Missy impossible
Another makeover for Doctor Who’s ninth series…
SPOILER WARNING! [ Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen Doctor Who Series 8…] Ten months after the world’s graveyards coughed up a Cyber-converted army of the dead, the dead are rising again. In Doctor Who’s series eight climax, Missy – Michelle Gomez’s gender-converted Master – gets zapped by one of her own Cyber-soldiers. A little earlier, UNIT scientist and Doctor cosplayer Osgood dies hard at Missy’s malevolent hands. But wouldn’t you know it: five years after resurrecting Arthur Darvill’s Rory from his death-by-crack (so to speak), show-runner Steven Moffat is bringing Missy and Osgood back.
In other words, don’t think that a recent OBE has made an honest man of Moffat, or that six years of stewarding Doctor Who has sapped his love of playing merry havoc with its machinery. Since 2010, Moffat has rebooted the Who- niverse, killed the Doctor (sort of), fixed the Time War, reset the Doctor’s regeneration cycle and reversed a trend for funky-haired young Doctors by casting Peter Capaldi. Change, as he told Lounge in 2009, is what the Doctor calls for: “Overhauls are so part of Doctor Who’s make-up that not having an overhaul would be the bigger departure. The show leans towards new. It’s when it starts to lean towards old that it’s in trouble.”
Continuing Moffat’s mission to keep Who fleet-footed, series nine re-introduces two-parters with a twist, a move wellmatched to Capaldi’s mix of stealth and mystery. “We’re changing the rhythm quite a bit,” Moffat says. “For a long while, 45-minute stories were the backbone of Doctor Who. The rule I’ve got is that you won’t be absolutely certain whether [an episode] is going to be [ half of] a two-parter or not. With each of the two-parters we’re doing, there’s a substantial difference between the two halves.”
Master plan
Another difference will be a contrast with series eight’s heavy-clouds climax. After TARDIS pal Clara (Jenna Coleman) lost her boyfriend Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson), a lust for life will propel series nine. “The Doctor and Clara feel more in a groove,” Capaldi teases. “They’re enjoying being the luckiest people in all of history because they get to play with this immense toy box, which is all of time and space.”
“It’s the idea that life is short,” says Coleman, reflecting on Clara’s response to Danny’s death, “and I want to live it, and feel alive, and hang out with my best mate in the TARDIS… They’re very united in the TARDIS, eating up all of time and space with reckless abandon.” But, as Moffat interjects, his pan so dead he’ll
need to resurrect it soon: “What could possibly go wrong?”
Enter Missy in Moffat’s opening two-parter, ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’/ ’The Witch’s Familiar’, which refreshes the Doctor/Master dynamic in an early-’70s style. “One of the first things I did when I started writing was go back and look at the Jon Pertwee/Roger Delgado version,” says Moffat. “They absolutely play it as best friends. One of them wants to blow up the world and one of them wants to stop it blowing up, but hey – you can’t let those little things get in the way… But don’t worry, she’s just as vile and psychopathic as ever.”
Not that Missy is the only agent of disaster. The Doctor causes havoc with a decision made in battle that has, Capaldi says, “cataclysmic repercussions.” Unless a certain daily British newspaper’s spoiler story about a young take on a classic villain is right, what the “repercussions” are remains debatable: the series’ secrets have, pleasingly, remained secret after 2014’s script leaks.
But we know that Who old-hands Toby Whithouse (‘The God Complex’) and Mark Gatiss (‘Robot Of Sherwood’) will return as writers, joined in another welcome twist by Who’s first women writers since 2008, Catherine Tregenna and Sarah Dollard. Completing the bill are two of 2014’s newcomers. Peter Harness (‘Kill The Moon’) will revive Ingrid Oliver’s Osgood and suckered shape-shifters Zygons. Also returning is Jamie Mathieson. whose earlier episodes (‘Mummy On The Orient Express’, ‘Flatline’) made him look like a showrunner-to-be, and whose two-parter pairing with Tregenna holds one of Series 9’s tastiest-looking secrets.
The eyebrows have it
Previewed at Comic-Con, the trailer bursts with vintage/new Who stuff. We see corridors for running down, battlefields, Daleks, Capaldi’s eyebrows, Gomez’s evil lip-curl, space cities, sea cities, Capaldi striking a power chord, a possible glimpse of a Viking on a spaceship and aliens aplenty: with muttonchops, multiple faces, metal heads, suckers. Plenty to keep the Doctor busy until 2014’s grand-climax director Rachel Talalay returns to direct a Moffat-penned series finale that, she says, promisingly, turned her head to “spaghetti”.
But it’s a glimpsed new (maybe…) character that really ups the tease factor. In dandy highwaywoman drag for ‘The Girl Who Died’/‘The Woman Who Lived’, Game Of Thrones player Maisie Williams lifts a mask to reveal an identity so surprising, Capaldi’s iconic eyebrows erupt. So who is she? Jenny from 2008’s ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’? A regenerated Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter and first co-traveller?
“I think he’d like to see his granddaughter again,” says Capaldi, seeming to fuel the latter fire. But Moffat claims not: “It’s a significant role. We’re not throwing her away. She is a brand new character. She is not someone from the Doctor’s past… It will develop in unexpected ways.” After six years of deception, the biggest surprise might be that Moffat’s not fibbing. But where would the fun in that be? As he well knows, there’s nothing like a little devious mischief for keeping a show alive. ETA | 19 Septem ber Doctor Who Series 9 starts on BBC One next month.
‘Don’t worry, Missy is just as vile and psychopathic as ever’
steven moffat