Mercy

Story: The Witch's Familiar
Written By: Steven Moffat
Length: 45 Minutes
Year: 2015

The two-part series nine opener concludes with an episode that is solid and has plenty of enjoyable ideas...but upon rewatch and further scrutiny I found myself not enjoying it as much as I had the first time.  I think the issue is that it is, at the end of the day, a predictable affair.  I called it before the episode even aired that the cliffhanger of the Doctor seemingly about to shoot the child Davros would probably end up being that he was shooting the handmines.  This turned out to be a correct assumption on my part (and it really wasn't hard to figure out.  I also knew early on that the Master and Clara would not be dead and the TARDIS wouldn't be destroyed. All of these things in the cliffhanger really left me with little tension or worry or dread, because I could see from 1000 light-years away that they weren't anything that had actually happened.  That is this two-part story's fatal flaw really...it just feels like the outcome is very predictable.

A lot of praise for this episode has been given towards the Master/Clara storyline, but I actually don't think I liked it much at all.  It begins with the Master telling a story about the Doctor to describe how he always gets out of these crazy situations, which really just felt like classic Doctor Who padding to me. It was a fancy way of telling us something about the character we've pretty much known for years.  Then we get into the whole sticking Clara into a Dalek thing...every step of this bugs me...because Clara comes off like such a dope.  She trusts the Master, even though every step she takes in her plan clearly seems to put Clara in danger.  But Clara follows her plan, even though it smells like a trap from the beginning.  Clara just seems idiotic and naive to trust or follow any plan the Master has here, especially as she is barely hiding that she has an evil scheme up her sleeve the whole time.

Now the high points of this episode come from the scenes between the Doctor and Davros.  They build nicely, they take a leisurely pace...they have the style of a Big Finish character building scene.  The kind of thing that just doesn't get done that often in the newer series.  The last time something like this truly happened was probably during "The End of Time" with the character scenes with the Tenth Doctor and Wilf.  I don't really recall a scene like this in the whole of the Matt Smith run. Capaldi and Julian Bleach are both great in this.  Bleach is, by the way, a fine Davros.  He captures the more quieter subtle evil of the original Michale Wisher Davros in "Genesis of the Daleks" and mixes in some of the total raving lunatic that Terry Malloy often employed for the character in the 80s.

But then the Davros plan must unfold, and somehow it is using the Doctor's Regeneration energy to regenerate the Daleks (which I guess just makes them stronger somehow? It isn't really explained what regenerating does to them), and then it turns out the Doctor is using these decaying Daleks in the sewer to kill all the other Daleks on Skaro.  How their regeneration makes them super mud I dunno.  The whole thing seems like it is trying to be really clever but the more I think about it the more I feel like I just don't understand it.  Daleks turn into mud, and then when it is given regeneration energy it becomes super mud.  I guess that's all I am meant to know so I'll just go with it.

While escaping the Master tries to convince the Doctor that the Dalek with Clara inside is actually the Dalek that killed her, and she tries to get the Doctor to kill Clara, but the Doctor figures it all out when she screams mercy, which is so unlike a Dalek...except that I've heard Daleks say mercy at least a couple times before...so that felt forced.  But it did lead to a nice ending scene with the child Davros that picks up where the cliffhanger of the last episode left off and proved that I was totally right about what was going to happen (though if I am honest I thought that would somehow create an alternate history where Davros turned out not to be an ass who created the Daleks, but I was wrong on that front).

It isn't really a bad episode...it just feels like every twist that comes along you can see coming if you are thinking at all.  It wasn't Moffat at his most clever.  I liked it a little better before I revisited it and found all these things that just kept nagging at me, and it hurt the viewing experience.  It's a solid two-part opener to the season, but it is predictable and doesn't always work.  Flawed, but worth it for the scenes between the Twelfth Doctor and Davros, which really do work well. 

NEXT TIME: Attack at the Underwater Nuclear Reactor