The Woman Who Lived
(Season 9, Dr 12 and Clara, 24/10/2015, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Catherine Tregana, director: Ed Bazalgette)
Rank: 296
'I’ve lived through famine. I’ve lived through plague. I’ve lived through wars. I’ve lived through hardship, suffering, death, loneliness and strife. But do you know the moment that finished me Doctor? It was being alive for The Spice Girls’.
As Charles ‘Unquiet Dead’ Dickens would say, ‘life is made up of so many partings’. Shortly after ‘And turn that gas-lamp off, it’s giving me flashbacks!’ For ‘The Woman Who Lived’ picks up the story of Ashildr the Viking girl from ‘The Girl Who Died’ and her adventures in time (but not space), who has by now lived through 800 years of ups and downs and seen her loved ones die several times over. She’s become battle-hardened and scarred, a world away from the innocent creative young girl she used to be and with nothing left of the innocent hopeful girl he wanted to save. Because, if you somehow missed the earlier review (and don’t worry if you did, it’s not the most important of episodes) her immortality is all The Doctor’s fault, caused by his use of an alien immortality patch to bring her back from the dead. So she’s been plotting his downfall all this time and looking for a means to escape via the nearest alien spaceship. It really is quite the coincidence she bumps into him straightaway (from our point of view) given that The Doctor only saved her life an episode ago! The story then asks again whether The Doctor was right to bestow immortal life on someone without asking. Which would be a question worth asking had ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ and any story where The Doctor mentions his great age (there are a lot of those) not already given us the answers: life, without the people you love to share it with, sucks and isn’t really living at all, just survival.
Once again you have to ask ‘is
everything alright at home?’ given that showrunner Steven Moffat keeps
returning to this theme, although here at least he’s turned his usual
‘everybody lives!’ ideal on its head by handing it out to two different writers
to challenge him why that might be a bad thing. It’s an odd one this story arc,
with two episodes that have completely different feels, written by two completely
different writers and set in two completely different eras. Where last week was
all comedy Vikings and anachronisms this one is all Middle Ages and highway
robberies as the background to a serious debate about what it really means to
be immortal. Catherine Treganna, though a newcomer to the series (she wrote
some Torchwoods first – the gruesome ones, mostly, though she also wrote the emotional
ones where Jack has a brother and Owen a lover), wins on points from Jamie Mathieson
– the important points are worth making, even if they’re a bit muddled and
don’t necessary take us anywhere new. Both halves are scuppered by one very
major problem though: they’ve relied on Maisie Williams, the breakout star of
the moment thanks to her turn as Arya Stark in the era’s breakthrough hit ‘Game
Of Thrones’ to sell us the idea that Ashildr is first playful innocent girl and
now battered harrowed veteran despite looking much the same (the two stories
were filmed back to back). They just ask too much of a girl still learning her
trade and the big emotional scenes of Ashildr’s anger at
the Doctor condemning her to the sort of life he leads when he knows how hard
that life of watching others die is should, on paper, be a huge emotional
climax. In practice it just looks like a lot of pouting and shouting. Maisie (who turned eighteen during filming and thus legally
went from being a ‘girl’ to a ‘woman’ during the making of this story) just
plays them the exact same way: wooden. It really is one of the worst
performances in the entire run of the series. So all the nuances in the script,
all the debates and back and forth, all the metaphors and hints, get lost
because we don’t really believe Ashildr has seen anything of life, never mind
enough to turn her semi-evil.
