The Rings of Akhaten: The Most Important Leaf in Human History

This is the most divisive episode of the series so far, 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’s entirely sincere about something the show usually only gestures at.

It’s also the episode where Clara finally gets to be a companion rather than a puzzle, which matters after a run of stories that kept her at arm’s length. The rest of this piece is mostly me trying to work out why a plot I can’t defend still got to me. Fair warning, I keep circling back to the leaf. I’ll get to the leaf. What I can say up front is that I came out of it moved and a bit annoyed at myself for being moved, because every time my head said the plot didn’t hold together, something else in the hour was quietly doing its job. That’s an odd place for a review to start, but it’s honest, and it’s the reason the score below isn’t lower.

A leaf

It opens not on an alien world but in a suburban street, across about twenty years, in the best sequence the series has given us yet. 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, and 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. It makes sense of everything about her: the nannying, the restlessness, the not-quite-leaving. And it does it without a single line of explaining, which is the thing I keep wishing this show would trust itself to do more often. I’d honestly have watched twenty minutes of it, and then the Doctor turns up and we’re off. The cut from that quiet street to a bustling alien marketplace is jarring in the best way, a reminder of how much room this show has when it’s willing to use it. It sets a bar the rest of the episode doesn’t quite clear, though it gets closer than its reputation suggests.

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.

It means the whole society runs on a version of the thing the episode is about, too. 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. Clara’s friendship with her is the warmest thing in the hour. When Clara hands over her mother’s ring, the one keepsake she has, as payment for the ride to the temple, and then has to watch it disappear into someone else’s hands, it’s a better argument for the episode’s theme than any speech that comes later. The Doctor gets it back for her at the end, quietly, without mentioning it, and that’s about twenty seconds I’d happily keep.

The song that holds a god asleep

It should be said that this is the most musical episode Doctor Who has ever made, and that’s central to how it works. The whole society runs on a lullaby sung continuously for millennia by a rotating priesthood, passed from Queen of Years to Queen of Years, holding a god asleep. 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. The score does an enormous amount of the storytelling, and if the episode works for you at all, it’ll 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, which feels like a waste when the rest of the hour is so willing to linger on the market. I’d have swapped a few minutes of moped chase for more of that, because a priesthood that hands a child the job of keeping a god asleep and calls it an honour deserves more than a couple of scenes of dread. The performances sell it better than the script does, with the masked figures standing absolutely still while everyone around them panics. Mind you, the moped racing through space is silly enough that I enjoyed it in spite of myself, and the sheer cheek of it fits an episode that’s happy to be a bit ridiculous in the name of feeling something.

The sleeper, and the leaf again

The plot proper is where it wobbles. The Old God wakes up. It’s a large angry face in a star, and it wants to be fed, and the show can’t quite decide whether it’s 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’s 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, and 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, which stung after watching him lose the Ponds in The Angels Take Manhattan. 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, although it’s asking for a lot of goodwill and it doesn’t build much of a plot to earn it. I can see why plenty of people switched off the moment the face in the star started shouting, and I can’t really argue with them, I just think the last ten minutes pay back the patience. If you came for a clever puzzle you’ll leave disappointed, and if you came for a feeling you might not.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok, and I’m glad it exists, but I’m in no hurry to put it on again.

Did the leaf work for you as an ending, or is a life that never happened too abstract to beat a god? Tell me in the comments.