Maisie Williams meets the Doctor!
Warning: Full spoilers below.
First things first, I think we should get out of the way the whole question of who Maisie Williams plays in this, the first segment of a two-part Doctor Who story. There’s been a lot of speculation that the character would be someone from the Doctor’s past — perhaps one of his children or his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, regenerated into a new form. Could she be Missy’s daughter, who was recently mentioned? Or an old foe who has taken on a new body?
Nah, she’s not any of those things. Which, frankly, is a bit of a disappointment. And which, really, you can’t hold against the show or showrunner Steven Moffat. It’s not his fault that so many of us fans have been building up the character’s importance to the Doctor in our minds for all these months.
And once one gets past the fact that Williams is not playing Susan or some other familiar character, it’s easier to embrace the story she’s in and who she is playing: the Viking girl Ashildr. And yeah, Ashildr is pretty important to the Doctor too, it turns out. Or at least she becomes important by the end of “The Girl Who Died.”
Ashildr is a cool character who fits in well with the Doctor in that she’s a bit of an oddball just like our favorite Time Lord is. “I know I’m strange,” she tells him, but strange is the Doctor’s specialty. Her love of storytelling and her puppets and her courage in the face of the invading Mire are all traits that the Doctor admires, so it’s no wonder that he’d be willing to break his rules and touch her with immortality as he does at the end of the episode.
Considering where Ashildr and the Doctor’s stories lead them here, the episode is by and large a pretty lightweight and fun affair for much of its running time. The anachronistic Vikings are a likable lot (Lofty, Daphne, Noggin the Nog, ZZ Top, Heidi, and of course, Limpy), and the Doctor’s training them to fight ala Army of Darkness is cute, even while Twelve’s translating the baby’s crying bordered on poetic. “I’m afraid, but I will sing for you…” And the design of the Mire foot soldiers was very memorable, a gross cross between a Hellraiser Cenobite and the baby from Eraserhead.
We want to hear it.
The Viking girl’s story plays nicely into the bigger thematic arc of this season as well, as the Doctor and Clara contemplate the constraints of being a Time Lord… of, as he puts it, being able to do anything but not being allowed to. Peter Capaldi is wonderful in this scene, his voice cracking at one point, when the Doctor talks about how sick he is of losing people. He doesn’t just feel bad about getting Ashildr killed; he also is thinking of all of those he’s ever known who he has had to leave behind as they head inexorably to death and he lives… forever. Looking at Clara reminds him of that, and it’s almost as if he knows (as do we) that their parting of the ways is coming much sooner than any of us would like.
This also plays into another big aspect of Season 9, which is the question of why the Doctor fled Gallifrey way back when. In the two-part season opener it was implied that there is a big, dark secret that led him to leave, but here he says running is what he does best in order to avoid the pain of his existence. He gets in his box and runs.
But the Doctor’s moment of realization as to why he chose the face he has now pushes him to break some of those stodgy old Time Lord rules. Yes, the fourth-season episode “The Fires of Pompeii” plays directly into it, as Capaldi of course was a guest star on that segment from back in the David Tennant era. But here the Doctor finally pieces together that he wears the visage that he does now as a reminder. “I’m the Doctor and I save people!” he bellows. If anyone happens to be listening or has a problem with that, well, to hell with them. Just as the Tenth Doctor broke the rules and saved the Capaldi character in “Fires,” the Twelfth Doctor breaks the rules for Ashildr too.
And so she lives; she’s “functionally immortal” now thanks to his tinkering. But as the very cool closing shot of this episode shows us, and as the Doctor essentially predicted, immortality is not necessarily all it’s cut out to be. As the camera spins around her and the world ages beyond that, Williams’ face slowly morphs from a sweet expression of happiness to something darker altogether. The Doctor’s tidal wave?
Some notes:
- The Doctor has a moment of realization that Ashildr’s now a “hybrid.” But the hybrid we’d heard about from Davros earlier this season was a cross between Time Lord and Dalek, right?
- “Immortality isn’t living forever. That’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying. She might meet someone she can’t bear to lose,” the Doctor says pointedly at Clara. “That happens, I believe.”
- O.K., guys, the sonic sunglasses are broken. Are you happy now?
- Check out the 2000-year diary!
- “What’s the one thing gods never do? They never show up!”
- Oh, that Benny Hill theme music!
Doctor Who continues its strong season with the much-anticipated arrival of Maisie Williams as “The Girl Who Died.” While the revelation of who her character actually is may come as something of a letdown for longtime fans, the episode itself and its bigger thematic touches more than make up for that.
