The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar: Ranking - 180

  The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar

(Series 9, Dr 12 with Clara, 19-26/9/2015, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Hettie MacDonald)

Rank: 180

'Hello Davros you old misery guts. How are you? Still down in the dumps? Never mind, it’ll pass. Or would if you stopped refusing to die anyway heh heh heh. I bought you some grapes. No, grapes…Here let me put them in your hand for you…Oops not that one! Sorry I forgot I helped blow it off once, silly me. So, how are the kids? Busy exterminating? That’s nice. They ought to come round and see you, you know, they don’t live that far away from you. The ungrateful youth today running around thinking they’re being important exterminating people. How is the family business? Did it recover after the last time I, y’know, exterminated it? Oh we had some fun times didn’t we? You trying to kill me, me trying to kill you. And now here you are sat in that bath chair of yours while I’m running rounds on new legs, funny isn’t it? Whose this? Oh this is Missy. You’d like her – her hobbies including gloating and shrinking people. You’d hate Clara though, she’s everything you’re not: nice, kind, courageous, youthful even though she’s lived an impossibly long time and existed in every one of my timelines. Where is Clara anyway she seems to be missing?...’  

 

 ‘Why not start with a blockbuster? Why leave it till the last two weeks?’ So said Steven Moffat, explaining his reasoning behind this two-parter: he wanted it to be big, bold, expensive, audience-grabbing. ‘Oh no!’ groaned a significant part of the audience who were still trying to recover from ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ from nine months earlier. You see, for all of Moffat’s desires to make Dr Who bigger and bolder than ever it’s his smaller scale stories that live longest in the memory, at least for me. ‘The Empty Child’ was a creepy kid in a gas mask, ‘Blink’ was a statue coming to life in a haunted house, ‘The Girl In the Fireplace’ was a King’s consort and her fireplace, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ a tale of a timelord arriving in a girl’s back garden and eating fish fingers and custard, stories that are Heaven for more fans than not. By contrast whenever Moffat goes for big stakes we often get Hell, or at least with ‘Dark Water’ an afterlife with an aftertaste that lingers despite the things the story gets right. So it’s not a surprise that the parts of ‘The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar’ that work best are the ones that are smaller in scale, the parts that aren’t about exploring Skaro in mind-numbing CGI detail, watching the Doctor egg on a sea of Viking extras in his sonic sunglasses as if he’s at a rock concert and teaching them the word ‘dude’ several centuries early or watching planes hover in the sky in a costly CGI effect but the parts that are all dominated by character, which this week feels as if the Doctor is calling on a grumpy elderly relative in a care home (Davros) while his annoying little sister tags along (Missy).

For. yes, the part of this story that really does make it seem like a season finale is that we get two enemies for the price of one, the first time any variation of The Master and Davros have ever shared screen time (the end of ‘Frontier In Space’ revealed that The Master was secretly working for The Daleks but they only get one iconic scene together and that’s it). Casual fans who don’t really watch the series might think that one monster is much like another, just as one hero is like another, but where Moffat excels this week is in showing the contrasts between his two leads. There’s Davros looking much like he always does: he never changes, give or take the greater budget and technology in prosthetics, with every line of hard-fought living etched into his elderly face. He’s immobile and not just because he’s stuck in a chair permanently, still obsessed with killing people, still petrified that his own creations will turn on him, still largely charmless – the sort of dictator you’re afraid of from one look, even before he’s opened is moth or tried to kill you. The sort of man so obsessed with survival he’ll do anything to live – and he has, giving up half his body to perfect his experiments and live forever, barring timelord interventions. Even though The Doctor’s defeated him every time he’s still convinced of his own superiority and that he’s always going to win, his brushes with The Doctor having not changed him one little bit.

