Season 9, Episode 1 - The Magician's Apprentice
I sat and watched tentatively as this episode began, the foul taste of Season 8's final episodes still fresh in my mind. "Don't be crap," I thought as a war-torn alien landscape trapped a young boy, and The Doctor showed up to save him. Nothing offensive yet, but nothing particularly reassuring either. Then The Doctor asks who the boy is, and the answer he gets literally made me call out, "Oh-HO!"
"I am your father!"
With that cold open, the bar had been set and the stakes had been raised. Now I was really worried, because if it was crap, it would hurt all the more.
We soon discover The Doctor is being pursued by a robed roller-blader with a severe skin condition, who had tracked him through a handful of locations referencing previous seasons. His a message for The Doctor is that Davros has remembered something, and this revelation clearly sends The Doctor on a bit of a downer.
Then we cut to Clara at Coal Hill, teaching her students all about her apparent lesbian fling with Jane Austin, for some reason. Quite apart from this unnecessary In-Who-Endo, it now seems that everyone is cool with Clara casually receiving calls from secret military organisations at work and running out on her job at a second's notice. Either way we end up at UNIT HQ investigating why every plane on earth has become frozen in time.
Sadly it is nothing but a ruse by Missy, who delightfully doesn't even bother explaining why she isn't dead. In some ways I loved that, but it could also be seen as very lazy. Now I know The Master is pretty crazy now, and I understand we are still meant to see Missy as a bad guy, but randomly disintegrating people seems particularly psychopathic. Her interplay with Clara is nice though. I liked the way she reveals the concept of a Confession Dial, The Doctor's last will and testament. The big let-down that it wasn't for Clara was kind of telegraphed, but still had a nice pay off.
"You ain't no thang."
After some techno-babble, the ladies find The Doctor a few hundred years in the past having an "axe battle." I will admit, it was really fun watching The Doctor rock out, and the dodgy jokes were glorious, but this section chewed up a lot of time, making it feel that not much actually happens this episode. Lumpy-face turns up again, and after a demonstration of his snake powers, we have some kind of Mexican stand-off and The Doctor is coerced into following Snakes McGee to where Davros sits dying.
Then we get treated to another one of those God-awful disguised Daleks. Ugh! I hate, hate, hate them. They look stupid and go against everything the Daleks stand for.
"When they tell you not to run in the toffee apple factory, let me tell you, you don't run."
The stealth planet was an okay device, although the "you can see it once you've been here a while" was a bit of a stretch. Why was Davros' place not stealthed too? How did they get from outer space into atmosphere without feeling it? Not a big deal, but one of those things that can grate if the rest of the episode isn't good enough to help you ignore it. Gladly that isn't the case here.
I liked that they pulled some more archival footage to tie this into the Classic Who stuff. And I absolutely loved showing us Four's line from Genesis of the Daleks which forms the whole premise of this episode. And that leaves us with a delightful cliff-hanger that revisits that very question, asking if The Doctor has changed enough to answer differently this time.
"Sarah Connor?"
It's tough to rate this one, because it's only part one of a two-parter, but on the face of it, I liked it. Missy continues to irk me, but I must admit that this episode had her growing on me. I also note with interest the apparently abandonment of the Sonic Screwdriver. Could it be this spells the end of Deus Ex Screwdriver? It would be an interesting path to take, especially as it gives up a solid merchandising stream. Most likely The Doctor will just build another one when all this is over, but I'm interested to see where they take it. Part two may see me want to retroactively reassess my opinion of this story, but now I'm going to call it a winner.
9/10
Can we fix it?
Not much to do here, especially in the second half, but the opening could use a couple of tweaks.
Firstly, Clara's call-up to UNIT, needs a review. I wasn't a fan of her commanding her students to whip out their phones and start searching for news on the planes. I'd prefer to have that scene cut down to just have her circle the plane on the window. Sure, the Headmaster can come in at that point and say she has a call, but rather than Clara jump in with, "that'll be UNIT," we instead hear that her mother has been taken ill. Clara would looked perplexed for a second before the Headmaster tells her, "they're trying to get in contact with her doctor," at which point Clara twigs, makes her apologies, and bolts. Things play out the same from there.
The way I see it, The Master / Missy may be insane, but randomly killing people and bragging about windowing his wife is a bit OTT. The Master was originally Doctor Who's version of Loki. Power-hungry and convinced of his superiority to other life forms. The crazy should be manifesting as unpredictability and mood swings rather than malicious murder.
With that in mind a slight tweak to Clara and Missy's interaction. We should be treated to a glimpse at Missy's point of view here. When Clara talks of Missy going good, Missy looks confused. "I've always been good," she says, "just not your good." Missy could still kill those guys, but rather than brag about how mean she is being to show how she is totally a bad guy still, I swear, she talks about how it's not evil because humans are primitive. A parallel of Loki's ant/boot metaphor would be nice. A particularly cheeky thing would be for her to use it verbatim, prefacing it by saying "A great man once said..."
These are minor quibbles though. Overall it was top notch.
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