Doctor Who: Under the Lake/ Before the Flood
To start things off, the answer is no.
No, this venture did not fully address my concerns about characterization from my “Series 9 Thoughts” post. Yes, we did have some great little character moments throughout- some of them fantastic, actually- and a good deal of potential foreshadowing in regards to where this season is headed, but no. We haven’t yet experienced series 8′s rich characterization in this season.
But my oh my, does this episode achieve levels of brilliance anyway.
Not every episode needs to be a character piece. Blink- the episode that this episode, for all of the elements that it effectively borrows from others, resembles the most- still managed to be a great episode of Doctor Who, and more so than just that, a fascinating work of science fiction in of itself, using the tools of Doctor Who to achieve these goals. This two-parter is of the same caliber, and I’d argue even more so.
And before I go on further, another no, this episode doesn’t top “Listen”. Listen was an excellent work of science fiction and an amazing character piece, as well as an important episode for the show.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t anticipate this episode becoming a personal favorite, though.
Peter Capaldi absolutely delivers here. Because for all that I went off on before about how this episode isn’t exactly a character piece, his Doctor shows a lot of character. For all of the compassion that we have seen him recently express, here we find the Twelfth Doctor back in his element, with a base under siege by monsters, an expendable crew, and a mystery to be solved. He’s still cold and calloused, too. We do see more efforts on his part to connect with the passengers- particularly through Clara’s cue cards- but we see him once more as a manipulative, harsh man on a mission, willing to do whatever it takes to save the day. Indeed, his emotional apathy is critiqued frequently throughout the episode, as is Clara’s, with the ever-important question that series 8 raised about the way the Doctor influences Clara brought up again. Clara gets a bit more to do this time around- Danny is even fleetingly mentioned- making her seem a bit more like herself rather than just the “archetypal companion” we saw from the last story.
However, as mentioned before, this is hardly a character piece. No, this is an episode focused primarily on it’s concept, which is rather fascinating in the way that it uses the show’s conventions and expectations to keep the viewer guessing. As mentioned earlier, the episode borrows from earlier ones- The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit, Waters of Mars, and Blink all coming to mind- but does such in a way to keep you from truly figuring out what’s going on before the Doctor does. And that’s the true brilliance of the episode: the plotting is crafting using elements of the past to create something new. We’ve had base under siege stories, and we’ve had time travel paradox stories, but putting both together somehow manages to create something new, fresh, and largely unpredictable. The paradoxical plot here is a superb one that brings to mind some of science fiction’s greatest questions about time travel and the hypothetical ways that it would influence our decision-making.
In terms of episode-specific characters, while the crew is likeable as a whole, of particular note is Cass, a deaf character who is portrayed by a deaf actress. Cass manages to have a strong amount of emotional depth, command, and intelligence to boot, and is a very memorable addition to the series indeed. The other notable is the villain, the Fisher King. While we don’t necessarily see much of him, his imposing size, excellent design, and morbid “evil plan” allow him to feel dangerous in the way that classic Who monsters would if they weren’t so darn cheesy.
And really, on that note, one of the most charming elements of this episode is the way that it takes bits and pieces from classic Who, the Russel T. Davies era, and Moffat’s era to create an episode that just feels so authentically and uniquely Doctor Who. The sense of fun is there, the strong writing is there, and the genius plotting is there. While it may be too early to call it a classic, to say that it excels somehow still feels like an understatement.