By contrast there’s The Master who looks very different to how she used to. She’s changed genders for a start and looks younger than she used to for most of her life but somehow it’s more than that: in the past you could rely on The Master to be up to something, all that incredible charm and manipulation used against you in a selfish plot to rule the world. But now it’s weirder than that: she’s callous sure, thinks of being cruel to people as her favourite hobby and you wouldn’t want to be in a room alone with her because you’d always come off worst. But there’s an impermanence about her too, a sense that she could change on a sixpence and go from being cruel to being kind and back again before you’ve worked out what’s going on. It seems odd in retrospect that we were teased for years with the idea of the Doctor reincarnating as a girl (most of them jokes by Tom Baker about who his replacement might be made as long ago as 1981) and yet nobody that I know of in fandom thought about what The Master might be like as a girl. Pretty fabulous is the answer, at least now that they’ve got her portrayal right at last (her debut in Dark Water was pretty botched and written just like John Simm’s for the most part). Michelle Gomez is every bit as nutty as her predecessors but still recognisably like the scheming Delgado and theatrical Ainley and manic Simms incarnations (I won’t mention Eric Roberts’ monotone if you don’t) and yet there’s an extra something in there too, a feminine side for lack of a better word. This is a Master driven by instinct whose able to read people and play them against each other, without getting her hands as muddy in brainwashing or obeying strategies and who wants to control people rather than rule a world; she’s a stirrer this Master, who uses her enemies’ weaknesses against themselves, every bit as cunning as before but less directly involved in the drama. It’s no surprise that it’s this regeneration of The Master who becomes as close to good as he/she ever do by the end of their run – even this early on she’s the shifting go-between, not as bad as The Daleks and not as good as The Doctor. It’s a clever testing-the-waters idea that went so well a female Doctor to follow pretty much inevitable, though Whittaker’s portrayal wasn’t given anything like the thought that went into Missy here. There’s something different behind the eyes now, a desperation, a madness that’s started creeping in. If the Doctor keeps defeating her then maybe there really is something wrong with her? Maybe she isn’t the greatest person in the room, just the most sadistic? She’s impossible to read nowadays, equally ready to be rude to you and consider it flirting or charm the pants off you and steal your trousers. If anything she’s come to resent the fact she keeps surviving, that she keeps coming back in a new body only to die in new ways again and is a tiny bit suicidal these days, desperate and not necessarily in control anymore. Her brushes with the Doctor have changed her considerably, not least the fact that he’s caused quite a few of her regenerations by now (including this one, indirectly, though we won’t know that till the following year and ‘The World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’). Davros wants to die but is afraid of it. Missy wants to live and is secretly afraid of that too. They’re a fascinating lesson in contrasts and I wish we’d had more of them talking to each other this episode, instead of The Missy skulking in the shadows with Clara.

As for Clara herself, at the start of her final year in the series, we’re beginning to really see the story arc Moffat had planned for her by now. She’s no longer the ignorant inexperienced little girl with big ideas the Doctor first met (‘first’ being a relative measure in this era of Dr Who!) when she was still working as a nanny and fell into her own hijacked internet (‘The Bells Of St John’). She’s hilariously unruffled when the prime minister rings up for her in the middle of teaching a lesson about Jane Austen, flying off to UNIT HQ on the back of a motorbike as if it was an everyday occurrence (much of a relief as it was at the time after three episodes about his death back to back it’s odd in retrospect that there’s no mention of Danny though, especially in a class of pupils who would be missing him too). She holds her own with two of the biggest baddies the universe has to offer, even sort-of befriending Missy in a sort of ‘odd couple’ run of banter, despite the timelord’s snarky put-downs. The Doctor has made her tougher, stronger, more independent – and foolhardy. In a mirror of what happens nearer the end of the year in ‘Face The Raven’ she acts the hero and nearly pays for it with her life, ending up trapped inside a Dalek. This is, oddly enough, the second time its sort-of happened to her (although it was as ‘Oswin’, a half-remembered Clara sent down the Doctor’s timestream in ‘Name Of the Doctor’ back when he still looked like Matt Smith and she was still fairly new to this). It’s a big lesson in contrasts: back then she was innocent, bordering on naïve, making soufflés and trying to be happy. But this Clara has seen a lot of the bad things the universe has to offer thanks to her travels with the Doctor and she’s now experienced, hardened, foolhardy, almost with a Missy-style death wish of her own thanks to her journeys alongside him. And what of the Doctor himself? He’s changing too in more ways than being elderly and Scottish. So much of series eight was about his debate as to whether his new face was a ‘good man’ or not, still suffering PTSD for all the people close to the 11^th Doctor that were lost simply for being around him. He’s less sure of himself after the events in ‘Dark Water’, hiding away (well, in the sort of way only the Doctor could hide: noisily): hanging around with a group of Vikings and having what Clara calls a ‘mid-life crisis’. He’s a lot more tactile than the last time we saw him, surprising Clara with compliments and a hug that catch her off-guard (even if he then admits that he hugs ‘because it’s a good way of hiding your face’). It’s proof that people can change, even without recourse to regeneration. He’s no longer as sure of his own morality, no longer certain that his hearts will tell him the right thing to do, no longer sure that he’s the ‘opposite’ of the two villains before him, one of whom keeps surprising him by temporarily being nice. Like all the best baddies the Doctor is not entirely good even though he wants to be and the mistakes that he’s made have piled up and began to gnaw away at him.  The best parts of ‘Magicians Apprentice’ by far are the moments when these four very different characters bump up against each other and discover something new about each other that they weren’t quite expecting or even more so about themselves: Davros’ new understanding of where his drive to kill comes from, Clara’s understanding that she’s not infallible, Missy’s new understanding that being bad isn’t always good and The Doctor’s understanding that being good is sometimes bad. One thing that was in the original draft script but got dropped from what’s seen on TV is more of a contrast with Missy and the Doctor, not just Davros, something I wish they’d kept: ‘We both kill people’ says Missy at one point to Clara ‘There’s no difference in what we do– the only difference is that I enjoy it more’. One other great line I wish they’d kept is when the Doctor asks Missy how it’s going, looking for praise after getting her out of trouble, to which she retorts as only a regeneration of The Master can ‘Well, dear, you’ve saved Davros’ life, lost a fight with a snake and accidentally made the Daleks more powerful than ever…’ before being glared at with the infamous Capaldi eyebrows.  

