Forest of the Dead: Saved, and What That Costs

The second half of a two-parter like this is usually where the clockwork becomes visible, and “Forest of the Dead” is no exception, because every apparently disconnected thing from Silence in the Library turns out to be holding something up. But what elevates it above a clever machine is that it spends its resolution on grief. Three separate people lose something irreplaceable here, and only one of them ever finds out.

Donna’s other life

We left Donna’s face on a statue and a voice announcing she’d been saved. What that meant, it turns out, is that she’s inside the computer, living a life. The sequence is superbly unsettling. Donna is in a bright, ordinary world where time jumps: she meets a man called Lee, and then she’s married to him, and then she has two children, all in a series of hard cuts that skip the connective tissue entirely. She never notices, because that’s how the simulation works. Everyone in this world moves the same way. Everyone’s memories start in the middle. It’s Miss Evangelista, dead and uploaded and rendered brilliant by a data corruption that also disfigured her, who forces Donna to see it. And the moment Donna does, the episode turns genuinely cruel: she looks at her own children and they simply blink out of existence, because they were never anything but a subroutine. Catherine Tate plays the whole run beautifully, and the show doesn’t spare her.

Evangelista is the standout of that whole strand. In life she was the one everybody talked over and quietly sniggered at. Corrupted in the upload, she has become the cleverest person in the story and is profoundly, articulately miserable about it, hidden behind a veil because her face didn’t survive the process intact. The episode uses her to land the point it was always building toward, that she was never stupid and was simply never listened to, and the cruelty of it is that now she can out-think every person in the building, she’s lonelier than she has ever been.

What the library did

The central explanation is elegant. A century ago the Vashta Nerada hatched in their millions and the Library’s computer did the only thing it could: it teleported all four thousand and twenty-two people inside itself and stored them. Saved, exactly as you’d save a file. They’ve been sitting on a hard drive for a hundred years while the shadows owned the surface. And the little girl watching it all on her television is CAL, the computer, a dying child of the Lux family whose mind was wired into the Library so that she could live forever with every book ever written. That’s a genuinely lovely, sad idea, and it retroactively explains every strange cut and flicker in part one.

The Vashta Nerada get a good explanation too, and it’s the best line in the story: the paper in every one of those billion books was pulped from trees on their world. They didn’t invade the Library. They hatched in it. This is our forest. The monster has a legitimate grievance, which is a very Doctor Who move. The confrontation that follows is a good one as well. Faced with a swarm capable of stripping him to the bone in about a second, the Doctor doesn’t fight it at all. He tells them precisely who he is, invites them to go and look him up in the several billion books surrounding them, and then asks for one day to get the survivors off the planet. It’s the sort of scene this programme does better than anything else on television: a man winning an argument with a trillion carnivorous microbes purely by being enormously confident and extremely well documented.

Spoilers

Then River Song, and the part of the episode that will stay with me. The plan requires someone to be wired into the computer to power the download that restores four thousand people, and it will kill them. The Doctor intends to do it himself. River handcuffs him to a pillar and does it instead. Her argument is unanswerable and it’s the whole point of the character: he can’t die here, because she has already met the man he becomes. She knows his future. She’s seen him older, and kinder, and standing at the Singing Towers of Darillium with tears on his face, giving her a sonic screwdriver as a gift. She knows all of it, and she refuses to tell him a word of it, because, and she keeps saying it, spoilers. Alex Kingston is magnificent, and the imbalance set up in part one pays off completely. She’s dying for someone she’s loved for years, in front of a man who met her yesterday and still doesn’t know her name. He is devastated and slightly bewildered, which is exactly right. He hasn’t earned this yet. She does it anyway. The show has circled this territory before, since Reinette lived a whole life in the gaps between visits in The Girl in the Fireplace, but this is sharper, because River isn’t waiting for him. She’s ahead of him, and she’s chosen to go first.

The Doctor works out that the screwdriver she carries is one he hasn’t given her yet, which means he will, which means there’s more of this coming. He uses it to catch her consciousness at the moment of death and upload her into the Library, where she gets a kind of afterlife with the crew who died and a little girl who owns a world of books. It’s a fudge, and it’s a beautiful one. This is an episode destined to have far-reaching consequences, and even watching it cold that much is obvious.

The quietest heartbreak is saved for Donna. Restored to the real world, she doesn’t remember what she lost, but Lee was real. He was another saved mind, and he’s there, in the crowd, trying to call after her. He has a stutter. He can’t get her name out in time. She walks away without ever seeing him. Nobody tells her. The Doctor sees the whole thing and says nothing, which is either mercy or cowardice and the episode refuses to specify. After the way she’s grown since Partners in Crime, watching her lose an entire life she never knew she had, twice and in different ways, is a bleak note to leave her on. The show plays it in near silence, too. No swelling strings, no dialogue spelling out the tragedy, no reaction shot telling you how to feel. Just a man in a crowd failing to force a word past his own stutter, and a woman walking straight past him toward a blue box, and the moment closing over both of them. It is comfortably the most restrained thing in the episode and comfortably the most upsetting.

The idea that actually holds the whole thing together is CAL: a dying child given every book ever written and an entire world to live inside instead. Everything else in the episode, the shadows, the hundred years of missing people, River’s sacrifice, is built around that one tender image, and it’s the reason the ending works instead of just resolving.

Rating: 4.5/5. A dense, satisfying resolution that pays off every thread and finds real emotion inside its own machinery. The upload ending softens River’s death slightly, but by then the episode has earned a little kindness. A library full of the dead, a diary full of a future, and a woman who died to protect a man she hasn’t met yet. Spoilers, apparently. I’ve never wanted a spoiler more.