Doctor Who Series Blog – A Town Called Mercy

Doctor Who reinvented two things last Saturday. Firstly, the classic ‘A Town Called Malice’, and secondly, it bravely took on the spaghetti western.

The premise of this episode was a little less fast-paced than previous episodes. Rather than being chased by dinosaurs, Daleks and robots, the Doctor and the Ponds were confined in a town called Mercy (hence the title, clever huh?). Outside prowled a rather angry cyborg, a half human half machine creature with an eye that will probably feature on the next iPhone and an arm straight out of Tony Stark’s laboratory. But I digress. The cyborg demanded that the Doctor be brought to him or he would destroy the entire town.

From the beginning of the episode, everything appears to be pretty clearly laid out. Inside the town are the good guys, the innocent American bystanders, stranded in their quaint little Clint Eastwood film. Haunting the hills surrounding the town is a phantom creature who can disappear into thin air. Seems like a fairly straightforward scenario, doesn’t it? The Doctor should swoop in, wave his sonic screwdriver at the cyborg and save the day. Not so fast. In typical Doctor Who style, our assumptions are thrown back in our faces like a startling slap with a wet fish. It turns out that there is another in the town who goes by the title ‘doctor’, Kahler-Jex, played by Adrian Scarborough. Jex has crash-landed nearby and was mercifully taken in by the people of Mercy. Although, an innocent victim he ain’t.

This is where things get interesting. Jex has had rather a sordid past. On his home planet he helped engineer cyborgs so that his people could win a bitter war they were fighting. Kind of like growing GM crops, just with bazookas instead. He comes to Mercy as a doctor, curing the comparatively primitive inhabitants of diseases, as well as providing rudimentary electricity to a town in an era before it was invented. If a lot of this sounds similar to the Doctor, then it should. Both are aliens, come from far distant planets that are incredibly more technologically advanced than Earth can comprehend. Jex can make electricity out of his ship that appears to only be an oversized egg. The Doctor can solve hugely technical problems with a screwdriver and a green light. However, both have a horrifyingly brutal past. We may like to think of the Doctor as the universe’s Prince Charming, but he has also sent a lot of people and creatures to their deaths.

Series seven is attacking the way we think about the Doctor. It is trying to disengage us from a fairytale ideal and point us in the direction of a character that is far from perfect. The Doctor has struggled with this throughout Moffat and Davies’ reinvention of the classic series. In this episode, he is confronted with a mirror image, a man who has done evil, but hopes to reform and do good for the universe. It’s interesting then, that when the good Doctor discovers Jex’s blotted past, he throws him out of the town towards the hands of the cyborg. Hypocritical too, I might add, since the Doctor has been hunted by various enemies who he has wronged, yet always manages to escape. Only Amy is able to persuade him that doing so would make him devoid of emotion. In the end, however, Jex faces the ghosts of his past by blowing himself and his space-ship up to save the town – an admirable gesture seeing as he was the one that brought such grievances to the town. However, if Jex parallels the Doctor, it seems highly unlikely that the Doctor would do the same.

Another theme developing in series seven is a distancing between the Doctor and the Ponds. Every episode so far has ended with reluctance on the part of the Ponds to continue travelling with the Doctor. Amy asks that he come back in a few months, rather than jumping at the chance to fly into the time vortex one more time. More and more, Amy and Rory are trying to divide their lives between the reality of their domestic home lives and the surreal life of being the Doctor’s companion. The next episode sees a violent combining of the two, with the Doctor’s antics directly affecting the ordinary lives of Mr and Mrs Pond.