What is the shared thing all these characters need? Mercy. A realisation that they're only human' and make mistakes. Even when two are tinelords and one's a Kalid. It’s a word that runs throughout this story, the thing that makes the Doctor go back and save a young Davros at the brink of death, even after changing his mind about it several times, what makes Missy realise that there is more to life than pure death and destruction to complement her ego, what the Doctor finds for himself as he teeters on the brink of what he thinks will be his own death and the very word that helps Clara escape her Dalek-tomb. Like the best (and the worst) Moffat stories this one plays a lot with linear time so that all the strands line up to us at home even though they stretch centuries in ‘real time’, picking up the theme hinted at in ‘classic’ Who about how we should all be careful of our actions because what we do impact the lives of everyone around us like ripples. The story all starts with a repeat of the big unsolvable moral debate first raised in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ about whether anyone has the right to kill an infant even if they know they are going to grow up to slaughter quadzillions of people given that they haven’t grown up to do it yet and still have free will, being capable of change. It’s odd in a way that the second most quotable of arguably the most popular ‘old’ Who adventure (after the ‘do I have the right?’ speech that springs from it) hadn’t become a spin-off story before this (that’s not the only throwback to ‘Genesis’ either. In that story a frustrated harry comments of the Kalid locals ‘they’ll be throwing bows and arrows at us next!’ – which is exactly what happens in a scene in this story). It’s tailor made for drama as it’s the sort of debate that can be argued both ways. Indeed the Doctor isn’t sure what to do either when he first meets Davros during the Thal-Kalid war, trapped in a sea of quite hand-mines that turn out to be quite literal hands (surely the single best pun in a series full of great ones and one of the few scenes that had me on the floor laughing. Oh good old Dr Who, even in a scene when you’re trying t shock me you do make me laugh!)

