Review of It Takes You Away
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
When I saw a friend’s review of this episode up on Vulture titled “Pining for the Fjords,” I thought, “Damn! That was the perfect title! Why couldn’t I have thought of that and posted it first?”
Then it dawned on me that Through the Looking-Glass, and What the Doctor Found There was even more apt. The Doctor and her friends literally step through a looking-glass into an alternate reality where everything is so topsy-turvy that Alice surely would’ve understood how off-kilter they felt. They even manifested as mirror images of themselves (check Erik’s T-shirt logo or the Doctor’s hair flop and ear cuff)!
Plenty of other little details seem inverted, too. Ryan’s initial take on the reason for Hanne’s dad to be missing, which everyone else rejects as a cynical and somewhat rude view of the situation, turns out to be correct. The monster in the woods isn’t the real threat. And the blind character—fabulously depicted by an actual blind actress (score another point for the production team!)—”sees” more clearly than anyone else. (Okay, maybe that last one’s a trope after all…)
But this is clearly not just a Doctor Who version of Alice; it’s full-on Doctor Who. I mean it’s got “a juddering dimensional portal in a mirror in a Norwegian bedroom.” It’s got a bizarrely white in-between space (see also: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, The Mind Robber). It’s got doppelgängers and weird, dangerous creatures and the Doctor sacrificing herself to save the others by agreeing to stay somewhere she finds not-quite-unpleasant.
And it’s got heart.
I know there are some people for whom “a conscious universe masquerading as a frog” will have been a step too far (though I wonder whether or not they’d still have felt that way if the frog could’ve looked truly real). I was a bit put off by that effect myself, but I ignored it. After all, Zygons look like shit, too, when you get down to it, and it’s not like the show has ever needed fabulous sfx to tell good stories.
Because it was a good story. It was, at its core, a story about Graham’s loss and how he is (or isn’t) coping with it. That was mirrored (ha!)—or at least paralleled—by how Hanne’s dad Erik was dealing with the loss of Trine, his wife and Hanne’s mother. Both men found appealing ways literally to run away from the pain of losing a spouse, off into another world—Erik into the Solitract Plane, and Graham into the TARDIS and various planets and times.
Character-driven stories are exactly what I’d been hoping for as Chibnall took over, so I’m really pleased. The writers haven’t abandoned plot, though; there’s still lots of sciency-sounding mumbo-jumbo. (Even Yaz got in on it, suggesting to the Doctor, “What if you do something it hasn’t dealt with before, like reverse the polarity or something?” Reader, I yelled!)
And there’s so much more to explore here: Erik’s brokenness, the Solitract’s motivations and methodology, the way the Doctor doesn’t make any bold promises but offers truth in the best light she has (“I’ll do everything I can”), Yaz’s willingness to jump into danger if that’s where the Doctor’s going, the continuing evolution of Ryan and Graham’s relationship…
So despite its flaws (yes, the execution of the talking frog is at the top of that list), I came away from this episode with a hopeful feeling. My heart ached for Graham—when we first saw him back on our side of the antizone, he looked so broken—but the team felt cohesive, the weirdness felt just weird enough, and the Doctor felt perfectly in character. I envision reflecting happily on it all for a long time to come.
Well I had no issues with a frog talking with Grace’s voice. Maybe having grown up in the 70’s and 80’s and suspending disbelief on a regular basis had something to with that?
I liked the mirror imagery of the whole universe, only noticing the rest of it after I saw the t-shirt.
A solid logical story, and I have to say it, another one not by Chibnall. I’m therefore not holding my breath for next week’s mouthful!
I know what you mean! Series finales are always the trickiest, and I was never quite satisfied with what Moffat delivered. Given how underwhelmed I’ve been with the Chibnall-penned episodes this series, I’m not getting my hopes up too high, but I am crossing my fingers.
I just had a hard time making the jump that the Doctor figured out exactly what the nature of the threat was so quickly, before finding out much about it at all. Pretty big jump. And for it to be something but she heard from a grandma a few thousand years earlier? meh.
I don’t disagree, but you also have to take into account the fact that the whole plot has to fit within the confines of a fifty-minute episode. Certain shortcuts are necessary. The Doctor is supposed to be super clever; being able to make big leaps like that are part of what makes her so. I found it initially jarring, too, but was willing to give it a pass for those narrative (Doylist) reasons.