“Under the Lake” is the first half of a Series 9 two-parter in which the Twelfth Doctor and Clara arrive at the Drum, an underwater mining base in 2119, and find its crew being stalked by silent, murderous ghosts linked to a mysterious spaceship recovered from the bed of a flooded valley. The review looks at the base-under-siege setup, the design of the ghosts, Cass as the crew’s standout character and the episode’s cliffhanger.
It concludes that the ghosts and the ending are strong, but that the episode is slow and cheap-looking in places, and it is critical of how Clara is being written at this point in the series. It rates the episode 2.5 out of 5.
I’m not sure what it is with the Doctor and water, but it’s starting to feel like he’s doing it on purpose. Six years after the Flood on Mars, “Under the Lake” drops him and Clara into a flooded mining base at the bottom of a Scottish valley and fills the corridors with ghosts. It’s a straight base-under-siege story, the kind of thing this show has been making since the black-and-white days, and on paper that’s exactly my sort of episode. It didn’t frighten me anything like as much as The Waters of Mars did, though it was still enough to send my kids scurrying upstairs and leave me watching the end on my own. I’ll be honest up front, though. This isn’t one of the better episodes of the series, and while there’s a good idea buried in it, getting to the good bit is a slog.
The Drum is an underwater mining facility in 2119, sitting on top of what used to be a town before the valley was flooded. Its crew have found a spaceship on the bottom, and the inside is covered in writing that even the TARDIS can’t translate. Anyone who looks at it seems to come away with the symbols burned onto the back of their eyes, which is a lovely creepy touch. Shortly afterwards the base’s commander turns up dead, and then he’s back, drifting down the corridors with empty eye sockets and his mouth moving silently. The Doctor flatly refuses to believe in ghosts, having never met one in all his travels, and Peter Capaldi plays him as secretly delighted that he might have to change his mind. By the time another member of the crew has joined the dead, he’s run out of arguments.
The ghosts are the best thing in it
The ghosts themselves are genuinely good, and they’re the reason the episode works at all. The design is simple and effective, pale faces with black holes where the eyes should be, and the fact that their mouths keep moving turns out to be a clue rather than a gimmick. They only come out when the base switches to its night cycle, which gives the crew a rule to plan around and gives the story a shape. What I wasn’t expecting was that they could open doors and pick things up, which is a nice twist on the usual idea that a ghost can’t touch you. The plan the Doctor comes up with, luring them into a Faraday cage so they can’t get back out, is proper old-school Doctor Who problem-solving too.
The best character on the base is Cass, the deaf commander who takes over after the first death. She lip-reads, her colleague Lunn interprets for her in sign language, and the show never once treats her deafness as a problem to be solved. It also turns out to be the key to the whole thing, because she’s the one who can read what the ghosts are silently mouthing over and over: the Dark, the Sword, the Forsaken, the Temple. I also enjoyed the Doctor reading his apologies off a set of cue cards Clara has written for him, one for every kind of social situation he’s bad at. It’s a daft joke, but it tells you exactly where this Doctor is at.
Cardboard and Clara
Where it falls down for me is the look of the thing. The alien ship at the heart of the story is just too cardboard, and there’s no weight or realism to it at all. I know Doctor Who has never really been about the special effects, and I’ve forgiven it a lot of wobbly sets over the years, but they generally make an effort, and here I felt they simply hadn’t bothered. Compare it with the base in The Impossible Planet, which felt like people had lived and worked there for years. When the one thing everybody in the episode is staring at looks like a school play, it’s hard to stay scared.
Then there’s Clara, and I’m afraid this is where I part company with a lot of people. She seems to be making a really big effort at the moment, perhaps too big an effort, and she’s charging into danger as if it’s a game she’s bored of losing. More and more it feels as though the Doctor is her companion rather than the other way round. Clara’s never been my favourite, but I’ve never actively disliked a companion before, and that’s very much how I’m starting to feel about her. I know I’m probably setting myself up here, and they’re surely writing her this way for a reason. She’ll turn out to be some sort of god, or have to sacrifice herself to save the universe, but right now I don’t like her.
A cliffhanger that earns the wait
The last ten minutes are where it finally comes together. The base floods to shut down an overheating reactor, the Doctor and Clara get separated, and he realises the only way to find out what’s really going on is to travel back to when the ship first arrived, before the flood. See what I did there? He leaves in the TARDIS promising to come back for her, and a few moments later Clara looks out of the window and sees a new ghost drifting in the water. It’s the Doctor. That’s a properly nasty cliffhanger, and it’s exactly the kind of image this show does better than anyone.
There was a nice bit of real-world timing to it as well. Only days before this aired, NASA announced evidence of liquid water flowing on Mars, which made the comparisons with the Flood feel fresher than they had any right to. It had me thinking about how often this show comes back to water as the thing that gets you, the thing you can’t live without and can’t keep out. The Magician’s Apprentice kicked the series off with a much bigger bang, and by comparison this one feels like it’s still clearing its throat. It gets there in the end, but I wanted a lot more of the tension from the last ten minutes spread across the first forty.
Rating: 2.5/5. A decent ghost idea and a cracking cliffhanger, stuck inside an episode that looks cheap and takes too long to get going. Cass is the best thing in it, and Clara is the thing I’m enjoying least in the series right now. It’s ok, but this show has done this format far better, and it’s done it with water before.