Doctor Who - 'The Zygon Inversion'

“Why does peacekeeping always involve killing?”

Kate Stewart is dead. Clara is dead. The Doctor is about to be blown out of the sky.

As the radical faction of Zygons moves to destroy the cease-fire and force their peaceful brethren into a genocidal war against humanity, Osgood and the Doctor struggle to find a way to stop them, while Commander Bonnie wrestles with Clara's mind link as she searches for the Osgood box.

Will there be truth, or consequences?

The Good

• The contingency plan set up by the Doctor didn't involve actual death gas.
• Kate Stewart is not a complete incompetent.
• I like Osgood still.

The Bad

• There's something about this episode that jars, and I think I know what it is. This whole 'good Zygons and bad Zygons' thing is admirable in the message front, but... The problem is that it's not really true of the old Zygons, the bulk of whom were something like aggressively expansionist warrior-colonists, and as soon as you start to assert that it might be, you have to start looking at every other alien hat in nuWho and wonder why the Daleks, the Cybermen and even the Mire can be considered as irredeemable warrior races, but not the Zygons? Given how many changes were made to the Zygons, they might as well have been a new race, so it feels odd to use them when what was wanted wasn't really Zygons.
• The built in zap guns. Zygons sting, they don't zap, and switching out to a lightning projector that turns people into sparky burned candyfloss deadens the more horrific aspects of the series, a move all the more unaccountable in such a bleakly political episode.

The Ugly

• Kate Stewart increasingly seems like the daughter that the Brigadier would have raised if he'd never met the Doctor. The older Brig mellowed and while still a soldier at heart and willing to kill if it were necessary, he had more of the Doctor's mettle in him. Kate's absolute killy-killy stance is a narrowness that her father grew out of long ago.
• "The important thing is that Osgood is alive." Bollocks! You don't get off the hook that easily and stop talking to the audience and telling us what a favour you're doing us.

Theorising

So, Clara is clearly on the out, since they won't shut up about the potential effects of her loss, but I'm feeling less enthused about the series, so my theorising is way down.

Top Quotes

• "You know, I'm over two thousand years old. I'm old enough to be your messiah."
• "There's nothing in them, just buttons."
• Osgood 1: I'll answer that question one day. And do you know when that day will be?
  Osgood 2: The day nobody cares about the answer.
  I'm kind of already there, if I'm honest.

The Verdict

Meh.

I mean... yeah, I struggle to come up with anything much more than this. The Zygon Inversion had some awesome ideas, but was hampered by attempting to do a non-Zygon story about Zygons, and frankly by tacking its forgiveness message to a child-kidnapping mass-murderer. The Osgood Box resolution was pretty neat, but then had to be linked to a device from The Day of the Doctor which made it clear that the Doctor has no respect for Kate Stewart's ability to learn and grow.

Score - 4/10