I’m not sure I’m only one who feels this way, but Doctor Who‘s “The Girl Who Died” seemed kind of … underwhelming. Or so it seemed on the surface anyway.
Don’t misunderstand. Vikings are cool: certainly cooler than fezzes. And definitely cooler than sonic sunglasses that lasted about as long as the fezzes did. And certainly Maisie Williams, as the actress that plays Arya Stark in Game of Thrones, brought a lot of resolve, fierceness, and presence to this episode in her own right. However, in the trailer for this season that Moffat flashed in front of our eyes, there were things hinted on that just … didn’t pan out the way they might have done.
The episode starts off at the end of a missing scene with aliens and epic space resolutions that we don’t see only for The Doctor and Clara to end up in early medieval times on Earth: near a Viking settlement. Then, after The Doctor’s sunglasses get destroyed by a simple Viking sword, they are taken to the settlement as prisoners: only for an alien posing as Thor to send rust-bucket soldiers with guns to abduct the strongest warriors.
Because, after all, it’s totally not the first time an alien race as impersonated human gods: especially not Norse deities.
The obligatory StarGate SG-1 reference aside, we find out these giant rust-buckets and the Odin-impersonator are called the Mira: yet another warlike race that wants to do some conquering and drink heavily distilled … testosterone? And even though Clara, yet again, can’t listen to The Doctor’s orders and gets herself and Ashildr, Maisie Williams’ Viking girl character, abducted along with the other soldiers it seems to be Ashildr herself that sabotages Clara’s attempts to talk the Mira down from dealing with the Earth: or at least her village. I guess Clara now knows what it feels like, but it’s doubtful these life lessons will sink in any time soon. And even then there is something inspiring about the defiance in Ashildr’s face and tone when she challenges the Mira.
I mean: it wasn’t as though the Mira were going to be intimidated by words anyway.
In the end, the way they actually deal with the Mira is brilliant and cruel in its own way. What is the worst way you can punish a renowned warrior race? It’s simple: you humiliate the crap out of them through trickery and blackmailing them with evidence of their dishonour.
There are two elements of note, however, in “The Girl Who Died.” The first is that we discover just why The Doctor chose the face of Lobus Caecilius: the Roman whose family he saved from Pompeii in his tenth incarnation. It does take a while for the realization to set in, but then you begin to remember something. Do you recall when The Doctor told Clara in “The Name of The Doctor” that the name he chose was a promise he made? Well, as it turns out The Doctor also considers regenerated faces promises. And it was his promise, then, in Pompeii to save what lives he can: no matter how terrible the odds truly were.
But then we have the other element. So Ashildr dies due to her role in The Doctor’s plan to defeat the Mira. We already had evidence that there was something strange about her. It’s true that we were also introduced to the fact that The Doctor’s idea of deja vu often occurs in reverse: that he has the feeling of having met someone before he actually does. So there was some evidence of what was about to happen.
You see, the thing about advanced warrior races is that they often have excellent medical technology. You know: the kind that existed in “The Empty Child?” Well, as it turns out, the Mira left some of that behind and … It’s funny really. I was personally annoyed with the fact that Moffat seemed to make such a big deal about this character in this Season’s trailer: as being somehow central to much of what was going to happen. Certainly, it would have been nice of Ashildr had been another Time Lady: perhaps someone The Doctor knew. It’s that kind of teasing of his that has gotten old pretty fast, which says a lot when you apply it to a show about time travel.
And yet … in a way this episode is kind of an intersection in The Doctor’s life. It’s not just about the flashbacks to his time as Doctor Ten, though they definitely play a part in that. The Doctor stated, in “The Lazarus Project” that “a longer life isn’t always a better one. In the end you just get tired. Tired of the struggle. Tired of losing everyone that
matters to you. Tired of watching everything turn to dust.” Then there is also his own encounters with and his responsibility for Jack Harkness and knowing what the price of immortality ultimately is.
Perhaps it’s different now that The Doctor knows there are other Time Lords left. Even so, in a poignant scene with Ashildr, she tells him that leaving her village — where they accept her as being strange — would be like death. So what will that mean for Ashildr now when she herself may well be immortal? Still, there might be some recompense in this. The Doctor did leave her with another Mira medical device, for someone else: in case she ever gets lonely and can’t bear to lose that one other person.
So there is that. And again, we are introduced to another familiar word from “The Witch’s Familiar”: hybrid. What does that mean and how will this all play out in Doctor Who‘s “The Woman Who Lived” … and beyond?
Imagine The Ray Bradbury Theater mixed with Tales From the Crypt and what you’ll get — at least in spirit — is Tales of Halloween. Yet while Axelle Carolyn is the creator of this collection of vignettes, she is only one of eleven popular horror directors — such as Lucky McKee and Darren Lynn Bousman, among others — to have included a short film in the overall structure of the piece.
It’s difficult to actually review a collection of supposedly interlocking films, so perhaps the best way is to look at the overall structure of Tales of Halloween. While Corin Hardy mentions Ray Harryhausen as one of his influences in creating the monsters in The Hallow, you can really see the shadows of Harryhausen’s animation in the miniature land panoramic view introduction to Tales and in Mike Mendez’s “Friday the 31st” and Neil Marshall’s “Bad Seed” vignettes with the cute alien and mutant pumpkin respectively.
But aside from some attempts to unite all the narratives, mainly in “Bad Seed,” most of the stories seem pretty well independent. In that, perhaps the collection as an overall and cohesive story structure fails. However, each vignette can be seen to stand as confections and diabolical plots in their own right. Certainly Dave Parker’s “Sweet Tooth” and Axelle Carolyn’s “Grim Grinning Ghost” create some nice standalone urban myths, along with demonic children facing and doling out justice in both Adam Giegrasch’s “Trick” and Paul Solet’s “The Weak and the Wicked” stand out as particularly strong and memorable stories.
