What’s the Episode? Boom
What’s It All About? The Doctor and Ruby visit a war-torn planet where the Doctor accidentally stands on a land mine then spends the next forty-five minutes trying not to do that. That’s pretty much it. Oh, there’s a war on, and people are reduced to flesh tubes when they die, and ambulances that assess whether it’s worth spending money keeping you alive, and a Dad’s love for his child saves the day, and Ruby is shot (but gets better) and plenty more besides but that’s what it comes down to. The Doctor. On a mine. For an episode.
Is It Any Good? It is, as everyone and their dog must know by now, the grand return of Stephen Moffat to Doctor Who. After promising never to write another episode – much like the current showrunner – he’s back anyway and it’s fair to say that this was, up till this point, the most anticipated episode of the new season. The first two episodes have been light and fluffy – far too light and fluffy, in fact – but they’re also pretty standard RTD fare, which is to say entertaining enough in a peripheral way when the writer is obviously not focussed all that hard on them.
But this? Moffat’s era can come in for some amount of criticism, as any era of the show can, but Moffat-under-RTD carries a certain weight of expectation, whether it’s the classic-monster-invention of “Blink” or the straightforwardly obvious quality of “The Empty Child” / “The Doctor Dances”. And as with RTD, The Grand Return adds to those expectations. It’s inevitable and it means that the episode itself is going to be scrutinized harder than it might otherwise be. The big question is, has Moffat managed to recapture his under-RTD lightning in a bottle, or is this going to be the out-of-gas Season 7 that nobody really thinks went well.
The answer is somewhere in-between. This is manifestly better than the first two episodes of the season, and not by a small margin either. This is taught and tense, there’s proper investment in character, there’s real dramatic tension, it’s high concept without that being a pejorative, and it finally gives Ncuti Gatwa the chance to stretch his dramatic legs and really go to town on a script in the way he has so far been denied. The clear, visible, and manifest improvement in quality, however, doesn’t quite take this into top-tier Moffat territory, even though the sudden bounce in quality in gratefully received.
Why not? Well, for one, there’s a lot of Moffat’s greatest hits. When you have an ambulance that turns out not to be that (“The Empty Child”) it looks fresh and innovative. When you repeat the trick 20 years later it looks repetitive. Sure, it’s a different kind of, er, different but it’s still the same basic concept. Glitching tech allowing communication with someone who’s just died? “Forest of the Dead”, and there’s even a shameless “duplicate of the line” after the character has died off-screen. I won’t list them all out here but there’s a lot of them. To say nothing of the Doctor standing on a landmine and needing it to be defused being a “Genesis of the Daleks” riff/extension/steal/homage (delete depending on how generous you’re feeling).
But there’s a reason I’m starting with most of the negative stuff, which is because there really is so much that’s great here, and chief among them is Ncuti Gatwa, who finally gets a chance to show why he was actually cast. For the first time, this isn’t The Adventures of Ncuti Gatwa In Space but actually feels like he’s playing the Doctor. To repeat what I’ve mentioned in a previous review, little of that fault lies with Gatwa and mostly sits was Davies, who just didn’t give him anything to do and as a result Gatwa dialled it up to 11 with limited success. Here, he’s allowed to play concerned, fearful, compassionate, intelligent, and understanding and it’s great to see him finally fulfill his potential. The Doctor maybe drops a tear once too often – again, not Gatwa’s fault, he has to play what’s written – but an emotionally-engaged Doctor is always something to be appreciated.
And there’s some lovely quiet moments too. When the Doctor sings the “Skye Boat Song” it’s incredibly touching, partly because Gatwa can sell the hell out of it and partly because, of course, it’s a lament and what better place for a lament than the battlefield? (As a small aside, my mum used to sing that to me when I was but a wee boy to get me to go to sleep so I fully admit that the song carries more resonance for me than it might for some but even so, it still lands). And the Doctor quietly reciting strange poetry to calm himself and prevent the mine detonating is just a very Doctorish moment, while at the same time allowing Gatwa the chance to use moments of stillness to project his version of the Doctor. It’s really rather excellent.
Millie Gibson doesn’t get an awful lot to do here but what she does continues the fun energy that she and Gatwa share. There’s still not much to her character beyond, “enjoys adventure” and the sense-of-wonder scene feels a little contrived in order to give her a moment but she’s fine. The moment where she’s actually shot through entirely understandable miscommunication is a fine moment and if it means she spends the next third of the episode lying in the dirt, it’s worth it for the moment.
