Whowatch Part 16
Illustration by Rich Veitch
I finished Alan Moore's Illuminations, and after the opening Hypothetical Lizard drawn from his 80s work my enjoyment of most of the subsequent stories was directly proportionate to how much I could tell he was having a laugh with it. So Location, Location, Location, Cold Reading, The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, and What We Can Know About Thunderman were all winners for me (and I'd recommend my cohost Sean Dillon's piece on the latter), whereas Not Even Legend, the titular Illuminations, American Light: An Appreciation, and And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence were substantially less in my wheelhouse; I'll concede the latter two might be in "oh right, I'm one of those idiots Alan Moore isn't writing for these days" territory though. Not certain what's next on the novel docket, I'll be busy for a bit between Whowatch, a small project I wanna do for the newsletter a bit later this month, and getting around to writing about We Only Find Them When They're Dead. Leaning towards finally cracking open The Obelisk Sky though.
Mummy on the Orient Express
Flatline
In the Forest of the Night
Dark Water/Death in Heaven
Last Christmas
Sean: Hello and welcome back to the Whowatch! Today, we have a very special guest. To my virtual left, they’re leaping across time hoping that the next leap will be the leap home, it’s Freezing Inferno!
Frezno: For the love of God please help me, 2007 is not nearly as good as everyone remembered it being.
Sean: Certainly not as… interesting as 2005.
Frezno: Definitely a more interesting vintage. In the meantime, hello all!
Sean: Before we get into things, I have the obligatory question we ask all our guests: How did you get into Doctor Who, Frezno?
Frezno: Funny you mentioned it just now, because it actually was in 2005. I was channel surfing and came across this strange show, and saw a spaceship crash into Big Ben in London before landing in the Thames. I was intrigued by what was going on, so I kept on watching, and somehow the presence of the Slitheen did not deter me from watching for the next 18 years.
Sean: And it’s a good thing you weren’t considering I hear you appear on a rather charming podcast about Doctor Who.
Frezno: So I do! The Doctor Who Reviews show can (and has been) described as two people driving a third person mad over the course of almost 200 episodes. Sometimes there’s even another person joining those first two in the madness
Sean: Have any of the guests been on the sane side?
Frezno: Probably. Maybe.
Sean: You also have a twitch channel?
Frezno: Correct! I play old video games with a blue-haired virtual Youtuber avatar, and have a fun time with it!
David: Glad to bring you aboard the crew! I’ll need all the TARDIS cabinmates that can be spared to calm me down at the beginning of Mummy on the Orient Express as I start yelling at the screen CLARA WHY ARE YOU STILL HANGING OUT WITH HIM. YOU JUST HAD A WHOLE EPISODE WITH THE APOLLO 18 SPIDERS ABOUT THIS.
Sean: Well sometimes you have to say goodbye to your shitty best friend who brings the worst out of you. Question is which one’s which?
David: I actually have an “ah” in my notes as they explained that this was meant to be one final relatively relaxed journey, which of course The Doctor picked for maximum impending danger and excitement. Which of course totally works because Clara sucks in the exact same way as The Doctor, she’s just less obvious about it compared to Rose and doesn’t like seeing it reflected back at her (though I suppose I’m more sympathetic to her shock at 12 now that it occurs to me that she only really briefly knew 11, so her impression of him is at his relative best).
Frezno: This entire story just starts to really cement, here in the back half of the series, just how co-dependently fucked up the Doctor and Clara are to each other.
Sean: I mean, Clara literally describes their relationship to an addiction right before she throws caution to the wind and decides to go back to lying to Danny about what’s going on. Because, as the first episode of the series noted, Clara’s a bossy control freak.
Frezno: What interests me in regards to how much this episode is about Clara’s addiction to all of this is the contrast with Perkins, who outright refuses the call to adventure in time and space on fears of how it could change him. He’s like a completely normal guy by contrast to these risk-seeking addicts who lie to each other a whole bunch.
