Doctor Who (2005) 11-09: It Takes You Away (Quick Review)

Episode:

849

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Serial:

285

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Writer:

Ed Hime

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Air Date:

02-Dec-2018

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Is it just me, or is the title text getting smaller with every new episode this season?

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm giving you my opinions and observations of It Takes You Away, the third episode by writer Ed Hime. I don't mean his third Doctor Who story, I mean the third episode he's ever written for TV, as according to IMDb all he's been credited for before this was a couple of episodes of Skins. He's also written for radio and theatre though apparently. I'm pretty much as clueless about him as I have been about any of the new writers this season to be honest.

Though one thing I do know is that showrunner Chris Chibnall will be back next time for the series finale, then the New Year's special, and probably the series 12 premiere after that, so it'll be a long while before we see any episodes by new writers again.

There will be SPOILERS beyond this point for this story and maybe earlier ones too. Just giving you a heads up.

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It Takes You Away is a strange one, as to me it felt like a bunch of different stories with different tones stuck together. It's got three distinct acts and every time it seemed to be getting comfortable going one way it'd shift direction and go the other way instead. But I'd say that overall it's a story about grief and loneliness, despite the detour in the middle, with the lonely 'it' of the title having a name that's halfway between 'solitude' and 'distraction' (Solitract). Or maybe the 'it' is referring to grief in general and how it can pull people away into isolation.

The title made it sound like it was going to be a horror story and that's pretty how the episode started out. Well after the Doctor was done eating mud and warning us about the Woolly Rebellion anyway.

The first of the three parts is all about the heroes turning up at a fjord in Norway (in winter, though you wouldn't know by looking it), and then heroically breaking into some girl's house. Mostly because they were being nosy. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason in the story for them to be in Norway specifically, but I suppose there's no reason they shouldn't be there either.

I was fairly engaged with the episode at this point, trying to figure out what it was actually going to be about, as it steadily built tension and piled on the clues. A few minutes in and it'd already introduced an extremely boarded up house, the girl's blindness, the missing dad, the noises outside, the creepy barn and the mysterious mirror. Plus this time there actually was something hiding in the cupboard when Ryan opened the door!

Incidentally Hanna was played by the first blind actress to ever appear on the series and I reckon she did well in the role. I kept waiting for her blindness to suddenly become crucial to the story at some point, like I did with the deaf woman in Under the Lake a few season ago, but again it was just part of her character. I guess it gave her immunity to the mirror lure, which tricks grieving husbands into thinking they're vampires so they'll come closer, but I'm sure Solitract could've used its godlike powers to make a bit of a noise or something if it wanted her.

I also liked the scene where Ryan told Hanna her dad had probably left and Yaz rushed in to use her police training to try to calm her down. It came off a bit like the only character descriptions the writer had been given to work with was: "Ryan: Has issues due to his dad leaving. Yaz: Is a police officer.", which amused me, but it was perfect for their characters. Plus it cleverly steered me away from guessing the truth, which was that Ryan was absolutely right! In fact the whole episode is built around Ryan and Graham really, as it's about a father abandoning his disabled kid while dealing with grief after losing his wife, which makes it really strange to me that Ryan never confronts Erik. The guy is basically a mirror of his own dad and I figured the two were on a collision course from the start but they sailed right past each other without incident.

The expedition through the mirror brought the characters to the second part of the story, taking place in a fantasy world featuring spooky caves, flesh eating monster moths and Kevin Eldon in enough makeup to be unrecognisable.

It's not really somewhere you want to hang out in for long, though I've seen worse places on the other side of mirrors. I mean they could've ended up in the H.R. Giger dimension from the game Dark Seed, though I suppose it would've made zero difference to the overall story if they had. This part of the episode was so irrelevant that it really didn't matter what they found as long as it had inexplicably comfortable levels of gravity, oxygen and warmth, and they didn't meet their evil doppelgängers (that would've really complicated things).

At the time I assumed Ribbons and the anti-zone had some connection to the mystery of the missing Erik, but in retrospect he was only there to be expendable and establish the threat, and the whole trip was just padding. Actually that's unfair, as it was an interesting bit of story in its own right, it just wasn't an interesting bit of this story. The only point of it in the end was to put Ryan in danger so that Graham would have proof that Grace was a fake and then show Ryan that not all father figures abandon their kids when they need them.

Plus afterwards I started wondering things like: 'why didn't they just go back into the house and get a flashlight?' They could've picked up another shiny gadget to trade with Ribbons while they were there. Then I finally noticed that they never use their phones to talk to each other when they're separated, even though the Doctor's shown she can upgrade them to work across space and time. You'd think there'd be a lot more text messaging between three companions from the present day.

