I am an Idiot: The Very Finest Series of Doctor Who?

In years to come, the Twelfth Doctor’s fledgling series will be the Van Gogh of the Doctor Who Artistic Canon such is its strange brilliance, and such was its contemporaneous lack of appreciation.  It has a singularity of purpose not seen since Christopher Eccleston’s year at the TARDIS helm, and just as big a heart. It’s also got arguably the best leading performances the show has ever had and definitely the most interesting, complicated dynamics amongst the TARDIS crew. Both these things are subtle though. Capaldi never stoops to a “look at me” performance; he’s living the role, breathing it, inside it. He’s inside the Doctor’s mind more impressively than even Bob Baker and Dave Martin. And Jenna Coleman follows suit. What had been an airy-fairy sort of performance - which in itself is quite an accomplishment, considering the airy-fairy and very, very late development of Clara from a scripting perspective - gives way to an assuredness from Coleman. She is suddenly an actor who means business and a character we can believe in. The two of them represent a crack team of time travellers with, as the years to come will soon attest, some of the very greatest adventures ever made.

Aside from the regulars then, of which more later, what else is so wonderful about Series 8?

For a start, and completely superficially, doesn’t it just look glorious? The shift in colour and tone is as different as the shift between David Tennant and Matt Smith’s respective eras. Whilst Tennant’s time in the TARDIS was synonymous with bright pastel colours, The Eleventh Hour looked and felt like a vital, new show. So to does Series 8, but it’s not as obvious, not quite so tangible and in-yer-face. When one thinks about the Smith era, one imagines the omnipresent shadowy blues. When one thinks of Capaldi’s first season, the colour palettes which spring to mind are vividly different. Deep Breath is crimson and burgundy. Into the Dalek neon blue, Robot of Sherwood a deep green, Kill the Moon utterly grey, Mummy on the Orient Express spends half its time in sumptuous red and gold, and the remainder in stark white and turquoise. Listen likewise jumps from dark blue and black, to bright white and red, in conjunction with the massive, tangible changes in its soundscape which is possibly the best soundscape the series has enjoyed by a long margin. Lastly, Dark Water and Death in Heaven look thoroughly depressing in the best possible way: overcast, dank and miserable perfectly in fitting with the desperate air of doom and dread which pervades the finale from its opening minutes.

This is the first series for a long time, to feel like a complete set of episodes heading towards a clear and satisfying conclusion and which, despite every story being a new and unique affair, feels like with every episode we are building towards a climax. It is not just the enigmatic appearances of Missy but the narrative tensions between the Doctor and Clara, between Clara and Danny and between Danny and the Doctor.

For the first time ever, it feels like a companion choosing to go home every once in a while is a natural thing for them to do. Amy and Rory were always going home for a bit to… I dunno, wash up? Clara started hopping aboard the TARDIS during babysitting hours at someone else’s house. (Honestly, what on earth was going on with Series 7B?) Here though, Clara has a career, a boyfriend and a grandmother to return to. She has roots and is, from the first ten minutes of Into the Dalek, someone we can actually believe in as opposed to a fairy tale princess or an impossible girl. In short, she is no longer an archetype but a human being.

Importantly also, it is not just her journey we are following but her journey with the Doctor, who is emotional, unpredictable, alien and dangerous. This is a Doctor who could trap Clara with the bad guys because “he might need” his screwdriver. This is a Doctor who thinks abandoning Clara to decide the fate of a dying moon in a room full of nuclear bombs is him “respecting her.” This is a Doctor who either kills the half-face man or, even worse, talks him into killing himself. This is a Doctor who really doesn’t know who he is, who is scrambling around in the dark and agonisingly needs someone to help guide him in a far subtler way than the Doctor of, say, The Runaway Bride or The Fires of Pompeii. The season is his voyage of discovery, the “I am an idiot” speech in the finale being the first time, perhaps alarmingly, that we see this Doctor giving a proper, genuine and utterly adorable smile. Capaldi and Coleman completely sell these moments. They are totally committed. That first Capaldi smile must be an actor's decision but it proves how close he and Coleman are to this year's material. Yes, the story this series tells us a smaller one than those of the Russell T Davies years. It is less bold and not painted in quite so broad a set of strokes, but it only has one goal: to be good. Steven Moffat has openly said how unhappy he was with his last year at the helm with Matt Smith and Series 8 feels like this is a massively determined effort to make the very best show that he can. In terms of the writing, it is the most mature and affecting that Doctor Who has been. Give me Death in Heaven over Doomsday any day. (And for the record, I do love Doomsday!)

