Doctor Who: Dark Water (8x11)

Hahahahaha okay wow I didn't see that coming actually but I feel like I probably should have... I'm feeling a bit stupid at the moment. Let's discuss.

So, we start off with Clara and Danny talking on the phone. She's getting ready to tell him the truth about her continued travels with the Doctor, and all the things she did on those journeys. Before she starts, she tells him that she loves him - and not just that, but that she loves him forever, that those words, from her, belong to Danny now. As she says all of this, she starts to notice that Danny is not talking on the other end. Then, the horrible truth - Danny has been hit by a car and killed.

Clara is in a bit of a daze for a while, unable to process what has happened. She gets a call from the Doctor, and suddenly an idea occurs to her. She gets into the TARDIS and takes all of the keys from their hiding places. Then, she uses a sleeping patch on the Doctor just as he is taking them to a live volcano. As the Doctor wakes up, Clara holds out the seven copies of the TARDIS key. She threatens to throw them into the fire unless the Doctor goes back in time and changes what happened to Danny. The Doctor says he won't. Clara throws the keys into the lava. When she throws the last key in, she is horrified by what she has done. Then, the Doctor reveals the truth - it was all a highly suggestive dream. The Doctor didn't let Clara put the sleeping patch on him - instead, he put her into this dream state to play out what Clara had planned to do. He wanted to see how far Clara was willing to go for Danny. Clara is upset by what she has done, but the Doctor says that he will help her find the afterlife, and bring Danny back if it's possible.

The Doctor hooks Clara up to the TARDIS and follows Clara's link to Danny. They end up in a strange facility called 3W. There, they meet with Missy, who says she is a droid. She is there to help them. The Doctor and Clara are curious about the rows of skeletons lining the walls, contained in liquid. Dr. Chang, the doctor apparently maintaining Missy the droid, explains that the liquid hides everything but biological material. As Dr. Chang explains this to Clara and the Doctor, Missy flips a switch, and the liquid starts to drain out of the containers.

Meanwhile, Danny is going through the bureaucratic tedium of the afterlife. The man interviewing him, Seb, asks him if he's ever killed anyone, and then Danny is brought face to face with a small boy, apparently an accidental civilian victim of Danny himself, back when he was a soldier. Danny tries to talk to the boy, but the boy doesn't say anything.

Dr. Chang tells Clara and the Doctor a horrifying truth - dead people are still conscious. They can feel everything that happens to their bodies. Danny also gets this explanation, which is why he feels cold (his body is being kept somewhere cold). Dr. Chang arranges to put Danny and Clara in communication with one another. Clara needs to be sure that it's really Danny she's talking to, so she asks for Danny to prove it. However, Danny is worried that Clara will go do desperate measures to get to him, so he refuses to prove himself to her, instead only repeating "I love you," until finally Clara shuts off the connection, in despair.

The Doctor, meanwhile, discovers that Missy was lying about being a drone. She kills Dr. Chang, and then insists that the Doctor knows who she is. The hits just keep on coming - as the skeleton tanks drain of their liquid, we see that they contain Cybermen. Danny, after ending his conversation with Clara, is offered the chance to "delete" himself to get rid of the pain. He would then be "updated," and become a Cyberman himself. We don't get to see if he pushes the button or not.

As the Doctor tries to stop the Cybermen, he runs outside and discovers that he and Missy are on the steps of St. Paul's cathedral. He tries to get people to run and save themselves from the encroaching Cybermen. Of course, Missy says it's pointless: "the key strategic weakness of the human race - the dead outnumber the living." She also reveals who she is... Missy is short for Mistress. She is the Master.

I do have some things to complain about. But they're... complicated. I can't quite wrap my mind around this episode just yet. Once I see next week, I think I'll have a better handle on things.

Okay, so there's the fact that the Master is now Missy. I have very mixed feelings. First, yay! A canonical switching of a Time Lord's gender. Great. Secondly, more female characters are always welcome, even though Moffat doesn't write them well. I'd rather a woman than yet another man. But then... on the other hand, does it bother anyone else that the Master's obsession with the Doctor only becomes overtly sexual when the Master is a woman? Like, it's obvious that the Master has a creepy attraction to the Doctor. That's been obvious since we met him back in Series Three. Why is it that the Master, now female and calling herself "Missy," can only express physical desire for the Doctor in female form? This also continues the unfortunate trend of all the women in Moffat-era Doctor Who having some sort of attraction to the Doctor and/or being obsessed with him in some way.

The other complaint is even more confusing. So, the whole scene with Clara and the keys and the lava was supposed to be really tense, but the whole time, all I could think was - it's obviously a trick! And do you want to know how I knew it was a trick? Because the Doctor looked truly scared of Clara, and I just knew that the Doctor would always be five steps ahead of his companions. This wouldn't have been the case with Davies-era Doctors. But I just couldn't believe that Clara, or any other Moffat companion, would truly be able to get one over on the Doctor. It's not as if the scene didn't work, but what bothered me about it was the fact that, because the Doctor is always so much more brilliant than everyone around him, I never for one second believed that he wasn't in control of the situation.

