Worst. Episode. Ever.\n
I am speaking of the 2014 Christmas Episode of Doctor Who<\/cite> which made me so angry that I actually wrote a blog post about it. And then had to find the blog in order to post it. I’m that upset.\n To begin with: OK, it’s a Christmas episode. Fine. I get that. They’ve started a tradition of Christmas episodes, and it’s good for ratings, and fine. Fine! Fine<\/i>.\n Chronologically, within the story timeline the first thing that happens is that the Doctor, who is alone and in some sort of red-rock deserty sort of place, gets a Dream Crab in the face. We don’t see this, by the way, it’s before the beginning of the episode, but we find out about it later. What is a Dream Crab? Dream Crabs lull people into a happy dream while they suck their brains out. Er, they, the Dream Crabs, suck out the brains of the people. Or at least people, we aren’t told whether Dream Crabs can eat Dalek brains or the invisible gaseous brains of the Nestene Consciousness or whatever. But we do know that it’s about keeping the victim happy. “The Dream Crab induces a dream state. Keeps you happy and relaxed, in a perfectly realised dream world, as you dissolve. Merciful, I suppose.”\n So how do you fight a Dream Crab? You have to (a) figure out that you’re dreaming, and then (2) somehow reject the happy dream. Then the Dream Crab falls off and turns to dust. So: we have our alien villain, and it’s not a bad one, if not terribly original. The challenge will be for the Doctor to realize that he is in a happy dream, and wake up from it. One more thing about the Dream Crabs and their dreams—because they are (of course) telepathic, with some sort of gestalt identity, if multiple people are being eaten at once, they will be in the same dream. That is: If I am being eaten by a Dream Crab, you may or may not appear in my happy-being-eaten dream; if we are both being simultaneously devoured, we will both be in the same dream. This makes it a little more interesting, in my opinion, because it must be more difficult to create a shared relax-and-be-slowly-killed dream for three strangers.\n I know, I’m taking Dream Crabs seriously. But I’m watching Doctor Who<\/cite>. And that’s the fun of the thing, innit? To take this week’s preposterous premise seriously and see where it leads us? And that shared-dream business leads to an entertaining scene with the “Helman-Ziegler test” to see if it’s a dream by having the various dreamers all open different copies of a book to the same page to see if they match. I liked that.\n But I was telling the story chronologically. Evidently, the next thing that happens is that Clara (do you know about Clara? She’s the Companion these days, but at the end of the season she has chosen to stay home while the Doctor goes on travelling) gets a Dream Catcher in the face, too. This is later explained (or “explained”) as The Dream Crabs must have got to me first then found you in my memory<\/i>. Does this make sense at all? It does not. Am I bothered? Yeah, a little bit, but so far I can live with this. The Dream Crabs then hit four other humans, nearly simultaneously, so that the shared dream with the Doctor and Clara now has to make room for six. Got it? What’s that? Do we know how those four were found? No. They aren’t found in Clara’s memory, or the Doctor’s, and they’re pretty random (they could be from anywhere in time or space, but in fact they all share a billion cultural referents so, you know, they could be from anywhere in time and space that is familiar with My Little Pony and the Alien<\/cite> movies, and they all have British accents, and please, Mary, they’re about as random as the Giants starting rotation) but somehow (as collateral damage<\/i>, we are told) they get the Dream Catcher in the face. Boom! Now we have six people who are dying or will die if they don’t figure out that they’re in a dream and then reject the lull-you-into-happy-death dream premise. OK?\n All right, so I have problems with the episode already, if you haven’t figured that out, but now we come to the actual show itself. The bit before the titles is presumably the moments in between Clara’s blammo and the Random Four. The dream state is funny with time, of course, so we will ignore how long things may actually take in the actual world: let’s just keep in mind what is happening in the actual world while we’re watching the dreams that we don’t (yet) know are dreams. At the moment, then, we have two people caught in the dream: the Doctor and Clara. And it’s easy enough to keep them happy, one would think… get them together. So there’s Clara and the Doctor arrives. Only first, Clara comes across Santa Claus. This is later explained as being a subconscious resistance to the dream state, and that’s actually kinda-sorta cool: the brain is being forced to be happy<\/i> so comes up with an obviously false happiness, which can alert the dreamer that it’s a dream. It’s kinda-sorta annoying, too, but it’s the Christmas episode so fine, fine<\/i>, fine<\/strong>, we have achieved a reason to have Santa Claus in a Doctor Who episode. OK. Fine. I’m fine with that. Really. It’s cool. Santa. Father Christmas. Fine. This falls well within the parameters of taking the preposterous premise seriously.\n But when the Doctor arrives in Clara’s dream, the two travel to a research station at the North Pole to join the four randomly-selected middle class British dreamers who are dreaming they are scientists. The audience, by the way—this is a television show made for an audience, I don’t think that’s a spoiler—doesn’t know that we’re in a dream at this point, has no reason to, hasn’t seen a Dream Crab or heard of them. So what are our scientists doing at the North Pole to lull them into happyhappyhappiness whilst the Dream Crabs suck out their brains through a straw? Are they snogging supermodels, cheering on a victorious England footy team in the World Cup and winning Nobel Prizes in Cleverness? Are they unlocking the secrets of the universe and simultaneously inventing hover-egg-nog? Are they dreaming a little dreamy scientist dream of happiness and happiness and calm serene euphoric happiness, such as we are told is the Dream Crab weapon?