Time Heist (2014)

After being somewhat disappointed with last week’s episode. I was somewhat hoping that this episode would return back to something resembling good form. Certainly the trailer seemed to indicate this and the start of the episode seemed to start off like most episodes this series. The Doctor takes Clara away in the TARDIS and off onto their next adventure but within moments, the normality is disrupted when the Doctor and Clara are in a new room with two complete strangers. The two people that the Doctor and Clara meet are Psi and Saibra who are a augmented human and a shape shifter. There is a recording which in a nutshell sets up the story saying that they have had their memories wiped and it was all of their volition.  

 

I think I like the idea that Clara isn’t always with the Doctor in the TARDIS. I like the idea that she has a life away from the Doctor and the Doctor keeps popping in like a relative. The phone ringing is still a rare thing. I think the last time it rang was in the 2005 story ‘The Empty Child’. The whole theme of the episode (as the title suggests) is that it’s a heist adventure. The episode takes place in a bank which given the current attitude towards the banking community is perhaps the sort of area that deserves to have people of ill repute running it.  

 

The first thing that strikes me about this episode is that there is less of Clara hogging centre stage and the Doctor actually being the lead character. It’s fair to say that Jenna Coleman’s performances in recent weeks have been overshadowing Capaldi’s at a time when he should be striding away with the role. Here Capaldi shows us how good he is and there were moments of Malcolm Tucker in a few lines. Despite my growing frustration at the character of Clara, I think that Jenna Coleman’s performance was very good. I thought that it was good how Clara didn’t go gooey eyed over Psi and even their goodbye hug wasn’t a soppy send off.  

The main name that appears in this episode is Keeley Hawes who plays Ms Delphox. As much as I wanted to like her character I thought that Hawes’ performance was very similar to that of Ms Foster as played by Sarah Lancashire in the 2008 story ‘Partners in Crime’. I think that this Hawes’s character was slightly better because compared to ‘Partners in Crime’, the plot in this one was stronger. 

 

I thought that Psi and Saibra were two very good characters and Jonathan Bailey & Pippa Bennett-Warner did a good job of keeping up with Capaldi and Coleman. Normally I would have found the character of Psi to be irritating and I would instantly hate the actor playing the part but on this occasion I found the performance and the actor to be quite good. I thought that Bennett-Warner gave an understate yet engaging performance and I wanted these two characters to be alright at the end of the episode and thankfully they did.  

If I have an issue with the episode then I think that it runs away with itself in the final few minutes when its revealed that the person calling the TARDIS phone at the very beginning of the episode was Madame Karabraxos as an old woman. On a side note, I thought that the make-up was very good. Certainly better than some of the make up used to make people older that we have seen in previous episodes. The idea that she is ringing the Doctor in her dyeing days was something that clearly had Steven Moffat’s fingerprints all over it because it seemed overly complex. 

 

I’ve managed to get this far without referring to the monster which looked very good and is one of the strongest monster designs for quite sometime. The idea that it’s being forced against its will to do something isn’t terribly original but its used quite well here and the moment when its revealed that the Teller is the last of its kind was quite nice and about as soppy as it got. 

 

I definitely thought that ‘Time Heist’ was miles better than the previous episode because at least it felt like a normal Doctor Who episode. I still think that ‘Into the Dalek’ is the best episode of the series but at least this episode shows that ‘Listen’ was just a blip. Nearly halfway through the series and its been a pretty good run of episode with only one really letting it down.