Before the Flood

Dear Gary—
This story is over before it starts. But don't tell the Doctor that; he wants to have fun so he throws a spanner into the works to keep it going.

“So there’s this man. He has a time machine. Up and down history he goes, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, getting into scrapes.” The Doctor is telling a story—to us, the audience. I don’t like it. To me this is the show showing off. This is Doctor Who saying ‘Looky what I can do!’ The point of this opening segment is to set before us the Bootstrap Paradox (“Google it”) as the centerpiece of the episode. This is exactly the thing that I have against season arcs—it sacrifices the adventure on the altar of the almighty arc. In the case of Before the Flood, the narrative is shortchanged in deference to the “who really composed Beethoven’s Fifth” causal loop framework it just set forth in plain view. And by having the Doctor break the fourth wall in order to deliver the message it is by way of saying, ‘Ta da!’

It is a shame because the first half of the story set us up nicely; the second half lets us down. The tale is simply a flimsy excuse to get us to perform and admire the Doctor Who mental gymnastics game. It is as hollow as the sham Soviet town the TARDIS materializes in. I can’t even believe that this military base designed as a fake village for training purposes is real—it is simply a TV set ready for our actors to play in. The tip-off is that there are absolutely no people here—not even a stray guard or two. It is completely abandoned for no apparent reason. So devoid of life that a huge alien spacecraft can land there and no one is around to notice; the UFO must not have even registered as a blip on any radar screen in this supposedly militarized zone.

Of course there is always the possibility that our baddie of the hour, the Fisher King, has killed everyone within miles of the place. But that isn’t even hinted at. In fact, nothing of import is related in connection with the Fisher King. Oh, he’s big and impressive and scary looking all right. But that is his only raison d’etre. Beyond that he could be one of the cardboard Russians littering the streets of the town. We have no clue what his motivation is. I guess he wants to “drain the oceans and put the humans in chains” just for the fun of it. For all we know that threat could be nothing more than hot air. We have no demonstration of his powers other than somehow killing O’Donnell (off camera), presumably by brute strength, and making some magic writing appear on his capsule wall that will turn dead humans into transmitters. If the military is in any way active around that town the Doctor could easily enlist their aid in defeating the big guy.

I’m not even sure how the Fisher King knows where he is. He is presumed dead and wrapped up like a mummy awaiting burial when we first meet him, and then quite suddenly he appears alive and well and fully informed. He awakens on a strange planet but knows exactly where it is; enough so that he can write the coordinates on the wall; even if those coordinates seem awfully vague; and I wonder if anyone hearing them will actually understand them and know where to go or even why they should go. In addition, the Fisher King seems to know everything about the Doctor and Time Lords; yet he is fooled by a simple lie; and in the end he is destroyed by a deluge. (Makes you wonder, Gary, how the Arcateenians killed him, or thought they killed him.)

The Fisher King is an Etch A Sketch version of a monster.

Equally sketchy is Prentis. He should be a fascinating character, but we never get to know him. The script treats him as contemptuously as the Doctor treats him. He is a Tivolian funeral director come to bury the fallen Fisher King “on a barren, savage outpost.” Why did he choose Earth (hardly barren)? Why is he wandering about the town with no particular direction? Why does he have no helpers to dig the grave, act as pall bearers, etc? His only purpose (other than to be ghostly) is for exposition. He doesn’t even need much prodding. Copious explanations roll off his tongue of their own accord. Mention his home planet and he delivers a concise encyclopedia entry found under T for Tivoli. Ask him one question (“What are you doing here?”) and he rattles off a Reader’s Digest history of conquest and subjugation. Once his information has been imparted his character is dispensed with; thrown aside much like the Doctor tosses away his card. (“May the remorse be with you.”)

It is the Doctor who comes off the worst in this chicken or egg riddle, though. There is the obvious callousness that the script points out for us in the casual way he treats O’Donnell’s death, using it to test his theory. This insensitivity is reinforced by Clara when Cass questions the Doctor’s influence over Clara in her decision to send Lunn out on a dangerous mission; Clara explains to Cass of the Doctor, “He taught me to do what has to be done.” But this is what Doctor Who wants you to take away; the Doctor’s culpability goes deeper than that.

