The Girl Who Died: Rank - 308

                                             The Girl Who Died

(Season 9, Dr 12, 17/10/2015, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Jamie Mathieson/Steven Moffat, director: Ed Bazalgette)

Rank: 308

'Be silent all holy creatures! We have a tale to bewilder, By a daughter of our villagem name of Ashildr, She met with the Gods out in the sky and invited them to fight prepared to die But she lived forever thanks to a man in a box, who the fake Gods of Odin began to outfox, he bamboozled with words, fakery an electric eels, so to this Doctor we All began to kneel, he even brought back Ashildr back from the dead, though she wishes he hadn’t – it sure messed with her head…’

In which we get proper Vikings! What I always wanted in Dr Who! But only briefly. And they certainly don’t act like Vikings. Because this is really about a girl who...wait no she didn't. That title's wrong for starters!... Now, I love Vikings! Both the horned (and indeed horny) legend and the lesser known humble reality of traders and farmers scratching out a living on the land without any horns in sight. I would have been happy for a tale about either, but for 50-odd years we had to make do with the noises-off scenes in 'The Time Meddler'and a few bits of flashback in ‘The Curse Of Fenric’. I don’t know why: it’s a time that’s right in Dr Who’s wheelhouse full of travellers, explorers and storytellers: if ever a civilisation of the pre-20^th century were ready to believe in a man coming from the skies in a blue box and life on other planets, its them. At last after all those years of waiting we get a full Viking setting, only its full of people who don’t act like even the mundane basics of Viking legend . Rather than a story about the far more interesting Vikings, this one’s largely about a particular peasant girl the Dr takes a shining to and who he uncharacteristically promises will be alright. More to the point, it's about his huge guilt when she's not. So he decides to save her, even though this goes not only against the laws of time but the continuity of almost every other Dr Who story (because if the Doctor can just ‘choose’ to save people then nobody we’ve ever seen in the entire series need die). The whole crux of this story is that the Doctor is acting like a God, in a world of people who believe in actual Gods, that has been taken over by aliens who have far greater Godlike powers – a worthy and very Dr Whoy plot if ever there was one, but its an idea that never really comes together and is poorly executed, getting lost in the mix against other lesser plot details. You get used to Dr Who stories not quite delivering on the promise of the ‘next time’ teaser trailer at the end of the previous weeks or a write-up in the rRadio Times that makes it sound better than it could ever possibly be, but this one was particularly frustrating, sacrificing the promise of one of the most interesting settings the series could show for a distinctly underwhelming return to the idea of the Doctor trying to be more than what he really is, interfering with local time and the ripples this creates.

For all the fuss going on as I (re)write this, in the wake of ‘The Star Beast’, about Dr Who reflecting *check’s note* 21^st century society in a 21^st century drama, what Dr Who does to history when it’s in one of its ‘silly’ moods can be far far worse. ‘The Girl Who Died’ is, on the face of it, the Viking story I’ve been waiting my whole life to see. Only there’s been less historical research here than ever before so what comes out on screen ends up being less believable a Viking tale than, say, Noggin The Nog was about Norsemen. Dr Who has done this before with the past, true. Ever since Dennis Spooner took over as script editor in 1965 this series has been poking fun at the holes in Roman culture and as early as the second trip to the past was making out that mighty warlord Kublai Khan was a nice old man with a penchant for playing backgammon. Somehow though this story is worse because it’s not showing up the holes in society that were there but making them up as a the punchline to a joke that wasn’t very funny in the first place. Dr Who is a series all about treating societies and cultures in the way they want to be treated and even if it sometimes has the feeling that modern life is best, its generally kind enough not to say that out loud. Stick the culture shown in any other Dr Who story down to watch it and while they’d be angry at some of the depictions and struggle to understand some of the assumptions and probably declare war on the relevant era showrunner/producer for misunderstanding some intrinsic concept they’d hold dear, nevertheless they’d still mostly recognise themselves. Dr Who may not always be kind to the cultures it shows on screen but it’s usually fair and handled with a modicum of respect. There’s almost none here, in this tale of a weedy sleepy Viking village that doesn’t know how to fight but – mostly thanks to Clara’s accidental interventions – ends up starting a battle with an alien army anyway even though they’re hopeless.

