Doctor Who: Season 9 Episode 6 Liveblog

 The Girl Who Lived

Doctor Who, Series 9 Episode 6 of 12

By the Tripwire LiveBlog Team

“A bit dark in here…?”

Or “The Second One With Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams.” Okay, so now we know that Ms Williams (Ashildr) is (effectively) immortal, is carrying another of the Mire technology chips that will allow her to gift another mortal with living forever. Oops, sorry, SPOILER ALERT! On the other hand, if you’re reading this before you saw last weeks episode, why? And babies have their own language. And it’s poetic. And, of course, the Doctor speaks it… How would he not? We learned that this Doctor chose his face from Caecilius in the Season 4 episode The Fires of Pompeii, featuring one P Capaldi, where Tennant’s Doctor had a right fit at Donna (cue blubbing) about not changing the future. We’ve discussed this, and we think it’s a heavy-handed pointer that “NO GOOD WILL COME OF THIS!“

But perhaps Steven Moffat is being subtle. It could happen. Is Maisie’s character something to do with Davros’ “prophecy of the hybrid”? Duh Duh Duhhh! Could be! Apparently this hybrid is the worst thing ever. Worse than the episode when the Doctor towed Earth back into place, with no real effects on the population, wildlife, oceans, et cetera. Well, we’ll see, but I think we can see the shape of this season’s story arc.  Join us here at 20.20pm as we liveblog today’s episode!

20.20

The ground is snowy and the lens is out of focus. Horses approach. A fat man in a carriage shouts at a highwayman a bit. Spooky yellow eyes appear in the bushes. Scream. The Tardis appears. The Doctor has a stupid gadget, it’s beeping, he climbs in the carriage, wackiness ensues. The Doctor is sassing the highwayman. Beepy thing beeps more. It’s in the chest, whatever it is. They argue wackily over who will be robbing the carriage. The carriage drives away. Oh what fools they are!

Dramatic Reveal: The highwayman is Maisie!

20.25

The Doctor chides Maisie a bit over being bad now. Maisie can do a man voice, via the magic of practice. The Doctor has a mission. A mystery mission. Maisie has tragically forgotten her own history, The Doctor gets all sad. She now calls herself “Me” in a kind of rip-off of Little My from the Moomins.

Me leads the Doctor to Me’s house, and also makes all my sentences look like a caveman wrote them. Me is glad that Clara isn’t here. I mean, the me that is writing this, not the Maisie Me.

She has a house full of loot but does stuff for adventure etc. She tells the Doctor about all her badass adventures through history. She was at all the important history stuff. The Doctor is sad that she is all tough and killy now.

20.30

It’s getting all maudlin about how Me-sie has a finite memory and forgets her own life, which I think isn’t how stuff works. Look they’ve retrodden the whole “being immortal is sad” business so many times now that you can just make up the dialogue yourself and you’ve got the gist. It’s so super sad guys, for real.

The Doctor starts reading her journals and it’s all full of sad stuff about how her non-immortal babies died of the plague and whatnot. Right now I’m just making an expansive gesture of sadness in real life.

While sad stuff is happening, Me-sie has gone outside and is talking to a glowy-eyed forest lion-Chewbacca-thing. She says she’ll get the stuff from the cart that the Doctor wanted.

20.35

She comes back inside and the Doctor is all sad and whatnot and lectures her about how she can’t pretend to not be all sad about the past and such. I think he’s sad that a woman who has lived for like 300 years is way better at handling being immortal than he is, given the amount of time he spends whining.

They’re doing a heist now I think. The forest lion-Chewbacca makes a clicky noise in its throat because all aliens do that. They’re robbing a house easily because robbing stuff was easy in the past because all the locks were shit. Me-sie busts out some wicked sass on the Doctor and it’s pretty funny. Her crime-name is “THE KNIGHTMARE” like the old TV show from my childhood.

The Doctor gets out the beepy thing, which Me-sie tells him off for, because it’s night in a quiet house. They find the thing they wanted. It’s super purple costume jewellery. The something of something,  I wasn’t listening, sorry. I’m pretty sure the Doctor left the beepy thing behind. Or has larger pockets than you think.

