Under The Lake/Before The Flood
(Series 9, Dr 12 with Clara, 3-10/10/2015, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Toby Whithouse, director: Daniel O'Hara)
Rank: 278
‘At last! After 139
years my beacon is complete and I can get off this wretched planet! Wait, what’s
that? No signal because I’m in a remote village in Scotland? What a backward
planet!’
We oldtimer fans wondered when new Who came back whether we would ever get a ‘forgettable’ story – one that nobody could remember the second it had finished, to rank alongside ‘The Savages’ ‘The Space Pirates’ and ‘The Mutants’. After all, in theory there shouldn’t be one: the modern series is effects crazy, hurls twenty ideas at a story where one would do in the olden days and doesn’t have to drag things out twice past it’s normal length of stretching the budget. Well, unfortunately the time is now: ‘Under The Lake’ is the most boring of the modern Who stories and one I can barely remember even though I’ve seen it watched it lots of times (including five minutes ago and I still barely remember a thing). Now either this story is unlucky and I’ve been infected by a memory worm or something more fundamental is going wrong. After all, ‘forgettable’ isn’t the same as ‘bad’. On paper this story has a lot going for it: a proper ghost story with some actually really great CGI effects that rank amongst the best in the series, only it’s set on a sleek looking Scottish underwater base in the future that has moss instead of cobwebs and where the electricity keeps going out to keep us in the shadows. No other series would give you something like that. Writer Toby Whithouse’s starting point – a time travel story where you meet your own ghost – is exactly what Who is for. And he’s a writer that, thanks to his series ‘Being Human’, is a specialist at writing tense emotional stories involving ghosts (as well as other supernatural entities) so this was a story I was really looking forward to when I first heard about it. But something weird happens in the execution. It starts off as a ghost story but ends up an irritating riddle quest story and ends up as gonzo scifi. The first episode is by far the best of the two being plausible but slow (the way a lot of set-up episodes are) but then the second goes absolutely bonkers, with one of the most ridiculous monsters of them all and a resolution that isn’t even 20,000 leagues close to sense. Plus The Doctor solves it all not by doing anything clever as such but by sleeping in a box for 139 years. In what feels like real time.
The thing is, you never quite feel ‘submerged’
in this story. It comes across as shallow, a copy of all those ‘base under
sieges’ Dr Who used to do every week, only with less memorable characters (I
mean, this is the exact same set up as the first ‘base’ story ‘The Tenth
Planet’, only instead of a shouty American barking orders to a frazzled crew
it’s a deaf Scottish girl signing them, which makes less difference than you
might think). The trouble is you can’t do a base under siege ghost story and
you certainly can’t do it in a set this big – it’s a flawed concept that just
doesn’t work. All those siege stories worked because you could see the threat:
it generally came with great big clod-hopping Cyberman boots on and a mass army
that was a physical threat, pushing our friends further and further back until
they had to make a last desperate stand in a single room when all hope is lost,
picking brave heroes off one by one as the lines of defence get broken. ‘Lake’
tries hard to conjure up the same sense of desperation but it’s a different
matter when you have a ‘monster’ that can pass through walls and can wander
about at will: basically it reduces the cast to running around from room to
room while the cast are being picked off at random every time a ghost pops up
and says ‘hello’. It’s just not the same thing at all and gets boring by the
second death. It would help if we got to know the people on this base and
understand what they’re doing (they’re underwater miners apparently, in a cross
between ‘The Green Death’ and ‘Warriors
Of the Deep’ but that’s never mentioned again past the opening few minutes
and we still don’t really know what they drill or why), but
uncharacteristically for Toby Whithouse, who’s usually best at character,
they’re all bland. We don’t learn anything about them their worries hopes and
fears or the families they fear will never find out what happened to them. This
story doesn’t have anyone giving a tearful goodbye on a videocall or trying to
leave messages for the future. And Whithouse has the perfect opportunity to
really see how these characters cope under pressure and how emotional this
situation is: after all, when one of them died they come back as a ghost
immediately.
