Doctor Who review, 'It Takes You Away': Jodie Whittaker's best outing yet

This episode is thoughtful and big-hearted, blending scares and surrealism with aplomb

(BBC)

It’s been a solid, occasionally spectacular debut season for 13th Doctor Jodie Whittaker. Now, with just two Doctor Who episodes to go (excluding a Christmas special airing on New Year’s Day), show-runner Chris Chibnall has a pre-Christmas cracker in store, as the gutsy Gallifreyan is sent on her most thought-provoking escapade to date.

“It Takes You Away” is, at its heart, about death. But, rather like Talking Heads’s “Road To Nowhere” or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, this is a meditation on mortality with an ultimately uplifting message – that love can transcend even the end of life. Along the way Chibnall gives us a sentient alternate universe manifested as a talking frog, thus marking the point at which the new Tardis chief achieves “Peak Who”.

What’s also confirmed is how thoroughly Whittaker has bedded in as the first female Doctor (cue appalled pearl-clutching from the deepest recesses of the internet). Early on, she was a bundle of tics and one-liners. But in the penultimate outing she, and the writers, have calmed down to the point where Whittaker feels utterly at ease with, and in control of, the character – who has solidified into a chatty eccentric with a core of tensile steel.

Having pinged between Sheffield, the desert planet Desolation and a hotel infested with spiders (also in Sheffield), the show heads off this week to rural Norway for an instalment written by Ed Hime. A cabin in the woods is revealed to be a hideout for a frightened child (blind actress Ellie Wallwork) taking refuge against a growling monster concealed in the picturesque Nordic forest.

However, the mysterious beastie soon proves the least of the Doctor’s problems (partly because it isn’t actually real). Hanne’s father (Christian Rubeck) has somehow accessed a parallel universe via an inter-dimensional mirror. There he is happily sitting down to brunch with his dead wife, who, on the far side of the looking glass, appears to be very much alive.

As, it seems, is Grace (Sharon D Clarke), late wife of Graham and grandmother of Ryan. She was last seen sacrificing herself to prevent a Predator-style interstellar warrior making off with a Yorkshire crane-operator as a hunting trophy. But now here she is – ready to spend all eternity with Graham, if he’s up for it.

Obviously it’s a trap as the Doctor realises after leading the team to the new dimension via an extraplanar dungeon overrun with scary space moths (Sunday night drama can always do with scary space moths). Grace and Trine (Lisa Stokke) are, we discover, projections of a sentient universe desperate for someone to hug and cuddle (for ever and ever).

Erik was first to be seduced by this cosmic honey trap – to the point of semi-abandoning his daughter back on earth and rigging up a recording of a fake monster to prevent her leaving the house. Now Graham (Bradley Walsh) is won over, too, by the promise of eternity with a convincing simulacrum of his nearest and dearest.

Alas, Fake Grace gives herself away when reacting casually to the possibility of Ryan (Tosin Cole) falling victim to the space moths. With the ruse rumbled the Doctor finds herself standing alone against the cosmic intelligence, which has taken on the likeness of a frog because it (like Grace) adores frogs.

It’s all very Black Mirror – and you can imagine Charlie Brooker having fun trapping the Doctor in a eternal temporal loop with only a talkative amphibian for company. Here, the warm, fuzzy twist is that, despite impersonating two dearly departed spouses and imperilling everyone else, the universe isn’t bad – merely misunderstood. Thus it is easily convinced to do the right thing. Humans/Time Lords within the rogue galaxy is a potentially fatally destabilising force, the Doctor explains. She and the frog-thing then kiss their goodbyes, and it’s back to the tastefully appointed safety of Norway.

Metaphysics and Doctor Who don’t always mesh – remember that interminable 2015 dispatch in which Peter Capaldi spend 50 minutes running up a stairs shouting at himself? But “It Takes You Away” is thoughtful and big-hearted, blending scares and surrealism with aplomb. Next week’s finale may yet surpass it but, as of now, it stands unchallenged as the season’s finest episode.