Deep Breath: Ranking - 244

 Deep Breath

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 23/8/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Ben Wheatley) 

Rank: 244

'Hello future companions be you Dodo Steven Ben Polly or Barbara and Ian Chasserton Chessington Chollington back again, whoever you are, this is the Doctor speaking. I'd like to warn you against travelling with my future successors, a Dandy and a Clown. Not to mention [deep breath] the Bohemian, the Youngster, the Fashion Parade, the Mini-Me, Mr Kissalot, the Geezer, Toothy, Chinny or Little Miss Yorkshire. I'm really not sure about the chap with the eyebrows whose followed me to the North Pole either, he's far too grumpy, serious and old, not like me at all! Love Doctor One.'

[deep breath] What is Steven Moffat playing at? There we were, happily floating about space with a young looking man who was impossibly old saving planets and doing wonderful things and now there’s a grumpy elderly Scotsman in the Tardis acting like a self-obsessed toddler and insulting everyone including himself. Most of the time he’s untrustworthy, unreliable, unhinged. Even by the end when he’s apparently recovered from his regeneration he’s not rude, arrogant and insolent. This isn’t the Doctor! This isn’t Dr Who! This is a shouty man with eyebrows! No wonder Clara decides she wants to go home – we do too! 

 [more considered review once we’ve reached the end of the 12th Doctors story arc] Well…That was a brave move. Generally speaking when Dr Who changes the lead role it tends to happen against the backdrop of something safe and familiar, so that the only thing about the story that feels ‘different’ to how things were before is the Doctor him (or her) self, allowing us to see how the new one measures up to those who came before and how they do things differently. But ‘Deep Breath’ throws the Ice Warrior baby out with the waters of Mars: everything about this story and the way it works is different, leaving only Clara and the Paternoster Gang as our regular eyes and ears (and when you have an impossibly old Silurian living in Victorian England, her lesbian Human lover and their Sontaron butler as the new normal that shows how far out of kilter things have become). Having an untrustworthy Doctor, who doesn’t even trust himself and who still doesn’t know who he is by the end of the story, is a brave move indeed. Other Doctor regenerations have been more about the physical trauma, with regeneration seen as something of a nervous breakdown before the different Doctors learn to come to terms with their new idea of who they are, akin to what humans go through after long periods of stress or trauma (after all, more often than not a Doctor’s final episode has them shot/exterminated/altered during a trial/attacked by spiders/poisoned/falling pretty to Earth’s gravity and going splat/absorbing the time vortex). But this one, maybe because the 11th Doctor effectively dies of old age, is treated more like dementia: this is a Doctor who has lost his entire memory and it’s still a bit hazy when or if he gets it fully back (though in his notes to Jenna Coleman the writer told her to think of Clara as helping a friend through a major operation and wondering if he’ll be the same person she knew when he comes round, scared and intrigued all at the same time). The Doctor can’t remember names, words, things that happened to him, he’s lost all trust in the people that we trust and because he can’t remember who he was he can’t even trust himself. Other regeneration stories notably ‘Castrovalva’ and ‘The Christmas Invasion’, are about the absence of the Doctor from the main plot, but this one has the Doctor physically central to everything without ever quite believing he’s the Doctor. The joke about the 11th Doctor was that the Doctor never felt more older and weary, despite being in his youngest looking body; the 12th Doctor will grow up fast but for now the joke is that he’s a toddler trapped in an old man’s body, uncaring about anyone but himself and prone to tantrums when he doesn’t get his own way (half the story is him being told to take a nap by the adult figures and sneaking out to play when they’re not looking). 

