A.K.A.
Winter is Coming to Doctor Who. Guest star Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) has
been hyped for ages, and she’s finally here.
This is the first episode of the season that hasn’t really worked for
me. Though I wouldn’t call it bad, it’s
uneven and feels kind of half-written. It’s
sad, because Jamie Mathieson was hands-down my favorite writer last season;
however, the episode is co-written by Moffat, and as with Phil Ford and Gareth
Roberts last year (with “Into the Dalek” and “The Caretaker,”) my problems with
the episode seem more in his wheelhouse than Mathieson’s. (A few spoilers.)
The
Doctor and Clara land in a Viking village beset by raiders of their own – the
Mire, a group of alien warriors masquerading as Norse gods, have come to cherry-pick
their best assets. Being Vikings (death
before dishonor and all that,) they decide they want to fight a hopelessly
outmatched war against their enemies, and it’s up to our heroes to come up with
a plan that will actually allow them to survive it. Maisie Williams plays Ashidr, a Viking girl whose
characterization feels sort of all over the place, but her strong performance
grounds it pretty well.
My
biggest gripe with this episode is that the characters seem particularly driven
by the plot, doing things because the story dictates it and not because it
actually makes sense for them to behave that way. The Doctor is really defeatist here; once he
realizes the Vikings aren’t down with running from the impending fight, he
spends a big chunk of the episode offering no more than halfhearted plans that
are obviously not going to work. He
needs numerous pep talks and inspirations from Clara, Ashidr, and other sources
in order to get over it and do stuff, which, like I said, feels really forced.
It’s an
all right episode for Clara. She has a
nice scene early on where she shows off some clever intuition with the Mire leader,
a la “Deep Breath” or “Robot of Sherwood.”
Later, though, she’s mainly relegated to trying to spur the Doctor into
action, and while what she does in this plot is fine, the plot itself bugs me
enough that it’s hard to appreciate it.
That said, there are a couple of genuinely lovely Doctor-Clara scenes
that include him opening up to her about his regrets and her being attuned to
what’s going on with him.
I like that
there’s another mild reference to the Doctor’s possibly-ambivalent feelings about
having received a new regeneration cycle.
A lot of it is general Time Lord heartache about outliving the people
one cares about, but there’s a little thread in there that, to me, feels
specific to still being alive when he fully expected to die. After being a bit nihilistic and calling his
current regeneration a “clerical error” last week, I see a connection between
the two scenes. That really interests
me, because I wish series 8 had explored this idea more. It seemed at first like it was going there,
but it became more about the “Am I a good man?” identity issue. I hope this thread continues, because I'd really
like to know how the Doctor feels about the fact that he’s still here.
Also, I’m
so glad the episode brings back (and
actually answers) the “Fires of Pompeii”/Twelve’s face question. While I was hoping for an explanation that
was a bit larger, I really like the scene in which it’s revealed, and the old
clips it includes are perfect.
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