Osgood is back! Osgood is back! Well. Mostly. After Missy vaporized her in the “The Day of the Doctor,” fans have always held out hope that the Great and Powerful Moffat would use his resurrecting powers to bring one of our favorite Whoverse characters, and here we find her in “The Zygon Invasion”. Not only is she back, but she announces her presence with power and authority in trying to keep the peace between the Zygons and Humans.
This episode had a completely different feel than pretty much any other episode in Twelve’s career thus far. One can’t help but notice the parallels between “radical Zygons” vs. humans in current worldly events. It’s not unfamiliar territory for the Sci-Fi genre in general, in fact very popular series like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and many, many others have mastered the art of representing current social and political issues in fictional stories. A very interesting take from writer Peter Harness, whom we’ve seen write “Kill the Moon” and also pens the follow-up to “The Zygon Invasion,” “The Zygon Inversion.” Say that five times fast.
This episode is also probably has benefited the most from the two-part format adopted for this season as the entire episode was filled with so much build up and backstory, anything less than two parts would have mauled the script to shreds and left a very terrible shell of a story that is not befit of a Doctor Who show.
I was rather impressed with Clara’s performance as a Zygon. Though the putting the hair in a pony tail was kind of a dead giveaway since Clara’s never put her hair back before and has been in far stickier situations. The first phone tag scene was comical, 127 missed calls is definitely chuckle worthy however the remaining phone tag scenes just seemed to go on without purpose. Is it because Bonnie (Zygon-Clara) doesn’t know the ringtone on Clara’s phone so she ignores it? Or is it one of those other giveaways that Clara is not really Clara. If the ponytail thing didn’t tip you off, then the insistence on killing the pods without any investigation or consultation of the Doctor should have definitely tipped you off, but perhaps at that point the presentation of the ruse was over by then. Either way, my spidey-senses definitely knew something was up with Clara and pretty much suspects everyone, at all times. I’m imagining a dual-Twelve scene in part 2.
I definitely dislike the “bomb everything we don’t like” mentality of the members of UNIT, it feels a bit overdone. That might be on purpose to illustrate a point and perhaps it hinders the suspension of belief for the Whoverse and hits too close to home. The Doctor also seems to be going along with them a bit too much, even for Twelve. Though Twelve’s sardonic comments and absurd title of President of the World at least helped keep a little levity to the otherwise fairly serious episode but one in particular stood out among the rest:
Kate: You left us with an impossible situation, Doctor.
The Doctor: Yes, I know. It’s called peace.
Obviously we’re left with a huge cliff-hanger and so many questions that all boil down to: what happens next?! Well, we’ll find out in the next segment. Hopefully we’ll find out a bit more about the dynamic between Zygon Osgood and Human Osgood, what she means by being a hybrid, and which one is really left. Perhaps more explanation as to how everyone at UNIT got so trigger happy, what exactly happened in “Truth Or Consequences,” and how the Doctor is going to manage to escape this time. Until next week!
What did you think of “The Zygon Invasion” episode? Hit us up in the comments!
[rwp-review id=”0″]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