Tone can usually be a casualty of creative collaboration. Whereas The Hallow seemed to be deciding what genre and tropes it was made of out, Tales of Halloween — depending on what tale you were viewing — veers wildly between the mundane, the silly, and the outright murderous and horrifying. Even the fact that each tale is supposed to take place in the same American town doesn’t always show through until “Bad Seed.”
Even so, there is something nostalgic in these vignettes that hearken back to candies, and games, and movies. Certainly, Adrienne Barbeau’s dark and delightfully full and villainous voice as a DJ on the radio narrating each vignette also adds to this spirit. Mainly, Tales of Halloween is a lot like the ghastly Sweet Tooth’s grab bag: sometimes you find delicious morsels, and other times you just find guts … until you realize that both are valid snack choices.
There are many different interpretations of faeries. Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow, seems aware of this fact: particularly with regards to how the Fae relates to Nature, being the Other in relation to humanity, and always bordering on the formless. Anyone who has read the original fairytales, the oral cautionary folklore of the past, understands just how dark and alien faeries can be.
The premise of the film is fascinating: in that Adam Hitchens, a British conservationist, his wife Claire, and their infant son move to an old forest in Ireland. They move there so that Adam can survey and eventually allow for construction in the area. The problem, of course, is simple: faeries or, as they called in the mythology of the film, the Hallow dwell in the forest … and they do not take kindly to having their territory intruded upon.
Or at least that is what it seems. Hardy creates an interesting take on faerie mythology that feeds well the film’s narrative: at least upon first glance. Through Adam’s own stubbornly scientific observations, viewers see the Hallow as a form of fungus that takes over its hosts: a life form that is highly photosensitive and possesses a great aversion to cold iron. They also create changelings: substitutions of stolen babies when they want to infiltrate a human settlement. It is also very clever how, as what seems to be a hive-mind fungus, the Hallow already has a presence in their wooden house: a ubiquitous threat making the audience aware of that tenuous line between Nature and human society.
However, how the Hallow interacts with the protagonists is where it all begins to fall flat. Even though, at the beginning, someone with a knowledge of faerie lore might wince at Claire taking off the iron bars around the windows of their new home, the nature of the Hallow itself — or themselves — just doesn’t possess any continuity. One moment it seems as though it wants to consume the family; at another it toys with them; and then it wants to spread beyond the forest even though it could have done so many times over for years.
The Hallow as a creature defines its own film structure. It seems stuck in a place between body horror, creature featuring, haunted housing, psychological, and zombie survival horror. Its as though, like its Fae monstrosities, it doesn’t know what it is, or whether or what kind of individuality it possesses. Even Adam and his dog, both of whom are infected by the Hallow fungi, seem to struggle with its mutations slightly but still ultimately fight against it. It just takes away from the actual horror element despite the excellently malformed Hallow creatures, the engrossing scenic view of the forest environment that could easily have been lost to time, and the very real terror a mother feels when her child is danger.
There were a lot of themes that could have been explored in more detail such as a loss or questioning of identity, or even specifics about the incredibly elaborate book of fairytales that the farmer Colm Donnell left the family to warn them out of the forest. The ending just bludgeons for a sequel that lacks even the mystique of its forest environment seemingly last to humanity and time, and the following jump scare just feels a little cheap. But the environment was played with well and there was some kind of closure and humanity for the characters involved.
Before the Toronto After Dark’s showing of the film, the audience was treated to a video made by Corin Hardy: telling them that they should have brought with them cold iron, a flashlight, and goggles. And it is by using these tools that the audience might see that while some trails in the forest of The Hallow might be predictable, Hardy does manage to build on and create a mythos: just as long as he protects that vision and keeps that light right in front of him.
The idea of it began with a spontaneous pillow fight at a New Year’s Eve rock concert in 2005. But it wasn’t until 2006 at the Vatikan goth bar in Toronto that the Pillow Fight League truly began. The Pillow Fight League — an all-women’s competitive sports organization — combined mixed martial arts and pillow smashing techniques against each other in sixty-six events all across North America and even so far as South Korea. For six years, the costumed superheroes, villains, and anti-heroes of the Pillow Fight League, under creative stage names such as Sally Spitfire, Carmen Monoxide, Olivia Neutron-Bomb and Guillotina battled their way through five minute unscripted bouts of pillow swinging and grappling until 2011 when the organization went into a hiatus.
For five years, with the exception of at least one group known as the Bedlam: All-Girl Pillow Fight Revue made up of some of the League’s members, the Pillow Fight League as a unified national and international sport, group, and event remained in slumber.
This all changed six months ago when Brandy Dawley purchased the rights to the original Pillow Fight League and its tenets: becoming its new President and vowing not only to re-awaken the League, but to introduce it to a far vaster dream. Even though sanctioned by ” the Intergalactic Pillow Fighting Association” according to its home page, the Pillow Fight League has created a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo in order to provide its athletes and staff with compensation, insurance, training, and contribution to and the reconstruction of overall infrastructure. There are also some very nice perks for backers that want to see the sixty-seventh game happen and who want to be a part of the next chapter of the League’s history.
Pillow fighting as a sport is a fascinating concept. Pillow fighting itself is often associated with girls sleepovers, model shoots, and male fantasies, but there is something incredibly innovative and fitting on a physical and philosophical level in utilizing something considered to be soft and pliant in order to create a harder and challenging sense of atmosphere, activity, and competition. Certainly, there is something subversive in this act.
