After kicking the new season off with classic villains and old-school action, Doctor Who took a dark turn Saturday night with an underwater ghost story featuring murderous mumbling ghosts from outer space!
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
OK, actually, only one of the murderous mumbling ghosts is from outer space (until later — guess Who?). But still, how could you go wrong with a spooky setup like that?*
Well...
Warning: Spoilers abound!
There are a few elements required to keep you on the edge of your seat during a good ghost story: Foreboding, murder, darkness and the fear of more deaths.
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
Under the Lake packs all of that and something else: A whole lot of exposition — and not a lot of sense.
Things start off promisingly enough when the crew on an underwater mining facility brings a mysterious craft aboard — along with the aforementioned space ghost. Soon enough there's a freak fire and one crew member is suddenly on
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
Days later, the Doctor (Peter Capaldi), Clara (Jenna Coleman) and one reluctant time-and-space machine arrive to find that ghostly duo haunting away. In fact, they barely get a look at the alien craft before the now-armed ghosts come after them.
Of course, being a sensible Time Lord, the Doctor isn't buying into the whole ghost thing — at first. But after a bit of explanation from the remaining crew, whom he found huddling in a handy ghost-proof Faraday cage, he does the math.
Which is, basically, dead + see-through = ghosts.
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
That thrills the Doctor, who exclaims excitedly, "I've never actually met a proper ghost!"
He's so excited, the survivors notice that he isn't really concerned about the whole their-pal-died thing.
Welcome to grumpy Doc, folks!
Apparently Clara's working on that personality defect of his (or vast improvement, depending on your taste in Doctors), since she offers him an appropriate-response cue card, complete with his promise to help them with "the death of your friend/family member/pet."
But the fake niceties don't last because the Doctor just can't figure out why these people are avoiding the violent specters.
READ ON: 'Doctor Who' Recap Season 9 Premiere: 'The Magician's Apprentice' Kills (And Exterminates)
"OK, so they'll try to kill you, blah, blah, blah" he grants them. "You come back a bit murdery, sure. But even so!"
Actually, it doesn't take long at all for one of them to come back a bit murdery. The stereotypical-greedy-businessman character, who's just sponsoring this mission in hopes of some deep-sea oil (and one rare alien power cell), is drowned by the ghosts just before becoming one himself. All to no one's disappointment.
But that's where things sort of fall apart.
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
Using a crewmember, Clara and Hologram-Clara chicanery, the Doctor traps the mumbling ghosts in the Faraday cage and utilizes his oh-so-controversial sonic shades to transmit the scene to the facility's deaf captain. She lip reads their message from the great beyond.
"The dark, the sword, the forsaken, the temple..."
Sure, it sounds like goth gibberish, but the Doctor determines that it's actually coordinates, and it matches writing found in the alien craft.
The dark, he posits, means space. OK.
The sword? It's got to be the one in the
READ ON: 'Doctor Who' Recap 'The Witch's Familiar': Say So Long To The Sonic Screwdriver!
The forsaken, he says, is an empty town. Like maybe flooded military village where the mining facility is. This is really pushing it.
The temple is literally a church in this poor-man's-Atlantis.
It all leads to a stasis pod the Doctor knew was missing from the ship when he first saw it.
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
He guesses the soon-to-be dead see the writing in the ship, then they're killed and then those "coordinates" stick with them like an annoying song-of-the-summer — an earworm that they can't even "Shake It Off" post-mortem.
They repeat it again and again, and even recruit more ghosts to broadcast the info and amplify the signal to other aliens out there.
But who would figure that out? (Other than the Doctor, conveniently.) If you said, "The Sunshine State, the highway, the mall, the Chick-fil-A," I still wouldn't know where to find the specific sandwich you're trying to lead me, too.
Then again, I'm not part of a smarty-pants alien race able to decipher such things, so... fine.
The Doctor gets pretty jazzed about the whole thing,
"My God, every time I think it can't get more extraordinary, it surprises me," he says, rapt. "It's impossible. It's evil. It's astonishing. I want to kiss it to death."
As for me, I want to travel in the TARDIS to a point in time before he said that.
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
The Doctor decides to get to the TARDIS and travel further back in time than that. He's going back to when the spaceship originally landed so he can understand what's going on and make sure no one else has to die.
Clara looks out into the briny abyss and what she sees leaves her less than confident in his success.
(Credit: © BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED)
TO BE CONTINUED!
*Nerd note: While the first part of this ghost story was convoluted and a bit of a slow burn, part two could still turn things around. New Who (meaning the 2005-present reboot run) has a knack for making spooky two-parters work. The Ninth Doctor had the gas-mask filled duo The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The Tenth Doctor faced the underworld in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit and offered up a pretty good excuse to be afraid of the dark in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. And the Eleventh Doctor went face-to-forgettable-face with the gruesome Silence in The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon. So there's reason enough to tune in next week. Join me!
