"Death in Heaven"

"You will be like us. Now lie there and let me take a piss on you."

I normally begin these things with something along the lines of "Why do I do this to myself?" but this time I know why I'm doing this to myself. It's because I've actually been enjoying elements of Series 9 and am contemplating giving them the good old OCBW treatment. But it would do my slightly obsessive tendencies a tragic disservice to overlook the final episodes of Series 8 (even though I really don't want to watch "Last Christmas" again) and so I find myself here, where I left myself when I reviewed "Dark Water" nearly ten months ago. I seem to remember "Death in Heaven" being a non-stop televisual disaster from start to finish but let's see how we go. We begin with a recap of how Danny "His Last Name Matches The Colour Of His Shirt" Pink got snuffed something proper largely due to Clara distracting him with vague Moffat-style dialogue while he was trying to cross the road, how there's some random place with "water tombs", that apparently Chris Addison is the grey-suited psychopomp of the underworld (which is actually inside a "Gallifreyan Hard Drive") and how Missy, in a revelation about as shocking as, for instance, River being Amy and Rory's daughter, the "good man" River killed being the Doctor, or the news that the sun comes up in the East every morning, is none other than the Master.

How to make Clara more tolerable.

The opening completely ignores the ending of the previous episode in which Danny was talking to Clara while on the verge of erasing his own emotions. Now Clara's hiding, and the Cyberman from inside the office tank identifies her, but she claims that there is no such person purely so that this line could be used in last week's trailer to make people think that there is going to be a big revelation. But there isn't; it's just a trick to ensure her own survival. She claims to be the Doctor, and the title sequence puts Jenna Coleman's name before Capaldi's and shows Clara's eyes in the titles. Obviously it's meant to play into this "Clara is like the Doctor" thing which doesn't really work but one wonders if this was put in mostly by Moffat to spite critics who had started calling Series 8 "Clara Who" or "The Clara Show" to suggest that the Doctor himself was lacking emphasis. It sounds like the kind of petty thing he'd do - he seems to be almost completely incapable of gracefully taking criticism - but who knows. Anyway, outside the cathedral the Cybermen stand around like lemons while idiotic passers-by photograph them and the Master gloats. Then Osgood from the Fiftieth Anniversary episode shows up and reveals that all the randomers were UNIT agents. The ever-uninteresting Kate Stewart arrives and rather pointlessly introduces herself, how many kids she has, where she went to school and so on, and threatens the Cybermen by chucking down a battered old head from "The Invasion" that was cynically used in promotional material to try to get Old Who fans excited by making them think the classic Cybermen were going to reappear. They've done it with the Daleks; why not the Cybermen? People love those old designs.

Solar-powered Anglicanism: the next step in
world conquest of the town fëte economy.

Having been apparently spooked by this, the Cybermen all turn into Iron Man, fulfilling criticisms that were made of their redesign, and fly away with jet rockets coming out of their feet. Is there some inexplicable Travelodge product placement here with that prominent sign in the side of the shot? The dome of St. Paul's Cathedral opens and more fly out. It's suggested that the Master somehow engineered a way of hiding the facility inside the Cathedral, but it's never properly dealt with. Missy also refers to herself as the "Queen of Evil" which is a truly dreadful piece of Moffat dialogue in which characters must be as self-referential as possible. There's one Cyberman for every major town and city in the UK: they're all flying up into the air and exploding, which somehow produces clouds from which they will "pollenate" future Cybermen. They're also using the "recently deceased minds" stored in the Nethersphere to control them, but it's not explained why they're needed. All the dead people are going to be restored to their bodies for no clear reason. UNIT tranquillises the Master and the Doctor, the latter of whom tells them to "guard the graveyards". We of course immediately cut to a graveyard outside which a crowd has conveniently gathered. "Look at that!" says some randomer unnecessarily as the screen shows what we need to see. "How come it's only raining inside the graveyard?" This could also have been easily conveyed visually.

