Thoughts on "Before the Flood"

Well, that was certainly a ballsy opening.

==Spoilers below the break==

Sp the episode opens with the Doctor swaggering around, addressing the audience directly to explain how a bootstrap paradox works, implies he's Beethoven, and then jams to Beethoven's Fifth on the electric guitar....including all through the opening credits.

It's absolutely brazen and mad and daft -- Doctor Who in a nutshell -- but there's one glaring problem with it, and with the episode as a whole, that keeps it from being as immensely enjoyable as its introductory episode.

Toby Whithouse, despite being a well-established genre writer (I deeply enjoyed the first two series of Being Human, but once they moved to Cardiff and ditched all the long-running plots I kind of lost interest), is under the impression that a bootstrap paradox is this wonderful and endlessly inventive new take on time travel stories that the Doctor has to actually stand around and lecture the audience on what it is.

Sure, inventive....for my mom.

It's been a staple of the genre for decades by now. Seriously. We know how it works. Friendship Is Magic did it, on the assumption even children would understand it. Even Clara is completely amazed at episode's end over what a mindblowing concept it is....despite the whole Impossible Girl thing being a bootstrap paradox. She met the Doctor by creating the circumstances that led to her meeting the Doctor. Why is she so amazed by a bit of smoke and mirrors involving a hologram?

Pictured: bootstrap paradox

I don't want this to sound too harsh, because I did enjoy the episode. But it labors under the impression that this stuff is new and worthy of deep, important, world-shattering thought. It takes what is a fairly standard time-travel story and treats it like a mind-blowing revelation. Normally, I wouldn't have a problem with this, but many, many of the more interesting things, like Paul Kaye's wickedly funny turn as a Trivolian undertaker or the excellently-realized monster the Fisher King, voiced by the forever-amazing Peter Serafinowicz --

"It's not a bedsit. It's a flat."

-- or the ideas about the electromagnetic writing and the Star-Sword or whatever it was are instead shunted to the sidelines. The last episode suggested with every fiber of its being that we were in for a tense and heady romp packed with dense ideas, ala "The Big Bang". All the jigsaw puzzle pieces would fall into place, and stunning revelations would turn everything on its head. Instead, the episode is just kind of astonishing in its mundanity. It has this sparse, empty, distinctly unhurried feel, where all the things the last episode signified would be important are instead wrapped up in the simplest and least dramatic way possible. The missing fuel cell? The Doctor blows up a dam. The electromagnetic writing? Just pop on some sunglasses that'll delete it. The ghosts? Err....they're held together with electromagnetism somehow. The Doctor's ghost? Hologram.

I'm not saying it's a narrative cheat, exactly -- well, it is a narrative cheat, but that's the Doctor's plan, so I can't fault it for that -- because it does make sense and is in character and clever and everything, but the weight it attaches to such a bog-standard time travel plot just belabors the point needlessly while the things that should be the focus aren't.

One such thing:

Both stories in this series have had the same gist: enemy has a cunning plan, the Doctor thinks he's going to die, but he extricates himself from it at the last moment with a clever plan. I suspect the series is building to a point, as the last one did the same thing with the idea of soldiers and aristocrats and leadership. It resulted in one of the most cohesive and breathtakingly inventive runs of episodes the show has ever done, and breathed new life into those fifty-year-old bones. "Listen" in particular was a high water mark for Moffat's tenure, as he effortlessly deconstructs both his own storytelling tricks and the way childhood fears shape our thoughts in ways we aren't ever aware of.

The arc of this series seems to be the Doctor's hubris in thinking he can cheat death with a clever plan, so of course it's going to backfire spectacularly, probably in the series finale. Ever since this whole "Am I a good man?" thing popped up in "Into the Dalek", I've suspected they were going to go into Valeyard territory, seeing as the Valeyard was some kind of dark side of the Doctor who tries to steal his regenerations to keep living. Now, with this talk of a Time Lord-Dalek hybrid who led the Doctor to flee Gallifrey, I'm more sure than ever that's where it's headed.

The Doctor's grapple with his own mortality and death really should've had more focus in this episode. Especially given the Holy Grail overtones -- the Fisher King being a mythical character who is intimately connected to the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail, which grants everlasting life. But it's just kind of....there. It exists. Though it never really comes alive. Are we supposed to understand that foreknowledge of your own death and attempting to change it is a kind of immortality? I don't know. Maybe they're saving a deeper exploration for a later episode, but this one just ended up feeling unfulfilling and overly enamored of a time travel trope the show has done before.

Also, what the hell was up with the faux-Soviet town? They explain it was used for training the British Army to invade Russia -- good old Maggie, always planning ahead -- but....why? Why was that a narrative choice? Is there some symbolism the episode was trying to get across? Does this have to do with "The Minister of War" the Doctor's erstwhile companion mentions? Is the Doctor a dissent Time Lord in exile ala Leon Trotsky? Is it a metaphor for nuclear war and environmental catastrophe? WHAT, EPISODE? WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?!