Maius Intra Qua Extra

Episode three of series 15! I don't know how many episodes there will be this season (yes, I avoid spoilers to that extent) but I'm sure that there won't be more than eight or nine, and I'm a little sad that we're already 1/3 done. But...

(And I'm going to warn you now, spoilers! Like, big spoilers. Starting with the first paragraph bethind the cut. So if you click, it's your fault.)


... another stellar episode! Honestly, I think the only real disappointment here was the reuse of "Toxic" at the beginning. Maybe it was meant to foreshadow that we'd be revisiting old friends.

I will brag here that I called it, early in the story, at least to some extent. During the Shaya's exposition, when she described the lone base on the planet that had gone silent and that the rest of the planet was uninhabitable due to galvanic radiation, I said to my husband, "Sounds like Midnight." He said, "What? How do you figure that?" I said it was because the setting feels that way and Midnight was uninhabitable because of xtonic radiation, to which he replied, "How in the hell do you remember details like that?" And then when Shaya said that the star, before it collapsed, had been an xtonic star, I yelled, "It is Midnight!" then grinned like crazy when she said the name.

I also said at one point, "Oh, Aliss is still alive because whatever the thing is, she can't hear it." To which my husband replied, "Well, duh." Win some, lose some.

I do want to note that this was a great use of a disabled character - she was a colonist who happened to be disabled and became the lone survivor because her disability prevented her from going mad from the whispering. (As opposed to Cass in "Under the Lake", who was simply a plot point, included in the episode because someone needed to be able to read lips.) I also really loved that Lombardic society compensated for disability: they had alternate ways of displaying speech and required that medical workers know sign language.

But, back to the episode itself. It was creepy and thrilling, and it never let up on the pace. Aliss herself was fascinating: the lone survivor, sitting in the center of an empty room, hurt, frightened, and begging to go home -- she's got to be the monster, right? I mean, whenever a story has a character that's this pitiable, they always turn out to be the monster, or at least possessed by the monster. And yet, there are glimpses of something behind her, so maybe she's not the monster. She kept us guessing, and that kept us engaged.

It was also great to see that the other characters - the Doctor, Shaya and the other soldiers, though maybe not so much Belinda - were not taken in, and they kept her under watch even though they suspected she was simply a victim. The "heroes getting duped by a seemingly innocent person" (such as the Meep) is a trope that gets tiresome quickly.

Plot-wise, this was harder science fiction than we usually get with Doctor Who, which is +1 in my book. The monster worked in a particular way, and all the clues were laid out in the beginning (the mirrors being broken, people dying by either being crushed or shot in the back, the only survivor was deaf), and the characters slowly pieced it all together and figured out ways to stop it. The Doctor didn't even need to draw on his previous experience with it much, just that it has a game it plays and that it whispers to its victims. Of course the real fun was that we were also trying to figure it out, too, and we got bits of it correct (such as Aliss not being affected because she couldn't hear it).

I also felt that this episode had strong similarities to "The Waters of Mars", in that the commander of the mission, Shaya, was strong and competent, held fast to her ideals of what she's doing and why she's there, and developed a relationship with the Doctor with some amount of equality and respect, much like Adelaide Brooke did. And, their fates were similar, both choosing to die to do what they thought was right for everyone.

Cassio's mutiny was also refreshing. Look, we have people who form different opinions on things, especially under extreme stress! And a soldier who will take charge when he thinks his commanding officer has been compromised! The only thing I don't see is why so many people had to die. Cassio didn't believe that people standing behind Aliss would be killed, so sure, he ordered one of his soldiers to go there, but once that one got killed -- and maybe a second one, just to be sure -- why did any more need to do it? I think it would have been more impactful if Cassio had survived and had to live with knowing that he'd gotten those people killed, but that probably would have bogged the episode down. The later scene where they're trying to figure out who had the entity, worked better with only four people.

And then, that ending. No, not Mrs Flood. I'm talking about the entity manifesting on the spaceship and finally getting to wreak havoc across the universe. Maybe that means we'll see it again in sixteen years.

Thinking about the episode overall, I think it's a tight story even for viewers who have never seen "Midnight" and don't know anything about it. As I noted before, the Doctor didn't really draw on knowledge from that story, so viewing it isn't required. I do wonder how much David Tennant, while watching this with his family (because you know he did), figured out before the reveal, and if he had any flashbacks. :)

Oh, and one other thing: we still have no idea what the Midnight entity is, or what it wants. Sublime.