Doctor Who: Flatline
(1 episode, s08e09, 2014)

A familiar dimension in time travel.

A bearded man calls the police with vital information about who committed a crime. As a hissing grows around him, he begins to panic. He is soon ripped from the phone and literally inserted into the trim on the wall, a two-dimensional figure screaming in silence.

On the TARDIS, Clara is packing because Danny is a bit territorial, even though the Doctor claims that she can leave anything because there is plenty of space. The TARDIS lands in roughly the time and space where Clara lives, but the door has shrunken. Once the travelers extract themselves from the capsule, they find that it is roughly half its original size.

They’re also in Bristol, not London. Shades of Sarah Jane?

The Doctor doesn’t want to travel anywhere else while the TARDIS is malfunctioning, so he asks Clara to investigate while he gathers some tools. She meets Rigsy, a graffiti artist serving community service in the care of an abusive ass. She also notes a large makeshift memorial and a tunnel full of images of people. These people are missing and the memorial is for them.

Clara returns to the TARDIS to find that it is now action figure-sized. The interior of the TARDIS (and the Doctor) are the same size, and the Doctor asks Clara to pick up the craft and follow his readings. She meets up with Rigsy again and mockingly poses as the Doctor while she investigates. Together, they go to the apartment where the caller lived.

Rigsy muses that the victim could still be in the room since he went missing while the flat was locked up. He gets a little skittish about Clara until she shows him the TARDIS and the Doctor within. Rigsy is amused until the hissing screaming sound starts up and energy is drained from inside the TARDIS.

The pair next poses as MI-5 courtesy of the psychic paper and start investigating the walls under the Doctor’s direction by breaking them apart with a sledgehammer. While they work, a local police officer who was helping them is absorbed by the mysterious being. The Doctor is cued in by a new painting of a human nervous system on the wall. The aliens are experimenting with humanity in order to understand three-dimensional life.

The door slams shut as they pursue Rigsy and Clara, and while Clara takes a call from Danny, they escape by smashing a window with a suspended chair. Danny is very skeptical about Clara’s claims that she’s left the TARDIS.

They end up back in the tunnel as the community service workers start painting over the portraits. Clara tries to use the psychic paper but the supervisor lacks enough imagination to be affected. It isn’t until the images pull one of the workers into 2D that they all run and end up in a train warehouse. Clara convinces the supervisor in a very Doctorly fashion before rallying her new team and figuring out how to communicate with the aliens.

As they learn to communicate via mathematics, another worker is taken and it seems that the humans are deliberately being targeted. The Doctor creates a device to restore elements from two dimensions into three, but it fails. As another worker is taken, it becomes apparent that the aliens have evolved, but the team is able to escape after the Doctor fixes his device. The aliens give chase as they assimilate into three dimensions, and the TARDIS is knocked from Clara’s bag in the process.

The TARDIS lands on a train line and is nearly smashed into pieces by an oncoming train, but the Doctor is able to move it with his hand and then activates siege mode. This locks down the capsule, but there’s not enough power to turn it off or sustain life support.

Meanwhile, Clara, Rigsy, and the abusive supervisor stop another train in the tunnel and use it to punch through a blockage created by the aliens. The plan fails, but Rigsy proves himself to be rather heroic in the process. Clara also spots a cube with Gallifreyan markings and presumes it to be the TARDIS.

The team, now including the train driver, takes shelter in a disused office where Clara devises a plan. Using Rigsy’s art skills and a poster, they paint a fake access door that the aliens attempt to make three-dimensional. When they do, the energy is channeled into the TARDIS and restores it to normal.

Using the enemy’s power against them, Clara proved her mettle to the Doctor, and he praises her for doing so.

Realizing that the creatures (which the Doctor calls the Boneless) have no interest in peace, he declares that this plane is protected and that they are not welcome here. With that, he sends them back to their own dimension, echoing the confrontations with both the Sycorax and the Atraxi.

The Doctor returns everyone to the railyard above ground. The Doctor is disgusted by the supervisor but is pleased with Clara’s performance in his stead. He’s also intrigued that Clara rejected a call from Danny.

Meanwhile, Missy watches Clara on a tablet. She believes that she has chosen well.

This story marks a major milestone in the Doctor/Clara relationship. I love how the Doctor is still technically in charge, but he’s forced to act through Clara. In this way, he learns about how he is seen in the universe and gains respect for his companion and “pudding brain” humans. Clara gets to exercise the understanding of this Doctor’s character that she gained last adventure.

This new role for Clara will likely take a toll, as both Davros and Rory have pointed out in the past that traveling with the Doctor can turn companions into worse people. The Doctor is obviously uncomfortable with the development.

