Title: Doctor Who
Release Dates: 2017
Season: 10
Number of Episodes: 12
Summary/Review:
The 10th series of Doctor Who includes several landmarks. First, it is Peter Capaldi’s third and final series as The Doctor. I’ve grown to love his performance and wish he could stick around for one more series. Of course, I thought that about previous Doctors too, but Capaldi has joined the ranks of my favorite Doctors of all time. Second, this is the sixth and final series for Steven Moffat as showrunner. Moffat has been an innovator and changed Doctor Who for the future. He does have a habit of repeating himself in his themes and ideas, though, so it may have been better if he’d finished a little earlier. He apparently intended to leave after series 9 but was asked to do one more series, but oh wouldn’t Hell Bent been a story to go out on. Nevertheless, series 10 shows that Moffat had a few more good story ideas left. Third, the series sees the return of Matt Lucas as a full-time companion Nardole, a decision that seemed odd at first, but paid off across the season. Finally, this series introduced Pearl Mackie as the new companion, Bill. As a young, working class woman of color and a lesbian, Bill is a unique character in Doctor Who history, and Mackie shined with her humor, intelligence, and clear chemistry with Capaldi.
Moffat stated that the season was a jumping on point for new viewers and the first four episodes followed a familiar pattern for new companions: meeting the Doctor in the first episode, traveling to the future in the second episode, an historical adventure in the third episode, and the supernatural intruding into the companion’s everyday life in contemporary times in the fourth episode. All of this is undergirded by the mystery of what The Doctor is keeping in a vault underneath the university. The middle four episodes took a huge left turn and were more reminiscent of highly experimental style of series 9. First there was Oxygen, one of the standout episodes of the series that is a caustic critique of capitalism, and features a grave threat to Bill and The Doctor making a sacrifice. This is followed by three episodes linked together as “The Monks Trilogy,” although each episode features a different screenwriter and director. Moffat introduces a major new villain in the Monks but unfortunately they’re too reminiscent of previous villains the Silence and the Headless Monks. The trilogy starts off well with Extremis which could easily be edited to make a stand alone episode, but there are diminishing returns in the ensuing two episodes. There are good parts to each story, although I don’t know if it would be possible to pare it down to just one or two episodes instead of three. The final four episodes feature a couple of more episodes that fit more into the theme of Bill discovering the thrills of travel in time and space, while also incorporating Michelle Gomez Missy into the Tardis team (spoiler: she’s what was hidden in the vault). The concluding two-part story World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls is a tour-de-force that explores Missy’s efforts to try to be “good,” the return of John Simm as an earlier incarnation of the Master, and some extreme body horror in the form of the Mondasian Cybermen. Capaldi, Gomez, Simm, and Mackie all put in a remarkable performance in a mindblowing and heartbreaking story.
The mid-season “Monks Trilogy” derail makes it hard to give the series as a whole top marks, but for the most part it’s some excellent television and a fitting finale to the Capaldi era. Now Christmas needs to get here so we can say farewell to these characters and meet our first woman Doctor!
Below are links to my reviews of each episode from my Doctor Who sideblog on Tumblr:
- The Pilot (7 of 10)
- Smile (5 of 10)
- Thin Ice (8 of 10)
- Knock Knock (6 of 10)
- Oxygen (8 of 10)
- Extremis (8 of 10)
- The Pyramid at the End of the World (6 of 10)
- The Lie of the Land (5 of 10)
- The Empress of Mars (7 of 10)
- Eaters of Light (8 of 10)
- 12. World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls (8 of 10)
A note on ratings: A score of 5 is the baseline for a decent story from end to end with 10 being an all-time classic and 0 being an utter stinker. Basically, any story rated 8-10 is a great story, 5-7 is good and worth watching, 2-4 has its moments but can be passed, and 0-1 is only for the Doctor Who completionist.
Panorama of the Mountains 