Series 9, Episode 3 | Part 1 of 2 | First broadcast: 3 October 2015 | Writer: Toby Whithouse | Director: Daniel O’Hara
Cast
- Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor
- Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald
- Colin McFarlane as Moran
- Sophie Stone as Cass
- Zaqi Ismail as Lunn
- Morven Christie as O’Donnell
- Arsher Ali as Bennett
- Steven Robertson as Pritchard
- Paul Kaye as Prentis
Summary
The Doctor and Clara arrive at an underwater mining facility in Caithness, Scotland, in the year 2119, three days after its crew salvaged a mysterious alien spacecraft from a submerged, flooded town. The ship is missing one of its two power cells and bears four strange symbols carved into its interior walls, and soon after its recovery the base’s commander is killed, becoming the first of several silent, chanting ghosts that begin stalking the crew during the facility’s night cycle. Acting commander Cass, who is deaf and relies on her interpreter Lunn, briefs the newly arrived Doctor and Clara as the ghostly figures multiply, one of them the spectre of a Tivolian funeral director. The Doctor determines the ghosts are chanting a set of coordinates pointing directly at the base, and realizes they are killing crew members to strengthen a broadcast signal luring an unknown threat toward Earth. When the base’s systems trap Clara, Cass, and Lunn separately from the Doctor and two other crew members, the Doctor takes off in the TARDIS to travel back before the town was flooded to uncover the signal’s origin, leaving behind a horrifying final image: the ghost of the Doctor himself has now appeared outside the base.
Interesting Facts
- This episode marks the return of the Tivolians, a cowardly, easily-conquered alien race previously introduced in the Toby Whithouse-penned 2011 episode “The God Complex.”
- Sophie Stone, who plays Cass, is a deaf actress, and the episode notably incorporates British Sign Language into its storytelling through Cass and her interpreter Lunn.
- Colin McFarlane, who plays the doomed Commander Moran, had previously voiced the Heavenly Host robots in the 2007 Christmas special “Voyage of the Damned” and appeared in the Torchwood miniseries “Children of Earth.”
- The episode is the first part of a two-part story concluding with “Before the Flood,” and was the first Doctor Who two-parter of the series not to feature returning monsters, instead building an original ghost-story mythology from scratch.
- The cliffhanger reveal of the “ghost” of the Doctor himself appearing at episode’s end was praised by critics as one of the strongest moments of the season, with IGN singling it out as “the real shocker.”
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