I also like the chemistry between Clara and Rigsy. The artist has the typical everyman backstory that we associate with the Doctor’s companions, and he also seemed to catch on quickly with the role.

Looking back, this story echoes similar adventures from the past. The TARDIS was previously shrunk in Planet of Giants, Carnival of Monsters, Logopolis, Let’s Kill Hitler, and The Wedding of River Song, and we saw enemies who were able to shift targets through dimensions in both Fear Her and Mona Lisa’s Revenge.

These recycled story tropes aside, this adventure carried the day well with wonderful character development and a good balance of fear with the action and completely silent antagonist. It seems to be Jamie Mathieson‘s trademark.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express
(1 episode, s08e08, 2014)

One minute to doom.

A sixty-six-second clock begins ticking as Mrs. Pitt and her grandaughter Maisie are enjoying a meal in a luxurious train dining car. Mrs. Pitt spots a “mummy monster” but no one else seems to notice. Even a train official is oblivious.

At 6 seconds, the mummy gets closer. At 5 seconds, it has its face in hers. At 4 seconds, Maisie begins to worry as her grandmother panics. At 3 seconds, everyone in the car is staring. At 2 seconds, Mrs. Pitt screams in terror. At 1 second, the mummy has his hands on her forehead.

At zero seconds, she dies.

The Doctor and Clara arrive at the TARDIS materializes on the train. It is the Orient Express, one of many trains to hold the name, but this is the first innnnnn spaaaaaaaace. The Doctor is in a tuxedo and Clara is in a dress from the 1920s. As a singer offers a jazzy rendition of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”, the travelers enter the dining car where the Doctor questions Clara’s confusing sad/happy smile. It’s understandable since he chose this journey as their last together.

Clara admits that she hated him for weeks, but she received some advice: “Hatred is too strong an emotion to waste on someone you don’t like.” Clara realized then that she doesn’t hate the Doctor, but she can’t keep traveling with him in this form. They are interrupted by Maisie who calls the Doctor on what she sees as a lie. The train’s conductor, Captain Quell, apologizes as Maisie is escorted away. He then explains what happened to the young woman.

Later on, Clara begins to question her decision to leave the Doctor when she realizes that she may never see him again. The Doctor ponders the mystery of Mrs. Pitt’s death while Clara calls Danny about her quandary. The Doctor can’t refuse a good mystery, but he decides to leave Clara behind.

In the engine room, the Doctor finds a life extender – a device that tried and failed to save Mrs. Pitt – and Chief Engineer Perkins. Meanwhile, Clara gets dressed and finds Maisie, who is walking the halls in her nightclothes and carrying a shoe. She’s denied access to her grandmother’s body until she beats the lock with her shoe. Clara makes friends with Maisie as they work the problem at hand.

The Doctor finds a passenger named Professor Emile Moorhouse, an expert in alien mythology, and asks about the Foretold. This mythical mummy’s stare offers only sixty-six seconds to its victims, but victims can only see the creature when it appears to them. As they chat, the mummy attacks a chef.

After Quell orders the staff to cover up the chef’s death, the Doctor interrogates him with help from the psychic paper. Talking with Quell doesn’t pan out, but Perkins gives the Doctor a trove of documents and information. After meeting up with Moorhouse in the engineer’s room, the three watch the footage of Mrs. Pitt’s death.

The search for Mrs. Pitt comes up fruitless. The body is missing. Clara and Maisie are trapped in the room in which she was supposedly stored, and Maisie questions whether or not Clara is really done with her travels. The Doctor calls Clara’s mobile on the train’s communicator and rushes to her rescue when she tells him that she’s trapped. A suppression field blocks the sonic screwdriver, so Clara and Maisie are alone when a sarcophagus opens in the storage room. The box only contains lights and bubble wrap, and as Captain Quell apprehends the Time Lord for trespassing, another passenger is killed. The captain has no choice but to trust the Doctor with the case.

The Doctor realizes that someone has orchestrated the trip since the passenger list is stacked with brilliant scientists. When the Doctor questions this, the train stops and various passengers disappear as a lab appears in their place. Those passengers were hard-light holograms and the train’s computer Gus is in charge of this examination of the Foretold. Moorhouse suddenly catches sight of the mummy and is able to pass some information about its appearance before succumbing to fear and dying.

Clara calls the Doctor with the papers and schematics that she found. The Foretold appears to be targeting weaker passengers first, but this avenue of analysis is stopped when Gus sacrifices the entire kitchen staff to persuade the Doctor to return to work. As the team of scientists crunches through the data, Quell is the next to die as the Foretold exploits his post-traumatic stress. Quell describes the creature in detail and Perkins realizes that the specific time is related to technology to bring victims out of phase so it can consume their energy.