 Peter Capaldi is both brave and inevitable casting. Like David Tennant he became an actor partly because of a sneaking ambition to be the Doctor one day – a hope he assumed would never come true when the show was taken off the air (though he did get his agent to put him up for the 1996 TV movie without hearing back) - but unlike Tennant, who was a lone fan in his bedroom, Capaldi was (briefly) big in fan circles. In fact he wrote into the production team in the Pertwee years so often he became known as a bit of a pest. He pestered Barry Letts into sending him something and got a bunch of original scripts from ‘The Mutants’ (and if ever a story was going to put you off being a fan it’s that one) and tried to start up a new branch of the fanclub in Scotland, before being told in no uncertain terms that there was one already and he should join that. One of his letters praising the tenth anniversary special pull-out souvenir was even printed in the Radio Times, something they love trotting out every time they do an article about him. His casting as the Doctor was Mark Gatiss’ suggestion as the pair knew each other well – Moffat, who wanted a contrast to Matt Smith (and who at one time was considering making the 11th Doctor the oldest one yet) agreed and though other acors were on their shortlist none got as far as an audition. Capaldi heard the news he’d been cast while on the set of ‘The Three Musketeers where he was playing the baddy Cardinal Richeliu. Not allowed his mobile on set he found a missed call from his agent in his trailer and when he called her back she answered the phone with the words ‘hello Doctor’. However because of leaks Capaldi wasn’t allowed to share his secret with anyone else. Spookily his next role found Capaldi in Morovia, in the middle of nowhere, when a local lad ran up to him in broken English and said how much he loved him as Dr Who. Capaldi thought for a second his cover had been blown, but the lads actually meant his appearance in Dr Who, in ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’ and hadn’t understood his English tenses (a fact that’s mentioned briefly at the start of this episode but not explained till much much later; oddly no one mentions how much this Doctor’s face looks like the deputy prime minister in Torchwood, still Capaldi’s best role in or out of the Whoniverse). Back home Capaldi spent his time hovering around his local branch of Forbidden Planet, offering to have pictures taken with fans who might have remembered him from his appearances in the show, desperate to give his secret away but enjoying the thrill at them realising a year on what he was up to and why. He’s not too old for the part at all, despite what the naysayers said: if anything his impish qualities make him the youngest of Doctors while Capaldi had the perfect answer for critics who asked him that question (‘technically I’m 1995 years too young’). Capaldi brings a fannish enthusiasm to the role and – since his memory returns – the sense of all that knowledge and baggage from the past he carries around with him, but it’s not until season ten that he’s fully comfortable in the role (and even then is the most variable of all the actors to play the role, sometimes the weakest link and sometimes the best thing in it, depending o how well he connects with a script – oddly enough it tends to be the Moffat ones he struggles with the most). Especially here where the Doctor’s not quite himself. 

