Full Notes: The Magician's Apprentice | The Witch's Familiar

Davros' best story since Genesis has Missy's best moments.

Plot Summary:

A dying Davros summons the Doctor for one last meeting of the minds, while Missy and Clara are pulled into the heart of the Dalek empire.

Notable for:

• Peter Capaldi playing guitar.

• Return of Julian Bleech as Davros, not seen since Journey’s End.

• Return of Clare Higgins as Ohlia.

• Removing Davros from his chair for the first time, confirming all that remains of his body is a cybernetic torso.

• Davros’s eyes.

• Showing several different kinds of Daleks, practical and CGI, including an “original,” a Black Dalek (a la Sec), a gray/silver model from Evil of the Daleks, a red-and-gold Supreme, several new series gold Daleks (and variants), a Special Weapons Dalek, a Resurrection-style gray Dalek, 

• Saying that Skaro was rebuilt. “They've built it again,” says Missy, surprised. Skaro was briefly seen in Asylum of the Daleks, its first appearance since its destruction in Remembrance of the Daleks. In the book War of the Daleks, Skaro was never destroyed, the Daleks instead fooling their past selves into destroying a different planet.

• Missy refers to the “Cloister Wars” on Gallifrey and the Doctor stealing the moon and the president’s wife.

• First appearance of the sonic sunglasses.

• The Doctor’s a hugger now.

Commentary:

• This is a very ambitious story: bringing back the Daleks and Davros AND Missy, setting up the season-long Gallifrey/confession dial arc, and rebooting Capaldi’s Doctor in some ways. It perhaps inevitably doesn’t pull it all off perfectly, but some stuff really works, but you get the sense Moffat is a little high on his horse, thinking he can juggle so much.

• It’s a strange story to follow Last Christmas, which ends with the Doctor and Clara running off together and implying they’re now closer than ever. The beginning of this one seems to imply they haven’t seen each other for a while, and the Doctor is clearly isolating himself.

• Axe fight! What an intro for Capaldi in his sophomore season — playing guitar on top of a tank. This was such an good choice, and the dialogue allows him to be cool, smart (seeing Missy and Clara, then working them into the proceedings), and noble (sacrificing himself by surrendering to Colony Sarff). They really picked some nice shades too.

• Continuity overload! The story is a callback/sequel to many other stories:

  • Dark Water/Death in Heaven: Missy helpfully explains the whole “disintegration is really a teleport” psyke-out. Remember, bad guys: If you REALLY want to kill your adversary, always use a firearm.

  • Genesis of the Daleks: The Doctor gets the opportunity to kill the “ruthless dictator” as a child.

  • The Daleks: Same city, with the same doors! (Even though it’s not since it’s been explicitly “rebuilt”) Love those doors. Also: Someone climbs inside a Dalek for the first time since… The Daleks? (unless The Space Museum counts)

  • Remembrance of the Daleks: Confirmation that Skaro has been rebuilt, clearing up any confusion about the Skaro we saw in Asylum of the Daleks. The Doctor is shocked to find himself on Skaro, but isn’t confused as to its existence since he saw it as Eleven. For Missy, on the other hand, the fact that Skaro has been rebuilt is new information. This seems to contradict War of the Daleks, which suggests that the Daleks fooled their past selves (and the Doctor) that Skaro was destroyed. It’s also in keeping with Dalek Thay’s statement in Daleks in Manhattan: “My planet is gone, destroyed in a great war.”

  • Asylum of the Daleks: First, the brief appearance of a Dalek zombie drone. But more importantly, Magician/Witch does a much better job than Asylum in delivering on the promise of showing several different types of Daleks.

• Speaking of all those different Daleks: very nice, variety is cool. But I don’t like that it’s purely a gimmick. There is simply no reason for it, story-wise. Nothing is said or even implied about any differences between the different designs of Dalek. When you have variants of the same design, you can show different ranks easily, but what does it mean when there’s an original blue-dot Dalek next to a gray Resurrection Dalek? Is one more advanced than the other? If so, why hasn’t the other Dalek been upgraded? Apart from the Special Weapons Dalek, the differences are just superficial. Big missed opportunity to play on the different designs somehow. Good counter-example that does this well: the fan-made Dalek That Time Forgot.

• And hey, what happened to the New Paradigm Daleks? Let’s not just ignore history.

• Cold open has a nice depiction of the Kaled-Thal war: biplanes with lasers, plus bows and arrows. Very in keeping with what was described in Genesis. And “clam drones?” Are those the giant clam thingies from the caves?

• “Who made Davros?” Great question, which we don’t really get the full answer to here. But we do get the answer to a piece of him — that the Doctor helped him somehow instill a grain of mercy in them. Ultimately it’s a small victory, which is apt, because the payoff of this story is a lot smaller than what it seems to be setting up.

• Centrally, Davros has hatched an elaborate plan to hijack the Doctor’s regeneration energy and kinda-sorta turn the Daleks into Time Lords (a bit? maybe?). And the Doctor has seemingly seen this coming and allows Davros to do it since he knows it will also reinvigorate the dying, discarded Daleks in the sewers underneath the city, and they will attack and consume the “main” Daleks. Putting aside the logistics of that, this suggests that all the drama between the Doctor and Davros, the conversation, was basically meaningless: The Doctor wasn’t being kind to Davros, he wasn’t moved by him opening his eyes, he didn’t have a sincere laugh with him — all that was acting. In other words, the resolution to the plot undermines the drama we experienced before. Yes, you need Davros to be evil and irredeemable — he needs to be the deceiver. But in trying to make the Doctor five steps ahead of Davros, the story makes him seem cruel.

