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“Before the Flood” is the second part of the second two-parter in a season that will be all two-parters, because Steven Moffat has heard your complaints about the lack of two-parters in seasons 7 and 8 (minus the finale), which would have given the stories room to breathe (and also make sense), and he has decreed, “You dare to criticize me? Fuck you, now you get a season of all two-parters!”* And then he curled up in a ball and cried and wondered why he’s still executive producing this show, just like a lot of us are wondering. Anyway…

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

The previous week’s episode, “Under the Lake,” was pretty good and set up an interesting, semi-supernatural mystery. The conclusion, “Before the Flood,” wasn’t quite as good, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be. You see, I guessed the Doctor was in the stasis chamber pretty much right away, because I know how this show works now, its formula has become all but set in stone, but I was expecting some timey-wimey bullshit to be the explanation. Instead, it actually made logical sense this time! (Although I suspect it was not a surprise to anyone else, either.)

In this episode we get to see the Doctor facing certain, unavoidable death in a way that puts the events of the lake in Utah, Trenzalore, and even just the previous story in this very season, to shame. Here, the Doctor just fucking deals with it instead of all that nonsense we’ve seen before — no confession dial, no weeks of partying beforehand, no all of time and space in jeopardy, just quiet resignation of his fate and the hope that he can save Clara before it’s too late. I like seeing the Doctor try to figure a way out while understanding that history can’t be changed, rather than breaking that rules with timey-wimey nonsense to save himself at the last minute. (I’m looking rather pointedly at the two of you, “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” and “The Wedding of River Song.”) This story gets many, many points for not letting the Doctor use time travel as a way out, which always comes off feeling cheap.

Another thing I liked in this episode was the Fisher King, the presumed dead but not really dead alien in the Tivoli hearse. Not only was the creature itself very well designed, but they let it be really, really intelligent instead of just scary. I loved how it knew about the Time Lords and threw the Doctor’s unwillingness to change the future back in his face. Good stuff.

Also, the electric guitar version of the theme song? Please make that the actual, recurring theme song! It’s leagues ahead of the shrill, electronic version they’re using now.

Unfortunately, parts of the episode felt stale to me. It wasn’t just that I knew how the stasis chamber was going to play out (although that felt like it was right out of “The Pandorica Opens” in season 5), but other elements, too. O’Donnell’s nerdy excitement that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside ought to have been joyously contagious, except we’ve seen it so many damn times already that I really think from now on they’d be better off not having anyone say anything about it at all. O’Donnell’s off the cuff mention of the Doctor’s previous companions Rose, Martha, and Amy also felt weird to me. Usually I like these kinds of callbacks, but — the fact that everyone was supposed to have forgotten about the Doctor during his season 7 computer memory banks wipe aside — the show feels so different now from the days of Rose and Martha that it felt jarring to hear their names. I felt strangely protective, like, “You don’t deserve to talk about them anymore, show!” Which is pretty ridiculous of me, I admit.

I didn’t care for the opening monologue. Not all the stuff about Beethoven and the bootstrap paradox, that was interesting, but rather the way it felt entirely removed from everything else in the episode. A smarter script would have integrated that speech into a scene with Clara or maybe O’Donnell and Bennett so the call back at the end would feel more deserved. As it was, it felt completely outside of the story, and if you were to trim both the monologue and the callback nothing about the episode would be any different.

Lastly, with the Doctor’s ghost turning out to be a hologram he projected from his sonic sunglasses** there’s a sense of disappointment when we learn that part of his message was just randomly ordered names. Why not just end the list with Clara’s name? It would have had the same result, without the verbal shrug of admitting the rest was added for no reason. It makes the Doctor’s plan sound sloppier than it was, and makes the script feel unnecessarily manipulative.

Overall, not a bad story, but it could have used some polishing and more fresh moments. The show might benefit from having someone who can go through the scripts and cross things off that have been done to death already.

Oh, and one last note: I’m wondering if the “Minister of War” reference will be this year’s “Bad Wolf,” with hints of things to come.

*To be fair, though, I think a season of all two-parters might be a good thing in terms of allowing the stories more time to develop, like those old four-parters of the classic series.

** The sonic sunglasses have to go. They have to go. Changing the screwdriver to shades does not mitigate the show’s over reliance on a sonic device, it just alters the shape of the device. This is no fix. If you want to get rid of the sonic screwdriver, have the guts to actually get rid of it.