David: Perkins! One of the understatedly all-time great Doctor Who one-off characters, this dramatic little weirdo who’s enough of a freak to catch The Doctor’s eye but normal enough to not want to see where it goes, no explanations or even implications as to what’s up with him. Love that dude, hope there was never a tie-in novel or Big Finish audio explaining his deal because he’s perfect as-is.
Sean: Rule one: Doctor Who lies. It has often been thought of in terms of 'for your own protection' or 'to keep a secret,' but here we see the honest truth: They like it. It’s fun. It adds a degree of danger to the whole situation. Of course, as we see, it’s not fun for the people who aren’t in on the kink. It hurts them and makes things worse.
And yeah, Perkins is charming. The whole supporting cast is in this one.
Frezno: A running theme in the back half, how the Doctor and Clara’s relationship hurts those around them.
Sean: And in the episodes to come. It’s also, interestingly enough, a running theme within the works of one David Lynch, known for his film The Straight Story where
>>KERSH<<
Justin: In the Capaldi era, it feels like Steven Moffat and co. are dealing with the same baggage everyone from JJ Abrams to Rian Johnson to Clive Barker to Chris Ware have lugged around for decades, namely: it is very fun to construct a machine with a monolithic surface that hides a bunch of little twisting teeth-like gears, the kind that make a viewer shiver and bleed when touched – very fun to construct, but does it mean anything to play with? Compare an episode like this to the coming-out party of The Girl in The Fireplace –the mechanical anxieties that propel that episode are, here, a literal sixty-six second clock. Not for nothing that the base of the soup here is Agatha Christie – can you solve it, you can practically hear the writers saying, because you’re running out of time.
Only it turns out: yes, yes you can make a puzzle box that still moves you after it’s been disassembled and reassembled – you can make a clever story that still has two beating hearts. I knew the whole rewatch that the quantum mummy stalking the train car was a doomed soldier chasing after a faded flag, and yet watching the camera fizzle between a Jenna Coleman trying to find a way out of the most exciting bum deal in the cosmos and a Peter Capaldi with all the bravery to take on the curse of a dying woman but none of the courage to ask a dear friend to enter danger with him – that part’s more fun on a rewatch than it was the first time.
Locked-room-invaded-base episodes are usually where my interest in Doctor Who goes to die – there’s at least one a season and it pretty much always feels like an afterthought. Here, though, the tension isn’t ‘which of these nameless fuckers will die’ (always some, never all) but ‘will the interstellar train trip end with The Doctor and Clara arm-in-arm or torn asunder?’ – where both feel like real possibilities. Continuing our feverish wait from last time re: 'will Twelve say one goddamn honest thing?' - he’s cruel and outspoken on a surface level but, deeper down, so afraid of saying anything plainly - we get to see Clara here consoling and conspiring with the widow in the absence of any real collaboration with The Doctor.
These seasons felt like the first time, to me, that there was a serious possibility the Doctor and their companion would split apart into two equally compelling but separate shows. For all that River Song allegedly provided a check on 10 and 11, it never felt to me like she had the inertia of the show – Coleman/Clara does. From where we are in the season, I distinctly remember feeling like The Doctor was that shambling time-displaced mummy - a few words away from maybe, for the first time, not regenerating, but turning away from his faded flag and giving his energy to his old companion, now the Thirteenth Doctor. The tension here is not, as it was with Amy Pond, ‘will this mooning over him become romance?’. It’s ‘will the teacher retire, and his pupil take over? Will the Doctor – that good man who went to war – voluntarily unravel and remain at rest? Is that what the new face is for?’
Without spoiling much, for those of you further ahead than David, this episode is every bit a dry run for Heaven Sent, in my mind the finest hour Capaldi produced. The questions we’re dealing with on the Orient Express – can Clara replace the Doctor? Should she? From a narrative perspective, can you make a puzzle-box that’s about feeling deeper rather than thinking harder? – those are, delightfully, questions with answers. And they’re coming very soon.
