Dreams, Movie References, And Another Unresolved Doctor Who: “Last Christmas!”

The Good: Good plot development, Decent performances
The Bad: No real character development, Lack of resolution
The Basics: When alien parasites attack The Doctor, Clara and an Arctic base, the entire season of Doctor Who comes into question, thanks to “Last Christmas!”


Regardless of how the rest of the season finale of Doctor Who went, it is pretty hard to fight the feeling that Peter Capaldi’s first season as The Doctor ended in a pretty shit place. Regardless of what the BBC would call it, I tend to consider the last episode before a long hiatus the season finale and, despite how much the rest of “Death In Heaven” (reviewed here!) played itself up as the end of the season, the last moments of the episode and its follow-up “Last Christmas” argue otherwise. It is virtually impossible to discuss “Last Christmas” without talking about where “Death In Heaven” ended, so consider that a spoiler alert!

“Last Christmas” is the latest Doctor Who Christmas special/season finale and it has the unenviable task of picking up the Doctor Who story at a terrible place. The eighth season of Doctor Who climaxed with the death of Danny Pink, a Cyberman attack, and The Doctor being told that his long-lost homeworld of Gallifray had returned to our universe at its original coordinates. While the problem of Missy lying to The Doctor (as Peter Capaldi’s performance in “Death In Heaven” strongly implied) was fertile ground from which to launch a new character arc for The Doctor, “Last Christmas” is saddled with the burden of trying to be clever, while still being surprising. The crux of the problem at the end of “Death In Heaven” and at the outset of “Last Christmas” is that the viewer knows that Danny Pink cannot be permanently dead as the story would have us believe; in “Listen” (reviewed here!), Clara and The Doctor met Danny and Clara’s descendant. Given that Clara and Danny had not conceived a child from which to have an ancestor, Danny could not remain truly and completely dead. The implication at the climax of “Death In Heaven” was that the mechanism by which Danny Pink would be resurrected would be . . . Santa Claus.

Clara wakes up in bed, discovering that Santa Claus is on her roof, talking about tangerines. The Doctor and the TARDIS appear and he demands Clara come with him, before he confronts Santa Claus. Hopping in the TARDIS, The Doctor asks Clara if she actually believes in Santa Claus. In the Arctic, a four person team is trying to get to an airlock, through a medical bay that houses their four contaminated comrades. The victims are unconscious, having fallen prey to a parasite called dream crabs. They only attack when the victim thinks about them and it detects a mental picture of itself in the victim’s mind. When the Doctor and Clara arrive, it leaves the mission of the Arctic team compromised and after the parasites attack all six, the group is rescued by Santa Claus.

As The Doctor and the Arctic team study the dream crabs that have infested the station, Clara is attacked by one. Clara finds herself back with Danny Pink and, despite seeing chalk boards telling her that she is in a dream and dying, she shrugs off the warnings of her subconscious mind. The Doctor enters her dream directly and convinces her of it lack of reality. But when she wakes up from it, thanks in part to the dream Danny making another heroic sacrifice, the lack of a wound on her head from the dream crab makes her question reality. As she and the base’s inhabitants struggle to wake up, the Doctor tries to combat the dream crabs and formulate a way out of their telepathic attack.

“Last Christmas” might well be the episode of Doctor Who that alludes to the greatest number of other works. The dream crabs are reminiscent of – and explicitly referenced as similar to – the facehuggers in Alien (reviewed here!). The description The Doctor gives for what the parasites are doing to the brain is an allusion to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Phantasms” (reviewed here!) where Data sees invisible parasites through dream imagery. And the tangerines in “Last Christmas” are Steven Moffat’s equivalent of the spinning top in Inception (reviewed here!).