Which is a bit weird
because message for the future is what this story is all about. It turns out
that (spoilers, though honestly you’re better off finding out now than wasting
an hour of your life waiting to find out) there’s a dying alien called The
Fisher King who’s been stranded in this underwater village since 1980. An alien
that just happens to be seven and a half feet tall. Even in a village deserted
so the army can use it as cold war practice, it seems far-fetched. And it gets
worse. Apparently each ‘death’ is really a ‘beacon’ the alien is using to transmit a signal to his
own kind for help (they must be either a very patient or long lived species
though as it’s 2119 and the place isn’t exactly crawling with ghosts). And how
do people turn into a ghost? Well, they fudge over that on screen but in the
draft script at least the words form ‘an electromagnetic connection as the
brain gets starved of Oxygen at the point of death’, which is so silly and
meaningless it got taken out before transmission. The Doctor and two friends
then run past him (very very slowly) and get into a box to wait 139 years. As
you do. We don’t learn much at all about The Fisher King (who really ought to
make more of an impact given his size: he’s played by one of the tallest men in
the world, seven foot all former basketball player turned actor Neil Fingleton
who’s seven foot in real life and wearing a ‘hat’). We don’t learn much about
the people on the base. We don’t learn anything in this story except what a
Faraday Cage is, repeatedly (an enclosure covered in conductive material used
to block electro-magnetic fields which happens to be in the lift – an idea that
fascinated Whithouse ever since he researched it for a ‘Being Human’ episode
that didn’t get anywhere).
And yet this isn’t one of
those dumb empty frivolous Dr Who filler stories written by someone with an eye
on making a quick buck. Whithouse is far too good a writer for that. Instead
what we get is a story that has a lot to say below the surface but which gets
rather drowned out by all the silly monsters. There’s a really good theme of
having your senses taken away from you, which is a strong starting point for a
ghost story. The ghosts themselves all have blackened eye sockets, while
they’re all mouthing something the characters can’t hear. So it’s handy they
have a base commander used to sign language (over a decade before ‘The Well’
was lauded for having a deaf actress in a leading role) – even if what she
interprets makes no sense (‘The Dark, The Sword, The Forsaken, The Temple’)
which The Doctor immediately knows is co-ordinates for an underwater church. In case you’re wondering The Doctor is
attempting to sign ‘go ahead’ but accidentally says ‘You’re beautiful’ instead,
which is why Cass gives a double take. There’s also a hidden theme beneath that
of Humans being blind to things under their noses: there are two would-be
couples on this base and everybody knows it but them: O’Donnell loses the love
of his life Bennett and spends the end of the story moping, telling Lunn the
interpreter to get on with it and tell Cass he loves her before it’s too late
(he signs this before realising what he’s said and is shocked to get a kiss).
Typical Humans: you don’t notice that the love of your life might like you
back, in the same way that you don’t notice a seven foot tall alien sleeping in
a Scottish village. By chance, too, Moffat happened to choose this series to
introduce The Doctor’s much-mocked ‘sonic glasses’ and asked Whithouse if he
could fit them in rather than using the sonic screwdriver as usual. As it
happens it’s perfect for this story (and this story only): The Doctor sees more
when he can’t see to all outward appearances, just as Cass is most useful when
she’s using her extra senses to read lips rather than be distracted by the roaring
sound of The Fisher King.
There’s another nice
theme too of pre-destiny here, a favourite theme of the series going right back
to ‘The Space Museum’ that asks whether
you can ever truly escape your fate. The Doctor goes back in time (with Bennett
and O’Donnell) to track down the Fisher King 139 years earlier but in the
meantime in the best part of the story (what a cliffhanger!) Clara has just
seen his ghost. In her time he’s as good as dead and she’s never going to see
her best friend or get home again. In his time he still has a chance to change
the future. It’s more than that though: the Humans seem to have been picked off
in order as part of a fated plan. All that running around trying to work out
the patterns in episode one and really it’s fate: there’s nothing they could
have done because when The Fisher King calls they’re next. Dr Who has long
struggled with the idea of fate and how much you’re in charge of your own life.