 It will sort of pay off in time, as part of a three season long story arc where the 12th Doctor asks himself ‘am I a good man?’ and spends four years trying to find out (the answer, by the time of ‘The Doctor Falls’ is a resounding yes, as after acknowledging his darker side the Doctor sacrifices himself for strangers, give or take the extra coda of ‘Twice Upon A Time’) It makes sense that to end up there we have to start here, with a Doctor so confused and unhinged and prone to angry outbursts that Clara and the audience at home both genuinely begin to question whether he is or not. The Doctor will learn to be comfortable with who he is and literally lets his hair down as the years go on (literally too: Capaldi’s hair gradually gets longer series by series, going from near crew cut here to the point where he looks like a prog rocker by the time of series ten). To get there, however, we have this. And it’s a bit of a stretch too far for some, with many longterm viewers deciding to switch off here (with ‘Deep Breath’ the most watched 12th Doctor story of all that isn’t a much publicised season finale or Christmas special). I can’t say I blame them. ‘Deep Breath’ is a tough watch in many ways, with a Doctor whose grumpier than the 1st ever was (in short order within this episode he insults Clara, the Paternoster Gang, his fourth regenerations’ fashion sense, his own eyebrows and the entire population of Earth which he refers to as ‘the planet of the pudding brains’). And no, the Doctor’s realisation that he’s Scottish and can thus get away with complaining in a way the English can’t (an in-joke from a Scottish showrunner) doesn’t make up for this. Clara, too, is oddly self-obsessed even for her this story, more concerned with being stranded in Victorian London (by the bank of the River Thames, the same site as ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and ‘Thin Ice’) and where the young man she used to flirt with might have gone than for the welfare of her supposed best friend. The story goes out of its way to emphasise Clara’s worst traits too, Strax’s brief and rather odd medical exam of her revealing ‘reflected narcissism and passive aggressive tendencies’ while the Doctor refers to ‘controlling the control freak’. By the end, despite being asked by all and sundry to keep an eye on the Doctor, she’s all prepared to leave him. Even Ben and Polly, or Tegan and Nyssa, or a traumatised Rose, or even Peri after being strangled ever considered running out on the newly regenerated Doctor. It’s only the sweet ending that changes her mind, when the 11th Doctor rings Clara up with his dying breaths on Trenzalore (from the end of ‘Timer Of The Doctor’ and Matt Smith’s last day of filming, with a skeleton crew sworn to secrecy over who the next Doctor was before the official announcement) – a moment that’s meant to give the audience some comfort about change and this still being the same man, but just wants you to reach across the screen and take the 11th Doctor back. Doing all that in a story that’s suspiciously like old times (‘The Girl In the Fireplace’) but ten times slower (there’s really no reason why ‘Deep Breath’ needs to be 50% longer than the average episodes given that the middle scene sin particular run for a good quarter hour longer than they really need to) and which throws yet more mysteries at us that won’t be resolved for aeons (who put the advert in the paper for the Doctor and Clara to find? And who is the mysterious lady in the mysterious garden at the end? And even after getting the answers to both – spoilers – they don’t make much sense: I mean the Half-Face Man is mostly clockwork so why does he wake up in Heaven? And why does Missy care about sending the pair on this adventure? There’s a feeling in ‘Deep Breath’ that Moffat’s head is working to a degree of chess-playing and anticipated move-making like never before, that he’s setting up plot strands he won’t need for years yet, but he’s forgotten to include us in his new adventure, to give us any heart to cling to besides the head. Dr Who has now become something of a chore to sit through, for all the applause you give it. 

Which is not to say that ‘Deep Breath’ is a bad episode. Last time around so much was riding on the new Doctor and the regeneration story post Russell T Davies and David Tennant that Moffat only got to hint at the trauma of regeneration in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, the story that more than any other debut has the Doctor as close to fully formed from the start, hitting the ground running (so much so that it’s tempting to see a whole host of solo adventures in the gap between the two times he lands in Amy’s garden years apart). Moffat’s characters tend to be put the wringer more than most, pushed to extremes in their travels in the Tardis whether by being the Doctor or being around him. It makes perfect sense that, given a second go at a regeneration story, he dives in head first and looks at the trauma of waking up an entirely different person, unsure if they can live up to that old legacy (he may have been borrowing from his own doubts in series five about whether he’s really up to the writing job he’s spent his whole life preparing for). In this story regeneration isn’t a simple case of the Doctor waking up and having different adventures as a different character. You feel the pain, the confusion, the instability. If you’re having a hard time accepting all this, says the writer, then just think about what it means for the Doctor. After all, thanks to the events of ‘Time Of The Doctor’, the 11th regeneration has been round longer than all the others put together. He became the old man physically he was mentally (which in itself is a bit old, given that the Doctors don’t tend to look older in other stories and their metabolism stays the same, give or take regenerational stories where the actors have visibly aged – even Moffat’s other stories contradict this, like ‘Hell Bent’ that takes place over thousands of years but Capaldi never looks any older). This is a doctor that isn’t comfortable with who he is but feels stuck with it, which is a whole new twist on regeneration we’ve not had before, despite this being the 11th such tale – finding new ways to do that in 2014 deserves respect.

