James Wylder, Writer

by James Wylder

Today on Doctor Who, we dredge up the detritus. This is a story constructed out of old parts. There in the background-- is that the special weapons Dalek? The weirdly shaped one? It even gets a line this time. We mold this story together out of old parts and forgotten memories, and then tip the rubbish bin over on its side and burst forth anew from it. The nostalgia is the aesthetic, the old stories are what we remember, but its the new stories we keep creating that push us forward.

The episode is in every way a reflection, its title is a mirror of its predecessor, “The Magician's Apprentice,” the aesthetics mirror old Dalek stories from Hartnel to Cushing to Tennant, and the character interaction is a mirror of “The Genesis of the Daleks”, while the set up itself is a mirror of the previous series finale “Dark Water/Death in Heaven” where Missy takes up an old monster of the Doctor's and has a story with them. But again, its reversed.

Where before Missy was controlling the Cybermen, here she is fighting alongside the Doctor in a weird perverted way, teaming up with Clara to try to save him. Again, these scenes of Missy and Clara are mirrored with Davros and the Doctor. The reflections aren't what we expected of them, though. In getting to see how Missy handles a mission, we see up close and personal her excitable cruelty. She somehow works in a similar way to the Doctor, and yet not at all. You can tell that they grew up together, that their methods of problem resolution are tied together in a mutal understanding, and yet they are also incompatible. With how cruelly Missy treats Clara, one has to look back at Series 3 of Doctor who and shudder at what exactly Lucy Saxon had to go through. It must have been worse that we imagined it.

Strangely, we get to see the Doctor paired with Davros in a totally congenial way. The two of them get along for the most part, aside from the Doctor stealing Davros' chair, the Doctor shows real compassion for Davros on his deathbed (death... chair?). In what might be one of the most brilliant pieces of dialogue I've seen recently, Davros is informed of Gallifrey's survival, and is genuinely happy for the Doctor. At first, its confusing, but then Davros explains himself, and the scene manages to make Davros both more understandable, while also revealing him truly as the nationalist fascist he is as he gives a speech about how every man should have his own place he hails from. The speech is heartfelt, even though the scene itself is a ruse, and shows us more about the difference between Davros and the Doctor than we had before. Its not just that the Doctor wants Galifrey back, its that the Doctor wants it back because all the people there died, just just cause it was its home. Davros' tears somehow reduce Galifrey to simply being another pinprick on a map, a cultural joyland that should remain isolated, when the Doctor himself thrives on leaving, on exploring, on changing and understanding.

Thus, is Skarro rebuilt as a relic. The Daleks remade a city in the shape of their heritage, and let an old man drain their life away for the sake of the past. They are so hidebound to their own creation, their own story, that they cannot progress. When they finally do progress, taking the Doctor's regeneration energy, it destroys them. The very process of change is anathema to the fascism of the Daleks. They cannot truly progress to the next level without sacrificing their isolated purity. The Doctor meanwhile is able to survive by ignoring his own history. When all the Daleks expect him to have a sonic screwdriver, he has changed yet again, and has sonic shades. He is always adapting, always learning, and always, in the end, merciful.

The Doctor's great victory in the end, is corrupting the Daleks. By going back in time to save Davros, he drops a hint of color into their sea of white washed conformity. The Daleks can ask for mercy now, they know what it is, and they will be forever cursed by this taint of goodness. They will not be good, but their iron charge has that hint of hesitation, that tiny urge for decency. A defect that could not be put out. Always, mercy.

From all that defeat, from all that hell, from all that cultural detritus, something new is rising out of something old. Something holy from the sewers.


Lets note the funny bits, now, shall we?
-”The last chair on Skarro!” made me laugh harder than any joke on the show I can remember. A+ (also, a nice call back to the parody of Doctor Who Moffat wrote “The Curse of Fatal Death.”)
-”Your Sewers are Revolting!”
-”You are a bad doctor...”
-Missy poking Davros in the eye after she said she'd scratch his eyes out last episode. Nice.
-Oh, and if you rewatch “The Big Bang” from series 5, there is a scene with a Dalek that has some new meaning!.