It shouldn’t be surprising, given how The Doctor travels through time and space, that he has also encountered the fourth wall: and broken it. In fact, it’d not be all that shocking if this was neither the first, nor the last time, Doctor Who flirts with this form of paradox.
In either case, it is also not the last time we will be hearing about paradoxes. The Doctor begins the continuation to the last episode “Under the Lake” by introducing us, or reintroducing us to an old science-fictional staple: the bootstrap paradox for which he tells us to Google. After posing us with the conundrum of “Who wrote Beethoven’s Fifth,” a nice play on words and a Timey-wimey introduction to what is about to happen, or what has already happened rather, The Doctor plays a rock version of the song followed by another rock version of the Doctor Who theme.
With both bad-ass introductions upping the ante, we’re now left to see how Clara and The Doctor deal with the fact that he is now a ghost. But first we get to see The Doctor and his two temporary companions back in the 1980s at the Army base before it was flooded: where they meet the Tivolian before he died and the strange ship. There is a body of a tyrant called the Fisher King on board the vessel: deceased when the Tivolians had been conquered yet again by another species.
But the strange writing on the wall of the ship isn’t there and the missing ship’s power cell still in place. The Tivolian Prentice also has no idea as to who is projecting transmitter ghosts and has no knowledge of this technology. So we get more mysteries at this point in the game. And it only gets more convoluted and strange when The Doctor talks with Clara.
It’s a surreal scene, you have to admit. The Doctor is confronting the fact that he is going to die and become a ghost, while Clara is looking at the ghost itself: who has actually released the other ghosts from the Faraday cage. But this is a key event. Even Clara demanding that The Doctor more or less die on another Companion’s time doesn’t take away from this fact: that and the fact that his ghost is saying something different from the others. He is actually repeating the names of the crew, and Clara, over and again silently.
It also doesn’t take The Doctor long to realize that the Fisher King isn’t actually … dead. In fact, he probably knows that it is the Fisher King that wrote the writing on the ship’s wall: which imprints information into those that read it. What sort of information? Well, it’s the very information that manifests after the reader dies: and turns them into ghosts, which in turn changes them into transmitters to summon … something to Earth. In this way, this form of writing is actually very reminiscent of the Carrionites and their word-algorithm magic: except that it is more like a viral psychic meme that utilizes a person’s soul or essence to serve one function. As The Doctor states later, it is an ultimate form of violation beyond even time itself.
But the interaction with the Fisher King becomes even more eerie. When The Doctor actually does confront him — essentially meeting what he thinks will be his death — the monster reveals a lot of information. The Fisher King remembers the Time Lords. It is a strange thing when you consider the cracks in time, the second Big Bang, and the fact that The Doctor spent so much time and energy erasing all knowledge of himself and the Time Lords from the face of the universe. But this monster, who we have never seen before in any way, remembers this and even how they acted during the Time War itself.
Then more questions come up. The Fisher King reveals that if he kills The Doctor he can create a massive amount of transmitter ghosts: perhaps thirteen of them. In this way, once he goes back into that suspended animation pod we were introduced to in “Under the Lake,” this perversion of the Arthurian Fisher King myth can wake up centuries later, greet his people summoned from the stars, and conquer the Earth. But there is only one Doctor ghost that we’ve seen so far. How is this possible?
It’s at this moment that The Doctor knows what he has to do. First, he lies. He tells the Fisher King he erased the writing on the wall: that he would rather have a distorted and destroyed space-time than nothing at all. Then The Doctor, having already planted the power cell near the dam, causes the flood which kills the Fisher King.
But wait. The mysterious suspended animation pod we were introduced to in the last episode has been activating. This whole time we have been led to believe that the Fisher King will awaken and that his transmitter ghosts are about to bring his people down.
So what is in the pod?
Remember that Bootstraps Paradox? Recall just how much emphasis was placed on what was in that pod in “Under the Lake” and how The Doctor couldn’t open it? And remember how The Doctor isn’t supposed to cross his own time-stream?
The thing that you need to understand about time travel for The Doctor is the following. He still has to deal with fixed points in time: events he can’t change. However, he doesn’t have a human mind. He is a Time Lord. His mind works differently and in other tangents. And even if that weren’t an issue, there is the fact that just because the overall structure of an event can’t be negated, it doesn’t mean that details can’t be rewritten by someone who knows what they are doing.
Remember the Doctor’s ghost? Well, it makes a shriek like the one that summons the transmitter ghosts and lures them all to the Faraday cage again. It’s almost as though it did everything so that others could see him having this ability. But it seems so redundant … until you look back and see that The Doctor was watching all of this happening. Then The Doctor’s ghost disappeared.
And guess what — or rather who — comes out of the pod.
It turns out that the only reason The Doctor enacted his plan was before he saw the holographic ghost of himself that he hadn’t even made yet: and yet there it was. That is a bootstraps paradox.
Still, for all of the simple elegance and convoluted genius of this solution, it doesn’t come without a cost. Whereas the crew of “Into the Dalek” were, for the most part pretty brusque and hostile, and you almost got this satisfaction with the callous way The Doctor just didn’t bother being emphatic towards them, the cast for “Under the Lake” and “Before the Flood” are much more relatable. It really hits home when you see how Bennett realizes The Doctor knew that O’Donnell was going to die and how he had to prevent Bennett from crossing his own timeline to save her when the TARDIS went back one hour before they themselves arrives in 1980. There were moments where it seemed as though Bennett was seriously going to punch The Doctor: especially when he reveals he was doing this all to save Clara.
