Archive of Our Own

Gripping. Eerie. Nail-biting. Episode three of this series of Doctor Who was edge of your seat, hide behind the sofa telly. As one of two parts it sets up the next episode with its horrific cliff-hanger brilliantly. Toby Whithouse has written a fantastic episode, one which nods back to his Wild West homage A Town Called Mercy.

Under the Lake is an adventure chock-full of running, with a pinch of horror. It opens on a submerged, scientific, base in the year 2119 where a crew - later revealed to be military, for all that they're funded by a Petroleum company - discover an alien ship on a lake bed and salvage it. Bringing it aboard they also, unexpectedly, invite in ghosts and the first of a series of deaths as the crew are picked off one at a time.

Captain Johnathan Moran dies first, pushing his colleague Cass out of the way of the shuttlecraft engines when they ignite. Almost immediately, he reappears as a ghost now teamed up with the Victorian-garbed original figure whose arrival heralded his own death. What triggers the ghosts? What are they after? These two questions thread through the plot, driving action and mounting tension, Toby Whithouse using the environment in which the episode is set to ramp up the danger.

When we first meet the surviving crew they're safe in the Faraday cage. The murderous ghosts cannot enter therein - much like radio waves - and so are something more than a biological or spiritual phenomenon. We're told they can only come out at night. Then Toby Whithouse uses the submerged stations artificial environment to subvert day and night, literal ghosts in the machine tampering with base's computer systems. And, just to underline the increasing danger, the TARDIS cloister bell tolls mournfully in the background.

It was last heard tolling on Trenzelore, the one place the Doctor should never have gone. The sound itself is a lovely piece of foreshadowing, for the cliff-hanger at the end of this episode, but actually there's foreshadowing shot through this entire episode.

We first see the Doctor stepping out of the TARDIS, patting her side, questioning what may be wrong - for something is. The TARDIS is uneasy at first; desperate later. Yet both her adventurers over-ride her concerns. Clara is gun-ho, racing towards adventure and the Doctor? Later believing the base is being menaced by actual ghosts, he's so enthused he pulls the handbrake on the TARDIS over-riding all her concerns. He may now admit he has a duty of care towards Clara (that realisation seemingly perfunctory, a nod to worries Clara expressed back in "Kill the Moon" but which she now seems to have evolved past, leaving them on a planet with her sunglasses and most of her dignity) but he utterly overlooks the fact that the TARDIS may feel she has a duty of care towards her Doctor.

That duty of care (of a captain to his or her crew or companion) is evidenced by Cass, later in the episode, when the ghosts are trapped in the Faraday cage and the crew is safe to leave the base. That is Cass's urging. It's the Doctor who reminds crew (and audience) that most of those present are military soldiers, and that Ben is a scientist. The Doctor points out their near obligation to stay and investigate. His curiosity and enthusiasm are addictive, enticing, and speak directly to the show's younger audience. His fascination, the questions he wants to ask the ghosts: if they still get hungry, what their experience of death is like, the questions themselves are childlike, akin to what a child may wonder, abstractly, about death.

Just as Clara raced ahead, through abandoned corridors, thrilled with this call to adventure here too the rest of the crew are persuaded, with very little arm twisting, that if they left they'd wonder all their days what might have happened.

Throughout, we see the Doctor at his most professorial. Lecturing. Questioning. Pushing the crew of would-be companions to help unravel the mystery before them, praising and cajoling. And, in so doing, Toby Whithouse manages to make full use of his fairly large ensemble cast - each character having a role and a purpose. But, it has to be said, Clara is a little sidelined as action unfolds, for all that she's holographic bait for the ghosts chasing her as they try to entrap the three figures in the Faraday cage.

In my opinion, Whithouses's earlier work on Town called Mercy informs this episode. O'Donnell, in her crush on the Doctor, her glee when praised and her faux nonchalance, is very reminiscent of one Amy Pond. And Ben? Given that Arsher Ali George from "Arthur and George" was cast, the first correlation called to mind is that of Watson and Sherlock. But his dialogue and reactions remind me of Rory Pond er Williams.

Ben: "You're going to go back in time. How can you do that?
Doctor: Extremely well."

And by the end of the episode these two characters, so reminiscent of the Pond's in word and deed, go haring off on adventure in the TARDIS. And the Doctor? He's separated from Clara. And Cass and Lunn.

Peter Capaldi does a phenomenal job - much of the emotional tone of the episode pivoting around the Doctor. His performance is, to my mind at least, increasingly, a direct homage Tom Baker's Doctor. The teeth are a little more pronounced, the look is directly to camera and the voice, the voice. Damn if I don't hear Four in the intonation! It's the curls growing in, atop of his head. And then there are the moments when Capaldi reminds me of Ten: "I like adventures as much as the next man. As much as the next man's man even."