I'll be doing an analysis of every episode of Series 9 of Doctor Who after the episodes air. This is the first! Look forward to it for the rest of the season. -James Wylder

Television, or most entertainment, is made up of different pleasures. You go to a comedy for a taste of laughter, or to tragedy for tears, in a more general sense. But in a broader sense there are a whole pallet of tastes that make up entertainment. You might know this without even being able to express why when you are trying to think of a movie to watch, and think of two movies that are so very similar but you enjoy for different reasons and you feel a strong urge to watch one but not the other. The Magician's Apprentice knows its pleasures, and is unabashed in rolling them out on a tank for us.

What's really interesting about the episode is what those pleasures are, and exactly how unashamed of them the episode is. This is after all playing with the joy of nostalgia, and not just in the more vague way that TV often plays with nostalgia by throwing in tiny references, or bringing back an old villain for a new plot, but by directly tying the entire plot of this episode into the history of Doctor Who. From Missy's nonchalant, “Yes, I'm not dead just like always lets move on with the plot already,” to the casual use of Unit, all the way to showing off Davros, an old Dalek City, every sort of Dalek, and the clips of multiple Doctors from earlier in the show, its steeped in those things in a way that Doctor Who has shied away from since its return. Sure, the show has brought back plenty of old things, but it usually has done so in a way that it treats them as being new, or as tangential. Here, they are part of a past we are diving into. The past is the problem that needs to be solved, after all.

“Genesis of the Daleks” is one of the most revered Doctor Who stories, where the 4th Doctor and Davros square off for the first time, and the Doctor is given the chance to kill the Daleks forever, but doesn't. Its a moving moment for sure, but its also one that has been criticized: after all, if the Doctor had killed all the Daleks, it would have saved all the people they continually killed. This is dealt with in the episode itself, but not everyone buys the Doctor's reasoning on the matter. Here the consequences of his decision are laid out again for him: was it the right choice he made back then? We won't really find out where he falls on this question again till next week, but its a powerful one worth bringing up again.


But lets return to the pleasure of the past. With how much of my child hood was spent thinking through idea like, “but what if the Doctor returned to that story?” I find it totally charming that the show was finally brave enough to do so this directly. Not with a wink and a nod, but opening with it. This is after all an entire way we engage with stories: we pick apart their possibilities, create new futures and alternate routes for them. Now we've taken a chance and jumped down that rabbit hole. But even while its indulging in it, it stays away from the sort of excess that makes people despise this type of story: there are no long rambling explanations, and the problem isn't based around nonsense or technobabel. Instead, the story shows us what we need and centers the dilemma around the people involved in it.

Being that the entire revived series of Doctor Who has been written by fans who turned professional, there is something sweet about one of the overlooked pleasures of fanfiction being stripped of its thorns and made into a main course.

But lets not overlook the other fun that we had this week: first off, the Doctor played the guitar. Allow me to break my writing style for a moment to say oh wow that was so rad I mean wow that was super cool yes please I want more of that rock on you sunglassed powerchording hero. So yes, that was a highlight. Seeing Clara work with Missy was also fascinating, as Missy took on the role of the Doctor in the story, requiting Clara for the mission, leading her out onto Skarro's surface, figuring out problems and explaining the solutions, but also being utterly different than the Doctor even while she was similar by being utterly bonkers and without a trace of sanity.

Also, the very nice realization of the colony of snakes was fantastic, and it got the funniest line in the episode: “We're a democracy!”

These pleasures are just as important as the weightier ones, and that the show is so utterly fine with just sitting back and enjoying these moments makes it a delight. We're allowed to let Clara take a spin while walking on stars, and even though it barrels onto the next taste in its copious buffet, oh what a taste it was.

But in the end the thing I'll remember most from this is poor tiny Davros standing in a sea of hands with eyes. Those eyes that see and grab. They're always watching us. You have a one in a thousand chance of making it through, but can you? Whatever decision you make, you'll be seen. You can never escape horrors in a vacuum, nor end them. Maybe the scariest thing is knowing that even your hardest decisions, even your own death, are held to a captive audience, made of palms, or in the chair in front of the television.

But since we like being scared enough to watch this show, what could be more pleasurable than that?