The setting doesn’t help. They could
have set this story at anytime, including the present day (which we sort of get
in ‘Face The Raven’, though Ashildr/Me is
only a secondary character in that tale). Instead they set it in 1651, with
Ashildr a highway robber in Merrie Old Englande and don’t even do that properly
(we’re at the end of the English Civil War here, a setting with which they
could have done so much: the end of an actually very uncivil war that tore
families apart and turned ordinary peasants into looters and soldiers who have
nevertheless laid down arms in a grand truce that ends with the execution of
Charles I, a turning point in British history when people learn to think less
of themselves and more about their communities, as Ashildr slowly does thanks
to The Doctor. But it’s a background detail barely mentioned, not running in
parallel the way it should). We’ve been here before, lots of times – indeed the
reference to The Great Fire Of London (which Ashildr claims to have ‘probably
caused’, before The Doctor corrects her) underlines how close this story is to
‘The Visitation’: clumsy
unlikely-looking aliens hiding in plain sight behind cloaks and laughing at the
locals while repairing their spaceship (Sam is even a dead ringer for comic
actor Richard Mace. Though actually funny this time I’m pleased to say). It
could have been so different. Thanks to Ashildr’s journals we hear about some
fascinating times she lived through, when she was nearly burned as a witch (how
did she escape the fact she never ages?), when she was a Queen (until she grew
bored of ‘doing paperwork and playing backgammon’ and escaped) and when her
family died in the black death (so her genes don’t bestow immortality to her
children then?) and when she fought in the Battle of Agincourt, so why don’t we
got those instead? Heck even Ashildr’s time in a leper colony would be
preferable to this, despite having sat through the terminally dull ‘Terminus’ not so long ago which did
much the same thing (and how come Ashildr recovered? The alien patch means she
can’t die, not that she can’t get sick and therefore, if she caught leprosy,
her limbs should have fallen off even if the rest of her was intact). They’re
much more interesting and a much greater turning point in Ashildr’s life. More
to the point, what happens to her after we see her in 2018? Does she end up in a glass jar next to The
Face of Boe in the year five billion? The most interesting story of all is how
she felt when she outlived her Viking clan and then her Viking culture. How did
she survive? Where did she go? What was she thinking? Instead we meet her again
at a really dull time in her life, when she’s stealing money for food even
though she’s living in a big posh fancy house with an alien lion.
Yes that’s right, an alien lion (he’d
have been far handier at the Battle of Agincourt when lions were the token
mascot of English troops against the French, who were cocks. No that’s not an
insult, I do mean cockrels). Leandro scuppers all hope of this being a
‘realistic’ story because there’s no way an alien can hide in plain sight for
all those years, during the most superstitious and Godly of eras, with nothing
to hide him but a cloak. It’s daft. He’s not even a normal looking lion on four
legs, which would be bad enough, but one that walks around on two and talking.
This is CS Lewis fantasy, not Dr Who scifi. Once again though I can see what
Treganna was aiming at and how it got sort of lost in the wash: Ashildr is
desperate to escape her ‘slow life’ by now and wants off this planet. Once
again it fits in with the idea that she’s now a ‘woman’ not a girl’. Leandro,
though, is Ashildr’s opposite in so many ways that she can’t see. He’s the last
of his kind after an unexplained genocide on his home planet (covered at more
length in the draft script: it was The reapers from ‘Father’s Day’. Presumably Leonardo’s kind
only had nice modern buildings not great drafty old churches to hide in). Earth
doesn’t seem horrible through his eyes because he’s alive when he didn’t expect
to be and it’s a planet that kept him safe. Because Ashildr has forgotten, in
her desperate jealousy of death, how precious life can be. Unfortunately in
theory (perhaps less so given the awful alien costume where the budget has
rather too obviously run out) Leandro gets shoved to the background soon after
we meet him, important only in the sense that he’s part of the trap they’ve
sprung for The Doctor. Which is a great shame that undoes all that hard work:
the metaphor ends when Leandro winds up just another person prepared to kill so
that he might live.
It’s also a nonsense: the whole point
of Ashildr in her first episode was that she was bright and ahead of her time,
able to read people. Is she really so blind she doesn’t see the double cross
coming? Also, while I can imagine that 800 years without the gift of death has
made her resent the person who gave it to her, The Doctor is clearly a ‘goody’.
He saved her life, saved her village and proved his own bravery. Why does she
assume now that, rather than track him down and ask for his help, she needs to
use him as a patsy in a trap with a lion who hasn’t shown any of the
intelligence he’s shown. She’s also incredibly un-curious about who he really
is: last episode she was dead for most of the explanations so only got a regurgitated
version told through Viking myths about the afterlife. But The Doctor is still
the closest person she’s ever met to who she is now. Why isn’t she more interested in what he’s
been doing and whether there are other people he’s brought back to life (and
whether he can nip back in time and do it to her husband and children? That
would be my first question).
