Jamie Mathieson wrote what was probably my favourite episode last series: Mummy on the Orient Express. Taut, well-plotted, with excellent characterisation, it seemed Mathieson both understood and advanced the Doctor's relationship with Clara. His writing was fantastic, layered, nuanced. So too his earth-based episode Flatline. Steven Moffat has written episodes which I adore: Blink, Listen, The Doctor Dances etc...
The Girl who Died, in contrast to both writers' previous work, is nowhere near as good. Oh, the acting is superb (from Peter Capaldi and Maisie Williams above all) but the actual plot? It's weak. Thin, at best.
The episode opens on a fantastic teaser where the Doctor (in the TARDIS) is apparently under attack (for all that we didn't see battle-fleets) with Clara Oswald floating in the vacuum of space; something deadly and spiderish crawling up the inside of her space suit. And, just like last week, she's screaming to be saved. Companion in Distress. A direct contrast to Clara (later in the self-same episode) moving forward into danger, calm, collected, facing the leader of the Mire raiding party and negotiating her way out of danger with aplomb.
And in the role of Doctor!Clara's companion? Ashildr steps in. Hot-headed. The catalyst for all the subsequent action which unfolds. Ashildr first comes to our attention because she captures the Doctor's. In reply to Clara's querying whether or not he knows the young girl he's just noticed, we learn that for a time-traveller premonition is simply the act of remembering "in the wrong order". But, what's interesting about Ashildr isn't the fact that the Doctor remembers someone he's not yet met. Her role (apart from daughter to her father) is that of outsider and catalyst, of story-teller - and in so being - a mirror to the Doctor: Mad-man in a box, telling stories. Think back to Eleven (sitting by Amy Pond's bedside) telling his sleeping friend the story of the universe, so that universe could come back into being. Ashildr both tells and enacts stories, with puppetry, to keep her loved ones safe. So, with a little help from a Mire helmet she transmits, or tells her vision, (television) of a giant sea serpent attacking the pillaging Mire troop. That vision, picked up by each helmet worn by a Mire warrior, creates the reality of troops fleeing a puppet-show (and a half-baked trap in a barn) captured on Clara's camera phone for posterity and blackmail. The outcome of the battle scene isn't just an allegory about reputation and gossip, in today's internet age, but also a rather effective nod back to Plato's Allegory of the cave. The Mire (and we the audience) are watching shadows on the cave wall, perceiving them as real.
For all that Ashildr will become a facet of the Doctor by the end of this episode (sharing the fate all his companions face, the longer they travel with him) she stands as his direct inverse, or reflection for most of the episode.
Ashildr may have thought of herself as strange, may never have belonged ("the boys thought I was a girl, the girls thought I was a boy") and yet, even as outsider, is much loved and pivotal in her community. In Listen Clara travelled across time and space and met a little boy, crying himself to sleep, terrified of the monster under the bed in barn at Lungbarrow. Obviously he didn't want to grow up and join the army. Obviously he, like Ashildr, didn't want to leave home and may have been sleeping in the barn to get away from the teasing and bullying of other children. What's implied, in Williams' scenes with Capaldi, is that (unlike Ashildr) the Doctor wasn't accepted by his community. In cleaving to her home, and seeing the value of staying in one place Ashildr represents everything which is antithesis to the Doctor - who ran away from home and who advises the village to run.
The arrival of the Mire in the Viking village (or above it given that they're captured by teleport and their leader appears as a projection in the atmosphere) reminded me most of Knightmare's Dungeon Master Treguard, whose head used to appear above the action, looking down on players trying to solve the Dungeon puzzle, rather than bringing to mind Odin from myth or Marvel. Who is attacking and why is almost incidental, the attack and the foiling of the Mire purposely pantomime-esque. This, signposted by the nicknames the Doctor gives the men he's having to attempt to turn into fighters - Lofty, Noggin the Nog, Heidi - and the Benny Hill music which underlays the fight sequences. This purported A plot, of course, is secondary to the Doctor's own decisions, realisations and actions. His moment of deja-vue drives the B plot, in which he saves the girl who saved her village, saving her forevermore, because he can.
Previously the Doctor tells Clara that losing people has become unbearable. And, thus, I wonder where in the timeline we are. This series, aside from O'Donnell's death (with whom he may have connected) the Doctor hasn't lost anyone. Last series he lost Danny Pink, but it was Clara's loss rather than his own. And he lost Osgood. Before that? Eleven did lose people he loved: Handles. River. His Ponds. His Impossible Girl jumping into his time stream, but it's been two years televisually and I wonder if those loses still resonate amongst younger viewers.
I assume they don't.
Mind you there's always repeats and Netflicks etc. so, maybe, there are younger viewers out there crying as Eleven sits on a park bench and reads a letter from Amelia Pond.
For people who joined the show with David Tennant (or for whom Tennant was their Doctor) there are resonances here - purposefully placed - to remind us of the Doctor's Time Lord Victorious tantrum against regeneration. It's primarily the way the Doctor tells Clara: "I can do anything. But I'm not supposed to. It's in the way Clara asks what the rules of time travel are and he implies there are none. And Clara refers to the Doctor as a tidal wave - an oncoming storm - rather than someone making careful ripples in the multiverse. I wonder if the journey arc this series is going to be one in which there's nothing stopping the Doctor - if he doesn't stop himself - and the comeuppance from that.
We see him as Ten, reaching his hand out to the man who once wore a younger version of the face he wears now (a clip from Fires of Pompeii edited into the episode) as the Doctor remembers why he frowned himself the face he now sees in the mirror. And so the Doctor remembers he defines himself by saving people - individuals - rather than humanity as a homogenous whole. In the clip the person who implores him to save someone, anyone, is Donna Noble and that's unfortunate for we are reminded of everything Donna Noble was, and everything Clara Oswald isn't.
