The Zygon Invasion/Inversion: Ranking - 76

 The Zygon Invasion/Inversion

(Series 9, Dr 12 with Clara, 31/10/2015-7/11/2015, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Daniel Nettheim)

Rank: 76

   'Yes its time to play Truth Or Consequences. or Take Your Pick, that's a much better game. OK, you twisted my arm, any Zygon or Human that can go longer than ten minutes without saying 'what's that Dr?' and getting gonged out can go to the grand final. In this exciting finale they have to pick one of my 13 regenerations and defeating the monster that lurks behind it and defeating it. I hope none of you get the drashig! Now what's on the board, Carole Ann Ford?

 

 At last, after a season and a bit of just missing the mark for a variety of different reasons, the Peter Capaldi era comes right with a story that would make any Doctor look good but which is also built to all the 12^th Doctor’s particular strengths. The Zygons, popular monsters from the 4^th Dr era revived surprisingly late into the new revival on the 50^th anniversary special, go from being B-movie monsters and comedy interlude to being a properly serious threat with a particular moral message most unlike their less blobby rivals. We know from their first story that their greatest skill is creating budget-saving dopplegangers of Humans and then infiltrating their conquered worlds more slyly than just another mass takeover, all while keeping their victims alive. In an era when death by cold war and mass invasion is no longer such a threat and we’re more likely to die from some big power flexing his muscles somewhere an murdering us on the sly without our knowing The Zygons suddenly make a lot more sense than they did back in 1975. The peace treaty signed between them and humanity during the 50^th anniversary special has kept everyone relatively happy for some time by now (It feels like the tentative truces between Putin and the EU) and its enabled 20 million Zygons to assimilate into earth without most of the Human population knowing (maybe that’s a Zygon behind you right now! Ha, made you look...Oh wait it really is!) Only now there’s a splinter group at war and there’s a fresh debate from both sides about whether to use the ‘Osgood box’ set up in ‘Day Of The Doctor’ some 18 months after it was last mentioned, with lots of welcome digs at the countries who cause refugees by destroying their homes in wars now dare to complain that they have to house them. Peter Capaldi is never better than when delivering cold rage and he gets to do that a lot during this story, as both Humans and Zygons disappoint him over and over again and he gets to deliver long lengthy speeches about the horrors of war and the stupidity of the people who want them that deserve to be amongst DW’s most quoted (it still doesn’t get enough love this speech I don’t think – its ‘our’ version of the great Charlie Chaplin speech from ‘The Great Dictator’). They should read this speech to every person in charge and especially anyone who starts a coup: two of my favourite Moffat quotes are worth repeating in full - ‘You’re not superior to people who are cruel to you, you’re just a whole bunch of new cruel people who are cruel to other people who will then be cruel to you’ and ‘Once you’ve got the world how you want it what are you going to do with the people like you, the troublemakers? When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea whose going to die, whose children are going to scream and burn, how many hearts will be broken, how many hearts are shattered, how much blood spilt until everybody does what they should have always done from the very beginning – sit down and talk’. The full speech lasts some ten minutes – a super brave move for an era of the series when it was at its most action-based and least talky - and is a tour de force; bravely they even run it without music. If the rest of the two episodes can’t quite compete then, well, what can? Cleverly the plot never sides with either the humans or the Zygons; the refugees and the locals are all to blame and neither quite believed in peace, they just saw it as a temporary truce until they got what they wanted. You only need to look at the problems in France a few weeks ago for what happens when people are told they’re equal citizens for the cameras, and then patted on the head and moved out to the poor districts in town and treated like second-class citizens – unfairness just comes up and bites you later, when the oppressed feel they have nothing to lose by overthrowing their captors. Refugees have been a major talking point for as long as new Who has been around and its very much something that needs to be said and debated – which the plot does, as fairly as it can, before falling on the side that the shared need for peace is stronger than any differences and that everybody loses in a war. Capaldi finally nails the comedy too after an iffy start t his run and the opening scenes of him trying to ‘interview’ children at a playground, convinced some of them must be Zygon adults, are some of his best scenes too, another great display of DW taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary...and back again. Clara, so often used as either the