“Nothing’s sad ‘til it’s over. Then everything is.” - The Doctor, ‘Hell Bent’ (2015)
“I'm a lot more explosive than I look. And honey, I know how I look” - The Doctor, ‘Boom’ (2024)
Steven Moffat’s return to Doctor Who after a seven-year absence provides us with an opportunity to ponder his own era’s themes and internal preoccupations.1 To consider how the statements and suggestions made by the Smith and Capaldi seasons sound in the past tense, and to get a glimpse of how Moffat himself approaches a similar brief in a new context.2
‘Boom’ (his new episode, released last Saturday) offers rich pickings for those inclined to think deeply about his body of work,3 expanding some of his era’s more peripheral continuity, calling back to many of his scripts and revisiting motifs that made up the backbone of his time on the show. I want to talk here about one such background-level obsession that gets nicely inflected in this new script: Moffat’s searching consideration of the Doctor’s self-identity.
To give the abridged story: ‘Boom’ starts with the Doctor running to the heart of a battlefield and activating a landmine. Any major change in the pressure he’s applying (including severe changes in his internal hormonal composition) will trigger the “smartmine” and turn him into a bomb which will wipe out half a planet with its blast. For the first two-thirds of the episode, we are treated to a tense display, as the Doctor and Ruby navigate a series of problems, from shifting weight to belligerent combatants, all while staying within the mine’s non-existent margin of error.
But I want to discuss the episode’s final third. By now, the Doctor has realised that the Anglican Marines he’s surrounded by are fighting a war on an empty planet, tricked by the military theatre of the Villengard corporation into buying and battling combat hardware, and he needs to prove this to convince them to surrender and disarm the landmine. To do this, he appeals to an AI reconstruction of fallen soldier John Francis Vater, encouraging him to hack the Villengard system and find evidence that the conflict has been fabricated. Specifically, he relies on the fact that the AI has been reconstructed from a man who was a father, and whose daughter’s life is at stake if the mine explodes:
However little is left of you, you are still a father. Dad to Dad, you never let them down, right?
Vater’s infiltration of the Villengard technology prompts a firewall backlash, and for a moment it looks like the landmine’s failsafe countdown will hit zero. But at the last possible instant, we learn that Vater’s data ghost has fought back and dismantled the entire Villengard infrastructure. The landmine is disarmed and the Doctor is set free.
I’ve seen this resolution criticised as a Deus ex machina, unearned by the actions of the Doctor or those around him. But it seems to me that the resolution’s unearned nature, or more accurately the unusual way in which it is earned, is precisely the point. The key to appreciating what the resolution has to say lies in considering how the Vater AI responds to the Doctor’s request for help and invocation of parental obligation.
Moffat has discussed this episode as distinctively requiring the Doctor to rely on others,4 so it’s fitting that he should have a minimal role in defusing the threat. Indeed, the only character to make a material positive difference at the episode’s climax is Vater. And specifically, he does this by exceeding the Doctor’s (and the audience’s) expectations. The Doctor only asks him to gather evidence which will play a role in deactivating the mine, but the Vater that infiltrates the Villengard mainframe decides to completely remove the threat, simultaneously neutralising the mine and reprogramming a strategically inoperative “ambulance” to save Ruby. The emotional thrust of the moment of resolution, in which all of the Doctor’s problems are almost miraculously resolved at once, is the product of the Vater AI’s willingness to take matters into his own hands.
What distinguishes Vater (or whatever part of him has been maintained in the AI echo) is that he goes beyond what was asked of him. He does this for an entirely ordinary reason - love and concern for his child. No further motivation or development is needed. And yet these actions’ consequences position him as a mythic being, deconstructing a military complex that has been fuelling conflict throughout the universe. Through a sincere commitment to his obligations, he becomes the God in the machine, ascending to the level of significance usually reserved for the Doctor.
And of course, what’s interesting about this deviation from the show’s norm is what it tells us about the Doctor’s usual role as dispatcher of threats, a subject pushed to the fore by the episode’s many references to earlier Moffat scripts. A particularly highlighted example takes the resonant form of a poem the Doctor repeats to keep himself calm while the landmine is monitoring him, worth quoting in full:
I went down to the beach and there she stood,
dark and tall at the edge of the wood.