So, “Last Christmas” starts fun as a series of clever lines and quickly devolves into a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. The problem with “Last Christmas” is that the audience that is savvy-enough to understand what Steven Moffat is doing with the layers of dreams is smart enough to see the reversals late in the episode coming a mile away. So, there is something of a “fuck all” aspect to “Last Christmas” and it is basically that the episode serves to call into question not only the whole final arc of the season finale, but the entire prior season. (***More on that below the “Not Quite Spoiler Version” note below!***)

Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Nick Frost (Santa) play their parts well and, unfortunately, much of their role is to explain the plot. “Last Christmas” is an exposition-heavy episode with no real character development. As a result, it is an episode that leaves one without much to say about the episode as it is, as opposed to the episode as it fits into the larger context of the season and series Doctor Who.

That said, the dream crabs are a cool idea that are designed to be creepy. It is a fitting tribute to the 35th anniversary of Alien as much as it is a neat Doctor Who alien. Still, “Last Christmas” is an episode that ultimately insults the intelligence of Doctor Who fans by setting up the biggest reversal of the season without bringing an actual resolution to it. In other words, Steven Moffat strings viewers along before essentially admitting that the past few episodes have been unreal . . . but then does not give the viewer the satisfaction of having a true “wake up” moment. That means that, just as “Last Christmas” opened with the burden of pressure for the series to resolve resurrecting Danny Pink, the episode finishes with the immense pressure of making another episode that does not simply explain the multi-layered dreams, but compellingly resolves the entire arc.

Otherwise, it is impossible for fans to continue watching and not simply cry “bullshit” at all that comes next.

For other works with Nick Frost, please visit my reviews of:
The World’s End
Snow White And The Huntsman
Paul

[Knowing that single episodes are an inefficient way to get episodes, it's worth looking into Doctor Who - The Complete Eighth Season on DVD or Blu-Ray, which is also a better economical choice than buying individual episodes. Read my review of the debut season of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor here!
Thanks!]

3/10

****NOT QUITE SPOILER VERSION!!!!****

Only continue to read this if you’ve seen “Last Christmas” and the rest of the eighth season of Doctor Who!

“Last Christmas” is just riddled with problems, even though it seems to be the answer to a number of issues. Ironically, several of the problems are actually encapsulated in the way the episode fails to genuinely resolve.

The dream crabs are a neat idea, but they are an entity on the order of the creatures from “Listen.” In “Listen,” the Doctor goes hunting for a creature that is the perfect hider. The dream crabs are only active when they sense creatures perceiving them (a concept that sounds great, but is entirely hinged on the idea that the parasites recognize themselves . . . get it? The parasite only knows the thing you’re thinking of is it if it reads your mind, sees you looking at it and considering it and then it recognizes itself as the creature you’re thinking of!). As the dream states “end,” the creatures desiccate. There is no reason in nature for a parasite, which is presumably dying because its host is either dead or rejecting it, to immolate itself. If the creature can only exist in the alien environment for a short time unattached to its host, then that makes some sense, but not the act of resisting (think about trying to set yourself on fire with the power of your mind when you’ve just starved).

So, between that and the lack of significant wounds on the faces of those who have “escaped” and the tangerines, viewers know that the victims are still in the dream.

The question, then, becomes “how far back does the dream go?” The unsophisticated answer is “Dark Water” (reviewed here!). That faux-answer comes from how and where The Doctor appears to wake up from his dream. The Doctor, whenever he wakes up alone in “Last Christmas” is outside the TARDIS on the edge of the volcano that Clara took him to in “Dark Water.” The problem for the more sophisticated viewer is that The Doctor on the edge of the volcano was an image . . . from Clara’s dream, not The Doctor’s. That leaves two possibilities: 1. Clara succeeded in knocking The Doctor out with his patch and all that has followed is moments after Clara and the Doctor were reunited following Danny’s death or 2. The Doctor, Clara and Danny were attacked by dream crabs far, far, earlier in the season . . . like back around “Listen.”

