Doctor Who “Time Heist” review
Hello again! I’m Cariad, and here’s the latest Doctor Who episode in this eighth season: “Time Heist”. Last week’s episode “Listen” was my favourite of the season so far, so let’s see if this one is another hit!
Synopsis of Time Heist
Clara is at home getting ready for a date, while the Doctor hangs around and tries to convince her to spend the day with him instead. Just as she’s leaving, though, the TARDIS’s phone rings.
The Doctor answers it, and he and Clara immediately find themselves in a dark room, sitting at a table with two other people who have no memory of how they got there. A recorded message plays from the Doctor, saying that he agreed to a memory wipe of his own free will, and the same message plays from Clara and the other two people at the table — Psi, a computer-augmented human, and Saibra, a mutant human.
A briefcase on the table opens itself, and a screen inside plays a recorded message from a shadowed figure calling himself “The Architect”, who tells them about the Bank of Karabraxos; an impregnable bank, defended with lethal force, for the universe’s wealthiest clients. He tells the Doctor, Clara, Psi and Saibra that he needs them to break in and rob it, and that the briefcase contains everything they’ll need. They grab what they can and Psi downloads the data into this augmented brain.
A security team from the bank start pounding on the door and trying to get in. The Doctor and his team see a second door, so they escape through it. Meanwhile, the security team is called by Ms Delphox, the head of security for the bank. They inform her that the “intruders” have escaped. Ms Delphox decides that she’ll need “The Teller” to track them down.
Back outside the bank, The Doctor and his team stop running to figure out who everyone is. Psi had himself computer-augmented because he’s a criminal, with experience of robbing banks. Saibra’s mutant genes allow her to take the form of any living creature she touches, which she demonstrates by touching Clara and appearing exactly like her.
The Doctor realises that one of the items from the case is a DNA sample; Saibra could touch it, appear as the sample’s donor, and then she’d presumably pass the biometric tests to get inside the bank.
She touches it, and appears as an older man with grey hair. She takes the lead, and walks them all into the bank. The lobby is busy with other clients, and as they enter, an alarm sounds and all the doors except one are closed and locked. From the one open door, Ms Delphox emerges with The Teller behind her; a large alien, shackled in chains and restraints. She ignores the Doctor’s group and approaches one of the other clients, and tells him that The Teller has detected his guilt, his account will be deleted and his mind wiped. The Teller steps forward and, using his telepathic powers, he wipes the ex-client’s mind.
The Doctor and his team enter a private deposit booth to access the DNA donor’s stored belongings. With the door locked behind them, Saibra passes the biometric test to access the lock box. They open it, and inside is a bomb. Psi shows them a schematic of the bank which he’d downloaded from the briefcase, so they can try to figure out what The Architect wants them to do with the bomb. The room beneath them is a service corridor, and the floor itself is relatively thin; the Doctor believes that The Architect wants them to blow up the floor so they can descend into the bank. He sets the bomb in the centre of the room, and they all press themselves against the walls to escape the blast. However, there isn’t a blast; it’s a dimensional shift bomb, which blew a hole in the floor and shifted the debris to a parallel plane. They escape through the hole, into the bank’s service corridors.
Meanwhile, Ms Delphox and her security team realise that the man which The Teller wiped wasn’t the intruder they were intending to find. They decide to investigate the four clients who just locked themselves in a private deposit booth. However, just before the guards break in, the Doctor reverses the bomb which replaces the floor exactly as it was, leaving the room empty and undamaged,.
Deep inside the bank, they find a second briefcase from The Architect. Inside are six small devices which the Doctor grabs. A security alarm sounds, so they escape through a ventilation shaft and find themselves in The Teller’s room. He’s in hibernation, but he detects their thoughts and they try to run, but Saibra is caught in his telepathic grasp. She’s in agony and she can’t escape, so the Doctor gives her one of the devices from the briefcase; he says it’s an atomic shredder, a quick and painless death. She activates it, and she disappears.
They escape through another ventilation shaft, just as Ms Delphox and her guards break into the room. She tells her guards to release The Teller into the corridors to find the intruders himself.
Meanwhile, The Doctor finds another briefcase from The Architect. It contains a digital package which Psi downloads, and he instantly knows how to open the bank’s vault. There’s also a card with codes on, which Clara takes. The three of them hear The Teller approaching, so the Doctor and Clara split up to lead it away from Psi while he breaks the vault door’s encryption.
Clara hides in a corridor and tries to keep her mind blank to not attract The Teller, but he finds her and starts probing her mind. Psi hears it, and he thinks of a plan to save her; he accesses his memories of every criminal in his augmented memory and thinks about them, and their criminal activities, and their guilt. The Teller leaves Clara to follow the guilt it can detect, and it follows Psi until he can’t escape, and he uses an atomic shredder to kill himself.