 Clara carries a lot of this story, just as Rose did in 2005, but whereas she took to Tennant's Doctor more or less straight away when he woke up Clara takes a lot more convincing and the story is really about her coming to terms with the fact that her best friend isn't around anymore. You really feel it when the Doctor not only can’t remember her name but wonders out loud if she’s is Cybermen head ‘Handles’ from ‘Time Of The Doctor’ (technically the ‘companion’ he had longest, even if it was just a few minutes of screen time for ‘us’). Having been given no warning of any of this Clara is lost and it’s enough to make her go cross-eyed (no wonder she can’t control her pupils in the following stories!) The 11th Doctor might have mentioned a few times that he was really impossibly old but even more than most companions Clara’s always treated him as a contemporary, someone roughly her age that she wouldn’t look out of place if seen with. She’s a naturally flirty sort of person anyway, who treats lingering looks and risqué hints as normal everyday conversation with practically anyone, but she saved her biggest hints for the Doctor. This isn’t love the same way that it was for Rose, but you know hat in Clara’s head at least she thought she would end up with the Doctor one day – once she’d learned to trust him and, given that he had a time machine and they both were young (or at least seemed it) she thought she had all the time in the world. But now, even though the Doctor has actually aged no time at all, he now looks a good forty years older. Clara is as confused as the Doctor – is he a father figure now? Maybe even a grandfatherly figure? Given that she’s one of Who’s many orphans in some ways he’s exactly what she’s been looking for in that regard, but given her natural instinct is to flirt she’s not ready to give that up yet – and as lines in the script show she’s also a bit of a control freak who hates being made to behave a certain way (no wonder she became a teacher – it’s because she so hates being a pupil). It takes his younger self to comfort her that he is indeed the same person and that their relationship hasn’t really changed. 

Even so, it takes a while getting there. Clara seriously thinks she’s been abandoned without a second thought – something the 4th Doctor nearly did to his UNIT friends in ‘Robot’ after all so it’s not without precedent. The scene where the Doctor appears to walk out on her but she bravely stands up to the Half-Face Man and reaches behind her because ‘the Doctor always has her back’ – only for him to not appear long enough to make her (and us) think she’s wrong is the big emotional moment of the episode and one we’ve never really had before (or at any rate it’s ‘The Twin Dilemma’ done properly, but that script never lingered on what Peri was feeling and instead just threw her confusion in as a detail with the rest of the plot). All other companions who’ve witnessed a regeneration accept it, sort of (even if it takes Ben a bit longer than Polly for instance) but notably Clara is the only one who asks outright why he can’t just change his face back again because she preferred the ‘old’ one. The regeneration is written in as a sort of betrayal, something that the Doctor hadn’t properly warned her about, mirrored by the audience wondering if they can trust this new edgy Doctor too, is something Dr Who had never fully explored before. It’s also a neat reverse of the previous year, when the Doctor had been trying to work out if he could trust his ‘impossible girl’ or not. This story's central question, is the Doctor always automatically a 'good man', is a worthy question to ask. He's the Turlough of the Doctor world, apparently as ready to betray his friends as help them, only unlike the 5th Doctor’s obliviousness Clara has her doubts from the start and still has them by the end. He’s often a bit of a bully here to be honest, the 1st Doctor without the twinkle in his eye or the 6th Doctor without the wit. It was about time a story properly fully addressed what it means to wake up as a new person for you and the people around you and having that as the A-plot, overshadowing everything else, is a smart move. 