At first he tries to save the boy because that’s what the Doctor does before he learns the boy’s name (and the way things are set up at first I’m half-surprised we didn’t have a booming voice intoning ‘and that little boy grew up to be…Davros’ over the opening credits). He legs it until the halfway point of the story the big cliffhanger, where the Doctor makes up his mind what to do and comes back to kill Davros, certain that the death he’s seen the dictator cause is all because he don’t have the guts to kill him. And then by the end (spoilers) he comes back and saves the boy, having learned to show mercy in the hope that it will if nothing else make Davros a kinder person without a death wish. It’s a story that asks big questions about what really is kindness: a quick death or a slow painful lingering life? Euthanasia seems an odd topic to write about (and again asks you what on Skaro was going on in Moffat’s life while he was writing the Capaldi stories) but an obvious place to go after ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ confronted death head on. It was topical too, which the laws in Britain and most of the world edging closer towards a consensus that sometimes death was kinder than living in agony with a terminal illness, with 2014 the year the British Medical Association took out a thorough survey of Doctors to hear their views on GP-assisted dying. As ever, the Doctor Who debate is more nuanced than most of what was going on in the press, a series that is usually pro-life in any scenario, where life means hope and second chances, considering for the first time that death might be showing more ‘mercy’. We think, after all the stories we’ve seen, that we know what Davros himself would have chosen if he’d known how his life had turned out: he’d have chosen to live, because why else would a man experiment on himself to give him elongated life and build an army of Dalek tanks to help him survive. But maybe, just maybe, he’s living because he was afraid to die and he’s become cruel because he resents being alive in a body that only half-works? It’s a whole new way of looking at a character we thought we knew backwards, changing what we think of him and even, just a tiny bit, making us feel sympathetic towards him (sympathetic to a character inspired by Hitler? There’s a first! Yet, just as ‘Dalek’ showed you could be repulsed by a killing machine and feel empathy towards it, so happens here, in a story about people aren’t all good or all bad). The big twist though, the great Dr Whoy moment, is that it was this moment of kindness that directly caused this hate, with a damaged Davros growing up with a hatred for the person who saved him and made him lie through an increasingly hard wheelchair-bound life. The Doctor got it wrong, it was cruel to be kind in this instance and he’s semi-responsible for all the Dalek-related deaths in the series that follow, the opposite toe the usual formula where the Doctor changes things and makes lives better. What a downer! Except without it he’d have never got Clara back: had he not saved Davros that day he would never have known the meaning of the word ‘mercy’ and so it would never have been passed down to the Dalek machines made in his image and allowed Clara to escape. It’s during this story that Missy learns the value of mercy too. So his good deeds don’t go entirely unrecognised, even if they don’t quite work out the way The Doctor wanted them to.

That’s really quite a story and fair play to him, Moffat is one of those writers who always thinks long and hard about his plotlines, writing in little nuggets of wisdom that from a writer’s point of view makes them perfect little bits of plot-making, with storylines that feel very different that somehow all tie up at the end. This is, like so many Moffat scripts, really very clever. Had this been a compact story written as a short story for an anthology or a Dr Who annual it would be hailed as one of the greatest stories ever. The problem comes when you sit through this as a viewer, a simple idea stretched out beyond breaking point. So much of this near two-hour story is about setting up that big ending and getting all the plot-beats right and all the loose ends tied up together, which means an awful lot of empty minutes where nothing much happens and the viewer gets a bit lost. Take the first half hour: we have the Doctor debating whether to save Davros agonisingly slow, the cogs in his brain whirring in real time rather than the usual flashbacks, several longish scenes of the Doctor’s midlife crisis with Vikings that don’t seem to relate to anything else, an entire red herring sub-plot about planes hovering in the sky that comes out of nowhere and is never fully explained away (it’s simply an ‘excuse’ to move Clara to UNIT, when she could have started the story there anyway) and Missy teasing Clara for what seems an eternity. Usually when Moffat does a big explosive finale he’s had a series of putting the pieces of his puzzles in place so they usually feel more organic than this, but here he has to do it from a standing start as it were and it takes way too long for these pieces to move into position, so that by the time you reach the half hour mark you’re totally confused as to what’s going on. You will find out as the pieces work their way together but it takes so long getting there it simply loses your interest, no matter how invested you are in these characters and want to see how it all works out. Apparently I’m not alone either. Even with the extra boost of a publicity blitz and that big explosive opening in week one, by week two the viewers had fallen away badly, with the lowest ratings since ‘The Crimson Horror’ two years earlier (and that one was something of an anomaly, caused by hot weather and good television over on the other side).  Brilliant as the beginning, two-thirds in and ending is, too much of this ‘explosive’ opener feels like a bomb imploding excruciatingly slowly so it loses all fizzle. Extending this story to a two-parter, when it’s screaming out to be a single part (despite the rather good cliffhanger), was a bad move.

