holmes' head and conveniently for Moffat and Gatiss any plot holes or mistakes can be waved away with "it wasn't real" it only emphasises the absurdity of the ending of Series 3, in which Holmes was sent on a suicide mission after killing Magnussen, only to be immediately recalled moments later with no consequences whatsoever, an utterly ludicrous ending which Moffat and Gatiss presented to the audience with a straight face as if daring them to object.

Now with 30% more hot air.

Moriarty's presence in this episode is extremely unwelcome. I have nothing against Andrew Scott as an actor but I can't stand this portrayal of Moriarty, which is essentially just Christopher Nolan's version of the Joker with an Irish accent. Victorian Mycroft even describes him as a maths professor, but in the episode he's the same old creepy Moriarty, making gay jokes about Holmes and Watson, fellating his revolver barrel and acting like he and Holmes are in some kind of codependent relationship. There's that "cheekiness" I feared in my "concerns" article. Typical rubbish. Moriarty should never be more than a plot device to kill off Holmes, nothing more. Scott's version of the character has well and truly had his day and I sincerely hope that when Holmes says that he's really dead at the end that he means it.

"I'm as English as Queen Victoria!"

I also pointed out in my concerns article that Holmes shouldn't wear his deerstalker and cape in the city yet he does, despite Watson voicing concern about wearing the country tweeds he's still wearing from a rural adventure to the city morgue. On the other hand, Cumberbatch's Holmes does look quite snappy in the sequence at the estate of Sir Eustace (a desperate-for-any-work Tim McInnerny) in which he is wearing the deerstalker and cape with a snazzy tartan country get-up. That's probably the highest compliment I can offer it, however. The use of the Victorian setting just made me want to see these actors getting to do classic-style Holmes stories, perhaps with a touch of extra darkness in the vein of those tales Watson considers to be too sensitive for public release. To touch upon the cinematography for a moment, this special also features some dreadful spinning transitions which have been described as a homage but look totally out of place and jarring here.

Care for some crack?

Other than that, "The Abominable Bride" doesn't really even get away with being a sort of whimsical New Years' romp. It's the typical Moffat bag of tricks with some feeble efforts to bring in a gender theme in order to swat away accusations of sexism or misogyny. The women are nonetheless still heavily undermined, sidelined and used as shallow stereotypes and plot devices, however, so it hardly scores any points there. While this outing wasn't as bothersome as I expected, I nonetheless think that Sherlock has well and truly lost its way from the early days when there was some competence involved in balancing the mysteries with the exploration of character. These days it just seems to be narrative trickery intended to seem clever (without being clever) and a bunch of references for the sake of Holmes fans and, indeed, pure Sherlock fans, with the Victorian Holmes having confusing reminisces of the experiences of his modern-day counterpart. All the other stuff, like postmodern jokes about the illustrator and Holmes trying to use Watson's presentation of himself against him, fat Mycroft, the Reichenbach Falls and all the rest of it would be completely meaningless to the majority of the audience who apparently (to my horror) have never read any Sherlock Holmes, although to be fair, no one reads anything anymore. Much like Moffat's Doctor Who and its ongoing obsession with pointless references to bits and pieces of the old series, this is really just an exercise in self-indulgence, not written for a mainstream audience and not even really written for Sherlock's own diehard fanbase, but rather written purely for Moffat and Gatiss themselves, emphasising to a greater extent than ever the sheer irrelevance of this abominable production.

The 'Sherlock is Overrated' 1500 page views special

Whoa. Look at that! 1500 page views for 'Sherlock is Overrated' and 1600 for 'The Empty Hearse'! I know in the world of the internet that isn't really that many, but by Opinions Can Be Wrong's usual standard (given the regularly esoteric content) it's completely unprecedented. 1500 people who think that Sherlock is Overrated - or want to know why people think it's overrated, I suppose. I daresay some of them are repeat views and there's probably a bit of link jacking in there, but still. Still!

Now the 'The Empty Hearse' review doesn't count because it was linked on Twitter by a TV presenter here in Australia to whom it was shared by a friend of mine (quite without my knowledge) so it garnered a lot of views that way. 'Sherlock is Overrated' has succeeded purely on its own merits, I think by being an article with a title a lot of people were thinking but hadn't written about yet.

In hindsight I think the article is pretty imperfect, largely because it never actually explains how Sherlock is 'overrated,' just what I think is wrong with it. I suppose the logical conclusion is simply 'if it has this much wrong with it, it can't be as good as people say' but I ought to have made that more explicit in the article. In any event it's purely subjective, although I do think more and more people are admitting to themselves these days that the Emperor is walking about unclad. I just wish people would recognise that of a few more of the apparently unimpeachable touchstones of popular culture.

I sort of intend to compose 'Sherlock is Overrated 2; or, Sherlock is Still Overrated' but I haven't managed to do it so far because that would mean actually having to think about the show more, as well as trawling back through the episodes for screen grabs of Benedict Cumberbatch in the middle of sentences so he looks like he's pulling a funny face, and I simply could not be arsed at this point in time. Nonetheless it's good to see that I'm getting to someone or other out there who might otherwise be thinking "Why on earth does everyone think this show is so good?"

It's the same problem with current Doctor Who, really, especially given that they're co-written by the same man. These writers/producers have got good actors and a solid concept on their hands (even if both Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who are completely irrelevant in the modern day because they're products of radically different contexts to now). But they need to start realising that having a solid, substantial plot is just as important as characterisation. The problem with both of these shows is that they're so obsessively focused on character development that they don't achieve anything. Without both plot and character, they go nowhere, because pure characterisation doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. These elements should work towards some kind of thematic goal. Character studies only function within a broader text in service of themes. Otherwise you're just exploring fictional characters, and who cares about that? They're fictional characters, not real people.

But I won't bother getting into all that here. The point is, Sherlock is overrated. Actually, maybe it isn't anymore because people are starting to realise that it's a bit arsey. But we'll see what happens at the time of the next series. In the meantime, why not read the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? They're actually good. Well, most of them are.

Concerns before the Victorian "Sherlock" Special

If I know anything, it's that nothing gets people coming here more than me complaining about how much of a load of old wank I think Sherlock is. Nonetheless I must admit that, with a sense of disappointment in myself far greater than could be felt by any other towards me for saying this, seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in the Inverness cape and deerstalker with Martin Freeman sporting a bowler hat and moustache does stir something approaching guilty pleasure in the blackened recesses of my icy heart. I must confess, I'm a bit of a Holmes purist. I like my Holmes Victorian, and I don't think the concept actually works very well outside the confines of the late Nineteenth Century. Of course you can read all this and more on my extensive article on the subject.

In any event it looks like the next bit of Sherlock is an out-of-continuity piece set in the times of the original texts, and I'm all in favour of that, or I would be if I had any faith whatever in the two men who write the show, which I don't. One of my numerous issues with Sherlock is its insistence, like New Who, on "cheekiness." For instance, Holmes and Watson have to be mistaken for a gay couple a million times because "ooh wouldn't it be funny if we transposed their living arrangements from the books into the modern day, everyone would think they were gay." Or "ooh, wouldn't it be funny if Holmes met a modern person who was flirting with him, he wouldn't understand." And so forth. A result of all this "wouldn't it be funny" is that half the time characters in Sherlock don't remotely talk or act like people even do in real life in present times. Yet I'm sure we'll wind up with people cracking out fake Victorian euphemisms about Holmes being gay or whatever in the Nineteenth Century which will be even more unrealistic and jarring. So that's something to not look forward to.