It is after all, a series about time travel: how much of what is shaped in the
universe is free will, how much are things meant to be and how much of life is
random versus how much is karma for behaviour? Whithouse’s twist on this is
that The Doctor ghost mouths the names of the people who die in order and puts
Clara’s name next, knowing this will give him the kick up the backside he needs
to do something about it (leading to a nice little scene where Bennett turns on
him for only caring it’s someone he loves).
Unfortunately what could
have been a nice philosophical little story takes a back seat to a bonkers
scifi concept Whithouse has just learned about, ‘the bootstrap paradox’. This
story is a complete crib of the Robert Heinlein short story that gave it its
name (‘By His Bootstraps’) first published in ‘Astounding Science Fiction
Magazine’. In that story a young student named Bob means an older man who tells
him to give up his studies because he’s from the future and knows it’s a load
of huey.
However what he does know is how to build a time machine and if he passes on the knowledge he’s learned since Bob can go on to become ruler of the Earth. In the course of the story it turns out that the old man is Bob from the future (in a twist that was shocking in 1941 when nobody had really done it before) but of course it begs the question: if Bob gave up his studies then he’ll never be in a position to learn how to build a time machine and he spent his ‘first’ life learning that and how tot ake over the world instead of actually doing it. So if the younger Bob simply takes over the world from the first, he’d erase everything his future self would know that would allow him to do it. The story makes a lot of sense in the original and is, like most Heinlein works, told in a nice mixture of earnest seriousness and a mischievous twinkle. Unfortunately ‘Before The Lake’ substitutes it with one of the all-time worst scenes in the series: Peter Capaldi starts episode two (when in any normal series he would be dead after that cliffhanger) playing Beethoven on his guitar and nattering about paradoxes while breaking the fourth wall and talking directly into the camera (for the first time since it caused so much fuss in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in 1965). Only there’s even less reason for it: in that story The Doctor’s only just come into possession o a space-time visualiser from the Morok museum (again see ‘The Space Museum’) where apparently people looking in on real past events is all the rage. He has no reason to natter out loud to an imaginary audience here: the 12th Doctor would hate to talk to himself, he needs to have an audience (that’s why he keeps pestering Clara to run away with him every five minutes when she’s trying to move on with her life). Plus he’s literally in the Tardis with Bennett and O’Donnell, with no other time to tell ’us’ about this (unless he goes it after dropping Clara off, which is just weird) – Bennett comes back in the Tardis alone while The Doctor climbs in the suspension chamber for a long nap. Is this scene meant to be playing in the Doctor’s head while he’s in the chamber? If so then a few more clues would help. Besides it’s a very stupid way of relating something viewers of Dr who already instinctively understand by now: that if a time traveller went back in time and accidentally killed Beethoven when getting an autograph and had to replace all his compositions from the sheet music he was carrying, who would the real creator be? (It might be significant Whithouse chose someone who was famous for being deaf, at least in later life: his original draft had the time traveller accidentally replacing Da Vinci and copying out his paintings, an idea dropped for being too close to what happens in the plot of ‘City Of Death’!) Toby later told Dr Who Magazine that he fully expected showrunner Steven Moffat to take this daring scene out and was impressed when he left it in (in truth Moffat is up to his eyeballs with his own stories and the ‘Sherlock’ series and simply didn’t have time to write a replacement). The result is colossally stupid, but does at least give Capaldi (a former musician in the band ‘The Dreamboys’ and the dad of course of pop sensation Lewis Capaldi) the chance to be the first person playing The Doctor who also goes on to play the theme tune over the opening credits (and it sounds pretty darn good too). Well, at least they gave it it’s proper name this time I suppose: usually when Dr Who does this sort of thing they refer back to the ‘back To the Future’ films (and Heinlein is where Zemeckis got that idea too, though at least he added a different context for it). The bits that aren’t nicked from Heinlein, particularly the underwater ghosts, all come from the 2014 film ‘Under The Skin’ (even the titles are similar), which would be unwatchable had it starred anyone other than Scarlett Johansson (and even then it’s a bit, well, wet).
