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 considerably 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.
The town of Mercy, Nevada, 1870, 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 setup is beautifully economical. 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. 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 that he and his colleagues took volunteers from their own people during a war and turned them into cyborg weapons, without consent, in enormous pain. The war ended. The weapons were left. 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.
Two arguments, both good
What lifts the episode is that both sides are given a genuine case and the script refuses to quietly rig it. Jex is not 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, crucially, does not claim innocence. He knows exactly what he did, he simply 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 has not entered the town, has not killed a bystander, and gives fair warning. He is the most reasonable creature in the story and he is also a walking atrocity, and the episode lets both of those be true. And 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 as pastiche. More importantly, 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. The anachronisms are used sparingly and well 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.
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 is entirely prepared to let the Gunslinger take the shot. 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.
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 instead walks to his ship and destroys it with himself aboard, having decided that the ledger will not balance and that his people’s afterlife requires him to carry his own dead. 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.
Rating: 4/5. Handsome, thoughtful and unusually willing to leave its central question open, with a guest cast that plays it entirely straight. It loses a little to pacing, since the middle act circles while it waits for the confrontation, and Rory is given almost nothing to do. But the scene at the line is among the best the Eleventh Doctor has had. A line of stones, a cyborg who kept his word, and a doctor who healed a town because he couldn’t heal what he’d already done.