This episode really doesn't mess about when it comes to the story and plot. There's nearly no mention to this being a "new" Doctor, or how he's now almost completely different from before. They've done the wise decision of jumping ahead a bit in time in order to establish the feeling that this Doctor and Clara has been on their own fair deal of adventures. That they've gotten to know each other, that they have developed their own rapports and there's no need for dilly-daddling around the non-issue. Leaving the question about what kind of person he is now available to more fun ways of addressing it than just having two characters sit down and talk about it every episode.
There was however some, I felt, developmental problems. There's a new character introduced, Danny Pink, who works alongside Clara at Coal Hill School. They're adding him because there will be no romance or flirting between this Doctor and Clara, so Danny gets to now act as the romantic aspect of the show. This is completely fair, it's been done before in the show, many times. Most recently with Amy and her would-become husband Rory. But they didn't successfully sell Danny Pink as an actual person. He seems a bit too constructed and flat. First of all, they didn't give him much screen time. He was basically there only for the first and last segments of the episode, acting as a kind of grounding element in Clara's life. The little alone time we do get with him is really odd, it feels like they tried to cram far too much backstory into the character right off the bat. Within just a couple of minutes we know that he was a solider in the war, and that he's killed someone who wasn't an enemy soldier. They way they chose to show this was to first have him tell his class that he was a soldier, and when prompted if he'd ever killed someone who wasn't a soldier they did a sudden close-up of his face to reveal a single tear rolling down his face. It was just too much.
The Doctor, though, was just the right amount. From the moment we first see him he's right on key. He feels like he's already been through a couple of years as a character, he acts like he's always had the exact personality he has now. Peter Capaldi just generally sells his incarnation of the Doctor as a real person. The part I still haven't entirely bought into yet is how silly his adventures seem in terms of the apparent seriousness of the character. Don't get me wrong, it's not like he's portrayed even half as serious and moody as the teasers and trailers lead us to believe, but there's still somewhat of an offbeat gap between him and his situations. Into the Dalek is basically a retooling of the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage where people shrunk down in order to be sent into another living being's body, in the case of Into the Dalek a Dalek. It's a silly, b-film concept which I normally love, but I don't quite like it in the context of Capaldi's Doctor. It feels much more like something Smith's Doctor would've happened onto. I can practically hear his Doctor oohing and aahing at the marvelous technology, and how fantastic even the evil Daleks are. Instead we got Capaldi's Doctor walking briskly around lecturing everyone on what everything is.
There are some nice themes in the episode, we get to know the new Doctor a lot more than we got to during the last episode. We get to see him react to an entirely different environment and see how he interacts with new characters and threats. They also help spring what seems to be the overall theme for this new series: "Who is the Doctor?" Not necessarily who he is as in what his name and nationality is, but as in what kind of man he is. Why is he the person he is? Where does his faces come from? What makes him him? It's a common and oftused theme in the Doctor Who franchise, but it's for a good reason. It's always exciting to get to know the Doctor, to peel back even more layers from him. See what's underneath, what has lead him up to this point in time. I think we're in for a treat.
But who is Missy?
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