He did it all for Clara. The tone of that still comes out flat, but all right. All right Moffat. We get it. You want to remind us of how close they are. Why don’t you just bludgeon us with that a little more.
And even Clara, who is acting like a mirror to The Doctor again, gets called out on her behaviour: first by Cass and Lunn who asks just how easy it becomes for her to dispose of other people’s lives, and then by Cass herself who wants to go after Lunn who left to get Clara’s stolen phone. The ghosts also remain in the Faraday cage and Bennett has to look in on the remnant of O’Donnell and realize that even though some part of her is there, the woman he loved was long gone.
Cass has a bad ass moment, though, where even though she is deaf she actually bends down to feel the vibrations in the floor to know when to avoid getting killed by an ax to the head. And at the very least, she and Lunn finally admit their feelings to each other. So at least some emotional good came out of the resolution to this episode.
But now that this mystery is over, perhaps we will get to see just who the girl is who refers to The Doctor so familiarly as “old man” in the next episode of Doctor Who: “The Girl Who Died.”
You’d be forgiven to think that after the really good show with Doctor Who‘s “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar,” we would be subjected to something of far less quality. But “Under the Lake” proved to be something else entirely.
It doesn’t start with Clara and The Doctor in 1920s finery on a cosmic Orient Express, or even with The Doctor bungling his cover as a janitor with something that looks awfully and suspiciously like a proton pack. It does start with a team of scientists, not unlike “Into the Dalek.” But instead of automatically dealing with some people we have no sympathies or connections towards either way, we actually get introduced to the basic personalities of the team exploring a sunken city and an alien craft they found there in the not too distant future all things considered.
The episode starts off creepily enough: with a withered old Tivolian ghost and what seems to be the spirit of the group’s recently deceased leader.
They have no eyes and they seem to be repeating a phrase, silently, over and again. Sometimes they want to kill people with physical objects, and other times just talk to them. And, of course, they come out at night: or the artificial night of their own facility under the deep sea.
The Doctor and Clara do make it into this situation and it is here that you begin to notice something different. It starts off similar to most of their adventures: with Clara rather being somewhere else and questioning why they are there, but the Shut Up Clara element seems to be a bit more subdued this time around.
What’s even more refreshing is that the crew is already familiar with UNIT and know who The Doctor is: making his psychic paper pretty much redundant. At the same time, they take no sass from him: making it clear that while he finds the prospect of the afterlife fascinating, it did cost them their captain and comrade’s life. It shouldn’t be too surprising as well that even as The Doctor dismissively subverts the convention of the exploratory horror genre by already asking for the person in charge whom he should ignore, he also has Clara with cue cards to help him empathize with people and cover his own faux pas.
After all, The Doctor’s bedside manner is only exceeded by that of House.
When all else fails, he should have gone with: “I’m so sorry.” He used to say it all the time after all.
You would think that a group of scientists would have learned to examine details that stand out, right? Of course, you would also think that The Doctor would learn from his own experience: especially when the TARDIS herself wants to be out of that entire situation.
The Doctor should remember never to ignore Sexy.
Even as The Doctor is utilizing the minds of the crew and his Companion around him to figure out what the ghosts are and how to deal with them and just why they are there, it is the ranking member of the facility’s team — Cass — that clarifies some matters.
Cass is second in command of the Drum facility. She is also one of those individuals that, while reasonable and is quite willing to take The Doctor’s lead, has no issue taking him to task or calling him on his behaviour if it gets in the way of the mission and the dynamic she has with her crew. Cass is also deaf: a fact which eventually allows her to actually make out with the silent ghosts are actually saying.
But that information is not enough. There is also a suspended animation capsule from the craft that they recover from the ruins of the town under the lake: which they can’t open. And even though they manage to trap the ghosts in a Faraday cage, the ghosts manage to flood the station. The Doctor goes back in time to see where the craft came from and why the ghosts are being used as transmitters to summon or communicate with … something.
One thing you might notice, from the last two episodes, is that Clara is almost uncharacteristically quiet. Aside from a very forced and stilted conversation about her mental well-being by The Doctor in the TARDIS, her introductory lines, and the cue cards she is mostly passive and just letting others do the talking. And while this is definitely another refreshing moment when you consider all of the “it’s all about Clara” moments the last seasons had, it is sad that she isn’t actually … doing anything. So far we’ve seen her get “acted upon” and now go along with anything she’s told. It’s kind of disappointing that, at this stage in the game, it looks like this is the place to which her character has finally been reduced.
Yet this might change. Usually, in this kind of episode, The Doctor solves the mystery in an hour’s time. But he hasn’t. What’s worse is that another ghost has appeared in the water. And so now half the crew that left with The Doctor on his TARDIS seems to be gone, leaving Clara with the rest of them … and the hollow eyes of what seems to be her dead friend.
But nothing is as it seems and perhaps there might be … something to that capsule they can’t open. But maybe we will get to see Clara step up, or the plot work out in a “Timey-wimey” sense next time, on Doctor Who, in “Before the Flood.”
Perhaps it isn’t fair to compare Lilith Limited’s Allison Road to Hideo Kojima’s P.T. and the Silent Hills game that could have been, but the parallels are there. From vengeful white-clad ghost onryōwomen, locked doors, a ruined sense of domesticity, a slow building of dread and suspense, eerie radio broadcasts, to even so far as referencing “Dad was such a drag” there is definitely some overlap between Allison Road‘s prototype gameplay and the late and lamented Silent Hills demo.