They’ve woken up an old man in a comedy hat. He asks for his blunderbuss and then enters the room with a pistol. You can’t get the help. Me-sie wants to shoot him, the Doctor is being a total wimp about it.

20.40

Me-sie guilts the Doctor a bit about all his dead companions, like happens every week. They escape through the chimney and run into some rival bandits in the forest. Cockerney bandits from the East End (of the forest). They have some banter, but the Doctor hates banter and also puns. They banter with puns. It’s actually pretty funny, and the Doctor gets accused of being Me-sies dad. It’s actually funny, I’m not being sarcastic.

They overpower the other bandits, and the Doctor gets all salty about Me-sie’s killy ways.

20.45

Back at the house the Doctor is confronted by Grayson Perry. Grayson Perry is Me-sie’s butler. She’s wearing a nice dress now. The Doctor says he won’t take Me-sie on as a companion because she’s not a manic pixie girl.

Suddenly Lion-O appears! It’s seriously a fucking lion in a king outfit. He’s doing a Klingon voice *wanking hand gesture*. The Lion and Me-sie have a plan to open a portal by killing people. The Doctor is all salty about it, surprisingly. They’re going to kill Grayson Perry to go to space.

Then the lion breathes fire, yes seriously.

20.50

A guilting battle happens. Me-sie is mad at the Doctor for leaving her behind and always leaving stuff behind. The Doctor is guilting Me-sie about not being nice anymore. It’s all tragic and Frankensteiny.

Luckily to lighten the mood some comedy Welsh guards appear. That other bandit guy is being hung, now she’s going to use the eye of purple costume jewellery to use his death to open the space hole. The comedy guard shoots a pistol at the ceiling. Grayson Perry comes in and asks if it was the door. *Sad trombone*

Me-sie tricks the guards into arresting the Doctor, although he’s apparently wanted already and there’s a poster with his name on? Anyway he bribes the guards with thirty pounds, because inflation jokes are funny.

At the gallows, the comedy bandit is doing a comedy routine.

20.55

The Doctor is riding a horse very intensely. It’s a race against time. How long can comedy bandit hold out against the impending hanging? Apparently that is how hangings work. They hang you when the audience stops laughing at your jokes.

The fucking lion is wandering about in a woman’s bonnet and shouting about hangings. It’s awful.

The Doctor appears and does some comedy with comedy bandit and pardons the comedy bandit. But Me-sie touches him with the purple gem and it kills him and opens a space portal, oh well. Meteors come out of the space portal for some reason. Turns out the fucking lion was a traitor and planning an invasion and he starts breathing fire on everyone.

Me-sie is pretty sad about this and suddenly she cares again, because meteors hitting a barn is much worse than the black death or any of the other jading events she’s had.

21.00

Turns out the way to fix it is to revive Comedy Bandit (yes he deserves capitalisation now). Me-sie uses the second magic square from the last episode to revive him. It fixes everything, and the fucking lion even explodes for no reason as the portal closes.

The Doctor makes up some shit about how Comedy Bandit won’t be immortal because of something, something, something. The Doctor says mayflies are much smarter than humans, because they never eat and fuck all the time I guess. They talk about immortality stuff more, it is terrible.

She understands that she can’t ever be his companion because something, something, something, stupid, stupid, stupid. They whisper a bunch and she talks about how she’ll go around cleaning up the Doctor’s messes, for some fucking reason. I want to die.

21.05

The Doctor plays sad guitar on the TARDIS. Clara is back, and she’s chirpy as shit. The Doctor helped a child with some homework. The child has rewarded him with a selfie. But lo, what in the background lurks? It’s Me-sie raising a fucking eyebrow. The Doctor dramatically emotes at this. Clara asks him what the deal is. He brushes it off. I mean, Clara was in the last episode and knows Me-sie too, she could just use her damn eyes.

End of episode.

21.10

Next episode: The world is invaded by walking genital warts.

I don’t know who thought this episode was any good, or even worth filming, or worth showing after filming, but they were very, very wrong. It seems to have been written by the writers all shitting into a bucket. I’m going to go and have a shower, see you next week.

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