Deadly highwayman ‘the Nightmare’ and his sidekick come face to face with the Doctor.

One of the most anticipated episodes of Doctor Who, ‘The Girl Who Died’, finally aired on BBC One this evening.

Much of the hype was surrounding the appearance of Maisie Williams – aka Game Of Thrones’ Arya Stark – as Ashildr, a ‘cursed’ Viking girl, who appears to recognise the Doctor.

Williams will reprise her role in next week’s episode, and fans’ reaction to her debut performance was fairly positive, especially given the build-up:

News Source: Digital Spy and Geek TV

“Peter Capaldi’s so good. You kind of find yourself drifting off during scenes, thinking, ‘Woah!’ and then, ‘Oh my God, it’s my line'”.

“I’m kind of disappointed. I’ve failed in my head,” Tom Stourton tells us, talking about his role in this Saturday’s Doctor Who. “The small clip I’ve seen I just look really gormless. My mouth is wide open.”

The Siblings and Horrible Histories star is set to play a character the Doctor nicknames Lofty in scandi-themed instalment The Girl Who Died. “I’m not a cool, war-lord Viking,” Stourton is quick to say. “I’m like the idiot blacksmith who doesn’t want to fight because he’s a coward.”

And he’s not entirely enamoured with his performance. “There was a lot of staring at a blank sky pretending that we were looking at a spaceship. I sort of ran out of incredulous faces quite early on,” he tells us, adding: “I sympathise with all those people who do it all the time. All that business of staring at green poles and coming up with really big emotions is terrifying.”

It could have been worse though, he admits: “I came in all ready to do my best Swedish accent and fortunately they stopped me before I could make a real fool of myself.”
And the shoot itself was a lot of fun. Stourton had “Viking buddies to hang out with” and some pretty impressive surroundings: “You know the kind of place you go on school trips? They pimped one of those out so that it was a big village.”

The food left something to be desired – “There was a big table of banquet food there under the studio lights. You could have had a proper kind of feast but no one was grazing on it by the end. It stank so bad” – but his fellow cast-members were of a high enough calibre to make up for it.

“[Maisie Williams] is disconcertingly cool,” Stourton says. “She’s so sophisticated. I found myself cracking loads of bad jokes around her.”
And the Doctor himself? “He’s so good. You kind of find yourself drifting off during scenes, thinking, ‘Woah!’ and then, ‘Oh my God, it’s my line.’ It’s pretty amazing to see.”
“He was also really nice. I basically had to fight hard not to quiz him on loads of boring stuff that I’m sure he gets all the time.”

I ask Stourton if he’d like to step back into the Whoniverse and he laughs: “I mean, I think it’s possible Lofty will have a spin-off series…”
“I absolutely loved it for sure,” he adds. “I love sci-fi and I love Vikings. It was the perfect job!”

News Source: Radio Times

When – and how – did Bors turn into a Dalek secret agent? The Doctor Who showrunner explains…

Poor Bors. Do you remember Bors? He was the beardy, medieval guy in The Magician’s Apprentice that the Doctor challenged to an ‘axe’ fight. He seemed pretty alright then – before it was revealed a few scenes later that he was actually a Dalek agent, eye stalk and all.

As one fan raises in Doctor Who Magazine this month, however, this development proved a tad confusing. For just when – and how – did Bors change sides? And if he was in league with the Daleks all along, then why didn’t he just give Colony Sarff a call to let him know that the Doctor is partying in1138? Well, Steven Moffat has answered.

“Bors wasn’t an agent all along,” he writes, “he was a perfectly innocent helper to the Doctor. But when Colony Sarff sent a snake agent to wrap round his neck, that snake bit him. Sarff’s venom is full of the Dalek conversion nanogenes that we saw in Asylum of the Daleks. From that point on – but only then – Bors was a Dalek agent.

Even if this wasn’t explained on screen, that makes sense. In the American prequel for The Magician’s Apprentice, The Doctor’s Meditation, we see a bit more of the Doctor’s 1138 procrastination, including his budding, very genuine-seeming friendship with Bors. (You can watch it here.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, Moffat explains why Davros is a villain like no other, the VFX of series 9 are broken down and there is an extensive preview of Zygon two-parter The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion. All good stuff.

Doctor Who Magazine 492 is out now.

News Source: Radio Times