There are several scenes here that don’t work as well as by rights they ought to, slowing the action right down. It’s fun to see genuine musician Peter Capaldi play the guitar for real (he was in the 1980s band ‘The Dreamboys’, who were pretty good too in a garage band charismas kind of a way) play extracts from songs not written for centuries, ‘Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’ and unexpectedly but aptly Toni Basil’s ‘Mickey’ (legend has it she wrote ir for her one-time co-star Micky Dolenz fifteen years after appearing in the superlative but bonkers Monkees film ‘HEAD’, where she was the choreographer and danced with Davy Jones in black and white, then white and black). This idea of an anachronistic soundtrack presenting effectively a rock conewrt in Medieval Europe is an idea ‘borrowed’ from ‘A Knight’s Tale’ and it’s anachronistic Queen soundtrack (a band that surely deserve to be left in the middle ages – thank goodness Murray Gold doesn’t follow suit or this story would be a hundred places lower on my rankings) by teaching a load of Vikings new words and clever as the line about the Doctor bringing a guitar to an ‘axe fight’ and forgetting that no one else would understand the joke yet ought to be funnier than it is though instead making The Doctor look silly more than anything else. At the start of the series history was sacrosanct and changing it even a little bit broke so many timelord codes it was tantamount to murder. Recent stories since the time war, in which there are no timelords left to protect time, have in other stories made the Doctor equally reckless but he’s always paid the price for it, most notably ‘Waters Of Mars’ where he played God but also ‘The Name Of the Doctor’ (where Clara herself is keen to keep things exactly the way they were) and ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ arc (where the Doctor is supposed to be dead and keeping a low profile). There’s a great bit of dialogue where Missy claims that if she knows the Doctor he’ll be hiding out somewhere quietly, only to find him playing riffs on a (presumably sonicced given that there’s no such things as electricity) electric guitar a room full of baying Vikings which proves how little she knows her old ‘friend’, but otherwise this scene is entirely out of character. So is his sulking when he thinks he’s about to die, what with a plot strand about his ‘confession dial’/will that’s very clumsily written into the story. Fair enough if Missy is the only person entrusted with him giving it to him, but why does she then find Clara and gloat? It’s not very in character. When the pair are together there’s a great line about how Clara is the ‘puppy’, the pet of the two adults, but this isn’t very Master-like either: just compare to how Roger Delgado charmed Jo Grant and how Anthony Ainley tried the same thing with Peri (and failed). Clara, for her part, remains as calm and unruffled as ever, showing no sense of distress at being in the presence of someone both mad and evil, which would be entirely in character against anyone else but Missy: of all the people she’s met in this series this should be the person she hates most, after first saving then killing for good her boyfriend Danny at the end of the previous series. Instead they sit around having tea, passing banter, in a scene that seems out of kilter with everything else we see. 

There are two bits that feel like they’re going to be really crucial parts to the plot that then get forgotten, some of the most obvious examples of the way Moffat’s brain works so fast and the way he becomes so easily distracted: the planes that hang in the sky that then get forgotten about and the snake guy Sarff, who looks as if he’s going to be a proper baddy rather than a sort of errand boy (why does his head swivel and how does he use his snakes? Goodness knows, he just does; he’s such a Moffat character: looks amazing, great inventive idea, no reasoning for it and barely any dialogue). His dialogue sounds like a bunch of misremembered Who quotes: ‘the Doctor is required’ he hisses, just like Wotan in ‘The War Machines’ while ‘we come to bring him harm’ is hardly, say, Sutekh’s ‘gift of death’ (an idea which is rather apt for this story). Worst of the lot, though, are the scenes of the Doctor-Davros confrontation, a scene Moffat was itching to write after so enjoying the moments in past stories and thinking they were the best moments of past Davros classics like ‘Genesis’ and ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’. But they’re not the best parts of this one: too much of their dialogue is ‘do you remember the time when…?’ like two old dears nattering in an old folks home, while Davros too is uncharacteristically slow to try to kill his adversary when he turns up alone and apparently helpless. The Doctor, too, is uncharacteristically callous in stealing Davros’ wheelchair: I mean, he might be a ruthless dictator but he is disabled, there are limits! For whatever reason, mostly length I suspect, all the big set pieces this story promises to deliver on as a big booming finale-in-a-beginning fall flat: the big Davros-Doctor showdown is just endless talking, the big what-have-they-done-to-Clara? Dalek entrapment is clumsy compared to the subtler, much better one in ‘Asylum’ and you get the sense that Missy is there more because Moffat enjoys writing for her than because he knows what to do with her, a lot of this story having her standing around not doing much (she’s needed simply as an excuse to get Clara out of trouble before the big finale: that’s it, that’s her entire plot function if you look at the plot badly). This story has a lot of the hallmarks of Moffat at his best, but sadly loses a lot of that goodwill with the scenes that feature him at his worst. 