 Clara is a bit uneasy around this Doctor. So too are a lot of the audience. Rather than win them round by showing everything this new chap can do, as per Matt Smith's classy debut, here Steven Moffat dwells on the uncertainty, teasing us with what we might or might not be getting. The moment everything clicks into place is when Clara gets a call from 'her' Doctor asking her to be kind and give him a chance - and so we do. It's a really sweet scene and a very clever play with time-travel we've never had in a regeneration story before and solves the half-mystery of why the Tardis telephone was hanging when Clara went to look for her friend in ‘Time Of the Doctor’. As Matt Smith’s last performance it must have been a tough one to film – harder even than lying on the floor waiting for your successor to turn up and replace you, something all the lead actors have found quite traumatic (and none more than Hartnell who’d been the only Doctor till ‘The Tenth Planet’). He’s a whole level above everyone else in this story, imbuing his few lines with pathos grief, guilt and sorrow that someone else gets to have all those fantastic journeys that isn’t him. Somehow they managed to keep this bit quiet so that it was one of the few real surprises we got in the 2010s and it’s one of the best, really moving and unexpected. It’s a double-edged sword though: as much as this scene is here to make us accept Smith’s replacement, really it makes us want him to come back more than ever. There’s even a bit of symbolism that Moffat never actually intended: during the first take of the scene where the 12th Doctor rips off the face from the Half-Face Man (a cast of actor Peter Ferdinando to match what was below all the clockwork effects), a nervous Capaldi in one of his first scenes accidentally tore it. As they were pricey the production team had only made one and the shot was unusable so it led to much mad scrambling around behind the scenes. The only cast they had in stock happened to be Matt Smith’s face (probably one taken for ‘Nightmare In Silver’). So, although it’s hard to see on screen, the 12th Doctor is effectively tearing off the head of the person he used to be. 

The B-plot has its moments too. The very real mystery of spontaneous combustion in humans, which peaked in the Victorian years but still happens very occasionally now, is a very Dr Who idea for a plot. You can see why it would appeal to Moffat in particular: it’s a very Conan Doyle plot that could have a magical or a scientific explanation, that seems to happen to rich and old alike and is full of horror not so much because it’s something in your face pointing a gun at you but because it’s a threat that could happen to you at anytime, any second; like The Weeping Angels and The Silence it’s the anticipation of it that’s scary. Putting that in a regeneration story is highly clever too: regenerating looks a little bit like being set alight, especially in the modern era when it comes accompanied by sparkly orange pixie dust, of having all your atoms fused into something new. Only humans aren’t as lucky as timelords. For them they get all the pain of regeneration and none of the second chances. In a series that ends with the idea of cremation and fire being the single scariest thing that can happen, humans effectively dying again after death so that no one is spared the horror of pain even if they died peacefully, it makes sense Moffat would drop us a hint this early on too. Interestingly, given that of all the showrunners and producer/script editors who’ve run Dr Who Moffat is the least political of all, the spontaneous combustion victim named in the news report is Margaret Roberts, better known as Maggie Thatcher before she was married. If this was Andrew Cartmel or Russell T then it would be in character to give a politician they hated in a story all about trust and betrayal such a fiery painful death but that isn’t Moffat’s style at all and this isn’t a political story in any other way (maybe he just liked the name?) Either way, the idea of spontaneous combustion in Who is long overdue and it’s left delightfully ambiguous as to whether it’s caused by alien interference from the future or a genuine phenomenon. 

 It’s just that, typically for this story, that plot is ignored for other things. In a story that’s otherwise so slow and methodical we drop this element far too quickly in favour of a story about a man whose regenerated an entirely different way, by stealing body parts from other beings (including the poor hapless T Rex we see at the story’s beginning, who really deserved better being a helpless victim in all of this, poor thing). Just as Russell T Davies used the Autons and Sycorax as an easily understandable threat in a regeneration story that didn’t need hours of backstory so Moffat returns to the clockwork droids of ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’. He even throws in the detail that this is the ‘sister’ spaceship to the one from that story, the SS Marie Antoinette’ (and what do we associate with her? Cake. Even though her famous sentence, about the starving for bread that’s come to signify the obliviousness of the rich to the cruelty around them, was almost certainly never actually spoken by her). However it’s not as sweet or as original as ‘Fireplace’ and the effects, while horrific, aren’t a patch on the 1980s ones for ‘Frontios’ (which did much the same). So we end up with the Doctor and Clara reacquainting with each other over afternoon tea in a very weird sequence. Clara’s as bright as a button and even in regenerated form the Doctor’s got a few of his marbles at least, so why are the two of them so sure that they’ve been invited there by the other? Why do they accept the invitation without at least checking in with the other (the Doctor, who knows where Clara is) or bringing the Paternoster Gang along for more than mere cavalry backup (Clara). And why don’t either of them notice all of the other diners have clockwork faces? I can see what Moffat was trying to do – and once again it’s undeniably clever – comparing the timelord ability for new life with clockwork beings who have their time of collapse ticking away so that they absolutely know when their end comes, slowly winding down rather than starting again anew. But they’re an odd fit for this story. For instance: even though I know all these stories really well I tend to like to re-read plot synopsis before I start, just to refresh me what they’re all about. And this one has one of my favourite bonkers lines of them all: ‘It turns out that the restaurant has been made out of human skin and floats away like a giant hot air balloon across the rooftops of London’. Quite. ‘Deep Breath’ is a story that’s as real, as painful, as visceral as any Moffat story ever becomes (indeed, it feels at times as if Moffat was stung by all the critics who used words like ‘fairytale’ in their descriptions of Mat Smith’s early stories so decides to go the other way) – this sort of an ending does not belong. Nor does having a big fight scene over Big Ben which ends up with the Half-Face Man falling through a church spire and the Doctor agonising again over whether defeating a villain in battle makes him good or bad or both. 

