Deep Breath

[purplecat]

Deep Breath was, I felt, a bit of a messy episode very much a story with two halves and a coda which didn't necessarily all mesh together very well.

At one point it was received wisdom in Who fandom, that regeneration stories failed if they focused too much on the Doctor's instability following regeneration. This was primarily based on the fifth and sixth Doctor's debuts both of which I'm quite fond of (while acknowledging that The Twin Dilemma is poor quality even for a sixth Doctor story). However neither could be counted as an unqualified success so I thought it was odd to see the same thing being tried again. I'll confess I rapidly got a bit bored with it and was relieved when the second half kicked in at the moment the Doctor and Clara met in Mancini's. I didn't feel it was particularly showcasing Capaldi, the Paternoster gang jokes were not really worth the amount of screen time they got, and even Clara's confrontation with Madame Vastra felt a bit forced to me. It looked more like a heavy-handed attempt to underline the new "no hanky panky in the Tardis" (to borrow a phrase from old Who) status quo than a genuine attempt to explore Clara and Madame Vastra's characters and their relationship to each other. That said, I did like the shading in of Jenny and Vastra's relationship and the hints of the inequalities embedded within it. mondyboy (here) notes that the first half of the story is "a bit rubbish" and I can't help but agree with him.

The second half was much better, nice idea, some cool moments, not enough time for the plot to fall apart and the Doctor's confrontation with the villain was truly excellent. In fact I'm a little disappointed that we've not seen more of that side of the Doctor (rather than the "babbling fool" persona which both the eleventh and tenth Doctors also adopted to greater or lesser extents) but the moment where he sits still and is suddenly conspicuously the adult in the room was a great contrast to what had gone before. I wonder if it is deliberate that it was a side of himself he only revealed to someone he believed would not survive the encounter, and possibly was not equipped to appreciate what he/it was seeing.

ed_rex (here) very accurately sums up the coda. It was written as fan service and, at that level, it does the job admirably. But the cost is that it robs Clara of any real character development. She doesn't come to accept the new Doctor in her own right, but because the old Doctor tells her to. A number of people have noted that Jenna Coleman does a really good job with Clara given how thin a lot of the character's writing has been. Playing the "companion who won't accept the regeneration" is a pretty thankless task and she handled it well, making this viewer, at least, sympathetic to her point of view and care about how it was resolved. The resolution we got, in purely dramatic terms (taking out the Matt Smith squee!! factor), was deeply disappointing.


So, umm, a bit rubbish (or at least over-long) at the start, a very nice second half, and a coda that jettisoned character development for fannish squee points. It wasn't egregiously bad by a long shot, but I wasn't excited by most of it.

Comments

[kerry-louise.livejournal.com]

When I watched Deep Breath, I was really on the fence about Capaldi as the Doctor. With Into the Dalek, I was a touch more convinced but still not totally.

I rather enjoyed last nights ep though and I'm hoping that will continue, because I really enjoy Capaldi as an actor and it was really disappointing after Deep Breath when I realised I wasn't overly enthused about his Doctor, because I really wanted to love him.