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pedantherThree thoughts about this week's episode of Doctor Who, "The Magician's Apprentice":
There is, it seems to me, an obvious problem with building the episode's dramatic climax around Missy being shot with a disintegration ray after spending a large chunk of the episode pointing out that she survived being shot by a disintegration ray only two episodes ago. (It's even the same colour.) I choose to believe, at least as a working hypothesis, that Moffat is a good enough writer to have noticed this, and that Missy will show up at the most dramatic possible moment in an episode or two, having enacted some clever plan that depended on goading the Daleks into trying to disintegrate her. And that Clara running from the Daleks wasn't because her nerve broke, but because she figured out what Missy was up to and how she could make it work for her.
Which leads into my next thought: When the episode's title was announced as "The Magician's Apprentice", I assumed (as I expect a lot of people did) that the apprentice was Clara and the magician was the Doctor. Having seen the episode, Clara's still a front-runner as the apprentice, but even though the Doctor is explicitly called a magician at one point he's not the Time Lord that Clara spends most of the episode companioning to. And there are other completely different interpretations of the title available: for instance, it could be a reference to the old story about the apprentice magician who created an army of inhuman servants he couldn't then control, which points in the direction of Davros.
Third thought: Given what Davros says about compassion, and the final scene, and the trailer for next time, it seems like he is trying to goad the Doctor into going back and killing him as a child. Perhaps he figures there's not much difference between dying and never having lived, and doesn't mind which happens to him as long as he goes into it knowing that the Doctor has accepted his viewpoint. But I keep wondering: when Davros says he remembers what happened, what if that includes the last scene? What if everything the Doctor is about to attempt is already part of history?
There is, it seems to me, an obvious problem with building the episode's dramatic climax around Missy being shot with a disintegration ray after spending a large chunk of the episode pointing out that she survived being shot by a disintegration ray only two episodes ago. (It's even the same colour.) I choose to believe, at least as a working hypothesis, that Moffat is a good enough writer to have noticed this, and that Missy will show up at the most dramatic possible moment in an episode or two, having enacted some clever plan that depended on goading the Daleks into trying to disintegrate her. And that Clara running from the Daleks wasn't because her nerve broke, but because she figured out what Missy was up to and how she could make it work for her.
Which leads into my next thought: When the episode's title was announced as "The Magician's Apprentice", I assumed (as I expect a lot of people did) that the apprentice was Clara and the magician was the Doctor. Having seen the episode, Clara's still a front-runner as the apprentice, but even though the Doctor is explicitly called a magician at one point he's not the Time Lord that Clara spends most of the episode companioning to. And there are other completely different interpretations of the title available: for instance, it could be a reference to the old story about the apprentice magician who created an army of inhuman servants he couldn't then control, which points in the direction of Davros.
Third thought: Given what Davros says about compassion, and the final scene, and the trailer for next time, it seems like he is trying to goad the Doctor into going back and killing him as a child. Perhaps he figures there's not much difference between dying and never having lived, and doesn't mind which happens to him as long as he goes into it knowing that the Doctor has accepted his viewpoint. But I keep wondering: when Davros says he remembers what happened, what if that includes the last scene? What if everything the Doctor is about to attempt is already part of history?
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Date: 2015-09-20 08:19 pm (UTC)