The conceit of the episode, bringing stillness to this most hyper of Doctors, really lands as well. By forcing the Doctor into a single position where he can’t just run around yelling at people to fix things we get both a great idea for an episode and a great chance to Gatwa to prove himself by anchoring the whole episode through his charisma alone. And of course he’s up to the task. The Doctor really has to remain the centre of this episode, otherwise it isn’t going to work. Not every Doctor would work in this context – Smith’s twitchy, restless energy just wouldn’t allow it, and Whittaker’s softer, less melodramatic take feels like it wouldn’t quite land either – so we get an episode that feels like it needs the Fifteenth Doctor. That’s always a good way to judge an episode – if it feels like it has enough specificity for the Doctor in it then it shows the writer is considering this Doctor, not just some generic concept of the character.
The sheer scope of the episode being reduced to two locations (three, if you want to include the brief TARDIS interior scene) could have been a disaster and if the episode isn’t completely successful it at least feels like the first episode this season that’s a swing and a hit rather than two swings and two misses. That the season is taking chances is definitely a great thing but this is the first time those chances actually feel they’ve resulted in something worthwhile. If this isn’t top-tier Moffat it’s still scads better than anything else Gatwa has been presented with. Four episodes in, it’s about time.
Would You Recommend It? Yes, of course! This is an incredibly easy episode to enjoy and the fact that Moffat has been able to deliver something of quality in the season is just very welcome. Sure there are flaws here – more coming up! – but there’s a coherence to this that’s been sadly lacking so far.
But those flaws are definitely still there. For one, the romance at the centre of it is perfunctory to the point of irrelevance. It’s there but it’s just so incredibly corny. It’s not easy establishing a decent romantic pairing in such a short space of time but it’s actually one of the things RTD is very good at doing. He can sketch in characters you understand and care about in a stupefyingly short period of time so they carry impact when something happens to them. Moffat can write good characters but this time it’s something that’s rather gotten away from him, to the point where we have the unrequited love between two soldiers that just screams, “this character’s dead” before they’ve uttered a single word. And right enough, one of them is reduced to a flesh tube before you can say, “when this deadful war’s over, I’ll marry that gal!” and the war cliche is complete.
And then there’s the politics. Doctor Who is always better when it tries to be about something and there’s a real attempt from Moffat to be properly politically engaged. It’s incredibly refreshing after the not-even-perfunctory “politics” of the previous two RTD episodes and Moffat’s fury at war and the exploitation of it for profit is exactly the sort of anger a Doctor Who episode should exhibit. There are moments when this doesn’t quite land – the comment about the mine having flashing lights because it looks good in the showroom has the shape of a trenchant critique but falls apart because if there’s one thing anyone buying a mine would know, it’s that the last thing you want it to do is draw attention to itself. But despite the occasional misstep, the results are infinitely preferable than not bothering to say anything at all.
The idea that an army – an Anglican army at that, revisiting another theme Moffat has hit before – has essentially ended up waging war on itself because the AI has determined it’s the best way for the company that provides the weapons to keep making money is a sufficiently strong hook to hang the episode off and the revelation lands. It’s not just that the company needs to make money, it’s that the lives that are lost in the pursuit of it are just entries on a ledger, something that allows the money to keep on rolling in. Just the sort of thing Doctor Who should be criticizing, frankly.
The solution to getting the Doctor off the mine – that the love of a father for his child will overcome all sorts of technological restrictions – is a bit hacky, as is the slightly wooly critique of AI but it’s not nearly enough to stop the episode from working. It is – yes, again – another theme that Moffat has returned to (“The Doctor Dances” for starters, another episode centred around a war other people get caught up in and which is resolved by a parent’s love for their child) and it’s not any more original here than the other times he’s brought it out but if you have to use that as your way out then using it in service of a genuinely angry, political episode is certainly the right way to do it.
Moffat’s return to the world of Doctor Who could have gone any number of ways but to see an episode of this strength is just, in the end, incredibly reassuring. If it’s not top-tier Moffat – and there’s just one too many things that stop it from being that – it’s still extremely strong Moffat, and extremely strong Moffat is better than almost anyone else when it comes to writing Doctor Who. This is a fun, exciting, enjoyable episode that manages to be about something and at the same time gives Gatwa the first chance to really show why he’s been cast. It’s not perfect but to say that it’s more than good enough would be to damn it with faint praise. The season has managed to finally get underway and we can but hope the remaining episodes manage to maintain this sort of quality.
Scores On The Doors? 8/10
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