Review of The Witch’s Familiar
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
Well, it wasn’t godawful.
In fact, it may well be the best second half of a Moffat two-parter I’ve yet seen (though the bar isn’t set very high, in my opinion). That’s not to say it was anywhere near flawless, but I did find plenty to enjoy.
The episode begins by resolving the we-didn’t-believe-it-anyway deaths of Missy and Clara and giving an actual explanation for the method of their escape (and Missy’s in Death in Heaven). It struck me as odd that Missy would need Clara to suss out why the Doctor always survives. Does Missy already know the answer or not? If she does, why walk Clara through it just to ask the follow-up question (“What happens if the Doctor assumes he’s going to die?”)? The only reason to do so is to bring the audience along (which is not good storytelling).
If Missy doesn’t know why the Doctor survives, then she was dead wrong when she told Clara “you’re the dog” in the relationship. Despite knowing him for millennia, Missy still needs a human who’s only traveled with him recently, on and off for a couple of years, to figure out the Doctor for her? Neither of those interpretations makes much sense, and the scene thus left me vaguely dissatisfied.
Meanwhile, the Doctor is being all Doctor-y, chucking Davros out of his chair and driving it around himself. Moffat, in turn, continues to address the audience indirectly through his characters. When the Doctor survives the onslaught of Dalek guns and comes out calmly sipping a cup of tea, he chides his adversaries, “Of course, the real question is, where did I get the cup of tea? Answer: I’m the Doctor. Just accept it.”
That’s all well and good if all I ever wanted out of my stories was some plain silly fun, no matter how it works. But unlike the nominal target audience, I’m an adult (and a writer, at that); I expect the fiction I consume to make self-consistent, logical, in-universe sense. I also don’t like having the head writer thumb his nose at me so blatantly. Yes, people are going to think deeply about the show and critique its stories! Either get over it and move on with your life, to take notes and try to do better. Stop throwing tantrums, especially in middle of a script.
~ahem~ Right. Taking my Ranty Pants off now.
I did love the snark between Missy and Clara. Clara is doing her best to be on her guard, though she’s obviously forgotten her own rule from Deep Breath (speaking of self-consistency) about not making a threat you’re not willing to follow through on when she flares at Missy, “You won’t survive turning your back!” Missy, on the other hand, is less bat-shit-crazy and more coldly calculating this time around. She still can’t seem to make a plan that accomplishes her end goal (same as it ever was), but she doesn’t spare any ruth in going for it.
For long-time fans, this episode is peppered with references to well-known stories, and gives lots of nods to continuity questions both past and future. Most notably, of course, is the callback to Genesis of the Daleks, in which we first met Davros. Although we were not treated to the same array of failed creations in the sewers (like the fan-favorite giant clam), we did get a sufficiently horrible new concept: Dalek sludge.
Meanwhile, Missy continued the tradition of almost revealing more about her historical relationship with the Doctor. Much like her Ainley incarnation in Planet of Fire, who famously begged, “Won’t you show mercy to your own—” before succumbing to the flames, Missy is interrupted in a reminiscence of her own: “The Doctor gave it to me when my daughter—” The viewers are thus left with new fanfic fodder from which to form a plethora of fresh hypotheses.
There’s plenty of Foreboding Dialog™, too. I can’t help but think some or all of this stuff will come back into play some day, especially given Moffat’s track record of (poorly) playing the long game. For example, Davros claims the Doctor’s compassion “will kill [him] in the end.” Given the following two lines (Doctor: I wouldn’t die of anything else. Davros: You may rely on it.), I couldn’t help but hear Moffat himself speaking again.
And some of Missy’s final words to the Doctor officially bode, too. First she tells him, “In a way, this is why I gave her to you in the first place. To make you see. The friend inside the enemy, the enemy inside the friend.” If that’s not a reference to herself, then I’ve never watched Doctor Who.
