Doctor Who - Recap: Bank On It

Credit: BBC

As with the best brain-teasing Doctor Who episodes, much of the genius of "Time Heist" is in the big twist at the end. Here, The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) receives a call on the TARDIS phone and suddenly finds himself and Clara (Jenna Coleman) transported to the Bank of Karabraxos, an impregnable private bank for the galaxy's wealthiest clients. They're in a room with two complete strangers, augmented humans Psi (Jonathan Bailey) and Saibra (Pippa Bennett-Warner), with no memory of how they came to be there. However, they find recordings of themselves verbally agreeing to have their memories wiped, along with a set of instructions from a mysterious figure known only as "The Architect": in short, they're going to have to rob this impregnable bank, or end up incinerated. Or worse, turned into brain "soup" by The Teller, a mysterious alien creature who is the last of his kind, and whose incredible mind-reading abilities are used as a security measure for the bank to detect guilt in potential robbers. Of course, the story is less about the actual "how" of the heist than about the "why" of it. Who is The Architect? What are they stealing from the vaults? And to what end? The eventual answer casts "Time Heist" in an entirely new light, and practically makes a re-watch a must, as this becomes an episode that is instantly rewarding. Very rarely has an episode ever changed my perception of it in such a short time-span, but I was admittedly won over by "Time Heist".

Credit: BBC

Much of my initial issue with "Time Heist" was the same problem I've had with some of the other episodes this season so far, which is that the story often remains distressingly vague for long stretches. I can understand maintaining a certain aura of mystery, but there's something unnerving about the show expecting us to care about something as vague as this mission. I suppose our investment is supposed to be driven by the question of what they're here to get and why they're here to get it, but much of the episode is instead taken up with The Doctor, Clara, Saibra, and Psi running through the halls in a desperate attempt to escape The Teller. After a while, scenes just start to blend together and lose their sense of urgency, even as they're chased by one of the more terrifying creatures on this show in recent memory. In fact, one of the few things making this dreary first half worthwhile is the background we get on The Doctor and Clara's companions...

Credit: BBC

Psi is a cyborg of sorts who is no stranger to crime, due to his career as a hacker and a thief. However, he has a bit of pathos mixed in, as he's manually erased all memory of his friends and family in order to keep them safe, since one of the penalties of being caught while attempting to rob the Bank of Karabraxos is the incarceration of one's next of kin. So Psi is essentially a man on his own, who knows he has people he loves out there somewhere, but who can never bring himself to be with them again. Saibra, meanwhile, is a woman with the ability to take on the form of anyone she touches due to a "holographic shell" effect that allows her to adapt to a person's appearance through DNA contact. Unfortunately, this also means she can't be intimate with anyone, since anyone who touches her will only see themselves staring back at them. This leaves Saibra every bit as alone as Psi, and it shouldn't be a surprise to learn that their reasons for participating in the heist are directly related to their respective loneliness: The Doctor discovers that Psi is looking for a device that will restore his memories, while Saibra is after a jar of genetic material that will alter her chemistry and make her a normal person. On the one hand, I can understand why we couldn't have this information up front, since the characters have had their memories wiped. On the other hand, it would have helped in making their "deaths" feel more poignant. Of course, since they're not really dead, this is admittedly a bit of a moot point.

Credit: BBC

And so we reach the conclusion, as The Doctor comes face-to-face with Karabraxos herself and discovers that she's been using clones of herself to ensure the security of the facility. It's this that prompts The Doctor to realize that he's the Architect, and that he engineered the entire Time Heist after convincing Karabraxos in the present to call him in the future, when she's old and full of regret. But why? The Doctor uses the Teller's mind-reading capabilities to restore the memories he had erased, and we learn that decades from now, Karabraxos is on her deathbed with guilt that weighs heavily on her soul. Her only solution is to call The Doctor to plan the heist and rescue whatever is in the vault back in the Bank of Karabraxos in the past. And the contents of that vault? Well, it turns out the Teller is not the last of his kind, as the vault contains the last female of the Teller's species. Karabraxos had been overcome with guilt over allowing a species to fall into extinction, and asked The Doctor to reunite The Teller with its mate to allow for the continuation of its species. Maybe it's quaint, maybe it's overly sentimental, but I thought this was a wonderful little twist, as it turns out this isn't a heist but a rescue mission. It casts the entire episode preceding it into a new light, and completely changed my mind about the episode and its narrative merits. This wasn't a vapid, meaningless mission. It was about the preservation of an entire ancient race. And that's perhaps the most meaningful mission The Doctor has undertaken in some time. The weight of those stakes could have helped to make the episode more resonant had they been revealed earlier, but the twist is just so note-perfect here, at the end, that I couldn't really fault the episode for holding off on it. The Teller's race is saved, Psi has his memories back, Saibra can be a normal person, Clara can finally go on her second date with Danny (Samuel Anderson), and The Doctor can delightfully gloat to himself about having successfully robbed a bank. It's a win, all-around!

"Time Heist" isn't a perfect Doctor Who, but it's more than the sum of its parts, as this proves to be an episode that is more substantive than it initially appears. Yet that dramatic heaviness never compromises the adventurous spirit that makes Doctor Who so frequently enjoyable.