That’s all wrong. The irony of this story is that Viking culture was so recognisably similar to ours, with a much closer equality between genders and classes than anywhere else in Europe in the 9^th century – arguably most cultures up till the 19th. Not all Vikings were warriors, most were traders, but that didn’t mean they were the weak kneed lot seen here: there was no great difference between the warriors and the fishermen and farmers left behind in the villages, with the exception that one half was trained to be offensive and one half to be defensive, to fight off whatever attacked from the outside in rather than from the inside out. This isn’t a village where the good and great have been drained away by the alien threat either: those we see on screen are able bodied men of fighting age and honestly this is the one culture where practically everyone would know how to fight, even if they weren’t very good. Here it becomes a joke that these warrior are so untrained they hack their own limbs off: funny in a Monty Python film; less so in a story about time travel. The village as shown on screen wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in a Europe where territory was always being disputed by somebody, even in a one-off village.  Not since ‘Braveheart’ recreated the battle of Bannock Bridge…without a bridge (still can’t believe I got thrown out of a history lecture once for pointing that out) but with anachronistic Irish music have so many liberties been taken with a timezone in a piece of drama for no good reason. Because the reality was so much more interesting.

You can tell that writer Jamie Mathieson, usually such a reliable and safe pair of hands, just doesn’t have his heart in this story, which was an idea of Steven Moffat’s that the showrunner had never got round to doing. Mathieson’s a writer usually sparking with ideas, most of which he’s allowed to run with, but for this series all of the ones he suggested (the Doctor accidentally turned himself into a ghost, an alien earthworm that burrowed deep under the ground, a return for the Zygons) by chance clashed in some way with other stories that were lined up ready to go, especially the ‘Under The Lake/Before The Flood’ and ‘Zygon Invasion/Inversion’ two parters. Rather than turn down the work and wait a year, Mathieson did what any freelance writer would do and agreed to give it a go. Honestly though, it’s a bad matchup: some writers are born for historical stories full of research and detail and character but Matheison’s not one of them – he’s a lover of big bold images and seeing where the starting point takes him. He’s a wildly imaginative writer who thinks big – and the problem with historical stories is you have to be restrictive and controlled, while the stories tend to be smaller in scope simply because the people involved don’t know about other continents yet, never mind other planets. The tone is rather set from the minute the Doctor walks out the Tardis and exclaims ‘No not Vikings – I’m not in the mood for Vikings!’ This is one of the greatest, most fascinating time periods the Tardis can visit and if even the Doctor’s bored you can be sure the audience will be too. Even the location filming, in Fforest Fawr Woods near Caerphilly and Cosmeston Medieval Village in Penarth aren’t as worthy as other historical locations (they’re basically some huts on a bit of grass without any sense of village life or culture to brighten them up) and these tatty looking handful of extras don’t seem as if they live in this world, more that they’re a bunch of 21^st century actors who wandered onto set. Usually one of this series’ biggest strengths is how it brings the past to life in the present, but nobody’s heart in this story and everything feels fake. 