Another element of course is the writing in general, the enormously laboured "drama" which characterises the writing of Sherlock and most modern "dramas" in general. What I mean is that "drama" these days mostly seems to constitute close-ups of characters staring into the distance while sad music warbles in the background, people giving big speeches full of hyperbole and slow-motion crying. Now as I stated in my review of The Empty Hearse, the Victorian age was an age of propriety. Emotions were to be expressed very privately, or not at all. Somehow I doubt that the writers will be able to manage this because it's not what gets viewers and sells DVDs in the age of the modern "drama." As a result I'll be incredibly curious to see how they handle that. The common argument is that Sherlock is "a show about a detective" and not "a detective show." That would make sense if the show, as I've said numerous times, didn't labour the same two points every single week: "is Sherlock Holmes a good guy?" Yes. "Are Holmes and Watson really friends?" Yes. Are we still going to get this in the special? It's a flawed premise. The concept of "Sherlock Holmes" as originally conceived revolves around the idea not of exploring the character of an eccentric detective, but of extraordinary crimes and mysteries solved by an eccentric detective. One of the reasons Sherlock never really says anything is because its "Sherlock Holmes," the protagonist it explores, is just some guy Moffat and Gatiss made up. He's based on Conan Doyle's character, yes, but he's far from being the same thing. Therefore too much exploration of his character borders on irrelevance. The transposition to a modern setting was presumably meant to shed light on the concept, but anything vaguely relevant to the original written character was thoroughly covered in the first series, and possibly the first episode. Maybe this 'special' is just going to be a "romp."

The third and final part of the unholy trinity of big problems with Sherlock is of course how incredibly smug the show is. As far as shows go, Sherlock has its head so far up its own arse that it's coming back out of its own mouth again. And now that you've digested that fairly disgusting image, consider this: we've already had tonnes of knowing nods to the old books, with puns on original titles, Holmes using the deerstalker as some kind of personal branding, and even awareness of its own fanbase in "The Empty Hearse." So how bad can we expect this to be in a show that fully embraces the smug self-awareness which consistently undermines the show's drama if it's set in the very era it so dearly loves to reference? Coy remarks about things that might happen in the future, perhaps? I dread to think.

I'll say this for starters: I hope to high heaven that the bits where Mister Cumberbatch is clad in the stereotypical Sidney Paget illustration gear (the deerstalker et al, don't you know) are set in the countryside, because as any right-thinking student of Holmes and Victoriana knows it would not have even crossed one's mind to wear such an outfit in the Metropolis. And I hope they tone down the cheekiness, the self-referentiality and the "drama" for the sake of the setting. On the other hand, of course, Victorian Britain had just as many drug addicts, perverts and public urinators as we have today, they just pretended that they didn't. So obviously there is room for Victorian-style Sherlock to be shocking... or, perhaps, Sherlocking? Anyway. It could be good. I'd like it to be good. I don't think it will be good, but maybe the fact that during Series 3 people seemed to wake up to the fact that the Sherlock Emperor was not wearing so many clothes as he first appeared has jolted Moffat and Gatiss out of their torpor. Or maybe they'll just do what this cabal of writers usually do - as recently witnessed in their associate Chris Chibnall's response to criticisms of Broadchurch Series 2 - and declare that all their critics are simply wrong and stupid and that there's nothing they could improve.

I really must make clear, and I know that this is a cliché thing to say, but if you want good, proper adaptations of Holmes stories that are true to the tone, setting and characters then you basically can't go wrong with the 80s and 90s Granada TV series starring Jeremy Brett as the Great Detective. I'd say Brett's Holmes is a little more flippant than the written character, but that's about it. Maybe this Sherlock special will approach that, but people have been making half-arsed Victorian Holmes telemovies for years and they never really seem to fully grasp the situation.

Urgh I just realised their Moriarty might be in it. Can't wait until December...

"No one's forcing you to watch it."

Piss off.

"Dark Water"

After the next round of budget cuts, post-its will replace episodes.

Right. If it doesn't happen now it isn't happening. I've been watching The Thick of It lately and I'm keen to compare it to Peter Capaldi in arguably a less confronting role, admittedly at the expense of The Thick of It's actually good writing. We begin with, naturally, not the Doctor, TARDIS or adventure but Clara as usual calling Danny on the phone. Thus is revealed, after all this waiting, the great expected secret about Danny: he can't cross roads safely and talk on the phone at the same time. In all honesty, we don't need to hear six "shoot oops" from Clara at the start of any screenplay after hearing this phrase done to absolute death in this series. She's embarking on some kind of post-it-note-driven confession about lying, but it's never made clear why: didn't Danny already figure out that she was still travelling with the Doctor last episode? Not sure what else there is to be done with that. She has a big self-referential ramble about saying the deadly phrase "I love you" and Danny gets hit by a car, which apparently makes no noise whatsoever on the phone. Clara nonetheless says "that's a thing" - was someone paying Moffat to insert the phrase "a thing" into every episode? - and says that he's the "last person who's ever gonna hear me say that." Why? This never gets resolved either.

Auditioning for one of the water tomb bodies.

Of course the whole point of this is that Danny dies as he lives: in a humdrum sort of way, killed offscreen by a speeding car, not aliens or something. Now I know he notionally had an exciting life in the army and what not but I mean as a character he was humdrum. Later Clara's mourning, standing in the middle of the street where it happened - clearly not learning from Danny there. She phones the Doctor, who's mucking around on what looks a bit like a gloomier version of that planet from Revenge of the Sith where Obi-Wan hunts down General Grievous. She's all dead inside, having a stilted conversation with her weird grandmother from "The Time of the Doctor," and complains about Danny's death being boring and ordinary. Much like himself, then. I'm trying to wrestle the subtext out of this but it's still drama with the blunt end of the wedge. Clara thinks she's "owed better." Then the Doctor answers the phone, Peter Capaldi giving an adrenalin shot to the episode. That being said, I realise Buffy-style the representation of death as silent and dull is something which can have a purpose, although I wonder given the Buffy precedent if really now its only purpose is to remind of shows that have done it before. Suddenly the Doctor wakes up on Lanzarote or rather some lava planet which is intercut with flashbacks of Clara nicking all the TARDIS keys, one of which is in The Time Traveller's Wife. Remember how in the TV Movie he was reading H.G. Wells' The Time Traveller? Well, pomo Who, pomo intertextuality I guess. Clara's used some kind of "sleep patch" on the Doctor and is chucking all the keys into a volcano to force him to help her prevent the death of Danny. Apparently lava is the only thing that can destroy a TARDIS key. Seems a bit ordinary for sci-fi. Why not dropping them into a blue giant star or a black hole or something? Anyway, hearing Jenna Coleman trying to fill the name "Danny Pink" with emotional gravitas is a pretty awful moment.

"I do not choose now to do what I came to do."