“Under the Lake,” the third episode of season 9, is a welcome step up from last week’s disappointing “The Witch’s Familiar.” A base under siege, a spooky threat that’s actually alien in origin, a mysterious spaceship found on the ocean floor — this is practically an episode from the classic era!

The script by Toby Whithouse is pretty strong (I’ll always love him for writing “School Reunion” in season 2) and the cast is game. My only problems are, as usual for Moffat-era Doctor Who, the characterizations of Clara and the Doctor. Clara’s gung-ho “let’s have an adventure” attitude had me rolling my eyes from the get-go. I’m hoping they play more with this idea that she’s overcompensating for the loss of Danny, but given the lack of consistency from episode to episode I wouldn’t be surprised to see the whole idea dropped just as quickly as it was raised.

The Doctor is actually in fine form for most of the episode, the usual Moffatisms not withstanding (“I want to kiss it to death”? Really?). The bit with the apology cue cards, while funny, definitely allows us to check off the “Suddenly, The Doctor Doesn’t Seem To Know Anything About Humans Despite Spending 1000s Of Years Around Them” box on the Doctor Who bingo card. I think we can check off the “Overuse of Fan Wank” box, too, for the fawning crew member who’s heard of the Doctor and is a big, gushing fan. (What ever happened to the Doctor removing his name from databases all over the universe in season 7 so that history would forget about him? Oh yeah, Moffat happened.)

Like the last story, this one is also a two-parter, so I’ll have to reserve overall judgment until it’s complete. However, judging from the scenes in the teaser for next time, it appears we once again have the Doctor being certain that he’s going to die, a mere one week after a story that was pretty much all about the Doctor being certain that he was going to die (despite having a counter to Davros’s trap and an escape plan in mind from the start, apparently). But given the strength of this first part, I’m holding out hope for the second.

However, the sonic shades have got to go. They have got to go. In a TV series full of ridiculous things, the sonic shades are beyond ridiculous.

And now, a fun bit of Doctor Who neepery! One of the Doctor’s apology cue cards reads: “It was my fault, I should have known you didn’t live in Aberdeen.” This is a direct reference to the Fourth Doctor accidentally dropping Sarah Jane Smith off in Aberdeen instead of her home in South Croydon when she left the TARDIS at the end of the 1976 serial “The Hand of Fear.” Toby Whithouse really seems to love Sarah Jane Smith. Who can blame him? She was my first companion (I suspect she might have been his, too) and will always be the one I measure others against.

I’ve been putting off reviewing the latest Doctor Who episode, “The Witch’s Familiar,” because I thought it was so stupid I was tempted to not bother. After a pretty good first part, this second part of the season opener was full of bluster but empty of substance. The Moffatisms were strong in this one, especially his characteristic use of flash over logic. But let’s get to it.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

There was a moment when I thought this episode had nailed it. Just freaking nailed it. It’s more than a moment, really. It’s an exchange between the Doctor and Davros that I thought was exceptional. Just the two of them, in a room, talking, in a scene that is allowed to go on for several minutes without jokes or explosions or the Doctor randomly announcing “I am the Doctor!” (Well, actually he does do that last one, sort of.) And I thought, they’re really going to do this, they’re really going to let the show have some maturity for a change, they might even actually have Davros die. But then…

DAVROS: Ha ha, it was all a trap and you fell for it!
DOCTOR: Ha ha, I knew it was a trap all along and I let it play out this far in order to lay a trap within your trap, even though as far as I know it cost Clara her life and, oh yeah, the lives of two UNIT soldiers who had nothing to do with anything!
ME: *sighs heavily, checks time to see how much longer this episode will be*

There were logic issues. So many logic issues. Why would a Dalek casing actively translate the words of its inhabitant rather than simply broadcast them? What’s the point? A Dalek wouldn’t say anything like “I love you” or “My name is…” anyway (except, I guess, Dalek Caan, who has a name, but who’s counting?), so why the failsafe translation mechanism? It doesn’t make any sense, unless the implication is that some Daleks are actually trying to be friendly but can’t because the casing won’t let them, which would be a pretty radical reimagining of the Daleks. So why is it there? For the plot, it seems, and no other reason. It exists so there could be a scene where Clara, hidden inside a Dalek casing, has trouble communicating with the Doctor.