Alas the stupid ideas
don’t end there. Everyone’s least favourite Dr Who alien, the Tivolians, are
back with Prentis basically working as an ‘undertaker’ slave to The Fisher King
(after a stop off working for The Arcateenians, a race of wispy CGI fairies that
feed off Human hearts that Whithouse created for his Torchwood episode ‘Greeks
Bearing Gifts’). He has literally no other job function besides delivering
exposition for his sleeping master, as well as being another reason someone
really should have spotted something amiss with aliens running around even in
remote Scotland. Comedian Paul Kaye gives the role his all (he was such a
Whovian his pre-acting punk band had done a song he’d written called ‘Looking
For Davros’; it’s a wonder Prentis isn’t playing Beethoven’s 5th as
a duet) and is a lot better than David Walliams was in ‘The God Complex’,
offering a sense of cunning and manipulation behind the same tired lines about
being a scaredy cat alien that’s the most enslaved in the universe and there’s
one neat line (a sign that says ‘If you’d invaded our planet you’d be home by
now!’) and looks suitably creepy when turned into a ghost. However he’s still
incredibly irritating and there’s even less reason for him to be here (surely
Cold War Scotland is the perfect place to be enslaved by either America or
Russia? And shouldn’t such a scaredy cat be in panic mode about all those
nuclear missiles lying around?) It’s one of the many plotholes in this story
that we never fully find out what happens to him.
We do find out what
happens to The Fisher King. This being from folklore (‘Perceval’ by Chretein de
Troyes, written in the 12th century) is a natural source for a Dr
Who monster. In the folk tales he's a
King charged with guarding The Holy Grail; it doesn’t take much rewriting to
make him the skeletal remains of an alien army leaving coded glyphs to lure
humanity to their doom. Unfortunately the costume is also big and unwieldy that
even I could probably run away from it and while they’ve clearly aimed to go
for terrifying’ the result looks more ‘laughable’. Now making Dr Who monsters
is hard and what seems scary is subjective (it’s why some people watch horror
mo vies behind the sofa and others watch it to laugh at like comedies) and
there are far worse looking monsters out there. Unfortunately though the script
doesn’t do him any favours: he's another of those supreme beings who show their
powers by huffing and puffing and re-acting, rather than actually doing
anything. The sad truth is that, however daft they look, at least The Quarks
and Krotons did something. His back story is so garbled too: ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ had a similar starting
point of words acting like a curse which, when re-told, would bring back the
dead but that was a direct consequence of runes left by a Viking race who
already seemed to have supernatural powers to Ancient Brits. The Fisher King
uses messages to kill people (how?) and uses their ghosts as a beacon (how?) to
call for help while he sleeps soundly in his suspension chamber (does he really
trust Prentis to take the call and not
wander off and/or get eaten?) Surely he’d be better off using that time
invading either UNIT or Torchwood (or both) and phoning up a spaceship repairs
ufo? Or dropping in on the Doctor for help (the Pertwee stories might well be
set in the 1980s after all and he’s forever popping back). Surely, too, when a
time traveller comes back and asks him what the hell he thinks he’s doing the
first thing he should so is go ‘oh great – could you give me a lift? I mean I
might not be able to fit through your spaceship’s tiny doors but you could at
least phone up my local garage for me’. He’s also another one of those
creatures built up to be this huge unbeatable monster ‘who’s science so
pre-dates your it seems like magic’ (at least according to another cut line in
the script) but The Doctor defeats him by tricking him and blowing him up
(itself a questionable move: I know he’s killed and The Doctor is scared Clara
will be next but honestly, he wants a lift – nip back in time and take him back
home before he started killing people. It’s not like you haven’t contravenes
the laws of time twenty times already this story Doctor. Sheesh). Nice roar
though: it’s a cross between a wolf, a lion and a heavy metal singer (no, seriously: director Dabiel O’Hara was a
huge Slipknot fan and knew their lead singer Corey Taylor was too so, hearing
he was in town for a gig, invited him to the Dr Who Experience in Cardiff and a
tour round the Tardis set in return for a sample of his voice which is mixed in
there too).