However, the comparison ends there. Whereas P.T. was a demo with a closed reality of cyclical torment that slowly reveals its gruesome and surreal nature, Allison Road is an upcoming game with a house filled with a first-person voice-over perspective, some Christian iconography, odd noises becoming more frequent, a property you can survey from the outside, and eventually mysteries you can explore during the day … if the horrors of the night do not destroy you first.
But while Allison Road might have started off as a small fan project by Chris Kesler and eventually the endeavour of the expanded team Lilith Limited, its prototype gameplay has taken the YouTube Let’s Play community by storm and become a green-lit phenomenon on Steam.
And now Allison Road‘s path has branched out into a Kickstarter Campaign. While Silent Hills would have been on the PlayStation 4, Allison Road is planned to be on PlayStation, XboxOne, Mac, Linux, and PC: while having an Occulus Rift interface. Kickstarter rewards include designing a scare for the game, and a standalone Lucid Dream PC game set in the Allison Road universe.
Currently the Kickstarter Campaign is receiving a massive amount of support and rewards are disappearing fast. It is hoped by Lilith Limited that their nightmare will commence in 2016.
Let’s say we are still playing a game called Doctor Who. It’s to be expected that in a game between The Doctor, Missy, and Davros that the rules will change constantly, but imagine that both “The Magician’s Apprentice” and the more recent “Witch’s Familiar” share a one-word thesis statement.
What is that word?
Before we answer that, and realize why that is the correct answer, let’s look at what we might have gotten wrong. The conceit of “The Magician’s Apprentice” was that Davros was still in a nihilistic mood from “Journey’s End.” He already knew he was dying, there seemed to be nothing he could do about it, and it looked like it was going to be a case of “If I go down, I am taking you with me, along with my stupid, disobedient children.”
Seriously, my Daleks were too stupid to even notice the people they killed survived and failed to kill them again. Maybe I should have made snake people instead. Oh. Wait …
In retrospect, it might have also seemed clear that The Doctor symbolized the magician — who appeared out of nowhere on Skaro in the past to abandon a young Davros to Handmines — and that Davros was the apprentice to the ultimate sleight of hand and disappearing act of The Doctor. The act of abandonment and helplessness was changed by Davros into the creation of the ultimate survival of the strongest lifeforms that were fully dependable: on exterminating the hell out of you.
Some of this makes sense and you would totally be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that Steven Moffat attempted to lead us to: that Davros would force the magician of The Doctor to complete his disappearing act and help him go back in time to kill him as a child and destroy The Doctor’s own sense of compassion.
But there is something to be said about super-villains. The best super-villains are those with two qualities: complexity and, strangely enough, optimism. Most super-villains have a plan: even and especially when they are near defeat. It’s kind of like being a magician, or the apprentice to one. There is always something up your sleeve: which is even more incredible when you’re Davros and you only have one cybernetic arm left.
Now let’s bring Clara and Missy into the act. I know that a day or so before “The Witch’s Familiar” I remembered that Missy and Clara both have vortex manipulators. It explains a lot. So of course neither of them were dead. Right now I’m just going to say: if this episode will be remembered for anything aside from the compelling and uncomfortably poignant dialogue between The Doctor and Davros, it will be for the pure psychological torture porn situations in which Missy puts Clara.
Missy must not have been there on the day when her parents told her not to play with her food.
This is literal. We start off the episode seeing Clara hanging upside down from a rope on a desolate tree while Missy is sharpening a long stick. Of course, Missy isn’t going to make it that easy. I will give you several guesses as to who the witch and who the familiar are in this dynamic. Clara doesn’t so much need Missy to help her rescue The Doctor so much as survive the horrors of the Dalek City itself. Missy explains the situation and lets Clara come to her own conclusions, but she doesn’t make it easy for her. But whereas The Doctor might have a tough love attitude with Clara at times, and still quite a lot of leeway, we are always reminded of that scene in “The Magician’s Apprentice” where Missy compares Clara to a pet.
Missy manipulates Clara. She threatens her in an almost playful manner. She comes up with plans and makes Clara do all of the dirty work. You can see Missy’s utter disdain, and amusement at hanging Clara from a tree, tossing her into the Dalek City Sewer, the psychological game of turning her back to a stake-wielding Clara only to remind her of her powerlessness and disarm her with ease, and then making her sit in Dalek armour after killing its original host, and always leaving Clara wondering if and when she is going to turn her over the Daleks.
Missy sometimes likes tinning her food as well.
This last act of Missy’s is especially terrifying when you remember “Asylum of the Daleks” where one aspect of Clara, Oswin, was turned into a Dalek. If this Clara has any of Oswin’s memories, you can imagine her reliving that lost life over and again.
Clara is even more of a plot device in this episode and somehow loses more agency than before under Missy’s seemingly arbitrary but ultimately meticulous cruelty. It almost makes up for The Doctor, yet again, trying to convince us that right now Clara is his “be all and end all”: and the most important person in the show.
So here we have a magician who is drawn into the act of his inadvertent apprentice, and a witch manipulating her familiar into her own scheme. These dynamics will overlap in final acts against The Doctor.
The backdrop is excellent as well. We are shown more about Dalek physiology and the differences between the Cybermen that interact with their systems through the repression of emotion, and the Daleks that express their power through anger and hatred. There has always been something poetic about how the Daleks speak and Moffat has Missy explain this in an extremely clever and disturbing manner. I mean, who knew “I love you” in the Dalek language meant something along the lines of “Exterminate exterminate.” But the Dalek Sewers are even more beautiful, in a horrific way. Daleks don’t consume enough to make a lot of waste. However, they have to put their dead somewhere. There is just one thing … Daleks are extremely hard to kill, and they do not die of old age. Imagine vast underground chambers where dying and rotting Daleks merge together into dark filth filled with pain, helplessness, and nothing but their own hate. It’s the literal foundation of Dalek society.