“Last Christmas” forces fans of Doctor Who to go back and question everything from the current season of the show. Given how many scenes include only The Doctor, Clara or Danny, the only permutation that makes any real sense is that the three of them were attacked by dream crabs (the fact that the Doctor and Clara remain in the dream state at the climax of “Last Christmas” is the evidence – in series – of the existence of the parasites). In other words, from a narrative sense, it makes no sense to have scenes with Danny if he is not a part of the parasites telepathic link (much like it makes no sense in stories of characters who are in the middle of a death dream to have scenes where that character is not present). The thing is, “Last Christmas” is so unsatisfying because it calls into question everything in the season, including the season premiere, but having raised the questions, it fails to answer them.

Clara and the newly-regenerated Doctor went through a series of adventures that were remarkably mundane in the current season. Almost everything encountered by The Doctor and Clara in the eighth season were things that were human, humanoid, and/or encountered by both of them in the past. The Doctor (in his prior incarnation) and Clara had encountered Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax before. The first time we see The Doctor in this season is after the TARDIS has been ejected from a dinosaur’s throat. “The Time Of The Doctor” saw The Doctor regenerating from Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi. As “Last Christmas” belabors pointing out, dreams have incongruities and leaps that those in the dream do not question. Director Paul Wilmshurst seems to realize that by the way he directs the episode – the group is attacked, cut to a shot outside the base for a massive explosion and then a rescue from Santa’s toys. But look back at the season of Doctor Who: it opens with a complete non-sequitor from the last time we saw The Doctor.

Moreover, episodes like “Into The Dalek” (reviewed here!) which begins with The Doctor arriving from the distant future and illustrates what appears to be a flashback works much better in dream terms. In other words, if the episode happens in its literal order, The Doctor arrives at Clara’s school moments after he was in the future and in telling her the story of their mission, he actually experiences it only then (it’s not a flashback, it’s a temporal discontinuity that makes sense in dreamline nonlinear).

But a parasite that needs to keep its host in a dreamstate to feed upon it would want to make its dreams as much like reality as possible. Things like exploding dinosaurs in Victorian London might fit in perfectly with The Doctor and Clara’s lives, but things like Jenny’s TARDIS blue vest and Strax reading her thoughts in “Deep Breath” along with the familiar monster of the week for that episode make for a remarkably rational introduction to a dreamstate.

The tirade The Doctor gives in “Deep Breath” is, unfortunately, the best argument for the parasite attacking ridiculously early in the narrative. In that episode, The Doctor comments that his face looks familiar and he asks what could be happening that he couldn’t just tell himself. If the prior incarnation of The Doctor was attacked on Trenzalore (an idea that is not out of the question considering that prophecy stated he would die on Trenzalore and the planet was surrounded by every adversary in the universe), choosing a familiar face as he regenerated would provide his next iteration with a clue that he was trapped in an unreal state.

Even such a lavish theory does not improve the current season of Doctor Who . . . for one simple reason: “Last Christmas” does not resolve. Instead of having a season that tells a single, complex story that is brilliant, “Death In Heaven” ends on an anticlimax, “Last Christmas” says “question everything” and it all hinges – as too much recent Doctor Who has – on the next episode.

. . . And yes, The Missy subplot actually works as a function of The Doctor’s subconscious guilt in a dream narrative! Sadly, none of this makes “Last Christmas” any better on its own.

For other Doctor Who episode and movie reviews, please visit my Doctor Who Review Index Page!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Another Alien Of The Week Episode With A Soldier Bent: “Mummy On The Orient Express”

The Good: Acting, A few clever lines
The Bad: Very predictable plot and character arcs
The Basics: In a season dominated with a negative view on soldiers, “Mummy On The Orient Express” is par for the course.


The eighth season of the rebooted Doctor Who has an intriguing sense of issues embedded in it. It was actually not until “Mummy On The Orient Express” that I realized that one of the aspects that the new Doctor has been lacking is a real love for exploration. The new incarnation of the Doctor (Twelve, Thirteen, or whatever number until it is retconned) has been cranky, methodical and scientifically-motivated without having a strong drive to actually save lives or care much about the people he saves. In other words, the Doctor seems to “explore” by rote; he fumbles from place to place without a real plan and with no apparent desire to save the lives of those he runs into.

