This is the most divisive episode of the season, and I understand exactly why. The plot is thin to the point of transparency, the antagonist is a shouting sphere, and the climax is two people making speeches at a planet. If you need Doctor Who to have a working mechanism underneath it, “The Rings of Akhaten” will drive you up the wall. I liked it anyway, and I think the reason is that it is entirely sincere about something the show usually only gestures at.
A leaf
It opens not on an alien world but in a suburban street, across about twenty years, in the best sequence Series 7 has produced. A leaf blows into a young man’s face and pushes him into the path of a car. The woman who pulls him clear is the one he marries. They have a daughter. The mother keeps the leaf pressed in a book, page one of 101 Places to See, a travel guide for journeys she never takes. She dies in 2005, and the girl grows up, and the leaf stays in the book. It’s told almost wordlessly in about four minutes, and it establishes Clara Oswald more effectively than The Bells of Saint John and the two Claras before her managed between them. This is a woman assembled out of a near-accident and a book of unvisited places, raised by a mother who ran out of time, and it makes sense of everything about her: the nannying, the restlessness, the not-quite-leaving.
The market
Then the Doctor takes her somewhere, and the somewhere is genuinely wonderful to look at. The Rings of Akhaten are seven worlds orbiting a pyramid-temple around a star, and the show spends real money on the market: dozens of prosthetic species, hawkers, food, noise, a proper alien crowd rather than four extras in a corridor. Doctor Who very rarely does scale on the ground like this, and for once the frame is full. The economy is the neatest invention in it. Currency here is sentimental value, objects that matter to their owner, priced by what they cost emotionally, which means the Doctor has to haggle with something he minds losing, and it means the whole society runs on a version of the thing the episode is about. Merry Gejelh, the Queen of Years, is a small girl who has memorised every song, law and story of her people, and whose job is to sing an old thing back to sleep. Emilia Jones is very good, properly frightened, and specifically frightened of getting the words wrong rather than of dying, which is a much better note to play.
It should be said that this is the most musical episode Doctor Who has ever made, and that’s central rather than decorative. The whole society runs on song, a lullaby sung continuously for millennia by a rotating priesthood, passed from Queen of Years to Queen of Years, holding a god asleep. Murray Gold’s score does an enormous amount of the storytelling here, and the long sequence where the singing spreads from Merry to the priests to the whole crowd, building as the thing in the star begins to stir, is the closest this programme has come to opera. If the episode works for you at all, it will be during that sequence. The Vigil are a decent secondary threat too, masked enforcers who exist purely to deliver the Queen of Years to her obligation, with no malice and no negotiation. A civilisation that has bureaucratised its own human sacrifice is a properly bleak idea, and it’s given about two scenes.
The sleeper, and the leaf again
The plot proper is where it wobbles. The Old God wakes up. It is a large angry face in a star, and it wants to be fed, and the show can’t quite decide whether it is a parasite, a god, or a very hungry sun. There’s a decent idea underneath, a thing that eats stories and memories and lived experience, and a civilisation that has been paying it in songs for millennia, but the episode never makes the mechanics concrete enough for the threat to bite. People are threatened by proximity to a shouting face. That’s about it. Then the Doctor makes his speech, and it’s a good one: he offers the parasite everything he has, every memory, every loss, the whole weight of a very long life, and challenges it to finish the meal. Matt Smith plays it hard, and the detail that he’s crying by the end, that the offer is real and costs him, is what saves it from being a mere power move. It isn’t enough. And this is the part I actually admire: the Doctor fails. The thing eats a millennium of grief and is still hungry, and the man who solves everything is out of ideas.
There’s a small character beat in the middle that I liked more than the plot around it. Clara trades her mother’s ring, the one keepsake she has, to buy a moped ride, and then has to watch it disappear into somebody else’s hands as payment. The Doctor gets it back for her at the end, quietly, without mentioning it. In an episode about the price of things that matter, having the companion actually pay one is a better argument than any of the speeches, and it’s handled in about twenty seconds without comment. So Clara gives the thing in the star the leaf. Her argument is that the Doctor offered a life that was lived, enormous but finite and therefore countable. What she has is a life that wasn’t: every day her mother didn’t get, every place in the book she never went, all the unhad futures compressed into a dried leaf. Infinite potential, none of it spent, impossible to consume. And the parasite chokes on it.
As physics this is nonsense. As an image it’s rather beautiful, and it’s the correct climax for an episode that opened on a leaf and a book of unvisited places. The show has decided that the most powerful thing in the universe is what didn’t happen, and it commits to that completely rather than hedging. Whether it works depends entirely on whether you’ll accept an emotional resolution to a physical problem. I will, here, because the episode has been honest about being that kind of story since its first four minutes. But it is asking for a lot of goodwill, and it doesn’t build much of a plot to earn it with. Neil Cross gets the balance right later in the season with Hide, which has the same interest in grief and a great deal more holding it together.
Rating: 3/5. Beautiful to look at, generous with its ideas, and the strongest characterisation Clara has had, anchored by an opening sequence that’s among the year’s best. The plot is a shrug, the antagonist never becomes a real threat, and the resolution asks you to accept sentiment as a weapon. Worth it for the ambition and the sincerity, but it’s carried by its edges rather than its middle. A leaf blew into a man’s face and made a family, and years later it was worth more than a Time Lord’s entire life. That’s either profound or ridiculous, and I’ve decided I don’t mind which.