"The sky's too big, I'm scared," I cried.
She replied, "Young man, don't you know there's more to life
than the moon and the President's wife?"
I’ve seen some extremely perceptive analyses of this poem fragment since the episode released, and the many possible candidates for the woman at the edge of the wood give the lines an evocative ambiguity that matches the best of Moffat’s writing. Critical to note for our present purposes, though, is how the references to the moon and the President’s wife directly link ‘Boom’ to Capaldi’s second series, one bookended by unreliable accounts of the Doctor’s involvement in their theft.5
And an even more subtle harmonisation should encourage us to look to Capaldi’s arc in understanding ‘Boom’s mechanics. When the Doctor discovers that the landmine operates by turning the victim into a bomb, using the target as its own explosive, he talks one of the Anglican Marines around by warning them that an immolating Time Lord’s blast radius will put everyone at risk with a banging line worthy of its place in the series trailer:
I will shatter this silly little battlefield of yours into dust. All of it, in a heartbeat, into dust.
The reference to a heartbeat here - to what can happen between one beat and the next - feels reminiscent of Clara’s declaration of complex mortality in ‘Hell Bent’ (made, incidentally, just moments after the Doctor revealed that stories of his involvement with the moon and the President’s wife had been exaggerated):
… between one heartbeat and the last is all the time I have
The Capaldi run generally and his second series in particular often performed an extended and elegiac meditation on the question of why the Doctor left Gallifrey, and the intimately related question of who the Doctor is. Its conclusion was as nuanced and knotty as we should expect from Moffat, so can’t be summarised easily. What we can say, though, is that Moffat’s conception of the Doctor understands him as an ordinary, limited and often failing man who chooses at every moment to be the best he can be. Being the Doctor is a choice and a difficult one at that.
And here, in the present, past the end, we get a glimpse of how the Doctor started. Back when he was just a young man running away from home, exploring the universe with his granddaughter, he was exactly like the Vater who now ensures that everybody lives. It’s no coincidence that Vater’s introductory scene in the episode’s cold open has him describing his “dad skills”, unwittingly quoting Capaldi’s Doctor’s brag to Clara in ‘Listen’. Just like Vater, the Doctor gained his transcendent status by going beyond what was asked of him, by doing what was right to the greatest extent possible, by distinguishing himself rather than being distinguished.
Fittingly, while the Doctor spends much of his time on the mine chastising the Marines for their faith, he offers a qualified retraction of this critique when talking to Vater’s daughter in the episode’s closing moments. He’s impressed by her faith in her father, and with good reason: it’s exactly the faith he has in himself. The faith he has in his ability to be the Doctor, rather than, as he once put it:
… just a bloke in a box, telling stories.
Coming back, almost a decade later, to a show he redefined, Moffat shows us how that storyteller must have looked before the stories. It is explosive.
As if I needed an excuse…
A gloriously self-conscious writer, Moffat doesn’t pass on the chance to tie his new writing to the work that dominated over a decade of his professional life. There was never a real risk that his new episode would be entirely self-contained.
A group which includes your present reviewer.
Missy, taunting Clara with clues about the Doctor’s past in ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’:
Clara: Since when do you care about the Doctor?
Missy: Since always. Since the Cloister Wars. Since the night he stole the moon and the President's wife. Since he was a little girl. One of those was a lie. Can you guess which one?
… and the Doctor, revealing all to Clara in Gallifrey’s cloisters in ‘Hell Bent’:
Clara: … and the kid told you the secret?
The Doctor: Ah, no, he didn't tell anyone anything. He went completely mad. Never right in the head again, so they say.
Clara: Okay, that's encouraging.
The Doctor: The last I heard, he stole the moon and the President's wife.
Clara: Was she nice, the President's wife?
The Doctor: Ah, well, that was a lie put about by the Shabogans. It was the President's daughter. I didn't steal the moon, I lost it.