The Twelfth Doctor in The Devil's Hour

or "What if Doctor Who got mistaken for a serial killer because he got confused and clumsy and all sad?"

The following contains spoilers for the Farnborough Film Studios show on Amazon Prime Video, The Devil’s Hour, mainly about the premise of the show. Not many plot details, really.

I’m going to talk about something that concerns me greatly, as I have co-written a movie in the past and would like to have another screenwriting job in the future. And I like movies that are a bit strange. Movies and TV shows that make you think. Entertaining stories that take your imagination for a ride, stories that reflect on the human condition and the difficulties we have organizing ourselves in such a way as to respect each other’s competing needs for communal connection, biological satisfaction, distraction from suffering and the knowledge of death, spiritual engagement, individual and family autonomy and dignity, and striving to fulfill your potential. Y’know, all that highly entertaining subject matter.

And I used to love time distortion narratives. I still like a well-done example. One of my favorite books and movies is Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut’s literary masterpiece in my opinion, and one of the best if not the single best adaptation of his work into the cinematic form. Chronologically non-linear narratives pre-date Vonnegut, of course, and there might be as many ways of telling a story as there are stories themselves, despite what Aristotle, John Gardner, and Sid Field might urge you to believe or adhere to.

But now they’ve gone too far! Not really. I just felt like starting the sentence that way. It just felt right rhythmically, y’know? But the flashback and the flash-forward and the dream-truth and the foreshadowing psychic glimpse are all over the place these days. Some of the following is a bit facetious, athough true and sincere and grimly terrible.

Are y’all familiar with Doctor Who? He’s a Time Lord from planet Gallifrey who can go anywhere and anywhen in his TARDIS, a police call booth that is phone booth-size on the outside but on the inside is an impossibly larger conveyance and habitation.

The Doctor defending his TARDIS from space baddies

Many actors have played the Doctor over the years, and the idea the show adopted is that Doctor Who regenerates in a different body and personality each lifetime. For three seasons, Peter Capaldi played the Doctor, the Twelfth Doctor to be precise.

The Twelfth Doctor with a case of space pinkeye

Peter Capaldi is a master of the art of acting. You can see a young Capaldi in the 1983 film Local Hero. A later Capaldi you shouldn’t miss is in In The Loop, a superb political satire. He’s always engaging to watch. Something about his eyes and nose and lips. His eyes, ears, nose, and throat you might say. Basically his entire head instrument. He’s a master of his instrument.

In The Devil’s Hour, Capaldi is introduced as a prickly, all-knowing serial killer. Except—spoiler alert!—he’s not really a serial killer, he’s just understandably grouchy. See, he keeps getting reincarnated as himself and having to endure the same dumbbells he’s been plagued by in the previous iterations of his life. He keeps telling everybody, “We’ve had this conversation before in this very place,” but no one believes him. No wonder he doesn’t suffer fools gladly and so often accidentally on purpose sorry not sorry kills them.

Capaldi at the moment in The Devil’s Hour when we both realize we’re lost

Gruff exterior, heart probably of gold or some similarly non-reactive precious metal. Gets his unwitting companions into bewildering and often life-threatening situations. Has a view of the bigger picture no one else has. I think you can see the parallels to the Twelfth Doctor Who, and to top it off they’re both played by Peter Capaldi.

That’s why I maintain that “The Devil's Hour asks the question, "what if the person you think is a serial killer is just an incompetent, confused, accidentally murderous Doctor Who?"

Capaldi as a guy with an unpredictable basement, perfectly communicating utter confusion

“But,” you might object, “reincarnation is not time travel, albeit The Devil’s Hour does hop around as if it were time travel, a la Slaughterhouse Five.” Well, I might retort, how do you think you get to be Doctor Who? You get reincarnated. On Earth you get reincarnated by being born. On planet Gallifrey you get reincarnated by having a new actor chosen to play you by casting director Andy Pryor CGD-CSA.

“But he doesn’t have a TARDIS. He doesn’t even have a sonic screwdriver.”

One, so what. Two, how do you know he doesn’t have a sonic screwdriver? You haven’t seen everything in his basement. Also, he may not have a TARDIS, but he has a private, enigmatic lair the inside of which does tend to transform unexpectedly.

The major difference between the two shows to me is, with Doctor Who, I almost always understood what was going on and why I was watching it. I’m currently in the middle of Season2, episode 3 of The Devil’s Hour, and I don’t know what’s going on or why I’m watching it. I don’t know what the characters want. I don’t know what I want for them. At the end of Season 1 Lucy survived the house fire. In this season I really don’t want to go through that again. What’s the endgame here? That they all achieve moskha? Although I can see a certain amount of improvement in her unstuck-in-time son Isaac’s ability to interact and experience joy. But is that enough? It might have to be. There’s only two-and-a-half episodes left in the entire season, so I suppose Isaac’s increasing ease within humanity and of course the excellent acting of the entire cast might be enough to sustain me that long. I’m not sure.

This is how I felt when the third season of the German time-travel show, Dark, started. But at least this is in English. This reminds me of a problem I have with Darren Aronofsky’s two most salivated-over films, Pi and Black Swan. The conceit overwhelms the buy-in so much that it’s impossible for me to identify with the characters’ problems because I can’t even identify the characters’ problems. I’ve written pieces with this exact symptom of aesthetic miscalculation, and I’ve paid for it in audience dissatisfaction and learned from it.

Understand, please, that I’m not panning the show. It’s very well-done. I’m just taking up a little of your time making a little fun of it by expressing what I see as one of its weaknesses. Surely taking a little time for that is not a crime. Also, the 2007 film Time Crimes is an almost perfect time travel movie, I highly recommend it.