Time Heist
(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 20/9/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writers: Stephen Thompson and Steven Moffat, director: Douglas MacKinnon)
Rank: 272
Telepathic scary alien to checkout one please, I'd like to report a robbery...
Or 'Oceans Eleven, Twelfth Doctor', for one of the unlikeliest Who scenarios yet: an intergalactic bank heist. Yes that’s right – Peter Capaldi is, for one week only, George Clooney and Clara is Tom Cruise, with their own team of notorious bank robbers (only two though, naturally, as the budget won’t stretch to eleven or indeed thirteen). It’s a bit…odd. Back in the 1960s one of the fun things about the series was the way it dropped the characters we knew and loved ‘inside’ other television programmes, so that one week they’re in a Western (‘The Gunfighters’) and the next they’re playing parlour games like some grotty children’s quiz (‘The Celestial Toymaker’). By 2014 there aren’t many genres the show’s elastic format hasn’t stretched to and kudos to writer Stephen Tompkinson for actually finding one that’s utterly unlike anything the series had done before (not bad for a series in its fifty-first year), but there’s a big reason why Dr Who had never done anything like this before. The two live in very different universes: The Doctor famously doesn’t care for money. This is not a capitalist series – quite the opposite in fact (it was only two stories ago he was being compared to Robin Hood) so the amount of work that goes on trying to get this scenario to fit leads to a confused, convoluted story that throws every bit of scifi at the topic that the writer can (time travel, aliens, cyborgs, telepaths and clones) yet still never quite makes sense and only occasionally feels like Dr Who. It’s also not a very linear series, at least in this era when it jumps time tracks so often, while heist movies absolutely have to be about the problems of getting from A to B without the copout of jumping ahead to C. Having this week’s ‘ordinary turned extraordinary’ be the security system at a bank (which can kill you if you’re guilty) has perhaps crossed the line from being inspiredly weird to boringly mundane (even if the security, The Teller, is one of the era’s better looking monsters, not least for being ‘real’ – in the sense that it’s animatronic rather than a CGI effect). Even the way this story is filmed, with lots of the sorts of lingering slow motion action shots, filmed at right angles, is so incredibly alien to the straightforward way Dr Who is usually shot (where the camera views are ‘normal’ and what they see isn’t) that it makes everything feel a lot stranger than a lot of Who stories that are going for shock value by being out there and wacky but are still shot the ‘normal’ way (like ‘The Web Planet’ ‘The Happiness Patrol’ or ‘Love and Monsters’).
Perhaps most of all it
makes The Doctor seem like the ‘baddy’ – for half an hour anyway. Of course things
aren’t quite what they seem. The Doctor is actually helping save the Karabraxos
bank when a solar system causes it’s systems to be shut down, but you don’t
know that. Neither do The Doctor or Clara, who have had their memories wiped.
This also has the effect that we’re watching an entirely different series,
perhaps ‘Blake’s 7’ (where the terrorists/freedom fighters often tried to rob
pillars of the establishment out of protest, even though their efforts tended
to hurt everyday people far more than the corrupt system controlling
everything) or ‘Genius Game’ (the wretched 2025 quiz hosted by David Tennant
that saw an ‘ocean’s thirteen’ group of people lying to each other and a bank
teller in an attempt to win oodles of money. Tennant doesn’t get to vapourise
the losers though – at least in the first series – or it might be worth watching.