One more thing: I hate to sound like a broken record, but Clara and Danny's relationship still doesn't make sense to me. Yeah, they keep saying that they love each other. But I need to see it, not just hear about it! Clara is still too bland of a character for me to understand her love for Danny.

But let's move on to some of the really delicious things going on in this episode, because overall, I've gotta hand it to these guys. I was impressed.

First of all, there's the twist. Missy is the Master. I complained above about some of my complicated thoughts on this matter, but let's turn to the most important positive aspect. Last week, I said that I still didn't like Missy, and thought she was mostly a waste of space. The only thing that could convince me is if they had a really good twist coming as to who Missy really was. And we got that twist - it was huge, it was unexpected (although a lot of people did expect it, I'm guessing) and it was enormously satisfying when the truth finally came out. Personally, I knew Missy was the Master at the moment when she grabbed the Doctor's hand and put it on her chest. When Missy walks away, the Doctor leaves his hand up the air, looking stupefied. Not because he touched a boob - he's not a 12-year-old, after all - but because he felt two heartbeats. From there, I went - Time Lord! Missy! Mistress! Master! - ahead of schedule, so the reveal at the end was merely a confirmation of what I'd already guessed. Even so, that's part of the fun. The hints are there, but they are just subtle enough that only someone who was really looking for them would see them.

Incidentally, the scene with the two heartbeat realization was one of my favorite moments in the whole episode. Missy says: "My heart is maintained by the Doctor." The Doctor replies, "Doctor Who?" And then Missy calls out "Dr. Chang!" I laughed really hard at that.

Then we've got the start of the episode. Despite the fact that I don't quite understand Clara and Danny as a couple, that phone call at the beginning was really sweet. It worked really well as a plot technique, too, that we never saw Danny get hit by the car, and in fact we don't even hear anything over the phone to signify that something has gone wrong. We hear Danny say "I love you too," and then... well, after that, we're not sure when the actual moment of death occurred. How much of Clara's little speech did he hear? He was just alive one minute, dead the next, with no precise way to mark when it happened. I loved that. I also loved when Clara described Danny's death. She said: "It wasn't terrible. It was boring. It was ordinary." Working with the Doctor has made Clara expect a certain fantastical element in her life, and when she's denied it, she feels sort of ripped off, in more ways than one.

The volcano scene had its issues, in the sense that it didn't fool me, but it was still a great scene in terms of pacing and acting. The Doctor may have had a handle on the situation, but he still didn't know if Clara was going to go all the way. When she threw that last key, he seemed genuinely distraught. Not because he was doomed, but because he realized something about Clara he had never had to confront before. This is further highlighted when the Doctor says that he's exactly the sort of friend that Clara deserves. This is actually quite the insult, since we know the Doctor despises himself. On the flip side, it was actually rather sweet when the Doctor said that he cared about Clara enough that her betrayal didn't matter to him.

The big concept of this episode is that "the dead remain fully conscious." So, if you're getting cremated, you feel it. If you donate your body to science - ugh. Just imagine. This is a sufficiently creepy idea, and it's also fairly original, from what I can tell. I mean, I'm sure it's been done before in some way or another, but this concept of the body and mind being linked in such a permanent way is actually quite different from usual sci-fi ideas of the mind-body problem. So, I enjoyed the uniqueness of this concept, and it's very unsettling implications.

There's this one quality of this episode that I'm having a hard time describing, but I really enjoyed it. Clara is dealing with a major loss, and she goes through a lot of different stage of grief. In order to see Danny again, however, she has to set all of that aside and, as the Doctor says, "be strong, even if it breaks your heart." She has to be the investigative companion to the Doctor, and treat this as any other adventure, if she wants to succeed in it. And in the end, she does just this. It's also interesting to me that while the Doctor is often very obtuse about matters of human emotion, he understands that Clara is going through a terrible loss, and he knows that when he tells her to be strong, it won't be an easy thing for her. It seems the Doctor can only access these emotions through noticing them in others.

Before I wrap up, I must praise the acting in this episode. Jenna Coleman did a great job with all of this emotionally heavy material. In particular, I loved her in the volcano scene. Very nice. Peter Capaldi also had to pull some heavy material, and of course he delivered it flawlessly. The highlights of his performance were when he said he cared about Clara, and when he finally realized the truth about Missy/the Master. Samuel Anderson did great with his tearful realization of his own death, his confrontation with the boy he had killed, and his shaky, desperate indecision about whether or not to become a Cyberman.

I'll stop there! Despite some of the usual complaints I have about this show nowadays, this was a great penultimate episode to the season! I honestly don't know how this is going to wrap up, but I'm looking forward to it.

9/10