by Sarabeth Pollock:
Doctor Who Recap: “The Bells of Saint John”
Original Air Date (BBC/BBC America): Sunday March 30, 2013
Season 7 Episode 6
Greetings, Whovians! Welcome back to the second half of Series 7…or, as we say here in the States, Season 7. I suppose that it’s entirely appropriate that tonight’s episode premiered the day before Easter, because there were more Easter eggs hidden in this episode than most of us will have in our baskets tomorrow. (Aside: thanks to my awesome sister who gave me a giant Easter basket loaded with candy, I am now in the middle of a fantastic sugar rush…so hold on to your knickers….)
We can’t begin this week without talking about the new Companion, Clara Oswin Oswald, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. If we jump into the imaginary TARDIS and go back to the episode “Asylum of the Daleks” at the beginning of Series 7, you’ll remember the plucky but doomed Soufflé Girl, known as Oswin. She had been trapped inside a Dalek but had the ability to control them and thus provided the Doctor a means of escape. “Run, you clever boy,” she told him. At the time, Whovians around the world released a collective “WTF?” at the unexpected appearance of Coleman, who admitted in interviews that it was one of the best kept secrets in Cardiff. We didn’t get to see her again until her proper introduction in the Doctor Who Christmas Special, “The Snowmen.” (Spoiler Alert for “The Snowmen” and “The Bells of Saint John Prequel”) Clara Oswin was a Victorian-era, barmaid cum nanny. Enter The Doctor and chaos ensues. Just when we think we understand how she becomes the new Companion…Clara dies. Her last words were “…and Remember.” Again we all say WTF? Jump ahead to “The Bells of Saint John Prequel” when we see a morose Doctor sitting on a swing set. He pours his troubles out to a little girl, who, in spite of her mother’s warning against talking to strange men, feels very much at ease talking to him. He complains that he’s lost his friend; he has seen her twice but he ends up losing her. The little girl encourages him to keep looking. When she leaves and joins her mother, her mother chastises her for talking to strange men. The little girl’s name? You guessed it: Clara Oswald.
So, with all of that in mind, welcome to “The Bells of Saint John!”
We start with a warning about the dangers of wi-fi. Have you ever seen something that isn’t there while surfing the web? Well, as it turns out, if you connect to Wi-Fi using a public signal, “they” will find you and within 24 hours you’ll die and find yourself downloaded into the web itself. The man issuing the warning firsthand: he has been downloaded, too. We see a whole wall of tiny television monitors with people calling out for help. The need help and they don’t know where they are.
Cambria, 1207. A monk bangs on the abbey door. “The bells of Saint John are ringing,” he cries. The abbot decides they need to go to him. “He” turns out to be the “Mad Monk,” only he’s no monk. It’s the Doctor, dressed in monk’s robes. They pass along the message and he requests a horse. Once he has left, the monks look at the portrait of the woman The Doctor was painting. It’s Clara, “the woman twice dead” that the Mad Monk has been searching for. The words “Run, you clever boy” are written across the bottom.
Back in the present, Clara, a nanny for a friend of the family, asks the older daughter if the internet is working. Angie tells Clara that it is working, and she can log in as well. (More than one person can log in at a time, you know…duh) The dad is getting ready to leave with his son. He tells Clara that she can have the night off, but she’s planning to stay in and figure out her computer. And when he says they’re still looking for someone to take her place, she says that she isn’t in a hurry to leave. The boy, Artie, has a book with him. “Summer Falls,” by Amelia Williams. (Easter Egg!!!) She warns him that he’ll cry his eyes out with Chapter ten. Once they all leave, she goes up to her room to fix her computer.
In 1207, The Doctor reaches “The Bells of Saint John”…and it’s the TARDIS (Easter Egg!) The phone is ringing, and it’s not supposed to do that. He answers it and is connected with Clara, who thinks she’s on the phone with tech support. After an amusing banter about calling the wrong time zone, he tells her to try logging into the Wi-Fi. Angie is about to leave, but she gives Clara the password: RYCBAR123. How on earth is she supposed to remember that? Clara talks while she enters it: “Run You Clever Boy And Remember 123.” Realization dawns and The Doctor flashes back to Oswin’s comments, and Clara’s last words.
But it doesn’t work. So she clicks on the evil signal…and the download begins, only she doesn’t know she’s being downloaded. There is a knock at the door and so she goes to answer it. Outside is The Doctor, still dressed in monk’s robes. He beams with glee when he sees her. “Clara Oswin Oswald!” he says. She doesn’t know anything about the middle name, and she certainly doesn’t know him. He looks in the mirror as she asks the eternal question “Doctor Who?” He shivers at the sound of his name as she says it. She shuts the door on him.