[Quick anticlimactic shout-out to the production design team: I wasn’t here for The Beast Below, but it strikes me that any episode where the setting has little signs that whir and click – part fairy tale, part Severance – is my absolute favorite thing.]
>>KERSH<<
Sean: But perhaps the most notable Lynch story where this idea pops up is in Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks, co-written by Mark Frost, is a show about the secrets of a small town. But more than that, it’s about the secrets of one Laura Palmer, who constantly lied to everyone she was close to for the sake of their own safety. She didn’t want to burden them with her suffering, her grief, her trauma, her sexuality. So she created a persona that was the inverse of that. The High School Sweetheart who cared for everyone.
As with Clara Oswald, she’s both the lies and the truth.
Frezno: As a fellow Twin Peaks aficionado, I have to wonder: Laura Palmer has suffered worse, but is Clara a worse liar? Laura has this air of guilt around her that I just don’t feel with Clara when she starts lying through her teeth to the other man closest to her at the end of the episode.
David: The thing is, no because she likes having fun but in a way where it feels like everything’s running smoothly, so a lie is the A to B with the least friction. The hypocrisy is a borderline non-issue. Yes she’s a born teacher, but at the end of the day her real gift that’s a subset of is handling people, as we see reinforced further in the next episode.
Frezno: Speaking of handling people, Gus.
Sean: Ah yes, one of the many mysteries that are never explained within the show proper, but might be explained some time in the future, should some tie-in author get clever and decide that Gus was the Rani all along. Aside from that, what a charming baddie.
David: Oh my god we DIDN’T ever learn about that, did we?
Frezno: I actually think Gus works much better without tying him to any pre-existing continuity reference. Gus is just like… a capitalist death drive given a charming voice. Always insistent that the workers keep working to get the end result value of solving the Foretold mystery, willing to kill any surplus in order to get the compliance, and even just going “Thank you for giving me my profit, you can all die now”.
Sean: If you don’t do your job, which is killing you, then you die. Do a good job, you die. Doctor Who, for all their faults, is someone who looks at a system of cruelty and decides to rebel.
David: (The Doctor is also someone who has more than come to terms with the idea of a whole lot of people dying in the process.)
Sean: This episode sees the debut of one of the three major new writers of the Capaldi era. We won’t meet the third one for another two entries of the Whowatch, but the first was the writer of the previous story, Kill the Moon’s Peter Harness. But Jamie Mathieson marks the more populist option figure of the three, writing the more action based stories. For many, he’s akin to what Moffat’s role was in the Davies era: the standout writer of the series who isn’t the main writer.
Frezno: As much as I appreciate those other two less populist writers, god damn do I adore the Mathieson stories of this era, this one included.
Sean: And we are immediately followed up with another Mathieson story, wherein Clara Oswald plays the role of Doctor Who against the characters of Flatland.
David: Maybe the best creature effects in the whole of the franchise up to this point, and not unrelatedly pretty close to regular AI drawings.
Sean: They look more like people than AI.
David: In service however of an honestly pretty meh episode imo. It successfully pulled off a “That is a thing”, and “Takes quite a lack of imagination to beat the psychic paper” was quality, but it–
Sean: Honestly, I feel the same about this one as you do with Kill the Moon: it is very much a single unit of Doctor Who.
David: Precisely.
Sean: I would pick rewatching the episode before it over this one. And not because of the Jazz cover of Queen making Foxes one of two artists who can actually cover Freddie Mercury without sounding like ass.
Frezno: I kind of love it, mostly because Clara Oswald as Doctor Who is wonderful.
Sean: She’s a Doctor of LIES!!!
Frezno: So, Doctor Who then. What struck me is how it’s structured, though. You have her first adventure taking place on a council, where she encounters a working-class person with a unique talent who gets drawn into a world of strange monsters before helping to save the day by bringing that unique talent against them. It’s a mirror of Rose.
I’m also a big fan of the little touches and subversions of how Clara plays being the Doctor. Like her reaction to the noble self-sacrifice attempt by Rigsy, and talking about her favorite hairband. It’s such a wonderful contrast to how Capaldi was treating practically doomed people just last story, and shows that she’s capable but different. For me this all culminates when she says to herself “what would the Doctor do” before shaking her head and going “no, what would I do?”.