The Doctor's having none of it of course, refusing to be involved with a paradox, and dismissively suggesting Clara make good on her threats which she claims is him trying to seize control. His response, "I am in control," is very Malcolm Tucker. Her remark that "You will never step inside your TARDIS again" is pure trailer bait, and in any event she tosses all the keys into the Fire of Doom. Then she has a big cry while saying she'd do it again. Can't the Doctor just click his fingers? I think I heard a cut line addressed that. It is, however, very conveniently, all a dream. The Doctor turned the tables on Clara in the first place. This is exploitative writing at its finest, the Doctor claiming it was a test to see how much she meant it. Instead of telling her to "piss off" however he tells her to "go to hell." How droll, he was making a pun about how they'd go find the dead. Presumably the Doctor believes that the TARDIS might be capable of accessing the "afterlife." How does that work? Maybe if he believed living consciousnesses went to another dimension or something, but otherwise "heaven" is a pretty metaphysical concept. What are we going to get next, an episode where the TARDIS lands inside an idea or something? It's odd. Anyway, we get some overplayed drama shite about how the Doctor cares for Clara so much that betrayal wouldn't matter and pure trailer speak about "the darkest day, the blackest hour." Why do characters in New Who always saying "a thing" or spout vaguely poetic-sounding crap all the time instead of actually commenting on events like real people?

That's right, it stinks.

Anyway Clara sticks her hands back in the TARDIS's dubious "interface" from "Listen" and off they go. Meanwhile Danny is being shown the ropes by Chris Addison who's concerned about him being cremated and reveals that they're all on the inside of a Hollow Earth kind of deal. Obviously the bureaucratic office space heaven type imagery is hardly something new either. The TARDIS lands in a spooky building with teardrop logos everywhere and skeletons in tanks, which of course move when the Doctor's not looking. I'm surprised at one point they didn't go past a painting where the eyes slid away and someone peeped through. The Doctor checks out a hologram book about the place rather pointlessly and they finally, after a whole series, meet Missy. Knowing who the character is it's of course completely predictable that Moffat gets his kiss in here as the Doctor gets orally accosted. I'm so worn down by this stuff after ten years of New Who, but the thing is this: the Doctor never kissed anyone in the old show, did he? No, not like that. Why? Because he just didn't. That wasn't in the nature of the character, and no one seems to have cared. Now it seems like one is mandated once a year, and if it isn't outwardly, boringly romantic - making the Doctor seem like any other screen hero - it's like this, just pointlessly cheeky and the writers doing it because they can. I think the thing that bothers me is that, regardless of whether it's done sincerely or as a joke, it's basically the writers saying "Old Who's characterisation and tone was wrong," because it was conspicuous that in Old Who this never ever happened. The thing is, Old Who wasn't always terrific on the characterisation front, but the way they treated the Doctor, and the way they treated romance most of the time (except for weak crap like marrying off female companions), wasn't conformist to regular drama or what have you. So whenever they do stuff like this, even as a joke, I feel like it's saying "it's better that Doctor Who be more conformist to the norms of modern TV" which to me is emblematic of the way that New Who so often seems to spectacularly miss the point of the show's original premise, which was to stand out and be different. That's not to say the Old show wasn't as unashamedly populist as the New, but I feel like it more often did so on its own terms (although I'm sure tedious gasbaggers on some of the bigger, more "uber"-populated forums could lecture me on how every single Old Who episode is a worthless rip off of a pre-existing narrative and New Who is better in every way). It is of course also a problem because it's just Moffat going "Wouldn't it be funny if the Master and the Doctor kissed on screen?" and making it happen. It has nothing to do with the story really, it's just an old fan mucking around, which like so much of New Who's self-awareness, makes it virtually impossible to suspend disbelief about anything because the narrative doesn't function as if it is a representation of actual (albeit fictional and fantastical) events happening to people and instead feels more like playing with toys. But hey, it's a kid's show, right, so maybe that works in its favour (or maybe kids deserve to be taken seriously too).

"Why don't they fall off the ceiling?"

Anyway Missy pretends to be a robot, they meet someone named Doctor Chang, and Clara and the Doctor have an exchange where Clara says she's not okay and the Doctor responds "there would be something very wrong if you were." Typical Moffat "Look at me, aren't I clever" dialogue. No offence to the guy (I know no one says that in good faith) but why does he write these days so much as if he's got something to prove? If he's as good as his biggest fans claim that his winning of awards proves him to be, he shouldn't need to. In the Nethersphere Chris Addison makes a naff reference to the death of Steve Jobs explaining the proliferation of iPads in heaven, which is clearly not all it's cracked up to be, being cold, dark and apparently involving crime if the police siren is to be believed. Chris Addison makes an analogy to babies which serves in no way to explain or bear any relevance to the idea that the Nethersphere is an extension of existing consciousness rather than a "true" spiritual afterlife. Then a visitor turns up and we discover that the person Danny killed in Afghanistan (or Iraq I suppose) was a young boy upon whom he recklessly opened fire when checking a house in a battle zone.

No skeletons in his water closet.

In the real world, such as it is, the Cyberman imagery is extremely obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Doctor Chang reveals that the dead bodies have a "support exoskeleton" which Clara immediately deduces must be invisible. Why is Doctor Chang so accepting of all this? Is he from the future? I think it's kind of implied that he is, but it's really not clear. I guess "Into the Dalek" showed people from the future being uploaded so I suppose it's possible. Chang shows off "Dark Water" in which only "organic material" is visible. Pedantry time! Why does his suit disappear? Even if he was being a dreadful cad and wearing a polyester suit, that's still organic. He also makes a pervy joke about swimming pools 'cause obviously as a scientist he's a big old nerd and of course for Moffat that means he wants to trick people into exposing themselves as his only way of seeing anything arousing. Anyway, the only purpose of the Dark Water is to hide the presence of the Cybermen. Its invisibility qualities serve no other purpose whatsoever. There's a possible Malcolm Tucker reference when the psychic paper is alleged to show swearing. Back in the Nethersphere, Danny tries to be nice to the kid he shot. Does he expect that to work? Why does the kid want to see him anyway? Chris Addison dodges the question, so Moffat does too. Outside, Chang reveals that the company's founder discovered that TV white noise is actually a psychic message from the dead. Capaldi has to deliver the atrocious line "Can you just hurry up please or I'll hit you with my shoe." Chang reveals that the dead remain conscious in their bodies (somehow - New Who implying souls as usual), saying that this "never occurred" to anyone before. What? People have imagined that forever. I know I have. Moffat trying to seem clever again.

Says it all.