Amongst the Pyramids of Mars DVD Special Features, there is a documentary called Serial Thrillers in which Alan Barnes opines that perhaps the Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes era was made by two men who wanted to make “a great programme that they personally enjoyed watching" rather than a children's or family show. Series 8 feels similar: like Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin are making a great show for themselves. The evidence: Peter Capaldi boasted during pre-publicity for the series that it was going to be different in that “the scenes are longer.” It’s an odd thing to promote about your Saturday night, rollicking, pacy adventure series – the long scenes?! But he’s right. Look at Deep Breath. For a start it’s 75 minutes long. It’s almost a movie. The first scene by the Thames is five minutes long. The spectacular scene in the restaurant in which the Doctor asks, “Do you have a children’s menu?” lasts an eternity compared to the immediately previous The Time of the Doctor, a story in which the pace was so fast it took this reviewer at least three watches to understand everything completely. So Moffat and Minchin slow the pace of a family action adventure programme. It’s a bold move, perhaps an unwise one given the viewing figure slump the following year but it gives us more opportunities to live with the characters, to immerse ourselves in the world of the Doctor and Clara and for my money, makes the show immeasurably better.

Long scenes abound later on in the season. Kill the Moon ultimately becomes a series of desperate dissertations on the value of life in one grey room; Death in Heaven ends with seventeen minutes in a graveyard in which our leads discuss friendship and the all-conquering power of love. Listen’s best scene has to be the one at the end of time, as the universe is collapsing, and the Doctor and Clara discuss who she was having dinner with. Mummy has a tour-de-force of a scene in which the Doctor tries to work out the modus operandi of the Foretold as it kills people. The fact that this is one long scene is what makes it work: the Doctor seems more and more heartless as he watches people die whilst clinically using their last few minutes alive to dispassionately gain clues. And Capaldi is on fire. (Incidentally, am I the only one who wishes he'd returned to the dinner suit rather than switch to the bloody hoodie?)

More evidence that this is the season Moffat always wanted to write comes with the darker tone. We hear every year that “we’re going darker.” It was essentially the whole campaign for the 2011 season starting with The Impossible Astronaut. But this is properly dark. This is no fairy tale. This is People Really Die dark. What strikes me as one of the most harrowing scenes is the one in which Kate Stewart is pulled from a plane in the middle of a storm and we see her flailing around, trying to clutch at something, anything to save her. But there’s nothing to cling to. She’s gone. And the Doctor is appalled. The fact that she's later caught by her father is by the by and doesn't take away from that moment which works so well. Another storyline one couldn’t really imagine coming from the Russell T Davies era is the death of the Afghan boy. The child coming back to haunt Danny silently in heaven is as frightening as Doctor Who gets from an adult perspective. The story’s culmination, Danny accepting his own death to save the boy feels natural, right and at the same time unpredictable. Moffat is often accused of being egotistical - inventing new Doctors is the usual vitriolic ammunition fired in his direction - but here this alleged selfishness, if it even exists, is surely working for the betterment of the show. This is his best work by a country mile.

It must be said also that Series 8, although few fans seem to acknowledge this, features some of the very strongest material for the Daleks and the Cybermen, not just in terms of writing but directorially. The Daleks assault on the Aristotle is relentless high-octane action, and should be regarded as the modern-day equivalent of an Earthshock for those even deadlier of nemeses. The airlock being shattered; the fireballs; the handheld cameras, the Dalek mounted cameras, the explosions, the 80s-techno music and the strange brass trumpeting as the Daleks enter the ship: all make for one of the most beautiful-looking and viscerally exciting Dalek stories. Also, we're literally and metaphorically inside the Daleks head and on screen this is perhaps the most extensive exploration of what it means to be a Dalek.

