Clara’s dead! The Master is dead! The TARDIS is destroyed! The Doctor is going to kill a young Davros! Oh noes! How we all these totally major developments be resolved? More importantly, will Steven Moffat completely drop the ball like he did with last season’s two-parter? Let’s see!
5. They survived?! No way!
Yeah, come on now.
Doctor Who shares a problem that our superhero Big 2 comics share, because of their long running state, there is only so much that will change so rapidly before the return to a status quo. The adventure is more in the how things happen rather than what happens. So when an episode ends with the companion and the Master “dying” and the TARDIS being blown up, it is an incredibly difficult sell.
That being said, Jenna Coleman and Michelle Gomez as Clara and Missy respectfully do an incredible job as a darkly funny double act as they infiltrate the Dalek city. We also get a bit of literal inside info about how a Dalek container works and it is very disturbing.
4. “I’m the Doctor. Just accept it.”
Speaking of the above notion of status quo, something else that this show has in common with superhero comics is that it can really rely on contrivances a lot and a lot of “I’ll explain later” and never do and what not. Now, I will say, the contrivances and unexplained events here like how the Doctor can control Davros’ chair, how he can even survive out of it, the replacement for the sonic screwdriver (which I’m not the greatest fan of) and this prophecy (because of course there’s one) are not the show’s most egregious examples, sometimes you really do kind of need to explain stuff.
Steven Moffat has said in a variety of interviews how he always liked how it’d seem the Master would die and just appear on a later episode with no explanation. But that was decades ago, and maybe I am one of those goddamn millennials spoiled on tightly plotted shows but hey!
3. The Killing Dalek
Man, I’m making all the superhero comic references tonight.
Okay, now “The Killing Joke” is 90% a piece of crap. We know this. It used a female character in some of the most gross, misogynistic ways in all of comics and despite the fact it led to one of the most iconic disabled characters in comicdom, that was the result of people trying to salvage a from this mess and not from the comic itself.
Having said that, there was that ten percent, mostly the ending that I was really reminded of in the scene with the Doctor and Davros. This is the pivotal scene, the one the entire episode is built around. Davros’ motivations behind the creation of the Daleks, bringing them back (not unlike how the Doctor saved Gallifrey) and the fact that he kind of his the last Kaled, not unlike how the Doctor was thought to be the last of Gallifrey are all brought to bear and it’s a haunting and sad scene. And, like how “The Killing Joke” ended, this scene ends with a joke.
It’s too bad the episode keeps going.
2. The Great Dalek Poo Revolt!
And it was at this point I realized I just typed the words “The Great Dalek Poo Revolt” and tried to conceive how even in context the works and…. no… just no. Move on!
1. Emoshens!
Like the ending to the season 8 finale “A Death in Heaven”, this episode’s ending relies on an emotion. Back then it was love, and it was utilized in some of the most horrible ways possible. In this episode’s case, it’s mercy. From the idea that the word “mercy” shouldn’t be in a Dalek’s vocabulary (even though it is, but why would I expect Moffat to remember things he himself wrote) to the Doctor showing mercy to a young Davros, it is a heavy price we must pay to show mercy, but it is, in the end, worth it.
This two-parter was, while flawed, still much better than the two-parter we left the previous season on. You know, there are people that say Steven Moffat can’t write Doctor Who anymore. I disagree. While I do think his time a showrunner should come to an end sooner rather than later, when he is not trying to be overly clever or overcomplicate his stories with multitudes of plots and twists to try and trick the audience, he can still write a good Who story.
