{"id":1792,"date":"2015-09-30T18:21:05","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T18:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1792"},"modified":"2015-09-30T18:21:57","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T18:21:57","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-the-witchs-familiar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2015\/09\/30\/so-what-did-i-think-of-the-witchs-familiar\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of The Witch’s Familiar?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Is it about the destination or is it about the journey? As usual, the only accurate answer is \u201cit depends\u201d. A more helpful answer would be at least as long as this blog post.<\/p>\n

Early on in the curiously-titled The Witch\u2019s Familiar<\/em>, the Doctor orders Davros out of his chair at gunpoint and sails into the midst of a horde of Daleks, whose weapons are unable to penetrate the chair\u2019s forcefield. Colony Sarff London (I think that\u2019s his name) however, already has his snake-y bits inside the chair and so the Doctor is overpowered and returned to Davros. We go from the Doctor trapped in Davros\u2019s chamber back to the Doctor trapped in Davros\u2019s chamber and in narrative terms nothing whatever has been accomplished. But \u2013 the two scenes with the Doctor in Davros\u2019s chair also contain some of the funniest moments of the whole episode. That\u2019s this story all over.<\/p>\n

The plot is split roughly in two with the Doctor vs Davros being largely static and Missy and Clara\u2019s journey having a bit more adventure to it. But notice again that all of Missy and Clara\u2019s actions are designed to get them right back where they were at the end of the last episode \u2013 in the centre of Dalek mission control. At least here, Clara has been sealed up inside a little tank during the previous thirty minutes.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a little step back. Firstly, Moffat clearly does understand that \u201ckilling\u201d Clara wasn\u2019t the real cliff-hanger last week and so we open on Jenna Coleman clearly alive if dangling upside down from a convenient rock. The pretitles sequence is fun and reminds of the business of the Doctor\u2019s \u201cwill\u201d (which is then ignored until just before the end \u2013 I fear it\u2019s this season\u2019s arc-plot) but the story doesn\u2019t start until after the titles. So that\u2019s another scene which could just be cut and no-one would notice. I\u2019m quite tempted to see if I could do a shorter edit of these two episodes. What do you think I could get it down to? 60 minutes? 45?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at the Doctor\u2019s side of things first. In interviews, Steven Moffat has opined that Doctor\/Davros scenes are always great. That may be true, but they aren\u2019t always this long. True, we have here \u2013 maybe for the first time \u2013 a pair of actors who could rival Tom Baker and Michael Wisher, but that doesn\u2019t mean that, stripped of any meaningful context, I\u2019m going to be happy to watch them sit and chat for 20 minutes. Don\u2019t misunderstand me \u2013 I love it when characters get a chance to express themselves, but it works best when the stakes are really high. Midnight<\/em> is basically one long dialogue scene, but the Doctor is frantically trying to work out how to save not just himself but a whole bus-load of innocents throughout. Here, not only is the dramatic situation curiously inert \u2013 Davros clearly does not wish the Doctor dead, or he could have accomplished that very easily \u2013 but no-one seems to be trying to achieve anything either. The Doctor is full of bluster and fury at first, but his murderous rage never materialises \u2013 like Clara staring impotently at Missy\u2019s impudently turned back.<\/p>\n

So while they blather elegantly on, it\u2019s left to Jenna Coleman and the sublime Michelle Gomez to carry the day, which they do with some style. Clara and Missy\u2019s adventures in the Dalek sewers are funny, exciting and have crackling dialogue and the notion of what happens when one is not only encased in a Dalek shell but (unlike Ian Chesterton in The Daleks<\/em>) actually wired into its telepathic circuits is Steven Moffat at his absolute best, taking a piece of Doctor Who lore we\u2019ve all just accepted for fifty-plus years and providing an explanation which makes perfect sense and which sets up the only genuinely suspenseful part of the entire episodes \u2013 Missy goading the Doctor into exterminating the Dalek which unbeknownst to him houses his best friend.<\/p>\n

About the only thing wrong with this scene is that nobody at any point recognises that the Doctor and Clara have been here before. The Doctor\u2019s first encounter with Clara was when she was inside a Dalek and didn\u2019t know it (Asylum of the Daleks<\/em>) and yet this goes unremarked-upon. It\u2019s one thing to insist that Doctor Who works best as a series of basically unrelated stand-alone tales (a view I\u2019ve expressed more than once). It\u2019s quite another to design an incomprehensibly intricate arc plot spanning several seasons and then just not stop to remember what you\u2019ve already written. There are a few other niggles like this in this episode. \u201cThe chamber is sealed,\u201d intones Davros. However, the Doctor, Colony Sarff and later Missy all sail in and out with any trouble at all. \u201cLook at the cables,\u201d the Doctor is told, and we can see that some of them at least are Colony Sarff serpents, but this fact is never mentioned again.<\/p>\n