So it turns out everyone's begging not to be cremated to spare their bodies, which still have feeling. If they're dead, wouldn't the nervous system have stopped working? How can an uploaded mind, even if somehow still connected to a body, feel anything from the body if the body's dead? So dead people have more physical sensation than, say, paralysed people? It's bizarre. The Doctor appropriately enough declares it all a sham, arguing that "the dead are dead," that they're "just gone." Suddenly Danny's getting a call from Clara, but Clara's getting a call from Danny. How did that happen? "We've been scanning you telepathically since you came in." That's convenient. The skeletons all start standing up and the Doctor and Chang piss off leaving Clara alone. The Doctor's wondering what he's missing, asking "who would harvest dead bodies?" It's the Cybermen, as we see when the doors close, but it's still a valid question, or at least: why would the Cybermen need dead bodies? They're just old bones and stuff, what use would they be to the Cybermen? Isn't the point that they combine cybernetics with living organics? Surely an empty skeleton with no muscles or organs or brain would have no use whatsoever to them. Well, that wouldn't fit the spooky idea of the Cybermen turning skeletons into more Cybermen would it, so the issue is avoided. Missy stands around gloating and Chang reveals she's not a robot. He accepts the existence of robots then, so is he from the future? Missy says she'll not kill him until he says something nice, so in fear for his life he says something nice and she kills him. So long, Doctor Chang. What an odd character. I wonder what she would have done if he'd slagged her off.

"Can I have something to eat?"

Missy's claim that she's "feeling a bit emotional" is of course jutaxposed against the Cybermen, I suppose suggesting that cold reason is most dangerous in the hands of irrational people. The Doctor exclaims "Cybermen!" possibly surprised at their presence given that they would have no use for a bunch of old dead parts. Meanwhile Danny can't prove to Clara who he is, while Missy reveals that people in the Nethersphere only think they've gone to heaven. It's actually a "matrix data slice" which is a "Gallifreyan hard drive," evoking the weird dimensional computer storage of the Time Lords as seen in "The Deadly Assassin," "The Ultimate Foe" and so forth. Supposedly the dying minds are uploaded, edited and put back into their "upgraded" bodies. Again, wouldn't the Cybermen need living people? In fact why do they need minds? I guess that's the problem with the Cybermen, really: if they're so advanced and don't want emotions, why don't they just go full robot? The Doctor wonders "which Time Lady" she is and Missy says she's "the one you abandoned," presumably a last minute effort by Moffat to get people thinking it's going to be Romana or Susan or something. People had already been saying the Rani for months, as if Moffat would bring back an unpopular and little known character from the Eighties. It's like people who every year seem convinced Omega is going to come back. The Doctor heads through a tiny door and discovers himself bursting out of St Paul's Cathedral, Missy wondering if he didn't realise where he was. He shouldn't be too surprised, most of the time they can't escape from the middle of London.

"Simm? Bit rich for our blood now."

Back inside Danny keeps telling Clara that he loovs her, and she gets pissed off. Now the point here right is that Clara said those words were super special and unique from him right, at the beginning of the episode, right? Danny's trying to show how it's him that way? But it never pays off, Clara never acknowledges what he's doing, and we're left to assume that she's either too distraught or too dense to see it. Maybe Moffat's just playing with our expectations again or maybe he didn't even realise what he'd done. Either way she claims she wants to be with him, having to unleash the dreadful line "I have to be with Danny Pink." Unfortunately, no sentence involving the name "Danny Pink" is ever going to sound profound or genuinely emotional. Chris Addison encourages Danny to delete his emotions and the Cybermen emerge as Murray Gold bombast crashes in the background. The Doctor runs around yelling, Missy says it's too late and the human race is basically buggered with a bargepole because the dead outnumber the living. What use do the Cybermen have for dead bodies??? Then of course she reveals she's the Master. Holy shit! We only predicted that in the first episode! Much like River Song being Amy's daughter, I initially thought this would be too obvious to be true, but lo and behold here we are. The Master's back.

"But I thought all Time Lords were now
to be Seventies fan club members!"

I seem to remember finding "Dark Water" pretty intriguing at first broadcast but the plot's got more holes than the Seventh Doctor after he landed in San Francisco in 1999. We never find out what use the Cybermen actually have for dead bodies, there's no explanation for how or why the mind is somehow still connected to the dead body in the Nethersphere (apart from it being an elaborate trick to encourage people not to cremate anyone so they Cybermen can use their bodies for whatever reason) and we don't discover why Danny's accidental victim visited him. By this I mean that we don't find out in the next episode either. Danny just isn't interesting enough for me to care much about Clara's plight - I'm not a monster, they're fictional characters: if one dies, I have to be pretty bloody fond of the character to mind. The problem is, not enough happens: Danny dies and then talks to Chris Addison on the set of Blade Runner, the Doctor and Clara visit an imaginary volcano, and then they stand around in a building being fed plot exposition that isn't even true. Obviously as part one of two "Dark Water" has to set things up, but it's all either set up or pointless time wasting. The "drama" side of things is okay as they go, but its delight in constantly spelling itself out is tedious. The Master's reveal is incredibly obvious and the Doctor doesn't have nearly enough to do. I think the main thing that needed to be ditched here is the presence of the Cybermen, and they needed to spend less time over-emphasising the Doctor's, Clara's and Danny's feelings and more time establishing rules for the plot. It was interesting at first broadcast, but looking back what I can see are very murky waters indeed.

"Listen"

The lamp on top of the TARDIS is where, at this point?

We've had the Dalek episode. We've had the dumb historical celebrity episode. Now it's time for the Spooky Doo episode. I like horror, but I guess you need to be a little kid to find this stuff scary. I also find it doesn't really work in serialised fiction. It's not like a monster is going to sneak up behind the Doctor, snap his neck and then bam, that's the end of Doctor Who four episodes into the new series. 'Listen' is more a psychological thriller than anything else, but it's still pretty tame as they go. We begin with the Doctor meditating on top of the TARDIS: an odd image, but an interesting one. What's he contemplating: deep matters of philosophy, perhaps? Spiritual and metaphysical possibilities? No, of course not, he's wondering if scary monsters live under the bed. He wanders around the TARDIS talking to himself and being pointlessly creepy, blowing out candles and so forth, while hypothesising about hidden beings that accompany us all our lives. He contemplates that in contrast to hunting and defence, evolution has never produced a creature perfect at hiding. Since when were any of these hunters or defensive creatures perfect? The example of a 'perfectly defended' creature is a puffer fish, hardly the epitome of invulnerability. Anyway, what about chameleons? What about stick insects, or sloths or stonefishes? They're all just as good at hiding as a puffer fish is at defending itself, in some cases better. I'm being pedantic, but the Doctor's premise seems to be based on some pretty unsubstantiated generalisations. Apparently such a being would only possibly be able to be observed when the observer was alone. What? It's a pretty stupid thing for him to be thinking about, like something an idiot or maybe a drug user would think was sophisticated. His chalk spookily falls off a book, the word 'Listen' appearing on his chalkboard. Well I've just shat my pants in terror. Roll titles!

"Formal jacket with a t-shirt! Never goes out of style!"