\n No. They are dreaming of terror, and bewilderment, and death. They are dreaming of Dream Crabs. They don’t know what those are until the Doctor explains them, of course, but that’s even scarier. They are dreaming of a nameless alien terror, they are dreaming of a fear you can’t even look at, they are dreaming of their own animated corpses. Good work, Dream Crabs! That’s the stuff! I know nothing would lull me into tranquil beatitude faster than being menaced by a faceless goo-dripping parasite wearing my own body. Natch!\n But then we, the audience, don’t know this is a dream, because we are fucking idiots, so that’s all right. But there’s a plot twist! Clara, in the dream that we the audience don’t know is a dream, is captured by a Dream Crab (well done with that placid elation stuff, you alien life form, you, that’ll lull the rest of them into Well, anyway, Clara and the Doctor wake up, only as I say they’re all still dreaming and Clara and the Doctor are just dreaming that they woke up, and then everybody wakes up, only they’re actually still in a dream, yadda yadda yadda, long past the point where we can care at all about any of it, because it’s being shoved in our face that it isn’t actually happening. And then everybody really is<\/i> saved, and everybody really does<\/i> wake up, right? And the Doctor is back in the deserty place, wakey wakey, Dream Crab turns to dust, and back to the TARDIS and to Clara, who is still asleep with the Dream Crab on her face, because something something something, and he stuns the Dream Crab with his sonic screwdriver, which is something you can do, evidently, if you’re awake, and it turns out that—gasp!—she’s eighty-three years old! The Doctor has been away for decades! Gasp! Clara and the Doctor are saying goodbye one last time before she leaves the show forever!\n OK, a moment please, please just give me a moment, just give me one fucking moment<\/i> before the big reveal that this too is a dream. The end of the previous episode was the good-bye where Clara stopped travelling with the Doctor. This whole episode, then, is setting up a second<\/i> good-bye scene.\n Wait, did I say a second good-bye scene? Because this is Clara<\/i>, who has already died twice, legit died, totally died, with death scenes and everything. And then the Doctor died, oh yes died, last regeneration, no possible future, end of the road, with a long and incredibly sentimental good-bye scene. And then<\/i> in the first episode of this season, the dead Eleventh Doctor calls her on the telephone to have another<\/i> good-bye scene. So there have been [makes David Tennant teeth] five<\/i> previous good-bye scenes between the Doctor and Clara, and that is so totally not counting the one where she tells him to go away and never come back when she’s all mad at him at the end of an episode and then forgives him at the beginning of the next, which doesn’t count because I had forgotten all about it before I looked in the wiki<\/a> to see if I had lost count of how many times she had died. So this one, with the terrible old-age makeup, is the sixth<\/i> good-bye scene for Clara, who I am now calling the Goodbye Girl by the way, because that is all she ever fucking does is have death scenes and say good-bye, and I am fucking hooting<\/i> at the screen at this point because it is so stupidly obviously another fake-out.\n And yes! It’s another dream! Because the happy dream that the Dream Crabs have decided on for the Doctor and Clara, the dreamy happy happy dreamy dream happy happy dream that is going to make them so happy they won’t mind having their brains slowly liquefied and sipped by goo-dripping killer-spiders, and believe me at this point in the episode I know from brain-liquefaction, the final lullaby of dreamland is that Clara is old and dying, abandoned and alone. It’s hard to decide who would be made happier by this, Clara or the Doctor. What do you think? Is Clara’s happy dream to be old and lonely, but to see her dearest and last friend one more time when she is too aged and weak to travel with him? Or is it the Doctor, who can bask in the warm glow of knowing that he absent-mindedly condemned his companion to sixty-years of slowly maddening isolation? Either way, what a sure bet that neither would want to wake up from that banquet of joyous delight.\n Oh, yeah. They do wake up. And she’s young and goes into the TARDIS with him. The end! We are assured that she will be back next season! Hurrah!\nshitting themselves sideways<\/strike> halcyon receptivity) and sent into a dream of her own. Which we are explicitly told is a happy dream. Which features her dead boyfriend. I’m just going to let the whole contents of this dream pass, because (a) evidently lots of people wanted one more scene with the dead boyfriend and I can’t argue with fanservice, and (2) I just can’t. I really just cannot even can. Not even a little bit can I. Although—and this totally is just occurring to me as I am writing this—this is the bit where we find out that two people whose gooey bits are being simultaneously ingested by Dream Crabs are in the same dream, because the Doctor heroically plants a Dream Crab on his mush for just that purpose, to get into Clara’s dream and invade it to warn her that it’s a dream and she’s dying and all. But the Random Four aren’t in this dream at all and the dream has no place for them, despite the later-revealed fact that they are all still being dream-devoured all through this bit, so gestalt geschmalt.\n