What’s really chilling, though, is her assertion that “Everyone’s a bit of both. Everyone’s a hybrid.” In and of itself, that’s not so shocking; after all, it’s pretty much a truism that every individual has different impulses, and our relationships with each other are a weird mix of positive and negative. The kicker comes when one remembers back to the (oh-so-convenient, never-before-heard-or-even-hinted-at) Gallifreyan prophecy Davros called out earlier in the episode. He mentions “a hybrid creature [created from] two great warrior races forced together to create a warrior greater than either.” Listen again to Missy’s delivery. She emphasizes the word hybrid, and gives the Doctor what I would characterize as a significant look. I’d be willing to wager there’s a season arc hidden in there somewhere.
But what of our other antagonist? Davros seems for much of this story to be almost pitiable. We have now seen him as an able-bodied child caught up in a horrendous war, innocent and scared, and as a dying husk of a creature hanging on by a thread. He presents himself as a sympathetic being, someone who just tried to do right by his people all along. Yet in the end we see that he is (again) simply a master manipulator channeling Sith lords (Davros-as-Vader: Let me see it again… with my own eyes. Davros-as-Palpatine: As always, your compassion is your downfall!). Similarly, the Doctor shows us that Davros isn’t the only one who can work the room. The way he buys into Davros’s change of heart is a ruse, too, and he’s been executing a plan to defeat Davros this whole time.
As the Doctor makes his escape, a single Dalek blocks his path, and we see the culmination of Moffat’s latest retcon. I am usually an anti-fan of Moffat imposing his own contributions onto the entirety of the show’s history (e.g., Clara being all up and down the Doctor’s timeline), but this one is surprisingly meaningful. If Daleks channel emotion through their guns, and any emotional outburst comes through the voice modulator as “Exterminate,” the fact that they so often spend their time screaming their favorite catch phrase without actually doing anything finally makes sense. And, of course, the scene with Dalek-ified Clara not only reminds everyone of Asylum of the Daleks but also serves as a beautiful character moment for the entire Doctor/Missy/Clara trio.
There are a few more rocky moments here at the end: glossing over how much damage Clara might have suffered disconnecting from the Dalek interface, the painfully trying-too-hard-to-be-cool sonic sunglasses, and the HADS being rewritten as the Hostile Action Dispersal (rather than Displacement) System. That’s only to be expected, as we know Moffat’s not the greatest at tying up loose threads.
But the episode comes full circle, too, with perhaps the best cliffhanger resolution I’ve seen. By allowing the entire story to unfold before coming back to explain what led the Doctor to stand on that battlefield pointing a Dalek gun (apparently) at young Davros, Moffat doesn’t cheapen the moment with easy sleight-of-hand. Instead, he brings us back to both the beginning and the midpoint, grounding us in something familiar: the Doctor saves people. And we take the Doctor’s hand, ready for another trip in the TARDIS.
Young Davros
Instead of saving the young Davros and bringing him home so that he would learn the concept of mercy and pass that on to his Daleks (who never seemed to understand it in prior episodes) so that the Dalek shell Clara was imprisoned in would understand that concept and be able to translate what Clara said to that word there by allerting The Doctor that Clara was in there and not to destroy that Dalek thus saving her life… Why not kill young Davros so that the Daleks would never have been invented? Or take him off of Skaro and find him a good home so that he wouldn’t grow up a twisted psychopath and invent the Daleks? Or go farther back in time and broker a peace between the Kaleds and the Thals so that the terrible war on Skaro never started in the first place?
Of course that’s probably the sort of reality twisting changes that made the time war so destructive. But if The Doctor did any of those things there would never be a time war in the first place. I know you’re not supposed to go back in time and make changes that directly affect you and the absence of the Daleks would change The Doctor’s life a whole lot. But wasn’t that what the Time Lords wanted him to do in Genesis of the Daleks? And by that time in his life The Doctor had already interacted with the Daleks several times so their absence from the time stream would already have affected him.
Ugh, now I’ve got a headache just thinking about that. But it seems like The Doctor could have done a lot more to prevent the evil of the Daleks if he’d tried a little harder.
Preventing Daleks
I think it would be easy enough for the Doctor to find a way to keep the Daleks from ever happening if he really tried, yes. But he’s already been through the “have I the right?” argument with himself, and I think he’s decided that too much would change all across the universe, let alone in his own timeline.
Also, we (the audience) actually already know the Daleks have that word in their vocabulary, even if the Doctor doesn’t. Case in point: “I’m River Song. Check your records again.”