"Steven thinks my Doctor should have a 'trademark grunt'."

So the rain isn't really water, it flows wherever it pleases, and passes into a morgue in which it spontaneously turns dead bodies into Cybermen. Thus Danny Pink is now one of them. This is probably the most daft Cyber-conversion process yet. Somehow a little bit of water spontaneously puts a suit of robotic armour around them with weapons and jet boots and everything. Yet the episode simply can't explain why the Cybermen need dead bodies at all. If they're this advanced, what on earth is the point of using the corpses, and what good does it do? I once read a good analysis of the Cybermen as compared to the Daleks which argued that if the Daleks are meant to evoke the Nazis then the Cybermen were originally meant to evoke the Soviets, deriving from a defensive paradigm of ideological orthodoxy which demanded conformity at all costs. The Cybermen barely speak in this, however, and any possible motivation for wanting to utilise dead bodies is never conveyed.

"You'd better agree to help us, because the money for
this big hangar set runs out in less than two minutes."

The Doctor wakes up in some hangar with a big plane in which the TARDIS is being stowed. Kate Stewart reveals that they are trying to force his cooperation and claims that it's exactly what the Brigadier would have done, which I question. Aboard the plane there's a completely pointless role for Sanjeev Bhaskar as a very minor UNIT character. I wonder if he was short of dosh or something. There's a portrait of the Brigadier looking old and heavy, "Battlefield" style, on the plane, and it's revealed that the Doctor is "President of the World" by an extremely unlikely unanimous international decision. Yes, I'm sure that in the event of a crisis the combined heads of government of all the world's constantly bickering nations would agree that a complete stranger with no official status should be given complete authority over the entire world's military. This never even comes to anything in the story. The only good bit of all this is when the Doctor makes a rather effortless joke about American presidents and their apparent inability to do anything except bomb and pray. Kate Stewart's line "You are the chief executive officer of the human race" is classic stupid Moffat-style "cool sounding" dialogue, as if being "emergency President in control of the world's armies" is the same as "being president of humanity". He's so desperate to be quoted.

Do you want a stonner?

Back at wherever the hell the Cybermen were (inside St. Paul's, I guess) Clara tries to prove that she's the Doctor by waffling on about Kasterborous, the Prydonian Order, the apparent "four marriages" of the Doctor, the apparently dead status of all of his descendants, and most baffling of all, a completely pointless reference to Jenny from "The Doctor's Daughter". I find it very telling that if we consider the first of the Doctor's "four marriages" to be to his never-seen Time Lady wife, every other "marriage" has occurred in New Who. It's a good example of how the writers of New Who have an utterly neurotic relationship with the show's origins: "The Doctor was never romantic in the old show, so in the new show he should get married or we should make jokes about him getting married every few years!" Has the assumption on Moffat and RTD's part been that the Doctor was not a conventionally romantic character in the Old Series because the writers were incompetent? Has it never occurred to them that this was an aspect of his character which made him unique and interesting? I thought Clara's line about Glasgow University was just a joke about Capaldi but it turns out my ignorance is showing; it's a reference to classic Troughton serial "The Moonbase", of which I've read the Target novelisation but haven't seen the partly animated serial - those animations are barely watchable in my experience. Then Cyber Danny shows up and kills the others after agreeing that Clara is a liar. The other Cybermen note that he's not under cyber control. They've got a point. Why isn't he? This unanswered question hangs over the rest of the episode.

"I'm, er, a, er, stereotypical fangirl, er, er."