The Doctor and Clara run to the vault door. Psi had successfully broken the encryption, but one of the locks has physically malfunctioned and won’t open. While they try to think what to do, they hear a storm break overhead. A solar storm is bombarding the planet and interfering with its electrical systems, which triggers the final lock to open and the vault door swings out.
Clara realises that the codes on the card she took from the briefcase correspond to deposit boxes in the vault. They follow the codes to find a neophyte circuit which could’ve restored Psi’s deleted memories, and gene suppressant which would’ve cured Saibra of her mutation. The final direction is to the private vault, but before they reach it, The Teller finds them and stops them.
They’re taken to Ms Delphox’s office, where she leaves two guards to execute them. However, the guards are revealed to be Psi and Saibra; the “atomic shredders” were actually teleporters to a ship in orbit.
They escape down to the private vault, and break in. Inside, they find Director Karabraxos herself — who looks exactly like Ms Delphox. It turns out that Karabraxos had clones of herself made to staff her banks, since they’re the only people she can really trust.
When the Doctor realises how much Karabraxos hates her own clones because they’re just like her, and he realises how much he hates The Architect because he’s just like him, he starts to understand what might be happening. Karabraxos gets up to escape from the solar storm, but the Doctor gives her a piece of paper with his phone number on, and he implores her to call him when she’s old and full of regret for today. She takes it and leaves, leaving them all to The Teller.
The Doctor believes there’s a way for him to get his memories back, and he submits himself to The Teller. All of his memories are uncovered, including his lost ones; he remembers the phone call at the TARDIS, and he remembers it was from an old, dying Karabraxos, who regrets her past and wants to change it. He remembers finding Psi and Saibra and architecting the plan to break into the bank by leaving clues for himself.
When The Teller finds the memory of why the Doctor came, he breaks the telepathic link. He knows the Doctor came to rescue him, and his partner who was locked in the vault by Karabraxos to guarantee his cooperation.
They all escape from the vault, and take The Teller, his partner, Psi and Saibra back to their home worlds.
The Good
This was a relatively smarty-warty timey-wimey episode! It wasn’t perfect, but it was great to see time travel and knowledge of past events used in such a different way!
It was also great to see some racial diversity in the bank’s clientèle. It would’ve been so easy and predictable for the bank to be populated only by old white guys in suits, so I appreciate that they took a more interesting route.
The sound design in this episode was particularly good! The sound of The Teller’s telepathic probing was astonishing, and the subtle visual effects surrounding it added a real sense of energy and tension. I loved it!
The Interesting
Today, on planet Earth, a “teller” is a person who works at a bank and deals with customer transactions face-to-face. They’re also the person most likely to spot a fraudulent transaction before it occurs; for example, by checking if notes are counterfeit. This is also what The Teller in the episode does!
The voice of the security computer was Kevan Brighting, who also provided the voice of the narrator in The Stanley Parable!
The Bad
Here’s some free advice for “the most secure bank in the universe”: there’s no point putting all that biometric security on your doors when every room is connected by metre-wide ventilation shafts with grates which aren’t even screwed into the wall. Good grief.
I’m getting a bit bored of the “Clara fighting against her instincts” theme in this season:
- In “Deep Breath” it was dangerous for her to breathe.
- In “Into the Dalek” it was dangerous for her to not breathe.
- In “Listen” it was dangerous for her to look.
- In this episode, it was dangerous for her to think.
How about some predictions for the rest of the season? It wouldn’t surprise me if we had episodes where Clara can’t move, sleep, eat or pee. Well, probably not the last one. But still, these dangers cease to be scary as soon as they’re a predictable check-list for the rest of the season.
So… Ms Delphox tells the Doctor and Clara that The Teller will wipe their memories and put their bodies on display to deter other intruders, and then immediately after that she takes The Teller away and tells her guards to kill them. Huh? Why did she change her mind? What does she want? Them dead, or just brain-dead?
The Ugly
Of course the first person to die in the episode was the black man. Of course the first person to die in the Doctor’s team was the black woman. It was great to see some diversity in the bank’s lobby, but it does feel like the victims are a bit predictable.
In Conclusion
…meh.
It was a neat idea for a story, but the execution held back and wasn’t exciting. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out how the Doctor planted all the briefcases, and I just can’t believe that this was the best way to rescue The Teller. Really? Really?
The plot just didn’t fit together beautifully, and a really great time-travel story needs to read like poetry. I’m disappointed, because the idea could’ve been developed into a much better story.
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