David: It’s a clever setup, clever touches, perfectly solemn denouement, I just…wasn’t feeling this one myself. It was highly functional at doing the thing it needed to do is what it was.
Sean: Then there’s In the Forest of the Night, which… it’s a bit crap, isn’t it?
David: I wouldn’t have to look it up to tell what most people’s issue with Forest of the Night is, and they’re right, but the even deeper core issue is that just as the likes of Kill The Moon and Flatline are One Unit Of Doctor Who, Forest of the Night is One Unit Of Crap Doctor Who. Aside from the grodiness of its premise it isn’t even the kind of bad worth getting worked up about like Hungry Earth. It just sucks and is nothing.
Sean: We’ll be getting into that type of Doctor Who Next Time.
Frezno: Ah, Forest. I kind of admire what it is trying to do (go full-on Doctor Who Fairy Tale) without actually being totally in love with it, if that makes any sense. I kind of like Danny’s even-handed understanding of Clara’s lies, and that killer line about fearing less and trusting more kind of makes sense with the theme of lying going on in this season.
Sean: It makes perfect sense. It’s very much Doctor Who’s second attempt at engaging with William Blake, and only succeeds at being better at the first by virtue of it being competently written. That said, if Titan doesn’t get its act together and hire noted comics writer Elizabeth Sandifer to do something Who related, then they will have squandered their money on nothing save the scraps of crap Doctor Who Dan Slott could farm out for Christos Gage to write for him.
David: Slott on Who is a Dream Crab, it can’t hurt you if you don’t look at it or think about it.
Sean: As with many Doctor Who monsters (with two notable exceptions), the best way to fight them is by hiding behind your couch.
On that note, CYBERMEN!
David: They don’t even suck too bad this time!
Dark Water/Death in Heaven is probably the best Who finale to date, with the important caveat that this is not the same thing as being the best episode that is a finale. It’s got good and interesting stuff without being a total banger, BUT it’s probably the best of the eight times up at bat so far of resolving a series’ worth of emotional and thematic conflicts with how these people have helped and hurt one another into a single coherent climax where history could get blown up by robot zombies.
Frezno: Cards upfront: the first third of Dark Water is my favorite Doctor Who episode ever. Its intensity and messiness as the lies and grief bring Clara to the darkest razor’s edge in trying to bring her dead love back, and the way that the Doctor both is saddened by this betrayal and forgives her for it, literally changed the course of my life and creative thinking.
David: Somehow almost slipped my mind, I guess because of how hard the tone and focus pivot from there, but one of those general osmosis Doctor Who bits I absorbed a long time ago was the Doctor’s speech about being confused as to why he wouldn’t forgive a betrayal. I knew it was coming sooner or later and it STILL took me the fuck out. The ‘splooch!’ sound effect when the flat key’s thrown in was ill-considered though.
Sean: In many ways, this is a stealth remake of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. The Cybermen are amassing an army that (in this case actually are) the undead out to overtake the world. The cliffhanger of the first part reveals that there is another baddie in the mix besides the Cybermen. And the final scene between Clara and the Doctor is just… my heart!
Having seen this before Army of Ghosts/Doomsday very much hurt that story, as I talked about all the way back in WhoWatch 3: It’s Morbin’ Time! And here, you can see this awful, tragic story about two people who love each other so much having to hurt each other contrasted with two people who grew apart after one went full monstrous. In many regards, Michelle Gomez’s Missy is the best incarnation of the Master Doctor Who would ever do. A mad woman who is able to match Doctor Who on their own terms. Someone who aspires to have the Killing Joke style relationship of “We’re not so different you and I. I’m something of a scientist myself.” And she will burn the world down to get it.
It’s not romance. Not because violence ≠ love. But because it’s the sort of friendship that has spent millenia brewing under the surface of reality. Centuries old and extremely fucked up.
