The Doctor and Clara throttle down just a bit to face… ghosts!
Warning: Full spoilers below.
After the heavy events of the past four episodes — Season 8’s finale featuring Cybermen and the return of the Master/Mistress and Season 9’s opener with the Daleks and the return of Davros — “Under the Lake” feels like a bit of a throttle down for Doctor Who with its fairly ordinary tale of just plain old, oh, you know… ghosts!
It’s also, with its cliffhanger, indicative of how most of Season 9 is going to go. Judging by the episode descriptions released by the BBC, it seems that almost this entire run will be made up of two-part episodes. And there’s nothing like a creepy cliffhanger to evoke that old Doctor Who magic. But more on that in a second.
The episode begins in an underwater mining facility in Scotland of 2119 where the crew has salvaged a ship of unknown origin. But things very quickly go wrong and the group’s commanding officer is torched by the ship’s engines. Next thing we know, however, he’s somehow revived but… he’s still dead, black holes where his eyes used to be. Oh, and he’s accompanied by another weird dead guy in a top hot. Yep, ghosts.
When the Doctor arrives, he can tell that the TARDIS isn’t happy — something is wrong. But Clara is riding high from her latest round of space-time travels and excited to stumble onto a new adventure here, even if the Doctor is more reticent about the situation. He even leaves her hanging after a high-five attempt!
But once the Doctor and Clara meet up with the crew of facility, who have been fending off the ghosts, we do get some humorous Twelfth Doctor moments. His dismissal of the Burke-esque Pritchard in particular is great. Just like that Aliens douchebag, Pritchard is mainly concerned with how he can profit from his current otherworldly and dangerous situation. The Doctor has no time for such idiocy. “Sorry, why is this man still talking to me?” he says through Pritchard and to another crewmember. If only we could all handle jerks like that with such aplomb.
And then there are the index cards. Let’s call them empathy prompts for this Doctor, a little bump for Twelve when he can’t quite connect with those around him properly. Here he utilizes, badly, “I’m very sorry for your loss. I’ll do all I can to solve the death of your friend slash family member slash pet.” But at least he’s trying!
His interaction with the ghosts is also fun. When the Doctor and Clara first come (literally) face to face with the scary suckers, the Doctor’s reaction is more how cool and curious the situation is than how scary it could be. And he also talks to them like they’re five-year-olds. “Hello. Did you want to show us this? It’s very nice!”
That said, he doesn’t actually think they’re ghosts… until he finally catches up to what everyone else has already concluded. That’s a Twelfth Doctor trait for sure, taking his own time to get from point A to point B, but it’s also interesting because he then embraces the concept fully and proclaims that these “ghosts” are proof that death is not the end. This circles back to what he and Clara were trying to accomplish in last season’s finale with the death of Danny Pink story.
Interestingly, Clara seems to be over the loss of Danny now. It’s not clear how much time has passed since his death at the end of Season 8… and his resurrection as a Cyberman, and his death again, and his whatever-that-was appearance from beyond at the very end of that finale. But I would think that Clara might be thinking of him again here, or perhaps she or the Doctor might even mention him, considering the nature of this story. Of course, the writers can’t continue to dwell on the Danny thing forever, but still. Wasn’t the whole Danny sending that kid he killed through that whatchamacallit portal back to the land of living proof that death is not the end?
But oh, the ending of this episode! So great. The Doctor himself is now that very proof. The Doctor is… a ghost!
Some notes:
- Celebrating New Years for two centuries sounds like fun… or maybe one of the circles of hell.
- The Doctor talking to the TARDIS: “What’s wrong? You’re not happy. Why aren’t you happy? Why have you brought us here?”
- “So who’s in charge now? I need to know who to ignore.”
- Another Doctor fan emerges!
- Some of the Doctor’s other index cards include: “I completely understand why it was difficult to not get captured” and the always handy “No one is going to get eaten / vaporized / exterminated / upgraded / possessed / mortally wounded / turned to jelly. We’ll all get out of this unharmed.”
- Maybe I missed something, but if the Doctor is willing to go back in time to before the spaceship landed, why didn’t he just do that earlier in the episode? Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.
I always welcome the creature-feature Doctor Who episodes, and “Under the Lake” does that tradition proud. The shimmering, ghastly specters are scary enough, but the apparent fate of the Doctor in this cliffhanger is the real shocker.
