The Bells of Saint John: Something in the Wi-Fi

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 a plot you could follow with the sound off, which sounds like a dig and really isn’t, because it moves so quickly you don’t have time to mind.

I’d braced myself for another sad one. After the Ponds’ goodbye in The Angels Take Manhattan, and a Christmas special that was mostly about a woman dying twice, the show had spent a good stretch of time in its funeral clothes. This is the lightest episode in a while, and that’s not a complaint, it’s a relief. There’s a new companion who walks in already talking back, a villain who runs her evil from an open-plan office, and a Doctor who for once seems to be having a decent time. It isn’t flawless, I’ll get to where it thins, but it’s a proper enjoyable forty-five minutes.

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 finished telling you why, the picture has already changed and he’s in it. Then we’re in 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 fetched is the Doctor. He’s spent an unspecified stretch of time up there in a robe, brooding over a woman he’s watched die twice, which is the medieval equivalent of moping in your room with the curtains shut.

I love that. It’s a lovely bit of misdirection and a lovely bit of characterisation in one go, the sort of thing that tells you where his head is without anyone having to say it out loud. And then 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 kind of loop this show enjoys. The Doctor answers, learns it’s a tech support call, and goes straight from mourning to working, which is how he copes with most things. A phone box that can be phoned has always been a slightly absurd idea, and the episode leans into the absurdity without winking at it too hard.

Spoonheads and a very tidy villain

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 they do manage a few moments of real menace before the plot takes over, one of them turning up on Clara’s stairs being the best.

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. I’d happily have watched a whole episode of that office. 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, and I’d have liked a little more of it.

The way the whole thing is staged helps a lot. A lot of the episode takes place on screens, in browser windows and on webcams and in the little loading circles that everybody recognises, and that’s what sells the idea that this could happen to you. It’s an episode about the thing in your pocket, so it keeps showing you your pocket. The plane sequence, with a jet falling out of the sky and being pulled up at the last second, is the one big action set-up and it’s tidy and tense. I’m not sure the villain’s plan makes a huge amount of sense if you pick at it, but it never asks you to pick, and in an episode this quick that’s the right call.

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, a woman I first met in Asylum of the Daleks and again at Christmas, and Jenna-Louise Coleman plays her as someone entirely unimpressed 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’s 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 show is careful that the uploaded expertise only gives her skills, because the nerve and the bluffing 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 build a partnership on, and it gives an otherwise light episode a spine. The motorbike ridden vertically up the side of the Shard 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, and nobody follows it up. Nobody asks who the woman was. It sits there as a loose thread in an episode otherwise busy tidying up, the sort of thing this show plants and then leaves alone for a year, and it’s what makes the Clara mystery feel planned rather than improvised.

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 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. The hacking sections that lead up to it are a bit of a drag too, because watching someone type is never tense however fast the cuts come, and I found my attention drifting whenever the screen filled up with code.

The Great Intelligence gets the shortest end of it, being little more than a place-holder for the season. It speaks, it threatens, and then it’s gone, and the only reason it’s in the episode at all is to remind you the Doctor has a bigger problem waiting. 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, and I wish the rest had been braver about it.

Rating: 3.5/5. I enjoyed this a lot more than the number suggests, and it’s an easy rewatch on a wet Sunday.

Did you feel the third Clara earned the Doctor’s suspicion, or was he reading too much into a woman who just happened to know the number? Tell me in the comments.