There are several shows on television featuring ageless, cosmic intelligences who tolerate the inane witterings of lesser beings. There's Rick and Morty, a brilliant cartoon about a mad scientist and his hapless nephew (Thursday, Fox – more on this later). There's The Meaning of Life with Gay Byrne (which returns on Sunday) about a giant paternalistic face who shepherds lost celebrities to sentience. And then, of course, there's Doctor Who (Saturday, BBC 1), who like many healthcare professionals, chooses to endlessly wander time and space rather than work for the HSE.
Peter Capaldi’s grumpy and universe-weary Doctor returns this week into the middle of a nightmarish war zone. There he finds a war-urchin marooned in a field of “handmines”: human hands with eyes in the palms, sticking up through the dirt ready to drag unsuspecting victims to their doom.
“What’s your name?” The Doctor asks.
“My name is Davros,” says the boy.
Oh dear. Davros invented the Daleks, a murderous armada of futuristic wheely bins with limited vocabularies and phallic protuberances, and the Doctor is the archenemy of the Daleks (their old archenemy was “steps” but nowadays they can fly).
“But you can call me Dave,” adds Davros.
We cut to the future, where a scary-faced, robe-wearing baddie named Colony Sarff (to spite his hipster parents, I’m going to call him Colin) is wandering the galaxy seeking the Doctor.
Colin visits a whole three places. He visits a seedy bar filled with incoherent, oddly-shaped weirdoes, much like the cantina in Star Wars or Brogans on Dame Street. He also visits the Shadow Proclamation and the Sisterhood of Karn, which you'll recognise as both Doctor Who institutions and excellent names for 1980s goth bands.
On Earth, the Doctor’s pal Clara (Jenna Coleman) is teaching an English class, but when an extraterrestrial power freezes all planes in mid-flight, she abandons it to investigate (as a public servant, she’s basically unfireable).
It turns out that Missy (the excellent Michelle Gomez) formerly the Master, the Doctor’s psychotic frenemy, has frozen the planes to get Clara’s attention. Rather than, you know, just texting her.
Missy has the Doctor’s last will and testament, she says. The Doctor, once again, is predicting his death. Like a hypochondriac relative, he’s always predicting his death. He’s probably going to be fine.
Missy needs Clara’s help to find and save the doctor. But isn’t Missy supposed to be dead? “Death is for other people, dear,” she says, lightly. So is she a goody now? She nonchalantly kills a few people.
They’re just extras though, which allows Clara to throw Missy impressed, girl-crush glances. Clara clearly needs a strong female role model after years travelling with an old grouch in a flying shed.
They track the Doctor to 1138 AD where he’s is engaged in anachronistic hi-jinks with some peasants, an electric guitar and a tank. He’s wearing sunglasses because he likes to party.
Unfortunately Colin arrives and turns out to be several scary space snakes in an old cloak (life hack: pay for just one cinema ticket!) and an evil henchman of Davros. This makes sense, really. As a bunch of snakes in a cloak, he was never really going to be a physiotherapist or a chef.
Colin magics everyone to a crumbling rural space hospital where Dave is dying. Davros is now his familiar thousand- year-old self, with a melty face and a glowing blue eye in the centre of his forehead, sitting in a high-tech roller-bucket.
He has not aged well. His children are genocidal pepper pots and his best friend is a pile of snakes in a coat. He shows the Doctor footage of his fourth incarnation (Tom Baker) philosophising about whether it’s right to go back in time and kill a tyrant. “Compassion, Doctor, it has always been your greatest indulgence,” cackles Davros/Dave.
Then Missy discovers that they’re really on Skaro, the Daleks’ home world, and there are Daleks everywhere who won’t shut up about their jobs and all the exterminating they plan to do. The Daleks proceed to exterminate/incinerate Missy and Clara. And suddenly we’re back in the introductory scene with the Doctor now pointing his sonic screwdriver at child Davros’s head.
Oh yes! It's a well-paced, time-twisting, space-operatic, self-referencing Doctor Who episode with big sci-fi-concepts and a solid, if unoriginal, moral conundrum at its core: If you could time-travel to kill Hitler, would you do it? I would, but by midweek there are loads of people I'd go back and kill, so I'm probably not the best person to ask.
Headed for madness
When Westlife were decommissioned, it was stripped down and mined for parts. Nicky Byrne, a being of hair and teeth and bonhomie, was repurposed for light entertainment. He helms
Four Heads
(Sunday, RTE 1) a creaky gameshow in which teams must declare how many of their members will get an answer right and lose points if they’re wrong.
One team is captained by Majella O'Donnell, wife of Strictly Come Dancing hoofer Daniel O'Donnell, and made up of her friends and family. The other, led by magical Marty Morrissey, features a unicorn, a mermaid and a centaur.
No it doesn’t. It’s largely made up of confused RTÉ personnel who look as though they entered a door marked “HR” or “Exit” only to find themselves blinking in the lights of a television studio. “Not again,” wail radio personalities Paddy McKenna and Brenda O’Donoghue.
“How many legs do three horses, two Corrs and a spider have?” asks Byrne, keen to accelerate their descent into madness.
Over on Rick and Morty (Thursday, Fox) an advanced race of giant heads (not the RTÉ Authority) has the people of Earth compete in a murderous intergalactic talent show. Then Morty learns something troubling about Rick's space/time vehicle. Rick and Morty really does owe a debt to Doctor Who. Both shows are inventive, high-concept romps featuring distant, time-and-space-bending protagonists and whiny, morally conflicted companions. But while the Doctor struggles with the concept of killing one person to prevent genocide, Rick Sanchez enslaves a mini-universe to power his car.
