Doctor Who 9x5 'The Girl Who Died': The Many-Faced Traveler

nicholasimarshall
Oct 21, 2015
7 min read

Doctor Who 9x5 is a lighter touch for our darkest, broodiest Doctor, but it's another way to show us who he really is.

Reviewed while deeply afraid that the Silence are real and we just can't remember that they're there.

Forget the Vikings. Forget the simplistic sci-fi story of some advanced but clunky warrior aliens bearing down on helpless villagers. Forget your fawning over star-power Maisie Williams. That's all a fun but thinly cast veil to disguise the true purpose of this episode, one explored in other Doctor Who episodes, many of them among my favorites. This is about studying the Doctor. The endless Traveler. It's about peeling away another layer, because after 1100+ years he just has so many. Missy said in 'The Magician's Apprentice' that her relationship with the Doctor was a friendship infinitely more complex than Earthlings could understand. It's implied that the core of who and what the Doctor is, as a person, is just as complicated. His experiences are unfathomable to the likes of Clara and the rest of us. How those experiences shape him must be as elusive. So no matter how endless his story is, no matter how often we see him or how many faces he takes, there's always something new to learn. Or perhaps a new angle on something we already knew. 'The Girl who Died' is about the Man who lived, who always lives, always comes and always leaves. The Man who, as he has so often explicitly stated, always runs.

'Girl who Died' is a lighter, quip-heavy addition to the Moffat era, and as much as I love the existential questions he usually tries to explore, we all know how easily he can just run into a wall of his own writing and nobody understands what the fuck is going on. And he just leaves you like that. ('Look!! Something shiny and cool!! Awesome, right? Don't you wanna know what it is? Well, too bad. Now let's move on and never speak of it again'... This is what I imagine Steven Moffat saying to me all the time). So this easy and light Vikings versus Robots story is strangely refreshing. Not once was I actually afraid of the metal porta potties and the Cylon-eye patch guy. Nor did I fear for any of the adorable Vikings (... yep, I'm gonna stick with the word 'adorable'), not even Maisie Williams' Ashildr. It's the show giving us a quick breather before we get back to the stuff of the Doctor's nightmares, like the Silents or mass exterminating trashcans. It's nice to not have to freak out in anxiety for a week. Even still, my default is always to give such episodes a decent or average rating at best (unless that episode is 'The Lodger,' which is the pinnacle of Doctor Who laid-backness). And I was ready to give this episode the same. Because Doctor Who is still at its most engaging when considering the big universal questions (simple when he can go anywhere in the universe).

'Girl who Died' goes like this: The Doctor and Clara see some Viking warriors get vaporized by this alien race called the Mire in order to make energy drinks. Ashildr, the 18-year old who can vote in the UK but of course still looks like a young girl, impulsively declares war on the Mire, which means she signs the death warrants for all the non-warrior Vikings (that's a thing?). The Doctor says they're hopeless, but better to fight and have a good death, because 'that's the best anyone can hope for' (a fleeting moment of poignancy in an otherwise easy-going episode). Clara reminds him he's not an idiot so he needs to find a way to save them, and, of course, he finds a way. The villagers unite and find the most comical and embarrassing way to beat the 'Mighty Mire.' Hint: their plan involves social media. LOLZ.

That's it. That's the episode. Fun, but unchallenging. I'm a guy who finds comfort in desperate, depressing drama, especially once in space. So 'Girl who Died' can only be so appealing for me. Especially since some of the jokes were a bit heavy-handed and unfunny, and parts of the episode were a tad uneven, like when the Doctor and Clara remark on how laughably inept the villagers are at fighting. And the villain was less than meh. Thus, the episode was only somewhat more than meh.