In this season, the resounding theme of the show has been one against the merits of soldiers. Soldiers have been despised by The Doctor, which is odd because the prior Doctor was the “good man” who “goes to war.” At the climax of the prior season, The Doctor remembered his “lost” regeneration as the War Doctor and finished the regeneration as a warrior under siege from virtually every villain in the known universe. So, that this Doctor despises soldiers seems like a case of odd self-loathing or utter forgetfulness. “Mummy On The Orient Express” continues that despising of soldiers and, without any real segue or clear sequitor, reinvigorates the Doctor’s sense of imagination and delight for exploration (a trait which could have been organically infused by an encounter with River Song, but was not). That sense of delight helps make the trip The Doctor and Clara take as the intended “last hurrah” for Clara to the Orient Express very incongruent with where “Kill The Moon” (reviewed here!) left off.

Eager to say goodbye on a less-sour note than the tirade she went off with on their last adventure, Clara allows The Doctor to take her to the Orient Express. This Orient Express is flying through space and Clara is excited because it seems like a fun, low-key way to say goodbye. But almost immediately, it becomes clear that The Doctor and Clara are in yet another life-threatening situation when one of the people on the train complains about how her mother died horribly while one the train. The Doctor quickly recognizes the cause of death as the modus operandi of The Foretold, an ancient mummy who seems bound to a scroll that was brought aboard the train. In trying to bring comfort to the grieving passenger, Clara gets locked with her in the train car that is holding a sarcophagus.

But the Doctor quickly figures out that the people being killed are all notable for their intellects and the fact that they seem to possess the skills and backgrounds needed to study the Foretold. With only sixty-six second between the moment the Foretold appears to its victim and that person getting killed, The Doctor starts to study how the mummy is killing people in order to try to stop the adversary.

“Mummy On The Orient Express” seems to exist only to figure out a way to keep Clara in the Doctor’s life for a little longer. The episode is, otherwise, an utterly unremarkable “creature of the week” story and the episode has the feel of any number of episodes of The X-Files (reviewed here!) where the purpose was to scientifically explain a supernatural creature.

The feeling that “Mummy On The Orient Express” is a disconnected, “creature of the week” episode is accented by the lack of the larger arcs from the season or for the character of The Doctor. I have remained disappointed that the current season of Doctor Who has not pursued the hunt for Gallifrey that the prior season insinuated would be the purpose that drove the next regeneration of The Doctor; “Mummy On The Orient Express” does not suddenly pick that up. As well, the recurring scenes of “Paradise” inhabited by Missy are not peppered throughout this episode. Instead, one has to insinuate that Missy might be behind programming Gus, the computer system running the new Orient Express. The only explicit thematic tie between “Mummy On The Orient Express” and the other episodes in this season are the references to the fallout between the Doctor and Clara in the prior episode and the generic despising of soldiers.

It is in “Mummy On The Orient Express” that I realized that I like Peter Capaldi as The Doctor, but the new incarnation of The Doctor does not actually have any distinctive traits. In fact, he’s pretty heartless (ironic for a character who has two hearts). This version of The Doctor does not seem to genuinely care about the lives who are imperiled in his orbit. People are getting killed all around him and the Doctor wants to study how they die. He’s a cranky, somehow more genial version of Melvin from The Walking Dead! Even in “Mummy On The Orient Express,” Peter Capaldi plays the Doctor well, but for all the ways that Capaldi is engaging as The Doctor, The Doctor is not written as a particularly likable or even interesting character.

Unfortunately, Jenna Coleman’s Clara Oswald is not particularly interesting either. As my wife pointed out to me when we discussed “Mummy On The Orient Express,” which might be the episode she was most excited about seeing thus far, Clara played off the prior Doctor well by grounding him in his absurd moments. But with the new Doctor being a crabby, methodical and oddly unimaginative new Doctor, Clara has been transformed into a character who suddenly is delighted with exploration and does not want danger in her life.