On the plane the Master wakes up and tells the Doctor that Gallifrey isn't lost. There's a good line here when the Doctor says "All you wanted to do is rule the world [...] piece of cake." Capaldi sells this stuff well. Osgood says they've got the Master on file because she was once Prime Minister. Uh, and surely from the numerous times UNIT encountered him in the Pertwee era? Osgood says that the Master "wasn't even the worst" Prime Minister; presumably this is slipped in so all the Tories in the audience can immediately assume that Moffat's having a go at Thatcher and get pissed off because of their own assumptions, as Tories are wont to do. Not that I care about that. It just seems a bit obvious. I mean, Thatcher is one of the people responsible for the proliferation into legitimate political systems of the insane ideology of neoliberalism which has allowed corporate and plutocratic interests to undermine Western democracy, purely out of a baseless and irrational pathological hatred for socialised policies that actually worked, so you can slag her off all you like, and slag off other corporate puppets like Reagan while you're at it, but it's all a bit on the nose. It's sort of like River's feeble attempts to defend Richard Nixon in the Series 6 opener. Anyway enough of my political ramblings. The clouds are getting more dense and murky.

Clara gets struck down by the next big Moffat villain:
aliens who turn people's heads into huge blocks of stone.

I like Osgood, to be honest. I think she has a nice rapport with Capaldi in this, and she's much better in this and in Series 9 than she is in the Fiftieth Anniversary special. Moffat started writing her with a bit more confidence. Down on the surface, Cybermen are climbing out of graves. Again, why do the Cybermen want corpses? What purpose does it serve? I can appreciate that Danny and others at the morgue are reasonably "fresh" but some of these graves have carvings showing that they're from the eighteenth century! What possible use could the Cybermen have for putting armour around old bones?!? It just doesn't make sense. In some respects it's also a bit too close to the Cybermen's appearance in "Army of Ghosts", and at least in that one their "ghostly" appearance was due to a misunderstanding of what was going on. Here they're using bits of dead people for no discernible reason. Why has Danny brought Clara to this graveyard? It's not explained. A Cyberman flashes past her. Is this one tiny reference to the Gaiman episode from Series 7 in which one Cyberman very briefly displayed the ability to move quickly? On the plane the Doctor explains that the clouds are full of "cyber pollen" that cause "full conversion" on contact with flesh. But why oh why oh why do they want dead people? I think I may have finally figured it out, and I'll get to that by the end.

"As President of Earth I order you to shit yourself."

One thing that makes the Cybermen seem particularly absurd in this is that these ones are apparently so advanced that they can fly and turn into a kind of water that instantly turns people into more Cybermen but they still can't walk around without making loud stomping noises. It also doesn't explain why they need the dead people's minds. It's soon to be stated that they're part of a hive mind. Why bother with the original minds, then? Can't the central intelligence just direct them? It even shows eventually that they're all made to obey a kind of command bracelet. On the plane the Doctor mentions that the Master must have a TARDIS somewhere but it's never seen and this element is never resolved. Oh, and how I hate the term "Planet Earth". Just say "Earth". "Planet Earth" sounds like something from a 90s environmental cartoon. Missy lamely parodies the song "Mickey" with her own name, and then effortlessly tricks Osgood into coming over. I like the idea that she manipulates her by saying that the Doctor will be impressed, but it makes Osgood look hopelessly incompetent and unprofessional that she does actually walk over. Missy says she's going to kill Osgood but Osgood disagrees, given the presence of the guards and so on. Why would you leave the Master with only two guards? In any event she somehow escapes her bonds, somehow gets over to Osgood before the guards can react, somehow kills both of them still before either guard reacts, and disintegrates Osgood with no resistance.

Spits acid.

