Flood of Expectations

Review of Before the Flood
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I don’t think I like it when the Doctor breaks the fourth wall.

Perhaps that’s what got me off on the wrong foot such that I didn’t enjoy this episode as much as I’d hoped. It was better for me the second time through (as is often the case when I don’t immediately take to an episode), but after the strength of my positive reaction to the first half of the story, I guess I was just underwhelmed.

The fact that the tone of the second half of the story was—save for the scene when Moran was after Cass (brilliantly executed, by the way)—was completely different from that of the first certainly didn’t help in terms of expectations. Even knowing going in, though, that it would not—could not—be another Base Under Siege episode, I just couldn’t get a grip on this one at first.

By my second viewing, I approached it with a sense of reservation. With this dampened enthusiasm, I was able to see Before the Flood more favorably. Although the question of how the Doctor will cheat death and save Clara is clearly the main focus of the storyline, I found the “B story” centered on O’Donnell and Bennett more engaging. (Maybe once I knew the “trick” it wasn’t as fun watching the illusionist’s act?)

O’Donnell is another one of those audience stand-in characters like Osgood whom we love because we can relate to her. She’s the fan we all wish we could be: cool and knowledgeable in the presence of celebrity, but gleefully fangirly in private. This alone should have clued me in that she was living on borrowed time; it’s a rare thing that someone who might make a good Companion survives their episode(s).

Moments after the episode opens, O’Donnell drops what I’ll dare to venture is a monumental hint about what’s to come. Once the Doctor has established the time zone for us (1980), she declares that they are thus at a point “pre Harold Saxon, pre The Minister of War, pre the moon exploding, the big bat coming out…” Because the Doctor even makes note of that middle piece, it’s fairly obvious we’re supposed to pay attention to the part we haven’t heard of before, and perhaps even think about other similar people we might have heard of (e.g., the Minister of Chance (and again) or the War Lord). We’ll see where that goes.

But O’Donnell is not long for this world, and although the Doctor does suggest she should stay in the TARDIS, Bennett is right that he doesn’t try very hard. Like the Doctor, I knew right when I heard the list that it was the order in which people would die (though I didn’t remember said order). When she fell prey to the Fisher King, then, I was sad but unsurprised.

And I couldn’t disagree with poor, bitter Bennett (who reminded me very much of Rory in that moment, calling out the Doctor on his bullshit) that the Doctor prioritizes lives differently. He didn’t put much effort into saving the woman Bennett loved, but he’d risk ruining time for Clara. We’re getting hints again at the Doctor’s non-human (non-21st-Century-Western?) moral compass, and it can be disconcerting.

Speaking of morality, I continue to find Clara’s methods off-putting. In the same way as the Doctor does, she uses other people as tools to do “what has to be done.” Far from being angry with him for making her his “accomplice” (as she accused him in Mummy on the Orient Express), she holds her own and directs the others to her own ends. (Though I have to say, for someone who insisted that she and a deaf person “stick together” as they go, Clara’s awfully cavalier about how she searches for Lunn.)

One of my favorite moments of the episode—though admittedly for purely smug-making reasons rather than narrative ones—was when the hearse’s suspended animation chamber opened up right at the end to reveal it had been the Doctor in there the whole time. It was extremely gratifying to see that the guess I published last week turned out to be correct.

So the Doctor got around the problem in a typically circuitous way, and even went to far as to address the paradox inherent in his solution directly. That’s it’s own kind of fourth wall breaking, as the show has used the “bootstrap paradox” plenty in the past without really even acknowledging it. On the one hand, it’s nice to get that nod; on the other, I’m still not so sure about having the Doctor speak directly to me.

Oh well. At least it gave us the chance to see more of the Doctor’s cool guitar moves—and the clockwork squirrel.