No, it’s the quieter moments that you remember in this story. The clever opening scene with Clara interrupted during her lesson at Coal Hill School (I’m gutted they cut a scene of her on motorbike, surrounded by half the UNIT army, shouting back to her class through the window ‘and don’t forget homework for tomorrow: pages 27-30!’ before driving off, a very Dr Whoy combination of the ordinary and extraordinary). The eerie walk through the sewers where the remnants of Daleks from past battles lie forgotten, something that works well both as a character point (Daleks don’t tolerate failure), a plot point (…because they don’t show each other mercy’), a clever mirroring effect (disabled Davros is treated so much like the old guy at the folks home, forgotten and abandoned in exactly the same way as his injured soldiers – in the context of what Davros sees as a boy all of them are depicted more like war veterans than usual, casualties of war who were shown no mercy when they came back changed by what they’d seen) and simply a great bit of effect work, breaking up the long bits of talking. Little Davros, all cute and innocent, pleading for mercy in a way that he’ll never show anyone else. Those are the parts of the story you take away with you. 

      
Full credit, though, for at least finding new things to do with old characters who shine stronger than they have in a long time here – certainly more so than either baddy’s previous appearance and it’s very in keeping with the modern series to go back and revisit characters from the old one in a more nuanced, softer light for the most part. After a strong debut from Michael Wisher in 1975 Davros had gradually become a caricature, a ranting Dalek in human form rather than a real person, but here he’s more than just a monster – he’s, well, Human for lack of a better word even though he’s a Kaled, more like the frightened mutated Dalek of, well, ‘Dalek’, backed into a corner by circumstances who thinks he has no choice but to spread hate because he’s forgotten how to love. The best parts of this script take their cue from the superb Big Finish audio series ‘I, Davros’ (their best Who-related range by far) that imagined a whole new back story for the Dalek creator – how a lonely, scared child with an abusive family and a scientific bent ended up taking his anger out on everyone around him fanatically, to the point of experimenting on himself, driven to wipe out the people who hurt him until he couldn’t stop and wiped out the people trying to help him as well. This story goes one better though by involving the Doctor in the action and making all that anger, all that shame, the Doctor’s fault. Julian Bleach wasn’t given anywhere near enough to do in ‘Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’, given how much of Russell T Davies’ story had to wrap up story arcs and give a decent farewell to Donna, but he’s excellent here, the closest anyone has come post-Wisher to capture all the nuances in a character so easy to overplay.

 There are tales that people were a bit worried by his low-key performance in rehearsals (Bleach is, by nature, down the shyer end of the scale) but they ‘got’ it when they saw him on set in costume, playing a Davros who seems more broken than we’ve ever seen him before, ut still capable of angry noisy rants when moved. The Daleks are well catered for too, with director Hettie MacDonald having an interesting take on The Daleks: she treated them as Human extras, asking them to react in scenes the way Human characters would, to look ‘scared’ or ‘bold’ or ‘apprehensive’. A silly idea on paper but it works: while you can’t fully read their expressions you can tell the shift of atmosphere in the room depending on whether the Doctor or Davros seem to have the upper hand and it works really well I think.  
Moffat seems a lot more certain who kissy Missy is too, after toying with her character during ‘ark Water’, a story that sets her up as a mystery for the first half and gets by on shock factor once we learn who she is. In ‘Dark Water’ she’s every bit as cruel, killing UNIT troops without a thought (and even asking one to pose for a final selfie) and applauding at the idea of reinforcements to kill, but at the same time she’s capable of emotions beyond this, with a line in teasing and flirting that for anyone else would be playful. Michelle Gomez always made the part hers from the first but this time Moffat’s seen what she can do on screen and isn’t afraid to push the boat out. Even though  ‘Magicians’ is a two-parter that too often has perfunctory dialogue – the usual recycled Dr Who themes of the Doctor being grumpy for no reason, Clara responding with sarcasm and Davros ranting – Missy is nearly always saying something inspired, clever or funny or shocking, or more often all three. When she isn’t on screen the story sags badly. For it’s a sad truth of this story that, as interestring as the baddies are, the goodies come out of this one badly. Clarea sort of holds her own with Missy in the first episode, keeping her as honest as anyone Human can, but they forget about her and dup her in a Dalek in episode two, as much to keep her out the way as anything else. As for the Doctor, these are some of the 12th Doctor’s worst scenes and, always a variable actor, Capaldi is al over the shop, playing serious scenes for laughs and under or overplaying the comedy so it never quite lands. It’s a bad sign when your star is being turned into a caricature and being played for laughs when perhaps the two most clichéd and caricatured baddies get such a new and nuanced depictions and by the end I was rather rooting for Davros to be honest.