Speaking of, I’m surprised the Doctor didn’t make mention of Clara being inside a Dalek the first time he met her. But then, I guess most of season 7 didn’t happen anymore, since the events of Trenzalore played out differently, or something? But if that’s the case then Clara shouldn’t still be the Doctor’s companion, so who even knows? (As my brother once put it, is any of this even happening since the Doctor didn’t die at that lake in Utah?)

Anyway, the Doctor again does some weird magic mumbo-jumbo by giving some of his “regeneration energy” to Davros (I neither like nor understand this new ability Time Lords have to lend regeneration energy, it implies way too much control over the process and their own biology) but that turns out to be the trap. Oh no!

DALEKS: Ha ha, now we are super hybrid Daleks! We are stronger than ever in ways you cannot see and will not be demonstrated before we are immediately taken out of the story by some nonsense about evil sentient sewer poop!

Yeah, what else? The sonic sunglasses are the stupidest thing since the Eleventh Doctor went on about how fezzes are cool. There’s some mumbo-jumbo about a Time Lord prophecy regarding a hybrid warrior, possibly half Dalek and half Time Lord that either will or will not be mentioned again in the future, because with Moffat who even knows? Missy has a rope suddenly, which she uses to tie up Clara for no real reason. The TARDIS can do yet another brand new thing to avoid being destroyed, this time dispersing into molecules, so it looks like it blew up, and then waiting to reform at the Doctor’s command. (Of course, it could have just turned itself into that little metal thing from last season instead, but that wouldn’t have been flashy enough, I guess.) At the end of the episode, the Doctor realizes he has one last thing to do with kid Davros and runs into the TARDIS, leaving Clara ALONE ON SKARO, THE MOST DANGEROUS PLANET IN THE UNIVERSE, ALONG WITH MISSY, WHO TRIED TO KILL HER, AND THE EVIL SENTIENT SEWER POOP, WHICH IS KILLING EVERYTHING! Way to go, Doctor.

There’s some good stuff, too. The Doctor riding in Davros’s chair was fun (“Admit it, you’ve all had this exact nightmare”), although that scene went nowhere. Davros’s joke that the Doctor is not a good doctor. The flashback story Missy tells. The line “the only other chair on Skaro.” The answers are finally given to how Missy survived the end of last season (teleporter!) and how Skaro is back (the Daleks rebuilt it!). But for me, in this episode, the bad far outweighs the good. All flash, and very little logic.

Running this episode past the Doctor Who bingo card, we can check off “Glib Companion Banter,” again between Clara and Missy, a dynamic I really enjoyed, “Fanbase Trolling Dialogue” for the bit about Missy having a daughter on Gallifrey, “Continuity? What Continuity?” for Davros having eyes that can still open and see (it was never explicitly mentioned that he didn’t, but it was implied given his decrepitude and mechanical viewing device), “It’s Magic! I Ain’t Gotta Explain Shit!” for the use of regeneration energy and the ostensibly souped-up Daleks that don’t do anything new or exciting, “Plot Hole!” for the fact that the Doctor purposely got Missy involved, resulting in the death of two UNIT soldiers, but she doesn’t actually do much in either episode, “Over Use of Fan Wank” for explaining that the Doctor keeps surviving because he always goes into danger “expecting to win” (Moffat loves writing characters who talk about how awesome the Doctor is), “_______s Are Cool!” for the new sonic shades, and “Clara Conveniently Forgets Important Fact That She Previously Knew” for forgetting she used to be a Dalek in one of her splinter lives.

Ah well, maybe the next episode will be better. Hope springs eternal.

Season 9 of Doctor Who is upon us, and this weekend saw the first episode hit the air, “The Magician’s Apprentice.” It wasn’t a bad episode, I thought, although it relied heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of Who history, both the new and classic series. It’s also the first of a two-parter, so it’s hard to judge the story overall, but generally I enjoyed it.

***MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW***

I imagine anyone who hasn’t seen the classic 1975 Fourth Doctor serial “Genesis of the Daleks,” or hasn’t seen the 2008 Tenth Doctor episode “Journey’s End,” would have a hard time understanding just why it’s so important that the little boy on the battlefield is named Davros. (Let’s leave aside for the moment that for all the Doctor knows, Davros could be quite a common name on Skaro and this boy doesn’t necessarily have to be the Davros.) This is probably why I enjoyed the episode more than Alexa did, because there were lots of Easter eggs for classic-era fans like myself that might have left others feeling left out. There are quite a few callbacks to “Genesis of the Daleks,” including video clips of the Fourth Doctor in action, as well as some audio clips of Davros’s interactions with the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth Doctors. I quite enjoyed seeing a new take on the thousand-year war between the Kaleds and the Thals on Skaro. (Nice to see cameos by the Sisterhood of Karn, the Shadow Proclamation, and the Judoon again, too!) It’s always exciting for longtime fans like me when Davros shows up. We have a lot of history with him. Aside from the Master, Davros is the closest thing Doctor Who has ever had to a supervillain.

