Doctor Who: 'The return of Doctor Mysterio' review.

An old review of the return of  Doctor Mysterio written for the 'Journey into the TARDIS' Facebook group.

The return of Doctor Mysterio:

First broadcast in the UK on the 25th December 2016.

Directed by Ed Bazalgette.

Written by Steven Moffat

Starring Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, Matt Lucas as Nardole, Justin Chatwin as Grant and Charity Wakefield as Lucy.

The Christmas special of 2016 was the only episode of Doctor who following the Christmas special of the year before: The husbands of River Song. As usual in a dry year of TV Doctor Who, I immersed myself in the spin offs: Big Finish and the tie -in novels. By late November 2016, my anticipation for a new episode of Doctor Who had reached fever pitch. My mind was full of questions: why Doctor Mysterio-wasn’t that what the show used to be called in Spanish in the sixties? Would this link into the episode or was it an enigmatic title to tease the audience with? How would Matt Lucas’s character Nardole fit in? Would he be like Catherine Tate: playing a one-off character mainly for comic relief to be fleshed out more effectively in the following season? More interestingly, how do Superheroes fit into the world of Doctor Who?

I’m a fan of comics: always have been. Spiderman, Superman, X-men and Batman were favourites of mine as a youngster, by my early twenties I was a fan of the DC Vertigo line in particular the Sandman comics; Shade the changing man and Hellblazer. Although what constituted a comic, in my mind, had changed considerably over the years, my passion for the more conventional Superhero comics had been maintained with the regular Marvel and DC offerings at the cinema.

The episode starts off with a montage of comic book strips read by a comic loving boy. I like the camera work of one of the comic book panels becoming alive drawing the audience into an establishing shot of New York accompanied by an iconic shot of a steaming manhole with a yellow cab driving over it. These shots serve to remind us the action will take place in New York. The Crane shot slowly sweeps up a tenement block and the camera pans across a bed with an adult man in a dream like state. We soon see him as a child and we quickly realise that he is reliving a very important moment in his life: a moment that involves the Doctor. The Doctor is hanging upside down outside the character’s window swinging like a pendulum. In typical twelfth Doctor fashion, he greets the young man as if hanging upside down outside a window is the most normal thing in the world. I like it how the boy, Grant, assumes that the Doctor is Father Christmas after all he was when Rose was nine years old and wanted a bike. Grant’s acquisition of his powers soon becomes apparent as he swallows the Gemstone which he thought was a pill. The Gemstone knows what people want and provides people with their wishes.

It is quickly established that the adult Grant is a nanny who is in charge of a baby girl and that he has Super powers, enabled by the Gemstone he has swallowed. The theme music crashes in signalling to the audience that the opening has finished and the main storyline has been introduced.

As the opening credits end, we are thrown into contemporary times. We see Lucy, a journalist and the Doctor and Nardole investigating Harmony Shoals.   They discover the company is a front for the Shoal of the Winter Harmony, an alien race of disembodied brains who have been implanting themselves in humans. It was a nice nod to the last episode of Doctor Who: The Shoal were one of the bad guys in the Husbands of River Song. I like the physical menace of these bad guys: splitting their host’s faces to reveal the disembodied brains and weapons is a good, creepy touch which sticks in the viewer’s minds.

Only in Doctor Who could you see a Superhero, a journalist; the protagonist eating Sushi whilst investigating, accompanied with an android who stops off in eleventh century Constantinople to rule wisely. It is these madcap scenes which continue to enchant and draw me to the show. The episode is primarily about Grant and Lucy’s relationship with the madcap world of Doctor Who serving as an entertaining backdrop to this relationship. I like the quieter moments where you see Lucy and Grant coming together. The Doctor and Nardole have plenty of time to come unstuck in comical situations, I enjoyed the way they worked together to solve the mystery of Harmony Shoals plan to take over the world. Moreover, I liked the subversion of expectations: when Grant, single handily catches the crashing ship saving the world, his Nanny, his employer falls for his alter ego: Grant the baby sitter not Grant the spandex clad superhero.

In all, ‘The return of Doctor Mysterio’ acts as an effective bridge between ‘The Husbands of River Song’ and series 10. It serves this function effectively. Moreover, it provides the audience with a charming family fun packed episode with drama; creepy villains and a great little romantic plot. Nardole seems to have become an effective partner to the Doctor acting as an advisor and one who seems to accentuates the Doctor’s eccentricity and other worldliness. Capaldi, as usual, shines as the Doctor.