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Tag: Series 9

Confession #132: I Don’t Think Capaldi’s Series Are Bad

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As part of a conversation with some friends online the other day, someone mentioned the upcoming series (only three more weeks to wait!) and that they needed to catch up on last series before the new one began. Then the conversation turned to Capaldi and his episodes.

Now regular readers will probably know that I adore Capaldi’s Doctor. So when folks wished for a list of the standalone Capaldi episodes worth watching, I was filled with excitement. Who better than me, I wondered, to provide such a list? But at the same time, it made me sad to think that so many people think his series aren’t worth watching. Sure, every Doctor has to slog through some stinkers, but I just don’t get why so many people think these episodes are that much worse than those of other Doctors.

The biggest issue, of course, is Moffat’s problematic showrunning. Some of Moffat’s ideas (like how his Companions kept being puzzles rather than people) really made my skin crawl. But by that same metric, Matt Smith’s Doctor shouldn’t be considered worth watching. I think the important thing to remember is that every era, every Doctor, has suffered from bad writing—some more so than others, I’ll admit—and that all judgements about quality are down to personal preferences.

That being said, I have compiled my own list of a few episodes from each of Capaldi’s three seasons that I think are worth a watch. I’ve included some notes on each one to give an idea of what it’s about and provide my own heads-up about the biggest pros and cons I remember. (If I’ve missed something major, please leave a comment so I can make the change. It has been a while since I’ve watched any of these…)

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Just a Sprinkle of Humbug

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Review of The Return of Doctor Mysterio
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Ah, the annual Christmas Special… That sixty-minute episode that tries to be all things to all people, but most especially to those who never watch Doctor Who except this once a year. No wonder Moffat chooses Christmas as the time to trot out his most gimmicky ideas.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2016 BBC

Having already exploited Santa Claus/Father Christmas two years ago (and included a nod to Sherlock Holmes (and thus his own work on Sherlock) in 2012), Moffat needed a new cultural icon to shoehorn into his annual holiday offering. Since there would undoubtedly be copyright issues with something like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, it seems he decided it was instead time to cash in on the recent resurgent popularity of superheroes—thus we end up with “Doctor Who Does Superman” this year.

Not that a fluffy superhero “romp” is entirely unsuited to the situation. The trope is easily relatable to a casual viewer, who thereby doesn’t have to know anything about the show at all to understand the premise of the episode. I’m not a huge fan of this type of genre crossover, but I thought the conceit by which young Grant gained his superpowers was sufficiently Doctor-y and believable in-universe. (“Take this,” the Doctor tells 8-year-old Grant, handing him a gemstone to hold with what, in retrospect, turns out to have been a particularly unfortunate choice of words.)

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Reader Poll Roundup: Series Nine Edition

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When I drew my comparisons last year between Series Seven and Series Eight, I had to do a little handwaving because of the difference in the lengths of those series (thirteen and twelve episodes, respectively). For similar reasons, the switch between Doctors was difficult to quantify. This time I can draw more direct parallels as both the number of episodes and the current Doctor are the same between S8 and S9; S7 will also get a look-in.

Beginning with the average (mean) ratings of episodes, we see the usual ups and downs over the course of the series. To get the average rating for any given episode, each star rating (e.g., 5 stars) was multiplied by the number of votes it got, the results added, and the sum divided by the total number of votes. For Series Nine, we get the following:

Although there are some peaks and valleys (more on that later), we see that the ratings were fairly consistent throughout the series. Fully half of them fall within less than a third of a star of each other (from 3.45 to 3.75 stars).

If we rearrange the data to show how the episodes scored from highest to lowest, we can see the trend more clearly (note that the episodes are different colors between the above and below charts; apologies for the vagaries of my visualization software):

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A Song of Comfort

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Review of The Husbands of River Song
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Christmas episodes are unusual creatures, trying to be all things to all viewers. There is the expectation that a large number of families, including those who don’t regularly watch the show, will be tuning in. Thus, the episode should be easy to follow for those with little or no knowledge of the characters and ongoing storyline(s), and fun and cheerful for those making it part of their holiday celebrations.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

At the same time, it has to be satisfying for those of us who follow the show regularly. If it’s a complete toss-off, the production team risks alienating its core audience, which is also bad. Thus a Christmas special is a weird hybrid (see what I did there?) of fluff and substance that can be very difficult to execute.

