Flatline (TV story)

Flatline was the ninth episode of the eighth series of Doctor Who produced by BBC Wales. For scheduling reasons, it was a "Doctor-lite" episode.

Flatline was Jamie Mathieson's first script for the show. Two years before writing it, he had pitched his ideas for a story to Steven Moffat, but was unsuccessful. When he again met with the executive producer, he showed him four ideas for episodes, complete with his own illustrations, aided by his background in art college. Taking an interest in the monster he had created for what would become Flatline, Moffat asked Mathieson to produce a story outline and he got the job to script the episode.

It was only after writing several drafts that he was told the episode would need to lock the Doctor away in a single location, as Peter Capaldi’s scenes for the episode needed to be filmed quickly to bide by the production schedule.

Mathieson decided to write a script where the Doctor was "in the dark". For this to be successful, he had to create a unknown quantity to feature as his alien enemy. Much like his next creation, the Foretold, he elected to have no dialogue for the aggressors, allowing  something about them to remain "unknowable". (DWM 479)

Synopsis
When a council estate is faced with strange murals of people who have gone missing in tens within a very short span of time, and the Doctor is rendered unable to be the leader of the panicking people for this mystery, Clara steps into the incapacitated Time Lord's shoes for a day as Earth gets visited by aliens of a kind that neither the Doctor nor his Tardis have ever seen before in the known universe.

Plot
The Doctor misjudges the location when returning Clara home, resulting in them landing in Bristol rather than London. They also discover that the exterior of the TARDIS has shrunk down due to its power being drained by something nearby; the Doctor stays with the smaller TARDIS to figure out what is going on while Clara looks around. She finds that locals are disappearing, and mystery murals of them painted in a nearby pedestrian tunnel. Clara returns to find the TARDIS' exterior has shrunk further, trapping the Doctor within as he is unable to fit through the miniaturised doors. He hands Clara his psychic paper, the sonic screwdriver, and an audio/visual earpiece so he can keep in touch with her, and then has her carry the TARDIS with her to where he has tracked a large source of energy.

Clara poses as "Doctor Oswald" and gains the confidence of a local graffiti artist, Rigsy, who is part of a community service team, despite the Doctor's initial hesitation towards him. After finding nothing but a strange desert mural at the flat of the latest disappearance, Rigsy gains help from a police officer to gain access to the flat of the first known missing person. The Doctor instructs Clara to tear out the walls, believing the energy source to be within them. While they work, PC Forrest is sucked into the ground out of view of Clara and Rigsy, and when they reach her screams she has disappeared. They look around the room and find another strange mural, and the Doctor realises it's likely to be PC Forrest's nervous system, and believes the first mural was a closeup of human skin of the latest victim. As the entities start to move towards Clara and Rigsy, the Doctor quickly explains the creatures are two-dimensional, and must have been experimenting on the three-dimensional world. As Clara and Rigsy try to avoid the entity, which is in the walls and ground, Danny phones Clara, and she manages to avoid questions of her whereabouts and quickly hangs up. The Doctor, who is listening in, recognises that Clara has lied to him about Danny accepting her continued travels in the TARDIS.

Clara and Rigsy return to the rest of the community service group, who are about to paint over the murals in the pedestrian tunnel. The Doctor realises that the images are masquerades for the two-dimensional creatures, attempting to understand three dimensions; after the creatures take one of the services workers, Clara leads the rest away with the creatures chasing them. They take shelter in a nearby engine repair warehouse, where the Doctor helps Clara to try to communicate with the creatures using mathematics. When another worker is taken, Clara and the surviving members flee into a disused subway tunnel. As they explore, they find their only escape route has been flattened to two dimensions by the creatures. The Doctor provides Clara with a device to restore the dimensions, and they just manage to escape. The Doctor also tells Clara that he has worked out a way to stop the creatures and return them to their home dimension, but the TARDIS doesn't have enough power. In the chaos, the TARDIS is knocked down a shaft on to an active railway line, with an oncoming train heading right for the TARDIS and the Doctor. With some advice from Clara, the Doctor is able to get the TARDIS off the rails by using his hand to move it, resulting in the Doctor doing a little victory dance for saving his TARDIS and himself. However, his victory is short-lived, as the TARDIS tips over onto the rails again. In order to protect the TARDIS from the oncoming train, the Doctor activates its siege mode at the very last minute, but without power is unable to return it to normal.

Clara uses the sonic screwdriver to stop an out-of-service train, and they attempt to use it to ram the creatures to prolong time to get back in contact with the Doctor. However, the train is simply transformed into two dimensions; as they escape, Clara finds the TARDIS now looking like a plain cube with Gallifreyan symbols, and takes it with her. Taking shelter in a disused office space, Clara comes up with a plan to provide energy to the TARDIS by having Rigsy paint out a fake access door on the back of a large poster. When the creatures attempt to pull it into three dimensions, they instead feed their energy into the TARDIS, restoring it to normal. Realizing they have no interest in peace, the Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to stop the creatures, whom he dubs the "Boneless", sending them back to their dimension with a warning to those who survive the trip to never return. The Doctor returns everyone to the surface safely. Clara rejects a call from Danny, catching the Doctor's attention; he notes that she enjoyed 'playing the Doctor' for the day. She asks him to admit that she was a good Doctor; he reluctantly tells her that she made an "exceptional Doctor," but that "goodness" had nothing to do with it.