Treganna has another go at this same
theme, of a character who really wants to live when Ashildr really wants to
die, with robber Sam The Quick. He’s played mega Whovian and comedian Rufus
Hound, who pestered each and every production team since the 2005 revival about
getting a part in his favourite show (and when he was turned down for not
having enough acting experience he promptly took a semi-regular job with Big
Finish, appearing in lots of Dr who stories to prove his worth that way! The
best of the bunch is the wonderfully named ‘Short Trip’ ‘How To Win Planets And
Influence People’). He even has a tattoo of a Dalek on his chest which had to
be covered up by makeup for filming! (Now that would have confused continuity
and led to all sorts of rumours). He’s very good considering how far this part
is from what he normally does, nailing a character that’s close to his own
anyway, a wisecracking comedian that basically invents stand-up comedy by
improvising during his intended hanging. For even while the mouth is laughing
you can tell that Sam’s eyes are sad, a neat three-dimensional touch that
Ashildr really needed. They do say that doing comedy is like stepping into the
hangman’s noose and trying to survive, with language like ‘you slayed them’ and
‘I died a death last night’! Best line: ‘Come on Doctor, don’t keep hanging!’ For
if people are laughing with you they’re less likely to kill you! Sam knows that
life in this era is nasty, brutal and short so he’s made the most of every day,
including the one where he’s meant to die. It’s clever setting this story at
the traditional site of executions: Tyburn, then a village that was part of
Middlesex but now part of Greater London where ‘traitors’ were hanged between
1196 and 1783 and it’s recreated well too. They do thinks subtly though: Sam
doesn’t plead for extra life or beg for a stay of execution because he’s made
the most of what he has. His delight on surviving (a return of ‘everybody
lives!’) is in great contrast to Ashildr’s sulking that she didn’t die and part
of why she changes her mind about her gift of life. It’s great fun seeing him
sort of invent the first ‘Doctor Doctor’ joke too. But it’s too small a moment
and so poor is this story’s resolution that it gets lost. They also introduce
Sam far too late in a badly paced story that’s all over the place, with twenty
minutes of talking, twenty minutes of action then five minutes of excessive
talking again. With The Doctor talking to Ashildr most of the time they don’t
have a chance to give him anything much to do.
Any other story would have handed the
supporting character to the companion, but Clara isn’t here this week (not
until a really odd two minute coda anyway) and Jenna Coleman is on holiday.
That’s a real shame. This story needs Clara more than most do. You see, Clara –
more than most modern companions – is The Doctor’s conscience, representing how
‘we’ at home, ordinary people who haven’t lived through space and time for
centuries, feel. While Clara’s arc is that she takes on too much burden and
starts thinking of herself as The Doctor, nevertheless she’s more useful to him
as a brake, to stop him going too far. It would have made so much more sense,
actually, to switch the two stories around and have The Doctor resurrect
Ashildr because Clara wasn’t there to tell him that was a bad idea. So instead
we have an immortal lecturing someone he turned immortal that she’s doing
immortality ‘wrong’. The big debates between the two fall apart because this is
clearly hypocritical. The Doctor has used his days to do good it’s true, but he
can flit in and out of trouble, avoiding the consequences that Ashildr has to
live through (the story’s best line is that ‘you come for the wars, I deal with
the aftermath’). He really should have left Ashildr some pointers, perhaps a
spare Tardis on Earth history up to the year five billion. He could have left
Ashildr an immortal companion to grow old with too. These scenes smack a bit
too much of ‘I left home because of you and made lots of mistakes because you
weren’t there to parent me’ which just aren’t interesting, at least not when explained
at this length (the Doctor’s not the only one who looks down on ‘banter’). It’s
only right and proper that the person who bring Ashildr the curse of
everlasting life should be there when she has a change of heart but actually
The Doctor has very little to do with it: Ashildr springs Leandro’s trap then
finds out it was to let his people invade, not let her out (all those extra
years of life and she’s still a gullible numpty with a lot to learn!) This
story would have been so much better had they split this story up and put the
opposites together, so that Clara (who would have done anything to save her own
boyfriend Danny a few episodes ago) breathes new life into Ashildr again while
Sam makes The Doctor less jaded. Who knows, maybe that was the original plan?
Because there’s something deeply lopsided about this story, which in the first
half is so slow it feels like you’re watching 800 years unfold in real time and
in the second half is so muddled it’s hard to follow what’s happening.