Not since the emergence from their Telosian tombs has the Cybermen’s invidious feeling of menace been so evocative. They stand silently in the glass booths of 3W. The camera starts at their feet, glides up to the inexpressive face and the drums beat faster. The glass panels open and the army jerks into life. As they leave Saint Paul’s, there is a tangible feeling of dread and hopelessness and our Doctor runs through London screaming at people to, “Go on! Run away!” Watching the Doctor so powerless is in itself deeply affecting but it only heightens the fear we should have of the Cybermen. In the next episode, Danny Pink, who has been brutally augmented and facially scarred stands as a testament to all that is evil about the Mondasians and represents the most startling tale of conversion the series has ever attempted. It brings the shallowness of the Sally scene from Rise of the Cybermen into sharp relief. Converting someone we already know, even if we don’t particularly like them, feels cruel and plays against the usual rules of Doctor Who.

The Master is also served perhaps better than ever before too. Capaldi’s reaction when he realises who he has been talking to is deeply worrying in its terrified silence. Missy is given an agenda we can believe in of the Master, echoing way back to Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee exchanging banter in The Sea Devils. She just wants “my friend back.” And is going about it in a way only a psychopath could, which makes her insanely dangerous but for once, actually believable. The flippant way in which she kills Dr Chang, Seb and Osgood, marks her out as a villain to be truly feared. The fact that Michelle Gomez is so wonderful only highlights the staggering quality of the writing.

No, I haven’t mentioned the elephant in the room that is In the Forest of the Night. On paper, perhaps it could have worked. But we never believe, not for one second, that we are in London. It’s a small clearing with some traffic lights in it. Apart from anything else, where the hell is everyone? London is a city that never sleeps. It could be three in the morning and the streets would be teeming with people. On this particular 6am in London though, the commuters haven’t even bothered to show up. The scenes in the TARDIS with the children are long but without merit. There’s no need for them to be quite so lengthy as they don’t go anywhere. We don’t learn anything. It’s a peculiarly lethargic story considering it presents us with such an immediate crisis. But every season has its Power of Kroll or Time-Flight or Fear Her. And it would be wrong to use any of those stories as examples of the quality of the remainder of their respective years’ output.

Across Series 8, two main themes emerge: deception and soldiering. To take the former first: Deep Breath sees the Doctor failing to tell the truth to Clara. Look at the restaurant scene. She asks where he got the coat from. “I bought it,” he replies instantly. It’s such a feeble lie. Tantalisingly, we last saw the Doctor approaching the tramp from whom the coat was bequeathed angrily and the tramp in an obvious state of distress. This leaves open the alarming possibility that the Doctor took the coat forcefully. The fact that he lies to Clara at the first mention of the coat points to there being something amiss. Lying continues throughout the series, both from the Doctor and Clara, becoming more and more of a motor to drive the narrative. The beautiful scene on the beach at the end of Mummy on the Orient Express is another example of the Doctor’s vagueness regarding truth. He actually jokes about leaving the passengers behind in the train to die in the explosion and even then, we’re not sure that he isn’t telling the truth, such as is the dangerous ambiguity with which Capaldi plays the moment. Clara’s incapability in vocalising her time-travelling addiction comes between her and Danny several times and such is their inability to communicate truthfully that Dark Water begins and ends with two lovers unable to articulate their feelings for each other. Deception is proven to be slowly destructive and the ultimate cause of unhappiness and is evidenced most keenly in the very last moments of the series, in which the Doctor and Clara lie to each other in the café before going their separate unhappy ways.