Dalek Sewers double as Graveyards for undying pain and suffering. Aren’t all great societies and civilizations founded on the quality of their plumbing?
But then we travel above the Sewers and back to the top. You might find it kind of sad just how the interaction between The Doctor and Davros actually goes.
Because this …
After The Doctor steals Davros’ chair — and you realize that Davros pretty much has no legs, or an arm and you get the lovely spectacle of seeing his metal spine sticking out of his torso — we get another “Genesis of The Daleks” moment where Davros tells The Doctor that he has been keeping himself alive through wires and tubes that connect him to all the Dalek race and entices him to destroy them.
… isn’t deja vu at all. Oh no siree.
And then we have the greatest feat of the episode. Whereas seeing the usually self-sanctimonious Clara humbled constantly is nice (there isn’t even a Shut Up Clara Mini-Game in this entire episode), Moffat actually manages to make us … feel sorry for Davros.
Oh it’s true. We know that Davros is most likely planning something, and he is, but you realize that everything he is saying to The Doctor is absolutely true from his perspective. Davros really did want to save his own race. He saved them by his own standards. He wanted to live so that he could further aid them in surviving and thriving. What is really touching in a weird kind of way is seeing the rapport between these age-old enemies: and Davros accepting his own mortality is reminiscent of The Face of Boe dying. It makes you want Davros to die this episode: for an entirely different reason. And look: it turns out he still has his eyes after all … and he’s crying.
But he probably stole those eyes from someone else because, what a surprise, he tricks The Doctor and tries to use his regeneration energy to make his Daleks more powerful: and keep himself alive. It is kind of a let down to be honest. Here we had a story that could have been quite poignant: with an antagonist that actually shows some humanity before he dies, or perhaps just wants The Doctor to give him a mercy kill.
Seriously, Doctor, if there was ever a clear case for euthanasia …
I mean, it’s pretty horrible to be Davros when you think about it: the terrible will that drove him through all that pain and torment — by others and his own hand — to create a legacy that has tried to destroy him so many times. Or at the very least there was that hint of Davros getting his ultimate moral revenge.
But as I said before, super-villains have to be generally optimistic — read: ambitious — and Davros and his treachery makes sense for what he is.
And Davros is going to screw you over in five, four, three, two …
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only heavy-handed villainous final act. After Missy actually rescues The Doctor — and hilariously pokes Davros in his one eye — she tries to trick The Doctor into killing Clara: who is still trapped in her Dalek armour and can only say “I’m a Dalek” and “exterminate.” Or so it seems.
And here is where things get interesting. Aside from the fact that Davros is, in The Doctor’s own words, “a moron” for not realizing that regeneration energy would affect the rotting Daleks in the Sewers — “The Sewers are revolting” being one of the best lines in this entire episode — Missy’s long and elaborate story about how she tried to save Clara from “the Dalek” would trip so many alarm bells in The Doctor’s mind that even the TARDIS crashing would be more subtle. Surely Missy understood that The Doctor knew she was more of a liar than he is and is far less trustworthy.
Traumatized. For. Life.
But here is where the game reaches its most important point. Remember the beginning of this article: how I asked you if you were going to find a one-word thesis statement for this two-part season’s opener, what would it be?
Daleks have a limited vocabulary. Aside from the Cult of Skaro, only one other Dalek said a word that was an anathema to its existence: such as when the Dalek in “Dalek” asked The Doctor for “pity.”
Clara, through her Dalek armour, asked for “mercy.”
And there it is. “Mercy.” How is that even possible for a Dalek to say without throwing up a little bit in its non-existent orifice of a mouth? But that word is the thesis of both “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar.” It is The Doctor’s greatest strength.
Cue in the timey-wimey. That’s right. It turns out Sexy didn’t die. TARDISes apparently have the ability to disperse into scattered molecules. So Sexy takes The Doctor back in time: back to where he abandoned a small child. He then destroys those mines with the gun he cobbled together and takes little lord Davros back home to, most likely, his fascist and warmongering family.
Seriously though: trauma for the rest of his life.
At the beginning of “The Witch’s Familiar,” Davros laments that all Daleks have a genetic defect of “respect” towards their creator. But it seems as though they have another “defect” as well. And now we know why.
Then consider Missy. Missy, after The Doctor realizes Clara is in that Dalek armour, reminds him that there are friends in enemies and vice-versa. Then she leaves. She must have known that the Daleks knew that word: mercy. She just made both The Doctor, and in particular Clara, work and suffer for it.
So there we go now. Davros and Missy are most likely still alive: and scheming. Clara becomes the plot device that resolves another episode yet again and inspires The Doctor to perhaps subliminally influence Davros into placing some compassion into the Daleks. We even get to see more tantalizing hints as to what The Doctor’s and Missy’s previous lives on Gallifrey might have been like while not spoiling the rest of their character development. And The Doctor continues to possess one power greater than Time Lord regeneration. One magic word.
It always seemed clear, at least to many Five Nights at Freddy’s fans, that Scott Cawthon was not finished with Five Nights at Freddy’s even after stating that his fourth gamewould be the last in the franchise. Yet what has always been striking was the fact that while the premise of the games was that the animatronics of Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Freddy and friends were possessed by the spirits of dead children, the animatronics themselves seemed to have personalities and history beyond just being haunted.
