Did Witch’s Familiar really ruin the Daleks?

Back on my Dalek bullshit again…

This discourse refuses to die, so we need to get the heart of it. During The Witch’s Familiar, Missy neutralises a Dalek patrolling the sewers, then wires Clara into its casing as the new operator. As both a demonstration and twisted experiment, she commands Clara to say some seemingly innocuous phrases, which don’t come out of the Dalek’s speakers the way Clara expected:

MISSY: Say ‘I love you’. Those exact words. Don’t ask me why, just say it.
CLARA: I love you.
DALEK: Exterminate.
MISSY: Say, ‘you are different from me’.
CLARA: You are different from me.
DALEK: Exterminate! Exterminate!

Trapped inside the Dalek, Clara finds it increasingly difficult to communicate when it really matters; later on in the story, she cries “I’m your friend!” and it emerges as “I am your enemy”. Everything she’s trying to say is being warped into things you’d expect a Dalek to say instead.

The problem – the accusation that here Moffat is ‘ruining’ the Daleks, ‘damaging the franchise’, etc. – stems from the assumption that this means the casing is the evil part of a Dalek, and the mutant inside the casing would actually be innocent (even friendly!) without this insidious censorship happening to them. The charge is that Moffat’s trying to make all of Dalek history out to have been the same kind of verbal miscommunication that we see happening to Clara. This would certainly neuter the concept of the Daleks quite a lot, making the mutants redundant and the casings equivalent to autonomous robots.

Bent Sent

On resolving the schism within the Capaldi era’s most famous duology.

Everything You Think You Know Is Lore (And Everything Will Change, Forever More (AGAIN))

Emergency post. [Originally uploaded February 29, 2020 – one day before the airing of Series 12’s finale]

The incumbent Doctor is reaching the climax of their second season in the role. Events set in motion by the Master have brought us to the cusp of discovering an enormous, world-shattering secret – one that promises not only to expose a shocking untold history capable of destroying the Time Lords themselves, but to retroactively recontextualise the entire journey of the show’s central character, answering the question of why this whole adventure truly started. Brand new information, divulged by the antagonist in the second half of a series-opening two-parter, has us asking fevered questions about a mysterious figure from the past and what their cryptic title could mean. A sudden return to Gallifrey at the end of the penultimate episode heralds a reveal that will surely rewrite the lore wholesale, and force us to forever view the Doctor and the Doctor Who apocrypha in a new light.

Series 5-10 (image grid)

Click for full size (6400 x 4320).

The Barn Trilogy one seems to have been enthusiastically received on Tumblr, so have this other, much larger, infinitely less shareable grid I made a while back for each Moffat series. I cheated and included specials where I felt it was warranted. (Kerblam Chibshow is still coming, be patient.)

Expanding ‘Hell Bent’ (2016)

Originally written on June 13, 2016 as part of a discussion about how successful Hell Bent was as ‘a return to Gallifrey’ and whether it could have been improved on. In the intervening two years I’ve come to appreciate the episode more for how it sidelines Gallifrey, but I still salivate at some of the ideas I proposed in this overly excitable rant, so I’ll include it here – with some criticisms and thoughts I have about it now added at the bottom.

Series 8 and Series 9 are the peak of NuWho

Originally posted to try and rile some people. It is more or less my real opinion, though.

[March 5, 2018]

Series 8 and Series 9 is the best two-season run of the post-2005 series and in the top 5 of the show overall. What Moffat, Minchin, Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman achieved in those two seasons – in the context of televised Doctor Who – is unbelievable. The thematic ambition of S8 alone is jaw-dropping even if you don’t factor where it led in S9. It takes a sheer brassness of balls to turn everyone’s favourite wacky kids’ adventure show into a slow-burning, obsessive character-study of addiction, lies, grief, and toxic power dynamics, driven by the sheer skill of the two lead performers, but they did it unapologetically. That is what it looks like to execute a single artistic vision and not even give a shit if it’s popular.
In 15 years S8-9 will be spoken of in the same breath as S25 and S26 with McCoy. The shit episodes like Forest of the Night will fade from memory like Battlefield and Silver Nemesis. We will talk about episodes like Listen, Heaven Sent, Witch’s Familiar, Mummy on the Orient Express, Face the Raven, Dark Water, the way we currently talk about Remembrance, Survival, Happiness Patrol, and Ghost Light. (Toss in Extremis and World Enough & Time/The Doctor Falls from S10 if you want to look at Capaldi’s run more generally.)

You’re welcome.

[May 27, 2018]

The Capaldi era, specifically Series 8 and 9, are a golden age of the revived series – and will be consensus viewed as one in under 10 years, similarly to Seasons 25-26 with Sylvester McCoy. The narrative and thematic ambition of them is only matched by Series 1 with Eccleston. Moffat’s partnership with Minchin, Capaldi and Coleman triggered a creative renaissance which threw out the tired conventions of NuWho in favour of an unprecedented focus on characterisation and deconstruction. Clara is the most fascinating and complex companion of the revived series, and the Twelfth Doctor is perhaps the greatest ever.

[June 26, 2018]

[Capaldi’s] third season is significantly weaker than his first two. S10’s structure completely falls apart in the middle and it only recovers for the finale, it’s running on less thought-through ideas/characters and bears the unpolishedness of a fatigued showrunner who had planned on quitting a year sooner.

By contrast, S8 and S9 will be viewed by future generations as NuWho’s equivalent of Classic 25-26, which is to say an unusually ambitious era grossly misunderstood by viewers at the time, containing some of the show’s richest ever storytelling and one of its finest lead actor duos.

[…]
Moffat should have been given Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Brian Minchin as collaborators from the beginning of his tenure, so we wouldn’t have had to wait through 4 years of fumbling to get to his best overall work on the show. Though it could be said that S8-9 were only possible because of the conceptual developments made beforehand during Smith’s run, so perhaps not even that.
Regardless, The Day of the Doctor through The Husbands of River Song is the peak of his tenure and a golden period that the show would be significantly worse without.

[NOTE ADDED IN POST: I was unfair to Battlefield, that’s not really a bad one.]