This episode by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat is primarily a tour de force acting wise. But, it's also a fantastic celebration of who the Doctor is. Oh not of his tools: TARDIS, sonic specs or screwdriver, but of what makes him the man he is, what shaped him, what he believes in and, despite everything we do, why he values us; the human race.
At the heart of The Zygon Inversion there are two questions being asked: How would the Doctor fight a war? And, as the song goes: War, what is it good for? The next line Absolutely nothing has always been the Doctor's stance on war and aggression, apart from those several hundred years spent fighting the time war when he couldn't bear to think of himself as the Doctor. And on the last day of that war, we're reminded there was another box with another big red button. As with The Zygon Invasion, The Zygon Inversion refers back to Day of the Doctor on which day Operation Double was born and there were three Doctors, two Osgoods, and one peace treaty.
On this day there's once again a stand-off, human against Zygon, invasion versus the nuclear destruction of London. On this day there's only one Doctor standing in the Black Archive but he's worth three of himself given Peter Capaldi's delivery, the passion he brings to bear, and the episodes climactic scene as scripted and acted. Capaldi is a gift to the episode, and the series as a whole.
The second part of this adventure opens onto the cliffhanger ending of the last. After a quick recap, Bonnie!Zygon (who copied Clara) later dubbed Zigella by the Doctor (Is that from Nigella or Zoella, I wonder?) takes aim with a rocket launcher at a Presidential UNIT plane. Simultaneously Clara Oswald wakes to find herself through the darkest looking glass, once again. When we first met Clara, in Asylum of the Daleks her echo-self was trapped within the mindscape of a Dalek. Here, she wakes walled-up inside the memory of her own flat, imprisoned inside a Zygon pod. The correlations with Last Christmas - where she was once again in mortal jeopardy whilst trapped within an alien induced dream state - are unmistakable and, in fact, having been here before she has the ammunition to fight back. Clara takes control of the dream in a Whovian form of lucid dreaming and fights for control of Bonnie's body, one trigger finger at a time, to save the Doctor and Osgood.
The visual clues (telling the audience that this isn't the real world) are fantastically well done in this sequence, from the inverted red alarm clock numerals to the toothpaste squeezed out of the tube dark as mud. And then there's the television screen acting as interface to the outside. Television was once thought of as a window onto the world. Nowadays we all live in a world where we're constantly turning to look at a screen, on a tablet, or a phone. There's a frisson of horror running through Clara's nightmare-scape, given what her entrapment could lead to, encapsulated by the lovely visual nod (in that static filled television screen) to the 1982 film Poltergeist, or at least the advertising imagery most associated with the film. But telly isn't simply a passive medium any longer. When Clara takes aim at the television and Bonnie misfires the rocket launcher? The nod here has to be for a Wii game.
Half-slumbering Clara slowly wakes, blinking lights in her flat corresponding to her fluttering eyelashes beautifully, and becomes the ghost in the machine - or Zygon - Bonnie unaware Clara has managed to tap into the link which controls her duplicates nervous system. When the Doctor's phone rings, thanks to an incoming text from Clara (announcing that she's awake) its lettering is large and red. I wondered if that was to make it highly visible on screen or, whether it's also a nod to the red pill in The Matrix that wakes the dreamer. Awake Clara fights her darker reflection as the Doctor falls to earth with Osgood, thanks to two trusty parachutes. He lands with a Union Jack chute onto debris-strewn sands and our disbelief is suspended that he and Osgood lived, whilst the rest of the crew died. This is subtly suggested by the seats which make land: blue, regular airplane seats, nothing like the leather seating seen in first class where the Doctor and Osgood were seated. Children probably won't even have registered that there must have been a pilot and a crew who perished as collateral damage in Bonnie's war.
Clara presumed dead, Osgood steps into the companion's shoes. If she's not following in Clara's footsteps, then I'd have to say she's following in Sarah Jane Smith's: translating Doctor speak and encapsulating events for younger viewers. Osgood is a fantastic guide to the current adventure but also to the Doctor himself, his personality and foibles, and like the best of companions she's there to cajole him into a more positive frame of mind. It's Osgood who bolsters his hope that Clara's alive, Osgood who tells him that to text is human and, Osgood who later truly restores his faith in humanity when his other friend (Kate) has dashed it.
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, it is implied, shoots first and asks questions later. Whilst it's incontrovertible that she shot a Zygon dead in self-defence "Five Rounds Rapid" she's definitely of a mind to fight fire with fire. Thus, as Bonnie ramps up the rhetoric and prepares for all out war Kate manoeuvers herself into direct opposition. Zygon against human. Z67 chemical agent against nuclear warhead under London. Aside from Kate Lethbridge-Stewart being a fantastic personification of political cold war manoeuvering (or the stand-off of mutually assured destruction) she's also in the unfortunate position of having to personify the hawkish mindset of most military commanders and senior politicians today. Facing off against her, even more stubbornly?
Bonnie reminds me of a young child (given her temperament) when faced with two Osgood boxes and one Doctor in the Black Archive. That mulish stubbornness and her complaint:
Bonnie: "We've been left to fend for ourselves"
Doctor: "So's everyone."