In a series of disjointed sequences reminiscent of the school scenes from 'Into the Dalek,' we see Clara's disastrous date with Danny Pink, who wants to skip the foreplay and go "straight for extras" with Clara. We get some typical 'instant reversal' humour where Clara wants to not talk about teaching and then they discuss just that, laughing uproariously about something that doesn't sound terribly funny. When they agree about a desire to 'kill' a student Clara cracks some more jibes about Danny being a stone cold killer before he insists that he did a lot of good work as a soldier. When he claims that "people like you get the wrong end of the stick" Clara completely overreacts and storms off. I'm not sure why Clara is this defensive - maybe she's a puffer fish - but there you go. Back in her room the Doctor's talking Moffat nonsense: "I need you for a thing." He makes some dodgy jibes about her appearance so that Moffat can overemphasise the non-romantic aspect of the character, and then goes on to describe his theory that "no one is ever really alone" and that it's related to how everyone has the same presumed nightmare. These two concepts have a vaguely Jungian quality to them (shadows and archetypes) but it's hardly a sophisticated concept; it's two human kids and an old lady from different historical periods having a hand from under their bed grab their ankles. A couple of aliens might have served to mix this up a bit. Clara claims that "everybody dreams about something under the bed." Do they? Not sure I ever have. To investigate, the Doctor makes Clara stick her hands into these rather sexual-looking pink squidgy things on the TARDIS console to hunt down the dream. She thinks of Pink when her phone rings, however, and it seems as if we've come to the wrong place.

"Now stick your fingers deep into the psychic interface."

Clara assures the Doctor that their location can't be right: she was never in a children's home in Gloucester. I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be orphanages in the Nineties. The Doctor thinks it is the right place, but surely he must know that it isn't. Didn't he take a hop, skip and a jump through Clara's youth back in 'The Rings of Akhaten'? He's a bit arbitrarily thick at points in this. The answer is, of course, that we've actually arrived in the past of a young Danny, who calls out to Clara revealing his original name to be Rupert, much like the bear with the checked trousers. It sounds a bit like he says 'Rupert Pig' but we are in fact witnessing Clara's date as a young child. Inside the 'home' the Doctor has a short and pointless conversation with the late night supervisor. When the Doctor asks him if ever he looks around to find his coffee's disappeared, he replies "everybody does that." Do they? I'm more of a tea drinker myself, so maybe the scary creatures under the bed aren't interested in my English Breakfast. The TV also turns off by itself so we think something must be afoot. Upstairs, Rupert Bear tells Clara that he thinks there's something under his bed: "everyone thinks that sometimes." Again, do they? I sometimes have weird dreams about animals under my bed, not ankle-grabbing hands, and I'm not scared, just annoyed that I have to figure out a way to get rid of them. Incidentally, Rupert has a pretty bloody big room for an orphanage. Maybe this is a concession to how rare they were by this point, although I'm inclined to think that they were probably in fact nonexistent.

Dream a little dream of me.

We get to see how Clara is great with kids as she clambers under the bed and rationalises to Rupert that late night noises are generally explicable: other people asleep or awake, the house creaking (it's implied later) and so forth. Something sinks down on the mattress above them, however, and they emerge to discover a huge lump under the blanket like the invisible man's in there pitching a massive tent. There's the reason these orphanages were closed down. Why doesn't Clara just whip the cover off the bed? Well she doesn't, and the Doctor, who's turned up while they weren't looking, sits around waffling about Where's Wally because it can't be New Who without the Doctor cracking some shit jokes. He explains that being scared is a 'superpower' because it enhances your responses. It's an interesting idea relating to the evolution concepts proposed earlier that the episode doesn't fully follow up on: fear as an instinctive response. For whatever reason, the Doctor insists that they turn their back on the giant blanketed phallus, telling it that they won't look at it. After some mucking about there's a flash and it disappears out the door, nicking Rupert's threadbare bed cover. After he makes some dark remarks to Rupert, Clara calls the Doctor a "big grey haired stick insect" in some more of this series' obsession with ageism and then she gives Rupert an 'army' of toy soldiers to comfort him, topped off by the Colonel who is "so brave he doesn't need a gun." It's a pretty heavy handed parallel to the Doctor. Rupert calls this toy 'Dan the Soldier Man,' implying that these events are setting up Danny's future. The Doctor telepathically sends him to sleep and back in the TARDIS he acts like more of a doofus than ever, asking Clara if she has a connection to the child when it's painfully obvious that she does. He states that he gave him a dream about being Soldier Dan: another Moffat ontological paradox? Will dream suggestion make him the man he is today? This episode is a little too willing to suggest that it will.

Moffat's summer home.

Clara goes back to the restaurant just after she originally stormed off to patch things up with Danny. We get some more shit humour from Moffat when Clara says her mouth wants to "go solo," which is just a repetition of the remarks Capaldi made about his eyebrows in 'Deep Breath.' She mentions the name Rupert, making Danny suspicious. Then an astronaut comes in and motions to Clara. Right. Danny becomes frustrated about Clara's prevarication and pisses off. Clara leaves too, so I hope they paid for their drinks already because otherwise that restaurant's going to be out a few quid. It turns out the astronaut is a descendant of Danny from 100 years in the future named Orson but also played by Samuel Anderson who plays Danny. The Doctor used the psychic link from Clara or what have you to pick him up, and it turns out that he was at the end of the universe where he was flung by a time travel accident. The imagery we see of a decaying planet with a giant pink sun on the horizon is very evocative of the later sequences of H.G. Wells' 'The Time Machine,' one of the more successful pieces of imagery in the episode. I don't know what happened to no stars, Utopia, fanged people with tattoos on their faces and so on from 'Utopia' at the end of the Universe but who cares, that was dumb. The experiment in which Orson took part was to shoot him into 'next week.' If so, why is he in this big spaceship? What would he need it for? He's more than ready to go home after being stranded in the future for six months but in another example of our 'Twelfth Doctor is a dick' characterisation Capaldi makes up some cock and bull story about the TARDIS needing to recharge so he can test if there's anything out there now that all life has ceased. It's kind of convenient, isn't it, that someone with a connection to Clara enabled this particular scenario to come about.

"Your romantic subplot disgusts me."

In the TARDIS where Orson is shacking up for the night Clara finds Dan the Soldier Man and Orson relates that his family has an old story about time traveller ancestors, implying not very much beyond the fairly obvious fact that he might be a descendant of Clara. Now that we can see it clearly, why does Orson's spacesuit have the logo on it of the mission from the episode for which the costume was originally designed? Maybe it means something else here, like 'Sweaty Bollocks 6.' A message on the ship door visible only under night lights tells its writer not to open it, Capaldi telling Clara that Orson must have been tempted to seek some 'company' from whatever lurked outside. He reasons that the creaky sounds should just be the ship cooling, but argues that he needs to know if there's something outside. When a knocking begins, he starts reciting poetry, as characters so often do in Moffat Who. He unlocks the door and it starts to open, but he claims that this could just be a result of pressure from outside. When Clara argues, he inexplicably yells at her and browbeats her into returning to the TARDIS. The air starts rushing out of the ship, but there's no evidence of anything coming in. Orson rescues the Doctor and Clara sticks her hands back into the TARDIS' erogenous zones so that the Cloister Bell will stop ringing: "apparently I can do a thing," she declares, regurgitating more dreadful Moffat non-dialogue scraped from Joss Whedon's excrement.

"One day when you grow up you'll attempt
to bash in a caveman's skull with a rock."