There are other oddities
too: not mistakes as such because they’re clearly there as red herrings, but
the script gives them so much emphasis it feels more as if Whithouse was trying
hard to give us a logical reason behind everything, before sweeping the rug
from under us by giving us the least likely one. Because this is a ghost story
they’re only seen in the dark: The Doctor wonders out loud if it’s due to a
malfunction of the UV lights, added to the base to make up for the lack of
Vitamin D underwater. This makes sense: there’s a line of thinking that ghosts
just happen to be in a different part of the light spectrum that we can’t see,
past the colour purple (it’s why UV rays are invisible to the naked eye).
Vision is on a spectrum though and no two people’s are alike (certainly nobody
has vision quite like my astigmatic eyes I’ll bet) so sometimes in certain
conditions people can see them. It would have been a worthy if safe explanation
that makes sense in a story all about sight and ‘being blind’ to things. But
no: it’s all pre-timed by an alien trying to call home and – in another scene
cut from the original script – because the base’s automatic systems generated
their own magnetic field a night, out of phase with The Fisher King’s. How can
the ghosts, who are eteheral enough to walk through walls, use solid objects
like axes? The Tardis rather conveniently refuses to cover a bit of water and rescue
Clara, Cass and Lunn in a way that, given The Doctor’s look of seriousness and
the fact we’re dealing with a story about ghosts, feels as if it’s going to be
some big revelation, but nope; it turns out The Tardis is just being grumpy. So
why do the cloister bells sound then, eh? Something that used to be kept only
for the worst possible situations (it didn’t even happen until the end of the 4th
Doctor’s run in ‘Logopolis’) is now
going off all the time like a faulty car alarm. The Faraday Cage too feels as
if it’s going to be much more important than it is and while the ghosts do have
something to do with electromagnetism that’s not really the solution either:
they are dead, just being used as radio waves effectively. It all feels a bit
desperate, as if the story has nudged too far into ‘fiction’ and way from
‘science’ even though there was a perfectly good rational story there waiting
to be told. Also why is this part of Scotland underwater? It feels as if it’s
going to be an important part of the plot or give The Doctor an excuse to rant
about stupid Humans and global warming, but we don’t get either (It is
Scotland. Perhaps it just rained even more than normal?) As The Doctor says at
one point: ‘More questions! You think you’re about to have all the answers –
then more questions!’ Which would be alright if we had any final answers that
make sense, but we don’t. So what is the point of watching? Also, not a ‘mistake’
or a ‘red herring’ but a real own goal: this story had the brilliant working
title ‘Ghost In The Machine’ (in a story about the original meaning of the phrase
too, about the separation between mind and body at the point of death) and then
they changed it to something so generic and dull it sounds like a pair of
instructions to a deep sea diver heading to Tescos, not a Dr Who title ful of
mystery and allure.
Oh well, it wouldn’t be
the first Dr Who story that makes no sense when you stop to think about it.
