Sunday 30 April 2017

Doctor Who Series 10 First Impressions: Episode 3 (Thin Ice)

(Hello! You know the drill, I think. This is an episode of Doctor Who that just aired yesterday and there are spoilers for it, so if you've not seen it yet go watch it. Okay? Okay.)

ORA!
Oh yes, that was quite nice and I'm still grinning like an idiot at that one definitive part where Doctor Who lays its cards on the table. We're going to get into that, apolitical blogging be DAMNED, but we gotta build to it just like the episode does. So, this is Thin Ice! That's Thin Ice by Sarah Dollard, not Thin Ice by Marc Platt which is a 1990 Doctor Who story with the 7th Doctor, Ice Warriors, and Ace leaving to go to Time Lord school. A 1990 story that never got made due to the minor problem of the show getting shitcanned in 1989, but it got an audio adaptation. I haven't listened to it. We straight up reused the title, but if like every goddamned Dalek story ever can be called Blank Of The Daleks then I see no harm in using a title for an unmade story for... an actually made one. That was a nice little tangent to bulk up my opening paragraph, aren't I fun? So, Sarah Dollard! She did Face The Raven last series! I really loved Face The Raven. It was the best Clara departure ever for the thirteen days in which it appeared to be Clara's actual departure. "Let me be brave" still resonates with me. Thin Ice is another memorable one, and it's quite good and I enjoyed it a lot. It'll probably be remembered, if not for being "the one with a giant fish under the Thames" then for that scene. Again, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Or, as we'd say on my pal Rainiac's Doctor Who Review podcast... we can't talk about that yet. He's cribbing from this writeup for his next episode 'cause I'm sitting it out to let another cohost get on and not crowd up shit, so I'm talking to the future here when he's looking shit up. Ahem. BIG FISH'S EYE REFLECTED IN BILL'S DIVING HELMET. MIRROR SHOT! MIRROR SHOT! QUOTE THIS VERBATIM ON THE SHOW! Now that we have that out of the way, let's tackle Thin Ice.



Right away, Bill's savviness is back, played for both comedy and drama. The drama comes first when she realizes that London in 1814 is not going to be kind to a woman of color and expresses that concern to the Doctor. It will continue on when she gets upset at him following the death of the little street urchin kid, Spider, to drowning in the ice. This is standard new companion Doctor Who stuff, it's when the companion realizes that the Doctor isn't exactly held to human standards and has dark secrets and death surrounds him and all that other bullshit. This is just another standard course Bill is taking as the Doctor's tutor. Basic Time Lord Ethics 1203. The Doctor, to his credit, owns up to it all after Bill's insistence. He tries to answer "have you killed people" by explaining the situations and circumstances, but that isn't what Bill asked. The answer is yes. Yes, he has. Yes, the Doctor has seen lots of people die. No examples in recent memory come up where the show has outright killed a little kid in such a brutal fashion though. Dropped into freezing waters to drown. That's the optimal outcome; we hope Spider drowned before the giant fish ate him. The alternative is too dark to consider. Still, before the darkness we have some lighter moments. Bill's sci-fi knowledge comes back as she ponders about time travel rules and being in the past and butterfly effect bullshit. That's just how time travel works, yeah? Not really. The Doctor's sarcastic as hell about it (which leads to the wonderful joke about Pete) and a general joy. As he says near the climax, "Smug belongs to me.". We also get that wonderful line about history being a whitewash, as Bill looks at a multicultural crowd at the Frost Fair. These are all cute little moments, but the undercurrent of it all is still there. There's still something under the ice killing people. Already a comedy drunk and a little kid have died to it. The Doctor, despite his "moving on", is clearly invested. Notable is that the TARDIS has dragged him here after sorting out all that Vardy business last week. My mind goes back to that key exchange of dialogue from way back in The Doctor's Wife. The Doctor complains that the TARDIS never took him where he wanted to go. She, in her human body, replies "No, but I always took you where you needed to go.". The Doctor has been to the Frost Fair before. Those other trips have been pleasure adventures in Earth history, from the sound of it. This, then, is the TARDIS putting her foot down. There's a problem happening here and it needs fixing.