The biggest ‘steal’ though was how this show cost £2.5million when it was just
a load of bad Mensa quizzes. Rumour has it that the show was outdone in the
ratings by a low budget documentary about pangolins and is perhaps only the
second real flop of Tennant’s long career). It’s also the closest an actual Dr
Who story has come to resembling the ‘escape room’ craze of the era, where a
team is locked in a room and given clues as to how to work their way out and
every franchise seemed to have one (and yes there was a Who escape room, involving
Daleks and Cybermen. Honestly most fans would lock themselves in and never want
to come out – depending on the fans you were locked in with!) The fact that the
viewer doesn’t know what’s going on either is meant to make you question The
Doctor’s morality and the question that keeps cropping up across series eight
of whether he’s a ‘good man’ or not – something that might have been a question
worth asking if this was a new show, but we’ve had half a century of the Doctor
being a good man. No amount of grumpy bickering or the Doctor’s wretched new
catchphrase ‘shuttity up up up’ is going to change that in one go (it doesn’t
make him a bad man, but it sure makes him a chore to watch at times). The
Doctor isn’t Avon, or indeed that weird guy common to every quiz like ‘Genius
Game’ who simpers to everyone’s face then stabs them in the back but needn’t
have bothered because everyone sees through it and votes him out immediately:
you can’t have a beloved character enter their ‘villain era’ this many years into
a show, have him turn over a new leaf at the end of each episode in a season’s
run and still expect the public to buy it. A lot of fans, in fact, think The
Doctor is very out of character as it is for being so ready to rob a bank, but
actually he’s robbed stuff before lots of times if he thinks the people in
charge aren’t looking after things properly (starting with The Tardis).
So instead we’re left
with trying to work out how the Doctor can possibly be good and, well, I’m
still not quite sure, even after the ending or reading all the descriptions of
what’s going on. There are sure to be a few spoilers in this paragraph so best
to come back to this paragraph if you haven’t seen the episode yet…Well, it
turns out that The Doctor really is ‘the great architect’ of the bank (Is this
the same planet ‘Paradise Towers’
is on in the future? That might explain why they assumed he was that too). So
despite acting so grumpy all episode, even for him, he was actually doing the
right thing all the time and forgot. Very 12th Doctor that! Which to be
honest I’d guessed from the first and I don’t usually guess anything right. You
can tell it from the moment of that unconvincing message from the architect
(which is clearly Capaldi putting on a bad American accent and being altered by
computer, the way news stories do when they want to protect witnesses – even
so, his cadences are so unusual his voice stands out a mile), never mind when
they lay it on thick that the architect is someone The Doctor ‘can’t stand’ (it
wasn’t going to be anyone else really was it? This isn’t Davros’ style and he
loves and respects The Master too much). The Doctor has set himself and Clara
an elaborate trap to get them to break into the bank vault in the past, right
on time for when the solar storms hit. It turns out that the director is
adamant that the bank is safe, but she’s wrong – the solar storm breaks the
‘atomic seal’. She’s still adamant she knows best despite all evidence to the
contrary so The Doctor gives her the Tardis telephone number with the words
that he’s a time traveller, asking her to ring when she’s changed her mind and
wants his help (which is a long time coming – she’s on her deathbed). The
Doctor is attacked by The Teller who scan him for guilt, which somehow restores
all his memories and then he discovers that there’s a female Teller locked in
the vault that he’s been protecting all this time.
So The Doctor set up this
bank raid to create this moment and put his friends in apparent danger to
trigger a crisis and then solve it. Wait, what? Why create such an elaborate
plan? It makes no sense at all. Surely all the Doctor needed to have done is
record the dying Director Delphos and have her urge her younger self to put
things right, then travel back in time. Or do something to protect the bank
from solar storms (there’s bound to be another one along one day. And why build
a bank on such a vulnerable planet anyway?) Or why not go back in time and help
prevent the Tellers (the last two of their kind) from being captured. While the
idea of an alien that can tell people’s guilt telepathically and incinerate
them is a great concept (with the ‘bent head’ look of his victims one of the
scariest things the series has done for a while, an effect so much better than
the similar one in ‘The Bells Of Saint John’)
it makes no sense given the ending. Why does reading the Doctor’s thoughts
suddenly remind The telkler he has a missus – while The Doctor might feasibly
