Who Wants To Live Forever?

We are already half way through this series of Doctor Who and I am quite enjoying the new, longer-format, two part serials. The last two were more of an “unconventional” two part story in that the episodes are linked but exist as separate stories on their own. They were two that I had been particularly looking forward to due to their writers: Jamie Mathieson who wrote my favourite two episodes from last year, Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline; and Catherine Tregenna who wrote some of the best stories for the spin-off series Torchwood including Out Of Time which was possibly my favourite single episode from that, admittedly, hit-and-miss series.

The first part of the story, The Girl Who Died, was probably not exactly what I was expecting as it turned out to be one of Doctor Who’s “romp” adventures: high on humour and slapstick action but, for the most part, rather light on plotline. Some reviewers likened it to last year’s Robot of Sherwood which I can see to a point but whilst that one felt like it was written with Matt Smith in mind this was definitely done for Capaldi’s Doctor with his irreverent humour and (now rather more subdued) grumpiness. Rather more low key was Clara who now feels like she was written in after the event – I’m wondering if her last-minute change of mind over leaving has led to some hurried script changes?

The humour worked well with the rubbish Vikings (all the backroom boys – I’m sure they should have had a chartered accountant in there) pitted against even more rubbish aliens who could be frightened off with a little slight-of-hand trickery. The one-liners all hit the mark (calling the Vikings everything from Noggin the Nog through to ZZ Top) and the action suitably chuckle-worthy. It was really only in the last ten minutes that something much darker came to light in which the Doctor brings the “girl who died” back to seemingly immortal life. The Doctor clearly breaking the laws of time and uttering the haunting line: “Immortality isn’t living forever, that is not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying."

The second episode sees us drawn to 17th Century England and the adventures of the immortal “Woman Who Lived”, now a prototype  Dick Turpin in an episode surprisingly low on action and high on dialogue which was, at least in my opinion, far better for it. It is also interesting that Clara featured as a mere cameo in this episode which does make me wonder about what brief Catherine Tregenna was given. The action did pick up towards the end and I suppose that being Who we had to have a “monster of the week”. I don’t think it was really required as the discussion between the Doctor and Ashildr on the true nature of immortality was actually far more interesting. The brief twist at the end (and possibly a link for the future) seemed to be lifted straight from Tregenna’s Torchwood work. I hope we see more stories from her in the future.

Much of the interest of these episodes has been around the performance of Maisie Williams as Ashildr. She is best known as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones, the sword wielding tom-boy, and I suppose it is easy to draw comparisons between the two. I think she did pretty well with it although I would like to see her in a non-fantasy role (I have heard good things about Cyberbully although haven’t seen it yet). Surprisingly, she is now 18 years old although still looks about 12 (which is probably due to me being a couple of series behind on Thrones). Still, I think she has the talent to break the barrier between child and adult actor. I’m interested to see what she does next.

I’ve been trying to spot the series arc over the last six episodes and whilst it looks like the Doctor may be having a mid-life crisis with his partying, shades and electric guitar, the real theme has been examining how much he can interfere with history itself,  whether this was saving the child Davros to preserve the timeline, creating a causal loop to save himself or meddling with time to save others. This was a common theme with the early years of the show: particularly the First Doctor stories The Aztecs, in which the Doctor warns against trying to alter time “You can't rewrite history! Not one line!" and also The Time Meddler in which the Doctor stops a fellow Timelord from altering the events of 1066. What this series appears to be addressing is exactly what happens if the Doctor is the Meddler. Anyway, it’s Zygons on Halloween next week complete with UNIT in tow. It’s like it’s 1975 again…