There’s a major problem, additionally, in that the Viking setting is just the backdrop for a different kind of story, one that returns to the themes of the 10^th Doctor’s arc and specifically ‘The Waters Of Mars’ about what the Doctor can and can’t get away with. It’s been a grey area ever since the Doctor started tinkering with history back in the Hartnell days and all the more so since The Meddling Monk turned up in the 10^th century selling 20^th century technology to Ancient Brits in their fight against The Vikings. In theory a plot where aliens are helping the Vikings out against the Ancient Brits should work just as nicely, but instead we get it in reverse; an alien race taking the Vikings in a one-way fight (its w onder there are any Vikings left. Surely that’s a plot beat better meant for a culture who died out for largely unknown reasons like the Olmecs or the Incas?) There’s a great and very Dr Whoy plot that the Doctor thinks he can get out of trouble by playing the old ‘I’m a God’ card (the way he did in ‘The Myth Makers’ when he was assumed to be Greek God Zeus) only for a bunch of aliens to turn up and do the same thing, with far more impressive technology. Very clever, very funny and a worthy start to a story that’s basically about whether the Doctor really has God-like powers or not, interfering when one of the Viking villagers he’s grown close to dies, refusing to accept it and bringing her back to life. But this, of all settings, is the wrong place to make that point. The major reason I’m so narked with the portrayal of Vikings in this society and the way they’re drawn as a bunch of cowards is that in this time period they are all convinced, without any doubt whatsoever, that there is an afterlife waiting for them on the other side of this one. Valhalla is paradise, and even if you only got there if you were really brave (probably dying in battle) nevertheless it was what you aimed for, with the same zeal today’s youth aim to be social media influencers or football players, even if secretly you knew that it might never happen for you. It’s an unbroken aspiration, unquestioned. The idea that Vikings couldn’t be bothered to learn to fight makes no sense – it’s the path to living forever, far more so than the Doctor’s scientific jiggery-pokery. If anything they should be so cross with him for taking Ashildr back from an afterlife where she’s partying with the Vikings’ finest. It doesn’t help that part of the plot point even reminds you of this, as the Mire promise Valhalla is where they’re taking the villagers. There’s no way these Vikings would be untrained in fighting and need to be organised by the Doctor. And even more so there’s no way they’d have been afraid of death in quite the same way they’re portrayed here. I remember the days when the Doctor was reverential to history, refusing to change anything – that you could tell a Dr Who antagonist by the way they treated Earth history as if it was nothing, to be beaten, rather than a civilisation to take on its own terms. Now it’s the Doctor who calls Vikings silly nicknames (Lofty, Daphne, Noggin the Nog, ZZ Top, Heidi, and of course, Limpy). When did he ever do something quite as rude as this before to someone who wasn’t trying to kill him? What did the Vikings ever do to him? (Except put him in chains – and other cultures have done far worse).The usual take on this is that they’re presented to us as ‘Dad’s Army’, the people left behind when the fighters went off to fight, which just isn’t true: every village had proper fighters left behind to defend them and everyone was trained including the women, while Vikings just didn’t live into old age for that to be a problem (plus what I think people miss is that these warriors more closely resemble UNIT, cheerfully heading into battle despite not having a chance against technology they don’t understand – with Ashildr their ‘scientific advisor’. Maybe that’s why the Doctor gets so attached to her so quickly?) You only need to look back to 3^rd Dr era of Who to see what’s wrong: he isn’t on the sidelines tut tutting and preventing people being hurt (a medic rather than a Doctor), he’s acting like the Brigadier and he’s not very good at it. When the Doctor brings back Ashildr from the dead and gives her eternal life he isn’t just dooming her to the same eternal life of going on forever and watching his friends die the Doctor goes through, he’s preventing her from reaching the Heaven that is her birthright and which would grant her eternal life anyway. Had the story revolved around that point, had Ashildr been angry with the Doctor for those reasons, had everyone else been too, it would have made a valid point. But it doesn’t: the repercussions are all in the next episode ‘The Woman Who Lived’, which has all but forgotten about Ashildr’s Viking past.

Even without the Viking noises it’s a mighty odd thing for the Doctor to do, bringing her back from the dead. He’s seen plenty of good people die in his care of duty, including many close friends. The devastation in ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ alone visibly ages the Doctor a good few centuries. He’s already learned the lessons in ‘The Waters Of Mars’ the hard way that he doesn’t have the right to save everyone. Why does he only start acting like God again now? For one girl he has all of one conversation with about being an ‘outsider’?  (And honestly none of the things she described would be seen as being an outsider to her society: Vikings loved imagination and storytelling nd encouraged girls to act like boys). It would help if Ashildr really was the quirky, imaginative, eccentric brilliant kid the script seems to think she is, but she isn’t: there’s nothing she does in this story to show that she’s anything other than bog standard. Not that being special should matter in a series that’s all about how every life is precious, regardless of who you are anyway. And she’s not that little: even allowing for the fact that Maisie Williams looks younger than her actual age of eighteen in this story, by Viking standards Ashildr would be more than old enough to have babies at fourteen and be running a household, bossing the men around. She’s not that smart, she’s not that interesting and there’s another million Ashildrs out there across Scandinavia that the Doctor doesn’t seem that fussed about. Yes this a girl who died indirectly because of his actions and a lot of this is guilt, but that seems a small point to start disobeying the laws of time over. I mean, if the Doctor really can go back and rescue people like this why doesn’t he do it for Adric or Katarina or hundreds of the people he’s closer to than this? The doctor meddles with history the exact same way he always told people off for doing since The meddling Monk - the fact that this is in roughly the same era as ‘The Time Meddler’ when we first met ‘The Meddling Monk’ only makes it more obvious.