As the two plot-lines converge it transpires that Davros needed the Doctor\u2019s regeneration energy to reinvigorate the Daleks. Why exactly? They don\u2019t look old and clapped out. They swarm and fly and exterminate and generally seem in absolutely tip-top condition \u2013 if a bit piebald.<\/p>\n

Sidenote: One of Steven Moffat\u2019s absolutely worst decisions as show-runner was certainly that appallingly misguided Dalek redesign we got in the generally fairly rubbish Victory of the Daleks<\/em>. Since then, in Asylum <\/em>and now here, he has attempted to conceal the error by surrounding his \u201cBeyonce\u201d Daleks with as many different models as possible. Here, although the Victory<\/em> models I think are absent, the eighties \u201cspecial weapons Daleks\u201d makes a cameo appearance as do some sliver and blue chaps from the sixties. \u201cAnd they look fine together,\u201d proclaims the executive producer. Yeah, but the bronze ones still look the best, striking a perfect balance between the iconic silhouette and the detail required in modern TV production. It\u2019s no coincidence that that\u2019s what Clara gets sealed up in. Anyway\u2026<\/p>\n

Once infused with regeneration energy, the not-particularly-enervated Daleks don\u2019t seem suddenly more potent and ferocious either \u2013 they seem exactly the same. Hettie MacDonald doesn\u2019t seem to have read the script either. And it\u2019s really, really unusual in this day and age for the effects work to be so poor that it actually gets in the way of the storytelling, but nothing about the revenge of the sludge Daleks is remotely convincing and it\u2019s genuinely hard to understand what the script intended here. The visual cause-and-effect is almost completely absent, and that includes Missy\u2019s execution of the Dalek too. A mid of mud on the floor, a lot of screaming and shouting, a bit more mud on the Dalek\u2019s casing and boom! Excuse me? Did I turn two pages at once?<\/p>\n

And how did we get here? Because Davros wanted to see the sunrise. Pardon? This is a ploy so maudlin and so transparent, I would be furious at the Doctor for falling for it, if it were not tediously obvious that he was setting up his own plan. As other commentators have pointed out, this is \u201cI bribed the architect first\u201d from The Curse of Fatal Death<\/em> only played with a straight face, and as much as it makes the writer<\/u> feel clever, it makes the audience<\/u> disengage because the drama evaporates. \u201cI knew what was happening all along and I\u2019ve already put a plan into motion to save the day,\u201d isn\u2019t half as much fun as \u201cI\u2019ve been caught completely by surprise and I just have to hope that this desperate improvisation somehow works!\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, we come back to the real cliff-hanger \u2013 not whether Clara will survive (of course she will) but whether the Doctor will be morally compromised. But this too is the writer outsmarting the audience, not the Doctor outsmarting the enemy. Rather like those shocking scenes on the front of sixties superhero comics which seem to show game-changing revelations and then turn out not to be quite so epic as they seemed once you get to that page in the comic itself, the scene we thought we were watching at the end of part one was in fact revealed as a less interesting version<\/u> wherein the Doctor does the nice thing and shoots the mines, which obediently vanish, unlike less sophisticated twentieth century mines which would have blown up when hit and taken Little Davros with them. Isn\u2019t the progress of weapons technology a marvellous thing.<\/p>\n

So, once again, I\u2019m frustrated. Steven Moffat is an immensely clever writer and Doctor Who in theory is an ideal medium for his talents, but this episode contained far too much writer self-indulgence, in the form of narrative loops which fail to advance the plot, repetitive dialogue scenes which tell us the same thing over and over again (no matter how elegantly phrased or beautifully spoken) and \u201cclever\u201d solutions to plot problems which feel like the answers to crossword puzzles rather than the needed dramatic catharsis.<\/p>\n

All that having been said, for Clara\u2019s adventures in the Dalek, for Peter Capaldi\u2019s impassioned performance, for the line \u201canyone for dodgems?\u201d, and especially for the absolutely scintillating Michelle Gomez, I\u2019m not only going to dredge up three stars for this, I\u2019m going to keep the score for the two-parter at four. It may be rather less than the sum of its parts, but many of those parts are awfully good.<\/p>\n

Those sonic sunglasses were only for this episode though, right? Right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is it about the destination or is it about the journey? As usual, the only accurate answer is \u201cit depends\u201d. A more helpful answer would be at least as long as this blog post. Early on in the curiously-titled The Witch\u2019s Familiar, the Doctor orders Davros out of his chair at gunpoint and sails into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-1792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-sU","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1792"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1795,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions\/1795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}