Timelord Thoughts 2 - The Witch's Familiar

On to part two of the season opener - and what an episode it was. Just a reminder that these are my observations having watched the episode just twice - once completely cold and then once to write this post. I've stayed away from as many spoilers as possible (I didn't know about the Davros reveal last week for example) and since transmission I've not read any reviews.

The Witch's Familiar

• Come on  - we *knew* that Clara and Missy weren't dead, but it's still a great way to start.
• Fourth Doctor ! First Doctor ! Looks nothing like Tom Baker but who cares. I love that Missy refers to Twelve as "The Eyebrows".
• The pointy stick. "Why am I tied up?". "In case there's nothing to hunt". Huge wink. Oh I love Missy I really do.
• Missy loves to show off. Look how clever I am - I'm as brilliant as the Doctor. But I also think that she is testing Clara and could almost be said to be as obsessed with her as she is with her fellow Timelord.
• A nest of vampire monkeys. Now *that's* an adventure I'd like to see! I also love the green glow from the sonic with just the eyes all around the Doctor.
• Those soaring shots of the Dalek city are just fantastic.
• Missy selected Clara for the Doctor (she was the woman in the shop). She keeps saving her from death. I wonder why?
• So Davros has figured out that it was the Doctor there at the beginning in the field of hand mines. We still don't know if the Doctor saved him though...
• The Special Weapons Dalek speaks at last!
• A very brief shot of the body of Davros lying on the floor. His chair enters the control room and....
• Oh that's just brilliant! "Admit it. You've all had this exact nightmare". "So, anyone for dodgems?" I was laughing out loud by this point.

• The sight of  Davros squirming on the ground is almost as creepy as when he is in his chair.

• Clara really is just a plaything for Missy. Like a cat toying with a mouse until it dies...
• Well I guess Davros could have a tea-making machine in his chair. He would need something to drink while whiling away the hours watching all those videos of his past encounters with the Doctor.
• A personal force field does explain how Davros survived all those attempts to kill him.
• Looks like the genius scientist has a plan though. Did he expect the Doctor to escape the way he did? 
• Okay so a miner with a canary then. I love the way Missy just looks bored when she turns her back on Clara.
• The sewers are a nice link back to the first ever Dalek story. I guess these are all that remains of the ones which didn't pass the entrance exams to get a nice shiny battle tank casing.
• Hang on - if Daleks can't die, then doesn't that mean that there are thousands of decaying Daleks clogging up sewers around the universe? What about the millions killed in the Time War? It's a gruesome image. Actually, thinking some more, I personally believe that a Dalek creature *can* die if it's vapourised or it explodes or any of the myriad ways we have seen them killed before. A Dalek just can't die of "natural causes" like old age. Perhaps the dialogue could have made that clearer.
• Dark star alloy - we've heard of dwarf star alloy before. I guess this is it's sharper cousin. If it can cut "like a knife through people" then that must exclude Timelords.
• "The Doctor gave it to me when my daughter...". Oh Moffat, you're poking that cattle prod through the bars of the fan cage again aren't you? A thousand stories just popped into existence.
• Yuk. The squelchy Dalek remains want mobility again. Not sure how they are going to operate the casing though - not having any limbs / tentacles / appendages / things.
• The only other chair on Skaro. Just wonderful. Another laugh out loud moment.
• "You keep not dying. Can you give it some welly".  The dialogue is really zinging this week.
• Not quite sure why the Doctor went all cockney there. It sounded a bit Harry H Corbett in "Carry On Screaming". Which is not a bad thing.
• Daleks are afflicted with a genetic defect of respect and mercy for their father? Apart from the ones in the classic series that weren't then? It does explain why they never managed to kill him though. Lock him away in a dank dungeon maybe but never destroy him.
• Ah, and now Davros paraphrases his own speech from "Genesis of the Daleks". As the Fourth Doctor once tempted him, so Davros now does the reverse, dangling the chance to destroy all the Daleks on Skaro. This incarnation doubts himself already.
• The look on Missy's face as she seals Clara up in the Dalek...
• So Daleks channel their emotions through their guns and shout "Exterminate" to reload - yeah I can buy that. Moffat loves filling in little bits of Who lore. Having said that, we know that Missy lies so it could all be bobbins. Still, being trapped in that casing unable to express yourself properly *would* make you very angry.
• It's obvious that the Doctor's confession is going to be a big part of this season's arc. Nice misdirection there when he chooses the sunglasses though.
• "I fought him once on the slopes of the Nevervault". More food for fan fiction lovers out there. Of course RTD was doing this years ago with all that stuff about the Time War.
• These scenes between Davros and the Doctor are just electric. I can't take my eyes off the screen.
• Having dealt with the return of Gallifrey and the name of the Doctor, the next thing seems to be - why did he really leave. It's a reasonable question. I doubt the answer is going to be as simple as we think though. That "...safe...from both of us" line is ominous.
• Is Davros *really* pleased for the Doctor? Has he changed? This is unexpected.
• Holy f***k. Davros just opened his eyes! Well just because he never did it before doesn't mean he can't. Unless this is a change due to the Doctor being there when he was a little boy. Just when you think there are no surprises left... 