It really doesn’t help that Maisie Williams is cast in the role and effectively doing this in her Summer holidays from making ‘Game Of Thrones’. In 2015 she was pretty much the single biggest guest actor Dr Who could get and was painted as a huge feather in the show’s cap that it got her at all (a sign of how far Dr Who had fallen really, given what a boost it had been to acting careers since the comeback in 2005) so of course they were going to give her a big juicy part – and as someone who’d come to fame in a fantasy medieval style epic this was an obvious part to give her, with the original drafts of the script ore of an ensemble piece than this. But she’s all wrong: as wide-eyed innocent Arya Stark, reacting to what other people do to her, Maisie’s pretty darn good, in George RR Martn’s hands delivering straightforward text in tales of derring do, the perennial victim in a world where darkness is hiding at every turn, usually with a dragon for company. But this is Dr Who, even a lesser Dr Who has a lot going on in the script that’s told in the spaces between the lines and only in the eyes and there’s just none of that here. Maisie’s performance is one of the worst by a big name star in the series, one-note and unbelievable, but it’s not really her fault - she’s just playing this role the same way she did Arya and it’s not that kind of a part despite the medieval trappings; the director should have been helping her with that. To be honest my first thought when Ashildr snuffed it, aside from being ‘gosh that wasn’t much of a part given all the fuss she got in pre-publicity this series’ was ‘phew – at least we don’t have to see her again’. But we do. The next  few stories are all about the curse of being round the Doctor and what he does to people and particularly Ashildr’s problems living with the eternal life he’s cursed her with (as well as inspiring Clara to carry the burden of weight she was never meant to carry) both of which are underwhelming as Dr Who story arcs go (beaten only by the ‘will they?’ ‘won’t they?’ ‘Guess they can’t now he’s a cybermen’ arc of Danny Pink’s relationship with Clara the previous year. Which raises another thought: why isn’t Clara angry at the Doctor for saving a Viking girl he’s met once rather than her boyfriend?)   

There’s yet another story arc this series too of course: the hybrid. There was great speculation as to who or what it might be including dalek-timelord embryos and Clara only being part human, but the red herring is dropped on us that it might be Ashildr, who carries around a little of the ‘Mire’ aliens from this story around with her. A bunch of skulking stone aliens, they’re some of the least seen and least described monsters of the Dr Who universe, even though they clearly have huge powers (the effects of ‘Odin’ appearing in the sky are exquisitely realised and even in the 21^st century seem like magic, rather than computer graphics: originally Brian Blessed was cast in this role to make his first return to the series in 29 years and  would have been perfect for it, as small as it is – illness meant he had to drop out at the last minute). And yet the Doctor fools them with a bunch of electric eels and a puppet, Clara filming their retreat  and adding the ‘Benny Hill’ theme music over the top as they run away. That all seems a bit easy for a monster we were told were some of the greatest mercenaries in the universe doesn’t it? While it’s a worthy solution to the series-long question of when is the right time for a pacifist to fight (something that’s been asked since ‘The Daleks’ as long ago as the second story) by having the Doctor fight in an underhanded, sneaky sort of a way where nobody (he thinks) can get hurt, it isn’t half rude to the aliens. I mean, the Doctor’s never stooped this low before to film their cowardice and blackmail them with it– he’s never taken such delight in defeating a monster or making them feel bad. Plus everything he does is taken from Clara’s word and she didn’t exactly hang around to talk much with them. For all he knows they’re saving the Vikings and giving them eternal paradise in the stars for benign reasons (Ok, so no they’re being slaughtered but it never seems to occur to him to ask). If  the Doctor’s oddly insensitive and clueless to The Vikings, that’s nothing compared to what he does to The Mire in this story.