Upstairs Kate Stewart claims that one of the Brigadier's big ambitions was to get the Doctor to salute him. Ugh. Shit like that never comes up in the old Pertwees; you just have Pertwee telling the Brigadier that he's a "military idiot" or a buffoon or whatever and that's that. You can't rewrite the past, Moffat, no matter how you try. In a sort of Twilight Zone reference a Cyberman on the outside of the plane peeks through the window and a bunch of them are revealed to be in pursuit. The Doctor goes downstairs to confront the Master. I think Michelle Gomez is a bit better at the "crazy" acting than John Simm was; he always seemed little uncomfortable in the role to me, and should have been allowed to play a more serious version of the character rather than just an evil version of Tennant's manic Doctor. In any event we keep cutting back and forth, and now Clara confronts Cyber Danny, not realising it's him, saying how important the Doctor is to her and how they're best buds and so forth and he gets all jealous and sad and reveals his identity to her, taking his face plate off to reveal the serious and debilitating effects of being hit by a car and turned into a Cyberman: your face gets covered in liquid latex. Look, I didn't think Danny was a very good character; I think he was written as a bit of a dullard. Nonetheless I can't help but feel sorry for Samuel Anderson having to give one of his final performances in the show swathed in make-up in a ludicrous rubbery-looking Cyberman costume. Spoilers beware: he gives his actual last one (unless he has a dreaded cameo in Series 9, which I fear he will) in a Santa outfit, so it doesn't get much better than this. Incidentally, if the "cyber pollen" instantly converts the body into a Cyberman, why do they bother leaving the face intact? How is a Cyberman even able to remove his "face" plate and show his organic face underneath? Face.

"May I come inside please?"

He declares that "I don't want to feel like this" and wants Clara to turn on his emotional inhibitor. This is essentially the opposite of "The Age of Steel" then when they wanted to turn the inhibitors off. Back on the plane again, there's another good Capaldi exchange when the Master says "Ask me" and the Doctor simply retorts "Shut up!" As it's in response to this twee, smug villain, it's as if he's saying it to Moffat. The TARDIS phone rings and she reveals that she's the "Woman in the Shop". Guess it's time for me to do as I said I would and consume my own trousers with brown sauce, then, or rather just complain that it's a crap resolution. It's never really explained why the Master wants Clara and the Doctor to be together, especially when other versions of Clara had already been established prior to this. The Master says she wanted to bring together "The control freak and the man who could never be controlled." This in itself is stupid enough on its own - it simply means nothing - but it also fails because this "Clara the control freak" characterisation was only raised in this series, and we were always simply told it was true without it ever being shown in her behaviour. What's more, looking towards the subsequent series, this characterisation is abandoned again and replaced with "Clara the reckless risk-taking daredevil" so it's really only an idea that exists on the spur of the moment.

Time for New Who to start ripping off the Monty Python job interview sketch.

On the phone Clara tells the Doctor that Danny's crying. Is he? The Doctor stands there looking constipated while Cybermen thump on the windows. Sanjeev gets killed off after hardly being in it, a role that could easily have been played by an extra. Clara says of Danny that "I hurt him and he wants it to stop." Okay, so how did she hurt him? Was it when she lied about no longer travelling with the Doctor after she said she would? Nothing seemed to suggest that he really cared before now. It's an unresolved element of this big confession she was apparently trying to make at the start of the previous episode that didn't seem to really be based on anything. Again, Capaldi has a good line about how a fully Cyber Danny would just kill her: "I'm not going to help you commit suicide." Then Kate Stewart also gets sucked out of the plane. Bye. The Master makes a random joke about Belgians, Moffat recycling his own material from "Time Crash" in masturbatory glee. She teleports away and the plane blows up, the Doctor diving through the air. I liked that Missy teleported into the Nethersphere, because it's consistent with the representation of the Matrix in Classic serials, particularly "The Trial of a Time Lord", in which it is shown that it is possible to physically "enter" Time Lord computer systems because (I think) they exist in another dimension. It's only a minor element, however. The Doctor somehow summons the TARDIS mid flight and dives into it while Murray Gold's rip off James Bond music blares in the background. Chris Addison has to utter the breathtakingly awful line "Permission to squee" but is thankfully killed off by Missy. Incidentally, Addison memorably played the opportunistic Ollie alongside Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It. How come they never share any screen time here?

Death in Heaven action figure combo back.
Free cardboard tombstones included.