The TARDIS lands in a barn somewhere where a little child is sobbing in bed. Clara asks if it's Rupert or Orson. Why would it be? Was she thinking of either of them? A couple of people we only see from the knees down come in complaining about the crying boy, the man declaring that his behaviour won't be tolerated in the army, the woman insisting that he doesn't want to be in the army. Then Moffat attempts to drop his massive bombshell: "Well he's not going to the Academy, is he, that boy? He'll never make a Time Lord." So presumably this is the Doctor. It's not altogether inconsistent with characterisation we've seen before, but where are we? Why are there "other boys" he could go and join? We were told just last week that the Doctor was "born into wealth and privilege" so he can't be an orphan, can he? Where is he then? Gallifreyan boarding school? Who knows. It seems to lean towards the 'not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords' thing too. In the TARDIS, Capaldi jumps to his feet repeating old Tom Baker lines: "Sontarans perverting the course of human history." Reason for this inclusion? Anyway, kid Doctor wonders who's there, so Clara grabs his leg to stop him getting out of bed, telling him it's a dream. Is this another ontological paradox? The Doctor only became interested in this because Clara hid under his bed and grabbed his ankle when he was a child? Back in the TARDIS, Clara insists that the Doctor depart and not ask her what happened, much like Rupert with the invisible phallus. Why? This isn't a potential monster situation. Isn't he allowed to learn something from this, maybe see himself as a child and remember what it's all about? Sadly it's not to be.

Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?

Instead of leaving things as ambiguous or subtle, however, we cut away to what we didn't see before: Clara giving kid Doctor a big spiel about fear, and how one day he'll come back as John Hurt in the 50th Anniversary Special when fear will make him kind. Is she meant to have subliminally imprinted these qualities upon him while he slept? 'Cause I've tried that on someone, and it doesn't work. They send Orson home and then Clara goes off to smooch Danny, but we cut away again to Clara pontificating further to little William Hartnell in his barn bed on Gallifrey, saying that "it's okay to be afraid" because "fear makes companions of us all." So was this whole episode's point summed up in 1973 when the Third Doctor said that courage was "being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway"? In the TARDIS, Capaldi pointlessly underlines the word 'listen' for emphasis and Clara leaves the little toy soldier with the kid Doctor. He probably woke up in the morning and said in his childlike squeak "What's this, hmm? Toy soldiers left by my bed at night? I won't be having with that, not one bit." 'Listen' is okay, I guess. It's an interesting experiment, at least, but the plot's far too convenient: too many of Moffat's same old ontological paradoxes and coincidences, too much navel-gazing about the character of the Doctor and too much repetition of what's come before: inexplicable potential monsters in 'Midnight,' the end of the universe in 'Utopia,' creepy orphanages as seen in 'The Impossible Astronaut' for instance, and Clara interfering in the Doctor's history as in 'The Name of the Doctor.' As the Doctor doing something in his spare time rather than being a monster of the week runaround it's interesting and unconventional as far as New Who goes but I feel like it would have been improved if the strongest idea - the Doctor contemplating some mystery - had proceeded along more interesting or more intellectually sophisticated lines than 'spooky monster under the bed.' The thriller elements aren't even really left unexplained - it was just Clara grabbing the Doctor's ankle when he was a little boy, with the rest presumably being a series of coincidences. As usual, some of the ideas have merit but the execution is, in my opinion, inelegant and by this point even a little trite. It feels less like a 'best ever episode' as some are claiming it and more just the regular charlatan's routine of dressing up something ultimately insubstantial in a narrative and vocabulary which gives the illusion of profundity. My recommendation is that if you want to listen, you do so to some lost Hartnell or Troughton serials, and don't overestimate New Who's capacity for integrity.

"Into the Dalek"

If the Daleks can't see you, they think you don't exist.

It's a new year and the Nation estate have a contract about which I'm sure they're very pleased, so it's time to do the Twelfth Doctor's confrontation with the Daleks. We begin in a typical New Who spaceship crewed by people who don't speak BBC English, fighting a Dalek saucer. It's all very exciting. Actually, if I'm being honest, it is a bit exciting, but fear not that we're about to turn into Star Wars or something because the Daleks, as they so often do, have a Master Plan: exhaust the CGI budget. As such our space pilot's ship explodes and she finds herself on the TARDIS. Before this, we get an unnecessary shot of the upper half of a Dalek saying "Exterminate!" in his brightly lit saucer bridge in case you've forgotten that's what Daleks do. On the TARDIS, our soldier wants out but Capaldi isn't having any of it, seemingly being stubborn to make a point. I think Capaldi carries this stuff reasonably well; he has the right demeanour for a Doctor who can make demands. After dragging a "please" out of her they arrive on the main anti-Dalek rebel spaceship, the 'Aristotle.' "It's a hospital," the Doctor remarks. I can't fault him. It looks a lot like a hospital - a lot. As in a building on Earth in the present day. A spaceship with rectangular paned windows? Right. We get a tiny bit of matte painting or something of a larger hangar from one angle to try to convince us that we're in space.

Nothing to see here.

Some soldier colonel with a beard rolls up with his crew and starts being a dick: "I'm still going to kill you," even though Capaldi saved the life of this soldier, whose name is bizarrely 'Journey.' She has them spare the Doctor's life: "He's a doctor, and we have a patient." "Why does a hospital need a doctor?" the Doctor asks. Colonel McBeard fobs him off with some answer implying the Daleks showed up first and killed all the doctors, while 'Journey Blue,' whose name sounds like a brand of aftershave, tells him "You don't like soldiers." Subtlety hasn't been Moffat's strong suit for a while. Further along, they come across a big glass cylinder: "Wow, a molecular nano scaler!" the Doctor exclaims, even Capaldi incapable of delivering this kids' TV line with anything approaching believability. It reminds me of Mel exclaiming "a megabyte modem!" in 'The Trial of a Time Lord,' which also sounded very futuristic in its day. The Doctor assesses that in science fiction tradition it's used to "shrink the surgeons." That 'science fiction tradition' includes a Tom Baker serial, of course, 'The Invisible Enemy.' We're hardly in pastures new here. In any event, if they can shrink stuff, why would they need to shrink surgeons? Wouldn't they have technology far superior to human hands? Anyway, the patient under examination is none another than a Dalek: "You can't put me in there!" Doctor Capaldi exclaims with some consternation. Why not? Roll titles!

"Why am I Mister Pink?"

Back on earth, the pacing of the episode takes an abattoir bolt to the head and has its flesh sluiced away as we cut to some beefy guy called Danny Pink training little kids to be soldiers at the Coal Hill School. We get some pointless comedy and then, as in every effortless school scene ever written in anything, the bell rings. This is followed by a completely nonsensical conversation Mr. Pink has with the secretary of the school where she keeps saying things like "I bet you did," and "I know your type." What's she on about? Him being a soldier? If I was a teacher and the secretary of the school was this weird with me I'd be pissed. In class some kid asks Pretty In Pink if he's ever killed a man, and like a classic incompetent teacher he doesn't fob off the question, although he really cagily does to the question about killing anyone who wasn't a soldier. Whatever is being set up here, it's another thing not being handled in a way that could be remotely considered to be subtle, as exemplified by the cliché single tear running down his cheek. In the staff room Clara is introduced to Mr Pink, the headmaster declaring that he's "a bit of a ladykiller." Wouldn't that be kind of an unprofessional thing to say about a colleague, especially when introducing them to a fellow colleague? Danny Pink denies this: is this heavy handed foreshadowing of a future plot point that he did kill a woman, literally? Or did he not kill a woman, but did kill a man? Perhaps he killed a "good man." Why do I get the feeling we've been here before? Clara questions the soldier practice outside, asking if Danny's "teaching them how to shoot people" and if any "moral dimension" of soldiering is that you "cry about it afterwards." Why is everyone being so confrontational to this guy? Then again I'd probably find it a bit odd if I worked at a school and some guy started trying to start a sort of cadet club. Maybe he's called 'Danny Pink' in juxtaposition to anti-military 'pinkos.' Maybe that's why he's crying.

