"I see beauty!"
The Doctor's greatest enemy returns to challenge everyone's expectations.
This week's episode of Doctor Who deals with some interesting moral issues and a lot of very good character development for the Doctor. Clara continues to emerge from the shadow of her (thus-far) superior predecessors as we see her as more than just a live-in nanny who sometimes travels with the Doctor. I've been avoiding most news about this current season of the show, so I was not sure what to expect from the episode. I was almost as surprised by the episode as the Doctor was when he went "Into the Dalek."
The Doctor responds to a distress call from Journey Blue and her brother, soldiers in a rebellion against the forces of the Daleks. Their ship is destroyed by a pursuing Dalek ship, but the Doctor manages to save Journey. Angry that her brother is dead and confused about where she is, Journey demands the Doctor return her to Aristotle, her command ship. The Doctor coerces her into asking nicely and then takes her back. The ship's leader thanks the Doctor for rescuing his niece and then orders his men to kill the Doctor.
Journey pleads with her uncle to spare the Doctor because he is a doctor, which they need to care for a special patient. The patient turns out to be a damaged Dalek that developed a sense of morality and appreciation for beauty. They want the Doctor to repair the good Dalek so they can use it against their enemies.
After engaging in a bit of flirting and agreeing to drinks with former soldier and new teacher at the Coal Hill School Danny Pink, Clara runs into the Doctor. He hands her the coffee that she sent him to fetch at the end of the previous episode, and she insists that was three weeks ago. The Doctor protests that he got distracted. ("By what?" "You can always find something.") Now he wants her help with the Dalek.
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor asks her the big question on his (and the audience's) mind: "Clara, be my pal. Am I a good man?" Clara responds honestly that she doesn't know, and neither does the Doctor. After some of his actions in "Deep Breath," neither knows what to make of the Time Lord's newest incarnation.
With the use of some technobabble ripped straight out of the Fantastic Voyage, the Doctor, Journey, Clara, and a pair of soldiers shrink themselves and transport into the Dalek. Hence the highly imaginative episode title. Inside, one of the soldiers tries to use his grappling gun to get to the soft, squishy center of the Dalek, but he only manages to attract the Dalek's internal defenses against "infection." As the "antibodies" swarm the quintet, the Doctor tosses the soldier something and tells him to swallow. The antibodies disintegrate the man a moment later. The Doctor explains that the man was dead anyway, but the radiation left by the man when his remains are dumped might lead the rest of them to a safer place.
The safer place turns out to be a large goo pit filled with organic residue. Now deep inside the Dalek, the Doctor leads the rest of the team to the Dalek's internal power supply, which was damaged and is leaking radiation. The Dalek speaks of how it found beauty when it saw the birth of stars and decided that the Daleks are not as inevitable as they claim. In fact, it states the Daleks should give up their quest to wipe out all other life because life always renews itself. ("Resistance in futile!")
The Doctor repairs the damage to the Dalek, and it immediately reverts to true Dalek form by summoning the nearby Dalek ship and trying to kill every living thing around it. As everything goes to hell, the Doctor decides that the notion of a good Dalek is too good to be true. They will never be anything but evil. Clara calls him on his bullshit and demands he find a better way. The Doctor realizes she's right and decides to do something "amazing."
Believing that the Dalek's memories of beauty and being good are still stored inside its central storage unit, the Doctor sends Clara, Journey, and the second soldier, Gretchen Allison Carlyle, to reactivate the suppressed memories. Carlyle, not wanting to waste time while their people die fighting the Dalek's, prepares her grappling gun for a fast ascent to the top of the Dalek even though she knows it will mean her life. She asks Clara if the Doctor is mad or right. Clara says, "Most days, he's both."
Carlyle fires her grappling gun and dies when the antibodies swarm her. We see her wake up with Missy in "Heaven." Journey and Clara rise to the central storage unit, and the Doctor descends to the soft, squishy center of the Dalek. ("Journey to the Centre of the Dalek" would have been a much more fun title, but they already used a riff on Jules Verne with "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" last season.)
