Review: Lights Out by Holly Black

An e-short was published last year, one for each Doctor so now that we have a Twelfth Doctor played by the wonderful Peter Capaldi there's an e-short for him too. This one is written by Spiderwick Chronicles author Holly Black. 

The story is set between the first two episodes of Series 8, Deep Breath and Into the Dalek and sees the recently re-generated Twelfth Doctor go to an intergalactic coffee house to get some coffee for Clara. When bodies start appearing he grabs the story's narrator "Fifty-One" to help him investigate. 

In my mind this is just as good as the best of the other e-shorts. It's very dark and manages to contain a real surprise in it. The tone fits in with that of Series 8 really well and Black manages to capture the Twelfth Doctor's character well too, which is impressive given how little of the incarnation she must have seen when she wrote the story. 

As ever there are some continuity nods, mostly in the form of cameos and mentions from various Doctor Who races. I'm pretty sure Black must have set a record for number of Doctor Who alien species mentioned in a short story. 

A short but fantastic story which fans of the new Doctor will love.

Doctor Who Unlocked: Into the Dalek

Every episode of Doctor Who has much more than meets the eye so I like to put together a little post exploring links to the past and other things you might not have known about! 

WARNING: Contains Spoilers

Into the Dalek is the first Doctor Who story since 2010’s The Waters of Mars which hasn’t featured Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. Coincidentally, that episode was also written by Phil Ford, who wrote Into the Dalek. 

We see Clara meeting new teacher Danny Pink at Coal Hill School. The school featured in the very first episode of Doctor Who back in 1963 where teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright taught the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan. The school reappeared in 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks when daleks had built a transmat system in the school’s cellar and last year’s The Day of the Doctor when we saw Clara working there.

Using miniaturization to treat a patient has happened before in Doctor Who. In The Invisible Enemy the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela went inside the Doctor’s own head to fight a virus.

Other cases of miniaturization include a TARDIS malfunction in First Doctor story Planet of the Giants and the Doctor hiding in the Teselecta to avoid his death in The Wedding of River Song. Like Rusty, the Teselecta had robotic anti-bodies.

Rusty grates “Death to the Daleks” at one point, which is a title of a 1974 dalek adventure featuring Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor.

When the Doctor opens his mind to Rusty, images from past dalek stories are seen. We see an extermination from Dalek, the dalek attack on the Valiant from The Stolen Earth and the destruction of the daleks and the crucible in Journey’s End.

The Doctor then mentions meeting the daleks on Skaro, referring to the second Doctor Who story The Daleks. Skaro was destroyed by the Seventh Doctor in Remembrance of the Daleks but has since been seen (in ruins) in Asylum of the Daleks.

The attacking daleks shout “SEEK! LOCATE! DESTROY!”. Whilst nowhere near as famous as “EXTERMINATE!” these dalek calls have been heard regularly in Doctor Who, right from The Daleks onwards.

The scene where Clara and Journey are climbing was actually filmed by the actors crawling along the floor!

The new Doctor makes his dislike of soldiers clear, a character trait which was particularly clear in the Tenth Doctor.

Michelle Gomez reveals her character’s name to be “Missy”. Gretchen is the second character to have made it to “Heaven”, after the Half-Face Man in Deep Breath.