The end result is a story where the good bits are great and the bad bits are kinda awful, so they kind of cancel each other out, some of it so inspired and some of it so tired that you can’t quite believe it belongs in the same season, never mind the same story. It’s very much in keeping with everything else we get this troubled year, a series of two part stories that are all a series in ‘contrasts’ that change what you think of people and which are all re-thinking what you thought was good in the first half when you come to the end of the second. On that score at least this story is the best in the year: it doesn’t have the ‘what the?’ of ‘Under The Lake/Before The Flood’, or the tired debates on death versus everlasting life that comes across as just a pale retread of this one in ‘The Girl Who Died/The Woman Who Lived’  and for my money has more interesting emotions to play with than the guilt and angst of ‘Hell bent’ and ‘Heaven Sent’. It’s the ‘other’ half of that year’s promises, to make every two parter look like a blockbuster movie, that doesn’t quite come of: this should be a moody character piece not a big budget story with explosions every five minutes. Still, even if some of the details are rough and ready the main concepts are excellent, with a central idea of mercy and what it means to different people that’s perfect for Dr Who storytelling and shows us lots of new friends in an old light. It also looks very impressive on screen too, with overseas filming in Tenerife giving an exotic feel to the ‘Hand-mine’ scenes and possibly the best depiction of Skaro we’ve had so far, a city that very much feels like the one we saw in the second ever Dr Who story in 1963 but in high definition in more ways than just the filming procedure, feeling like a real place rather than a set. How do they do that? Especially in a year when, post-credit crunch, drama budgets at the BBC were lower than ever. Is it…magic? Although of course, because this is series nine, they still have to ruin all that hard work with something. In this case the fact that so much of this story is shot in the dark so we can’t properly see anything (did they need money for the meter after spending it all on location?) Part magician’s blessing part witch’s curse, that’s this story in a nutshell.

POSITIVES + Yes I know, I mentioned it already but I’m still laughing all these years on…Hand mines. That are actually hands! Terrifying yet silly, as a sea of hands stretch out from under the ground, trying to pull their victim towards them. A moment of absolute genius that touches on so many Dr Who themes at once: the stupidity and cruelty of war, the facelessness of battle, the way that the Kalids and Thals both feel trapped on their own planet, very very alien – and hilarious!  

NEGATIVES – Steven Moffat decided, on a whim, that he was bored of the sonic screwdriver and decided to invent…the sonic sunglasses! He thinks they make him look cool. They don’t. just make him look like the worst kind of American tourist, cupled with one of those annoying people banging on about the latest tech and how it saves you time and money and makes them look amazing (when it just makes them lazy and look like an idiot). I mean, only an extra-terrestrial would wear sunglasses during a visit to Essex and I doubt it was any sunnier in 1138 than it is now. Besides, what’s wrong with the screwdriver? It’s so very Dr Who, a practical every ordinary object turned extraordinary – sunglasses are already seen as a bit exotic and don’t need to seem extraordinary. This story really is Moffat’s years as showrunner in a nutshell: he changes The Master and Davros for the better, after a lot of careful thought, reinventing them to give new ways of looking at them without changing intrinsically who they are. Then he throws some big major change away just because he can with no rhyme or reason to it and it doesn’t work at all. It’s a lesson in why, in the modern era, they really need someone of equal power to the showrunner who can stop them, like they did back in the days when you had writers, script editors, producers and directors all having a more or less equal input. For nobody liked the glasses except Moffat, nobody: no one on set, no one behind the scenes, no one in the audience. At least he saw sense after the fandom complained and restored the screwdriver the following year! One more cut line I wish they’d kept: Clara asking the Doctor ‘okay sonic glasses, a guitar and a tank – you realise that this is some sort of midlife crisis?’)

BEST QUOTE: Missy on The Doctor: ‘He's trapped at the heart of the Dalek empire. He's a prisoner of the creatures who hate him the most in the universe. Between us and him is everything the deadliest race in all of history can throw at us. We on the other hand have a pointy stick. How do we start?’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There were two trails to kick off season nine, one of them on TV (on the BBC’s red button) and the other one at the cinema. ‘Prologue’ was the rather boring title given to the former, a two-minute catch-up as the Doctor heads to Karn still reeling from what we know later are the events of ‘Hell Bent’. Ohila, leader of the Sisterhood, takes time out of her busy schedule looking after a candle to banter a few words around with him. Like a headmistress she whittles out of the Doctor that he’s been given an invite to a big meeting with someone from his past who used to be an enemy but has delayed going. ‘Why do you always lie?’ she asks. ‘Why do you always assume I’m lying?’ he responds. ‘It saves time’ she smirks. Oddly for a red button bit of footage that a lot of fans (especially non-British fans) never got to see it’s rather crucial to how the series pans out too, with the first sight of the confession dial, handed here by the Doctor to make sure the ‘right’ people get it. The Doctor’s parting words ‘Look after the universe for me – I’ve put a lot of work into it!’ You can so tell that this  snippet is a Moffat piece of writing as it bears all his hallmarks: an ongoing conversation in questions, the Doctor concealing something with someone getting it out of him and characters talking in ways that only people on TV do that’s absolute nonsense but sounds good (‘An enemy is just a friend you don’t really know yet’). It’s not one of his best, but it is at least well shot (Sarn looks gorgeous) and Capaldi acts his socks off, far more so than in the parent episode(the time of between series has done him good). An odd omission from the series nine box set.   

