by Nicholas Lemieux
Following the bleak ending to Series 8, the following Christmas special that year, Last Christmas, reunited the Doctor and Clara with another adventure. Surrounded with a lowly crew in a North Pole research base by ravenous alien Dream Crabs who trap their victims within dreams whilst feasting on their brains, their only hope of survival is down to Santa Claus himself. Basically Alien and The Thing meets Miracle on 34th Street. The special itself features the Doctor and Clara each discovering their lies with one another and, by the end of the episode, deciding to get back together and go on more adventures in the TARDIS.
Series 8, whilst received generally positively, also had some criticisms involving the unbalanced bleaker tone, not to mention for having some extremely poor episodes, such as Kill the Moon (the one where the Moon turns out to be an egg) and In the Forest of the Night (the one with trees and poor child actors, one whom does the voice for Peppa Pig). For Series 9, the show adopted a one-off unique storytelling process, with nearly every story this year being a two-parter. With more time to flesh the story out, this seasons received great critical acclaim and has since been regarded as being one of Doctor Who’s strongest seasons to date.
As for the Twelfth Doctor himself, since his character development last season, he has definitely mellowed out as a character. His first scene this season is him arriving at a medieval duel on a tank whilst playing the show’s theme tune on an electric guitar for God’s sake, and he also seems more sympathetic to the plights of the people he encounters, particularly with Clara as his moral compass. A notable theme this season is the growing dynamic between the Doctor and Clara. Flatline, an episode from last season, showed Clara taking on the role of the Doctor for the day after he is incapacitated in a shrunken TARDIS, investigating 2D monsters in a London underground railway system, a role Clara is disconcertingly able to take on quite well, down to his mannerisms and non-existent fear in the face of danger. As the Doctor himself puts it at the end of the episode “You were a good Doctor, Clara. Goodness had nothing to do with it”. Series 9 plays with this theme further by showing just how comfortable and confident Clara has become with her lifestyle going on madcap adventures with the Doctor to the point that she almost a gender bent version of the Doctor himself (Hmm) and the Doctor is starting to grow concerned about this...
Right off the bat, Series 9 kicks off with an epic two-parter The Magician’s Apprentice/ The Witch’s Familiar, featuring the return of Davros, Missy and the Daleks followed by Under the Lake/ Before the Flood, a time travel complex base-under-siege throwback to the old Doctor Who stories of the 60’s. This season’s story arc starts to be fleshed out by the episode The Girl Who Died. It starts off as a simple episode; the Doctor is in a Viking village and has 24 hours to train the non-fighting villagers to prepare for battle against warrior aliens known as the Mire. However, towards the end of the episode after the Doctor has seemingly saved the village, heartbreak ensues after he discovers that a young Viking girl called Ashildr was killed in the process. The Doctor is frustrated, grief-stricken by how no matter how hard he tries, he can’t save everyone in these conflicts, when suddenly he finally realises why he chose the face of Lucius Caecillius. During the climax of The Fires of Pompeii, the Tenth Doctor is tearfully convinced by his companion Donna to save Caecillius and his family during Mount Vesuvius’ eruption. For once, the Doctor decides to break the rules of life and death and brings Ashildr back to life via some micro chips. However, the episode still ends on a sombre note, as the Doctor discovers that the micro chip he used to resurrect Ashildr may have also granted her immortality. Sure enough, the ensuing episode The Woman Who Lived shows the Doctor encountering Ashildr again 800 years later as a highwayman in the 1600’s, who over the years has become increasingly aloof and indifferent to human life after suffering through countless losses and is now going by the simple name of Me, having her forgotten her original name years ago. Although the Doctor is eventually able to make Ashildr realise that she still cares about the lives of others, Ashildr still never forgets the curse the Doctor had inadvertently placed on her...
Before the season finale (as well as the found footage episode Sleep No More, which we won’t talk about...) , The Zygon Invasion/ The Zygon Inversion features the Twelfth Doctor desperately trying to maintain a peace treaty between humanity and the shape shifting Zygons, in order to prevent an extremist group of Zygons from breaking out a war between the two species. Personally, the climax of this two-parter, in which the Doctor engages in a confrontation with Bonnie, the leader of the Zygon cell, features what I feel was Capaldi’s strongest performance in the role. When Bonnie expresses her desire for vengeance and war in retribution for how her race has been treated, Capaldi delivers an absolutely chilling speech highlighting the pointlessness of war. “When you fire that first shot” he proclaims “you have no idea who’s going to die! You don’t know whose children are going to scream and burn! How many hearts will be broken! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning: Sit down and talk!”When Bonnie insists that the Doctor will never understand the horrors of war, 12 is disgusted and with raw fury brings up the pain he still feels from bringing an end to the Time War, which wiped out his people. “I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you could ever imagine, and when I close my eyes... I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count!” And then, with such fury and grief, the Doctor explains how he deals with all this overbearing pain: “You hold it tight...until it burns your hand, and you say this: No one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain. Not on my watch.” The speech is enough to make both sides of the conflict instantly stand down; this was definitely the point for me that Capaldi truly solidified his role as the Doctor.
