Day 815: The Witch's Familiar

I rate The Witch's Familiar very highly for two scenes in particular. They are quite different scenes in terms of why they exist and what they want to accomplish, but I feel that they are very good indeed and help the story be objectively good.

The first is the solution to the cliffhanger. The Magician's Apprentice ended with the apparent extermination of Clara and Missy, complete with both of them being disintegrated. However, The Witch's Familiar opens with them both alive and well, ready to start their plan to rescue the Doctor. What I love about this scene is the way that the resolution to the cliffhanger is framed: as questions leading to an answer rather than a simple answer. For comparison's sake, I'll pick a random cliffhanger from another story - Remembrance of the Daleks Part 2. Here, Ace is surrounded by Daleks and has a small rocket launcher with her. She could be able to blow them up, but she's clearly going to die in the process. Left with virtually no way to survive, the question at the end of the episode is how she'll get out of it. At the start of part 3, we receive the answer (the Doctor uses an anti-Dalek gun that he'd been developing over the past episode) and we move on. It's a clear set-up for we see the question posed in the cliffhanger solved immediately, and we move on.

Now, as I said, The Witch's Familiar begins with the question posed in the cliffhanger (How did Clara and Missy survive?) already resolved - we see both of them alive and well. But Moffat realises that this is not satisfactory and he wants the audience to realise that simply seeing that it has been resolved is not enough - we need to see how it solved (This is something that he also applied to great effect in Sherlock's The Reichenbach Fall with both he and Gatiss letting Sherlock live, but not telling the audience how, creating a large amount of excitement and discussion about the solution and not the end result). So the sequence of us finding out how Clara and Missy survived is framed as Missy asking Clara a question, and then leaving Clara to figure it out. It allows us to see the working, to see the lead-up to a solution rather than just a solution itself. It makes the resolution to the cliffhanger feel more satisfying, and, in my opinion, works better than just seeing a solution, as discussed earlier with respect to the Remembrance of the Daleks cliffhanger (which has always stuck out to me like a sore thumb in that story. I love Remembrance of the Daleks except for that moment.).

Now, the other scene that I really enjoy in this story comes later on, with the Doctor and Davros. The Doctor/Davros scenes in this episode are always going to be difficult to analyse, because that element of the story is based around Davros forcing the Doctor to give up his regeneration energy for him, which he does by abusing his compassion. So these scenes have the double meaning that Davros doesn't really mean what he's saying, he's just manipulating the Doctor into doing what he wants him to do. And that works, because it both gives us the opportunity to see Davros and the Doctor talk in a way that we've never seen them before, less as enemies and more as old friends who are just on different sides of a brutal war, but it doesn't dilute the original antagonistic relationship that the two have. But there's one Doctor/Davros moment that I feel is a real sense of compassion on Davros' behalf for the Doctor.

It's when the Doctor reveals that Gallifrey has survived and that he now has a home that he can in theory go back to. And Davros comes across as legitimately thrilled for the Doctor, because you get this sense that understands the importance of a home and the importance of belonging to a society. After all, Davros is a creature of war, where his patriotism was so high to his cause that he would consider destroying every other piece of life in the universe just so that his vision of the Kaled way of life would survive. And so he has this twisted attachment to the concept of belonging that he wants to share with the Doctor, and you almost feel disgusted that Davros feels so happy for him because you know that the two of them are sharing in this happy moment for the wrong reasons. And I find that fascinating, and it's part of why I really love those scenes between the Doctor and Davros.

So The Witch's Familiar is able to show a strong ending to the first two part episode of the series. And not only that, but it's also kept what made the Capaldi era so great - this sense of stopping to breathe in the story rather than just keep everything going at a rapid pace. It's a philosophy that gives the series something really strong to be based on.