That’s a shame because, even while the major parts of this story are all wrong, some of the minor bits work really well. Mathieson hasn’t lost his ability to write some cracking lines that show he really does understand how this series works, most of the time, from the Doctor’s comment ‘I have a plan’  and Clara’s weary ‘yes you’ve been saying that for two days now’ to her comments that the Doctor is running around madly exactly the way he does when he’s waiting to think of something. The idea of the Doctor clashing with the Mire over who is the most God-like, when all the Doctor has is a yoyo and a bit of fruit, is classic Dr Who, the ordinary and extraordinary banging heads. The Mire thinking they’re under attack and legging it is really quite funny, until they go too far and throw the Benny Hill theme in too. There’s a nice bit where the Doctor explains to Clara how he was once told by Donna that he needs to save someone if he can, to the point of regenerating with Caecillus’ face from ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’ to remind him of that (a nice bit of continuity because we were wondering about that, although you have to ask why the 6th Doctor took on the face of Commander Maxtible, the timelord who tries to execute the 5^th Doctor in ‘The Arc Of Infinity’, not an adventure I’d want to be reminded of. Was it to remind him to avoid going back to Gallifrey again because of their bad dress sense? You do wonder why the 10^th Doctor got the same voice as the latter half of corpse diggers Burke and Hare following David Tennant’s appearance in 6^th Doctor story ‘Medicinal Purposes’ too). There’s a fan pleasing moment when the Doctor gets out his old diary, now extended from 500 years to 2000 (always a good joke, in any era). Even then, however, there are odd little bits that don’t quite connect. There’s an odd opening scene of Clara in space and finding something in her spacesuit, while having to trust that the Doctor can get her back again. Clara is already one of the more trusting companions around, we don’t really need this bit to see her faith in him – and if its setting up the season climax, that one day the Doctor won’t always be around to save her, then it seems an odd way of going about it as he does here instantly, with no particular difficulty. The Tardis, which once used to be the most amazing creation in all of television, capable of travelling anywhere in time and space, has now become a thing that lands while the characters are still nattering about something else and haven’t even bothered to check the scanners. The Doctor spends most of the ending laughing at The Mire for being cowards who run away – yet a few minutes he was trying to get the villagers to do the same and nine times out of ten running away is what he does rather than fight. Tonally it’s a mishmash, some bits agreeing some bits contradicting other episodes, while even by 12^th Doctor standards he’s a bit inconsistent across the story, changing his mind over and over. Clara, meanwhile, gets precious little to do once she’s beamed back from space.

The result, then, is a story that isn’t as badly as made a bit of television as the three stories that are lower in my ranking, but then those three stories were ones that were always going to struggle to work as Dr Who tales, with fundamental flaws that meant they were doomed from the start. This one is slightly different: there’s a great story to be told about Viking life and how it compares to our own. There’s a great story, too, to be told about the Doctor getting too big for his boots and in a moment of unthinking grief condemning someone good to a life of being bad by preventing them from dying, eve though its one we’d already had (for in a series that’s all about change knowing when to stop and let things go is one of the hardest things – and we now the Doctor hates goodbyes). There’s a potentially brilliant story about ancient civilisations fighting the Gods they thought were there to keep them safe who turn out to be aliens. This story, sadly, un-delivers on all of those fronts and instead gives us an oddly balanced farce with big emotions tacked on. Not since the days of Donald Cotton in the 1960s has a Dr Who story veered this sharply between drama and comedy and Mathieson can’t quite pull that off as well, simply because this world doesn’t feel real enough for it to work. Ultimately, for all of Peter Capaldi’s attempts to gee things up (and this is one of his best stories, perhaps the most inconsistent actor to play the doctor whose either great or awful), this is a flat story where everyone seems uninspired and bored, from the writer to the set designers to the costumers to the actors and actresses to the director and while it’s not always the case that  story that was boring to make is one that’s boring to watch, sadly it is in this case. By Odin I will have my proper Dr Who Viking tale one day!

POSITIVES + The Mire are potentially a lot more interesting than what we get here. They’re a race who want mankind, not for their land or their bodies or to sell in slavery, but to feed off their testosterone because they find it tasty. While it seems a bit odd they don’t go straight to Roman gladiators and why they zap so many women along with the men when they capture the villagers (and yes women do have levels of testosterone, but not as naturally high as men – you’d think Mire technology would be able to give a scientific reading which life forms had more) that is at least a nicely different take on the usual Dr Who alien invasion scenario and more to the point it makes sense of why The Mire have picked this timezone in particular (honestly most alien races with time travel capabilities are better off going back to the stone age, when we were at our most helpless). You would have thought there’d be at least one Viking legend about them though. Or maybe everyone in this village was so weak they died off after all even after the Doctor’s help?  The Mire suits are an interesting design too, looking as if they’d been hewn out of stone, but in a different way to The Weeping Angels or The Melkur. We deserved to see a lot more of them than the few minutes we get anyway. That’s a real downside to the 12th Dr’s era: all those potentially interesting aliens we only get to see for a few scenes as a budget saving device; this is one of the worst examples of it though.

NEGATIVES – Oh dear. When The Doctor ‘spoke baby’ in ‘Closing Time’ and a little bit ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ it was presented as a half joke you could believe or not (because unpredictability is what the Doctor, particularly the 11^th Doctor, is all about). But now the 12^th Doctor most definitely can and the sense of Peter Capaldi pretending to listen as he translates a baby’s oddly intellectual premonitions of doom and disaster are cringe-worthy indeed. Vikings had enough soothsayers of their own – a warning from one of them would have been better.

BEST QUOTE: ‘’Immortality isn't living forever. That's not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying’.