“Mummy On The Orient Express” is disappointing in that it is criminally average. There is nothing surprising, only something explained. That is hardly compelling television, even if Capaldi plays the protagonist of the episode well.

[Knowing that single episodes are an inefficient way to get episodes, it's worth looking into Doctor Who - The Complete Eighth Season on DVD or Blu-Ray, which is also a better economical choice than buying individual episodes. Read my review of the debut season of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor here!
Thanks!]

4.5/10

For other Doctor Who episode and season reviews, please visit my Doctor Who Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Women, Choices, And (Almost) Perfect Doctor Who: “Kill The Moon!”

The Good: Great character moments, Decent performances, Engaging plot development, Special effects
The Bad: Premise problems in the concept and resolution
The Basics: “Kill The Moon” is so close to perfect that its issues are almost easy to overlook, but the power of the episode is gutted by one or two questions the audience is not able to reconcile.


When I encounter great television, I find myself excited and happy to be a reviewer. After all, I love talking about film and storytelling and when my wife got into Doctor Who late last year, I’ve discovered that the best episodes of the series spark conversations between us. “Kill The Moon” certainly did that for us and while my wife has some great theories to explain away the problems I have with the episode – and they are all based in the minutiae – they are not supported by the episode itself, which robs the episode of being a rare, perfect episode. That said, “Kill The Moon” is ridiculously close to perfect and that is impressive given that some of the moments hinge on the young actress Ellis George.

What makes “Kill The Moon” so good is the fact that the episode evolves. What starts as a throwaway adventure turns into a creepy episode and then into a philosophical debate. But unlike some of the episodes of Doctor Who where a philosophical concept is explored and executed, “Kill The Moon” actually has big character-based consequences for The Doctor and his companion, Clara Oswald. That there is a significant character-based consequence to what could be an “alien of the week” story elevates “Kill The Moon” and makes for a great hour of television. Unfortunately, it also makes it difficult to discuss “Kill The Moon” without skirting close to spoilers for the episode (I’ll try to minimize the spoilerific aspects in this review!).

“Kill The Moon” picks up very shortly after “The Caretaker” (reviewed here!) and it immediately begins with a sense of consequence to the prior episode. “The Caretaker” had The Doctor on Earth with Clara at the Coal Hill school. Interacting with people there led The Doctor to very casually pick one of the students, Courtney, to whisk away in the TARDIS and that has consequences in “Kill The Moon.”

Following The Doctor’s interaction with the somewhat troubled student at Coal Hill, Courtney, Clara complains about how Courtney has been acting since. Apparently, Courtney stole The Doctor’s psychic paper and has been acting out because The Doctor flippantly remarked that Courtney was not at all special. Asking The Doctor to reassure the girl that she is, in fact, special, The Doctor offers to take Courtney to the moon where she will become the first woman on the moon. But the trip takes Clara, Courtney and The Doctor to 2049 where they discover the TARDIS has landed not on the moon, but rather on a space shuttle that is headed to the moon and crashes there.

The Doctor almost instantly discovers that the gravity on the moon is off; it, in fact, has a gravity field that it should not have. The Doctor’s team learns that the shuttle is being sent to the moon, ten years after a Mexican mining expedition to the moon lost contact with Earth, to potentially destroy the moon with nuclear bombs. Clara is initially unimpressed by the dilemma; she has been to the future and knows the moon exists, but The Doctor insists that he does not know the outcome of events in play. That ambiguity soon turns horrible for Clara when it becomes clear that the moon is infested with what appears to be giant, extraterrestrial spiders, but the crew realizes are antibodies for a giant embryo. Facing the idea that the moon is, in fact, a massive, one hundred million year-old egg that is about to crack and leave Earth without a satellite and potentially threatened by what comes out, Clara squares off against the last astronaut and The Doctor. With The Doctor refusing to influence events, Clara, Courtney and the astronaut struggle to choose how best to save Earth and humanity or the emergent life form.