I also realised that despite this being a story all about loneliness and grief, no one grieves for poor Ribbons. Mostly because he was a git.

The third part of the story began when they reached the other side of the anti-zone, broke into another version of Erik's house and finally learned what was going on. They probably also noticed that everything here is flipped horizontally like a mirror, but I didn't see it myself until it was pointed out to me, despite the guy having Slayer written across his t-shirt.

After a long exposition break so that the Doctor could get us up to speed on this universe-threatening super-being that'd never been mentioned before, the episode settled into something more familiar and predictable for a while. I was grateful that they hadn't found the back door into the afterlife or Star Trek's mycelium network or something, death's already complicated enough in Doctor Who, but I've seen the Lotus-Eater Machine trope done before and I've seen it done better. Plus there was no danger of Graham falling to temptation and staying, because the entire universe would be destroyed if he did. Man I did not miss Fifth Doctor-era stakes in my Doctor Who.

Turns out that the mirror was a lure like they thought at the start and Graham really was caught by it. He even gave Solitract his credit card details I guess, seeing as fake Grace knew the details of everything else in his memory. Funny how the title The Woman Who Fell to Earth applied just as much to Grace by the end and now they've done the same thing with Grace being the 'it' in It Takes You Away.

It was nice to see what a reunion between Graham and Grace would be like, with him telling her about all of his adventures, and Bradley Walsh gave a great performance, but I've already seen Graham being tortured by his imaginary wife this season! Plus it turns out that it's not much fun to see Graham getting false hope and then being tormented and miserable.

The episode started to reclaim my interest when the Doctor talked the Solitract into ditching Erik and taking her instead, but then I realised she was being self-sacrificing rather than clever and I found that to be a bit of a let down. Speaking of disappointment, the episode reveals that the Solitract manifests as lost loved ones and then gives the viewer plenty of time to wonder who it will be for the Doctor. My mind started running through all the former actors they could've gotten for a cameo and family members we've never seen before. Maybe they could've even recast Susan! I think the writer knew that people's imaginations would be running wild here and decided that if he was doomed to disappoint whatever he did, he might as well disappoint spectacularly.

So what we got was a frog on a chair.

I don't generally give ratings on this site, but whatever rating I would've given this episode dropped a point when this thing turned up. It's not just that it's deliberately ridiculous, it's also inadvertently rubbish! If it'd shown up in the Pertwee era I wouldn't have been bothered by it, but coming after the spiders from Arachnids in the UK, the Pting from The Tsuranga Conundrum and the weirdly well-realised flesh-eating moths, it's atypically ropey. I guess it looks fairly decent in a still image, but frogs don't have a mouth designed for speaking, so it talks like Kermit the Frog. Plus it talks in Grace's voice, which seems disrespectful somehow.

Also we finally got the context to that great looking shot from the trailer of the Doctor blowing a kiss and walking away and it turns out that it was her saying goodbye to a conscious universe in the form of a diminutive amphibian. So that was a bit of a let down too.

It was straying so close to Rings of Ahkaten, where the Doctor also tried to give her life experiences to a godlike being to save someone, that I expected her to pull out an item that represented something clever and give it to the frog to make it happier. Like a leaf full of infinite unlived days... or a smart phone with extra-dimensional reception! I'm sure Solitract could sort out a charger for it and then it could make all kinds of new friends on the internet. I'm just not sure why an episode about breaking out of your isolation and coming back to your friends had to end with poor Solitract becoming totally isolated and alone again.

But that point I knocked off the score as a frog penalty got put right back on when Erik saw the note on his wall and realised the full extent of what a crazy terrible dad he'd been. Well, maybe not the full extent, as that house was extremely boarded up and playing monster sounds to keep your blind daughter terrified of going outside is not normal, but I think he turned a corner.

Overall I think the episode was pretty good, even if the pay-off didn't really work for me. Plus for all its flaws I can't say it didn't earn the moment at the end where Ryan called Graham granddad. Still not at fist-bumps yet though. The episode had a bit of horror, it had a bit of comedy, it had a lot of carnivorous moths, and it was well made... mostly. Also it showed that Graham brings food out with him now, which is good because I was worried about him going hungry all the time after Rosa revealed that they don't get to eat as often as they'd like.

It's just a shame that the main thing people are going to remember from this episode is the bloody frog puppet. No one will be prepared for the Woolly Uprising when it comes. Oh man, if the Solitract had appeared in the form of a sheep that would've been amazing.

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COMING SOON

Doctor Who will return with the series 11 finale, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos.

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