Also, Maisie is the next most likely target. The Doctor arranges for Clara and Maisie to come to the laboratory so the scientists can study her death, and Clara notes that the TARDIS is trapped behind a force field. Clara also confronts the Doctor because he knew that something might happen on this trip.

As Maisie sees the mummy, the Doctor transfers her grief to him so he can confront the mummy. During his 66 seconds, he deduces that the scroll that the scientists were analyzing is actually a flag. The mummy is an ancient soldier augmented with stealth technology to allow it to kill only its victims by pulling them out of phase, and it is trying to protect the flag. The Doctor declares that the war is over and surrenders, thus ending the mummy’s watch as it salutes and collapses into a pile of dust.

Gus congratulates everyone for solving the mystery, then decides to kill them all. The Doctor works the teleport technology in the mummy’s remains and saves everyone as the train explodes. Clara discovers this as she wakes up on an alien world, also understanding that the Doctor had to pretend to be heartless in order to fool Gus. The Doctor explains that he couldn’t save everyone, and he had no idea if he could succeed. He also has no idea who was manipulating the train’s computer. He tells Clara that sometimes, all your available choices are bad ones, but in the end, you still have to choose.

Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor offers to travel with Perkins but he refuses. Clara asks the Time Lord if he loves being the man to make an impossible choice. When the Doctor says that it is his life, Clara wonders if it is an addiction. But you can’t truly tell if something is an addiction until you have tried giving it up, and the Doctor has never done so.

Clara takes a call from Danny, then lies to her boyfriend and chooses to continue her travels with the Doctor.

This story swings back upward after the character decline of Kill the Moon. It effectively removes the tension between the Doctor and Clara by framing this adventure as Clara’s last hurrah and then reframes it to provide room for epiphany. Clara realizes that the Doctor is now a realist – sometimes all of the available choices are bad ones, but there is still no choice but to choose – and the Doctor realizes that Clara’s empathy forces her to mourn every death and failure, no matter how small.

The Doctor is still abrasive and detached, but at least they’ve met on common ground. Unfortunately, that leads Clara to forgive by lying to the man she loves. Not a good look, Clara.

Otherwise, the monster feature is a fun horror romp with a twist. I actually enjoyed that the Doctor had to scientifically prove what the monster was, even though it meant sacrificing people for the methodology. The story is also another dip into the well of Agatha Christie’s oeuvre, which we previously visited in The Robots of Death, Terror of the Vervoids, and The Unicorn and the Wasp.

This story also features a music video due to the cameo of real-life singer Foxes covering Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”. The BBC released an official music video with clips of Series 8 episodes, which was a first for Doctor Who. Foxes herself then uploaded a second video consisting solely of her performance and music mix.

Of course, we have ties to the history of Doctor Who. Following Amy and Rory’s wedding, the Eleventh Doctor received a call regarding an Egyptian goddess loose on the Orient Express in space. Meanwhile, the Doctor manipulates Clara in a similar fashion to how Seventh Doctor manipulated Ace in The Curse of Fenric. The Doctor’s respiratory bypass also came into play once again, as it had in The Ark in Space, Four to Doomsday, Smith and Jones, and The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe.

Considering mummies, the previously encountered them (in one form or another) in Pyramids of Mars (the source of one of my favorite Doctor Who “nope” GIFs) and The Rings of Akhaten. Oh yeah, and that question… of course, he had to ask “Are you my mummy?”

This story is a big step up from the previous outing and provides a good stepping-off point as we barrel toward the finale and the resolution of Missy’s plan.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Flatline

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Doctor Who: Kill the Moon
(1 episode, s08e07, 2014)

An innocent life versus the future of all mankind.

Do you remember Courtney Woods? It seems that she’s been quite the troublemaker after meeting the Doctor. She’s been using the psychic paper to sneak into clubs and stowing away in the TARDIS, and it’s all been since the Doctor told her that she wasn’t special. It damaged her psyche.

The Doctor and Clara find Courtney in the console room and the Time Lord offers to make the student the first woman on the Moon. The TARDIS lands in the cargo bay of a shuttle approaching the Moon, and after the landing, the travelers meet the crew who want to know what’s going on. The cargo bay is full of bombs, and the Doctor distracts the human crew with tales of infinite regenerations while conducting a Fourth Doctor gravity test with a yo-yo.

The Moon’s gravity is too strong and no one knows why. The Doctor presumes that it has somehow increased in mass. A Mexican mining outpost has gone missing and this crew is an after-thought in a third-rate spacecraft. The travelers and the crew venture onto the lunar surface to investigate, finding the outpost and a lot of organic webbing.