 Which leads on to ‘Deep Breath’s biggest problem. It’s so oddly paced. There’s as explosive an opening as any we’ve ever had, when a dinosaur turns up in London coughing up the Tardis, a rattled Clara falling out of the Tardis Pertwee style just like ‘Spearhead From Space’ while the Doctor himself is in manic Robot’ mode. The dinosaur himself is gorgeously rendered, far more convincing than the ones in ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ and Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ (it’s a shame we haven’t had a dino story since, as with the current budget and the effects coming on this far a decade or so ago they would surely look quite something if they did it today). Having two different timezones from the past collide is so very Dr Who, even if it’s strange that there isn’t a folk tale of dinosaurs in Victorian London given how much this period likes to gossip and spread ghost tales, from Spring-Heeled Jack to Jack The Ripper. But then it ends up an incredibly talky episode. By the time the Doctor and Clara sit down to talk almost nothing has happened in plot terms and their conversation goes on for hours. Given the setting, we thought we were in for Victorian’s other great folk tale, not already used in Moffat-era Who or Sherlock, Sweeney Todd. Instead of horror, though, we get talking. I mean, if this was a real restaurant the pies would get stale, the Doctor and Clara would have eaten three courses and the waiter would be looking to throw them out by now. Then we finally get that big action finale when things start happening and the effects of the Doctor and Clockwork guy over London is nicely done, even if it’s a little too obviously a repeat of both ‘The Christmas Invasion’ and ‘The Next Doctor’ both. Maybe if this story was 50 minutes as usual two action sequences would be enough. But this one is eighty minutes, practically the length of a feature film. I mean, this Doctor spends twice as long running around in his nightshirt as Paul McGann did in full costume. And there’s no C-plot to hold our interest along the way. Well, not unless you count the very ending (the mystery of who the mad woman referring to the Doctor as her ‘boyfriend’ is and what she’s doing with someone we’ve just seen die on screen anyway, which until eleven episodes later makes no sense at all and just adds confusion on top of confusion; although incidentally another pointer to this year’s series arc is so subtle you don’t even notice it the first time, Madame Vastra’s farewell comments to Clara that she should ‘give the Doctor ‘hell’). 

