Doctor Who: Flatline (8x09)

Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Blah. Plot. Let's start there.

So, as the Doctor is trying to drop Clara off, something weird happens with the TARDIS. It's getting smaller on the outside! The Doctor stays inside while Clara wanders around to investigate. She finds a crew of people cleaning up graffiti, and there meets a member of the crew who is there for community service (he himself does graffiti and he got busted). His name is Rigsy, and he tells Clara about all of the people who have been disappearing lately. When she gets back to the TARDIS, she discovers that it has shrunk even more. The Doctor, still regularly sized inside, can no longer get out of the door.

Clara and Rigsy go to investigate the place where the last disappearance occurred. Clara talks to the Doctor through an earpiece, and with the Doctor's help, Clara and Rigsy try to solve the mystery. When a police officer goes missing on the premises while they're searching, things start to become more clear: creatures from a 2-Dimensional universe are making contact with our universe, and flattening things - and people - as they do so.

At first, the Doctor tries to make contact with them, hoping that they might be reasoned with. Perhaps they don't know that they're hurting people? But it turns out that's not the case. There's this graffiti of people standing with their backs facing away from the world. Rigsy thought it was a memorial for the missing people, but then the people in the graffiti start to turn around. The 2-D universe gets the power to go 3-D, and these people peel themselves off the wall and start chasing our heroes.

As Rigsy, Clara, and other members of the clean-up crew try to get away through a train tunnel, the TARDIS is knocked over and falls down a railing. Clara has lost the Doctor! She must try to think like him to come to a solution. She has Rigsy paint a door into the wall, so that the 2-D creatures will attempt to make it 3-D to get through. She sets up the TARDIS, which the Doctor has put into lock-down mode, right next to this fake door. The 2-D creatures end up re-powering the TARDIS! (It had gotten smaller since they were sucking energy from it). The Doctor emerges and uses the sonic screwdriver to send the 2-D people back where they came from, with a warning to never return.

The Doctor helps everyone get to safety. Clara says goodbye to Rigsy and the others, and then delightfully asks the Doctor to admit that she was good at being "the Doctor" for the day. The Doctor says that she was an exceptional Doctor, but that being good had nothing to do with it.

We also see the Doctor learn the truth about Danny Pink in this episode - he doesn't know that Clara is still traveling with the Doctor!

We end the episode with Missy, who looks at Clara on a screen, and congratulates herself on having "chosen well."

So. Why did I start this review with an "Argh?" Because it was so damn close to being an AMAZING episode! When I first realized that the Doctor was going to be trapped in the TARDIS the whole time, I thought... finally. Here's our chance to see Clara on her own. Here's our chance to develop her character. But NO. Clara spent the entire episode either a) doing what the Doctor told her to do, or b) wondering what the Doctor would do. She wasn't being Clara, she spent the whole episode pretending to be the Doctor! Ugh! There was this one moment where she said "what would the Doctor do?" And then she changed her mind, all resilient, and said "no, what am I going to do?" And I thought - well, okay, it took us a while, but at least now we're getting somewhere. But NO AGAIN! The very next words out of her mouth are about what the Doctor just said! Ugh!

Then there's the side characters. While Rigsy was fine, he wasn't all that interesting. And the other characters were as bland as bland could be. There was the one guy who was just generally a jerk, and that's all he was the whole time: just a jerk. No complexity. The train driver was a generic nice guy and nothing more. It would have been nice to flesh out these characters, at least a little bit.

Then there's this whole thing with Danny. I don't get what's happening here. Clara keeps talking about Danny as if she's only with the Doctor because Danny allows her to be. Which is really weird, considering that Danny didn't tell Clara to stop. If she just told him the truth, it would be much better. What was the point of Danny finding out about the Doctor in the first place if we were going to go right back to her lying to Danny about it?

And then at the end of the episode, when the Doctor makes that comment about how Clara did a great job of being the Doctor, but that "good" has nothing to do with it? What was that nonsense? What exactly did Clara do in this episode that was "not good?" She didn't sacrifice anybody's life needlessly... she did everything she could to get everyone out to safety, and even if she lied and said she had a plan, she wasn't giving them false hope, was she? She still had hope, too! As did the Doctor! I feel like this episode was trying to be all deep, and show us how Clara is becoming more like the Doctor, and how that's not a good thing.

But it's hard for Clara to become more like the Doctor, when I have absolutely no clue who she is on her own! Character development! Give it to me!

Okay, but not everything sucked. There was a lot of creativity and thought that went in to this episode, and I should definitely talk about it.

I like the idea of a 2-D world. It's not original to Doctor Who of course, but it's still a cool thought. The effects when things in the room were being flattened were pretty cool. I wasn't entirely sure what to think of the 3-D monsters that came out of the 2-D world. They could have been cooler. But the concept behind them was really well done, even if the execution was a bit shoddy. So, I'm still going to list that as a positive aspect.

The concept of the TARDIS getting "smaller on the outside" was really funny too. It's a simple inversion of what we'd expect, and it sort of reminded me of that Doctor Who short where the TARDIS ends up inside of the TARDIS. The nice thing about having a show where the rules of time travel don't really matter is that you can play with some of these fun ideas without worrying that they make no sense. The smaller-on-the-outside idea was quite the success in this manner.

Also, even though I was annoyed with the way Clara seemed totally controlled by the Doctor in this episode, I did enjoy some of the funny moments of banter between them, as the Clara has control of the sonic screwdriver and the psychic paper, but the Doctor, in vain, tries to retain total control of the operation. When she first introduces herself as the Doctor, the actual Doctor is not too happy about it. That got a laugh out of me.

Also, I rather enjoyed the fact that the Doctor was in real peril of dying in this episode. Obviously we knew it wouldn't happen, but he was in a dangerous situation, and he wasn't going to go out in some cool and heroic way, he was just going to be crushed inside the TARDIS as a train rolled over it, or else die when the life support within the TARDIS shut down. That threat of the Doctor's mortality was actually nicely done, and I felt his desperation as he tried to say goodbye to Clara.

I think I'll leave it there. From what I've seen, this episode got mostly positive reviews. However, I can't get over how badly this premise was wasted. It could have been such a cool opportunity to side-line the Doctor and have a companion-based episode. Like "Turn Left" for Donna! But instead, we simply got a shadow of that. Clara's the one being the "Doctor," and yet she's really only listening to the actual Doctor, as he spends the entire episode telling her what to do.

5/10