Above all, this is a very gloomy
episode. I don’t mean the subject matter necessarily (if anything they could
have gone gloomier and harder hitting). I mean the look of it. It’s twenty
minutes before we see a light that isn’t by a candle and it looks awful. Some
Dr Wh stories would be better off shot in the dark (the base under siege ones
especially) but this isn’t a scary threatening physical storey at all but a thoughtful
philosophical one – we need to see the lights in the actors eyes and the way
their expressions change depending on what they say. Location filming took
place in a particularly wet Welsh May, but even over and above that they seem
to have used a filter to make everything look extra depressing. So there’s no
colour, no light, no life, no anything – it’s as close as they can come to
making the past look sepia toned. It’s depressing. The Doctor’s argument after
all is that life is always worth living, that you can become old and jaded
unless you see life through someone else’s eyes (like Clara – again, that’s why
she would be so useful in this story!) but no we see life through Ashildr’s,
drab grey and empty. That’s heavy going when there’s nothing else for forty five
minutes. They even stick the colourful space lion in a black cloak.
The ending too is poor. For Ashildr’s
story to work we need a pay-off, a sense that the Viking girl has learned her
lessons and dedicated her life to saving people once more, living life anew.
But what do we see? There’s a moment when Ashildr sees people dying because of
the mess she caused and she goes to pieces, reminded that she does care but
after that? Nothing. She lives with Sam as her ‘companion’ even though they are
two very different people (and Ashildr’s not going to tolerate his flirting and
probably only get hurt again). The Doctor talks as if Ashildr will be ‘big’ and
go on to do great things based on the conversion we’ve seen, that one day he
will be ‘glad’ he saved her and she replies ‘one day everybody will be’, but
there’s no evidence of it. Ashildr could have started the welfare state forty
years early, helped look after Robin Hood, created a soup kitchen, taken in a
stray puppy. Instead all we get as a pay off is her looming behind Clara and
one of her pupils, Evie, in a deeply odd coda where she shows The Doctor a ‘selfie’
taken in return for him helping with homework about Winston Churchill (which,
given how little the one in ‘Victory Of The Daleks’
relates to real life, she should have got an E for). It’s a deeply odd thing
for a pupil to do anyway – but then Clara is a very odd teacher (CRB checks
should have picked up on her mysterious second life by now and it’s not normal
practice for teachers to keep pictures of pupils on their phone for persona use,
especially for showing to ex-caretakers who no longer work at the school). How
did Ashildr track Clara down? Why did she bother if she didn’t go and speak to
her? Why not turn up when The Doctor was around (in this era he’s always
hanging round Coal Hill School). It feels as if they didn’t quite know how to
end this so decided the simplest way was to show Ashildr was alive and well in ‘our’
day. But that’s not enough. We need to see that she’s changed. We sort of see
that in ‘Face The Raven’ I suppose, where
she’s ‘helping’ the aliens and dropouts hide in plain sight in a magic alleyway
nicked from the Harry Potter books, but that doesn’t feel like a proper ending
either. The Doctor talks about Ashildr thinking big but she seems to have done
nothing for three hundred years. One other thing too: The Doctor says twice
that taking Ashildr with him as a companion would be a ‘bad idea’ for both of
the but never really says why. If he means that he needs to travel with someone
who isn’t jaded then great, he already has Clara – it’s not like he’s only
doomed to travel with Ashildr from now on. If he means it’s bad for her then
why not at least take her to a more interesting planet that isn’t filled with
death and destruction. But then, he really should have done that from the first
when he saved Ashildr’s life (there are no end of Viking-like planets in Blake’s
7!)