We discover a twist, of course, once the Doctor and Bill dive down under the river in their old-timey diving suits. There's a massive fish under there, and tiny anglerfish are pulling people down from the ice to feed it. There's no malice on its part; the thing is just eating to survive. More to the point, the fish is a prisoner itself. No. Prisoner is the wrong word for this story. This fish is a slave. A slave chained to the riverbed since... well, we don't know when. A slave kept a slave because of its labor value. This giant fish eats, and... well, this giant fish shits. This giant fish's shit is a powerful fuel source in its own right, and it's kept down below to be fed so it can shit out more of the fuel and provide a valuable resource. The lower class of England, the comedy drunks and the child thieves who pickpocket to survive, are expendable resources to produce this giant fish shit fuel. At the forefront of this grand plan, profiting from it all, is a rich fellow of status named Lord Sutcliffe. Here, then, is the key of the episode. The Doctor and Bill go to visit him. All signs point to the mysterious Lord Sutcliffe being an alien in disguise, wanting to use the shit fuel for a rocket or something. The Doctor urges Bill to let him do the talking, because she's got a temper and is too passionate for the sort of buttering up the Doctor has in mind. Information is needed, and... what's he say? "Passion fights, but reason wins." Yes. That. Lord Sutcliffe enters the room, greeting the Doctor with a friendly nature, as he would to someone else of status. He trails off as his gaze meets Bill, sitting in a chair. Bill's had a comfy time of it so far when it comes to the prejudice she was fearing at the start of the episode; nobody has harshed on her for the color of her skin or made snide remarks or anything like that. Until now. The episode sucker punches us by bringing that back. Lord Sutcliffe immediately gets indignant and incredibly racist, calling Bill a "creature" and being outraged, just absolutely outraged that a woman of color is daring to grace his immaculate rich house.


The Doctor responds by punching him right in his racist fucking face. At a period in history when people with reprehensible beliefs about minority groups, just like Lord Sutcliffe is, are parading around those opinions quite openly and getting punched in the face by other people for it... at a period in history when there's a huge debate about whether or not it is okay to punch those people with reprehensible beliefs in the face, Doctor Who stands up and says "yes" and actually has the lead actor punch a fucking racist right in his racist fucking face. Good on it. That, to me, is just what Doctor Who would do. Of course, for the punch the Doctor and Bill get themselves captured by Lord Sutcliffe. We do get another wonderful Capaldi speech out of it, where he states flat-out that the worth of human life has nothing to do with status or privilege or anything like that. Lord Sutcliffe thinks he owns the thing under the river because it was passed down to him, but a life cannot be property. A life cannot be used as slave labor. What we have here is a more hard-edged version of Creature From The Pit. Adrasta locked Erato in the pit to keep up her metal monopoly and be rich, and Lord Sutcliffe keeps the fish locked under the Thames and lures people to the Frost Fair so they will get eaten and give him more fish shit fuel to "further the Empire" and keep his status. He's totally human and completely without pity for anyone who doesn't have status. Who needed an alien in this story anyway? This guy's bullshit bigotry is villainry enough, and real villainry at that. His plan is to just blow up the damn Frost Fair and let everyone sink underwater to feed his fishy slave. The Doctor gets out of his bonds quickly, being used to capture and all that... but it's Bill he asks for the go-ahead. "Only an idiot knows the answers. If your future is built on the suffering of that creature, what's your future worth?". It's poignant because that's our world. Western civilization, all the privilege and decadence and whatnot, it was all built on the suffering of people. People who folks like Lord Sutcliffe saw as subhuman. Bill decides that this is worth tearing down, and we work to free the fish despite the risk that it might eat half of London. Lord Sutcliffe's plan is foiled. See the look on his face, the innate frustration. How DARE he be denied something. How dare he be denied the chance to murder dozens and get away with it, all for his own benefit? How utterly satisfying to watch the gross racist have his murder plot ruined... and in the end, the Doctor was right. His life, the life of a noble lord, ends just the same as the life of a comedy drunk or a child thief. He drowns in the cold waters of the Thames. Good riddance.


We get a nice wrapup with the Doctor forging some stuff to make one of the poor kids Sutcliffe's heir and thus give him and the others a good life, and then Nardole bitches the Doctor out for a bit and whatever's in that vault knocks. Only three times. No clue who or what's in there, but oh well. This was a really good episode! It's also a very political one, but unlike the political Peter Harness episodes I haven't seen much hate for this... beyond one or two very silly Twitter comments calling Doctor Who "SJW" now. Aside from that term losing all meaning and becoming a catchall term for "PERSON I DON'T LIKE"... just what the hell show have you been watching? This is the program which has been fighting against space Nazis since basically its inception. Anyway, there's no need to get any more into that, I feel. This was a great episode with a lot of heavy themes and it definitely took a side at a point in time when it needed to take that side. That's the kind of thing we have this show for, and I have lots of respect to it for that. Good job, Doctor Who. You punch that racist. You punch him good.


Next time: Ba da ba ba.


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