The best thing about turning on Doctor Who every week is that you never know what you’re going to get. Maybe it’ll be a historical romp; maybe it’ll be a futuristic alien adventure. This show tries on genres the way a regenerated Doctor tries on clothes. Sometimes it’s horrifying, sometimes it’s hilarious, and sometimes it makes you question the very nature of your reality.
And then there are episodes like “It Takes You Away,” which try to be a little bit of everything all at once.
Written by Ed Hime, the season’s penultimate episode sets itself up as a modern-day Scandinavian noir, where unseen monsters stalk the countryside and a family has barricaded itself in an isolated cabin. Then, it takes a hard left into alien territory, with flesh-eating moths and creepy, dripping caves. And then it takes another left into alternate universes, meditations on grief, and dead doppelgängers. Also, there’s a talking frog who’s basically an entire sentient universe.
It’s enough to give you tonal whiplash. There are several misdirects throughout the episode, and “It Takes You Away” ends in a very different place than where it started. There are a lot of ideas and pieces to juggle, and some of them are inherently stronger than others. Still, that sort of shoot-for-the-moon ambition is what makes Doctor Who so special — and, in all honesty, it’s what this season has sort of been missing. So far, the Thirteenth Doctor’s run has been marked by fairly standard stories: Here’s a historical figure, here’s an alien planet, here’s some scary stuff the Doctor has to run away from. It’s been fun, but it hasn’t necessarily captured the sense of large-scale awe and wonder that makes Doctor Who unlike anything else on television. Which is why I’ll always applaud a strange, ambitious episode like “It Takes You Away,” even if it swings for the fences and falls a little bit short.
Initially, the episode seems fairly straightforward: The Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan have landed in modern-day Norway, where the trees are tall and the fjords are beautiful. Soon, however, they realize that something’s amiss: There’s a young blind girl named Hanne (Ellie Wallwork) living all alone in a boarded-up cabin, and she’s convinced that there are monsters lurking outside. Her mother is dead, her father’s gone missing, and when the Doctor and company hear strange, unearthly noises outside, they settle in for a showdown with these unseen creatures.
Or not. It doesn’t take long before Graham discovers a strange mirror in Hanne’s house, which doesn’t show reflections. (“We’d know if we were vampires, right?” Ryan asks.) Graham, Yaz, and the Doctor peek their heads through and discover a portal to another realm, a creepy cave system inhabited by flesh-eating moths and a grumpy alien named Ribbons (Kevin Eldon). Suddenly, what’s outside the cabin seems a lot less scary than whatever’s been hiding inside this mirror.
But then, Ribbons reveals that the cave is actually something known as an Anti-Zone, a sort of buffer area between two universes. So what’s in the other universe? Well, it looks like a fairly pleasant version of ours: This is where Hanne’s father Erik has been hiding out, tricking his daughter by pretending there are monsters outside to get her to stay inside the house while he’s away. He’s been sneaking away to this other universe because here, his late wife Trine is still alive. Sure, we’re meant to have some sympathy for Erik, but he also might be one of the worst dads in the Whoniverse. Not only does he abandon his blind daughter to think that he’s dead, but he traumatizes her and crafts this entire illusion of monsters to terrify her. Not your finest moment, Erik.
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