The best Doctor Who monsters are the ones that make an ordinary object faintly sinister for a fortnight afterwards. Statues. Shop dummies. Gas masks. “The Bells of Saint John” goes after the Wi-Fi list on your phone, the one with the four or five networks you don’t recognise and have never thought about, and for a modern-day romp built largely out of laptops and a motorbike, it does rather well by it. It’s the lightest episode in a while, and after the funeral tour of the back half of last year, that’s not a complaint.
A monastery, and a phone call
The opening is a proper Moffat trick. A man on the internet warns you, in a video, not to click the link, and by the time he’s told you why, the picture has already changed and he’s in it. Then a monastery in 1207, where a monk climbs a bell tower to summon a brother who has retreated from the world to think. The bells of Saint John are ringing, which turns out to mean the telephone on the front of a police box is going off, and the man being summoned is the Doctor, who has spent an unspecified stretch of time in a robe painting portraits of a woman he’s watched die twice. That’s a lovely bit of misdirection and a lovely bit of characterisation, the Doctor doing the medieval equivalent of moping in his room with the curtains shut, and the reveal that the caller is Clara, in the present, phoning a helpline she’s been given by the best help desk in the universe, is exactly the sort of loop this show enjoys.
The threat is that something in the network is harvesting people. It scans, it selects, and it uploads a person’s consciousness out of their body into a data cloud, leaving the body dead in front of a laptop. What’s inside the cloud is worse, and the show cuts repeatedly to trapped faces asking to be let out, aware, permanently. The Spoonheads are a good monster on a small budget: mobile servers that adopt whatever face will get you to open your door, then rotate the back of the head open into a dish. The image of a friendly stranger swivelling their skull around is properly unpleasant, and the show gets two decent scares out of it before the plot takes over. Celia Imrie is very good as Miss Kizlet, running the operation from an open-plan office in the Shard like middle management, adjusting her employees’ loyalty, conscience and IQ with a tablet the way you’d tweak a thermostat. That’s the sharpest idea in the episode, and it’s dropped in almost casually: an office where the boss can slide empathy down a notch when someone gets awkward about the work. The client, of course, is the Great Intelligence, back from The Snowmen and now farming minds instead of snow. It’s a decent continuation, the same appetite with updated infrastructure, though the episode is content to leave it as a voice on a screen.
Clara, version three
The meat is the Doctor and Clara circling each other. This is a third Clara, modern and alive and with no memory of the other two, and Jenna-Louise Coleman plays her as someone entirely unimpressed by the fact that a strange man has appeared at her door claiming to be a monk. She’s a nanny for a family whose mother has died, she can’t work a computer at the start of the episode, and she is completely in control of every conversation regardless. The uploading gives her a nice arc: a woman who was hopeless with technology gets a lifetime of expertise poured into her head as a side effect of nearly being killed by it, and immediately starts using it to hack a corporation from a café. The scene where she works out Kizlet’s staff list from social media photos is the best thing she does all episode, and the show is careful that the uploaded expertise only gives her skills, because the nerve, the bluffing, and the decision to walk into the Shard and order lunch while blackmailing an executive are all hers.
The Doctor is watching her the whole time, not with affection so much as suspicion. He knows something she doesn’t about her own existence, he’s not telling her, and there’s a real edge to how carefully he keeps studying her face. It’s a good, slightly uncomfortable dynamic to found a partnership on, and it gives an otherwise light episode a spine. The set pieces are fun too: a plane falling out of the sky and pulled up at the last second, and a motorbike ridden vertically up the side of the Shard, which is nonsense and looks tremendous. There’s also one line dropped in so lightly you almost miss it. Clara has the Doctor’s number because a woman in a shop gave it to her, years ago, telling her it was the best helpline in the universe. Nobody follows it up. Nobody asks who the woman was. It sits there as a loose thread in an episode otherwise concerned with tidying up, the sort of thing this show plants and then leaves alone for a year, and the sort of thing that makes the Clara mystery feel designed rather than improvised. It’s a notably good-looking episode, as well. Colm McCarthy shoots contemporary London as somewhere worth looking at rather than as the default backdrop it usually is, the Shard at dusk, the river, a breakfast on a bridge with the city behind it, and the choice to stage a conversation about a global conspiracy over coffee at an outdoor table does more for the this-is-happening-where-you-live idea than any amount of shouting.
Where it thins
The resolution is the weak spot, and it’s the same weak spot as several recent episodes: the Doctor solves it too easily. He sends a Spoonhead of himself to Kizlet’s office, uploads her into her own cloud, and forces the company to reverse the entire process. Everyone comes back. There’s no cost, no complication, and no sense that a thing which has been eating people for years took any real dismantling. UNIT arrives to tidy up, and the Great Intelligence simply withdraws to be a problem another day. The one genuinely good note in the ending is the last one: Kizlet, restored to a mind that hasn’t been adjusted in decades, reverting to the frightened child she was when the Intelligence first found her. That’s a proper sting, and it’s over in fifteen seconds. It’s the one moment where the episode’s own idea, that a person can be edited, gets pointed back at the woman holding the tablet.
Rating: 3.5/5. Fast, funny and confidently modern, with a strong hook, a good villain performance and an introduction that finally lets Clara be a person rather than a puzzle. The resolution is far too easy and the Great Intelligence is doing little more than holding a place in the season, but it’s an enjoyable, well-shot forty-five minutes. The network you never chose, the face at the door that isn’t one, and a man who has now met the same woman three times and still hasn’t told her.