 There is, at least, more fun and games with the Paternoster Gang making their last appearance. The 11th Doctor never really had a ‘base’ but the longest he spent anywhere, bar Trenzalore and Leadworth, was here so it makes sense he should return. In theory this should work like ‘Robot’ in putting a new Doctor amongst his old friends to better show the changes – and emphasising the differences between then and now. It’s a delight to have the gang back together again and they have most of the best moments and certainly all the funniest ones in what’s really quite a grim story, such as Madame Vastra getting Jenny to pose like one of her French Silurians but for ‘decoration’ while she’s really working on a map or Strax knocking Clara out by throwing her The Times a little too hard (although that’s odd in itself: what other companion, having been stranded in a different time and worried about a newly regenerated Doctor, stops to read not just the newspaper but the classified Ads at that. Missy really does have very weird idea bout humans). A word too for their new ‘weapons’, props that really nail each of their three characters and are the result of yet another Blue peter competition (a 13 year old gave Jenny an old fashioned gauntlet, an 11 year old created a sonic lorgnette for Strax and a seven year old gave Madame Vastra a very fetching sonic hatpin). Shockingly this episode received six official complaints for the rather chaste lesbian kiss between Vastra and Jenny because of the idea that Dr Who was promoting ‘some sort of gay agenda’ (the irony being that no one complained when there really was a gay agenda of sorts by Russell T Davies deliberately having Captain jack kiss the Doctor in ‘Parting Of The Ways’ to make gay kisses ‘normal’. For a while this was a record for the new series, until ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ knocked it out of the park at the end of the year). The 11th Doctor might have spent a long time in plot terms with the sleuthing trio, however, but he shared very little actual onscreen time with them so we never fully get to see the contrasts. It felt at the time as if the Paternoster gang were going to be regulars, having gone down really well with fans the previous years and not getting as decent ‘goodbye’ scene at the end of this story, but no: to date, and certainly during Moffat’s years as showrunner, this is their last appearance. Frankly, it’s a waste. The Doctor-Clara story will play itself off across the rest of the year so often (with the love triangle of Danny Pink thrown in for extra jealousy) that it will get boring. There isn’t a story this entire season that wouldn’t been better off with a green lizard, a potato-headed soldier and a Victorian human in tow. Needless to say all three members of the cast are the best actors here, equally comfortable at romance, comedy, drama, and action (by contrast Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi are a bit wobbly on their feet at times). A word too for the thankless short role played by Brian Miller as the tramp the Doctor passes. If he seems familiar you either know him as the showman in ‘Snakedance’ (or know his voice from ‘Resurrection Of the Daleks’ and ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’) or from propping up the bar at various Dr Who conventions where he was patiently waiting for his wife to finish work – she was Elisabeth Sladen, Sarah Jane Smith, and this role was partly a sweet gesture to the family after her death to give them a financial boost and make them feel as if they still belonged to the ‘Who’ family. 

 More of that heart in the story itself would have made it a far better one, or at least a more watchable one. It’s not that ‘Deep Breath’ is bad in any way, it’s just a story that really stretches your patience, with its extra running time (that really really should have trimmed at the scripting stage), moody night shoots and its pastel colours and lack of colour or action. For such a big event it feels oddly small scale. And while small scale Dr Who episodes can be some of my favourites (‘The Edge Of Destruction’ or ‘Boom Town’) this was the wrong time to do it: in the wake of ‘The Day Of the Doctor’ and the big fuss over Capaldi’s casting (in an epic hour long ‘live’ show broadcast a full year before this debut story that was nearly as big a mess as the ‘Day Of the Doctor’ Aftershow Party and which Capaldi himself was deeply embarrassed by) there was a lot of attention circling round this episode and they even put it in cinemas again, just like the 50th (to date it’s the last time this series was). Everyone was a bit underwhelmed. Even before the story went out – and scripts for Capaldi’s first five episodes were leaked, plus a rough black and white cut without the effects of this story, with Moffat as angry as I’ve ever seen him in interviews about how all his carefully kept secrets were being leaked and robbing viewers of the sense of surprise, cursing the individual who did it before finding out it was from a publicly accessible server in Miami that hadn’t been given tight enough cyber-security so was actually all the BBC’s ‘fault’, not that the people who came across it had to spread it of course – people were underwhelmed. ‘Deep Breath’ wasn’t the story we were expecting. Unusually for Moffat it wasn’t a story we weren’t expecting that ended up being better than we could have imagined anyway. It’s a story that takes its time to not to very much at all, very very slowly. And while lingering on the after effects of regeneration was a good and brave move and while parts of this story come alive and enjoyable as much as it is, you leave this story feeling that you’re not all that fussed about tuning in next week, unlike all the other stories that had you desperate to tune in for me (well, maybe not ‘The Twin Dilemma’ or ‘Time and The Rani’ but even they the feeling of ‘what did I just watch? Surely they couldn’t do that again the following week?!) Moffat is too good a writer to make this story as bad as either of those turkeys and ‘Deep Breath’ is one heck of a lot more palatable than it was at the time, now we can see it in context as part of a four year arc of the Doctor discovering himself that can afford to take its time. After ‘The Eleventh Hour’ Dr Who never seemed more stable and confident. After ‘Deep Breath’ Dr Who never seems shakier or more unsure of itself. As a regeneration of the Doctor this is actually well handled. But as the regeneration of a show, of making people want to see where the series can go from here and making us excited for the future, with the feeling that the show is in safe hands, it’s a failure, a story that asks the viewer to hold their breath for something to keep us watching so long it risks us turning bluer than the Moxx of Balhoon. 