At least they tried to do the right
thing, though, by putting immortality front and centre in a story at last
rather than on the sidelines. The whole episode boils down to the fact that you
can’t control how other people behave and The Doctor’s pained response ‘I didn’t
save you so that you could become this!’ But saving someone from death doesn’t
mean you can choose the life they lead, any more than a transplant donor can
choose who gets their body parts. Life is life and everyone gets one life they
can control and no more: their own. Ashildr has become the opposite of The
Doctor, a reckless narcissist who can’t be bothered with other people who are ‘like
smoke in the breeze’, rather than seeing how scared all life is when you’re the
only one with the perspective to see how short it really is. It’s a worthy if
gloomy idea for a story and could have been a really great one if The Doctor
and Ashildr had been in true opposition to each other, say by putting Clara in
danger, rather than him acting like a disapproving Great Aunt. It would have
been awful if we’d left ‘The Girl Who Died’
with comedy Vikings and that sense that life is going to be great after all:
the biggest improvement, perhaps the only improvement, from 20th
century Who to 21st is the idea of consequences, that other people
have to live with what The Doctor can up and leave at the end of the story and
this is one of the best examples of that. ‘The Woman Who Died’ has its heart in
the right place then, trying to tell a story about what immortality would
really be like, how brutal it would be to see the people you love grow old and
die while you stayed the same and had to live on still. This idea is certainly
better explored than when Torchwood tried it in their extended ‘American’
series four ‘Miracle Day’ (when everyone stays the same age. Except Captain
Jack who grows older). Maybe even better explored than ‘Mawdryn Undead’ (where it’s an
afterthought to a story that’s really about The Brigadier and Nostalgia). It’s
certainly done with more attention than the throwaway ending to the anniversary
fun of ‘The Five Doctors’ (immortality
as a curse being an odd thing to say at the end of a story celebrating a
programme’s 20th birthday). Unfortunately it’s not done anywhere
near as well as it could have been – such as occasional Who writer Toby Whithouse’s
‘series ‘Being Human’ with its blood-addict vampires who crave death but are
too cowardly to take it.
The problem is there’s no twist: you
know without watching it that immortality isn’t going to be all it’s cracked up
to be and the betrayal by Leonardo is signposted a mile away. Given that
Miaisie’s name kept popping up in credit reveals for these episodes fans got
the wrong idea and thought she was going to turn out to be a far more
interesting character than she turned out to be – a younger Missy, or Clara
before losing all her memories or something. Instead she’s just a girl that got
lucky and failed to die. Which by any other series’ standards would be an
interesting character in itself but in Dr Who feels like taking the easy route.
They don’t tell Ashildr’s story that well either. The two episodes are just too
far apart in tone and character, going from extreme silliness to extreme
seriousness when they’d have been better off both being a mix between the two.
The biggest obstacle with Ashildr’s arc is that you just don’t care enough for
her to take up an hour and a half of your life. There’s nothing particularly memorable
about Ashildr’s journey and nothing about her character to make you care.
There’s not even a proper ending, just a conversation with The Doctor where
they’re frenemies from now on, people with very different views but who
nevertheless understand the other’s. It’s a waste of a really good idea: had
they had Ashildr sacrifice herself to save ‘her’ people, finally realising the
importance of life at the very end of it and wishing she could live her life
over, I’d have wept buckets (especially played by an actress who really
connected with the part). Alas we’re in an era of Dr Who when Moffat is too
overworked and the budget stretched too thin to do episodes like this one
justice, so we get some fan-friendly hi-jinks in a Welsh forest (Fforest Ffawr,
Taff’s Well again) and an actress whose name will look good on the publicity
trailer. Most of all ‘The Woman Who Died’ needs another few drafts to truly
come alive and more love and attention than it’s been given. Ironically it was
empty cheap stories like this tale of immortality that helped kill off Dr Who’s
momentum.
POSITIVES + Highwaymen!
Not seen in Dr Who since 1983! The robbery scenes are good fun, especially when
there end up being multiple robbers working at cross purposes with The Doctor
in the middle. It all looks not unlike an Adam and the Ants’ music video,
another source Treganna quoted as an influence! Treganna wrote the script with the idea that
Ashildr was really living a secret life as Katherine Ferrers, a real-life ‘gentlewoman
of the road’ who robbed alongside the men and lived around London around this
time, although they chicken out of actually saying that in the script (Ferrers
had a husband in prison at this time which doesn’t fit the script, but even
that could have been worked in: Ashildr taking the lonely road again). She died
in semi-mysterious circumstances too, in 1661 only five years after this story
is set: officially she died in childbirth but given how few records were kept
back then there’s plenty of room for a Dr Who style twist on the legend. Though
other sources say she went back further, to the Welsh folk legend of Twm Sion
Cati, who protected people from being robbed.
NEGATIVES – Peter Capaldi
is one of the those actors whose as good as his supporting cast. When they’re
great – as Jenna Coleman and Pearl Mackie generally are – he rises to the
occasion, but when they’re not on screen and the supporting cast are poor he
falters. There is no Clara for the majority of this story and only one teenage relative
newbie and an inexperienced comedian to bounce off for the most part, so alas he
gives one of his more under-par performances.
Previous ‘The Girl Who Died’ next ‘The Zygon Invasion/Inversion’
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