The Twelfth Doctor adventures reaches new heights as “Duty of Care” takes a look at The Doctor’s no killing policy with some really powerful characters and scenes that show how hypocritical it is but also how much he really does try to keep his friends hands clean even if his never will be. The new character Nne was such a fascinating idea and I had no idea where it was going to go until the very end. Amazing stuff, let’s take a closer look…
After Ash (Gwithian Evans) killed someone in cold blood in the previous episode The Doctor (Jon Culshaw) instead of dropping him as a companion altogether drops him of at an old friend called Nne’s house (Nne is played by Dona Croll, for the record!) who begins to tell him of a better path, but Ash isn’t having any of it and truly believes killing Mundar in the previous story was justified. Meanwhile The Doctor pops over to the Shadow Proclamation jail and meets prison guard Amaya Aphra (Gemma Knight Jones) and finds out that a lot of the villains he’d sent to the prison have been killed in custody and he’s starting to think he knows who might be the culprit.
Back with Ash and Nne we eventually find out that her lovely house is actually a somewhat fancy prison on a remote asteroid, one she earned after spending a few decades in a much nastier one, as she was once a young tyrant repressing and even killing her own people based on picking up from where her father left off and not questioning it until The Doctor arrived and showed her the effects of her actions. Ash is appalled and wants nothing to do with her, though with nowhere to go she keeps trying to get across that she’d dedicated the rest of her life to stopping people making the same mistakes as her. The Doctor and Amaya follow the masked assassin of the Doctor’s past foes and as it turns out the assailant isn’t Ash, but isn’t a million miles away either…
Again, I just have to say how great this script is. The dialogue between Nne and Ash and later The Doctor, Nne and Ash are excellent and really put The Doctor under a microscope like never before.
The Continuity:
Not a lot given away on this cover, but then how could you without giving away massive spoilers?
Beyond picking up from the previous story, there isn’t much continuity here. A few old foe and previously seen alien race name drops, but nothing major.
Overall Thoughts:
“Duty of Care” was a fantastic look at redemption and justice as concepts and whether The Doctor really is in a position to force those themes on his travelling companions, full with great dialogue and tense scenes where you’re never 100% sure you know how they’re going to go. A very easy 5.
The big reveal here is that the assassin is actually Amaya, who is using a Vortex Manipulator to pop into her own prison under a mask and kill The Doctor’s “unjustly saved” criminals, with her main goal being to find Nne, who was responsible for the death of her mother and the suffering of her people when she was young. She tries to kill Nne when she and Ash visit her homeland using her own Vortex Manipulator the Doctor gave her (which just made Ash angrier at the freedom she was given) but The Doctor stops her, only to watch as Ash and Amaya agree that Nne needs to die and they both head off to her asteroid home. Just as things look grim and Nne gives a teary goodbye phone message to her daughter and granddaughter the TARDIS materialises around her, causing Amaya and Ash to use the latter’s key to get inside the ship to get her.
The Doctor however has moved everything around, causing them to open the door to a forest. Ash and Amaya split up to find her but Ash finds The Doctor first, who pleads for him to be better, and says he may as well shoot him because of the amount of blood on his hands, specifically mentioning the Time War and having been willing to wipe out his own species, even if he did eventually find a way to undo it. Ash is once again appalled but doesn’t shoot the Doctor, and then finds Nne who talks about her family and how she has done everything to make sure they don’t follow in her footsteps, and eventually Ash puts the gun down, at which point Nne vanishes and The Doctor appears, showing the whole thing was a hologram test to see if he really would kill Nne is cold blood, and he passed, unlike Amaya, who tried to shoot Nne with no hesitation. Amaya is placed in a cell and The Doctor and Ash renew their travels, with an odd cliffhanger where it sounds like their whole adventures up to this point is rewound…?