Day 814: The Magician's Apprentice

One of the things that Steven Moffat decided to do with Series 9 was to experiment with story telling methods. In particular, he experimented with longer stories, with every single episode bar one in Series 9 being, in some shape or form, a multi-part story. It means that we get to spend more time developing the plot and allowing it to be just a little more complex or giving it just a bit more time to breathe and not get caught up in the need for action every fifteen minutes. And in some stories, this approach works really well, producing some of the most compelling and brilliant episodes of Doctor Who ever produced. But, the only problem is, I'm not sure that it works for The Magician's Apprentice.

If I treated 'The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar' as one episode, then I'm fairly sure that I'd have no problems with it. As I'll talk about tomorrow, I actually rather like The Witch's Familiar, and it solves many of my problems with The Magician's Apprentice. But I can't get behind The Magician's Apprentice as an individual episode. It's not the direction, which is really well crafted (the pre-titles sequence in particular strikes me as one of the best in the series' history, primarily due to the way in which it has been shot). The writing, as well, isn't really at fault. It behaves exactly as a 'Part One' of a two part story should, delivering some fine set-up to the story and focussing on the exact situation of the characters, in this case primarily that the Doctor is feeling profound guilt about his actions towards the young Davros. But I can't get beyond the fact that nothing happens in this episode. It feels like there's fifteen minutes of plot in this episode and half an hour of filling time and waiting for Part Two to come along. It means that I'm just left feeling empty from this story, because there's nothing to really bite my teeth into.

And I fully acknowledge that this is my problem, and not anyone else's. As I say, I do enjoy the two part story as a whole, it's just that I can't enjoy The Magician's Apprentice as an individual episode. Fortunately, things do improve from here on, and Moffat's multi-part experiment does end up working a lot better after this point.