Inside the mining outpost, the team finds a corpse. They restore power and oxygen and the Doctor discovers that the Moon is slowly disintegrating. Crewman Henry explores a nearby cave and gets eaten by a spider. Another spider enters the base kills crewman Duke and sets its sights on the rest of the team. Courtney gets separated from the team and ends up killing the spider with a cleaner that she brought along, leading the Doctor to conclude that the spider is a germ. Gravity is also shifting as the internal mass of the Moon is moving.

Courtney would really like to go home so the team returns to the TARDIS. Clara wonders why they don’t just leave but the Doctor isn’t sure that the Moon doesn’t survive this adventure. He isn’t sure what happens beyond this point, but he knows that he must remain here to see that this problem is resolved. It is a fluxed point in time. Meanwhile, crewman Lundvik begins prepping her nuclear arsenal.

The team investigates the site where Henry died and finds the cave to be full of germ spiders that are afraid of the sunlight. The Doctor finds evidence of amniotic fluid in a crater and dives in to investigate. Left behind, Clara and Lundvik head back to the TARDIS as Courtney posts about her adventure on Tumblr. Unfortunately, the shuttle is swallowed by a crevasse.

The Doctor returns and takes the team back to the mining base. He has figured out that the Moon is an egg, and the spiders are bacteria living inside it. If they destroy the Moon with nuclear bombs, they will have to explain why they killed a creature that is the last of its kind. On the other hand, the lunar disruptions are taking a toll on the Earth. While the Doctor and Clara debate with Lundvik, the Doctor gives Courtney instructions to bring the TARDIS to him.

He then decides to let the humans sort it out. Not being from Earth or the Moon, the Doctor chooses not to interfere, insisting that only humans can decide the future of their planet. He boards the TARDIS and leaves.

The team discusses the risks of eliminating the Moon. Lundvik decides to activate the bomb timer but Courtney and Clara suggest that the people of Earth take a poll. Between “kill” and “don’t kill”, the planet chooses “kill”. Lundvik decides to detonate the explosives but Clara presses the abort command first just as the Doctor returns.

The team descends to a beach on Earth’s surface as the creature hatches. As the Doctor monologues, the butterfly-like being flies into the stars, leaving another egg behind that becomes a new Moon. From this point, humanity expands into space and endures to the end of the universe because they chose not to kill. Lundvik is left to find her way to NASA while the Doctor takes Clara and Courtney home.

As Courtney leaves the TARDIS, Clara confronts the Doctor about what he knew. He explains that he knew that the egg was harmless but that it wasn’t his place to choose the fate of humanity. Clara is furious for patronizing her and placing them in danger. As her friend, he left her behind to scrabble with the rest of humanity.

She tells him to go away and not come back.

As the TARDIS fades from sight, Clara returns to her classroom and finds some solace with Danny. He tells her that, because she’s still angry with him, her relationship with the Doctor is not over. She agrees, then heads home for a glass of wine as she stares out at the Moon.

We continue the Doctor’s decline that I noted in The Caretaker. While I appreciate the prickly nature when it comes to no one getting sick and no hanky panky on the TARDIS, I found his decision to leave the humans to fend for themselves… well… anger-inducing.

I get it. I really do. It was important for humans to make this choice for themselves, but he could have offered a bit more warmth and explanation for his choice. He’s helped so many other times, but this one is the one that has to be completely hands-off? Clara had a point about the Twelfth Doctor being patronizing instead of being a counselor, and her anger is completely justified.

Now take this to the next level: Kill the Moon is an analogy for abortion. While the de facto custodians of this new life – Clara, Courtney, and Lundvik, notably all women – have the agency to choose, the Doctor’s role with his vast knowledge of was to guide, counsel, and console. He performed none of those roles, waving the “not my problem” flag and leaving the humans in the mire of making a life-altering decision without a trusted someone to provide support.

Clara’s anger was birthed from frustration and fear, and all of it could have been avoided with the Doctor’s help. Now that trust is broken. Especially because he knew that the egg was (mostly) harmless.

Note that the Ninth Doctor took a similar approach in Aliens of London, but he still remained as an anchor through a difficult moment. The Twelfth Doctor abandoned his companions.

All of that analysis aside, this story has an interesting hook with a Philip Hinchcliffe monster-of-the-week execution and terrible logic. The Moon is really an egg that incubates for millions of years, causes planetary distress upon hatching, and then is replaced by an exact copy to repeat the cycle in another eon?

The concept should have been incubated for much longer.

Rating: 2/5 – “Mm? What’s that, my boy?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.