This two parter is also very much a product of its time when Moffat virtually
turned time into a regular companion (Whithouse admitting that he wanted to
write something in his boss’ style). I can forgive all of that and the stupid
alien too. What I can’t forgive is how bland it all is: a base of picked off
people turned into ghosts in a setting that’s brand ‘new’ and where The Doctor
himself dies ought to be a lot more exciting than this. It doesn’t help that a
semi-promising if slow first half turns into a ten minute lecture about
Beethoven and a monster who can barely waddle. The Doctor gets very little
chance to do anything Doctory and Clara is literally parked out the way for
most of the second half because the writer can’t think of anything good to do
with her. Only in two scenes do you see Whithouse’s strengths come into play:
the great but in plot terms wholly unnecessary Tardis scene of The Doctor
telling Clara he has a ‘duty of care’ and is worried Danny’s death is turning
her into him, grief making her reckless (because ghosts hang over you and the
past changes and shapes you, even when they’re invisible memories). Certainly
it sets up Clara’s exit far more powerfully and subtly than anything that
actually happens in ‘Face The Raven’. The
other is Clara creating a set of ‘empathy cards’ for The Doctor, to help him
work out what to say to bereaved and grieving people (including such in-jokes
as ‘I completely understand why it was difficult not to get captured’ ‘I’ll do
all I can to saolve the death of your rind/family member/pet’ ‘No one’s going
to be exterminated/upgraded/ possessed/mortally wounded/turned to jelly’ and ‘I
won’t drop you off accidentally at Aberdeen’ – which happens to poor Sarah Jane
in ‘The Hand Of Fear’, which he still manages
to mess up by getting wrong – it’s the one bit of comedy in an otherwise deeply
sombre story and is nicely in character for both Clara trying to make The
Doctor more ‘Human’ and The Doctor still getting it wrong. Mostly though
neither actor has much to get their teeth into this week and Capaldi,
especially, is all over the place (to be fair to him he’s in grief himself,
after his mum died right when they were supposed to start filming. Thankfully
the production team handled this a better than they did when it happened to
Eccleston during ‘Father’s Day’ and
re-arranged the schedules to record other people’s material and give him the
week off. Once again it happens to be during a story that’s all about death
that must have been tough to face so soon). As for the rest of the cast, half
of them get bumped off before we get to know them so you don’t feel anything
for them and the other half remain less fleshed in than the actual ghosts, with
only Sophie Stone as Cass making any impression (and then only in a lone scene
where she stands up to The Doctor and ticks him off, much to his surprise).
The result, then, is a
mess. This is one of those stories that’s simultaneously stuffed with too much to
be resolved thoroughly and yet fells when you’re watching it as if nothing ever
happens. If you’ve ever wondered what a Moffaty story about time travel without
a plot attached to it would like (albeit one inspired by rather than written by
Moffat) well, now you know – it would look like this. It’s hard to say where
such a promising story went wrong other than saying ‘everywhere’, but unlike a
lot of the other stories littering up the bottom end of this list it at least
feels as if there is a decent Dr Who story in here somewhere. There are times,
too, when it feels as if this is going to be a great story: the opening is
nicely spooky and atmospheric, the ghosts effects are some of the best things
the Mill ever did and a lot better than most big budget Hollywood films (if
this had been paired with a decent plot I wouldn’t have slept for a week!),
while having a new twist on the old ‘base under siege’ theme and a time travel story
about ghosts was something very much worth trying. Just not like this: there’s
not enough tension to be a good horror film, an explanation too silly to be
good scifi and not enough happening to be good drama. It really shouldn’t have
been a two parter: it was conceived as a single episode and feels plotted to be
one, but the cliffhanger seemed too good to throw away for a mid-episode reveal
and like the rest of series nine it’s all been hit by the credit crunch so
budget have been slashed and corners have to be cut (including having the same
sets for two stories not one). In another era, with another showrunner who wasn’t
so preoccupied, it could yet have worked. There are indeed lots of reasons it
should have been a classic but ‘Under The Lake’, especially in its second part,
is sadly under par and as close to gibberish as Dr Who gets, despite all the
strong starting ideas this story had going for it. Oh well, at least they haven’t
done the really stupid ultimate no no for a ghost story and brought someone
back from the dead who’s destined to live forever being miserable, right? I
mean that would be totally stupid and…oh. Sigh, see you next week…
POSITIVES + The Doctor
ecxplains the concept of ear-worms by being rude about Peter Andre and the two
weeks ‘Mysterious Girl’ was at number one (mind you, the 8th Doctor
spent months in a Zygon-converted town where Bryan Adams’ ‘Everything I Do’ was
at number one for years so two weeks should be easy. Mind you, the peter Andre
is a truly awful song). Also I’m desperate to see more of the Doctor’s
clockwork squirrel (did he create it for K9 to chase?!) You can see it on The
Doctor’s guitar amp when he’s moaning on about Beethoven. Jenna Coleman received
the prop to take home on her last day as a gift.
Previous ‘The
Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar’ next ‘The
Girl Who Died’
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