Doctor Who - "Into the Dalek"

Is the Doctor a good man?

This is the question our newly regenerated Doctor wrestles with through-out "Into the Dalek", and it's what the episode suggests will be a major running theme through the rest of the season. It's a question that the series has long dabbled in - after all, until "The Day of the Doctor", we were dealing with a protagonist who wiped out his entire species - and yet, the question has always more or less been settled on a hard "yes". This isn't to say that the series hasn't questioned the Doctor's true morality from time to time. Sure, there was the time war and the 10th Doctor losing his shit in "The Waters of Mars" and basically the entirety of Christopher Eccelson's run on the show, but even in its darkest moments, Doctor Who has more or less come down on the side of "yes" when it was forced to answer the above question. The most recent Doctors, despite having a fair amount of darkness pent up inside them, were figures that we could generally root for without having to question it much. The 12th Doctor, while not exactly a villain, is proving to be a figure that's more comfortable with his dark side, which makes him a figure that's a bit more skeptical of the idea of the Doctor as an all-saving prophet that brings good wherever he goes, even if he occasionally has to take questionable measures to get there.

So our current answer to the question of whether the Doctor is a good man or not is "I don't know", as Clara put it, but I imagine by the end of this Doctor's reign we may get a more definitive answer. If the 11th Doctor's era was focused on the mystery and specter of the Doctor, analyzing who he was and where he came from and the way he can have the people surrounding him give birth to a timelord baby that they've met several times already, then the 12th Doctor's era seems to be focused on analyzing his mind - what's in it, how it works, and most importantly, what it's capable of. And who better to help us do that then the Doctor's mortal enemies?

The fact that "Into the Dalek" actually remembers the connection between the Doctor and his Daleks, the fact that they hate each other because they're polar opposites but also because they're alike in so many ways, already makes it one of the new series' best use of the classic villains. Aside from the excellent "Dalek" way back in Season 1 (which this episode shares more than a few similarities with), most of the Dalek adventures in the new series treat them too much like typical bad guys, setting them up on a repetitive plot cycle - the Daleks invade somewhere, the Doctor fights them off, they go away. "Into the Dalek" smartly breaks this cycle by taking a single Dalek and jumping into it, in much of the same way we're meant to be jumping into the Doctor's mind through-out the entire episode. "Into the Dalek" takes the parallels between the Doctor and the Daleks and puts them right there in front of us. It might be too much if it wasn't so effective - the idea that the Doctor himself could make "a good Dalek" feels kind of earth-shattering, even if it's something we already kind of know. It's an interesting question not just of Doctor Who's built-in psych but of the morality of sci-fi and superhero adventures in general - we root for our heroes because we see them as the good guys, but aren't we really supporting them for doing the exact same thing the villains are doing?

All of this ties very nicely into the "soldier" runner, which extends from new character (and, assumingly, future TARDIS ride-along) Danny Pink to this week's gaggle of doomed zombies (every time the show introduces us to a group that the Doctor will be assisting for the episode, I immediately weep a little bit for them). Moffat hate may be super trendy on the internet right now, but "Into the Dalek" demonstrates some of the genius of a Moffat script (that, to be fair, he shared with Phil Ford), where he juggles a million balls in the air then somehow manages to tie them all together in a way that fits in a way that you would've never guessed. This is a skill that he seemed to lose somewhere around the end of the 6th season/beginning of the 7th season, so seeing it back here gives me a lot of hope for the rest of the season. And on a closing note - how great are Clara and 12 together?! They're like "Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, Doctor Who edition". "Deep Breath" was a fairly solid start, but after "Into the Dalek" I feel extremely comfortable about where we're headed this season. Don't let me down, Peter Capaldi.