Series 9, Episode 4 | Part 2 of 2 | First broadcast: 10 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
- Neil Fingleton as the Fisher King
- Peter Serafinowicz as the Voice of the Fisher King
Summary
Travelling back to a Scottish village in 1980, before it was flooded to build the future mining base, the Doctor arrives with crew members O’Donnell and Bennett to investigate the alien ship on the day it first crash-landed, discovering it still intact with both power cells, no wall glyphs, and its stasis chamber sealed. There they meet Prentis, a Tivolian funeral director who reveals he has come to bury the terrifying Fisher King, an ancient enslaver of his people believed dead. When the Fisher King turns out to be alive, he kills Prentis, carves the fateful glyphs into the ship’s walls himself, and begins broadcasting a signal designed to summon an invading armada using ghosts of the dead as living antennae. Racing to stop the plan before O’Donnell becomes one of its casualties, the Doctor rigs one of the ship’s power cells to destroy the dam and flood the entire valley, killing the Fisher King and burying his signal for over a century, while pulling off an elaborate trick using a hologram of his own “ghost” to save Clara, Cass, and Lunn back in the present and lure the real ghosts into a containment trap.
Interesting Facts
- The episode is built entirely around a “bootstrap paradox,” a term the Doctor explains directly to the audience in a fourth-wall-breaking prologue while playing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 on an electric guitar — an instrument bearing a “Magpie Electricals” plaque, a recurring in-universe brand dating back to “The Idiot’s Lantern.”
- Unusually, the show’s opening theme music was rearranged and performed on electric guitar for this episode alone, a joke suggested by Peter Capaldi, drawing on his own background as guitarist for 1980s punk band the Dreamboys.
- O’Donnell name-drops several previous companions (Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, Amy Pond) and the alias “Harold Saxon,” alongside a mysterious, unexplained reference to a future “Minister of War” that even the Doctor doesn’t recognize.
- The character of Prentis and the Tivolian race tie back to Toby Whithouse’s earlier work, referencing the Torchwood episode “Greeks Bearing Gifts” for the “glorious Arcateenians” who conquered the Tivolians in turn.
- “Before the Flood” received the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of the entire series (95%), with critics highlighting Jenna Coleman’s performance and calling the Doctor-Clara pairing “one of the most successful in Doctor Who’s history.”
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