Doctor Who recap: 'The Crimson Horror'

We open in Yorkshire, 1893. A man named Edmund kisses a blonde lady farewell. “We must get to the bottom of this dark business,” he explains, “No matter what the cost!” He walks into a room lit bright-red. Too bright. Neon bright. Futuristic bright. A kindly old lady appears. She looks serious. (She is Diana Rigg, British screen legend and — mark your Doctor Who Bingo Board! — a recent guest-star on Game of Thrones.) Her name is Mrs. Gillyflower. She tells to the blonde lady that she’s sorry about the recent death of her husband. There’s a loud scream from the door…and we see the man named Edmund, on a slab, his skin dyed entirely red.

A man with a mustache looks down on the corpse, horrified. The humorous corpsemonger tells him it’s not the first — the people have been calling it “The Crimson Horror.” (The Dramatic Rules of Corpsemongers: In the British tradition, they’re idiot savants — see Hamlet. In the American tradition, they’re scary wise men — see Final Destination.) The mustache man is the dead man’s brother. He pays a visit to the greatest detectives in Victoriana: Madame Vastra and her sidekick/bodyguard/maid/wife Jenny. Turns out the dead man was a newspaperman, and the blonde lady was his pretend-wife in an undercover operation. (How’s that for an immediate download of plot?)

Mr. Mustache took an optogram of his brother’s corpse — printing out a photograph of the last image the dead man saw. Vastra and Jenny develop the photo — and see an image of their old friend The Doctor. From there, we’re off on a very special episode that feels like a Doctor Who spinoff, with Vastra, Jenny, and trusty chauffeur Strax solving mysteries around England. (Possible title: The Silurian Detective. Or The Reptile, The Maid, and The Potato. Or The Adventures of Nurse Strax the Butler in the 19th Century. These are all terrible.) Vastra wanted Jenny to infiltrate Ms. Gillyflower’s community, which is reserved only for perfect physical specimens. Strax cautioned his mistresses: They were going to The North, which, based on the Red Riding trilogy, is sort of the American version of “going to New Jersey.”

Jenny watched Mrs. Gillyflower give a speech about the depravity of the modern world. She demonstrated her daughter as a sad example: A lovely young woman, blinded by her father in a drunken rage. (Fun fact: Ada Gillyflower is played by Rachael Stirling, the actual daughter of Diana Rigg.) Mrs. Gillyflower offered a better life in her utopian community: Sweetville. It was eerily similar to the plot of BioShock Infinite, right down to the line about “the shining city on the hill.” Retro-futuristic sci-fi explorations of the turn-of-the-century Worlds’ Fair utopian instinct: So hot right now!

Strax insisted on a frontal assault: “Casualties could be kept to as little as 80%.” But inside, Jenny opted for the espionage option. She found her way into the match factory, which didn’t seem to be in use: A series of gigantic gramophones were playing loud “Factory” sounds, as a ruse. Meanwhile, Vastra investigated the corpses. She had seen the symptoms before. Long ago — 65 million years ago, specifically. (ASIDE: I like how, despite the veil, Vastra doesn’t seem to mind showing her clearly-not-human face off to random people. Clearly, she knows she can always win people over with her sparkling personality. END OF ASIDE.)

NEXT: Monster Who?

Jenny found her way to a remote, locked room, and discovered a creature being held captive. The creature was, in fact, our beloved Doctor, his skin completely red, his mouth frozen in a state of shock. Ada had kept him captive as a friend, calling him “Monster.” He sure looked the part, stumbling around like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. Jenny led him into the re-light room, while poor blind Ada stumbled around behind them. She told an empty room: “There will be room for us in the New Jerusalem.”

Inside the red room, Ada saw The Crimson Terror: A vat of red liquid that the denizens of Sweetville were dipped into. The Doctor managed to get better, using the healing green light of the Sonic Screwdriver. He was his old self again. He took Jenny in his arms and kissed her; she slapped him; “You have no idea how good that feels!” he exclaimed.

He told her the full story: The flashback played off in mock-old-timey film. (I kind of wish they’d fully committed to the gimmick and made it a silent-movie homage, but this episode was overstuffed as it was.) The Doctor and Clara arrived days earlier, aiming for London and winding up in Yorkshire. Clara was dressed up in Victorian dress; she looked more than ever like Clara Oswin Oswald, the sassy maid from “The Snowmen. (ASIDE: Is The Doctor’s relationship with Clara starting to remind anyone else of Vertigo? END OF ASIDE.)

They investigated Sweetville, entering themselves into the community as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (They were working with dearly-departed Edmund — yet again, this fast-paced episode quickly downloaded a whole episode of plot in just a couple minutes.) In the flashback, we learned that Mrs. Gillyflower had a “silent partner”: Mr. Sweet, who liked to “keep himself to himself.”

They also saw an attractive young couple, who appeared to have been turned into mannequins in a snowglobe. That was the purpose of the Crimson Terror: A process which preserves everyone, in preparation for a new life after the coming apocalypse. The rejects went into the Canal; but the Doctor survived, and was rescued by Ada. The dying Edmund found his way into the Doctor’s cell, which is why his image was imprinted on the corpse’s eye.

Meanwhile, Strax was lost in Yorkshire. He threatened to shoot his horse: “Fourth one this week. And I’m not even hungry.” But a charming young street orphan named Thomas Thomas guided him along. (I assume the name is a reference to an awesome British thing I don’t know about.)

Blind Ada told her mother about the monster. Mrs. Gillyflower decided that she had to hasten her dark plans. Ada begged her for a place in the New Jerusalem. “Do you not yet understand?” her mother said. “Only perfection is good enough for myself and Mr. Sweet.” She left her daughter crying in the cell.