But then the last ten minutes happen, and we see another layer of the Doctor. Ashildr suffers for the Doctor's seemingly benign plan that otherwise works flawlessly, and he leaves to be alone and try to forgive himself, or forget. Whichever comes first. He tries to explain to Clara that for him, winning 'the war,' or whatever conflict they're dealing with, is completely irrelevant. The Doctor leads people to death. It's inevitable, and he has to perpetually remind himself of that fact, and cope with the pain. This in itself is not unchartered territory for the show. On several occasions the Doctor has proclaimed how tired he is of people dying for him. But the newest layer is in part revealed from Capaldi's take on it. Many argue that the best asset Capaldi's doctor has is that he's much more honest and bare. But moments like this show that really he's not bare at all. His bluntness, his chastising of peope less intelligent than him, his apparent lack of concern for others... those are all veils. Masks that are different than the ones worn by previous Doctors, but still concealing the same struggles. Contrary to popular opinion, Capaldi's Doctor feels every death he causes, still reconciles with it. He just does it differently. After so often being confronted with the responsibility and the guilt, there's always another approach to battle it. The Twelfth Doctor comes off as cold and detached. Hence having tactful templates: 'I deeply regret the loss of your friend/family/pet.'

Whereas David Tenant or Matt Smith's Doctor would run back into the Blue Box wiping away tears with heads bowed until they have gradually moved on, Capaldi's does it with a hard, pragmatic veil. People die, period. He saves the greater good, and moves on with Beethoven playing in the background, not looking back. Pretending not to give two shits. 'Girl who Died' is all set-up for fifty-odd minutes to reveal this facet of The Twelfth Doctor with the proclamations that it's out of his hands and the villagers have to die so that the Mire can leave the rest of Earth alone. No use crying over it. Then he finds a way and makes a fun game out of saving them, completely jovial the whole time. But Ashildr's unexpected fall breaks that mask apart, and we see in the flesh what deep down we've always known, even in the moments we thought this Doctor might actually just be a well-intentioned asshole: this Doctor is a gravely pained, shame-ridden, tired old man. He jumps from one adventure to the next to flee that pain knowing that he can't escape it. Other incarnations did it their own way, and this is his. Detached, bitter, off-putting. And it makes him angry.

Matt Smith may have been a balance between Tenant wearing his heart on his sleeve and Capaldi's rational calculations, but at times it was a bit hard to swallow when he was detached, and I still occasionally find it jarring to see Capaldi's coldness on such an extreme level. This is the darkest incarnation of the Doctor I can remember. But episodes like this, moments like the one where he reflects on his cowardice running from other people's deaths in his own way, humanize him again. Making sure we the Whovians know Capaldi's Doctor is still the Doctor, the one who cares for every single life, who tries to save everyone he can, and who struggles to accept the simple truth that he will fail in that attempt. He struggles with the guilt and the pain, and the loneliness. He can change his face all he wants. It will always be there.

And every so often that struggle leads the Doctor to be impulsive. Which normally is fine, no harm done. But when the Doctor finds a way to save Ashildr, even during the process he realizes it might be a mistake, he may be toying with something he shouldn't be. But still he saves her. It's all about saving that one life if he can, and worrying about the consequences later. The problem is, he saves her by giving her a device that will always save her, making her virtually immortal. Peter Capaldi as an actor can so effortlessly move from coldness to a magnetic, poignant release of emotion. Exemplyfied in his venting scene to Clara and the moment he explains that he gave Ashildr a copy of the same device because the immortal life is a lonely one, so hopefully Ashildr can share it with someone she cares about. My saddest memory of the Tenant era was in 'Journey's End,' when he drops off all his companions and heads out in the rain, alone. It stays with me forever as the greatest consequence of the Doctor's life: everyone in his life will go away in the end. Capaldi's Doctor giving Ashildr the device so someone can be immortal with her is homage to that experience, that life in the rain. All the layers we see of the Doctor as a character build upon each other, and there's always a new one. What we see in this episode is another layer of how the Doctor copes with survivor's guilt and consistent loneliness. It's not the girl who died, it's the Doctor who traveled, in his lonely little box.

Grade: B+

When I got sidetracked

-The following meme allows me a short reprieve from the ever-present fear that I'm always seeing Silents and I'm just not remembering that I saw them or that they might be right next to me at this very moment.