In which the TARDIS materialises in an underwater mining facility, deep beneath a Scottish loch. The year is 2119. The Doctor is concerned that the ship appears to be acting oddly, probably due to some nearby phenomenon. He and Clara suspect the facility to have been abandoned. The canteen has uneaten meals lying on the tables, and in a hangar area they find a small spacecraft. It appears to be empty but they notice some strange markings etched into a wall, in a language that the TARDIS can't translate. The Doctor notes that a power cell is missing from a panel in the floor, as well as its stasis capsule.
They are attacked by a pair of ghostly figures, one of whom appears to be an alien Tivolian, wearing undertaker's apparel. They flee and find some of the crew are still here and have locked themselves in a chamber which the ghosts are unable to breach. The Doctor assumes this is because it is acting like a Faraday Cage. The facility - which is known to its crew as the Drum - has an artificial day and night lighting set-up, and as day-time arrives the ghosts vanish.
The crew comprise a man named Pritchard, who works for the oil company which owns the facility, and a younger man named Lunn who acts as signer for Cass, who is deaf. She is in charge of the facility now that its commander is dead - Moran, who is the other of the two ghosts. Making up the rest of the crew are O'Donnell and Bennett.
They explain that Moran was killed in a freak accident three days ago when the engines of the spaceship fired by themselves. They had just brought it into the Drum after finding it on the loch bed nearby. Also in the vicinity is a drowned village, from a time many years ago when the valley was flooded by the building of a dam. Pritchard has argued that the facility cannot be abandoned as Vector Petroleum would lose a great deal of money. Everyone has been sheltering in the Faraday cage each night since Moran's death. He also wishes the company to exploit the spacecraft, and is determined to find the missing power cell.
The Doctor offers to help them investigate what is going on here, intrigued by the idea of seemingly real ghosts.
The facility suddenly switches back to night-mode early, and the ghosts are able to return before they can reach the safety of the cage.
Pritchard has sneaked off to don a diving suit and go outside to look for the missing power cell. Before he can put on his helmet, the ghosts cause the airlock to flood. In the canteen, the others now see a third ghost - that of Pritchard.
O'Donnell manages to reset the base back to day mode. With Pritchard now dead, Cass orders that the Drum be abandoned. On contacting the surface they learn that a similar message has already been received. The Doctor realises that this was a ploy by the ghosts. He invokes his UNIT authority and orders the Drum quarantined. He then tells everyone his plan.
If the ghosts can't enter the Faraday cage, then once inside they won't be able to leave it either. They must be lured there and locked in.
They split up and follow the plan. Lunn is caught amongst the ghosts, but they fail to kill him. A hologram of Clara finally lures the ghosts into the cage.
Throughout their encounters, the ghosts have been seen to be repeating something over and over, which even Cass can't quite lip read. The Doctor eventually works out that the words are a series of symbols, representing the planets of the solar system. They are giving the location of the Drum to someone from beyond the Earth.
Bennett uses a remote underwater rover to search the sunken village and they locate the missing stasis capsule in the old church. This is brought into the hangar. It has a deadlock seal and cannot be opened, but an automatic countdown indicates that it will open itself in a few hours. They assume it contains the pilot of the mysterious spacecraft.
The Doctor works out what the strange markings in the ship might be. They are planting some sort of message in people's heads, which allows them to become ghosts when they die.
The base systems begin to break down. The nuclear reactor threatens to overload, and parts of the Drum start to flood. The Doctor, Bennett and O'Donnell become separated from the others. They are close to the TARDIS, and the Doctor decides to travel back in time to find out what happened when the spaceship first arrived in the area. After they have gone, Clara, Lunn and Cass see a new ghost in the loch outside the canteen windows. It is that of the Doctor...
The TARDIS arrives in the valley before it was flooded. It is 1980, and the village is actually a fake Russian one, built as a training ground for the military during the height of the Cold War. It has now been abandoned.
They find that the spaceship has just landed. It is a Tivolian hearse, carrying a corpse. This is an alien known as the Fisher King, who had been a recent conqueror of Tivoli. The undertaker is the ghost they have seen in 2119. His name is Prentis, and he has come to bury the body in what he considers a remote and backward planet. They see that the strange wall markings are not present.