The TARDIS pointlessly bursts out of the clouds as if it's Superman and then shows up in this graveyard in which Clara has been standing around for ages. One thing I'll say is that the atmosphere here is quite good. It really feels dreary, dark and doom-laden, with graves, stormclouds overhead, and loads of confused Cybermen stumbling around in the background like zombies. Shame there's no real story to speak of. I think the Doctor tries to explain to Danny that he should hold onto his pain and retain his humanity, but he actually needs him to switch off his emotions in order to fully access the "hive mind" and figure out what the plan is. If he's connected to this hive mind, why hasn't his personality been erased? Why do they need people's minds?!? On the other hand, the Doctor's said that if his emotions are switched off, Danny will become just another Cyberman; so why does he think, after switching the emotions off, that Cyber Danny will tell him their plans? Danny slags off the Doctor being like a military officer wanting to keep his hands clean as Clara prepares to wipe his emotions. I don't feel like the analysis of the Doctor from "The Caretaker" is taken to its logical conclusion here. How often is the Doctor really that callous? Furthermore, Danny simply looks ridiculous in the costume, and it's so hard to take any of this seriously, although Clara's line "I feel like I'm killing you" is a good one. Once Clara's done the deed Danny immediately goes stony-faced so we know he's under control, but he then floridly informs the Doctor that "The rain will fall again; all humanity will die." Why would the Cyber hive mind express itself in such a poetic way?

"You look a bit rough."

Then there's some rather shonky CGI work as Missy teleports in floating on her umbrella, and reveals that the big plot the whole time was to create an army of Cybermen to give to the Doctor so that he can put right all the big wrongs of the universe. The Master rather bizarrely argues that the Doctor has "always wanted" an army. Don't think that's true. He naturally refuses, and she threatens him by saying that if he doesn't do it then the cyber pollen stuff will this time fall on living humans and turn all of them into Cybermen. I think I've figured out the plot now. The Master wants to make a Cyberman army for the Doctor to try to make a point to him that he's a conqueror at heart, but she also wants to threaten him with doing it to all humanity if he refuses. So because these Cybermen use this water pollen method of converting people, she uses dead bodies to do it, because the cyber pollen stuff just needs organic material, not necessarily a living human. Again, however, this in no way explains why the Cybermen have any use for the original humans' minds if they're just going to erase them, and it also doesn't explain why, if these Cybermen are so advanced that they have this "pollen" thing, that they can't just make a huge army of robots, cut out the middle man, and completely ignore using organic material. Maybe it's still meant to be an ideological thing on their part, but because it's never stated, it's not clear.

"Hello, operator? Yes, can you put
me through to the people who know why
I keep showing up in this when I'm
actually in Hollywood making
critically-panned movies?"

The Master says she's done all this because "I need my friend back." It's an interesting line to pursue - their friendship, I mean - but this doesn't make a lick of sense and it's not at all subtle. There are a lot of heavy-handed flashbacks to earlier in Series 8 with ruminations on the Doctor's nature, trying to imply that the Doctor's going to go "Yeah, all right then," and lead a Cyber-crusade across the universe, but of course he has a different realisation: "I am an idiot with a box and a screwdriver passing through, helping out." It's not the most elegant expression of the nature of the Doctor's moral interventionism, but I guess it's something. Then he starts going on however about how erasing Danny's emotions hasn't changed anything because "love is a promise", not an emotion, and therefore not affected by emotions being wiped. But surely they're ignoring the fact that the Cybermen prize logic, not just emotionlessness, and therefore love would be irrelevant, irrational and illogical, as would promises be. I don't think this works. Nonetheless, apparently Danny wasn't really affected that much. I suppose we can assume that all the other Cybermen, the overwhelming majority of whom presumably "loved" someone in some fashion at some point or other, were all equally unaffected, but it's never stated and is completely inconsistent with how the Cybermen have operated at all other points in their history. The Doctor gives Danny the Cyber control bracelet and Danny gives a big speech, finally declaring what they are doing to be "the promise of a soldier". I almost expected the other Cybermen to all cheer. They fly off to self destruct in the clouds, because apparently this will somehow get rid of the cyber pollen. The flying Danny looks pretty risible, like an action figure being pulled into the air on a string. We see some stock footage of New York, Sydney and so on just to confirm this.