When you also consider how much time Scott Cawthon put into designing these animatronics and their toy selves, it isn’t really surprising that he wanted to create a new game like FNAF World.
Perhaps the first clue that FNAF World was going to happen came from FNAF 4 itself: in the form of its easter-egg Fredbear and Friends.
The main indication that FNAF World was going happen was through Cawthon’s constant website updates. Cawthon’s fanbase got to watch as his page changed from a thank you tribute with all of its motley antagonists, into a shinier version of its former self replete with new additions and cartoon “Adventure” character makeovers.
It was during this transition, from horror into fantasy, that Cawthon informed his fans on Steam of his intentions to make FNAF World as a role-playing game: in which all of the animatronics, formerly nightmarish enemies, will become its player characters.
This transformation from Five Nights at Freddy’s horror into FNAF World‘s adventure is not unlike watching Disney create cartoons from the grisly nature of early folklore. Still, early Disney always had a dark and adult sensibility and with Scott Cawthon’s storytelling abilities, FNAF World will have its own intriguing story premise.
Imagine an opening to a television program about time-travel for which you have been waiting. There have been hints as to what to expect but, given the nature of Doctor Who, it never starts the way you think it will. “The Prologue” actually wasn’t part of this episode, but its own minisode leading to “The Magician’s Apprentice.”
There is a plane up ahead that wouldn’t be out of place in World War I. There is also a man with a bow and arrow. You wonder if this is going to start on some other world or time: with Vikings on spaceships or something to that effect. Well, you got the first two parts right. It does take place in another space and time. Then you see a child. At first you think it might be Maisie Williams showing us her new role. But it isn’t Maisie Williams. It is a boy: a young, dirty, terrified boy.
It is at this point, if you’ve been following the rumours about the opening two-part story arc of Season Nine, that you know. You just know who it is.
This child is surrounded by what seems to be Handmines: most likely genetically engineered creatures created to drag people underground to their deaths. You’d be forgiven if you mistook them for your typical Weeping Angel fare. You know: the ones that like to hide under snow or dirt and grab you: stealing away the moments of your life. But no: these Handmines seem to just plain outright kill you.
It’s a good thing that The Doctor came to rescue this poor, scared child from these monsters that just dragged the archer soldier to his death, right? Only …
Think about your Whoniverse lore. Think about a world where archaic weaponry exists side by side with generations of different technology. Think about a world that has been at war for a thousand years. It’d be easy to make the mistake of not recognizing this world after so long and seeing how it — and its denizens — were portrayed in the Fourth Doctor’s run. I mean, they are all supposed to be heartless, evil, Spencerian fascists right? Certainly not ones that would take the time to save a child.
The Doctor asks the child what world this is, and the child doesn’t understand. As far as he knows, this is the only world in existence. The Kaled people, along with their enemies the Thals thought they were basically the centre of the universe before, millennia later, the First Doctor came and disabused their descendants of that notion.
But the code that unlocks the first level of this game is just one word. Just one name.
Davros.
It’s hard to recognize him. He’s young. He still has his eyes, his arms, and his legs. There is no cunning or twistedness in him: just fear, and The Doctor’s imperative.
He must survive.
Of course, The Doctor realizes the implications of this and he stands there, in horror, trying to decide what he will do.
Now we go forward. Colony Sarff, a being made of multiple snakes, is searching for The Doctor on behalf of Davros. I mean, why wouldn’t he use Daleks or Dalek agents and this strange composite snake person instead might be beyond all of us, but there the dramatic effect to consider. As it turns out, Davros is dying. I mean, since the last time you saw Davros in “Journey’s End”:
I name you … the Destroyer of Worlds … aghhhhhh …
But hey: when has death stopped Doctor Who villains in a mythological struggle with their nemesis anyway? But no. It seems legitimate. Davros has seen better days … ages and ages ago, but he does seem pretty physically ill. He knows the best way to find The Doctor is to get to his friends.
The Doctor has a funny notion of friendship. I mean, aside from Missy — who, blithely makes us aware of the obvious that she isn’t dead either (again, when do Doctor Who villains actually permanently die) — there’s also Clara and her priorities to consider. But one thing at a time.
All ships freeze above the Earth: threatening to fall on nuclear power plants. Is this Davros’ work? No. It’s too crude and almost insane. Actually it is insane and we all know who likes to be insane. UNIT contacts Clara because they can’t get to The Doctor. However, they do have a Doctor channel that he has forgotten about and … someone is contacting them through it.
Hmm … Someone has knowledge of UNIT having a Doctor channel. Who has dealt with UNIT before? Who knows the Gallifreyan calculations to access it? Who has been both an ally and captive of UNIT? Who is insane?
Yeah. That lady.
Honestly, here is the part in a Doctor Who episode when what I like to call the Shut Up Clara Mini-Game comes into play. I mean, here she is contacted by UNIT to find The Doctor but instead has to meet Missy. Usually, what I like to call the Shut Up Clara Mini-Game happens when Clara berates The Doctor for something petty, has a temper-tantrum, has no idea what’s going on, and generally makes the situation all about her. But strangely Clara is rather subdued in this scene with Missy: probably because Missy is threatening to kill people, is killing people, cost Danny Pink his life a second time, and she’s kind of flabbergasted as to why The Doctor would send that strange disk — that turns out to be his last will and testament — from “The Prologue” to Missy instead of her.
I’m not going to lie: having Missy compare Clara to a pet was pretty much the sickest burn rivaling the holocausts that she was threatening over the Earth. But together they figure out where The Doctor is: leading to a Vortex manipulator of Missy’s and the next scene.