“Kill The Moon” starts out and finishes with two somewhat ridiculous premises and that is all that robs the episode of perfection. In trying to suddenly be human to Courtney (at Clara’s behest), The Doctor chooses to take Courtney to the moon to be the first woman to step foot on the moon. That premise is fine, but in the Doctor Who universe, that would mean going back to the past: early in the third season of the relaunched Doctor Who, the episode “Smith And Jones” had plenty of humans stuck on the moon. In short, writer Peter Harness fails to adequately explain why The Doctor would need to go into the future to make Courtney the first woman on the moon; especially when it would take the TARDIS to one of history’s blind spots for The Doctor. The only other serious problem with the episode comes at the episode’s climax. In reality, there are no entities that are born pregnant – the closest would be in Star Trek’s “The Trouble With Tribbles” (reviewed here!) and that is, obviously, not reality. So, while “Kill The Moon” could not – even in the Doctor Who Universe – end without the Earth having a moon, the way that happens is not intellectually satisfying. The biology of an egg that takes 100,000,000 years to gestate, ten years to hatch and then both cracks out almost instantly with the ability to drop a new egg is dubious.

Even so, “Kill The Moon” is impressive and smart. When the TARDIS appears on the moon and the crew is hunted by the spiders that are revealed to be massive single-celled organisms, I had the fear that “Kill The Moon” would actually just be a cheap retread of the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Macrocosm” (reviewed here!). Fortunately, the episode quickly moves away from being a suspense or action episode. Instead, “Kill The Moon” becomes a simultaneous debate on the sanctity of life (whether it is ethical to destroy a planet to let a unique life form come into being or if humanity must be saved) and the power of choice. Doctor Who does not offer easy answers and perhaps one of the greatest moments in the new Doctor’s story is when he declares that humans have to make some of their own choices unimpeded by an alien like him and he abandons Clara on the moon.

“Kill The Moon” climaxes in a conflict between The Doctor and Clara. Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of Clara. But in “Kill The Moon,” Clara rises to the occasion and becomes a viable and interesting character who does not want the responsibility of make a choice for all of humanity. That and her profound and realistic reaction to the Doctor’s actions make her suddenly viable and compelling. Jenna Coleman sells Clara’s angst perfectly and her fury after the action of the episode is intensely-delivered.

Even Ellis George rises to the occasion as Courtney. Courtney was a pretty generic brat in “The Caretaker,” but in “Kill The Moon,” she has a very interesting and realistic arc. George plays Courtney as a girl who oscillates between excited, terrified and bored. She manages to play all along the emotional spectrum without ever feeling erratic or like she is not playing the same character throughout.

Peter Capaldi is wonderful as The Doctor in “Kill The Moon.” Instead of just being cranky, Capaldi plays The Doctor as existing on a higher moral plane. The Doctor refuses to advocate killing the emergent life form and he asks Clara to take a moral stand, without stepping in to make the choice for her. Until now, The Doctor has been cranky and short-tempered – in fact, his prior crankiness is what initiates the action of the episode. In “Kill The Moon,” he moves beyond that to a place where he exhibits faith and genuine appreciation for Clara and humanity in general. Capaldi makes the transition work.

Ultimately, “Kill The Moon” is science fiction at its best (more or less): it has an audacious premise, but grounds the extraordinary in a universal or deeply human theme. That makes the episode successful when it could have been ridiculous.

[Knowing that single episodes are an inefficient way to get episodes, it's worth looking into Doctor Who - The Complete Eighth Season on DVD or Blu-Ray, which is also a better economical choice than buying individual episodes. Read my review of the debut season of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor here!
Thanks!]

9.5/10

For other Doctor Who episode and movie reviews, please visit my Doctor Who Review Index Page!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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