Doctor Who review: A story about grief shows us the series at its weird and beautiful best

The strangest Doctor Who episode of the season is also one of the series’ most powerful, reminding us all that in the end, we are the people who remember us.

“It Takes You Away” is very likely going to be one of those episodes that divides Doctor Who viewers.

A strange, sad story that features everything from dark fairytale elements and lost little girls to magic mirrors and a literal talking frog, it’s easy to see how some Doctor Who fans might view it as the epitome of utterly indulgent weirdness. And on some level, it is.

This episode is certainly emotionally indulgent, offering up a melodic meditation on grief, loss and loneliness that is certain to resonate with anyone who’s ever lost someone they care about. But as a monster-of-the-week story, the episode relies heavily on entirely too-convenient exposition and wastes about ten minutes forcing our heroes to wander around a dark “Anti-Zone” dodging flesh-eating moths. (What was the point of all that?)

In the end, the way you feel about this particular installment is largely going to depend on what kind of show you want Doctor Who to be. If you’re here for the actual week-to-week plot where the Doctor faces off with a threat, neutralizes it and helps someone along the way, well. You probably didn’t care much for this episode. Because even though all those things do happen, to some extent, the story doesn’t look — or feel — at all like a traditional tale. Instead, it takes several of the series’ key tenants — that the people we love never truly leave us, that meaning can be found even in the strangest and most surreal parts of the universe, that memory and connection and care are the building blocks of almost everything that matters — and builds the story around them.

And, of course, there’s also the talking frog.

Picture shows: Graham (BRADLEY WALSH), Ryan (TOSIN COLE)

In the end, “It Takes You Away” is the sort of episode that really works only if you’re willing to commit and connect to it on an emotional level, to embrace the weirdness of a story in which a talking frog serves as an avatar for a sentient pocket universe who tricks people into crossing into its dimensional plane not because it’s monstrous, but because it’s lonely.

The Solitract continues the season 11 theme of pitting the Doctor and friends against bad guys who may not actually be villains at all, at least not in the way that we understand or expect. Yes, it lures Bad Dad of the Year candidate Erik through its portal by promising him a world in which his dead wife survived. But on some level, it thinks it’s doing him a favor. It’s meant as a gift, not a punishment. Why it doesn’t understand the reason it isn’t so is because the Solitract has been alone forever, and has no real concept of loss. (Or how it affects those left behind.)

While “It Takes You Away” is certainly a bizarre take on a monster tale, as a metaphor for grief, trauma and our very human desire to want to find the things we’ve lost, it works like gangbusters. The emotional heart of the story is the contrast between Erik and Graham, and how each has reacted to the pain of losing the person they loved most in the world. Erik, who is kind of terrible, abandons his blind daughter for a fantasy world in which his dead wife still exists, insisting that his behavior is fine because Hanne is a teenager and he left her some microwaveable dinners in the freezer. (Along with an elaborate set-up meant to trap her in her own home by faking deadly monster sounds in the woods. Erik is the worst.)

Graham, for his part, realizes almost instantly that the pocket universe version of Grace can’t be real, no matter how much he wants her to be. And even though he gives in to the fantasy of his wife returned for a short time, he nevertheless unhesitatingly chooses Ryan’s safety over the illusion of Grace when he has to, and it’s an absolute gut punch of a moment. One which has been absolutely earned over the course of the season, which is part of the reason Ryan finally calling Graham “granddad” is so emotionally affecting. (Bradley Walsh is such an incredible actor, by the way. The look on his face!)

Even the Doctor herself is not unaffected by the group’s meeting with the Solitract. She’s fascinated by the concept of such a strange and alien creature and so, by the way, is the episode, choosing to give us as viewers a look into its psyche in a way that other stories focused on similar beings (see also: House from season 6’s “The Doctor’s Wife”) did not.

The Solitract tries to bring humans into itself not just because it’s lonely, but because the people it chooses are too. (There’s a reason, after all, that it goes for humans who have lost loved ones.) It presents itself to the Doctor as a frog because it finds the creature’s form whimsically delightful. And it says goodbye by promising to dream of the lives the Doctor is living in her universe without it. As creatures go, it feels simultaneously unknowable and unimaginably sad. And it’s kind of a shame that both we — and the Doctor — can’t spend more time getting to know it.

After all, the Solitract is, at its heart, an infinitely powerful, incredibly old and indescribably lonely creature, that only wants a friend to bear its days with. That doesn’t sound entirely unlike someone else we know, does it?

Doctor Who season 11 concludes next Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on BBC America.