And what an absolutely bad ass scene it is. The Doctor is in medieval times and facing a long-suffering warrior on an empty tank and with a guitar. No one in the battling arena of that time seems to actually care about that, as per a lack of a Temporal Prime Directive or a stereotypical “It’s a Demon!” response. And hey: it’s one of the few times we see Mr. Cantankerous actually having fun.
So you just know something really bad is going to happen.
Of course the two women were being followed and Colony Sarff tracks them down. It’s funny. What do you think would truly disturb The Doctor? A threat from a monster made of snakes? Seeing Missy again? Knowing that Davros and the Daleks are probably coming for him?
No. What disturbs The Doctor is a sonic screwdriver: an ancient one handed to him by Colony Sarff.
It might have registered even before this what just happened between a young boy named Davros and a flabbergasted Twelfth Doctor. Of course, The Doctor wasn’t going to kill a poor defenseless child: even if one day he’d grow up to be an omnicidal psychopath. But he also knows that if he helped him survive the Handmines, he would go on to fulfill his future of horror and genocide. So what does The Doctor do?
Because these Handmines totally won’t inspire the appearance of the Daleks in a young and impressible mind. You know: creatures designed to drag others down to the depths with them. Not at all.
He does what he does best. After initially telling Davros what amounts to the idea that he must survive at all costs, and then realizing who he is dealing with … The Doctor runs. The Doctor abandons a small, scared little boy — not unlike himself at that age if he had grown up in a Thousand Year War — to his own devices: with the screwdriver he threw to him to help communicate with him … before he knew he was talking to a boy who would become a monster.
“Hey Davros. Actually, there are worse things than death. See you later … or rather, I hope I won’t.”
Imagine what that does to someone who had already grown up in a multi-generational war. Imagine what seeing a soldier trying to reassure and rescue you being dragged down to his death would do to you. Imagine someone who promises to save you and then leaves you to die: telling you beforehand to survive at all costs.
Suddenly, all the books that dealt with Davros’ past are swept away: leaving us with his new dynamic with The Doctor. Davros made the Daleks and, as Davros likes to point out, The Doctor made his Companions. But now we see that The Doctor essentially made Davros as well.
Remember how the First Doctor was basically responsible for releasing the Daleks on the Universe by his insatiable curiosity: essentially causing them to come across the Time Lords and eventually start the Last Great Time War? Well now we really know that The Doctor screwed up. A lot.
The ending of “The Magician’s Apprentice” pulls even less punches than the beginning. It doesn’t fuck around. We do get one Shut Up Clara Mini-Game: where she berates him for lying to her about knowing Missy wasn’t dead — and considering her his best friend over her — but it’s kind of halfhearted and she does have something of a point, only offset by hoping to continue their conversation and therefore let The Doctor survive.
But Davros has no intention of killing The Doctor. No. It’s unclear why Davros forgot about having a sonic screwdriver or seeing a mysterious man disappear in front of him. Perhaps dying makes him remember things. If so, he should probably recall his whole existence as Davros has died. A lot. And he’s supposed to be a genius level scientist who created an entire advanced race and he can’t clone himself a new body?
Potential plot-holes aside, such as Missy having trouble dying and always having a crazy backup plan, let’s play that game I promised you at the beginning.
Imagine you are a child left to die thousands of years ago and grew up in war. You see how fallible everyone is who vows to protect you or help save you. You are crippled and twisted during this war. You begin to think that people would safer in tanks and without the illusions of weak emotions such as love or compassion. One day, you encounter your worst enemy and he defeats you time and again: until you remember he was the one that left you to die at the very beginning.
The replaying the time of when he was the Fourth Doctor on Skaro is delicious enough. So what do you do when you realize you are now, finally, dying?
You kidnap The Doctor’s friends. You get The Doctor to you. You make him watch as your Daleks kill the person who is jealous over you being his arch-nemesis, the Impossible Girl that he’ll now never be able to play Shut Up Clara with again and … worse … Your Daleks kill his oldest companion.
You destroy the TARDIS. You kill Sexy.
So, what do you do now? Do you kill The Doctor in his moment of despair? Do you kill him before you die? Oh no. No, see, that is too easy. Instead, you give him a choice. You offer to let him play a game. You are already dying. Your creations have already rendered you obsolete. You have taken everything from The Doctor now. You give him an offer.
You see, The Doctor always prides himself on his sense of compassion. You always saw that as his undoing. Now, you have made him see that. Or perhaps deep down you are punishing him for what you think is cowardice that day on Skaro. You offer him a way to change the fate of his friends. Your replayed conversation with him for all those years ago, from “Genesis of the Daleks” is no accident. You make sure he hears his words to Sarah Jane Smith from so long ago.
“If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives… could you then kill that child?”
You already know he feels guilty for abandoning you to the Handmines and to time. What a better revenge than to make your old self-righteous nemesis betray and destroy his own ideals to kill a child in order to save those he loves. You’ve methodically taken away his best enemy, his Companion, and his TARDIS. He has already given up on his sonic screwdriver. Slowly and carefully, you are attempting to obliterate everything that The Doctor is: to prepare him for this last warped mission that is your revenge. The fact is, either way, you win. And either way, The Doctor loses.
Win / Win for Davros.
You thought that your final victory was the destruction of reality itself. But, truthfully, it is the obliteration of your enemy’s own reality — his thoughts and beliefs — by his own hand that is a triumph greater than any monster you have ever created.
Like “Deep Breath” last season, “The Magician’s Apprentice” doesn’t pull any punches. We will just have to see if it can continue its own sense of momentum next time in “The Witch’s Familiar.”
Mythic Bios 