unwitting cause of an episode or the deux ex machina method of solving it, finally gets to act like a real person this story too – the human conscience caught in the middle who shares the Doctor’s rage but also understands how hard co-operation by two such different species can be because she’s had more experience of living in a broken and divided world. She makes for a good baddy too when she turns out to be a secret Zygon; Clara’s always had a darker side than most companions so its a surprise how little she has been taken over by aliens across her run in the series and Jenna Coleman manages to make the two portrayals subtly different without giving the game away too obviously. The new Mrs Richard Osman, actress Ingrid Oliver,’s Petronella Osgood is a likeable character too, the human face of UNIT that would be in the front row fin the cosplay conventions if DW were a show in the DW universe and makes for a good double act. Err, with herself. And its fitting that its the two Osgoods who would want peace enough to work together as both human and zygon, despite working for an army, something which makes her seem more like the ‘Doctor’ to this era’s ‘Lethbridge Stewart’ in charge than ever (though the constant jokes about Osgood’s asthma and feebleness do grate on the nerves after a while and weren’t funny in the 50^th either). If there’s a character that lets the serial down it’s Kate: she may be a Lethbridge-Stewart but other than the name she shares nothing with her Brigadier dad - she’s more pompous and out of touch with the outside world than he ever was and far more ineffectual, relying on the Doctor to solve pretty much everything. There’s a floundering bit of plot too set in the wonderfully named town of ‘Truth Or Consequences’ (a real place in New Mexico – as Clara tells us it was named as part of a contest so that a big radio/TV show of the same name would record some episodes there in the 1950s and never changed the name back again) that ultimately doesn’t go anywhere and which feels like padding to make this a two-parter and sets up a cliffhanger that’s all too easily resolved. There are large parts, particularly in the first episode, when nothing happens and then the scenes where things do happen feel rushed (especially that cliffhanger, which needs more time to be set up and resolved). Still, the brilliant and very DW ending where (spoilers) the humans and zygons have a face-off (no, not the melting Kane from ‘Dragonfire’ kind, I mean a showdown) and both prepare to use their ‘Osgood boxes’ to destroy the other, but find them to be empty (and have their memories wiped, so they aren’t sure which is which anymore) more than makes up for the holes or boring moments in the plot. Better still, it asks deep and pertinent questions about the way we live our lives that shows like DW were born to ask and its sad that more of the new-Who episodes have tried to purely entertain, rather than educate as here. If a lot of the Capaldi era is about having some nice ingredients and a great recipe that’s still never quite cooked right, this story is for the most part judged to perfection: its funny, its moral, its memorable and it makes a worthy point well. Would that there were more stories from this era that could match this one or that writer Peter Harness (better known for more hard-hitting dramas like ‘City Of Vice’ ‘Wallander’ and ‘Case Histories’) could come back for a second go, for even if it isn’t quite perfect ‘Invasion-Inversion’ comes very very close to being a modern classic and is easily my favourite of the Capaldi era, with only a few teething problems with character and plot letting it down.
+ While fan-warming continuity references can hold up other stories, here at UNIT headquarters it makes sense that there should be so many nostalgic references. The Black Archives, where a lot of the alien artefacts are kept in a sort of British area 51, makes sense and the noticeboard, with pictures of as many past companions as will fit, is a nice touch; though its only up on screen for a brief time they know that us true blue Whovians will get hold of a screenshot and study it for hours. It’s so comprehensive: you can tell the production time had a whale of a time going through old photographs and publicity shots for anything they could plausibly use. Goodness only knows how UNIT know about Katarina or Kamelion though. And its a real shame Bret Vyon isn’t there with Kate wondering how someone looking so like her dad ending up helping to defeat the Daleks in the future. More subtle are the hints that ‘our’ Osgood is the daughter of UNIT soldier Sgt Osgood from DW story ‘The Daemons’ (he too is the geeky scientific one in glasses). I love the references to what Harry Sullivan’s been up to since leaving the Tardis alongside the 4^th Dr too: the gas that paralyses the Zygons is named ‘Sullivan’s gas’ after him and a nice nod of the head to the future Ian Marter saw for his character in his own spinoff book ‘Harry Sullivan’s War’.
- Peter Capaldi’s sudden lapse into an American gameshow host accent (as if he’s doing ‘Truth and Consequences’) is surely one of the worst impressions in all of space and time. He sounds as if he’s having a stroke. In Scottish.