As one might expect, then, there were parts of The Husbands of River Song (THORS—Ha! What an acronym!) that made me really happy and others that made me cringe a little. It’s difficult even to generalize which was which. Most of the interpersonal bits were good, though some were not; most of the guest artist bits were pants, though some were not; most of the plot points were eyeroll-y, though some were not. You get the idea: par for the course.

On first viewing, though, I found the good bits outweighed the bad. Moffat’s dialog was mostly rich in quotable one-liners, with the occasional battle-of-the-sexes comments that he seems to think are funny (but as far as I’m concerned almost never are). I took the lighthearted feel of a “romp” at face value that first time through, too, which meant that the guest cast (Greg Davies as King Hydroflax, Matt Lucas as Nardole (whom I kept mentally calling Unstoffe at first), and Phillip Rhys as Ramone) were all played at a just-right-for-the-occasion “panto” level of off-the-wall.

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Series Nine Retrospective

All through Series Nine, it felt like we were missing key elements of the overall story and wouldn’t understand until it all wrapped up in the final episode. That often happens under Moffat’s leadership, but this year—to me, anyway—felt particularly arc-heavy. Now that we’ve got that broader perspective, I wanted to go back and look more carefully at how it might influence our reading of earlier episodes.

The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar

We began on Skaro, bringing Davros, Daleks, and Missy all back on board. As the opening gambit, the first two-parter of the series had to introduce all sorts of ideas without letting on how many of them would come back later. In some cases the recurring elements were glaringly obvious (e.g., the Hybrid); in others it was more subtle (the way the Doctor can come up with a way to “win” and make complex calculations in a tiny fraction of a second). In still others, we got the sense that something might come back, but didn’t get hammered over the head with it (the Confession Dial).

Already, too, we got the sense that Clara was nearly ready to fly solo. She’s truly “taken the stabilizers off her bike” and acts like a Doctor substitute at UNIT. Rather than the beginning, this is the middle of her arc. Though she will continue to get ever more reckless, she’s already short some reck here. Clara is more mature and self-sufficient even than last series, and the fact that her boyfriend is “still dead” (thanks for that, Missy) further reduces her need to give any fucks for her own safety.

Then there’s Missy. We’ve been trained by her previous incarnations to think she would show up again later in any series she crops up in once. Yet after this, she scarpers and only returns in passing mention as the perpetrator of the Doctor/Clara pairing in the first place. (It’s so very the Master/Missy’s style to try to bring about an apocalypse just to get the Doctor to be her bestie again.) I’m counting that as a pleasant trope subversion.

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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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Review of Hell Bent
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Moffat couldn’t kill a character to save his own goddamn life.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

He likes to pretend he’s ruthless. He tugs heartstrings with near misses and kills off minor or supporting characters, but when it comes down to it, he’s simply unable to commit, even when the narrative demands it.

I had to wonder whether he was trolling himself or just trying to cut off naysayers at the pass when he wrote Ashildr’s words pointing out the way that the Doctor’s actions earlier in the episode had completely undermined the emotional impact of the previous two episodes. “She died for who she was and for who she loved. She fell where she stood. It was sad. And it was beautiful. And it is over. We have no right to change who she was.” And yet that’s exactly what Moffat does.

It has become something of an in-joke in fandom that you don’t have to worry when a character seems to die, because they’ll just come back at some point (I still haven’t ruled out a Danny Pink return). I don’t think anyone was completely destroyed by Clara’s death in Face the Raven because (a) we’ve become inured to Companion death (hers, even! Versions of her have already died in Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen!) and (b) we were all waiting for the end of the series for exactly this reason. There’s no “just this once” to Moffat’s “everybody lives!“

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Divine Execution

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Review of Heaven Sent
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Heaven Sent is what, back in the day, my Star Trek: The Next Generation-watching friends and I would’ve called a Mind F*** Episode. You watch the whole thing thinking you understand the basic problem the crew (or, in this case, the Doctor) is facing until the very end, when one new piece of information changes how you look at everything else.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

It’s a tricky stunt to pull off, especially given the nearly completely solo acting required of Capaldi. In the entire piece, there were only three other characters; only one of those ever spoke, and that was a single line to which the Doctor made no verbal response. In the hands of a lesser actor, it could have been disastrous.