I do think the nods to the Fourth Doctor are deliberate, both in the acting and in the writing. In fact, I think the current production team are deliberately drawing on influences from what came to be known as the Hinchlife era in Doctor Who. From 1974 to 1977 writer/script editor Robert Holmes and producer Philip Hinchcliffe drew on horror tropes seen in episodes such as "Pyramids of Mars", "The Brain of Morbius" and "Planet of Evil". Plus, given the hibernation chamber and the submerged base, I think they're deliberately referring to The Seeds of Doom wherein an alien pod is discovered buried in the Antarctic permafrost, brought into a scientists base and proceeds to grow, opening stinging people and infecting them so that they mutate into alien humanoid plant-life and The Ark in Space wherein the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivann arrive on aged space station and Sarah Jane is mistakenly placed into cryonic suspension by the station computer. The space station houses an entire crew asleep in suspended animation who've been attacked by an alien insect Wirrn.

For all that I adored the direct nod back to Sarah Jane Smith,

two moments in the episode did jar. I don't buy the allusion to such a socially inept, or possibly autistic Doctor, shoe-horned in here. I don't believe he'd need a pocket full of cue cards to help guide him on his travels. It's a little too much of a nod to Moffat's interpretation of Sherlock. Worse, it implies the Doctor is the way he is because he can't be otherwise. The Doctor has always been somewhat rude or abrupt, not suffering fools gladly; or otherwise.

Sarah Jane: "What's gone wrong this time?"
The Doctor: "Nothing. Nothing at all. What makes you think something's gone wrong?"
Sarah Jane: "Because you always get rude when you're trying to cover up a mistake."
[Planet of Evil]

Tom Baker's Doctor may have had a gloss of politeness (which may or may not have been meant) and a large smile, but he could be cutting nonetheless. It never meant he doesn't care, just that he doesn't conform to Earth sensibilities, in any century. And, to my mind, there's no reason why he should. The other jarring moment, for me, was when the Doctor failed to be able to sign with proficiency. Whilst it is understandable that casting Sophie Stone probably led to the casting of Zaqi Ismail as Lunn (in part possibly due to his BSL skills)

I assume the Doctor would be able to sign with or without the TARDIS translation circuit working normally.

Plotting throughout this episode is phenomenal, action is incredibly taut. But, aside from fantastic pacing and the odd moment of levity interspersing with moments of horror, the episode also draws on strong murder mystery elements. The alien craft brought in from the submerged village is, it is later revealed, missing a suspended animation chamber which should house the pilot, and a fuel cell far more powerful and lucrative than any oil Vector Petroleum could find through drilling or fracking. Hence, Pritchard's greed leading him to his doom. And then there are the four markings scratched into the interior wall of the shuttle craft which the TARDIS cannot, or will not translate.

The Dark
The Sword
The Foresaken
The Temple

The meaning of these markings is learnt thanks to the ghost's silent mutterings being successfully lip-read by Cass. The markings are themselves co-ordinates, an X marking the spot where the suspended animation chamber can be found. What should be questioned is why Lunn (the crew maker who signs for Cass and who, it is implied by Cass's treatment of him, may be a civilian) is spared by the ghosts:

"What's wrong with you? Why didn't he hurt you?"

I also wonder what the temple, or flooded village church, (which housed the hibernation chamber) may mean to the ghosts. After all they were kneeling when they first appeared to the Doctor and Clara. Kneeling and possibly praying? It's a compelling question, as interesting as the reason why the TARDIS couldn't, or wouldn't, translate the markings etched into the shuttle wall.

Design-wise the look of this episode is gorgeous - from the overly white shuttle craft whose lines remind me more than a little of a Star Trek runabout - to the corridors I can't help but feel the Doctor and Clara last ran through on Skaro. It feels contemporary, rather than set in a near future, and is more shocking because of that.

Doom and encroaching disaster are brilliantly foreshadowed, by Whithouse throughout the episode. One ghost begats another. Pritchard's greed lead to his death, the carrot enticing him into to suit up in deep diving gear and head off outside the submerged station is the missing alien power cell, spoken of by the Doctor. The discovery of his Pritchard's death, his ghost appearing in the refectory, moments later his body bobbing about near the sea floor visible through the window, of course foreshadows the awful twist at the end of the episode when the Doctor's ghost appears from out of the gloom.

That moment of discovery (the figure of the Doctor moving forward through the dark, murky, water) together with Clara's and our realisation that something terrible has happened in the past, is truly horrific.

"Every-time I think it couldn't get more extraordinary, it surprises me…][…I could kiss it to death."

And at the end of the episode we're left with the Doctor's ghostly figure and a suspended animation chamber, which can't be opened. A chamber we can only hope holds the Doctor - who in the gap between episodes - may be Shrodinger's cat. If it is him in the chamber, then it can be said he both is and is not alive.

The Doctor's quote above encapsulate what I felt most watching the episode. Fingers crossed I'll feel the same watching the second part.