Doctor Who Series 7: The Doctor Should Be Louder, Angrier, and Have Access To a Time Machine

The story so far: after a patchy first season, there were some signs in Matt Smith’s second season that Grand Moff Steven was righting the ship, albeit with an unfortunate emphasis on convoluted plot arc stuff and an overfondness for using “Doctor who?” as diegetic dialogue. We begin Series 7 with the Doctor having discovered that the Silence – the second of the multiple big teamups out to destroy him he’ll face over the course of his run – were trying to kill him because it was prophesised they’d be destroyed if the Question – “Doctor who?” – were answered on the fields of Trenzalore.

We’ll eventually get there… kind of. But fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a slog. We have a full thirteen episode season, divided in two with a Christmas special in the middle, and then a 50th Anniversary special before the final Christmas special. And for the first time since the revival show began, there’s no multi-part stories, so I have an eye-watering 16 stories to cover here. Pack a lunch, we’re going to be here for a while.

Oh, and content warning: there’s some sexual assault stuff coming up and the Doctor’s responsible this time and I rant about it a lot because, well, it’s the Doctor sexually assaulting people (yes, people, it happens multiple times). It’s not cool.

We kick off with the Moffat-penned Asylum of the Daleks, in which the Doctor is captured by the Daleks, as are a freshly-divorced Amy and Rory, and the trio are dragged before the Dalek parliament… But not for execution. Instead, it turns out that the Daleks want the Doctor’s help, since a crisis has arisen which is well beyond their ability to deal with via the methods they have to hand. Specifically, something’s gone south on the Dalek asylum planet – a place where they dump all the Daleks who are too twisted to be controlled but the Dalek authorities don’t want to simply execute. (Apparently the insane Daleks are so full of hate the other Daleks consider them sacred.) A rogue transmission has been emanating from the planet – the opera Carmen, which it makes no sense for any Daleks to be transmitting.

At the other end of the transmission is Oswin Oswald (Jenna Louise-Coleman), a surviving crew member from the starliner Alaska, which has crashed on the planet. That implies a major security problem: if the Alaska could get on, Daleks on-planet could conceivably get off. Oswin explains she’s been surviving onworld for a year or so, in part by hacking Dalek technology. The Daleks want the Doctor to go down and shut down the planetary force field so they can declare Exterminatus on the place, reasoning that the Doctor, as their nemesis, is just the man for the job. The Doctor just wants to get himself, his companions, and the Alaska survivors away safely. There’s two problems: something is badly wrong with Oswin, and an entire ward of the asylum is dedicated to Daleks with Post-Doctor Stress Disorder…

Doctor Who Series 6: Doctor Under a Death Sentence

The story so far: the Eleventh Doctor era has begun with a bit of a shaky season, in which Grand Moff Steven’s attempts to foreground the season arc more than it was in the RTD era (in which the “season arc” largely amounted to very brief phrases or hints at the existence of such rather than major plot dumps sprinkled throughout the season) let to mixed results. Still, Smith doesn’t seem bad as the Doctor, and after some hiccups the Amy and Rory companion team seem pretty excellent. Perhaps things will pick up with Series 6?

In a bit of a shift from the norm, the season opens with a two-parter – The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, penned by Moffat. After spending two centuries (from his perspective) travelling solo, the Doctor summons Amy, Rory, and River Song to a remote desert locale in the USA. He declares he’s going to take them to 1969 for a particular purpose, but before they take the trip he treats them to a lakeside picnic, during which someone in an Apollo astronaut spacesuit emerges from the lake. Telling the others to stay back and not interfere with what happens next, the Doctor approaches the astronaut – who shoots him dead, double-tapping him to prevent his regeneration. Shortly afterwards, the Doctor’s guests realise their invitation envelopes are numbered – and none of them have number 1. Returning to the diner at the rendezvous site, they encounter a younger version of the Doctor, who’s oblivious to what just happened.

There’s your season plot arc – “Who killed the Doctor and how does the Doctor get out of this one?” – and that’s an awesome setup in principle. In practice, there’s issues with running this story now. A “future version of the Doctor apparently dies” gambit was used fairly recently in The Big Bang, and that’s the sort of schtick you really need to let rest a bit before you use it again. Moreover, it’s going to turn out that the Doctor was shot due to the machinations of a big conspiracy that exists to stop the Doctor doing a thing which, as a result of them trying to stop it, eventually ends up happening, which is basically the same concept as the Series 5 season arc.

Still, the immediate story is fun! It’s got President Nixon (Stuart Milligan) troubled by strange phone calls, terrifying Grey-like aliens known as the Silence secretly puppeteering humanity from the shadows and editing themselves out of witnesses’ memories, and so on. It’s clear that Moffat loves this X-Files-adjacent stuff, and possible that he did a fair bit of research for this one; the idea that the Silence have ancient tunnels running under the ground and have been manipulating humanity for centuries is reminiscent of nothing less than the Shaver Mystery, the big paranormal flap that preceded the modern UFO movement, and if that’s not deliberate then Moffat has at least been discerning about picking out long-standing undercurrents in UFO conspiracy theory lore.

In addition, the older Doctor manipulating the others into witnessing his death, and River Song’s warnings that if they tell the younger Doctor what’s going to occur they risk significant cosmological damage to the universe, adds a pinch of interesting friction within the TARDIS crew, which isn’t a terrible concept. Dialling up the manipulativeness – which also ties into the conclusion of the story, in which the Dcotor broadcasts the existence of the Silence to the whole Earth and sparks off a mass genocide which humanity then immediately forgets they did – adds a big dose of Seventh Doctor to the mix, which in principle I am supportive of, though in this case I think the solution is more problematic than, say, the Doctor tricking Davros into blowing up Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks.