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I liked this one so much I watched it twice. I have really appreciated the simpler storytelling and the stronger character work in the episodes thus far; but it’s nice to finally have an episode that works more with the speculative aspect of science fiction. “It Takes You Away” proves that you can in fact combine plot twists and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey with character development and have everything enhance everything else. The plot is suspenseful, the environments are convincing, the guest star is compelling, and everyone on Team Tardis has an important role to play. I have some things to say about how Jodie Whitaker responded to the challenges presented by this kind of plot which will not be 100% positive; nevertheless, I am still 1000% here for Whitaker’s Doctor and absolutely love watching her. After several episodes ( “Rosa,” “Demons of the Punjab,” to some extent “Witchfinders”) in which the Doctor has to act by not acting or by transferring her authority to someone else, in “It Takes You Away” the Doctor has to use all her experience and ingenuity to solve this problem and to save all the humans for all the other humans who need them.
OK, first of all, I want an episode set during the Woolly Rebellion, but I know I’ll never get it. Second, though, I just want to talk about how much I enjoyed the construction of this episode. Superficially it resembles Moffat plotting in that there are a lot of twists and fakeouts (first there’s a monster in the woods, then there’s this magical mirror, then a horrible hellscape, then a mirror-image universe). But it does NOT resemble Moffat plotting in that all of it matters. Instead of being asked to forget the previous segment every time we get a new twist, the plot loops back to these earlier bits to give them more meaning. So, for instance, take Ryan’s assumption when they first find Hanna that her father has just skipped out on her. Everyone’s mad at him for blurting that out, especially as Team Tardis knows he’s just projecting his own anger at his father onto Hanna’s. And yet, several plot twists later, we discover that actually, Ryan was right; Hanna’s father HAS abandoned her, he’s just done it in an insane way that Ryan could never have imagined. Through all the twists and turns, this episode remains a story about being left alone by the people you loved–whether it’s Hanna and her father, Graham and Grace, or the Solitract and our universe.
Another thing I appreciate is the fact that the fairytale motifs enhance the episode without dominating it. The little trail of sweet wrappers, for instance, irresistibly reminds any veteran of Sherlock of the abandoned sweet factory in “The Reichenbach Fall,” in which the Hansel and Gretel parallels were driven home with a bloody sledgehammer. Hansel and Gretel is brought into this episode more by evocation than by direct allusion: the child abandoned to hunger by her desperate parents, the clever attempt to avoid being lost which is ultimately foiled, the witch who traps people in her tempting gingerbread house. Only this time, the witch isn’t after the children, but the parents.
While I’m listing things I appreciate: for TV, Hanna’s blindness was dealt with pretty well. By casting a blind actor they avoided the raft of ‘blind’ acting cliches that one often gets, and while Hanna’s blindness matters, it’s not her only important characteristic. The Doctor’s ‘map’ is probably the most interesting part of that aspect of the plot. As judgmental as everyone is about Erik and his monsters trick, after all the Doctor and Ryan also try to use Hanna’s blindness to deceive her about how bad things really are; and in the end, the episode indicates that they were all wrong to do that. Still, not sad that Erik got to come back and read the Doctor’s message and feel bad about it.
For me, the strongest part of the episode is the part where they’re figuring out what’s going on. The rocks in the anti-zone may be a bit bargain-basement but that is one creepy fucking place, and I love Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs. Just love him. Would not love him if I had to rely on him to guide me through an anti-zone full of flesh-eating moths, but love how 100% stomach-driven he is. Goodbye Ribbons, I will miss you but you did kind of deserve it. I also like the initial moments of weirdness with the mirror in the real-world house– “We’d know if we were vampires, wouldn’t we?”–and the initial weirdness of discovering the mirror house. (On the second viewing, I confirmed that in fact, in the mirror house, Erik’s “Slayer” T-shirt is mirror-image, whereas it’s right-way-round in the real house; I’m sure there are a million other cues that were more subtle that I missed.) “What are you doing in my house?” “What are you doing in YOUR house?”
What happens from that point on is a bit of a mixed bag, and some of that is the writing. The whole thing with Graham and Grace takes too long. The bit in the back yard when he first finds her, and then gets sucked into believing in her even though he knows he shouldn’t, is very affecting. I love his conversation with her about the previous episodes; he’s so excited and so unable to really articulate but yet he wants so much for her to be able to share it with him. But proving to Graham that Grace isn’t real involves too much repetition, and it drags out Graham’s period of agonizing uncertainty for longer than the actor can sustain it. Yaz getting punched through the portal after going off about how Grace would have been the first to go through that mirror should have been all it took; we didn’t need the Ryan test as well.
However, the Doctor’s pitch to the Solitract about whether to keep her or Erik is something you would have to pry from my cold dead hands because it’s a thing of beauty in which something that I got very tired of during the Moffat Years–the Doctor’s self image as the saddest immortal in the universe who has Been Through The Worst and Lost the Most–is revitalized in a completely fresh way by the casting change. No, the Solitract doesn’t need a husband. Who fucking needs a husband if they’ve got Thirteen?
So about the frog.
OK, on the plus side: there is no way to represent a person talking to a conscious universe that isn’t going to be inadequate, so kudos to the team for going absurd with it. I am completely down with watching the Doctor talk to a frog in a whited-out space and pretending it’s a sentient anti-universe called the Solitract. But I think that on this last and farthest reach, the writing falls down a bit (yes, I know it’s hard to convey a universe in words, but give it a try, Doctor) and so, ultimately, does the acting. Whitaker is great in this episode as long as she’s playing opposite other actors. But playing a scene opposite something which is not alive and/or, from the actor’s POV, not even there is one of the major challenges for actors working in sci-fi and even experienced performers have trouble with it. Ian McKellan nearly had a breakdown trying to film the dinner scene in Bilbo’s house in “An Unexpected Journey,” in which he had to interact with thirteen green-screened posts to which the faces of the dwarves and hobbits had been attached. Faced with a talking frog–or, from Whitaker’s POV, probably just an empty white chair–Whitaker produces a kind of breathy wonder which more or less carries the scene but which I found sort of unsatisfying. I wonder if they just didn’t leave enough time–either in filming this sequence, or in terms of the amount of space it occupies in the final cut–for Whitaker to really produce all the emotions the Doctor is meant to be feeling at this moment. She talks about her grief for the universe she’s just said goodbye to, but I personally wasn’t able to really feel it.
But this is a minor flaw in what is otherwise a gem of an episode. I especially love the way that final scene revises a cliche Star Trek ending, in which Kirk says goodbye to the spacebabe he romanced and she promises to “watch the lights in the sky” and think of him. Played out between Thirteen and a frog who talks like Grace, this is on the one hand a very queer version of that trope and on the other hand finally appropriately strange for the ending of a whirlwind romance between two beings from different worlds with a lot of mutual attraction but with utterly incompatible needs.
In the end, Erik, Graham, and the Doctor all have to figure out how to say goodbye to their impossible dreams and turn toward the living beings for whom they’re responsible; and that becomes, if not a happy ending, at least the happiest ending they can have. Graham’s final rejection of Solitract Grace is based on his conviction that Grace would never choose to save Graham over Ryan, and it’s moving to see him recognize and accept and love that about her even as he suffers through losing her a second time. In return, he finally becomes Ryan’s grandfather. So he got something out of his trip to Norway, even if he didn’t get to sample the soil.