POSITIVES + The new opening titles are the best for some time, maybe my favourite of the 21st century run as a whole. The original plan was to simply alter the Matt Smith ones until Moffat stumbled across a fan video made by aspiring computer graphic designer Billy Hanshow for youtube that put together a sort of rough mock up of what Mark Gatiss’ well-received first ever Dr Who story, the 3rd Doctor ‘Missing Adventures’ novel ‘Last Of The Gaderine’ (2000) might look like as a video (a story that feels like every Pertwee story put through a blender, featuring benevolent aliens, magic crystals, aeroplane chases and The Master; Moffat, unlike Davies or Chibnall, does tend to read stuff about him on the internet, so in case he’s reading this hello – and I hope you know how great you are, despite the odd criticism thrown your way). It’s a masterpiece in miniature that’s perfect for the offat era in particular, with the Tardis flying past a wheel of time cogs rather than space as per usual. The production team invited him to remake it in their proper studios but it’s ever so nearly the same – the only thing they really did was add Capaldi’s distinctive eyebrows and tint the video Tardis-blue (rather than the purple of the original). 

 NEGATIVES - The trailer promised us dinosaurs on the loose in Victorian London. We had that great opening scene of the dinosaur coughing up the Tardis. I had such high hopes for both being the main propulsion of this episode, maybe with Queen Victoria riding a diplodocus or The Wright Brothers taking a pterodactyl for a spin, or possibly a T Rex at large in the Crimean War. Instead Moffat gets bored and changes his mind (again!)there's just the one dinosaur and she's barely on screen before vomiting the Tardis, flirting with the Doctor and dying off screen. Bah! 

 BEST QUOTE: Vastra: ‘I wear a veil to keep from view what many are pleased to call my disfigurement. I do not wear it as a courtesy to such people, but as a judgement on the quality of their hearts’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it thirty second prequel known variously as ‘Strax’s Field Report’ or simply ‘Deep Breath Prequel’ was broadcast solely in cinemas. It features Strax, Jenny and Madame Vastra in their spaceship as it seems to be about to crash into the Thames. When told to stop recording because they only have twelve seconds before impact Strax replies that he needs to do something to pass the time before complaining ‘men!’ as his lesbian companions wander off to do some steering. Strax then discusses each of the Doctor’s previous lives, with the memorable image of the 3rd Doctor as ‘half man half Granny’ and the idea that the 6th Doctor regenerated because of his ‘single moment of exercise’ in ‘Trial Of A Timelord!’ The war Doctor, incidentally, is the only one he admires. Because of all the war aspect. He also complains that compared to round Sontaron faces all the Doctor’s regenerations are ‘too oblong!’ Too short to do much in terms of plot or character and not all that funny, it’s a real oddity that makes you wonder why they bothered. Also included on the ‘Deep Breath’ DVD and Blu-ray which, unusually, only featured a single episode (something only previously done with Christmas episodes).

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