Meanwhile, at a mysterious location somewhere as yet unknown, a man reports that Clara has been downloaded but she doesn’t possess any special skills. An authoritative woman declares that Clara should be given a computer knowledge splice. As she walks away, she contemplates killing her employee but decides to wait until he returns from his holiday. That’s very considerate of her. Her assistant expresses some concerns, and she reiterates that their mission is to make their targets essentially immortal by uploading them to the Data Cloud. She pulls out her table and calls up his file. With a flick of her finger, she modifies his conscience levels (from the choice of Conscience, Paranoia, IQ and Obedience). He wonders if she hacked into him, but she just deadpans that he merely changed his mind.
The Doctor pleads for Clara to let him inside. Through the security camera monitor, he insists that she called him about the Wi-Fi connection, and that he was in the neighborhood and has a really good “mobile phone” (he points to the TARDIS). Meanwhile, Clara hears a noise upstairs. At first she thinks it’s Angie, but then a little girl comes down the stairs. She repeats everything Clara says to her…and then Clara realizes that the little girl is the same girl from the cover of the “Summer Falls” book. Just as the thought hits her, the little girl’s head spins around and reveals a satellite dish-type transmitter in the back of her head.
Outside in the TARDIS, the Doctor does a quick wardrobe change. This time his coat is a little darker and a little longer, but he’s still the Doctor we all know and love. He goes outside and reveals that he has been de-monked. Clara’s voice is frantic as she cries out that she doesn’t know where she is. The Doctor whips out his sonic screwdriver and opens the door. Clara is on the floor, presumably dead. He sees the walking Wi-Fi hotspot and starts typing on Clara’s laptop. The team back at the hidden lair sees that something is preventing her from being downloaded. They can’t stop it. The Doctor succeeds in reversing the signal, and the hotspot sends Clara’s “soul” back into her body. She wakes up, disoriented.
The lair receives a message from the so-called hacker: “Under my protection—The Doctor.” The woman kicks her assistant out, saying she needs to talk to the “Client.” She tells him that the one he spoke of, The Doctor, is here.
The Doctor tucks Clara into bed, pouring her some water and setting out flowers and jammie-dodgers for when she wakes up. He picks up a book, “101 Places to See,” and finds a preserved leaf and a note on the inside cover stating that the book belongs to Clara Oswald…and it has her age listed and then crossed out until it reaches 24. 23, oddly enough, isn’t listed. (Possible Easter Egg?)
Clara wakes up and finds The Doctor keeping watch outside the house. She doesn’t remember anything, but not to worry because The Doctor has taken her messages and tended to the household business while she was sleeping. She couldn’t remember where she was, but now she’s at home safe and she can go to bed. He’s keeping watch over her. Instead of sleep, Clara decides to go down to him.
At the lair, the woman increases Alexi’s IQ so that he can work out a solution to their little problem.
The Doctor explains to Clara that we’re all swimming in a “Wi-Fi soup.” A computer can hack into another computer, but what if they could hack into people? And, given that a few hours prior Clara knew nothing about the internet, isn’t it odd that she just made a joke about Twitter? “Oh. That’s weird,” she agrees. She knows all about computers now. The Doctor thinks that she brought something extra back after being unconscious, and he very much doubts that she’ll be allowed to keep it. Suddenly, the Wi-Fi base station hot spot guy standing across the street starts turning on lights all around them while the lights in neighboring areas turn off. The roar of a plane’s engines alert the Doctor to the fact that some planes have Wi-Fi, and it looks like they’re being targeted. They run into the TARDIS and Clara has about five seconds to appreciate that it’s bigger on the inside. When they go back outside, they’re aboard the plane. The passengers are all unconscious, and so are the pilots. Believe it or not, The Doctor has never flown a plane before, but he manages to pull the nose up and disable the Wi-Fi before they crash. Once the pilots are awake, they leave them to fly the plane while The Doctor and Clara make a hasty exit.
“Find that box!” the woman cries.
Clara asks what is going on. “Breakfast,” he replies. That’s the beauty of having a time machine. You don’t need to wait for morning. They go outside and find themselves on the street in London amid a crowd of people who think that they just saw a magic trick. The Doctor uses his fez to collect tips to be used to buy breakfast and, after pulling a motorbike from the TARDIS, he and Clara motor away. She wonders why they’re on a motorbike instead of flying his ship, and he explains that he never takes the most powerful ship in the galaxy into battle. (Meanwhile, as they’re driving, the cameras on the streets of London are sending pictures of them back to the mysterious lair. This is why London is so great. An abundance of surveillance cameras)
The two eat breakfast atop a rooftop café. The Doctor explains that they jumped ahead to breakfast so that they wouldn’t be as tired as their pursuers who arrived the “long way.” While The Doctor tries to find their signal, Clara bombards him with questions. Is he an alien? Does he have a plan? He counters with a question of his own. How long has she been a nanny? She replies that it has been about a year, a year since her mom died. She tells him that she can locate the signal in five minutes with pictures and sends him off to get coffees. Before he leaves, he asks why she’s working as a nanny when she could be out doing the things that young people do. She mistakes this for flirting, which flusters him a lot.
