Doctor Who: Series 9, Episode 10 – “Face the Raven” (2015)

Still processing this episode.  Overall, I’d say that I really liked the episode stuff (ie, the one-shot story part,) and I’ve yet to make up my mind on the arc stuff.  On the latter front, I may need to wait until after the two-part finale before I quite know how I feel about it. 

The Doctor and Clara are on the case when they get a call from Rigsy, the graffiti artist from last year’s “Flatline;” he’s lost the last day of his memory, and there are mysterious markings on the back of his neck, counting down the minutes to zero.  The Doctor, deducing that the markings indicate Rigsy’s impending death, agrees to do whatever he can to save the young man.  The investigation takes them off the map to a hidden part of London (no, not London Below) where inflexible edicts govern the street and a deadly creature waits to be unleashed.

I’ll start with the one-shot story part, since there’s not much I’ll be able to say on the arc stuff.  It’s nice to see Rigsy again, but he doesn’t quite feel like the same character from “Flatline.”  He feels a bit flatter, more generic – like it could have been anybody, but the show slapped on the face of someone we know to make us (and the Doctor and Clara) more invested.  There’s only one significant moment where he really seems like the old Rigsy, and it’s easily his best.

The hidden-London angle is pretty cool, both in idea and execution.  I like how the team goes about trying to find it, and the place itself has a really neat design – it’s somewhere between Diagon Alley and the street scenes from The City of Lost Children.  There’s a lot of nice direction here, along with some inventive storytelling.  I’m not familiar with writer Sarah Dollard, who’s new to Who, but story-wise, I’m definitely in favor of her.

The Doctor and Clara are fairly good here.  I’d say both act reasonably in-character.  Not my favorite for either in terms of portrayal or adventure-contribution, but not bad.  There is a rather delightful moment in which the Doctor wonders why he always has to be the bad cop – too fun.  And as far as contributing to the adventure goes, this story seems to lean pretty hard on old-fashioned detective work.  The pseudo-Victorian look of the locale may have something to do with it, but for the most part, it feels more like a mystery than a straight-up sci-fi adventure.

All I can really say about the arc stuff is that I’m not sure what to make of it.  Beyond still figuring out how I feel about it, I literally don’t know if I can believe what I saw.  Personally, I’d like for it to have been a straightforward story, that the final two episodes will continue it and then move ahead, but I’m not sure if that’s the case.  Only time will tell, I guess.  Expect more spoilery remarks sometime after the finale airs.

Since I’m running a bit short, I might as well throw in a tidbit that I completely forgot to mention last week:  in addition to “Under the Lake” / “Before the Flood” giving us Who’s first Deaf performer with Sophie Stone, “Sleep No More” gave us Who’s first out transgender performer with Bethany Black.  It’s a fairly small role, and rather than playing a transgender character, she plays a non-specified-gender member of a lab-grown “grunt” species bred for war.  So, the character, 474, wouldn’t necessarily count as LGBTQ representation, but major kudos to Black for scoring a part on Who.