Doctor Who review: The Zygon Inversion

For the first time in this series, Jenna Coleman gets a substantial role in this Doctor Who episode, not just as Clara but also her Zygon double Bonnie.  The episode opens inside Clara's mind while she is held unconscious inside the Zygon pod.  Last week's cliffhanger is cleverly resolved when Clara is able to telepathically cause Bonnie to miss with her first rocket, allowing the Doctor and Osgood to parachute out of the plane before the second one hits.  

Strangely there is no mention of the other people who were seen on the plane in last week's episode. Presumably they were all killed but the witty dialogue exchanges between the Doctor and Osgood start up again when they land.  A scene of a plane being shot down by a rocket launcher is also in questionable taste after last year's disaster of the Malaysian Airlines plane destroyed over Ukraine.  

Last week's episode suggested a Zygon uprising was imminent but this week the focus is on Bonnie's attempts to locate the mysterious "Osgood Box".  Other than a brief snippet from a TV report about a Zygon sighting there is limited sense of crisis in this episode.  There is a lot of wandering around and a lack of suspense until the final confrontation scenes.  

A twist many would have seen coming was the reveal that Kate Stewart had survived and was posing as a Zygon double.  Her use of the phrase "five rounds rapid" when explaining how she survived is reference to her father the Brigadier who said the line in The Daemons (1971).  This is enjoyable to those with a classic Doctor Who DVD collection but for the majority of the audience may have made Kate seem very cold hearted.  Unfortunately, after her promising introduction in The Power of Three (2012), the character of Kate Stewart hasn't been developed greatly, and she is is not well served by this script.

The most powerful scene of the two-parter is the climax in UNIT's "Black Archive" where Kate and Bonnie are considering using the two Osgood Boxes which they believe can be end the conflict in their favour.   Both boxes have two buttons labelled "Truth" and "Consequences".  The link between the boxes and the New Mexico town, also known as "Truth or Consequences", from the previous episodes is not explained.  It seems possible that the Zygons arrival in the town may have been the result of a misunderstanding but it would have been better to have a line or two of dialogue to confirm this.  An advantage of the two-parter format is that it allows time for longer dialogue scenes and here gives the Doctor a chance to deliver a lengthy and passionate speech to Bonnie and Kate as he attempts to persuade them in favour of peace and reconciliation.  The Doctor succeeds in showing both characters the consequences of their actions and the scene is one Capaldi's greatest in the role so far.

The Zygon Inversion doesn't totally satisfy as a concluding episode to a two-part story and it feels as if this both parts could have been edited down to a great one hour special.  Although the Black Archive scene is brilliant, there is a lot of filler in this second episode, and also too much continuity referencing and some awkward shifts in tone.  However, overall the story deserves high praise for some very intelligent dialogue and its treatment of serious moral and political themes.