Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy - The Doctor's Sound And Fury
Episode 3 of Doctor Who series 7, “A Town Called Mercy”, is a morality play with a western subtext.
Episode 3 of Doctor Who series 7, A Town Called Mercy, is a morality play with a western subtext. While in most westerns the good guys and bad guys are fairly easily defined, Doctor Who chooses to take a much more nuanced, and frankly realistic, approach. On the surface, its a simple science fiction tale of an alien cyborg hunting down another alien and menacing the town harboring him. Appearances are deceiving, however, and throughout the episode our loyalties are constantly shifting - not only between the aliens but also between the Doctor and Amy. Voice and sound are key components to this episode and its inherent moral conflicts. Murray Gold outdoes himself with a spare and yearning score that enhances but never intrudes. When we first enter the town we are aware from the start that something is not right. The ambient music is vastly different from what we are used to in Who. A single banjo plays a plaintive tune. Its too quiet, the streets are too empty, the windows filled with the faces of frightened people. The Doctor almost immediately notices that there is technology here that is too advanced for the era - the cracking and sparking of the rudimentary streetlamp sounding like a fractured gunshot in the ominous silence. After the Doctor swaggers into the saloon and announces who he is, the townspeople grab him and march him right back out to the edge of town, throwing him over a line of rocks and limbs that have been placed there. He is caught between the cyborg on one side and the gun toting humans on the other until Isaac the sheriff, representing the voice of reason, steps up to save him ordering him to cross back over the line. 
Ignoring voices, different points of view, and the subsequent leap to conclusions and justification this leads to is a consistent theme throughout the episode. The townspeople dont give the doctor a chance to explain himself before they react because it is easier to pretend that he is the cause of all their problems rather than listen to him. We soon learn that Isaac has been hiding and protecting Kahler-Jex, an alien doctor whose ship crashed outside of town a few years back. He is a heroic figure to the people, having saved them from a cholera epidemic and given them electricity and heating. But the people are now afraid because they know it is Kahler-Jex that the cyborg wants. The Doctor discovers Kahler-Jexs ship in the desert. Upon attempting to open the hatch the ships alarm shrieks almost as if it were a live thing howling in fear and warning. After activating the ships database, the Doctor learns something quite disturbing. Kahler-Jex created the cyborg himself. He was part of a military program where he manipulated people into volunteering, and then experimented on them to create an army of super soldiers to end a war on his home planet. Once again the use of voice and sound here is striking. We do not see Jexs gruesome work but we are subjected to the screams of his victims. How many times has the Doctor been forced to listen to the cries of tortured beings begging for mercy? He is the one who listens. The one who hears the shouts and sounds and songs of the easily dismissed. Jex was successful in his endeavor to end the war but at a truly horrifying cost. The cyborg is one of his victim-soldiers, and has been hunting down the team who created him to extract his revenge. He has avoided killing innocent bystanders, keeping them behind the line ringing the town. When confronted by the Doctor, Kahler-Jex glibly tries to rationalize away his participation in the atrocities. Jex is the voice of manipulation and rationalization. He uses his words as weapons, taunting the Doctor and fabricating excuses for his part in all of this. Some of these poisonous words hit awfully close to home as the Doctor reacts with troubled confusion and then seething rage, hauling Jex through the streets of the town and throwing him violently over the line. In a shocking scene the Doctor grabs a gun from one of the townspeople and points it at Jexs face, informing Jex that he really doesnt know what he will do. It is now Amys turn to be the voice of reason, not because she sympathizes with Jex, she clearly doesnt, but because she knows what this kind of reactionary thinking leads to. Where do we stop the judging , she asks the Doctor. Her words reverberate with the noise of war do we kill the bullet makers, the bomb makers? Where do we draw the line and what happens when we blithely march across it? 
Soon the cyborg appears and Jex pleads for his life. Once again a voice is ignored. The cyborg does not, perhaps at this point cannot, listen. Isaac throws himself in front of Jex, and takes the shot intended for him. His dying speech is like that of a wise man lost in the wilderness begging fate to listen to hope and love and reason. He implores the Doctor to save Jex and the town, reminding both men that when we refuse to listen to the whole truth we forget that we are more than a single story. The use of sound in this scene is electrifying the cock of the gun, the scrabble of feet in the dust, the plodding, weighty steps of the cyborg and the injured echo in his speech, the heavy fall of Isaacs body to the earth and his quiet, pleading voice in the desperate silence of despair. The Doctor takes on the role of sheriff and that night he is confronted by a crowd of angry townspeople who want to give Jex to the cyborg. A boy in the crowd challenges the Doctor to a gunfight. But words are used differently this time. In a speech filled with the knowledge of a very old, tired and war-ravaged man, the Doctor appeals to the boys innate decency and lends him the strength to accept his higher nature. The boy listens to both the Doctors voice and his own inner voice, turning away from the expediency of violence. After facing down the lynch mob of frightened townspeople the Doctor comes up with a plan. At noon the next day, amidst the determined ticking of too many clocks, the cyborg finally crosses the line he had created himself and enters the town. Sound is a catalyst now the Doctor uses the forceful whine of his sonic screwdriver to temporarily confuse the cyborg and distract him while Kahler-Jex runs away and returns to his ship. Jex does not leave however. He finally listens to the pain of his creation and the guilt residing in his own mind and body. He accepts responsibility for his actions and initiates the ships self destruct sequence. In his last speech to the cyborg, Jexs scheming language is transformed and filled with remorse, regret and sadness. He acknowledges the cyborg as a sentient being who was terribly wronged and speaks his name and birthplace aloud. The cyborg wearily accepts Jexs death as the end to his tale of revenge and decides to walk into the desert and destroy himself. He cannot hear the call of his true nature and believes he is only a tool of war. This time the Doctor embodies the voice of reason. He reminds the cyborg that soldiers not only fight they defend, and this town needs protecting. A Town Called Mercy is a siren song to reason and memory a reminder that when we forget to listen to the voices of others we create silence. Within silence there is no debate, no consideration, no acknowledgement, no empathy, no mercy. Kahler-Jex states that we carry our own prisons within us. We also carry our own keys.