Towards the end of Series 9, Face the Raven shows the Doctor and Clara reunite with Ashildr again, now mayor of a trap street serving as a refugee camp for aliens. When Clara’s close friend Rigsy is accused of murdering one of the aliens, he is given a Chronolock tattoo which counts down to the time until a deadly Shade in the form of a raven is released and kills him. Clara, in her continuing manner of acting like the Doctor, recklessly has Rigsy transfer the tattoo to her, under the belief that they’ll find a solution later. Towards the end, the whole situation is revealed to have all been a plan by Ashildr to lure the Doctor to some unknown “employees”. However, when they all discover that Clara has taken the Chronolock, the Doctor and Ashildr are horrified, as the contract with the Shade raven cannot be undone. The Doctor becomes taken with rage and furiously confronts Ashildr, threatening to rain hell on her for Clara’s coming death but Clara calms him down and asks him not to be upset or to take revenge. After a final farewell between the two, with the Doctor kissing her hand before she leaves, Clara is struck by the raven and dies a painful death, whilst the Doctor is promptly teleported away, although he warns Ashildr that Clara’s request was only to protect her from his wrath.
Heaven Sentis widely regarded as being one of the strongest episodes of the entire show as a whole, notable for the fact that Capaldi is the only actor, aside from Jenna Coleman in a brief one-line vision as Clara and the monster of the episode, to appear in the entire episode. The episode shows the Doctor trapped in a castle in the middle of the sea, trying to find a mysterious Room 12 whilst being chased by the Veil, a monster which doesn’t run but never stops following him. After constantly navigating throughout the castle, and going through some inner monologues trying to cope with Clara’s death, the Doctor eventually discovers Room 12, which contains an enormous wall, 400 times harder than diamond. The Doctor futilely attempts to punches the wall, his hands bleeding in the process, until the Veil catches up with him and fatally burns him. The Doctor crawls back to the room he first arrived in and uses the last of his energy to restart the teleportation chamber, aware that due to the resetting rooms, the system will still contain a copy of himself. This in turn starts a never-ending cycle of countless Doctors arriving at the castle and each punching their way through the wall, each one quoting the Brothers Grimm fairytale “The Shepherd’s Boy” about a bird which slowly weathers away a mountain with its beak. Eventually, after more than two billion years of torture, the Doctor finally breaks through the wall and finds a shocking surprise in front of him: His home planet Gallifrey.
The final episode of this series, Hell Bent, wastes no time as within the first 20 minutes, the Doctor is able to quickly overthrow the Time Lord President Rassilon, who put him through this torture in the first place, and banishes him with only one line: “Get off my planet”. All these years of torture have broken the Doctor and he is more determined than ever to rescue Clara. Disobeying the laws of time, the Doctor jeopardises the fate of the entire universe by retrieving Clara from the final point in her timeline before her death and flees from his planet in a TARDIS (History repeats eh?). The Doctor is determined to rescue Clara, even though she is technically already dead, and flees to the very end of the universe itself to see if she regains her heartbeat, during which he has a final meeting with Ashildr. But Clara’s death is a fixed point in time, and there is nothing the Doctor can do to save her. Having realised the complete recklessness he has brought on between him and Clara, the Doctor ultimately realises the best solution is for him to wipe his memory of Clara, to put an end to his actions. After a final and ultimate goodbye, the Doctor wipes every single one of his memories with Clara. Sometime later, the Doctor visits an American restaurant and meets a waitress who looks strikingly like Clara and tells his story to her and laments how he feels there is something he has forgotten. After encouraging the Doctor to keep on going, Clara leaves and fulfilling her identity as the Doctor sets off with Ashildr in her own TARDIS, which is stuck as the restaurant, to travel the galaxy anew, although she is aware that one day she will have to return to her point in death. As for the Doctor, he returns to his TARDIS, new Sonic Screwdriver in hand, and continues to travel the galaxy alone, although before setting, he does notice a final message form Clara on his blackboard: “Run you clever boy and be a Doctor”.
To be concluded...
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