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Holy crap. That's basically what I have
to say about Extremis. I had
mixed thoughts on the first four episodes of this season. I felt
that, while all those episodes were quite good, they didn't feel as
tonally cohesive as series nine, and they softened the dark and
uncompromising nature of Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor a bit too
much. I liked all of them, but I wasn't sure of the direction that
Steven Moffat seemed to be taking things in for his last year as
showrunner, and I wasn't sure that this felt like it was worth a full
year's wait. That started to change with last week's excellent,
politically-charged Oxygen,
and now the change has completed, with a vengeance. Extremis
is not only the best episode of
this season so far, by a wide margin, but also one of the very best
episodes of the entire Peter Capaldi era; even more than that, it is
probably one of the best episodes of Doctor Who that
Steven Moffat has ever written. And considering that this is the guy
who gave us Blink and
Silence in the Library, that is
really saying something. Series ten just took the gloves off: things
just got dark, and unexpected, and very intense. If this is a sign of
how the rest of this season is likely to play out, then yes – it
was absolutely worth a full year's wait.
In
keeping with one of the darkest and most uncompromising Doctors that
the long-running series has ever seen, this era has caused more than
a bit of controversy by repeatedly bringing a show that has always
been regarded as family-friendly to some really grim places. Dark
Water/Death in Heaven and Heaven
Sent/Hell Bent have so far been
the biggest perpetrators of the Dark-Doctor Who
controversy, with their
genuinely grim and existentially frightening portrayals of death. I
have no doubt that Extremis just
shot to the top of that list. The premise is creepy enough: in a
vault of heretical texts beneath the Vatican, there is a document
dating back to the beginning of written history, penned in a dead
language, which supposedly reveals the true meaning of existence. Now
it has been translated – and every single person who either worked
on or read the translation has immediately committed suicide after
learning its secret. That naturally leaves The Doctor to unravel the
mystery... if he can do so without succumbing to its horrors.
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But it
isn't just the creepiness of the underlying concept: the execution of
the story is brilliantly unnerving. It starts with a richly
atmospheric Gothic gloom, full of deep shadows and spooky art design
which very much recalls one of the early Moffat favorites, Silence
in the Library. This is very
much a horror episode, but not in a jump-scare, creature-focused way
(though the creatures present are very creepy indeed), but a sneakily
menacing slow-burn. Then, the episode adds on some deeply unnerving,
mind-bending philosophical elements which finish the job of really
getting under the viewer's skin. This may be the closest that Doctor
Who has ever gotten to some
really creepy, Black Mirror-type
stuff, and it is kind of mind-blowing; not least of all because this
is not the show where you expect things like that to happen.
One
really can't say anything more specific than that and still remain
spoiler-free – and even more so than most, this is an episode that
deserves to be seen un-spoiled – so I'll have to leave things that
vague. But I can confidently say that this is one very effective and
very surprising episode, and that it immediately tied last season's
Under the Lake/Before the Flood
and Heaven Sent as my
favorite Capaldi-era story so far. If this sets the tone for the rest
of series ten, we could be up for a very intense few weeks that take
the Twelfth Doctor and Bill into some pretty unusual territory.
Here's hoping that this is the start of exactly the sort of
spectacular last act that this Doctor deserves.
Score:
-
Christopher S. Jordan
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