Inside the coffee shop, The Doctor places his order. The clerk moves to get the coffee but pauses suddenly. He tells The Doctor that he can’t save his friend. The Doctor stops, and just as soon as he repeats himself, the man returns to making coffee while the woman behind The Doctor continues the conversation. Evidently, the woman back at the lair is running the show. She can control everyone using the Wi-Fi signal. The Doctor runs back out to check on Clara, who is pondering a user name while her fingers fly over the keyboard. She flashes a huge smile at The Doctor: “Clara Oswald for the win…Oswin!” she declares. He flashes back to Soufflé Girl, who used the moniker Oswin. Well, now we know where that name came from.
Back inside, the woman tells The Doctor that they can hack into anyone at this point. They have base stations all over the world that they can use. Her client needs a fresh supply of minds, and they are providing them. While she’s talking, Clara is snapping pictures of the lair’s employees through their webcams. She uses their photos to tap into their Facebook, MySpace, Foursquare and Vevo accounts…and of course they all mentioned where they work on their Facebook accounts. They work at The Shard, London’s newest high rise tower, on Floor 65. When the Doctor returns, she tells him that she found their location. Only it isn’t The Doctor…it’s a base station. By the time the real Doctor returns, she has been downloaded. For real, this time.
Alexi reports that The Doctor is on his way to the Shard. He stops on the street to talk to a man there. He has also been downloaded, but he isn’t listening when The Doctor explains that he rode this particular motorbike during the anti-grav Olympics. With the push of a button, the bike suddenly takes off up the side of the Shard and right into the office.
The Doctor demands that Clara be released. The woman doesn’t understand why he’s come all this way for Clara, given that these people have been immortalized in the Data Cloud. The Doctor tells her that he plans to motivate her. The fact is, he isn’t really there at all. He’s still enjoying his coffee at the café. Yes, he sent the base station to the office, and he proceeds to download her to motivate her to release the people in the Data Cloud.
Her employees know that she has been fully integrated now, so they can’t let her out. The Base Station Doctor uses the tablet to increase her assistant’s conscience, and so he releases the people trapped in the Data Cloud. Clara wakes up to find that The Doctor is gone. The woman apologizes to the Great Intelligence for failing him. Members of UNIT invade the office and stop their operation. He tells her to release the employees, which will also release her. She hasn’t been alone for a very long time, and when she is released, she reverts back to the moment when the Great Intelligence first came to her. A little child’s voice comes out of her mouth and she asks the UNIT guards where her parents are. The other employees return to whoever they were before they were brought to work for the Data Cloud people.
Back at Clara’s house, she finds the TARDIS still parked in the back yard. He wants an answer to the question about being a nanny. There are so many places for her to see. Why is she still working as a nanny? She feels obligated because the one time she left, her mother died. He invites her to travel with him. Clara laughs and looks around. Is that how it works, she wonders. “Do you just crook your finger and people jump into your snog box?” Flustered and bemused, The Doctor denies that it’s a “snog box.” He tells her that the beauty of being in a time machine is that you can leave and get back to your loved ones before tea time. I seem to recall the 9th Doctor saying the same thing to Rose…but he never could get her back to the right time. Clara smiles and tells him to come back the next day after seven. When he asks why, she flashes a mischievous grin. “Because I might say yes.”
As she leaves, he asks her about the leaf in her book. It wasn’t a leaf, she explains. “It was page one.” She exits the TARDIS, and the Doctor sets out to figure out who she is. As he pilots the TARDIS away from her house, the camera pans up to show us the Gallifreyan symbols decorating the ceiling of the newly-remodeled TARDIS.
And that, my friends, is the end of the first episode of the second half of the seventh series. (Phew, that’s a mouthful)
Well, what did you think of tonight’s episode? The storytelling reminded me a lot of the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who. I am so excited to see what happens this season. I think we’re going to see lots of twists and turns, and at some point The Doctor will have to explain the fact that he’s married….
Until next week, Whovians!
Sarabeth Pollock is a contributor for DarkMedia. She covers True Blood, Doctor Who, Fringe and American Horror Story, as well as the True Blood comics and whatever movies and books happen to catch her fancy. She’s an avid writer, reader, and pop culture fan, with interest in everything from True Blood to Doctor Who to Anne Rice to Deborah Harkness. Follow her on Twitter at @SarabethPollock and check out her blog at http://sarabethpollock.wordpress.com
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