The Doctor needed to go find Clara. Jenny was confused: “Clara’s dead, isn’t she?” The Doctor answered; “It’s complicated.” Sure enough, the Doctor tracked down Clara, preserved inside one of the snowglobes. He tried curing her, but Jenny pulled off her undercover clothes, revealing her all-leather attack gear. She took down a few of them; then Strax appeared, in his space armor, and took down the rest with his cool laser. Vastra was there, too: The whole gang, back together, all confused about the idea that Clara was still alive. “I know who you think she is. But she isn’t. She can’t be.”

NEXT: The secret in the chimneyClara emerged, looking a bit woozy. The Doctor brought her up to speed. Vastra explained that her people had a bitter enemy when they ruled the world: The Red Leech, a parasite that secreted a fatal poison. It had returned in Victorian Times as the Crimson Terror. Clara suggested they investigate the chimney, where they found Mrs. Gillyflower’s rocket: She was planning to poison the air with the poisonous red substance. The old dame even had a cool piano-machine-slash-secret steampunk launch controls.

The Doctor found Ada crying, and took pity on her. He thanked her for saving her life, and insisted that her mother was not to be trusted. “I need you to tell me something,” said the Doctor. “Who is Mr. Sweet?” She could not betray her mother, even after everything. The Doctor insisted that she join his squad: “There’s something you need to know.”

The Doctor and Clara faced off against Mrs. Gillyflower. “Mr. Sweet is always with us,” she explained, noting that she had a very close relationship with her silent partner. Symbiotic, in fact…at which point she revealed a terrifying red lobster-leech-parasite hiding on her chest, with cold black eyes and a wide variety of sharp bits. (It wasn’t quite as gross as the reveal of Kuato in Total Recall, but consider: This was Diana Freaking Rigg.)

“He’s grown fat on the filth that humanity has pumped into the rivers,” she explained — a monster from prehistoric times, brought back to life by modern pollution, who gave her his venom in exchange for sustenance. “Mrs. Gillyflower, in the wrong hands, that venom could destroy the planet.” She held out her hands, and delivered the line of the episode: “Do you know what these are? The wrong hands! Haha!”

She explained her plan: To explode the rocket in the atmosphere and destroy all of humanity. Her new Adam and Eves would step out into “a new golden dawn.” The Doctor changed the subject: “Tell us about Ada.” The story about Ada’s drunk father was all bunk. Mrs. Gillyflower had experimented on her daughter, to discover an anti-toxin — she had left her daughter blinded, covered in scars. Ada stepped in: “You perfidious hag! You piranha! You harpy!” She began to beat her mother with her cane. Meanwhile, Clara took advantage of the moment to cripple the rocket-launch controls with a high-tech weapon: A chair.

Mrs. Gillyflower led her daughter out at gunpoint. The Doctor and Clara raced to catch up with her at the rocket launchpad. (ASIDE: Am I crazy, or did the whole look of this last scene — the tower, the stairs, the person falling to their death — not-so-vaguely resemble a key scene from Vertigo? Could it be that the Doctor somehow brought Clara back to life in three time periods — or rather, inadvertently caused the soul of Clara to inhabit the bodies of three different people? Am I just reaching? END OF ASIDE.) Mrs. Gillyflower made her way to the secondary firing mechanism, and fired the rocket. All was lost — but the Doctor had friends. Vastra and Jenny had removed the red poison.

NEXT: And she would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddling kids“If I can’t take the world with me, you will have to do,” said Mrs. Gillyflower. “Die, you freaks.” In that moment, the explicit theme of the episode came forward. Gillyflower, a eugenics fan of the first order, wanted to create a perfect race; but the Doctor and his friends defeated her, a gang of misfits stronger together than a whole army of fascist supermodels. Strax managed to save the day, having somehow climbed to the top of the chimney — he fired at her, and she fell down the chimney.

Lying on the floor, she was abandoned by the Mr. Sweet symbiote, who had no use for a dying partner. Gillyflower asked Ada to forgive her. Ada: “Never.” Gillyflower, her last words: “That’s my girl.” Parenting! The Doctor considered taking Mr. Sweet back to the Jurassic era; then Ada destroyed the creature with her cane, putting that idea to rest.

Clara scotched the idea of going to London; she’d had enough of Victorian values for awhile. The implication seemed to be that the Doctor was hoping that just being in Victorian London would spark something in his Companion. It was another dead end in the Mystery of Clara. Vastra and Jenny asked him the obvious question: “That girl? Clara? Question mark? You haven’t explained!” The Doctor, smiling: “No. I haven’t.” Is the Mystery of Clara a Mystery that will never be answered? Is that the greatest Mystery of all?

Maybe not. We got an unexpected scene at the end of the episode, with Clara back in the modern age. She looked at the computer — And saw pictures of herself on the Soviet submarine from three episodes ago and in the spooky mansion from two episodes ago. The kids she looks after had been doing some research. “It’s you, isn’t it?” (The boy had found the picture at school — an explanation so silly that there must be more to it, right?)

Clara was going to come up with an excuse…but then she saw a third picture, of herself in Victorian London. “No! I was in Victorian Yorkshire.” The kids looked happy. “Can we have a go! Show us the time machine!” The savvy daughter threatened to tell their dad that their nanny is a time traveler. Looks like the Doctor will be getting a couple more Companions soon.

I got a big kick out of this episode. Who head honcho Steven Moffat is spread so thing nowadays, so I imagine this is as close as we’ll ever get to a Vastra/Jenny/Strax spinoff. (We’ve only got two more episodes to go in this season — next week’s is written by Neil Gaiman, and then there’s the finale by Moffat.) Fellow Who viewers, what did you think about the Victorian shenanigans?

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