The Doctor Who Review | Season 9 Episode 5

Welcome back to the fifth Doctor Who Review, where I recap the week’s episode and give some thoughts and opinions on it. There are major spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

Title:  The Girl Who Died

Written by: Jamie Mathieson & Steven Moffat

We don’t really know why, but Clara is floating in space, and something is crawling around in her suit. But then she’s rescued by the Doctor and the thing is squashed. It was a slightly random beginning to the episode, and it shows the end of an adventure we will probably never see, but more on that in a minute.

The Doctor and Clara land on Earth to get the squashed bug off the Doctor’s boot and are captured by Vikings. Enter Maisie Williams, as Ashildr (Game of Thrones). As soon as the Doctor sees her, he gets a little bit funny, and when Clara asks, he answers that sometimes, being a time traveller, you ‘remember in the wrong direction’. He’s never seen her before, and yet something’s familiar.

The Viking village is attacked by Odin (obviously not actually the Viking god Odin, just a creature using a holographic image to hide his true appearance) who appears as a floating head in the sky (sort of Mufasa-esque), and his mechanically-clad minions, who are there to capture the strongest and best men of the village, so he can steal their testosterone and make himself better, faster, stronger (like a Kayne song). Clara and Ashildr get sucked away too, but he doesn’t kill them. Instead, a fight is planned between Odin and his minions, and the village for the same time the next day.

And so the Doctor and Clara have to train the rest of the village how to fight, because the members that are left are all farmers and workers, not soldiers. The Doctor also discovers that the creatures are called the Mire, and he finally comes together with a plan to thwart them. What I liked about this battle was that it involved stories, imagination, kicking butt through the power of an altered reality. Using Ashildr’s story-making mind, they are able to distort and change what it is that the Mire are seeing through their mechanical eyes. “That’s the trouble with viewing reality through technology,” says the Doctor,” – it’s all too easy to feed in a new reality.”

In the battle, Ashildr dies, but the Doctor, being the Doctor, puts a  Mire-made chip into her head, which saves her life, but it also makes her a hybrid – both human and the Mire. The chip will continue to heal her, essentially making her immortal. This reminded me of what Davros said a few weeks back, about a hybrid prophecy, and while it’s not quite the same as the hybrid he was speaking of, it’s an interesting little point, and potentially a key element to the overarching theme of this season…?

I did enjoy the Viking aspect of this episode. The episodes with stories like this – human races on Earth at some point in time – are usually my favourite. I was a little unsure about the sudden appearance of a robotic creature, but I did enjoy the overall episode. It was great to finally see the Doctor’s appearance explained, as we’ve all been wondering this for a whole season and 5 episodes now. The Doctor looks like Lucius in the 2008 David Tennant/10th Doctor episode, The Fires of Pompeii, because, as he tells us: “To remind me. To hold me to the mark. I’m the Doctor – and I save people!”

I loved how the Doctor gave all the villagers names in this episode, names that were not actually the ones that already had: Lofty, Chuckles, Heidi, ZZ Top. I also enjoyed how excited he got about eels, and how the day was saved through imagination and storytelling. The only connection to Clara being in space at the beginning of the episode (other than getting them to earth in the first place), was  that they used parts of the space suit to magnify the electric eels’ electricity to conquer the Mire.Overall, I did really like this episode, and while it is sort of a double episode, this part of the story did end here. Episode 6, The Woman Who Lived, picks up with Ashildr’s character again, but this Viking-Mire story is at it’s end.

Favourite quotes:  

“I’m not actually the police. That’s just what it says on the box.” – The Doctor

“Immortality isn’t living forever. That’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying.” – the Doctor

“The universe is full of testosterone. Trust me, it’s unbearable.” – Clara

Did you enjoy ‘The Girl Who Died’?

Original image from BBC