"Why are some of the most positive reviews on OCBW?"

Incapable of having a normal conversation with anyone, Mr Pink has an equally odd one with Clara where he asks "why" to basic remarks like "I was being funny." Maybe he's a robot? Then in pure sitcom style he goes to his classroom and acts out a conversation with Clara because he won't go to drinks with her for some reason. Maybe it's because he's such a non-metaphorical ladykiller; he just can't help it, and that's why he can't go - he might uncontrollably slaughter Clara during conversation. Turns out Clara is listening in and she gets him to change his mind. Wasn't there Peter Capaldi and a Dalek at some point in this? What's going on here? This isn't a sitcom, and even if it was, this wouldn't be funny. The lack of music helps, mind. Anyway Clara finds the TARDIS in her cupboard. Turns out Capaldi ditched her in Glasgow at the end of last episode, which bothers me. Inside, Capaldi manages to carry some dreadful jokes about Clara's age before asking her a dangerous question written specifically for Series 8 promos: "Am I a good man?" He needs her for something - what? Maybe to help him size up the Dalek given how morally confused he's seemingly become. Back on the Aristotle, the captured Dalek declares that "Daleks must be destroyed." Haven't we seen this before? RTD's 'Dalek Caan' in the Series 4 finale, for instance? Or, dare I mention it, the Sixth Doctor audio drama 'Jubilee' by Rob Shearman on which RTD based the 2005 episode 'Dalek'? Clara says the Doctor's prejudiced, which sets up our cannonball-subtle theme for this episode. Meeting the soldiers, who apparently let Capaldi piss off to pick up Clara despite all their talk of killing him earlier, the Doctor declares of Clara that "She cares so I don't have to." Ooh, edgy.

Mr Tickle.

The Dalek is apparently "so damaged it's turned good." Pretty sure we've seen this before too. Capaldi, Clara and some stiffs including Chanel no. 5, get miniaturised so that they can go "into the Dalek" as it were, much like the aforementioned Tom Baker serial where miniaturised duplicates of the Doctor and Leela go inside the Doctor's body. The nano scaler seems pretty daft but there you go. There's an awkward shot of the little people inside as the tiny capsule gets picked up, and then a guy who looks a bit like Shapp from 'The Armageddon Factor' inserts them into the Dalek's eye stalk. Isn't this a lot like what happened in 'Let's Kill Hitler' as well, where tiny versions of the characters ended up inside a mechanical eye? After a bizarre and inexplicable slow motion sequence they follow some equally slow 'visual impulses' - the Dalek must see everything about five seconds after it's happened - before they come to the 'cranial ledge,' a huge empty space. Pretty roomy inside a Dalek, it seems. Capaldi reveals that the Dalek's personality change is due to a malfunction in the 'cortex vault' which "keeps the Dalek pure," that "extinguishes the tiniest glimmer of kindness." This doesn't seem to mesh very well with the notion that the Daleks are born full of hate, and I'm not fond of the notion that some mechanical device represses an otherwise unmentioned positive side of their personality. Surely their ideology and genetic engineering is enough to do that. It's not unlike the thing that stops the Cybusmen from feeling emotions in that New Who Series 2 story. In a somewhat lame way the Doctor addresses the Dalek as "Rusty" and then all hell breaks loose when one of the soldiers fires a harpoon into the Dalek's armour. I don't get this either: since when did a Dalek's entire casing simulate an organic being? What would be the point of armour if it could feel pain? Maybe if they'd fired it into an organic bit - it's just an excuse to have some robotic 'antibodies' show up to menace the cast. Didn't this happen in 'Let's Kill Hitler' as well?

"You do know I'm an evil hypnotist?"

Another soldier with a beard gets disintegrated shortly after the Doctor feeds him an energy cell that will let them find out where the bodies are dumped. This turns out to be a nearby chute. "They've dumped him down there." How? The antibody was behind them - how could it have already dumped the remains? These convenient, arbitrary enemies inside the Dalek are a bit unambitious as a storytelling device. Capaldi gets everyone to jump down the slippery dip and they land in a puddle of green goo like the garbage chute from Star Wars or perhaps the Space Whale's stomach from 'The Beast Below.' Capaldi informs us that Daleks need protein. Do they? Never seen one eat anything before. They can travel through time, but they can't synthesise a few proteins to sustain their organic components? I'm overthinking this. The bearded soldier has become "the top layer if you want to say a few words," according to Capaldi, forced to play up the 'Doctor being a bit of a dick' card with which this incarnation has been saddled. He gets briefly throttled and then goes through a hole. He explains that the tunnel they go through is hot, which is presumably meant to explain why in the next scene their costumes look freshly laundered. Even if they dried, why aren't they encrusted with Dalek shit? Turns out the radiation is getting higher: for some reason Capaldi's question "Are you wearing a Geiger counter?" is one of my favourite lines of the episode because it's just... characters talking about stuff. Explaining things sensibly. It's not that hard. He figures out that the Dalek is suffering from a technobabble syndrome, a "trionic radiation leak." Why do these people want to cure the Dalek anyway? Turn him against their own kind? As Journey herself asks, "Why should we trust a Dalek?" It's not explained.

"We're in the gonads of the Dalek."

The Dalek reckons it changed its mind about things after seeing "beauty," in this case the birth of a star. It busts out another well-worn science fiction line: "resistance is futile." Apparently it's recognised the inevitability of life, which makes the Daleks' ideology seem a bit unsustainable. We've come across this before as well, haven't we? Didn't the Daleks in New York say pretty much the same thing? Capaldi hopes the Dalek isn't lying as they come upon the "heart of the Dalek," which looks a bit pants: just a bunch of rubbery looking tubes and stuff. He closes the radiation leak with the sonic screwdriver and the Dalek immediately goes back to being its normal nasty self, fighting all the soldiers and opening communications with the little toy Daleks on the saucer. The Doctor figures the Dalek wasn't "good," just "broken," but Clara slaps him because she thinks he's pleased with the fact that he was right about all Daleks being fundamentally evil. Moffat needs to cut it out with the slapping, which happened a fair bit in the Smith era too. Not only is it lazy and cliché, but it's basically saying "women have to resort to displays of physical violence because they can't express their point in any other way." He seems to think women slapping men is women standing up for themselves, but it's quite the opposite. Journey wants to place explosive charges inside the Dalek: wouldn't they be tiny and therefore weak? Clara demands that the Doctor "think" about what's going on. Meanwhile the other Daleks declare their intentions with an amusing model shot of lots of silly-looking toy Daleks. It looks a bit naff, but I complain about the lack of model work in the show, don't I? So I should probably shut my gob.

