12.21: The Zygon Inversion

In which talking solves everything.

Broadcast: November 2015

Watched: March 2022

“What’s your plan, Zygella?”

Love the slightly meta episode title that tells us from the off they’re going to mess with our expectations. If you wanted to be pretentious, you could probably make the same argument about Clara’s sort-of-dream sequence, where the toothpaste is black and the windows are blocked up. (Later on this season we’ll discover the Doctor’s mind-palace looks like the TARDIS; hers is her grotty flat, full of newspapers with gibberish on them. But this scene is so weird that it’s another bit that I suspect might haunt people who saw it as kids forever, giant maggot-style.)

The actual plot is an inversion, too. There’s a load of business with the “Osgood box”, suggesting there’s a maguffin which may provide a solution... but there isn’t. The only real solution is to talk with your enemies and find a way to agree. So instead of a cathartic explosion, the episode ends with a 15 minute scene of three people just... talking. It’s a very realpolitik view of war for an adventure series: like Kill the Moon, this one’s sort of about how anything you can fit neatly into 45 minute episodes is probably bollocks

(I had written down “is the Osgood Box a joke about the Moment too?” Then we see the boxes and, right, that’s entirely deliberate isn’t it, fair enough.)

The words “Truth or Consequences” run through this story like a stick of rock, and it’s not entirely clear where, within the fiction, it’s come from: it’s a town, and it seems to be name of the Zygon insurgent group, but then appears inside the Osgood boxes, which came from the Doctor, not the Zygons. It’s also not a binary that maps on brilliantly to the dilemma anyone actually faces - truth is not an alternative to consequences.

So I wonder actually whether at some stage it was “Truth and Reconciliation”, but they wussed out because it’s not a choice / is bit sensitive / they needed a reason to go to New Mexico. That does fit better with the fact the Zygon insurgents do genuinely nasty stuff - taking videos of the poor Zygon half transformed into his natural state is horrible - and with the fact the story ends with everything just being forgiven and forgotten, and not for the first time, even though, so far as we can tell, hundreds of people have died.

But, but, but... This is a proper great progressive sentiment of the sort you want from Doctor Who:

“You’re not superior to the people who were cruel to you, you’re just a whole new bunch of cruel people... The only way anyone can live in peace is if they’re prepared to forgive.”

Ditto the “You have no idea who’s going to die” speech about not knowing where wars end up. And the very ending, where Bonnie reappears, as a second (third?) Osgood is properly magical.

All in all, it’s absolutely wonderful, and the sort of story I don’t think we’d have got under anyone other than Moffat.

“Oh, and you should know, I’m a very big fan.”

Other things:

• Evil Bonnie is significantly hotter than regular Clara, which is why I’m rooting for the Zygons now.

• Only two parachutes leave the plane, so what, is there a dead pilot no one mentions? Bleak.

• In the scene on the beach, Capaldi looks old. Which is fine because he uses the line, “I’m over 2,000 years old, I’m old enough to be your messiah”. Perhaps I was wrong about [writer Peter] Harness and not doing jokes, perhaps it’s just more of a vibe.

• Hartnell picture! Cool.

• Saying “London! What a dump” in obviously not London is quite funny.

• The Doctor’s American accent is about as annoying as Missy’s, half a dozen episodes earlier. I wonder if that’s deliberate?

• “Dr John Disco” what.

• The Doctor calls Harry Sullivan an imbecile. Harsh.

• “So, you must have thought I was dead for a while?” “Longest month of my life.” The foreshadowing is not getting any subtler.

• Ingrid is ridiculously glam in person, you know. [Yes, this is literally just me bragging about knowing Osgood socially, sorry.]