Welcome to CultBox’s Doctor Who Awards, where we’ll celebrate the best bits of the frankly quite excellent Season 9 by using the word ‘winner’ a lot.
Best death: The Doctor
Ahh, bet you thought it’d be Clara!
Nope. Miss Oswald’s demise in ‘Face the Raven’ might bring a lump to the throat and a quiver to the lip, but when it comes to carking it, it’s The Doctor who outdoes her, one episode later in ‘Heaven Sent’, by dying what must surely be quadrillions of times over a four billion year period. Or whatever the formula for ‘n to the power of a massive hard wall’ is.
Time after time after time after time The Doctor dies, all the while chipping away at the wall.
Of course, technically, he never dies at all, nor does he take four billion years to get to Gallifrey. From his perspective he shows up, punches a sliver of wall, and ‘hey presto!’ he’s through. But for us we know the torture and sacrifice he’s made, and is always willing to make.
Best moment: ‘Sit down and talk!’
Maybe certain recent events make it feel more powerful, but The Doctor’s anti-war speech from ‘The Zygon Inversion’ is a potent piece of rhetoric on a scale that the show tends not to do very often, and certainly not at such length.
Capaldi delivers it with fury and passionate pleading in all the right places, and in doing so may have just created his Doctor’s defining moment in the show:
“You just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You’re not superior to people who were cruel to you. You’re just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole bunch of new cruel people, being cruel to some other people, who’ll end up being cruel to you. The only way anyone can live in peace is if they’re prepared to forgive. Why don’t you break the cycle?”
Best guest star: Maisie Williams
Another season, another galaxy of guest stars, including Paul Kaye, Jaye Griffiths, Steven Robertson, Rebecca Front, Reece Shearsmith and Donald Sumpter.
It’s also well worth noting that Season 9 was the first in Doctor Who history to feature the first openly transgender cast member (Bethany Black) and to cast a deaf actress (Sophie Stone) in a deaf role.
Among the famous faces, Maisie Williams was touted and teased as being important, and turned out to be more important than we thought. Popping up over and over again as the immortal Ashildr/Me, and always slightly more worldly and jaded than the last time, she became a sub-plot of her own. And who knows if it’s the last time we’ve seen her?
Best twist: The Doctor lives, the Doctor dies. Repeat.
The big twist of ‘Heaven Sent’?
We’re watching The Doctor on repeat. It actually gives away the twist right at the start, with the blood on the floor and the hand on the teleport lever, but it takes us most of the episode to circle back round and fully understand it, just like The Doctor has to.
The ‘Clara is a Zygon!’ moment from ‘The Zygon Invasion’ or the pre-titles “My name is Davros” shocker from ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ nearly won this, but for it’s sheer demented ingenuity and integral nature to the plot, The Doctor dying and dying and dying and dying wins. And wins. And wins. And wins.
Best unsolved tease: ‘The Minister of War’
Mentioned in ‘Before the Flood’ as an event of note, the Minister of War could be Season 10’s Big Bad, another story that Toby Whithouse has planned for the show in the future, or something purposely vague dropped in for any writer to pick up at another point. Who knows.
Sounds cool though, doesn’t it? Maybe it’ll feature again in next season’s Doctor Who awards.
> Buy the complete Season 9 box set on DVD on Amazon.
> Buy the complete Season 9 box set on Blu-ray on Amazon.
What was your favourite moment in Season 9? Let us know below…