‘The Doctor’s Meditation’ is the official title given to the longer series preview shown in cinemas in certain countries that showed ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ a little later than the UK – unseen on British TV and not featured in the DVD sets either this makes it possibly the least seen bit of ‘new Who’ footage around (although it was briefly on the official Dr Who facebook page). More directly tied into the start of ‘Apprentice’ it finds the Doctor trying to settle down in England’s past, in a castle in Essex in 1138 and has a lot more luck than the 3^rd Doctor did winning over the locals in ‘The Time Warrior’ as they all seem to worship him. The Doctor comes out of his meditation to ask local soldier Bors how many years he’s been in meditation and is shocked to find out it’s only been a few hours. The Doctor is too distracted to meditate and, feeling thirsty but annoyed by the quality of the water, the Doctor gets the locals to build a well, messing up his first eleven choices (‘but twelve is my lucky number’!)Next he requests a ‘throne room’ extension to the castle just for him, which is going well except that the builder doesn’t understand the concept of ‘sun-roofs’! Bors might be from the dark ages but he’s smart enough to see through a warrior in denial and tackles the Doctor about fearing a coming battle, given that he’s so restless and edgy. Bors admits that after getting to know the Doctor across the past few days and despite believing in his ‘magical powers’  he thinks silence is the one thing totally beyond him. Looking for more distractions the Doctor suggest a joust (with a spoon!) but Bors would prefer a goodbye feast. The Doctor finally gives in that he let someone close to him down badly and that he fears the next battle will be his ‘last’ and he doesn’t want to face it (‘I’ve seen many battlefields – this one will be different’). Once again Capaldi is on top form and Daniel Hoffman-Gill is excellent as Bors and it’s a shame he snuffs it so early into the episode proper. This timetoo Moffat’s writing is up to standard across the six or so minutes, while it’s clearly filmed in one of the two castles from ‘Heaven Sent’ (with the same fireplace!) and looks gorgeous, although it’s a nice bit of character rather than connecting heavily to the plot. 

More inconsequential is ‘Mind My Minions’, a crossover with the yellow memeable beings from the ‘Despicable Me’ film franchise broadcast roughly eight weeks before ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’. The Minions have been booked to appear on ‘The One Show’ (a sort of cross between ‘Pebble Mill’ ‘Blue Peter’ and your worst nightmares, yet somehow more random and more surreal than all three) only they’ve got lost in TV centre and keep  ending up in other programmes. One of them is Dr Who where the little yellow fellows find an empty Tardis and attempt to fly it, accidentally knocking it into the Tardises owned by the other Doctors (including the 1^st one mock-up created for the ‘An Adventure In Space and Time’ drama – which makes everyone turn monochrome - and the 10^th Doctor’s, which both hadn’t been dismantled yet). ‘I don’t weant to go’ jokes DJ Greg James, in charge of catching them, in an in-joke that shows just how mainstream Dr Who and it’s sayings still were back in 2015! The Tardis lands in Coronation Street, in a nod to another charity special (see ‘Dimensions In Time’!) Other programmes invaded include BBC News, a concert recording of the BBC Orchestra and, of course, ‘Blue Peter’ itself. Notably the Minions are usually computer animated but appear in this minisode as men in costumes. A fun seven minute piece of nonsense, with Matt Baker and Alex Jones two of the scariest monsters ever seen on the series.

Clara never meets Jane Austen in anything we see even though she mentions her again in ‘Face the Raven’, but the 1^st Doctor met her along with Steven and Vicki met her on the frozen river Thames in the Big Finish companion chronicles story ‘Frostfire’ (2007). They didn’t kiss. Thank goodness.

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