Frezno: Michelle Gomez is, full stop, the best incarnation of this character, and I only now just realized how the governments of Earth making Doctor Who the President and putting him in charge of everything is a microcosm of Missy’s fucked-up birthday present to him.
David: The Mistress/Master is thematically extremely on-point here in ways she never was before, for a particular reason - if she is and always has been the ruler of Heaven and Hell, The Master is literally God, and The Mistress is trying to get The Doctor to take the promotion from a mere Presidency to head upstairs. On a moment-to-moment basis her dropping a “we’re not so different” is almost as annoying as that line ever has been - which if anything isn’t helped by her finally being an excellent personality contrast to him in a way John Simm for his charm wasn’t to Tennant - but on the macro scale her as the Satan trying to tempt our hero into being the shithead they’ve always held the promise to be works a lot better. She popped through space and time to save everyone! Isn’t that how that works?
(Related note, I could excuse The Time War, but this is just straight-up The City of the Saved, and honestly it seemed more interesting as that before getting into the Cybermen of it all. Though the question ‘wait but is this an AI’ sure is a lot scarier now than it would’ve been in 2014! And love Chris Addison’s Seb, sublimely aggravating.)
Sean: I mean, Clara does basically declare herself a member of the Faction in that brilliant opening bit. This is Clara and Doctor Who at their most fucked up. They will destroy themselves and everyone else in the name of the people they hold dear. The volcano scene is quite possibly one of the stand out moments in the entire Capaldi era.
David: The whole “Clara Oswald never existed” feels a bit written-for-the-teaser the way it plays out even if it’s been set up for a while, but as it rules I’m willing to forgive it.
Frezno: Is it any wonder, then, that we get that reveal of Missy being the one to have put these two together in light of how utterly fucked their friendship has become? The entire back half of Death In Heaven is just the consequence of their constant lies and codependence, and they are called on it at every turn. Not only that, but the nature of soldiers and good men that’s been building is thrown into the mix, what with Danny throwing back the Doctor’s compassion because he knows his sacrifice is the only thing that will let Doctor Who know the evil plan.
David: Dan the Soldier Man has been made one of the stock-model interchangeable action-figure soldiers Doctor Who blows up every week to entertain children, and essentially flips him off before flying away to save the world when he can’t. It’s strictly speaking a sideshow to what’s ultimately an extremely high stakes debate over who The Doctor’s really-for-real best friend is, but it’s a cruelly on-point conclusion to his narrative and I’m glad after the Caretaker of it all he’s the one who gives The Doctor this year’s ‘I should really be less of a prick’ finale breakthrough. He even prompted a better ‘remember all those times I was a prick?’ montage than Doomsday!
Frezno: At least Doctor Who finds solace in answering the question of whether or not he’s a good man by declaring that he’s just an idiot trying to make the universe a better place. It took a season of being confronted with his worst excesses and getting called out by damn near everyone, but by God we did it.
David: Hot take hot take, The Doctor’s real name is first name An, last name Idiot. Completely changes the context of half their rants.
Sean: Keep in mind, this was aired on Remembrance Day, which is basically England’s Memorial Day and Veterans Day rolled into one. This is the day of Soldiers, and we’re having what is essentially the conclusion of many a sympathetic Tom King protagonist: the hero changes/dies, fixing the damage as best they can while still fucking up immensely. (As opposed to the unsympathetic ones like Adam Strange who reveal themselves to be the bastards they have always been.)
Also of note is the presence of the CyberBrig, if only because it led to this delightful bit from Steven Moffat in the letters pages of Doctor Who Magazine:
Kate: Dad, please don't sit in my office.
Cyberbrig: Just sorting out a few things for you…
Kate: Really, we're fine.
Cyberbrig: You've got far too many people. All you need is a Sergeant, maybe an occasional Captain, and a nice family car for you all to drive around in. Keeps the Earth perfectly safe!
Kate: It's changed days, Dad.
