Doctor Who is back with ‘The Magician’s Apprentice,’ part one of a double episode series opener, and it’s clear that this season, like the last, is going to be pure Moffat. The showrunner is hell-bent on pushing the envelope with the characters and the setting, to mixed results—ratings were low for the premiere, suggesting that viewers may, perhaps, be tiring of his handling of the venerable franchise. While those who did tune in offered some positive reviews, this episode was generally a bit of a sloppy, confusing mess, and it showed.
The premise: The Doctor is finally confronted with a dark episode in his past when he meets up with Davros, the creator of the Daleks, and we learn that the Doctor abandoned Davros in grave danger as a child. Now, he’s got to pay the piper, and the fallout is extending to those around him as well, a reminder that while the most recent iteration of the Doctor longs to fly solo and be his own man, his decisions and actions have a profound effect on the people he claims to care about. His defiant individualism is nothing but a front.
Capaldi’s Doctor is much, much darker, and we knew this going into his tenure in the role. Viewers were warned about it, and almost from the start, we’ve seen a scenery chewing pathos from the character underscoring the idea that this is a Doctor of regrets, hardships, and internal reflection. This is no happy go lucky, quirky, or quixotic Doctor, but one who seems burdened by the cares of centuries. It’s something that has actually worked surprisingly well in prior seasons—despite Moffat’s general inability to produce television that is not infuriating, there were bright spots of potential.
That’s clearly going to change with this season, if the troped and stereotype-laden opener was any prediction. While Moffat is fond of dragging viewers along and then bedazzling them with a plot twist, it’s hard to see how he’s planning to wrap up and redeem this two parter, now that he’s committed to this particular plot path. Maybe that’s his point as creator in terms of how he visualises the beloved character, but it’s not something that viewers are necessarily going to appreciate.
The opened begins with the Doctor landing in a strange field full of handmines—mines in the shape of human hands reaching out to grab unwary victims. He sees a small child in distress and offers the hope of help, only to take the TARDIS, and a chance of survival, away with him when he finds out who he’s helping: One of the worst villains in history. In a callback to the original series of Doctor Who, viewers have finally been confronted with the answer to the question of what the Doctor would do if he were ever presented with the chance to rescue or abandon a dictator as a child.
Did the Doctor choose wrongly? That becomes the theme of the episode as he’s called back to Davros as an old and dying figure still bent on revenge—‘Davros knows. Davros remembers.’ It’s not just the Doctor who pays the price, though, as Clara (Jenna Coleman) and Missy (Michelle Gomez) are killed, and the TARDIS is destroyed, at the very end of the episode, in a classic Moffat cliffhanger designed to pump up ratings for the next episode. (Coleman has already announced that she’s leaving the show, but she wouldn’t do so in such an obvious and heavyhanded way—she will be, as the Terminator likes to say, back. And the TARDIS has been through worse.)
This episode feels incredibly heavyhanded and clunky, playing upon one of the most ancient and overdone tropes in history, the would you or wouldn’t you. Davros was already a painful foil for Hitler—someone bent on the entire extermination of another race—and of course the ongoing theme of almost every time travel narrative ever is the question of whether the protagonist would go back in time to kill Hitler, thus changing the course of history even if it meant other, equally horrific consequences. Davros wants to challenge the Doctor on the subject of compassion by reminding him of how he failed a frightened little boy who later turned into a despot—what would have happened, he teases, if the Doctor had stepped up when he was needed?
Quite frankly, I found myself not really caring, as my emotional investment in the series and its characters is so low at this point, thanks to Moffat’s blundering about. This hackneyed attempt just feels like a betrayal of everything that makes the franchise great—it’s not about deep moralistic storytelling that hashes over old and tired ground, but about adventure and something more complex in the human experience. That doesn’t mean it can’t be dark, but simply that it should avoid borrowing ancient storytelling tactics that have been used over and over again.
Doctor Who has brought us some of the most creepy and menacing enemies in pop culture. This attempted to humanise one, but it failed miserably by virtue of relying on one of the oldest tricks in the book—there was so much potential to explore the Daleks from other angles that give the viewer deeper insight into who they are, and it was casually thrown away.
It’s safe to say that with Doctor Who, it’s okay to blink now.