Ever since Innes Lloyd's time on Doctor Who, the 'base under siege' has become a tried and tested plot formula of the program. This episode particularly harks back to The Ark in Space, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Moonbase. As in those stories, the Doctor and companion arrive and explore a seemingly deserted base. They soon meet up with the base crew and discover that people are being killed off by monsters. In base in this story is a 22nd century underwater facility called 'the Drum', built over a military town . The base crew here are a group of scientists and soldiers who have uncovered an old spaceship and the monsters are ghosts of a Tivoli alien and the crew, who attack the crew after they find symbols on the spaceship.
The obligatory base commander is a woman named Cass. She's a fairly standard responsible leader type of person except that she's deaf and has to communicate through sign language. This proves useful in deciphering the message that the ghosts are chanting. It is great that Toby Whithouse has included a deaf character in his tale, however, that doesn't change the fact that she's still a standard base leader archetype.
The rest of the crew were also standard archetypes. The ill fated Pritchard was the annoying corporate representative. Like Burke from Aliens, or even Lux from Doctor Who's own Silence in the Library, he's the kind of character who is always more of a hindrance than a help in these kinds of tales. Unsurprisingly he is killed off for his stupidity. Bennett is the cowardly scientist who only feels compelled to stay because others do. O'Donnell is likable enough but her one defining trait is that she is a fan of the Doctor, which basically makes her a Scottish Osgood. The last member of the crew is Lunn and I might be missing something but I'm not sure what personality he really has. He just seems to be there to translates Cass' sign language. At least his resistance to the ghosts may make him play a more useful role in the next episode. We'll have to wait and see if these are characters are developed in any way in the next episode.
The ghosts are pretty well realised. The moment when the ghostly Pritchard nearly smashes Lunn's head in with a spanner was particularly nasty and compelling to watch. It's not clear if there's a plot reason why the ghosts walk and don't run after the characters, other than to fulfill the zombie cliche. One of them is a Tivoli, like David Walliams character in The God Complex. Hopefully we'll see the living version next episode otherwise it will be a waste of guest star Paul Kaye. The fact that they can be locked in a faraday cage somewhat diminishes their threat and it might have been spookier if we, the audience, hadn't known about it so early. Presumably the ghosts will be released and caused havoc again.
Peter Capaldi continues to impress as The Doctor, who is back to being delightfully aloof. The idea that he needs cue cards to tell him to be nice was hilarious. Nevertheless the existence of the cue cards shows that he knows his callousness is something that he needs to deal with. It's nice to see that he is worried about Clara becoming like him. His excitement when he thought the ghosts might be from the real afterlife was also a great moment for the Doctor.
While the Doctor was compelling to watch it seems that Clara has had a complete personality transplant this week. She is now addicted to adventuring to the point where she's taking on some of th Doctor's traits. I suppose we can assume that there's a bigger time gap between this and The Witch's Familiar. Jenna Coleman conveys Clara's developing personality well enough but the character doesn't really contribute much to the plot. She helps to lure the ghosts into a trap, but that role could have been taken by any of the base crew. I hope the writers haven't left it to the last few episodes to actually give her a journey this year otherwise there doesn't seem to have been much justification in keeping Jenna Coleman on for an extra year.
Overall, the story is simple, which I suppose is why fans like it. It's nice to have the Doctor and Clara arrive straight into the adventure instead of meeting up on Earth before hand.However, the adventure as a whole is almost too simple. The dialogue is less snappy than usual. Again some people will find this refreshing from Moffat's more comedy background oriented dialogue, but this is a somewhat less interesting alternative. Nevertheless, the end of the episode hints at more interesting things to come. What was responsible for the flood? What is the content of the capsule from the spacecraft? And what is the reason behind the appearance of the Doctor's ghost outside the station? At a guess I would say that the Doctor's the one inside the capsule. If that's the case then it was too obvious. Hopefully the isolated Clara will be forced to contribute more.
The story is nonetheless well realized by the production team. The base is functional and lit atmospherically enough. The director manages to keep a decent sense of horror. Murray Gold's music was slightly more prominent this week and helped to raise the tension of the action sequences with the ghosts and the flooding. It seems that the set designers had fun with the 22nd century setting and added some amusing little Star Trek easter eggs such as the wall painting with the sailors in yellow, red and blue jumpers to the door code and the '1708'.
Under the Lake is the kind of episode is probably comfort food for older fans, but will probably fail to interest those, like me, who prefer it when the show pushes against its boundaries and stock features. The progressive cast hides a simple tale. Next week may be more interesting, and hopefully make the story as a whole more to my liking.
7/10
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