Last updated on 28 December 2024
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SPOILERS ALERT! Welcome back to the fourth Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. Please do not read if you have not seen this week’s episode. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
What is Doctor Who Season 9 Episode 4 about?
Title: Before the Flood
Written by: Toby Whithouse
The second part of the Under the Lake episode, Before the Flood begins where episode 3 finished. Clara has just seen the Doctor’s hollowed-eyed, pasty, see-through ghost floating in the water outside the mining station, and the Doctor has just headed back in time with two of the station’s team members, to before the town was flooded. The Doctor and the team members find the spaceship that landed, which turns out to be a hearse, and the box is a coffin, which holds someone called the Fisher King … who is the one who wants to turn everyone into ghosts to their repetitive words create a signal into the universe.
They also meet the funeral director who is a ghost in the future, and try to piece together what exactly is going on, and what is turning the people in the station into ghosts…in the future. Clara, meanwhile, in ‘real-time’, is waiting for the Doctor to return, ever watchful of the ghost Doctor and trying to keep herself and the other two team members who stayed behind, alive.
Eventually, the Doctor gets back and all, obviously, is fine and dandy. This was one of those episodes with a slightly confusing timey-wimey explanation. At the very beginning of the episode, the Doctor is almost talking to the camera, explaining a time travel theory, and uses Beethoven as an example. Long story short, the Doctor suggests we Google it. This is called a bootstrap paradox, and it “is a time travel paradox in which an object or information can exist without ever being created.” You can read more about it here.
The entire episode ends up like this. The Doctor heads back in time, even though he’s already dead in the future, but it turns out that the ghost him is actually just a hologram, and so when did that happen? He wouldn’t have got the information about Ghost him if Clara hadn’t given it to him, but the ghost him hologram wouldn’t have been there in the future if he hadn’t created it in the past. The bootstrap paradox. Crazy, mind-blowing times. But that’s Doctor Who for you.
Obviously, if you’ve read this, then you’ve most likely seen the episode, so I won’t go into too much detail. I did enjoy the beginning and end, with the Doctor talking to the camera. At least, I think I did. It’s never happened before, but I feel for the episode, it needed to happen, to explain what was going on. Time travel can get confusing, so when you have a handy dandy Doctor giving you the explanations, then all is well. I do like how this TARDIS connects easily up with Clara’s smartphone, and how a hologram version of the Doctor does a safety briefing at one point. The Fisher King was super ugly and tall, and very skeleton-like, but had a fantastic voice. The Doctor is still rocking on his electric guitar, and still as the sonic sunglasses … unsure how I feel about that. Missy is, once again, unaccounted for.
I think I liked it? I liked it more after this second episode, but again I’m going to make the comment about all these doubles.
Last week, Kim made the comment that she read/heard/saw somewhere that there are going to be a lot more double episodes this season. I don’t know how I feel about that. We’ll see how we go I guess.
Next week’s episode is called The Girl Who Died, and it’s about Vikings, and Maisie Williams (who plays Arya in Game of Thrones) is going to be in it. I like these sorts of episodes – ones with history or myths or legends in them. Definitely looking forward to next week…however, I’m going to be able to watch it straight away before I’ll be in Japan! The following week there will be two Doctor Who Reviews, as I catch up.
Did you enjoy Before the Flood?
Original image from BBC, via We So Nerdy.