The Doctor’s brilliant plan is to send a hologram ghost Doctor ahead in time to the underwater base to deliver a cryptic message to Clara to relay back to the real Doctor to essentially light a fire under him to get going already and save the day. Huh? Since when does the Doctor need a kick in the pants to solve a basically straight forward alien threat? Additionally, he programs the Holo Doctor to pass on a bit of information (that the stasis chamber is going to open that night) to his real self in order to give him the bright idea of getting inside that chamber so that he can pop up at the right time in the underwater base. Can't his real self think up this plan all by himself without the paradox? Surely he can set the timer going on the thing to open, and that is probably exactly what he does do, so why didn’t he think of the plan himself? Oh yeah, he did think of it himself, but only after he prodded himself from the past. Or was it the future? Or was it Beethoven? And if he can set the timer, why not set it for earlier? Why the need for Holo Doctor at all? Just have the chamber open an hour or two earlier, jump out and that's that.

However, here is my real question. Why the need for coded messages? Why not simply have Holo Doctor say in plain English, or Gallifreyan, or whatever language he wants, exactly what is happening and what he should do? The Doctor’s need to keep things fun and interesting only endangers everyone around him.

This need for excitement is probably what compels him to program his Holo Doctor to let the ghosts on the base out of their trap. (And how can a hologram do that exactly?) He figures Clara, Cass, and Lunn are getting bored just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Or maybe he wants to get Clara’s mind off of his seemingly inevitable death so she’ll stop nagging him about it.

If the Doctor is going to mess about with the laws of time and create this paradox in order to save Clara, why not go whole hog and rewrite history altogether to save everybody? He talks a good game about certain laws that can’t be tampered with, but he breaks any and all when it suits him. In this particular case he goes the paradox route rather than the history re-writing, and again I wonder why. Rather than using the missing power cell to blow up the dam to flood the town and kill the Fisher King, couldn’t he use it to blow up the Fisher King and the ship with the writing on it to avert all the deaths? Or erase the writing? But no, no, no; he is “still slavishly protecting Time.” And he can’t resist the thrill of “reverse engineering the narrative.”

That is the real crime against the Doctor. He has engineered the events. Clara isn’t in any danger while the ghosts are trapped; she doesn’t need saving. But the Doctor can’t stand for that so he lets the ghosts out so that he can come in and save the day. How does he save the day? By trapping the ghosts. He knew when he went back to the beginning that the ghosts were safely locked away in the Faraday cage. All he had to do was find out how the ghosts were created and stop any more from generating. Once he found the Fisher King all the Doctor had to do was immobilize him and then inform UNIT to collect the ghosts at that 2119 base.

Despite the flaws, there are several exciting moments as well as some interesting concepts and humorous bits. Cass is great as she argues with Clara over Lunn’s dangerous mission, and the scene of Cass sensing the vibrations of the axe as it is dragged along by the stalking ghost is tense and worthy of any good horror story. Quite a bit of it falls flat, however. The Doctor’s “morning breath” comment for instance, or the repeated emphasis on how dense the Doctor is when it comes to understanding Bennett’s mourning of O’Donnell. The wrap up of the Cass/Lunn romance is sweet but forced. Did anyone not know how these two felt about each other, least of all Cass and Lunn?

And I really want to know why the TARDIS is so obstinate throughout the story. It brings the Doctor and Clara to that base to begin with and then decides it doesn’t like it there and won’t return once the Doctor leaves. Or perhaps the Doctor simply makes up that excuse to keep his storyline intact.

When all is said and done the Doctor tells Clara, “The Fisher King had been dead for a hundred and fifty years before we even got here.” The Fisher King, that Etch A Sketch monster, was never the threat. It was the ghostly transmitters that were the problem and they were safely locked away. “But once I went back,” the Doctor continues in his explanation to Clara, “I became part of events.” He then goes on to lay the “who composed Beethoven’s Fifth” punch line on her and obscures the fact that his becoming part of events is exactly what put them all in danger; and deliberately so. He wrote this ghost story; or was it Holo Doctor? Who wrote Before the Flood? And isn’t he a clever man, Gary?