Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice (2015) - Written Review

 ***CONTAINS SPOILERS***

After a 9 month break, Doctor Who returns to our screens with 12 brand-new episodes and a Christmas Special, kicking things off with a two-part story written by Steven Moffat, beginning with The Magician's Apprentice.

When we last saw The Doctor and Clara Oswald in Last Christmas, they had settled their problems and decided to go back to travelling around the Universe with one another. So, it makes perfect sense that this episode should begin with them apart. I'm not sure why no one on the production team didn't say "hang on, doesn't this screw up the ending to Last Christmas?", let alone make a short Prequel episode explaining it. As much as Pond Life in 2012 was only watched by a mere 1% of the show's audience, at least the Ponds' divorce was (somewhat) explained! What did we get for prequels? Well, we had a short Prologue scene, which was so poorly written that everything it was teasing could be very easily predicted (I was trying not to shout "it's Davros!!!" at the screen), and seemed to be a bit useless really. Bit of teasing for fans, I guess. The other short, The Doctor's Meditation, was pretty poor though. There's no context to it whatsoever, and it really adds nothing to The Magician's Apprentice. Sure, it sets up Bors...but doesn't explain who he even is!

Anywho (get it?), the plot opens with The Doctor having disappeared...again. Heck, even Clara acknowledges that this is happening again, and yet the Universe is making a big deal out of it! Urm, Moffat - pointing out your plot hole doesn't make it go away. Anyway, Colony Sarff - an alien made out of thousands of snakes - has a message for The Doctor, from Davros. He searches through all vaguely-remembered Universe locations that hardly anyone remembers, searching the seemingly refurbished Maldovarium (where Dorium worked...and shut down), the seemingly majorly-refurbished Shadow Proclamation (although it is good to see the Shadow Architect and Juddoon make cameo appearances) and Karn, where Ohila is given the message - Davros remembers.
It turns out that The Twelfth Doctor found himself on Skaro during the Kaled vs Thal war, and ended up trying to save a little boy with the name Davros. While I'm sure someone wasn't crying out "it's Davros for crying out loud!" at the screen a bit too loudly, Peter Capaldi's reaction was brilliant. The Doctor refused to save Davros from the hand-mines that had caught him and now Davros has suddenly remembered for plot-specific reasons.

Meanwhile, Clara is teaching a class on Jane Austen, showing a lot more of The Doctor's mannerisms in the scene to show just how much of an effect the Time Lord has had on her, even if the mental image of Clara and Jane Austen having a romance in some unseen adventure will plague my mind every time the "great kisser" line comes up. The planes over Earth have stopped, and Clara goes to UNIT for help, where they get several messages from Missy asking them to come to her in Spain. This message scene seems to take far too long, and why on Earth Moffat didn't just make Missy give Clara a ring and ask to meet her down the pub I have no idea. Why did it need to be set in Spain? What was the point in the frozen plane subplot? Why was Missy's message scene so much longer than it needed to be? Who knows!

Anyway, after one rather contrived scene to find The Doctor, Clara and Missy use Vortex Manipulators (cos Missy's TARDIS has now been forgotten about) to go to Medieval Times, where The Doctor and Bors are having an axe fight, with The Doctor playing the electric guitar on a tank. Its not entirely clear why The Doctor wants to spend his last night doing a Medieval gig, but with Moffat's writing, one can only expect such bizarre and nonsensical scenes.

Clara and Missy try to understand what The Doctor is hiding from, until Colony Sarff finds them (he followed Clara and Missy...somehow) and takes them to what seems like a spaceship. While Clara and Missy are locked up...for reasons that are only there to drive the plot forward (I'm sensing a pattern here), The Doctor confronts a dying Davros. Davros plays a variety of footage and sound clips from Genesis of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks and The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, focusing on Tom Baker's line "If someone pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, a ruthless dictator, could you then kill that child?"

However, Missy and The Doctor notice that the gravity is natural, and Missy and Clara escape their prison to find themselves in a Dalek City on Skaro. So, yeah, Skaro's back with no explanation again through a big reveal, and now looks like 60's Skaro...unlike The Adventure Games: City of the Daleks and Asylum of the Daleks. Time travel, I guess.

This is treated as a big reveal for our three protagonists, and we also have Bors as a Dalek Puppet taking the TARDIS. Why Colony Sarff didn't take the TARDIS, and why Bors didn't kidnap The Doctor to take to Davros himself is never explained though.


Clara and Missy are taken capture by an awesome-looking 60's Dalek (now with light-up eyestalk) to the center of the Dalek City, where the Supreme Dalek orders their extermination - and the Daleks actually exterminate them! Bloomin' heck! How are they gonna get out of that- oh wait, they're both wearing Vortex Manipulators. The Doctor is left pleading with Davros in the hospital room, while back in the past, a future Doctor prepares to exterminate the younger Davros, with a cry of "exterminate".

And that's our cliffhanger for the episode!

I seem to have gone into a lot of detail in this review, although I have so much to say that I might as well get it all out somehow. The cast were terrific as always, even if Michelle Gomez's Missy is about as far from the Master as you can get in this, and I was glad to see some cameos, as well as the return of Julian Bleach as Davros! Davros is a fantastic character, and while I don't think Julian Bleach's performance was quite right in The Stolen Earth/Journey's End (funnily enough the last story with the Shadow Proclamation and Supreme Dalek as well), here he does a better job. I did find it odd that Davros had no wires or anything actually connected to him, just surrounding him, but maybe there was a good reason.

The production design, especially of the 60's-esque Dalek City, was fantastic; Hettie MacDonald of Blink fame returned to direct and did a cracking job; and Murray Gold's score was good, if a bit too loud at many points. Steven Moffat's script was entertaining, but there are quite a few notable plot holes (how Davros survived Journey's End and why his life-support system isn't keeping him alive is never explained), and it feels very much like a padded-out first part to the story. With a bit of restructuring, it probably would have worked as a 25 minute Part 1 of a classic series story, even if this was the length of a Part 1 and 2.

Overall, The Magician's Apprentice was good - nothing more, nothing less - and I'm interested to see where the story goes next week.