• And now Davros plays his trump card. Turning the Doctor's own "Am I a good man ?" question around into one about himself. This is just riveting.
• In the end you have two immortal enemies, both dying or expecting to die and laughing together at a simple joke. Has Moffat been reading Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke?
• What does Missy want from the Daleks / Davros if she is willing to give them the Doctor  / Clara?
• I doubt the Daleks recreated Skaro to include the creatures in the sewers. More likely they plucked it or copied it from a point in time before the Seventh Doctor destroyed it with the Hand of Omega. If that still happened.
• Could we really be about to see the final end of Davros as the sun rises over a reborn Skaro?
• Okay let's pause for a second and consider the Doctor flicking his wrist and calling up regeneration energy. Personally I don't like it, but it's not as if it's without precedent. They've been doing it throughout the series since it came back in 2005. First with that hand regeneration in "The Christmas Invasion", then River Song gave the Eleventh Doctor all her remaining regenerations in "Let's Kill Hitler" and don't forget he fixed her wrist in "The Angels Take Manhattan". Add to that the fact that although in the Classic series the Doctor only regenerated at times of great personal injury, Romana changed her form several times on a whim and Borusa seemed to be able to regenerate at will (although always into an old man for some reason). Like I said, I'm not overly keen on it being used in such an off-hand way but it's a method of getting us to the next point in the story...
• And the lights go on, both metaphorically and literally (in the case of Davros' third eye). Of course it's a trap. Compassion will kill you in the end, Doctor. Everything Davros said was a lie. I bet those human looking eyes were fake too. What's even more brilliant about this is that Moffat took his "hiding things in plain sight" trope to it's ultimate end. Davros said that he was going to trap a Timelord. We could all see the snake markings of Colony Sarff on the cables. Yet I got so caught up and distracted by the conversation between these two great opponents (and that's thanks to the mesmerising performances by Capaldi and Bleach) that it's still a shock when the trap closes.
• A second pause. So another prophecy. This time about the coming of a Dalek / Timelord hybrid and the Doctor's (possible) part in it's creation. Now Moffat isn't the first to add to or change existing Doctor Who mythology. Robert Holmes put the cat amongst the pigeons by adding the twelve regeneration limit. Successive writers had Rassilon or Omega create almost everything single handedly. Plus don't forget the Cartmel Masterplan where the Doctor was going to be revealed as "more than just a Timelord". I've no problem with prophecies or shaking things up and revealing previously hidden or unknown facts (I read comics for goodness sake, it's practically the raison d'etre of most superhero books). A "hybrid" sounds like an interesting concept. I just don't think you can link it to the reason for the Doctor leaving Gallifrey in the first place. It's a step too far, when he had never even heard of the Daleks until his second televised adventure. Now maybe as we learn more about this throughout the season it will turn out that the Doctor didn't know that the other "great warrior race" was the Daleks until *after* he left, but right now this revelation just doesn't sit right with me.
• A double bluff from the Doctor? So he knew Davros was lying. Knew he would try and steal the regeneration energy. Knew Missy was still alive and would save him? That's a hell of a lot of forward planning (well he did have three weeks thinking time during his 'farewell party'). I'm not entirely sold though. I suppose it could be a plan worthy of the Seventh Doctor to defeat the new Skaro Daleks before they start expanding their empire - by realising what Davros needed and roping Missy in to help (a threat bigger than both of them) but it's a huge stretch. Missy is just too unreliable. I think that it's just a bit of bravado for Davros' sake. The Doctor lies remember. The only part he figured out was that Davros had given the energy to creatures he had probably dismissed as irrelevant. 
• Speaking of which - regeneration energy went to all the sewer Daleks too? Just how? Oh *I* can explain it away by saying that the cables just distributed the energy across all parts of the city in a wave that touched everything in it's path, but I would have preferred a line of dialogue to do it for me.
• And now Missy's true colours are revealed. Last year she turned the dead into Cybermen to see what the Doctor would do with an army. Now she wants to use his hatred of the Daleks to get him to kill his own companion. It's chillingly unpredictable and manipulative. Especially as she takes the Doctor's hand and helps him raise the Dalek gun...
• That protoplasmic aeons old Dalek gunk spewing out of their casings is pretty horrible isn't it? I still would have liked a more "elegant" solution but that's what you get when every encounter is with millions of Daleks. 
• "Your sewers are revolting". Sigh.
• So it's a Hostile Action Dispersal System now is it? The TARDIS is in twinkly little bits but still has a force field? Why couldn't it just have made itself invisible or a second out of phase with time or something? Bizarrely that would have made it more believable.
• Sonic sunglasses? Ye gods NO! I'm all for getting rid of the handy dandy Screwdriver with it's infinite settings and the ability to fix anything with a quick wave in the air but this is far, far worse. Yes I get that it's a "Google Glass" kind of thing and it means that anyone can pretend to be the Doctor without the need for an expensive prop, but please - let this be a one off trick.
• The Master didn't have a very good time when he tried teaming up with the Daleks previously. I have a feeling that Missy's "very good idea" is going to be much more dangerous...
• The Doctor figures out where Dalek "mercy" came from and we return to the beginning in every sense. It's a neat trick, leaving the resolution of the cliffhanger to the very end of the episode. It ends as we always knew it would.

Conclusion:

Another excellent episode - mostly. Towering performances from Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach are at the heart, but things were let down by some retconning which just might be one step too far and a slightly lazy denouement. I'm still not entirely sure what Missy's involvement was for (much as I love her) beyond psychologically manipulating the Doctor. Time (and ten more episodes) will tell. Oh and don't mention the HADS and the sunglasses. Please. Just don't.