have guessed there was something like this behind his behaviour, why doesn’t he
just ask? (surely that’s easier and a lot less painful than risking having your
head bent like a teaspoon?) IT’s weird too that after such a big buildup of ‘don’t
get caught or you’ll be handed straight over to The Teller for disintegration’
that the Director decides to stop and have a chat first (the poor chap in the
sut at the beginning didn’t get this privilege). But then the whole ‘The Teller’
isn’t in charge, but is really a prisoner; thing doesn’t fit with what we learn
about him either. Surely a being who can sense guilt is the last one that
should ever be captured by anybody with ill intent. And why is it scaring
people off anyway? It should want it’s partner to be rescued: it would fit far
more with other Dr Who concepts if the male Teller wanted his loved one to be
alive and happy and free if in danger rather than trapped and safe, even if
they were the last of their kind (goodness knows The Doctor’s said that enough
when it’s him). Perhaps most of all The Doctor’s decision to make his later
self forget what he’s up to so he doesn’t feel guilty and the Teller won’t kill
him is ludicrous: all four feel extra guilty because they don’t understand what
they’ve said yes to and it might be something bad – if The Doctor knew that he
was helping prevent a bank form being invaded and reuniting two lover aliens
then everyone would know they were doing the right thing and wouldn’t feel
guilty at all (we’re told several times The Teller senses guilt, not motive). Something
tells me that something went wrong with the writing of this story somewhere
along the way because it just doesn’t hang together at all: the solar storms,
for instance, aren’t even mentioned until twenty-eight minutes in when suddenly
they’re the focus point, while the ‘clues’ are dropped in randomly. Plus it’s
so un-Doctory for him not to be curious about The Teller’s background or
welfare that it’s positively suspicious. The fact that Moffat gets a rare
co-writing credit suggests that an awful lot of re-writing went on in this
story and it still doesn’t quite cover up the cracks.
That said, it’s not all
hopeless – you might have to dig for it, but there is treasure to be found
here. There’s a lovely nod to fans with a quick montage of past people who’ve
tried to rob this bank including some old friends we haven’t seen for a while
or not at all in the main series: a Terrileptil (‘The Visitation’), Kahler-Tek (the
cyborg gunslinger from ‘A Town Called Mercy’
– how did he end up here?), a Slitheen, a Sensorite, an Ice Warrior, Captain
John Hart and a Weevil (from ‘Torchwood’), Androvax and The Trickster (both
from ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’), Abslom Daak (from the comics) and for some reason
some petty Human criminals who couldn’t possibly be on an alien planet
(including Charles Petty, better known as ‘Pretty Boy Floyd The Outlaw’ who
ended up a song by The Byrds. The script also features the Biggs brothers
behind ‘The Great Train Robbery, Bonnie and Clyde and Dick Turpin – they can’t
all be aliens, surely!) There’s a scary scene where The Teller stares back at
Clara through the sort of forsted glass you see in banks to separate the staff
from the customers (in fact I’m sure I saw that face in mine the other day.
Only their eyes were even further apart). There’s also a terrific pre-credits
opening where Clara is preparing for another date with Danny (after the first
one in ‘Listen’ went so terribly wrong)
and the Tardis phone rings, The Doctor answering it with the suggestion ‘what
could possibly go wrong?’ before they both wake up screaming, their memories
wiped by a worm (and in case you’ve had your memory wiped they first appeared
in ‘The Snowmen’ - apparently they work by emitting toxins into
the blood of anyone who touches them, something so evolutionary unlikely as to
be proof of the existence of God or, as this isn’t Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The
Galaxy, a rather desperate showrunner. I mean, what good is wiping the memory
of something that might be about to step on you if you’re insect sized? It’s
only going to forget and do it again). It’s a very Dr Who idea, because we know
how many things go wrong when people say things like that in Dr Who stories and
we also know Clara well enough to know her curiosity has been piqued and she’s
going to give in, even though when we last saw her she was adamant about
staying put. We also keep getting the theme that memories make us who we are,
which crops up a lot in Clara’s era (see ‘Last
Christmas’ especially); Moffat seems to see them as a form of ‘time travel’,
a way the Dr Who audience can connect to their own past without a Tardis. You immediately want to know more – and having
The Doctor and Clara learn through their own (forgotten) voice recordings and a
TV advert is a clever way of getting through the usual problems of repetitive
exposition that doesn’t sound natural. Unfortunately this opening is so strong
it’s something of a cheque the rest of the story can’t cash.
