Never let it be said that in the realm of nu-Who that the production team, who they might be, don’t teach their audience, whether it’s by osmosis or just plain longevity, how to watch the program. It’s the curse of hard-core fan that we began to figure out the authorial voice of RTD of even, dare we say, Steven Moffat. They all have their moves, and it requires a bit of an extra suspension of disbelief to ‘un-anticipate’ what plot churns might follow, especially in a two-part episode penned by Moffat himself.
This fan kept thinking of The Big Bang when watching The Witch’s Familiar. A story for which the front end of the story portended something epic, but instead was boiled down to a minimum amount of characters for the conclusion. Anyone longing for more Doctor/Davros interactions and were still left wanting after The Magician’s Apprentice will have been cured by The Witch’s Familiar.
It’s a well-crafted conclusion all-in-all. If Clara had left after this story instead of sometime later in the season the circle begun in Asylum of the Daleks will have been finished in The Witch’s Familiar. That at least would have been neat in it’s own way. Then again Clara got paired off with Missy. Any misgivings we may have mad about a distaff Master last year have now been resolved by these two episodes. Michelle Gomez must be having a ball with Missy as she’s just deranged enough to be fun, at that makes her interesting.
Of course the whole Davros/Doctor thing was a feint. How could it not be? And we do wish that regeneration energy was only something to talk around and not seen as in The Stolen Earth.
As mentioned before there are more than the usual share of two-parters this series. WIll they follow the pattern set in the first two weeks. We’ll find out soon enough. Caps and images for The Witch’s Familiar are now online.