Cyberbrig: And why don't have a big sign outside - UNIT HQ, with your name on it? Does you good to see your name on a big sign.
Kate: Well, we are supposed to be a top secret organisation….
Cyberbrig: Yes, yes - you put 'Top Secret' on the sign. Have I taught you nothing about security?! And for goodness' sake, why do you have all these women about the place? How much tea do you need?
Kate: They're scientists.
Cyberbrig: Scientists?! Have we been infiltrated? Evacuate the building, I'll lure them into a nuclear reactor.
Kate: They work here.
Cyberbrig: They what?! You only need one scientist, Kate. A funny one, with silly clothes, that's the ticket. Give him a tiny little office and a table, he'll be perfectly happy.
Kate: I'm a scientist. Science leads, that's what you taught me.
Cyberbrig: Exactly! Science leads! But only if you let it. Round them alup, put them in booths, waterboard any trouble-makers -
Kate: Dad, you're getting excited again! Your moustache has slipped.
Cyberbrig: Oh, no, has it? It's this face, it's a bit slippery - like all aliens. I say, Kate - do you think people know my moustache isn't real?
Kate: I think they always did.
But perhaps the most important debut of this whole story is the director, Rachel Talalay. Rachel started her career working under the tutelage of one John Waters before moving on to make such cult classics as Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and the great 90s comic book adaptation, Tank Girl. This two parter cemented itself as her debut in a way few television directors ever get the chance to do. From the use of dissolves (Oh god, Missy’s eyes in the sky) to the camera moving around Clara as she arrives too late to have a final word with Danny in-person and is met only with the memorial to the Cyberman appearing on the plane like it’s a gremlin and Doctor Who is William Shatner. Just so many amazing shots, and she’ll only get better and better with each story she’s given.
David: Clara first arriving at the graveyard in particular is a fantastic sequence, a blink-and-you-miss-it visual that’s startling on its own but horrifying in the context of ‘wait…the Cybermen aren’t that fast…right?...’
Sean: OH GOD, THE CRYING CYBERMEN! That’s almost as fucked up as 'The dead feel themselves decomposing/burning/being used for science.'
Frezno: God, the three words are such a gloriously morbid thing to put into your all-ages time travel show.
David: I wonder if that’s where that one SCP - looking it up, 2718 - about the afterlife being an exponentially-infinitely-worsening torture of your consciousness being spread out ever-thinner across every molecule that sheds from your corpse over the eons got it from?
Sean: I mean, it’s essentially Roko’s Basilisk, but competent. God is just your nervous system. Which is to say nothing has really changed.
But anyways, we have an extremely delightful post-credits scene with our next guest star.
Frezno: That’s right, folks, the Doctor and Clara’s final big lies to each other are immediately dismissed as the credits get interrupted by no less than MOTHERFUCKING SANTA!
David: (We gotta move on but their last big lies being to help each other, because that’s the only way these two deeply sad, broken people can think to be kind to one another, and it makes everything all the worse? God, so good.)
Frezno: (They’re so fucked up, and also my favorite TARDIS team. Precisely because of that.)
Sean: Fittingly, Doctor Who and Clara essentially ended the episode with The Gift of Magi. Anyways, Last Christmas is probably my second favorite Doctor Who Christmas Special. I love Nick Frost as a bitter, but still charming Santa.
David: I know Nick Frost is an actor of note but getting a guy named Nick Frost to play Santa feels like a bit. Good bit though! And he’s great even if they didn’t need to say twice in a row he’s the nice guy who helps, it’s a quality note that I don’t much blame them wanting to hit again.
Sean: I love the actor who plays Strax, Dan Starkey, being allowed to get out of the makeup and do some comedy. I love Shona and the rest of the North Pole gang. I love the dream where Clara ends up living happily ever after with Danny and her extremely fucked up imagining of what Danny was like and why he ultimately did what he did.
Frezno: What are dreams, if not lies being constructed by our sleeping subconscious minds? I love Clara’s dream, and the horrible implication that she’d rather die in her beautiful dream than live without Danny. It stands out to me that Danny and not the Doctor is the one to convince her to wake up, considering that he is a construct of her imagination. Perhaps the rational part of her mixed with her love for Danny.