The Teller himself is
pretty darn fabulous, inspired work by the prosthetic department who avoid the
usual clichés of guard dogs and instead go for something closer to a
hammer-head shark (dressed in an orange straightjacket weirdly, which is
definitely a look), with alien eyes that can see right into your soul (and are
worked by remote control; ‘teller eye wrangler’ is one of the more interesting
careers out there!) The idea of having to hide your thoughts from someone about
to kill you – which then inevitably becomes the only thing you can think about
after a while – is also a very Moffaty twist on thinks he’s done before (so
much so you expect the Doctor to say ‘Don’t think! Don’t even think! Think and
you’re dead!!!’) It’s also a typical Dr Who play on the truth that
exterminating people isn’t that far off every bank’s policy on Earth (woe
betide anyone who walks into this establishment asking for a loan…) The idea at
the scripting stage was to make him more insect-like and confined to a
wheelchair, but the final version is much more imaginative and less, well,
silly. BBC budget well spent I say, even in such a cost-conscious episode: a
lot of fans who watch Who off and on seem to remember him and ask him which
story he was in, even though they look baffled when I start waffling on about
banks and solar storms because a decade on they don’t remember those boring
parts at all. That name is particularly telling: he’s a tell-tale, the sort of
person who passes on what people joke about to teachers in class as if it’s fact
rather than letting off steam. The Teller never speaks. It might have come from
‘fortune telling’, predicting someone who might turn out to be a criminal in
the future (and this planet must have a weird criminal system if it’s okay with
exterminating people for merely thinking of carrying out a crime; there’s
nothing to say the man who was up to no good was actually going to go through
with it rather than chicken out. They could have at least had The Teller tell
the staff to keep an eye on him and nab him when he actually does something).
In a way though it’s a nice repeat of other Whovian takes on capital
punishment: ‘The Mind Of Evil’ ‘Shada’ and ‘Boom
Town’ all look at what we should do with criminals who either are no longer
capable of crime, or gave it up several lifetimes ago, or made a new life for
themselves and repented. This story is more severe though: there’s no
opportunity for appeal, no court case,
not even being shrunk back to an egg, just extermination. It’s weirdly out of
character The Doctor doesn’t at least try to stop it. After all, traditionally he’s on the side of
the criminal against faceless corporations (he pulled down the plutocracy in ‘The Sunmakers’ for less than this, not
helped out the manager).
There’s also the very Dr
Who theme that the ‘real’ treasure isn’t money but people and the friendships
and relationships we forge. There are hints that The Teller is either being
blackmailed or is protecting an illegal fortune of its own, but no - The Teller
is protecting his girlfriend from harm, aware that as the last two of their
species they will die out if they don’t protect each other. Every heist movie
has an unlikely romance sub-plot in it somewhere: it’s actually very funny that
Dr Who makes it between two alien beings, one of whom is the security guard
(that’s never happened before in any heist franchise!) Given that by now we’re
deep into the era of credit crunches and bank collapses and David Cameron’s
austerity measures that somehow tripled Britain’s deficit it’s a timely
reminder that there’s more to life than money and that people are being made
miserable effectively because of bits of green paper (that settles it,
Tompkinson was definitely listening/reading/watching some Douglas Adams. It’s
probably not Moffat given that the showrunner isn’t keen on Who’s former script
editor, apparently). As for Keeley Hawes’ many characters, it’s a clever twist
that she’s cloned herself to take on so many different roles at the bank
because there’s no one else she can trust. They don’t come out and say it, but
given the lack of any interaction with anyone else including on her deathbed
she’s a lonely soul who’s spent her life only interested in money. Presumably
clones don’t come cheap, but then what else does Ms Delphox (if that is the
original) have to spend her money on anyway? She appears to live at work and
has no family or friends. She’s Mr Banks in ‘Mary Poppins’ or perhaps Scrooge
(the Disney version, Scrooge McDuck, is being voiced by David Tennant in the
rather manic remake of the excellent ‘Duck Tales’ about now), someone who got
so stuck on the idea that money would solve all her problems that she’s
forgotten the importance of people. She’s everyone fooled by David Cameron’s
speeches about how the collective economy is more important than individual
suffering, who sees people as statistics rather than individuals with lives and
feelings. It’s a shame, then, that we don’t spend longer with her to properly
get to know her: had she had a Scrooge style conversion at the end and realised the error of her ways it would
have helped this story a lot, but alas she’s just Miss Foster from ‘Partners In Crime’ with a touch of Madame
Korvarian from ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, an
ice maiden in a suit and crazy eyewear who can’t see what’s really important. The
whole story hinges on her seeing the error of her ways, but the moment happens
largely off screen (a lot of her deathbed speech got cut for unknown reasons,
perhaps because the episode was over-running or because the aged prosthetics
really aren’t the best; weird how the ‘classic’ series could do this
effortlessly and the modern series messes up a good few times). They could have
done so much more with her character and her change of heart but, while Keeley
Hawes tries hard, there’s no character to get her teeth into, not even when
there are lots of Ms Delphoxes running around.
