Doctor Who might have just found its new Steven Moffat. His name is Jamie Mathieson and he is the scribe behind last week’s “Mummy on the Orient Express” and this week’s “Flatline.”
Like Moffat’s earlier work on Who (“Blink,” “The Empty Child”), Mathieson’s episodes have featured adversaries with a creative spin—in “Orient Express,” a mummy that appears to a single person only to kill them after exactly 66 seconds and, in “Flatline,” beings from a two-dimensional universe that dissect and experiment on us three-dimensional humans. And while “Mummy on the Orient Express”—for me at least—didn’t quite stick the landing that its initial promise seemed to offer, I could admire its clever set-up and character-centric dynamics. “Flatline,” on the other hand, is a tour-de-force and deserves inclusion right alongside “Listen” as the best Who episode of the year.
What certainly helps distinguish “Flatline” is that it represents the year’s annual Doctor-lite episode, or one in which The Doctor’s appearance is marginalized (usually for scheduling reasons). Here, the situation comes about when The Doctor mistakenly lands the TARDIS in Bristol. Right off the bat, both he and Clara sense that something is amiss. Sure enough, while the TARDIS’ interior is still as large and expansive as ever, its outside has drastically shrunk, making it difficult for The Doctor and Clara to even fit through the door. The Doctor decides to stay inside and figure out how to correct the dimensions, but decides to send Clara away, lest she accidentally be squashed in the process.
Clara wanders about, and discovers that there have been a string of disappearances in the general area. What’s all the more strange is that murals of the missing locals—their backs turned to the viewer—have suddenly appeared on a pedestrian tunnel. She returns to the TARDIS only to find that it has shrunken to the point where the Doctor can barely fit his hand out of the door. Trapped in the TARDIS, he gives her his screwdriver, his psychic paper, and an earpiece, and orders her to be his eyes and ears as they figure out what is causing this.
Posing as “Doctor Clara” (much to The Doctor’s annoyance), Clara soon gains the trust of Rigsy, a local graffiti artist who is part of a community service group. He gives her the lowdown on the disappearance. and takes her to the apartment of the most recent victim. Inside, nothing seems to have been disrupted, save for a new mural on the wall that appears to depict a cracked, desert floor. On The Doctor’s orders, Clara investigates. She even enlists the help of a local police officer. Unfortunately, while Clara and Rigsy are looking in another room, the officer is sucked into the ground. Hearing her screams, Clara and Rigsy rush back in, but it’s too late. They quickly see that a new mural has appeared on the wall—this one depicts a human nervous system.
The Doctor quickly reaches a horrible conclusion—the beings behind the disappearances are two-dimensional alien creatures that have found their way over from another dimension. Currently, they are absorbing humans and dissecting them in order to fit these foreign, three-dimensional beings into their own dimensions. Whether this is out of sheer maliciousness or simple ignorance of how three-dimensional forms work is not made clear. As it stands, however, the nervous system on the wall belonged to the now-dead policewoman and the cracked desert mural from before is actually merely a close-up of the other victim’s skin. Clara and Rigsy return to the group just as the creatures animate the murals on the pedestrian tunnel and begin chasing them. The group takes refuge in a warehouse and, from here on out, they are on the run from the monsters and their ever-evolving methods of hunting.