David: It’s fair play with Santa serving the same function on a broader scale, but I suppose it comes down to her imagining Danny as perfect, and thus he would save her - they couldn’t sell me on them as the next Amy and Rory in the end, but this still pulls the heartstrings.
Sean: It’s an imaginary story. Aren’t they all? Though really, this episode might be the most Grant Morrison Doctor Who story yet. It’s a story about how dreams are things of both monstrosity and wonder. “I’m a dream that’s going to save you” is basically the ending thesis of Flex Mentallo.
Also worth noting, this was supposed to be the final Clara story. We were to end with Doctor Who meeting up with Clara as an old woman, paralleling her final encounter with 11, before going off with Shona as the new companion.
David: So there was a reason I felt like Shona was supposed to come across as having something on the ball beyond the average guest star! And her having a dream of import where a magic maniac helps out before waking back up in her boring real life, only to be whisked away for real, would’ve been a decent companion opener.
(It’s also possible however Faye Marsay dancing and air-guitaring hard enough to save her life may have simply, ah, done it for me.)
Sean: But then Jenna Coleman decided she had one more series in her. (In fact, she also had one more episode in her as Death in Heaven was also supposed to be her finale.) And so Moffat did what he always does when he’s in a jam: blatantly rip himself off.
For those of you who haven’t experienced one of the great children's shows of the 90s, Steven Moffat’s first gig on television was for a show he created called Press Gang. The show tells of a bunch of High Schoolers running a newspaper and the chaos that ensues. From romances falling apart to gun toting losers trying to get attention to Thatcherites, the show had it all. But for the show’s fourth series finale, Day Dreams, we saw the main character and beta for Clara Oswald, Lynda Day, contemplate some important life decisions. So she dreams of what the future may hold for her and her friends culminating in her waking up and making the wrong decision. Only to find herself still in the dream to wake up again to make the right one.
Frezno: What I really love is how Doctor Who gets to take the reins of the sleigh in the ending, and how utterly overjoyed he is to do so. After this entire series worth of self-reflective pondering and codependent lying, the final big lies between the Doctor and Clara are dispelled. Doctor Who’s heart is healed, and he’s just having fun in this scene, joyous and wondrous fun.
Sean: The kind of fun us comics critics can only achieve by smugly noting that we have seen Shin Ultraman before our friends or refusing to explain why The Straight Story is the best Star Trek movie. That, and writing. Writing’s fun too.
Also, I brought this up briefly, but Jenna Coleman is fantastic as old lady Clara. You can feel the age in her such that she slightly down pitches her voice to sound completely different than usual, but still identifiably Clara Oswald.
David: After going to bat for dang Sherwood last time I’m surprised I didn’t have more to say this round, but I suppose that’s the thing; it’s easy to dig up subtle cleverness, whereas aside from Forest of the Night everything in the back half of series 8 simply Works to greater or lesser degrees in very self-evident ways. And I gotta say, after all this time in the ‘Moffat’s the better writer but RTD was the better showrunner’ camp it was satisfying to see what felt like our guy finally totally sticking the landing.
Frezno: It’s an absolutely incredible back half, just brimming with all these moody themes like the nature of 'goodness', or the power of lies, all of it culminating in a masterpiece of a finale and then a coda where these two messed-up best friends are finally honest with each other and have cleared out all the lies. They are both messes and I adore them, and onward they go for more adventure.
David: * Frezno blinks and is suddenly materialized in a cubicle as that freaky Promised Land leitmotif plays *
Sean: Be seeing you.
Next Time: Suddenly and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history… You're the puppy. No one is going to get eaten/vapourised/exterminated/upgraded/possessed/mortally wounded/turned to jelly. I am afraid, but I will sing. When things get really bad, I tear the memories out. The first thing I'd do if I wanted to invade the world would be to kill you. Not just pirates, space pirates.