It’s a theme seen in the two ‘new’ companions
too: it’s traditional for heist movies to have a ‘team’. On the one hand it’s a
bit weird that they’re here at all, given the conclusion: This Doctor isn’t one
to trust easily and he’d be far more likely to clone himself the way Ms Delphox
turns out to have done. On the other they do things that The Doctor and Clara
can’t do and their own pasts tie into the sense of isolation and loneliness
well. Psi is a cyborg, part computer (Tompkinson seems to have a hangup about
this, what with Tricky thinking he’s a robot, before finding out he’s part
Human in his previous Who story ‘Journey To
The Centre Of The Earth’). He’s wiped his memories of friends and family to
‘keep them safe’ as part of his livelihood robbing banks (even though he’s very
much the Vila to The Doctor’s Avon, the soft-hearted coward who’s clearly in
the wrong profession, before he redeems himself by saving Clara). Though he’s
relatively emotion-free, being part robot, he’s one of those (like Data in Star
Trek): Next generation) who yearns to be more and have what other people have.
The most affecting scene of the whole story is when Clara asks why he’s risking
his life to save her and he tells her it’s because she has people who will miss
her – but when he looks back over his life he can’t remember any of his flesh
and blood, back in the days when he was all flesh and blood. His treasure
waiting for him in the vault that he’s been promised (presumably by The Doctor
in his future) isn’t gold or precious jewels but his missing memories. Saibra
has the opposite problem: she’s a telepath, someone who finds other people so
easy to get lost in that she replicates their features every time she touches
them (for the first draft she was part Zygon, which explains a lot). Sadly they
clumsily bungle the moment she takes on Clara’s features (Pippa
Bennett-Warner’s hand stays the same black colour rather than turning to
Clara’s pale white) but it’s an affecting idea, the second most moving moment
of the story coming when Saibre tells The Doctor how awful it would be if she
took on his reflection and looked at him with eyes of pity. Sadly too they also
cut what would have been her best scene, as The Doctor rescues her and she
admits ‘I could kiss you – but then you’d be kissing yourself’ (‘and what’s
wrong with that?’ he asks). So Saibre leads a lonely life, unable to get near
anyone in fear of losing herself. She’s missing out on so much – which is why
her ‘treasure’ is a DNA manipulator that will ease her condition and allow her
to be with other people (it’s very like ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ this scene –
everyone gets a ‘physical prize’ that’s really just a prop for all the things
the characters have learned to do during the course of the story. There’s even
a sort of cyborg tinman). You think this is an episode about breaking out
money, like every other heist movie out there. It isn’t. It’s a story about how
people keep each other out, through over-zealous security guards that zap
others because of fear or hurt or wanting to keep people safe. That part of
‘Time Heist’ works wonders. It’s just a shame that they had to cobble together
such a nonsense story to go with it. Oh and the importance of loved ones can
also be seen in an ‘Easter Egg’ that only director Douglas MacKinnon would know
(at least until he told readers of Dr Who Magazine) his daughter Ruby made the
rocket out of an empty toilet roll that’s on The Director’s desk, because she
heard he was working on science fiction.
