Look Who's Morphing: On 'Deep Breath'

Season 8, Episode 1

Written by Steven Moffat

Directed by Ben Wheatley

So, this is what a decompressed Doctor Who story looks like.

There’s a dinosaur splashing about in the Thames, ordinary Londoners are combusting, and, never mind all that – here’s Peter Capaldi! ‘Deep Breath’ is so concerned with shouting from the rooftops about Doctor Who’s new direction that it forgets to have much of a plot for the first thirty minutes; or, ‘Deep Breath’ knows where its priorities lay, and doesn’t mess about with trivialities like ‘plot’.

Structurally, the first third feels so un-Moffat. There’s the spark of an exciting story, but that just sits there while the Characters Express Their Feelings At One Another. Which has more weight to it than any action-detective plot, but it means that out of the gate, it feels like there’s no apparent pace or purpose. Of course, we know what’s happening – we are being introduced to the new Doctor, and some of us (including Clara) aren’t on board just yet. But while the characters potter around Paternoster House, something feels off.

You can call it a “character piece” and you wouldn’t be wrong. ‘Deep Breath’ unveils the first of personality for the new Doctor, but it also pushes Clara into the fore with much needed characterisation. Some of this still comes from overt dialogue – people tell Clara that she is narcissistic and egotistical more frequently than she gets to act in any of these ways – but this new, unsure Clara gives Jenna Coleman so much more to work with.

Once Clara and the Doctor meet in the restaurant, it feels like things have returned to regular programming, with the necessary mystery and action unfolding around the pair. But this is still experimental, extended Doctor Who, so everything acts first as a character moment and second as a plot beat.

Clara’s two major actions in the belly of the ship – her breathless cyborg imitation and her logic game with the Half-Made Man – pushes her further than we’ve ever seen before. Coleman sells these moments like she’s working at a hotcakes stall: she’s scared, terrified, but still so resolute. Clara using her own life outside of the Doctor as inspiration in baiting the cyborg is genuinely exciting, and it feels like a first for the character. She’s more active than she ever has been before and it's refreshing.

Director Ben Wheatley plays with perception in striking ways. When Clara begins to run out of breath, red and yellow bars blur the edge of the screen. It feels like the corners of her eyes are flushing with colour. Earlier, in the restaurant scene, the Doctor tells Clara to look from the corner of her eyes. (It almost feels like there’s an unannounced perception filter at play.) The camera struggles at first to focus on the dining cyborgs – we can hear the mechanical clinking of the cogs ticking over in each and every body, but we cannot see their eerie robotic movements until the corner of the eye has triumphed, and the camera has found its focus. I think – think! – this might relate to Moffat’s second story of the season, episode four’s Listen. A quote released for that episode goes:

“What's that in the mirror, and the corner of your eye? What's the footstep following, but never passing by?"

Moffat does love him some eyes. We’ll see.

The ship of Theseus motif that emerges over the story – the broom with both the handle and broom-end replaced, as the Doctor puts it – gives us the biggest insight into new Doctor, and how he sees himself. Capaldi’s Doctor is, according to the show’s mythology, the first of a new ‘set’ of regenerations. He is a fine line, with fifty years behind him and uncertainty before him. Does he have any past-Doctor left in him, or is he something else? Is he even the Doctor any more, and does it even matter either way? This feels like the main question in play; the did-he-kill-a-robot-or-did-he-convince-it-to-jump? moment is another extension of this interrogation/revelation of character, one I’m sure that'll be followed up come the finale.

The monsters – a pact of clockwork droids set back to the dawn of time – reveal themselves to be a kind of inverse Cybermen; robots who want to become human. They’re suitably creepy – the way Wheatley lets the camera hover on the internal clockwork as the Half-Made Man thinks over Clara's logic puzzle gives us a clue about their intelligence and their calculating nature – but altogether disposable. They’re not technical marvels but half broken, half fixed entities lost in time and space. Are these the kind of figures that are welcome in Heaven, in The Promised Land? The broken, the decaying? The almost human?

Not to hurt our collective necks, but looking forward to the two-part finale of this season, we can see why their subversive robots-wanting-to-be-human might be more relevant than they first seem. As shown in publicity shots, the Cybermen are set to feature as the “monster” in the finale. Dots are being made, I won’t deny.

