The Doctor is back and this shorter than usual season will be one continuous story which is something Doctor Who hasn’t done since the mid 1980s. Certainly there have been season long arcs, and even Doctor Who spin off Torchwood did a event series a few years back, but this was the first time the main show has done it since the Trail of a Time Lord featuring Colin Baker’s 6th Doctor.
So how was it? So far so good on most accounts this episode was perhaps a little bloated with setting story threads up which by the end leaves the viewer with a lot of questions. Of course as a multi part story we shouldn’t expect things to be answered in this episode, but they certainly are going down the route of setting up mysteries which no doubt will be revealed bit by bit.
The biggest and most mysterious of these mysterious centres around the season’s big bad, Swarm, who escaped imprisonment at the start of the episode, absorbed someone’s life force to regenerate (but not like the Doctor) and then connect with the Doctor psychically at a couple of points. The most intriguing part of this was that Swarm claimed to know the Doctor going way back which was a surprise to The Doctor.
It can be expected that whoever Flux turns out to be we maybe can expect it to be someone who knows The Doctor pre William Hartnell’s First Doctor. After the Timeless Children story from the last series we can expect that to be explored more and perhaps find out that Swarm is an enemy of Jo Martin’s pre first Doctor, Doctor.
It could be that Swarm is from the same species that the Doctor is that pre-dated her becoming a Time Lord. There’s not much evidence for this other than that Swarm was able to regenerate from a weaker state to a more powerful one. Other enemies have done this previously, but it’s curious that the last series left us with the mystery of the Doctor’s true species and in this next story we meet an enemy who can regenerate and knows the Doctor from a time before her memory begins…hmmmm…
The episode also showed Yaz being more confident to challenge the Doctor and you have to believe it will only be time before the show tackles any potential romance between them. Speaking of romance, we were introduced to John Bishop’s Dan, who missed a date due to be being kidnapped by an intergalactic dog alien. That isn’t a sentence you get to write every day.
This dog alien, known as Karvinista turned out to be a friend and was kidnapping John Bishop to protect him from the Flux, which is a storm moving through all time and reality and wiping out whole planets like a hurricane blowing over a barn in a field.
This dog alien is the first of its kind we’ve seen on Doctor Who and comes after years of seeing cat aliens starting back in the Russell T Davies era of the show. Many commenters on the internet have likened Karvinista to Chewie from Star Wars, but I feel Barf from Space Balls is a much better comparison as they are both dogs.
Karvinista and the dog aliens somehow had knowledge of the incoming Flux and despite it being able to implode whole planets, they have the technology to defend the Earth from it. Nothing particularly wrong with this, but feels odd that they would have developed the tech to do this and put their efforts in to save all humans, but didn’t seemingly give advance warning to the Earth or The Doctor or others that we know of. If the dog aliens are man’s best friend then surely they would know that the Earth is always said to be under the Doctor’s protection and should have sought her out sooner.
If there was one other area of the episode I found slightly questionable it was was the Doctor and Yaz running into new character Claire. Whoever this Claire is, and that is another mystery this episode sets up, she said things which indicated that she already knew the Doctor. Maybe this happens constantly and the Doctor is used to it as a time traveller, but there aren’t tons of examples of this on screen. Queen Victoria was angry at the 10th Doctor before he knew why, Sally Sparrow in Blink warned the Doctor that he would get trapped in the past before it happened, and most famously of all River Song would meet The Doctor out of sequence.
Perhaps it’s something that would happen constantly for a time traveller, and the Doctor may brush off most random ‘hey don’t I know yous’ so not to risk causing paradoxes and such like, but felt odd that she wouldn’t pay more attention to this Claire. Claire clearly has more knowledge of The Doctor and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
We later see Claire meet an unfortunate fate as she is attacked by a Weeping Angel and presumably sent back in time. Claire did seem to have awareness of what to do around an Angel, but perhaps hadn’t met one in person as she didn’t manage to keep her nerve and got captured anyway. Maybe we’ll learn more about both Claire and the Weeping Angel’s origins in the weeks to come.
Conclusion
It’ll be interesting to see how all these story threads play out, and in an episode that also introduced Sontarans as well as a new potential companion and a couple of other characters and timelines I’ve not gone into here, there was a lot to digest.
As with any multi-part story we’ll know more about how good the over all plot and plan for the series is when more plays out, but for now this was an exciting return for The Doctor. The series has always been about excitement, mystery and monsters and this episode had lots to please it’s fanbase.
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