It’s the middle where the
story crawls to a halt, turning into an ‘escape room’ type drama where The
Doctor and co have to work out various puzzles (a staple of classic stories
like ‘Keys Of Marinus’ ‘Tomb
Of The Cybermen’ ‘Death To The Daleks’
and ‘The Five Doctors’). Mostly they’re
solved by some technobabble that makes them as impenetrable as the bank vaults
where there isn’t a storm coming. Everything gets a scifi ‘explanation’ that
makes increasingly less sense and while it’s far from the only Who story to be
sunk by technobabble this one does seem particularly prone to it. What is the
‘atomic lock’ the bank uses? Is it powered by atomic power or only work if you
have the ‘right’ atoms to access the vaults. Considering it’s supposedly such
an important bank you’d think they’d have better security than one slow-moving
Teller: customers mingle willy-nilly when the party of four walk out of a room
(with no one asking them who they are or why they’re there, when they clearly
don’t ‘fit’ – real life security guards can’t sense guilt by telepathy but use
intuition when something doesn’t quite look right, with a shifty looking
quartet looking puzzled with no obvious things in common and looking round the
building as if they’ve never seen it before – even though they’ve just left one
of its rooms - an obvious red flag). What’s the Teller meant to do if it’s
attacked by a whole team of robbers? It takes an age to scan the man listed on
the credits as ‘suited customer’ before deciding on his guilt and zapping him.
He wouldn’t have time for a whole team armed to the teeth – they could shoot
him from the entrance door and he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. The
middle of the story doesn’t work either as action heist movie (as there’s very
little action) or as Dr Who (when we have such clichés as running down
corridors – the same ones multiple times in fact – and walking through lifesize
ventilation shafts, which also seem something of a liability at such an
important bank). It’s as if elements of this story went so far removed from
what dr who generally did they threw in some long held traditions to win fans
over. But they feel fake, easy cop-outs in a story that started off in such an
imaginative way. It ends up going from a story that feels fiscally solvent and
impossible to solve to one that’s economic and makes a fist of things. After
all there’s so much more fun they could have had with a scifi bank setting in a
dystopian world run by the rich: the pens chained to the wall that try and
strangle you if you walk off with them, literal inflation of your belongings over
time, a loan with a surety that eats you if you don’t pay things back on time
and restrictions on time travellers nipping forward in time to collect the
quadzillions of interest on something they invested that morning. We need a
return to this bank with a more ‘normal’ story. It’s almost like the writers
started heading towards writing a diatribe about Britain (and the world’s)
economic situation in 2014, then pulled up short and went for ‘dumb action
movie’ instead.
Perhaps worst of all, the
characterisation of The Doctor and Clara falls flat. Things start off well:
it’s hard to know with this Doctor when he’s teasing and when he’s being
genuine but his Tom Baker style oblivious at Clara going on a date (‘why is
your face all painted in and why are you so tall? Is it to get a book off a
really big shelf?’ ‘I’m in heels!’) is the funniest this 12th Doctor
has been so far. There’s another nice bit of banter where The Doctor ticks
Clara off for pointing out the flaw in his plan to take out the floor ‘because
it’s bad for morale’ (‘and being blown up isn’t?’ she asks, incredulous). Unfortunately
they take it too far and he becomes more of a smug egotistical bore than the 6th
Doctor ever was. It’s more of a problem in the two stories before and the one
after this, but it’s uncomfortable seeing The Doctor jealous of Danny. He seems
to have got it into his head that every companion is a love interest now,
though the odds are actually just two out of maybe fifty so far (Rose and River
Song; he only seems to date blondes whose names begin with ‘R’) and his mocking
Clara ‘let’s see a date match that!’ as he takes off in the Tardis is so out of
character. They’re clearly trying to play it as a ‘gee if I was several
thousand years younger…’ age gap thing, about how terrible it is that The
Doctor feels things for people who consider him too old when he was their age
not so very long ago, but it’s weird. Rose and River were both special cases:
otherwise practically everyone he meets has always been ‘too young’ for him.
They were probably aiming at making The Doctor lonely too, a sort of mix of Psi
and Sainbre’s problems, of needing people but also needing them to be at a
distance for protection, but in doing so they just make The Doctor rude. You do
wonder what Moffat was telling his writers at the first half of season eight as
they all seem convinced that Dr 12 is just Malcolm Tucker in space, Capaldi’s
shouty politician from ‘The Thick Of It’, a narcissist with a swear word for
every occasion. I’m all for Doctors who
are awkward and antisocial and some of the best moments of the next two seasons
stem from that, but for now the Doctor isn’t clumsy so much as downright rude.