The Doctor’s fractious relationship with the military has, since the Pertwee era, been slightly problematic for the show. The Doctor’s revulsion at the mention of hardware often runs the risk of appearing hypocritical when, in the end, he calls on it for help. In Series 8, the Doctor is even more aggressively anti-soldier, refusing to allow Journey Blue board the TARDIS as her position in the army repulses him, despite her illustrating all the hallmarks of a fine companion: she is clever, resourceful, compassionate and above all, has the ability to listen. Her dismissal feels unfair and prejudicial. Later, in The Caretaker, the Doctor refuses to believe that a military man could possibly be a maths teacher, coining Danny’s unflattering nickname: P.E. The fact that the Doctor’s oldest friend, the Brigadier, retired to be a maths teacher is certainly not unnoticed by Mr Moffat, who uses the old soldier cleverly in the finale, to highlight the Doctor’s dependence on those around him, military or civilian. Series 8 presents us with perhaps the most complicated exploration of the Doctor’s insecurities when it comes to soldiering. He is a frenzied mass of anxious contradiction during Death in Heaven, greeting Colonel Ahmed as “Man Scout” awkwardly before stopping to salute the Brigadier in the story’s closing moments. In the end, it is Danny Pink and his “promise of a soldier” who is called upon to save the day and the Doctor is reduced to the role of the general alongside his boots-on-the-ground brigade. It is as if, although not made explicit, the Doctor this season is forced to come to terms with his anxieties and accepts somehow that his relationship with the military will always be a complex affair. In his salute to the Brigadier, he also proves that he has a new-found or perhaps rediscovered respect for the armed forces. By the time we reach The Pyramid at the End of the World two series later, his vitriol does seem to have subsided.

There is a strangeness about Series 8. It is like no other. It is quite often depressing. Kill the Moon ends on a surprising low. The Caretaker feels like it’s had some of its laughs cut such is the intensity of the lead performances. Death in Heaven ends the season up in the air. It doesn’t feel quite complete. It feels like a word I keep coming back to: real. It feels like it ends as chapters in real life end, with whimpered goodbyes and patchy, awkward hugs and silences, with so much left unsaid. This is indicative of the truthfulness which runs like a seam through Series 8. Clara’s actions at the end of Kill the Moon are not cosy and flippant; they’re vital and reactionary. Listen is an exploration of the Doctor’s fear, making him feel more real than ever before. Clara’s rise to Doctorhood in Flatline feels properly dangerous. And the best has got to be the volcanic scene between him and Clara in which she hurls TARDIS keys furiously into the magma. A person's continued search for self-recognition is as true and real a place to start any story. Series 8 choose bravely to explore the Doctor's self-recognition.This is Doctor Who through a real-life prism and it is quite spectacular. 

Curiously, Last Christmas acts as a thematic coda to the series. We see Danny in dreams and Clara mourns him. The Doctor reveals his lying is habitual and both he and Clara come to epiphanies about their reasons for travelling, tying the themes and obsessions of Series 8 in a neat bow. If Clara’s story had ended there, it would have been perfect. The following year would try to bottle the lightning that was Series 8 but didn’t nearly match its quality – and I include Heaven Sent in that diagnosis – because it didn’t have as strong a story to tell. The Doctor didn’t have anything to discover and, without Danny to ground her, Clara became more and more insufferable. But this doesn’t take away from the zenith of storytelling that Series 8 was. It is rich, varied, unpredictable and more importantly that anything else, emotionally truthful and in the end, quietly heart-breaking. 

In time, fandom will come round. For my money, all the stories, despite Forest and Flatline (remarkably seized upon as one of the series’ best) are stone-cold knock-out classics. Even Robot of Sherwood which is utterly delightful, joyous and even features Venusian Aikido! The performances won’t date. The heart won’t vanish. It’ll one day be a bastion of all that is terrific about Doctor Who. How anyone can watch the last ten minutes of Dark Water and not think they’re watching the greatest programme that has ever been made, I will never know. But maybe I am an idiot. Just passing through. Helping out. Learning. Or maybe I am just an idiot.

JH