The oddest choice in ‘Deep Breath’ is that it takes so much subtext and puts it firmly into text. There’s a lot of character-setting rhetoric that is all tell and no show. Elements that feel like they’re pulled directly from the Twelfth Doctor pitch document turn up as dialogue, in a kind of metatext. It is frequently acknowledged that Capaldi is older, and less like boyfriend-material than his immediate predecessor, as if to assuage concerns that an “old” man is playing a role that’s been the domain of young men. In the opening few minutes we have Capaldi shouting “I’m not flirting!” directly at the audience (or dinosaur as audience-surrogate, which is pretty funny in itself), which is a reaction to all the kissy-business of the same past two Doctors. In Clara’s confrontation with the Half-Made Man, she claims that if you don’t follow through on your threats, then your threats are worthless and hollow – a criticism oft levelled at Moffat’s penchant for “everybody lives!” endings at the expense of any real tension.

(Also: why is the episode so concerned with physical appearance? Do the producers think a section of their audience so vain that they won’t cling to this new iteration without the physical appearances being referenced so prominently, and so heavy-handedly? Or maybe it’s just for children, whose frame of reference is the Doctor as a young man.)

Maybe it’s just post-regeneration comedown, but the script feels like it is suffering from New Doctor teething problems. Jokes that would work with Matt Smith’s Doctor feel naff in the hands of Capaldi, and almost none of the physical comedy hits anything resembling a mark. I mean, “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if this man got hit in the BALLS?!” isn’t cutting humour regardless of which potential alien member is getting knocked about by a technomagic phallus. And Strax, the walking spud, repeats the same jokes he’s made in numerous other stories: he is bad at telling apart humans, and he likes to shoot things. It can get tiring in a standard length episode, but here it becomes plain how shallow he is, even as comic relief.

Although slapstick doesn’t fit either the introspective tone of this episode or the gravity of Capaldi’s Doctor, there are veins of humour that do mesh. "Droids and apostrophes, I could write a book," for example. Capaldi’s falcon-eyed diatribe about his eyebrows feature enough sharp lines it could ruin a hot air balloon expo.

In ‘Deep Breath’, the plot is secondary to the show’s regeneration. Out with the young, in with the old. We have a revitalised format, reinvigorated lead characters, and a narrative almost completely unattached to what has come before. There’s a handover of the torch with the Eleventh Doctor’s phone call from the past – which works because it’s embedded into Matt Smith’s swansong. This moment is, again, almost a convergence of text and subtext; if we are still undecided, we are being told how to react to this new Doctor.

And what a man. Looming, sharp, he’s the exasperated outsider rather than the curious alien or conceited romantic. Here’s the Doctor, dangerous as ever, a little curmudgeon-y, a little fragile, and with a brand new show for us. ¤

And…

The tag at the end, with the Arch Moffat-Woman welcoming the Half-Made Man into Heaven, gives us a “mystery” that we’re supposed to care about. I don’t know if it was particularly needed with the other arc clues dropped but, maybe there’s a point to it, other than a completely overt hook, but we just don’t know yet. Look, I’ll take the bait. The garden just looked so nice, and Missy, even with her deep shades of River/Clara/Amy, looks to be a fun antagonist. And maybe, just maybe, her familiar personality isn’t just a Moffat-Can’t-Write-Women problem. Maybe it’s intentional.

I think there are a couple potential previously introduced characters that might fit the mystery.

·    Her attitude and (apparent) relationship to the Doctor is befitting of a reincarnated, or perhaps missing link version of River Song. I think this is the least likely, just because the end of ‘The Name of the Doctor’ felt like a neat, final bow for the character.

·      Contestant no. two… the Master! Hey-ho. Or, you know, the Mistress. The egomaniacal arch-villain hits the mark of the Doctor’s nemesis, and her name – Missy – is a shortening of mistress. This would make for an interesting and much wanted reinvention of a male character, who could really use something new to do. I mean it isn’t a female the Doctor, but it’s progress, and it keeps on opening the right doors to changing the lead character into something other than white and male. This sounds like the most fun.

·      Or, maybe Missy, is an alternate Clara, one of the splinter Claras from her time jumping or whatever happened at the end of ‘Name of the Doctor’? Missy’s outfit – and umbrella! – is highly reminiscent of Victorian Clara from 2012’s ‘The Snowmen’. Missy does refer to someone, assumedly The Doctor, as her boyfriend – just as other people refer to the Doctor and Clara – but maybe this is a misdirect. I think letting Clara breathe without the cloying "Impossible Girl" mystery would be nice; give us this season, at least.

Or, you know, maybe she’s just an Original Character (Do Not Steal). Fingers crossed she’s more than more-of-the-same.