In the memory storage, Clara and Journey figure out that the memories do indeed exist and that restoring power to the appropriate sectors will restore them. Meanwhile, the Doctor debates with the Dalek and tries to make it remember beauty and goodness. For a moment, the combination of Clara and Journey restoring memories and the Doctor's overwhelming charisma manage to break through the Dalek's "evil." It declares, "I see beauty!" Then, as the Doctor merges his memories to help the Dalek cling to the image of beauty, it sees his hatred for the Daleks and decides that it also hates the Daleks.
Just as the boarding party from the Dalek ship is about to kill the rebels, the good Dalek sweeps in to wipe them out. Journey rushes in to hug her uncle, and the Doctor confronts the Dalek. It declares that it has work to do but that the rest of the Daleks won't bother the rebels anymore. It leaves to continue exterminating the Daleks, but the Doctor - echoing Clara - hopes that it will learn from his memories more than just his hatred for the Daleks. Journey wants to go with the Doctor, but he says she's a soldier in spite of her many obvious good qualities.
Back on Earth, Clara tells the Doctor that she still doesn't know if he's a good man, but she believes that he's trying, which counts for something. After the Doctor leaves and promises to come back soon (or later, one of those), Clara runs into Danny who asks if she is serious about wanting to go for drinks, and she says yes. He asks if she has a problem with soldiers, and she says that's not her.
The Not-So-Good
This episode suffers from "redshirt" syndrome. We get several throw-away characters whose only purpose is to die. I really didn't care enough about the first soldier to remember if he had a name or not, and I only remember Gretchen Allison Carlyle because they made a point of it just before she died. Even then, I didn't care about her death because she had been a non-entity until that point. The same went for most of the other characters on the ship, including Gretchen's brother and uncle. I don't recall if they had names because they were there to show how deadly and dangerous everything was, not to be real people.
I was also disappointed that Journey did not get to go with the Doctor. He's asking if he's a good man, but he can't seem to find it in his heart to accept that Journey is a good woman even if she is a soldier. Her presence could have given the show an interesting new Doctor-Companion dynamic, even if for a little while.
The Pretty Good
That all said, the characters who are developed are beautifully developed. I really would love to have seen the Doctor take on Journey Blue as a companion. She's tough and grounded in her moral convictions, yet she's still able to understand the Doctor's case for finding a better way. Ultimately, Journey is not just a trained killer; she's a defender of life who, like the Doctor, sometimes has to make hard choices. That the Doctor can't see that is disappointing, but also believable.
Speaking of the Doctor and his choices, he made several questionable choices in this episode, most notably when he used the dying soldier to save the rest of the team, but also when he left Journey's brother to die. Phil Ford and Steven Moffat's script doesn't give us any real reason why the Doctor doesn't choose to save them other than the story calls for them to die. It's Peter Capaldi's performance that gives us those subtle hints as to why the Doctor does what he does. You see it in his expressions that, yes, losing people still affects him. You hear it in his voice that he wishes he could save everyone. His body language when he first meets Journey is stiff, as if he's still upset that he couldn't save Journey's brother. He's doing the best he can, but he doesn't always know what that means anymore.
Although Clara was first shown to be teaching at the Coal Hill School way back in the 50th anniversary special "Day of the Doctor," only now are we starting to see how her life has changed since taking that job. She's finally starting to feel like a real person instead of the "impossible girl," a story line and character arc that just never quite came together. (As with many of Moffat's recent stories, it was better on paper than in execution.) I'm starting to like her as she matures as a character and as Jenna Coleman matures as an actress. It could just be that she's more experienced now than with Matt Smith, but I like her chemistry with Peter Capaldi a lot better than with his predecessor.
One thing this episode does well, despite dealing with some heavy material, is that it never loses sight of the fact that Doctor Who is supposed to be a fun show. It's not a light-hearted episode by any means, but it does manage the dry, snarky humor very well. The action set pieces are also well-balanced with the character development scenes.
Overall, I was much more pleased with this outing than with the previous episode. It was hardly a perfect adventure, but the Daleks usually bring out the best (and worst!) in the Doctor. It was certainly a much better showing than last season's "Asylum of the Daleks," a particularly weak episode. I hope that "Into the Dalek" (still hate that name) proves to be the rule for solid episodes for the rest of the season rather than the exception.
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