.
To digress for a moment:
From Russell T Davis' 2005 return of New Who, the journey has been as much the companions' own as the Doctor's. Rose travelled until a kiss from her Doctor spelled the end of her fairy tale and, later, a handy clone of Ten helped imply she'd get her happily ever after, after all. Your reading may vary, as regards Rose and her future, left on Bad Wolf Bay with her no longer-timelord boyfriend. Martha Jones travelled, grew, saved the world and walked back out of the TARDIS into her life (in London) to continue saving people and later - with UNIT - the world. Donna? She grew into her name, i.e. becoming truly Noble - right before all that she'd seen and accomplished was wiped from her mind. The Doctor may have saved her life, but he destroyed her just as thoroughly as if she'd died. And then we have Amy and Rory Pond. The little girl who waited, who ran away with the mad man in a box on the night before he wedding - past the second star on the right and straight on till midnight. The little girl who was protected from the madman, by the boy she'd overlooked and underestimated. Amy and Rory have a fully fleshed-out story arc. Both come of age and, finally, despite loving the Doctor, the danger, the travelling and the madness - as personified by their daughter Melody/River - Amy chooses a mundane, ordinary, life with Rory. Albeit in the 1930's in New York. But Clara? Clara has never really seemed to have a journey arc that made much sense. Her background (family, loss of mother etc.) has seemed as mutable as the leaves on a tree, changing in the seasons. Dramatically - in my opinion - it isn't enough for her to be a leaf on the cosmic world-tree which represents the Doctor's life.
In this episode Clara's characterisation is incongruous. Sidelined for the most part, she seems to be here simply to spur the Doctor on, offer advice, and generally comment like a Greek Chorus of one. Once she rescues herself (and Ashildr from the dangers aboard the Mayan ship) Clara becomes almost incidental to the action, which I found problematic. The companion is the audience's route into the show and into an episode. Here Clara steps aside, usurped if you will, by a girl the Doctor knows from somewhen other.
Adding a pinch of pluck (from the template from which Steven Moffat increasingly seems to draw his characters) Moffat and Mathieson cast Ashildr in the usual mould of feisty female, for all that she's less self-deluded and more self-aware than most. And within the confines on the episode her journey arc is clear - the outsider once ridiculed or misunderstood for her flights of fancy - saves the day with the power of her imagination. Story wins out. But, Ashildr's journey arc is twisted irrevocably, following her moment of triumph, not by death but by the Doctor.
Using a square piece of battle-tech (resembling a microchip) he heals her, the chip sinking into in the centre Ashildr's forehead, where the third eye is usually depicted as being. Are we meant to remember that Davros has a mechanical eye situated in the same spot on his forehead?
Earlier, the Doctor implies he's sick of turning people into soldiers - as he has done with Clara, as he did with Rory (The Last Centurian) before her. What's ironic is that in embracing the totality of what he can do, rather than what he should he creates his first immortal, or long-lived possible companion.
First?
Yes.
Jenny (his so-called daughter) was born from battle tech with the ability to regenerate. River was conceived aboard the TARDIS. And Jack? Bad Wolf/TARDIS brought him back to life, Rose!Wolf wishing it so, in much the same way that the Doctor here makes a choice, or wishes. The Doctor saving Ashildr? It resonates precisely because he once saved Donna Noble (from the metacrisis that had transformed her into the Doctor!Donna) but in saving her took away everything that had made her the woman she had become and so damned her to a life more ordinary - which was the opposite of what she might have chosen for herself. Here too it is strongly implied (as Ashildr wakes from death and as Maisie Williams stands and faces one arced ray of sunlight - day break - after another) that Ashildr too is damned. Damned to be taken from her people, by life, damned to run - which is precisely what she didn't wish to do. Oh the irony of the Doctor purposefully resurrecting someone - as the TARDIS did with Jack Harkness - and so possibly creating another fixed point in time and space, yet not considering that fixed point, wrong, unnatural - something or someone to be left behind at all cost!
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Jack: ...In the end, I got the message - I'm the man who can never die. [angrily] And all that time, you knew.
The Doctor: That's why I left you behind. It's not easy, even just looking at you, Jack because...because you're wrong.
Jack: [sarcastic] Thanks.
The Doctor: You are, I can't help it! I'm a Time Lord, it's instinct, it's in my gut. You're a fixed point in time and space, you're a fact. That's never meant to happen. Even the TARDIS reacted against you, tried to shake you off; flew all the way to the end of the universe just to get rid of you. (Quotes from Wiki)
Oh the irony!
Capaldi is fantastic throughout and continues to imbue his Doctor with Tom Baker characteristics, so much so that I can hear the Fourth's Doctor's tone of voice in the vocal patterns of the Twelfth. He is superb, most of all in moments when the Doctor is pensive, alien, other, poetic. His delivery 'translating' the babies cries into speech (at Clara's behest) is compelling. So too the moments when the Doctor is quiet, reflective and remembering. Maisie Williams is charismatic and a fantastic co-star throughout. Literally, heart-breaking in the way her character, puts forward the innocent argument about valuing home, and the connections she has forged in her short life, versus a life on the run. Williams also has a stillness about her acting, body language which hold the camera beautifully.
It's painful that they're both working to imbue such a thin plot with deeper meaning.
So far, this series episodes have been made up of two-parters, but with The Girl Who Died I can't help feeling that they could have amalgamated this episode into the next - i.e. The Woman Who Lived - made ample use of flashbacks to give us a sense of Ashildr's life, and lost little. I wonder if I'll still feel that way after the next episode airs?