Clara, too, arguably has less to do this episode than any other across two and
a half years. Most other stories set her up as The Doctor’s equal – to her
detriment and eventual death in ‘Face The
Raven’ – but here she’s used purely
to ask simple questions and get captured. Oh and make excuses for The Doctor,
something Psi picks up on right away – the sort of blind loyalty you have for
someone when you know them really well (wehich is odd, because if he ever did
that have that with someone he can’t remember it. Suely that’s an observation
better left to Saibre?) Right after the opening made it clear how she was a
rare companion with an independent life away from The Doctor. Neither stop to
properly mourn Psi or Saibre when they sacrifice their lives to save them – as
it turns out that’s another feeble copout so that ‘everybody lives!’ again
(surely a Moffat addition. It makes no sense though: The Doctor can tell an ‘atomic
shredder’ a device that’s meant to kill you from one that’s a teleporter, even
if he seems to have left his sonic screwdriver at home today). You start to ask
yourself why these two either travel together: unlike similar stories with
similar hissy fits that have moments of real tenderness underneath the surface
(‘Mummy On The Orient Express’ springs to
mind) you have to ask why these two are travelling together at all when they
don’t seem to like each other’s company that much. It wasn’t that long ago
Clara split herself into multiple splinters and travel through The Doctor’s
timeline trying to save him; why have things changed so much so suddenly. Even
a regeneration can’t explain it: The Doctor is the same man underneath and his
feelings don’t really change that much – just his ability to express them (the
obvious parallel is Peri, but at least that one makes sense. The 5th
Doctor gave up a regeneration to save her, so subconsciously the 6th
Doctor resents her, though you still have to question sometimes why she doesn’t
simply walk off on the first hospitable planet they visit and get away).
So that’s a story that’s often hard to watch, in a format that doesn’t quite fit and with an ending that’s largely incomprehensible. And yet there are many things about this story that do work, from the alien to the new companions. You certainly have to give ‘Time Heist’ props for trying something a bit different and shaking up the formula, something you can say for most series eight stories as it happens. By heist movie standards it’s a pretty good one, with an imagination that goes above simple action plots and characters who feel ‘Human’, even when one’s a cyborg, one’s a telepath and one’s an alien (Saibre might be a telepathic alien, but she at least looks and acts humanoid). Unfortunately by Dr Who standards it’s more bored ultimatum than Bourne, more bustle than hustle and more Plot Impossible than Mission. The thing that was most robbed in this story is our time: what with everything in this story going around in a loop and being caused by The Doctor, with no real sense of what exactly was saved, you leave the story going ‘what was all that about then?’ It could have been so much better with just a few tweaks. For instance the story ends ten minutes early, with at least that which could have been cut from the story’s middle: we needed to see Keeley Hawes on her deathbed realising she’s lived her life wrong, we needed to see Psi with his friends and family or at least watching old movies, we needed to see Saibre getting her very first hug, we needed to see The Teller with Mrs Teller and lots of baby Tellers living a happy family life free on some other planet. We get no return on our ‘investment’ in this story, to keep the economic angle going, no expected happy ending and what we get is quite a muddle. Instead we get endless jealousy and bickering from the two leads. Somehow this story got the tricky parts right (shoehorning the idea that love is more valuable than gold in a heist movie really shouldn’t have worked, but is actually the best bit) then dropped the ball with the basic storytelling. This story had so much promise but it ends up just forty-five minutes of The Doctor acting a bit gruff, Clara in a huff and the aliens don't get that much of a chance to strut their stuff. Sometimes the people making this story need to go back to school. Which funnily enough is what happens next…
POSITIVES + There’s some
nice filming at Kemball Electronics, a Bridgend manufacturers that doubles for
almost everything seen in this story: the bank entrance, the vault, even Coal
Hill School (only the vault itself and Clara’s flat were done back in a TV
studio). I wouldn’t say it looked ‘alien’ exactly (maybe it’s a chain and all
Earth banks are alien too? It would explain a few things…), but the camera work
does make it look strange with some unique architecture.
Previous ‘Listen’ next ‘The
Caretaker’
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