A Town Called Mercy: Nobody Gets Away Clean

Doctor Who does a Western about once a generation, and the temptation is always to treat it as costume: hats, a saloon, a showdown at noon, everyone very pleased with themselves. “A Town Called Mercy” wears the costume properly and then uses it for something a lot harder, a story about whether a man who did monstrous things for defensible reasons is owed protection, and about what happens when the Doctor is the one asked to decide. It’s the best-argued episode of the season so far, and the one that most obviously has something on its mind. It’s also the third story of the run, coming a week after the dinosaurs, and it could hardly be a bigger change of mood.

Mercy, Nevada, 1870

The town of Mercy has a problem. There’s a line of stones and skulls drawn in the dirt around it, and a cyborg standing beyond it who will kill anyone who crosses. The Doctor, Amy and Rory turn up, and the Doctor’s first big scene is a chat with a horse, which tells you the show is allowed to be silly right up until the moment it stops. And then it stops. The setup is beautifully economical, because Mercy has electric light ten years early, and a doctor who cured its cholera outbreak, and a population who are quietly, deliberately not asking too many questions about either one. Kahler-Jex crashed here, made himself indispensable, and the town has been protecting him ever since, partly out of gratitude and partly because their lamps work.

What he did before he arrived is the real story. He and his colleagues took volunteers from their own people during a war and turned them into cyborg weapons, without proper consent and in enormous pain. The war ended, the weapons were left behind. One of them, Kahler-Tek, has spent a very long time working through the list of the men responsible, and Jex is the last name on it. So the whole thing is a siege, but a strange one: the besieger is polite, the besieged are hiding someone they like, and nobody inside the walls can quite say out loud what they’re protecting. I like that it takes its time getting there. The town gets a few scenes to be a town before the argument starts, with people who have clearly settled into a life around this one odd man, and that matters, because when the pressure comes you understand why they’d rather bend their principles than lose the person who keeps their children alive. The Doctor, Amy and Rory are outsiders in all of it, and that’s what lets the argument happen out loud. Which sets up the question the rest of the episode wants answered.

Two arguments, both good

What lifts the episode is that both sides get a genuine case and the script refuses to quietly rig it. Jex isn’t a cackling villain. Adrian Scarborough plays him as a tired, courteous man who is entirely willing to explain himself: the war was killing millions, the programme ended it, and he has spent every year since trying to balance the ledger by healing whoever is in front of him. He also doesn’t claim innocence. He knows exactly what he did, he just doesn’t accept that it was wrong, and he’s rather good at explaining why. The Gunslinger, meanwhile, wants one man and has been scrupulous about it, because he hasn’t entered the town, hasn’t killed a bystander, and gives fair warning. He’s the most reasonable creature in the story and he’s also a walking atrocity, and the episode lets both of those be true. The town sits in the middle, having eaten the benefits and now being asked to pay.

The Western trappings are handled with more discipline than the show usually manages with a genre. It’s shot in Spain and looks it, wide and dusty and sun-flattened, and Saul Metzstein frames the confrontations as proper standoffs rather than pastiche. More than that, the script uses the genre’s actual grammar: a frontier settlement is a place where the law is whatever the people present agree it is, which makes it exactly the right venue for an argument about whether a man gets a trial. Den of Geek’s review picks up on the same thing, and it’s worth a read if you want to see how it lands for somebody else. The anachronisms are used sparingly too, since electric streetlights ten years early are better alien-presence shorthand than any amount of explaining, and the townsfolk’s careful incuriosity about them says everything about what they’ve agreed not to notice. If there’s a weak spot, the middle act circles while it waits for the confrontation, and Rory is given almost nothing to do.

The Doctor at the line

Then the Doctor drags Jex out past the stones at gunpoint and leaves him there to die. It’s an extraordinary scene, and Matt Smith plays it with a flat, frightening calm, because this isn’t a rage, it’s a decision. He lists the people who died because he kept giving monsters second chances. He points out that mercy has a body count. And he’s entirely prepared to let the Gunslinger take the shot. The last time I watched him decide he got to be the judge was The Waters of Mars, and this is the same temptation with the volume turned down, which is somehow worse. Amy stops him, and the way she does it is the reason this episode matters. She doesn’t argue that Jex is innocent, she argues that this isn’t how they do it, that the moment they start deciding who has forfeited the right to a trial they’ve become the thing they’re objecting to.

And then she says the line the season has been circling: this is what happens when he travels alone too long. She’s right, and he knows it, and the show has been building the evidence for a while, through the summary execution in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship barely a week earlier and the reputation-as-weapon problem of A Good Man Goes to War. What’s new here is that someone finally names it to his face while he’s holding a gun. It lands harder because Amy has watched him be certain before and has always followed along, and this is the first time she plants herself in front of the certainty and tells him no. The Gunslinger’s design is worth a note too. He’s a good practical build, half a man and half ordnance, with the weapon grafted where an arm was and a targeting display where an eye should be, and the show resists the temptation to make him lumbering. He walks like a person, which is what makes him unnerving, because the machinery lands as something done to someone rather than something built from scratch. When he finally speaks about the procedure, and about waking up as this, the episode has already made the argument visually and doesn’t need to labour it.

Isaac, and the ending

Isaac, the marshal, is the town’s conscience, and Ben Browder plays him with exactly the right weary decency, a man who has decided that Mercy will be a place that doesn’t hand people over, and who dies making that stick. Handing the Doctor his badge as he goes is a slightly on-the-nose gesture that works anyway, because it makes the Doctor responsible for the town rather than just passing through it. And the resolution is genuinely satisfying, because Jex solves it himself. Offered the chance to be defended, he walks to his ship instead and destroys it with himself aboard, having decided that the ledger will never balance and that his own people’s dead are his to carry. It’s the choice of a man who has finally accepted the terms he spent the whole episode refusing. The Gunslinger, left with no purpose, becomes the town’s silent protector, which is either redemption or another weapon someone else pointed and abandoned, and the episode is content to let you pick. I kept thinking about that after the credits, about a man who spent the whole story being protected by a town and a weapon who spent it being refused, and about how the person who ends up making the call isn’t the Doctor at all. It’s a quiet way to finish a story that spent most of its running time with guns drawn, and it leaves the Doctor holding a badge he didn’t ask for and the town he now has to answer to.

Rating: 4/5. The scene at the line is among the best the Eleventh Doctor has had.

Was Jex right to end it himself, or should the Doctor have let the Gunslinger finish the job? Tell me in the comments.