9.2 The Witch’s Familiar When it comes to the Doctor’s key foes that aren’t a) people in silver suits or b) killers with egg whisks attached, the best scenes have generally boiled down to two characters having a chat. The genial sequences between Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado in the old days, for instance. Or the prolonged chinwag between Davros and The Doctor we get in The Witch’s Familiar. Heck, it’s why I’ve got a soft spot for 2005’s Boom Town. That the episode is willing to put the brakes on for a good conversation. I daresay a few biscuits were in the original draft. Straight away justifying splitting series 9’s opener across two episodes, Steven Moffat’s script here makes sure there’s lots of space for dialogue in The Witch’s Familiar. Specifically, a chat between the Doctor, and a Davros who’s dying for most of the running time. It’s intercut throughout the episode, and it’s two long-standing foes seemingly engaged in a long goodbye. Two equals, head to head, on different sides of a moral divide. And as the conversation progresses, and you start drawing Venn diagrams in your head, it’s not tricky to see the overlap between them. In the midst of the chat, interesting things get discussed too. The Doctor telling Davros that Gallifrey is back, and “is safe from both of us”, for instance. Might Gallifrey yet be making its full comeback appearance later this series, as part of a revisiting previously destroyed planets roadshow? Then there’s the part where Davros views the Daleks’ “respect for their father” as “a design flaw”. Last series, in Into The Dalek, the suggestion was that the Doctor would make a good Dalek. This time, it seems, the Daleks are suffering from something that the Doctor has inherent to him too: compassion. In a strong tie-up to the episode, it turns out that compassion and mercy is more of a Dalek quality than you’d think, but I’m coming back to that shortly. There’s a sporting chance of that, of course, because The Witch’s Familiar swerved Davros’ potential demise, and had echoes of the Doctor pulling his life back from the brink in the past. “Am I a good man?”, he asks the Doctor, a line with an air of familiarity about it. It works: the Doctor is lulled into helping Davros, gets hooked up to a light show, and Time Lord energy allows the Dalek’s creator his very own regeneration of sorts. So where does this leave Davros? Is he the latest character in Doctor Who to now possess a little bit of Time Lord DNA in there? Well, there’s certainly hybrid talk (yeah, I shuddered too when they started talking about Dalek hybrids). It gets weaved back into long-standing Who – something last series steered clearer of – as Davros questions whether the Doctor’s running is because of a Time Lord/Dalek hybrid (Steven Moffat again, for better or worse, threading in questions that go back to day one of Doctor Who, and playing with the long-time mythology of the show). No answers thus far, but the door’s clearly open for Davros to come back at the end of the series to help round things off. Expect that Confession Dial to play another part, too. Along with Sonic Eyewear, it may just prove to be the key new prop of this series of Doctor Who. “We, on the other hand, have a pointy stick” Inevitably, it felt like The Witch’s Familiar was dominated by the terrific Davros/Doctor dynamic, but there were other things in there too. Well, sort of. There’s the small matter of Skaro to break into. That’s not a problem for Clara in particular, though. Last week, she took a phone call from a head of state, popped into UNIT, and generally looked to be taking control of anything she was let near. Oh, and she died. This week, she undied, and became a Dalek. Next week, start the betting on her winning Strictly Come Dancing. But I like that she became a Dalek. Few of us are intimidated by the Daleks any more (as impressive as the moments were with them flying off to get their shopping around the skies of Skaro), and so Steven Moffat decided to have a lot more fun with them here. Thus, he put Clara into the driving seat, and Missy promptly pissed herself laughing. So did I. Oh, and she told us something new about the Daleks. When they say exterminate, it’s them reloading. We’ll add it to the list. “I am a Dalek!” We’ve seen Daleks toppled in minutes by all sorts of things across the history of Doctor Who, but this is the first time to my knowledge that dead Daleks have bubbled up and killed living ones. How does this work? Does this mean that wherever Daleks have died, there’s gunk in the sewers somewhere? What happened to the remnants of the one that Ace spectacularly smashed to bits in Remembrance Of The Daleks? Does that mean that, somewhere under the floorboards of Coal Hill School, there’s some dead Dalek gunk ready to spring up? “The Doctor without hope… nobody is safe now” Still, redemption all round came with the ultimate ending, which concluded where things had started. By the Doctor saving Davros, which in turn led to him introducing the concept of mercy into their DNA. Granted, if he’d killed Davros totally, then Clara would have been saved a different way. But the Doctor – as had been firmly established – doesn’t do genocide, and has never rented The Last Supper from Blockbuster (a smashing little film, if you’ve never seen it). First to try? Another two-parter, kicking off with Under The Lake, from Toby Whithouse. See you next week for that one… Our review of last week’s episode, The Magician’s Apprentice, can be found here.
