DOCTOR WHO: Mr. Harvey Asks… Are You a Good Witch?
Season 9, Episode 2 “The Witch’s Familiar”

There are two major problems with the second episode of the 9th season of Doctor Who, and they come at the beginning and the end of the episode.
The first is that it is clear that Missy is lying about the vampire monkeys… and that’s just cruel, denying us the obvious joys of Doctor Who and the Vampire Monkeys.
But that’s only to be expected… she is evil, after all.
The second, and the larger of the two problems, is that the means by which the Daleks are defeated – being overcome by the resurgent Dalek-not-dead-sludge – makes no sense whatsoever. Each Dalek, after all, is an enclosed mini-tank, something this episode makes a point of pointing out, as Missy pointedly pokes the Dalek in the sewers, and makes the holes that the Dalek revenants can use to enter the Dalek and kill it. My alliteration aside, the Regeneration-Energy-infused Dalek Goo shouldn’t be able to overcome the Daleks the way they do, in any way, shape, or form.
AND I DON’T CARE.
Why? Because everything else in “The Witch’s Familiar” is just about perfect.
From Moffat trolling his critics by providing actual explanations for Missy’s survival and the return of Skaro to the sublime exchanges between Davros and the Doctor, this episode not only looks back at the history of Doctor Who and brings it into the modern age, but also asks real questions about the nature of the villains of the show in a way that both gives them more, pardon the term, humanity, as well as defining what makes them villains in the first place.

Davros, excellently played by the amazing Julian Bleach, is at his most disturbing and, frankly, terrifying here, and if this episode was just Capaldi and Bleach playing off each other that would have been amazing, but we also got Jenna Coleman’s Clara and Michelle Gomez’s Missy continuing their Odd-Couple-From-Hell routine. Between the two of them, we peel back the layer of megalomaniacal “bad guys” and see two evil people who have an actual depth to them that very few fictional “super-villains” really have.
Davros, of course, is not the leader of the Daleks, but their creator. The madness and twisted worldview that must exist to see the show’s Nazi analogue as good is staggering to contemplate, and yet here Moffat and Bleach give voice to that worldview and for a moment make both the Doctor and the audience feel a kind of sympathy for such a madman. It’s hard to see this seemingly broken and dying, yet still infinitely dangerous Davros play against any of the modern Doctors aside from Capaldi’s, if only because of the apparent age and gravitas that are hallmarks of the 12th Doctor: They are dark reflections of each other. The anger here in the 12th Doctor is deeper and fiercer than of Tennant’s or Smith’s incarnations (maybe Eccleston’s 9th, with his fresh anger over the War, could have come close), but the power of the exchanges, both quiet and loud, between Capaldi and Bleach are just incredible to behold. From his tears to the opening of his eyes and his inevitable betrayal, at his “death”, Davros has never been more alive and vibrant.
And Missy, oh-so-fine Missy, gets to be, to some degree, the evil version of the Doctor here, in a way that John Simm’s portrayal never really got to do. Here we have the charm of the Delgado Master and, again, the clear evidence that Missy’s “madness” is more act than reality, and I’ve seen fans of the show say they’d love to see a Missy/Clara spinoff over and over again. That Clara has been becoming more and more like the Doctor – for good and for ill – would certainly make such a thing be about as close as we’d ever come to the Master/Missy travelling with the Doctor, despite the likely short-lived alliance that would be. As we see here, Clara doesn’t have the killer instinct, and Missy is the killer instinct, so I think our Miss Oswald would quickly end up a scorch-mark, but the chemistry between Gomez and Coleman is oh so fun to watch. “Make your own stick”, indeed.
There are so many little joys to be had here, from Clara back inside a Dalek, Missy’s “Twenty feet”, the Doctor’s raging at the Daleks to return Clara, and the “only other chair”, but the most critical moment the episode addresses is the one that we were seemingly left with at the end of “The Magician’s Apprentice”, where we are meant to think that the Doctor may be willing to kill a child to save his friends. Of course he doesn’t, and he wouldn’t, because that’s not who the Doctor is, but it also spells out who he has always been: The man who believes that mercy and compassion are the best of virtues.
It’s that nature that brings the Doctor to Davros’ side, that keeps the Doctor from taking the chance to murder all the Daleks when it is offered to him, and back to a handmine field to rescue the frightened boy who will grow into his greatest enemy. You can hear it in his defense of compassion and his embrace of the idea that compassion will be the death of him, and in his confusion at the word “mercy” when Missy is trying to get him to kill the Dalek-entrapped Clara. Of course we, the audience, know that Daleks are capable of understanding the word and using it, at least when begging for their lives when faced by River Song, but the Doctor doesn’t, and it makes him realize that he has a chance to put that idea into the very DNA of the psychotic pepperpots, if he can only be true to himself and reach out to an innocent child, no matter who that child will become.

We also have a fun little exploration of the nature of the Daleks themselves, in the form of Clara speaking through the Dalek interface. That repeated refrain of “Exterminate” is reloading their weapons and channeling their hatred for everything not-them into a real destructive force, but also an enforced uniformity that stifles the potential for individuality that would potentially divide them. It’s no mistake that Dalek Caan and Rusty are considered insane by Dalek standards, and even abominations: They are individuals and have broken outside the programming.
But again, it is the strength of the performances here that make “The Witch’s Familiar” something special.

And we are left with some interesting questions that seem likely to factor into the rest of the season, like this prophecy of the Hybrid and the question of why the Doctor really ran from Gallifrey, as well as what exactly Missy’s clever plan was. We know that Jenna Coleman is leaving the show this season, but we don’t know the whys and the hows, but if the rest of this season is as solid as this opening two-parter, then Clara will have an exit that will take her out in style.
Note too the wardrobe move for Capaldi’s Doctor, away from red and black magician finery (which wasn’t really working) to the aging rock-and-roller look. Doctor as aging Rolling Stone.
Complete with a previous incarnation’s pants!