Doctor Who - Deep Breath/The Twelfth Doctor

Oh, nonono! You do not get around me with a giant dinosaur and a zeppelin!

I think I'm going to review new episodes of Doctor Who a week behind broadcast. That way, I can be spoilery (because if you've not seen it yet, you probably don't care), and I can dodge the worst of looking like a pill by making predictions which are immediately proven wrong. Also, I failed to write this one at all during the past week, so I may as well make best practice of my failings.

Deep Breath is the debut episode for the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi), previously glimpsed as a pair of eyes in Day of the Doctor and then at the end of Time of the Doctor. In his first full episode, he kicks off in full-blown manic mode and ends up throwing a machine out of a balloon; or talking it out, perhaps.

We open with a giant dinosaur in the river next to Westminster palace, a sight that will not be seen again until the inaugural World Energy Conference. When I say giant, I mean it's colossal; an almost ludicrously oversized T-Rex, scaled as it is so that it can have tried to swallow the TARDIS, an error which is lampshade and dismissed in-text by Madam Vastra (Neve McIntosh) - a Silurian from the time of the dinosaurs - who just knows better than the fossil record, so nyer. It coughs up said TARDIS and out spill Clara (Jenna Coleman) and the new guy, who is in the midst of an ever so exciting Regeneration crisis.
Later that night the dinosaur asplodes, and the rest of the episode is spent tracking down the perpetrator, a clockwork android from a 51st century spaceship which crashed in the primeval past, which has been harvesting human parts for millions of years to repair its spaceship and make a journey to 'the Promised Land', and incidentally creating an army of zombies.

Behind the main action, Madam Vastra tries to help Clara come to terms with the fact that regeneration is not always what you might expect (she has seen three versions of the Doctor, each younger than the last, but the new one is older), Clara help the Doctor to stay on an even keel and defeat the robot, and Jenny (Katrin Stewart) and Strax (Dan Starkey) be... kind of endearing. The arc plot of the series comes in when the 'dead' clockwork is taken to 'Heaven', an over-exposed English garden type of deal overseen by Missie, a weirdly made-up woman (Michelle Gomez) who calls the Doctor 'my boyfriend'.

The Good

1. The interplay between Vastra and Jenny, and between Strax and Clara, is as delightful as ever.
2. Capaldi is a great actor and there was some sparkling dialogue ('What's gone wrong with your accent?'), although I'm not sure any of that was particularly meaningful.
3. The central idea of the Companion adapting to the change in Doctor is a good one, and highlights what seems like becoming a running theme of the Doctor's reliance on external perception to judge himself. If Ten was about the Doctor's over-estimation of himself and Eleven was about the legend that the universe made of him, it looks like Twelve is going to be about the identity that the Doctor constructs for and with the input of his Companion (Vastra: "He looked young. Who do you think he did that for?") If nothing else, it makes a change from the Companions struggling to be seen by the Doctor.
4. The Doctor and Clara recognising that each considers the other an egomaniacal control freak.

The Bad

1. Clara's difficulties with the Doctor's regeneration are largely spurious. They don't make a lot of sense to the character, and as a result are dealt with primarily by her dismissing them, leaving a huge question as to why she freaked out in the first place.
2. Capaldi spends a little too long running manically around, essentially burning off the last of the Matt Smith incarnation, and not enough establishing himself.
3. Jenny and Strax are wasted.
4. With the 51st century clockwork, Steven Moffat seems to be determined to do as he did with the Weeping Angels and ruin a perfectly good monster by overuse, except starting out from a less interesting monster.

The Ugly

1. As with so many nuWho episodes, Deep Breath is very rushed. It's especially disappointing because The Eleventh Hour was so effective in its introduction not just of a new Doctor, but of a new companion (Amy) and a future companion (Rory). As a result, the good ideas and dialogue are kind of lost in the scramble.
2. The Doctor mind-melds with Vastra and falls asleep with a comic boing. Aside from the fact that a Silurian shouldn't be able to overcome a Time Lord telepathically, or at least not so dismissively, A COMIC BOING? What is this, a 1970s sitcom?
3. Oh, yay! Daleks. Again. And Cybermen ahead I see. Good to see we're not overusing our classic monsters.

Theorising

• Who is Missy? I've seen it suggested that she is the Rani, or a female Master (Mistress). I hope not, because I have had it up to here with villains who want to jump the Doctor rather than kill him. My own theories are the ship's computer of the SS Madame du Pompadour and the TARDIS, neither of which inspires me much.

Top quotes

• The Doctor: It’s covered in lines, but I didn’t do the frowning. Who frowned me this face?
• Clara: Nothing is more important than my egomania!
  The Doctor: Right. You actually said that.
  Clara: You never mention that again!
• The Doctor: I don't know, but I probably blame the English.
• Doctor: Clara, I’m not your boyfriend.
  Clara: I never thought you were.
  Doctor: I never said it was your mistake.

The Verdict

Deep Breath was a pretty so-so episode, which wasted the opportunity to showcase Peter Capaldi's Doctor with giant dinosaurs for sight gags and a plot device recycled from an episode that I for one didn't rate that highly in the first place. I'm also mildly despondent at the thought that in the same episode that the Companion flatly dismisses the notion of romantic attraction to the Doctor, we get a villain who calls him her boyfriend. Call me old fashioned, but I liked my Doctor mysterious, my companions in it for the adventure, and my sexual tension unstated and unresolved.

On his good days, Moffat writes a bloody good episode, but this wasn't a good day. Most of the elements were there, but the mix was unsatisfying, even to a jaded, squealing fanboy like me.

5/10

And the Doctor...

Actually, I'm going to have to get back to you on this one when I review Inside the Dalek next week.