Instead, it was suspenseful and engaging. That first time through, as is often the case with a Moffat script, you can see there are big hints being dropped, but you can’t necessarily put together the puzzle (at least I couldn’t—YMMV). Once you know the scoop, though, every little detail takes on new meaning, both just when thinking back on it and upon repeated viewing.

However, I found I enjoyed this episode more than almost any Moffat-penned script since he took over as showrunner. Usually Moffat’s episodes start to unravel upon closer inspection. That’s not the case for me this time. Only one thing bothers me, and it’s something I can fan-theory away if I try. In my book, that makes this episode a huge win in the Moffat-as-writer category.

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Facing the Consequences

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

I am so glad Moffat finally got some women to write for Doctor Who. Both of those new writers this series have added strong episodes to the canon (however one defines that), and Face the Raven in particular uses character as its driving force to great effect.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

I just wish I’d been able to experience the episode without expectations of where it was heading.

Over the last couple of years I’ve had bad luck with last-minute spoilers, and not just in Who. For example, in the first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the mid-series cliffhanger revealed [um, couple-year-old spoiler] that one of the team members was secretly working for Hydra. A couple hours before I had the chance to see it myself (late, yes, but still… ~sigh~), I saw a tweet about it: “I still can’t believe [So-and-so] is Hydra!” So much for that bit of dramatic tension. I spent the whole episode noticing the clues the other characters overlooked rather than overlooking them myself.

Similarly, the day before Face the Raven aired, a friend posted something on social media about how sad she was that this was going to be Jenna’s last episode. Well. Foreknowledge like that certainly changes the way one views a story. I can only imagine now how other fans would have experienced it, because I didn’t have the luxury of surprise.

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Perchance a Dream

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Review of Sleep No More
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Mark Gatiss scripts are always hit or miss for me. I have really enjoyed a couple of them, especially The Unquiet Dead, but others have fallen flat for me. This entire season has been really strong (in my opinion), though, so knowing Gatiss was the writer on this episode, I went in feeling cautiously optimistic.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

I came out the other end of the story rather confused—not by the plot itself so much as by how I felt about it all. After my second viewing, though, I think I finally figured out where I stand: with opposing opinions depending on how I look at it. As a writer, I found the episode to be a fascinating experiment using a worthy storytelling conceit; as a fan, I didn’t particularly like it.

Much of the online reaction I’ve seen centers on the “found footage” style. Some folks are touting it as a bold, new direction, while others feel it was a mistake of epic proportions. As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere between the extremes. Given the nature of the story, the found footage format (say that twelve times fast) strikes me as a perfect fit. It adds to the creepiness and makes the camera POVs part of the narrative itself. However, I found it incredibly off-putting. I’ve simply never been a fan of that style of film, and found it difficult to look past.

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Continuity à la Carte

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Review of The Zygon Inversion
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

This is the episode that made me look back and admit I hadn’t been entirely fair to Moffat.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

Regular readers will know that I’ve long since tired of Moffat’s regular tricks and quirks. It was easy for me, therefore, to jump to conclusions about previous stories that I now know to have been incomplete. In particular, I was really angry after Death in Heaven when Osgood died. It felt like an attack on the fandom for whom she was a cipher.

Now, though, it’s obvious that Moffat had a larger character (and plot) arc in mind for Petronella Osgood (I kind of wish we still didn’t have a given name for her…). He has even tied up the glaringly loose end of the Zygon peace agreement with humanity, left dangling for nearly two years since The Day of the Doctor. Many of us noted how that particular plot line had been abandoned unceremoniously at the end of the anniversary special; some felt the Zygons had been underutilized as a result. It’s nice to see those threads being tied back into the ongoing narrative.

Speaking of call-backs to previous episodes, Clara’s in-pod experiences during the pre-credits sequence was extremely reminiscent of both Last Christmas (with Clara’s search for dream tells) and Asylum of the Daleks (in that Clara was physically trapped inside an enclosed space, but had made a different space in which to exist in her mind). Long-term continuity was well considered here (more on that later).

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