"What idea of Steven's should I refuse to do next?"

The Doctor and co inexplicably manage to climb all the way back up to where they were when they first came in, declaring that they need to get the Dalek in the frame of mind it was when it was irradiated. Apparently the radiation allowed it to "expand its consciousness." He doesn't know how to do this, however, so we can get some subverted expectations for a cheap laugh. The other Daleks attack the Aristotle: we've definitely seen this stuff before. Inside, the remaining non-Journey soldier, Gretchen, sacrifices herself to the antibodies by firing a grappling line up to the cortex thing while the Doctor simply pisses off and leaves her to die. Gretchen reappears in 'Heaven' with Miss Pickwell from the last episode. It's not dissimilar to when the Doctor rescued Journey at the beginning, lending more credence to my theory that Missy is the Master and that "Heaven" is a TARDIS. We see Daleks and soldiers blowing stuff up. Why do the Daleks care about rescuing their 'comrade'? Why not just blow up the whole ship? Somehow Capaldi gets to where the actual Dalek mutant is located, while in the cortex Clara discovers the 'memories' which are just a bunch of lights in the wall. Pretty crude system. Elsewhere, the Dalek gets one of its better lines: "Daleks do not have souls." It starts seeing memories of random shit from New Who as Clara crawls through its memory ducts, reactivating its memories simply by whacking big red buttons along the floor. Seriously? The Doctor declares that it was when he went to Skaro that he "understood who he was" and the Doctor ceased to be 'just a name.' I suggest Moffat rewatch some early Hartnell. The antibodies are coming to get Journey, but somehow Clara hitting the last memory causes the Dalek to 'reboot' and the antibodies to 'reset.' Why?

Bellissimo.

Capaldi gives an arbitrary New Who speech, waving his arms around and enthusiastically declaring stuff like "you saw a star being born!" It's probably the lack of colloquialism in the dialogue as well as a general tendency to downplay some of the more exaggerated elements of the scene that allow Capaldi to carry this without it being nearly as cringe-inducing as, say, Smith's big speech from the end of 'The Rings of Akhaten.' He does a Vulcan Mind Meld with the Dalek to get it to understand things the way it did before. Why does it see "divinity" and "endless divine perfection"? Seems a touch hyperbolic. Then it witnesses the Doctor's hatred of the Daleks and that gives it reason to go kill its buddies. "There must be more than that, please," Capaldi argues. It reminds me of Tennant always pleading "just shtop, think" etc to bad guys in his time, when it was totally ineffectual and never worked either. During a transition the Dalek somewhat abruptly remarks to itself, "Daleks are evil," which comes across as a bit silly. It goes to town on the other Daleks, who all seem totally incapable of defending themselves against this one. The Doctor resigns himself to the fact that all they ever do is kill, even when 'good.' Again, this has been established before. It's a far less sophisticated analysis, just redirecting the hatred on another source, than the climax of the audio drama 'Jubilee,' which proposes an inherent logical contradiction in the Dalek imperative: if the Daleks ever achieved their goal of universal conquest, they would have no purpose, so it's actually in their own interests that they never achieve their goal.

I've got my eye on you.

Afterwards the Dalek just sits there chatting to the Doctor and Clara. He claims that it has unfinished business, and we get a very repetitious line: "I am not a good Dalek: you are a good Dalek." Seems like that's awfully similar to what we heard in 2005. That being said, this is New Who's eighth series and its tenth year onscreen. There are probably a lot of people out there, especially (but not exclusively) young viewers who've never seen the Eccleston episodes. Weird. Anyway, the Dalek goes away after giving them a lot of sidelong glances. Apparently the leaked script called for it going back to its saucer and self-destructing but that doesn't happen here. All we see is a shot of the saucer moving away. So what happens next? Who knows. There isn't time for resolutions in forty-five minutes of New Who. The Doctor and Clara piss off, Journey tries to follow but gets rebuffed by Capaldi because she's a soldier, and it's back to school. I don't know what all this 'soldier' business is about but we'll see. Clara doesn't know if the Doctor's a good man, and off she pops. I think it's time we went back to a companion who is a full time TARDIS inhabitant: this stuff with Clara and before her the last stint of Amy and Rory seems like it's run its course. Outside, Danny Pink suggests to Clara, "I thought you might have a rule against soldiers." What is going on with this solder thing? Clara disagrees and we're done.

Could you repeat that?

The main issue with 'Into the Dalek' is the fact that it's nothing we haven't seen before. We know the Daleks bring out a pretty harsh side of the Doctor. We know Daleks are never really capable of overcoming their genetically-engineered nature. We've seen people getting miniaturised and wandering around inside other things, too, in both Old and New Who. Another very notable example I've neglected to mention, of course, is 'Carnival of Monsters' in which Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor and Jo Grant are miniaturised and explore the interior of a machine. The narrative is a bit thin, and once again the lack of a real sub plot is problematic, resulting in a lot of wandering around sets one after the other, most of which don't have much particular purpose. The message is a bit simplistic - hating haters is still hate - and the stuff on Earth feels awkwardly positioned, as well as the extremely ambiguous comments about soldiers. It also seems deeply problematic to me that we're expected to find it troubling that the Doctor has 'prejudice' against the Daleks given that they're murderous totalitarian genocidal maniacs. As usual, there's plenty of clunky dialogue. I'm tired of the RTD-era gold, rivet-laden Daleks too. Moffat's 2010 'New Paradigm' seems to have been rendered damnatio memoriae but personally I think apart from the extravagant colours a more futuristic redesign was a step in the right direction. I'd like to see the standard New Who Dalek smoothed out with some of its panels and rivets stripped away, done up in gunmetal grey or something like that, and led to battle by maybe the white New Paradigm one to mix things up a bit. Just a thought. As for the script here, Capaldi does what he can with limited material, although a lot of the stuff at the school is, and I'm just going to be blunt, impossible to sell effectively given how badly it's written. That being said, I appreciated the future setting and I enjoyed Capaldi's performance, although I found the soldiers forgettable - like so much of the New Who guest cast, let's face it, they're never really there to do much except get in the way and die - and I think Clara's characterisation was a bit disagreeable. Overall, the episode's not great but I found it inoffensive. Clearly I've been worn down; much like the Cat and Rimmer in the Red Dwarf episode 'The Inquisitor,' by New Who's own low standard this episode has acquitted itself (for me at least - other opinions are available). What we really needed here, I think, is a bit more stuff about why 'hate' exists (fight or flight responses, etc) and whether or not we're born good (as Rosseau might have said), bad (see Hobbes) or neutral (Locke). Characters should be used to consider moral questions, not moral questions used to explore characters. Too much modern popular fiction seems to think that the fictional characters and universes are things and speculative ends in themselves rather than parts of a narrative whole. The Daleks do not exist. The Daleks are us, representing our hatred and totalitarian tendencies. The question is not "can a Dalek be good?" That's amusing but pointless fannish nonsense. The question should be "what might a good Dalek represent?" By all means go into the Dalek, but in New Who don't be surprised if you just end up covered in green shit.