Interestingly, the Doctor’s abandonment of Davros on the battlefield goes against the whole point of “Genesis of the Daleks”, in which the Doctor realizes he doesn’t have the right to make these kinds of decisions. When he asks the rhetorical question about killing a child destined to grow up to be a ruthless dictator, the implied answer is no, that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. To have the Doctor make a different choice now and leave Davros to presumably die in the hopes of changing history is a strange change in his character — although it fits in with Steven Moffat’s interest in showing the Doctor as flawed and fallible instead of just straight-up heroic.

Speaking of the Master, Missy shows up again, and I liked her in this episode more than I did in the entire last season. Some of that is because I thought her plot last season was overly complicated nonsense, punctuated by increasingly intrusive scenes tacked onto the end of several episodes, but here she could just be herself, and as a result actress Michelle Gomez really gets to shine. Her scenes with Clara were, for me, the highlight of the episode.

I also enjoyed seeing the old school Daleks on Skaro, including the silver and blue models used in the very first Dalek serial back in 1963. Skaro itself has had kind of a tricky history on the program. It was blown up by the Hand of Omega in the 1988 Seventh Doctor serial “Remembrance of the Daleks,” an act which is commonly thought to have started the Last Great Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. Except Skaro existed again, apparently, in the 1996 TV movie, in which the Daleks, weirdly, execute the Master on Skaro and ask for the Doctor, even more weirdly, to come pick up his remains. Skaro made another appearance at the start of the 2012 Eleventh Doctor episode “Asylum of the Daleks,” in which the Doctor is summoned to the planet for a trap. The TV series has never explained how Skaro is back from destruction (although I’m told the novels do, with the explanation being that the Hand of Omega actually destroyed a fake duplicate of Skaro after the Daleks discovered records of Skaro’s destruction during their 22nd century invasion of Earth and took action to prevent it — but convoluted shit like this is why I don’t read the novels). But anyway, Skaro is back, looking more like the Skaro we originally saw in 1963’s “The Daleks,” and being kept invisible and secret for some reason, although I’m prepared for this reason, in true Moffat fashion, to never be explained.

Yes, I’m going to harp on Steven Moffat a little bit here (surprise, surprise) because this episode is filled with what I’ve come to call Moffatisms. Once again, he shows his fascination with origin stories where none are really needed, as well as stories that are about the Doctor rather than simply adventures the Doctor partakes in. We once again meet an important character as a child, something Moffat has now done with Amy, River, Clara, and even the Doctor himself in last season’s “Listen.” Once more he handwaves away important questions like how Missy survived the end of last season, or how Davros survived the events of “Journey’s End.” Once again the most interesting and creepy part of the episode, the “hand mines,” turns out to have not much to do with anything else going on, reminiscent of the scary but ultimately unimportant Smilers in “The Beast Below.” And once more he recycles his own plots by giving us a story where the Doctor is convinced his time is up and decides to postpone the inevitable by acting out and partying before getting on with doing what he has to do, like in “The Wedding of River Song” and “The Time of the Doctor.” Granted, Russell T. Davies did it in “The End of Time,” too, but he did it first and only once. Moffat has now done it three times!

So, running this episode past the Doctor Who bingo card, we can check off “Glib Companion Banter,” except this time it’s between Clara and Missy, a dynamic I very much enjoyed, “Season Long Story Arc Explained in Throw Away Comment,” which I’m going to apply to Missy’s handwaving return, “Previously Killed Off Character Returns” for both Missy and Davros, “Fanbase Trolling Dialogue” for Missy referring to the Doctor in his youth as a little girl instead of little boy, and “Continuity? What Continuity?” for the return of Skaro. The “It’s Magic! I Ain’t Gotta Explain Shit!” square pretty much covers a lot of this, too.

Still, despite my annoyance at all the Moffatisms, I’m looking forward to the next episode to see what happens. (If you think Missy and Clara are really dead, you’ve never seen this show before!)