Bonnie: "It's not fair!"
is of a young child and, to quote the Doctor, when she petulantly says she wants war she is acting "like every tantruming child in history". For all that Bonnie is a Zygon, she is actually standing for us - humankind - with our propensity for war, as seen from the Doctor's point of view. Regional warfare and/or skirmishes is war on a microcosm, or playground level to a Time Lord now more than two thousand years old, who has seen entire planets (not countries, or continents, but planets) and solar systems burn in war. But, he rightly reminds us, loses are equally painful, loss of life equally tragic, regardless of the scale of warfare.
The way the Doctor holds the memories of war, loss, and carnage tight in the curled palm of his hand leads me to believe that the Whoniverse is most definitely a multiverse. Gallifrey falls no more, but Gallifrey did also fall. The reality where Gallifrey was saved into a pocket universe is the one we're watching, but its destruction happened. Gallifrey burnt, and not just in the Doctor's memories. We're no longer watching adventures in that universe.
"I mean, do you call this a war? This funny little thing? This is not a war! I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you could ever imagine. And when I close my eyes I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count!"
This scene, in which the Doctor is brought to the Black Archive to talk both Bonnie and Kate down, can be read as a commentary on current political events, on Daesh and the rise of fanatical, terrorist, violence. But, it also harks back directly to the threat of nuclear war between America and Russia throughout the decade of the 1980's. In so doing it calls to mind the 1983 film War Games, in which a sentient A.I. computer system (created for the D.O.D to run simulations of Global thermonuclear war) initially believes such a war can be won and has to be taught otherwise. The climactic sequence of the film has the A.I. correlating endless games of noughts and crosses (which strategically can have no winner) with nuclear war and so understanding that everyone loses regardless of who fires the first missile.
This is the lesson the Doctor is trying to impart to Bonnie, which he learnt fighting the Daleks during the lifetime in which he couldn't think of himself as Doctor. It's a lesson older, and supposedly wiser, humans still haven't learnt. For whilst Bonnie throws back the lid on one Osgood box to reveal the two red buttons, Truth and Consequences Kate Lethbridge-Stewart mirrors. Kate would burn London in a nuclear explosion, to supposedly save the world from alien attack. Worse, she's apparently been in this position fifteen times before.
The line delivery from Peter Capaldi (in the aforementioned scene) was fantastic, utterly brilliant, and mesmerising. His speech humbling. Capaldi is utterly believable as someone with a wider (intergalactic - all of time and space) perspective, who knows first hand that there are no winners in all out warfare:
"You just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You're not superior to people who were cruel to you. you're just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole bunch of new cruel people being cruel to some other people, who'll end up being cruel to you. The only way anyone can live in peace is if they're prepared to forgive. Why don't you break the cycle?"
and his stance is a compelling one. We're reminded of Osgood's comment that if she was going to invade the planet she'd ensure the Doctor was neutralised first (shot in the head, twelve times if necessary) so he couldn't start talking. The Doctor's chief weapon may be his gift of the gab, but it's his perspective that make him appeal so passionately to our better selves, regardless of our species. Neither Harness or Moffat touch on resource wars, nor should they, for the message at the heart off this episode is one of inclusion and forgiveness carrying the day.
Whilst the backdrop to the episode is, undoubtedly, encroaching warfare the message is inclusion and acceptance, the subtext friction between one minority group wanting to fit in and another faction wanting to subjugate. At the top of the episode Bonnie visits a Zygon living as a human, and forces his transformation. Caught between two states of being, part of his Zygon nature manifests his suckers looking like skin legions. He looks terminally ill. The fear of rejection by his community, and that his existence in that community might insight violence against him remind us that exclusion, persecution and bigotry aren't simply fueled by war or terrorism, though that is the primary metaphor here.
If some humans act/react first and think about the consequences later, driving the innocent to take their own lives in a mini-mart (in what felt like a clumsy yet shocking metaphor for a suicide bomber) not so Petronella Osgood.
Finally, overtly offered a ride in the TARDIS (as opposed to it being obliquely suggested to her right before Missy murdered an Osgood) she stands as the best of us, human or Zygon, because of her beliefs. Osgood will not answer the Doctor's question as to whether she's human or Zygon, until the answer no longer matters. Like the Doctor, she sees the similarities between the species (for which read immigrant community) rather than the differences. Osgood has already learnt lessons the Doctor tries to teach his companions, without having travelled in the TARDIS. And, like the Doctor I'm "a big fan".
I'm also a fan of how Ingrid Oliver plays Osgood in that she's utterly charming as well as being as written: decisive, observant, highly intelligent, compassionate and a very good match and foil for the Doctor. Acting wise, Jenna Coleman too impresses, although she impressed me last week more than this. But above all it is Peter Capaldi who is brilliant, forceful, moving and utterly believable in his portrayal as the Doctor on what could be one of humanities darkest days.
The Zygon Inversion feels like an equally balanced episode to its counterpart. The acting is in parts mesmerising, the pace slower, the message stronger. And, as someone pointed out on Twitter last weekend, it was a fitting episode to air the day before Remembrance Sunday. Peter Harness has written two damn good dramatic episodes in The Zygon Invasion & The Zygon Inversion. They work extremely well as a metaphor for current political events, and as a way for adults and children to be able to discuss some of these events. What is to be most celebrated though is how true the episodes are to the character of the Doctor - saving the world, one human or Zygon at a time.
We're blessed with both Peters: Harness and Capaldi in these episodes.