The Doctor contacts Clara and learns of the appearance of his ghost. It is also mouthing something silently, and they discover that it is a list of all their names, with some in the order that they have been killed. Prentis then O'Donnell are next, but Lunn's name is absent from the list. The Doctor-ghost then goes to the cage and frees the others.
Prentis discovers that the body he was carrying has disappeared, and the markings on the wall have now appeared. The Fisher King appears and kills him. It had faked its death to evade the Arcateenians who had liberated (then subjugated) Tivoli. O'Donnell is then found and killed by the creature.
The Doctor attempts to return to 2119 with the distraught Bennett, who was secretly in love with O'Donnell, but the ship takes them instead back only about minutes, still in 1980. They must avoid meeting themselves to prevent the creation of a paradox.
In 2119, the others see O'Donnell join the ranks of the ghosts. It steals Clara's phone to stop her contacting the Doctor. Clara works out why Lunn is never threatened. He was forbidden by Cass from entering the spaceship, and has never viewed the wall markings. Without the psychic programming they produce he cannot become a ghost, so is useless to them. He is therefore able to get the phone back.
After their earlier selves have left, the Doctor sends Bennett to wait in the TARDIS while he goes to confront the Fisher King. He learns of its conquering of Tivoli, and of its overthrow by the Arcateenians. Stranded on the Earth it has devised a scheme for rescue. The markings plant a psychic message in the brain of whoever sees them. When they die they are turned into ethereal beings who broadcast the location into space. The more ghosts, the stronger the signal. The Fisher King expects a fleet of its kind to come and rescue it in the 22nd Century. The Doctor tells it that he has removed the markings, so the Fisher King goes to check.
In 2119 the stasis capsule eventually opens - and Clara is surprised to see that it contains the Doctor. The TARDIS is returned to the Drum by remote control, so everyone is reunited. The Doctor explains that the missing power cell was his doing. He took it and turned it into an explosive, which he planted on the new dam. The blast destroyed the dam and the valley was flooded. Having been tricked into moving away from the stasis capsule by the Doctor, the Fisher King was killed in the deluge - whilst the Doctor took to the capsule, programmed to wake him up in 2119.
The ghosts are lured back to the Faraday cage by that of the Doctor - which proves to have been another hologram all along. Once locked in, the whole cage will be sent into space by UNIT, and over time the beings will fade away. The Doctor erases the memory of the alien co-ordinates from the brains of Cass and Bennett. The latter urges Cass and Lunn to get together, regretting never revealing his true feelings to O'Donnell. He has seen how they love each other.
Back in the TARDIS Clara wants to know how the Doctor knew what the ghost version of himself had to say and do, if he had been in stasis since 1980. He attempts to explain to her the concept of the Bootstrap Paradox...
Under the Lake / Before the Flood were written by Toby Whithouse, and were broadcast on 3rd and 10th October, 2015.
Unusually, this meant Series 9 had so far comprised two consecutive two-parters - double episodes being especially rare for the Steven Moffat era.
As mentioned last time, Moffat had said that Series 9 would have several two-parters, but it would shake up how people defined them.
Under the Lake is a very conventional sort of episode - a base-under-siege one. Before the Flood is very much a continuation of the story, but it is quite different in structure.
It begins with the Doctor addressing the audience directly, apparently breaking the fourth wall. He doesn't appear to be talking to Clara at all. He tells us about the 'Bootstrap Paradox', which will be relevant to this second episode.
The story he tells is of a man who travels back in time to meet Beethoven, taking all his CDs and copies of his scores with him for the great man to autograph. However, when he arrives in the past he discovers that there is no Beethoven. He doesn't exist. The man makes use of the scores he has brought to launch the music himself. He becomes Beethoven.
If Beethoven never existed, how could the man have taken his music back to the past with him? Only by becoming the very thing he went looking for.
The most famous example of this paradox is a short story by Philip K Dick, called The Skull, in which a man goes back in time to see Christ, only to find that he doesn't exist. In order for Christianity to develop, he takes Christ's place, even though it will mean his own death by crucifixion.
