“What do you think it feels like to be them, to be such tiny, ephemeral flashes of existence?"
That was an extraordinary piece of television- effective as drama, deeply creepy and scary, developed all of the regular characters significantly and equally. It also had a subtle couple of nods for the old school fans and probably has more significance for the season arc than we think at first.
Best of all, it was actually about something.
It's often a sign of a good script when you have a complex situation- and here we have 14th century Aleppo; Yas, Ryan and Graham all visiting friends or relatives in Sheffield and later move to outer space in the far future. It's complex, but never confusing if you're paying attention, all to the credit of new writer Charlene James, with Chris Chibnall getting a co-credit. It's all wonderfully structured, including a pre-titles teaser for the first time in ages- yay!
The regulars all get meaty stuff. We discover that, three years ago, Yas had a bit of a crisis- bullies, slipping grades, parents not getting it- and was only prevented from running away by a kindly police officer, herself a nicely written character. Ryan has a best friend who has suffered alone with mental health issues lately, and it's clear that Ryan feels he's been neglecting the people at home while he's away travelling in the TARDIS. His conversation in the TARDIS with Yas at the end makes me feel he may not want to keep travelling for much longer.
Then we have Graham's fears and anxieties about his cancer returning- and a nice little character moment for the Doctor of the kind that was missing last season as Graham confides in her and she frankly confesses her social awkwardness. More of this sort of thing please.
At first, in Aleppo, it appears the baddies are going to be the nasty CGI monsters- but it's a whopping great clue when we're told that the monsters don't exist. There's quite a lot of clever misdirection. The first part of the episode is creepy and atmospheric, a wonderful combination the excellent visual style we consistently get with Doctor Who these days (something I don't praise often enough) and equally good writing. It's a great sci-fi concept that we hav two colliding planets with a wondrously engineered artifact between them preventing armageddon, and also that this artifact seems to be a prison containing a woman being fed nightmares- a great concept, and a puzzle. Ian Gelder is superb, too, as the incredibly creepy finger-detaching man.
Yet the revelations pay off superbly- like how, in solving the apparent puzzle of breaking the lock combination the Doctor fails to solve the puzzle of what's going on, and falls into a terrible trap. And I love that the pair of cruelly playful immortals behind it all strongly echo the Eternals from Enlightenment- although, quite rightly, it's left ambiguous that this is what they are. What does seem to be clear is that they're the same as the eponymous villain in The Celestial Toymaker. Whatever the continuity implications, I love the visual style of how we get all the animated exposition. And I suspect their existence points towards something significant, hence the audio flashback to the Master telling us of dark Gallifreyan secrets and the Timeless Child.
But this is, at its root, a story about mental health. These immortal beings feed on our nightmares, our self-doubt, our feelings that we're not good enough. And it's in being strong, in rising above these doubts, that we can triumph. A wonderful subtext to an episode which is exceptional in every way.
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