• Also, if this was all the Doctor’s plan, why did he need Missy to shoot him out of the cables and stuff? Feels a bit like, “I meant to do that.”

• The resolution also makes the Daleks look like boobs. They “kill” Missy and Clara but don’t realize they’ve been teleported. They zap the TARDIS but have no idea they’ve been fooled. They are easily bested by sewer Daleks, whether their casings have been punctured or not. These seem like markedly dumber/less formidable Daleks than those in Journey’s End.

• Speaking of the sewers, they really have zero security for this? And what’s with the technobabble about Daleks being nearly impossible to kill? Since when? It’s all very contrived and makes the ending a bit predictable.

• Lots of references to gravity, which are retroactively amusing post-Wild Blue Yonder.

• Good CGI for the Dalek city… you can see the floating Daleks as blinking lights in the distance

• You can hate on the sonic sunglasses, but it’s a brilliant twist at the end, since it’s clear the Doctor ditches his screwdriver with Davros. (Where’s he been keeping it all these centuries?)

• Killing the Dalek in the sewer — not the best action scene. Why doesn’t the Dalek just kill Missy and Clara right away? I know, I know, Daleks always inexplicably take their time in exterminating, but here it just feels dumb. Also, why don’t the sewer Daleks attack Clara and Missy?

• Clara being inside the Dalek is pretty great. The language stuff — any expression of emotion comes out as “exterminate” — is a bit weird, but makes some kind of Dalek-y sense. The bit about emotions letting them “reload” is total nonsense, however.

• Michelle Gomez steals the show almost completely. She has about a million great lines, and can find scenery to chew even in the most austere Dalek chamber. She gets to murder a couple of UNIT people, signal to them she’s in charge (ordering the snipers herself), and gets the tables turned on her when her charm doesn’t work at all in the Dalek city.

• Unfortunately for Clara, what makes this episode a triumph for Missy is at her expense. Missy dismisses Clara early on as “the dog” to the Doctor (and herself by association), and she never gets a chance to show she’s more than that. Instead, Clara gets literally pushed around by Missy for an hour and a half (though “20 feet” is one of the absolute best jokes) and almost killed by the Doctor himself.

• A lot is made of Missy being the Doctor’s best friend, and the confession dial seems to confirm this. (Kind of makes you long for the days when Delgado was lamenting that he was going to kill the Doctor with missiles, which he found disappointing, but still did it.) You’re sort of waiting for the Doctor to pour some cold water on her interpretation of their relationship, but he never quite does or offer a different perspective. There’s clearly a deep connection between the two, and I like where they ended up going with this in S10. But here, again, you feel for Clara getting sidelined and condescended to — both Missy and the Doctor signal she’s beneath them.

• I’ll go on record as loving the bit where the Doctor rips Davros out of his chair and rides around in it. Is this the Doctor being mean to a disabled person? No, it’s the Doctor being mean to Davros, who happens to be disabled — there’s a difference. Is it out of character for the Doctor to be mean like that? Not really — he can be cruel or cowardly sometimes, especially when provoked, and there’s nothing like the apparent murder of your companion to provoke you. Also, I like that there was a practical need to do it, that the chair had a force field, which makes total sense.

• Love the line where Missy says it’s an honor to meet Davros. Nice reminder that the two arch-villains in the series have never actually met, and clear evidence that the people making Doctor Who are the show’s biggest fans.

• The central moral dilemma: do you abandon or kill Davros as a child if you have the chance? The cliffhanger to Magician is pretty good. We’ve seen him driven to extremes before (“Dalek”), so he’s capable. Still we know Moffat is more clever than that, and denouement, with the Doctor walking away hand in hand with Davros, has a nice feel. But I question how much of that feeling is dependent on the Daleks being defeated at the end. Would it feel the same if the Daleks really had killed Clara and/or Missy? If the Doctor had truly lost? Would he make a different decision in those scenarios. In all, it emphasizes how the story and the morality tale really have nothing to do with each other.

Four Questions to Doomsday - Pete

1. Why did the Randomizer take us here? Dalek hat trick!

2. What if the evil plot had succeeded? It sort of did. Davros gets a f**kton of regeneration energy, which seemingly gets imparted to the Daleks, who go through some kind of “reboot,” before the sewer Daleks attack and everything explodes. Questions: If there was that much regeneration energy harvested, did the Doctor (the pre-Timeless Child Doctor, I might add) lose more than an arm or leg later on?
   
   Is it the Doctor’s evil plot, though? Was his goal to destroy the Daleks, again, in a final end, again? There’s not really a hint that this is supposed to be the final battle between them, but it seems like a lot of trouble to go through to destroy this one city on Skaro. 
   
   Also, didn’t Davros get revitalized? That’s a win, isn’t it? Assuming he wasn't just faking all along.

3. Where's the Clara splinter? In the TARDIS, ensuring the HADS is turned on.

4. Dalek, Ogron, Professor Hayter, Viscount Banger, Fixed Point in Time, or Lady Cassandra? Dalek smorgasbord. Lots to choose from in terms of what you can enjoy, but ultimately unfilling.