Peter Capaldi holds an electric guitar throughout most of this sequence, and uses it to play the Doctor Who theme, segueing into the opening music.
The cast is headed by Colin McFarlane. He had previously appeared in Torchwood: Children of Earth as General Pierce, and had voiced the Heavenly Host robots in Voyage of the Damned. Here he plays Moran, a character who is killed in the first few minutes and features as a silent ghost for the remainder of the two episodes. A bit of a waste to be honest.
Pritchard is Steven Robertson, who had appeared in Whithouse's Being Human, and has recently been a regular in Shetland.
Sophie Stone plays Cass, who once played opposite Robertson in the Scottish police drama. She was the first ever deaf person to be accepted into RADA. She was especially pleased to be playing a deaf character who was a strong and capable individual.
Bennett is Arsher Ali, and Lunn is Zaqi Ismail. Morven Christie plays O'Donnell. She has starred opposite Christopher Eccleston in The A Word, and appeared in crime dramas Grantchester and The Bay.
As Prentis we have the comic actor Paul Kaye. He began his career as the comedy TV presenter Dennis Pennis before taking to more serious acting, including a recurring role in Game of Thrones. He has been playing the pathologist Dr Malcolm Donahue in the police series Vera for the last couple of seasons.
Last, but by no means least, we have Neil Fingleton as the Fisher King. The tallest man in Europe, the 7' 6" actor tragically died from cardiac arrest in 2017, aged only 36.
For the creature's vocals, two people were employed. Peter Serafinowicz provided the voice, whilst its roar came courtesy of Corey Taylor of the band Slipknot, who was a huge fan of the programme.
Things you might like to know:
- A working title for both episodes was "Ghost in the Machine". This would have been a little too close to the third instalment of Torchwood's first series - Ghost Machine.
- The Doctor ponders his own death once again - a recurring theme for this season - but there is no mention of the Hybrid (the Series 9 story arc).
- Being set in Scotland, the title really ought to be "Under the Loch". However, there are around a dozen lakes, as opposed to lochs, in Scotland.
- The Doctor had previously visited an underwater base in which dead people were being reanimated - in the computer game Shadows of the Vashta Nerada.
- If you look at the image above of the Doctor standing in front of the mural in the Drum's canteen, you'll see three small figures in the painted boat. They wear blue, yellow and red tops - the principal colour scheme for Federation uniforms in the Star Trek series.
- The ghost make-up design was inspired by that worn by Peter Cushing in the 1972 Amicus film Tales from the Crypt. In one segment of this portmanteau horror movie Cushing plays a kindly old man named Grimsdyke, who is driven to suicide by nasty neighbours. On the anniversary of his death he rises from the grave and kills his main tormentor (Robin Phillips, who played Altos in The Keys of Marinus).
- Toby Whithouse had previously created the cowardly Tivolians for his Series 6 story The God Complex. Then it had been another comic actor who had played the alien - David Walliams as Gibbis.
- The Arcateenians are discussed though never seen in the story. They were first seen in the Torchwood episode Greeks Bearing Gifts. This featured a lone Arcateenian convict, who killed to stay alive after being stranded on Earth for over a century. Another of her kind then visited Sarah Jane Smith at her home in SJA: Invasion of the Bane. This was a much more benign representative of the species, and Sarah referred to it as a Star Poet. Of course, the use of the CGI figure in the SJA pilot was simply a money-saving exercise, making use of an existing model.
- UNIT are still operational in 2119. The Doctor gives his ID number as 7-1-0-Apple-0-0. O'Donnell is familiar with the organisation, having worked in military intelligence, and even knows of the Doctor from his files. She mentions some previous incidents such as Harold Saxon but also a Minister of War, which the Doctor is unfamiliar with - implying a story from his personal future. O'Donnell knows of the Doctor's recent companions, from Rose Tyler onwards, yet doesn't recognise Clara.
- One of the Doctor's prompt cards reads: "It was my fault. I should have known you didn't live in Aberdeen". Presumably this was prepared for the benefit of Sarah Jane Smith, who was dropped off in Aberdeen at the conclusion of The Hand of Fear, instead of at her real home in South Croydon.
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