As Clara watches the Doctor enter the TARDIS, Missy, seated in a darkened room, is watching Clara on what appears to be a tablet. Missy says, with regard to "her" Clara, that she has "chosen well".

Cast

 * The Doctor - Peter Capaldi
 * Clara - Jenna Coleman
 * Rigsy - Joivan Wade
 * Danny - Samuel Anderson
 * Roscoe - John Cummins
 * PC Forrest - Jessica Hayles
 * Fenton - Christopher Fairbank
 * Al - Matt Bardock
 * George - Raj Bajaj
 * Bill - James Quinn
 * Missy - Michelle Gomez

The Doctor's TARDIS

 * The Doctor puts the TARDIS in siege mode.
 * When the TARDIS is in siege mode, Time Lord writing is clearly visible on the exterior.
 * The TARDIS makes itself lighter. When landed on the planet's surface, its true weight would fracture the Earth.
 * The Doctor has a desk underneath the console room.

Individuals

 * Fenton is not tricked by the psychic paper; the Doctor suggests this is due to a lack of imagination.
 * As he is trapped in the shrunken TARDIS, the Doctor hands Clara his sonic screwdriver and psychic paper.
 * Clara is sufficiently proficient with operating the sonic screwdriver that she is able to repair her earpiece without direction from the Doctor.

Organisations

 * Clara pretends to be from MI5 and Health and Safety.

Species

 * The Doctor knows a race made of sentient gas who throw fireballs as a friendly wave and a race with sixty-four stomachs who greet each other by disembowelling.

Story notes

 * The Radio Times programme listing was accompanied by a small colour head-and-shoulders shot of Christopher Fairbank as Fenton, with the accompanying caption "Doctor Who / 8.25 p.m. / Will guest star Christopher Fairbank be on hand as Clara is forced to go it alone?
 * The first train bears the number A113, an animation in-joke first known to originate in the Amazing Stories episode "The Family Dog" and used in many other movies and television shows. A113 is a classroom used at the California Institute of the Arts for graphic design and character animations, widely recognised by alumni of the institute.

Ratings
Overnight figures posted ratings of 4.6 million for Flatline. This was the lowest overnight audience since The Hungry Earth in 2010 and the second lowest since the 2005 revival of Doctor Who.

Filming locations
to be added

Production errors

 * The Doctor's hair is noticeably shorter in several scenes, starting when the TARDIS falls onto the train track.
 * In the TARDIS when Clara asks the Doctor to come and see the shrunken TARDIS door the scanner is in the right side of the TARDIS while before it was in the left side.
 * When the TARDIS was first small, the Doctor used one door to get out due to a lining in between in the doors. The second time the TARDIS was very small, both doors were open with there being no lining in between the doors.
 * The distance between the shrunken TARDIS and the tracks decreases. It is a safe distance from the tracks as the Doctor was climbing the dirt hill with his fingers, then it appears a little closer to the tracks the next scene when he pulls his hand in, the next scene, it is close enough that when it topples over, the top is laying on the tracks.
 * When Clara's phone rings towards the end of the episode, the ringtone is clearly heard. However, when held up, the icon for silent mode is visible at the top of the screen.

Continuity

 * Despite the Doctor acting like it's a new phenomenon he's never encountered before, the TARDIS exterior has shrunk on several previous occasions:
 * When the TARDIS doors opened during flight, it was made smaller upon materialisation in England in 1964, as were the First Doctor, Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. (TV: Planet of Giants)
 * When the TARDIS materialised in a miniscope, the Third Doctor and Jo Grant were drastically miniaturised. (TV: Carnival of Monsters)
 * In 1981, while the Fourth Doctor was fixing the chameleon circuit, the TARDIS was reduced in size after interfered with the Logopolitan's Block Transfer Computation. (TV: Logopolis)
 * The TARDIS was twice miniaturised while inside the Teselecta. (TV: Let's Kill Hitler, The Wedding of River Song)
 * The Doctor again uses "pudding brain" as a mocking description of humans and their intelligence. (TV: Deep Breath)
 * The Doctor uncovers Clara's lies about Danny's stance on her travelling with him. (TV: Mummy on the Orient Express)
 * Isolus and the Mona Lisa were able to transfer the two dimensional into the three dimensional, and vice versa. (TV: Fear Her, Mona Lisa's Revenge)
 * There are people naturally immune to the psychic paper; however, where William Shakespeare couldn't be fooled because he was an absolute genius, Fenton saw nothing reflected at him due to his low intelligence and lack of imagination. (TV: The Shakespeare Code)
 * The Doctor is uncomfortable with how easily Clara assumed his role. Previously, Davros and Rory, in different ways, noted the Doctor's tendency to turn his companions into reflections of himself. (TV: Journey's End, The Girl Who Waited)
 * The Cloister Bell sounds as the TARDIS in its weakened state is about to be struck by the train. (TV: Logopolis, etc.)
 * The Doctor tells the Boneless that planet Earth is protected, as he told the Sycorax (TV: The Christmas Invasion) and the Atraxi (TV: The Eleventh Hour). A similar statement was pronounced about the planet Trenzalore in TV: The Time of the Doctor.

DVD releases
to be added

Blu-ray releases
to be added