Doctor Who review: Before the Flood

This second episode of this two-parter moves the story in the new direction promised in the preceding cliffhanger.  Most surprising is the opening pre-titles sequence in which the Doctor tells a story about Beethoven to illustrate the "bootstrap paradox" before playing a few notes of the Fifth Symphony on his electric guitar and leading into a rock version of the theme tune.  These monologues are starting to be a trademark for Peter Capaldi's Doctor with the technique also being used to open last year's episode Listen.

Having travelled back in time before the flood, the Doctor arrives in an abandoned military base in 1980.  This is an eerie setting which makes this episode distinctive from the claustrophobic first part. Bennett (Arsher Ali) and O'Donnell (Morven Christie) have accompanied the Doctor and their characters are effectively developed.  O'Donnell is presented as the enthusiastic admirer of the Doctor who would probably love to be his full-time companion and, like Lynda Moss in Bad Wolf and Osgood in Death in Water, inevitably doesn't survive.  Bennett is an intelligent and sensitive character who questions the Doctor's ethics in a way not dissimilar to Rory Williams.    

Paul Kaye briefly appears as the Tivolian undertaker Prentiss.  His entertaining portrayal as the cowardly, subservient alien is consistent with David Walliams's performance as another Tivolian in The God Complex, the 2011 Toby Whithouse story.  Prentiss explains that he is on Earth to bury the body of his planet's former oppressor "The Fisher King".  Sadly for Prentiss, the creature isn't quite dead.  The theme of death, which is hanging over this series more than ever, also features as the Doctor again contemplates his own fate.  Like the Eleventh Doctor in Series 6, he believes that his death is a fixed event he cannot change.  The resolution in which the Doctor "tricks time" is also similar to the resolution of The Wedding of River Song.

For the second consecutive story, the Doctor and companion are separated and this allows Clara to take on a Doctor-like role with Cass and Lunn on the base.  Clara's decisions are brave but put others in danger, much like in last year's Flatline.  One of the most suspenseful scenes of the story is when Cass is stalked by the ghost Moran and feels the tremors in the floor to sense his movements and evade his axe.

Although visually impressive, The Fisher King is one of the weakest aspects of the story.  The creature has no motivation other than survival and is given a clichéd evil voice by Peter Serafinowicz. There is no background provided about the alien race to help us accept his unusual power of creating ghosts which can act as powerful transmitters.  

In the climactic scenes, the missing power cell is finally explained when we realise that the Doctor has used it to blow up the dam, flood the town and kill the Fisher King.  The stasis pod is unsurprisingly revealed to contain the Doctor who has been frozen inside for 200 years to escape from drowning.  The third and cleverest reveal is that the Doctor's ghost was actually a hologram created by the Doctor to lure the other ghosts into the Faraday cage.

The Doctor explains further to Clara that he programmed the hologram with words which would inform him what to do but that he got the idea from the seeing the hologram the first time.  This is therefore a paradox of the type explained by the Doctor in the pre-titles sequence.  Although it is presented in an entertaining way here, paradoxes like this have recurred several times in the modern era since Steven Moffat first used the concept in his classic 2007 episode Blink.  Although a very well made story with strong characters and performances, the use of such well-worn concepts leaves Toby Whithouse's story not quite reaching classic status but it does continue a very strong start to this series.