How I look after another frustrated attempt
to find a copy of Feel the Force.

With that all done, the Master tells the Doctor that Gallifrey's back where it always was, at its original coordinates. Clara wants to kill the Master but the Doctor stops her. Before he can do anything, however, she's apparently zapped by a random Cyberman off to one side who has also saved Kate Stewart, who's barely conscious and muttering about her father. This surviving Cyberman is meant to be the resurrected Brigadier of all things. This didn't piss me off the way it pissed off some old school fans; it just seemed unnecessary and a meaningless inclusion perpetuating Moffat's weird love of finding ways to reproduce characters on screen whose actors are dead. It could have been left ambiguous as to who saved Kate, and Kate herself could have easily shot the Master. The Doctor salutes the Cyber Brigadier, who acts all flattered before apparently flying off to have further adventures or something. Of course from all evil springs forth good, and this absurd element of the episode has been a source of all sorts of amusing photoshop jobs of Cybermen with little moustaches and UNIT uniforms on, so indirectly something of decency has come of it.

Imagine the music from the end of Airplane! playing.

Two weeks later at Clara's inexplicably luxurious one-person council estate flat she hears Danny's voice from beyond the mortal coil, a strange ghostly voice emanating from some light. He reveals that the Master's bracelet could bring people back but that there's only enough power for one person, conveniently enough. He sends through the child he killed in the war: "You need to find his parents; he died a long time ago." In the Middle East? Good luck with that. "I'm sorry, Clara," says Danny. Yeah, sorry for giving Clara this confused long-dead child who now needs to be returned to a place that is probably even worse than it was when Danny was helping Blair and Bush wreck it in the first place. Clara and the Doctor meet up at some café and both lie to each other: Clara claims that she's settling down with the resurrected Danny, who is actually still dead, and the Doctor claims that he's found Gallifrey and is going home, when actually Missy lied and we get to see a rather odd shot of Peter Capaldi abusing the TARDIS console in frustration. I guess it's kind of dramatic? The best part is a lonely shot of the TARDIS spinning through space. They agree to go their separate ways with a parting embrace. How sad. Look at them both there being bloody miserable and all. I actually do think this kind of works, but it'd be better if it didn't derive from the absurd premises established by the plot of this bizarre episode. I think all of this is partially a result of the fact that apparently Jenna Coleman was repeatedly changing her mind about when she wanted to leave the show, which means this ends up being an incomplete resolution rather than a sendoff, as is outright stated when, inexplicably, Father Christmas bursts into the TARDIS and asks the Doctor what he wants. It's one hell of a way of killing any lingering effect of the adequately touching penultimate scene. But we've got to keep the kiddies hooked for Christmas!

"AW, GE' BACK IN THE F**KIN' TARDIS CLARA!"
-The Doctor, 2014

In hindsight, "Death in Heaven" isn't as bad as I remember it being, but it's still pretty crap. The whole episode is essentially "The Doctor stuffs around on a plane while Clara stuffs around in a graveyard for nearly an hour" and it all feels rather slow and padded. Capaldi delivers some material very well, but too much hinges around this rather whirlwind Clara - Danny Pink romance that feels overstated and given too much weight. For the first appearance of the Master in over four years it's also a little anticlimactic, especially given that the story is the Master teaming up with the Cybermen, something that was more or less equally tedious in "The Five Doctors" in 1983. The Cybermen are desperately overused in Moffat's tenure, and in New Who in general they're boring and ineffectual because they never have any motive beyond "convert the local population, go on to convert the world". At least in Old Who, even at their most incompetent, which admittedly was most of the time, they had goals beyond "convert everybody". They actually had an agenda and were constantly trying to subvert and interfere with their enemies' efforts to completely destroy them; they were desperate survivalists who went to increasingly elaborate and brutal lengths to try to ensure the continuation of their existence. Now they're more like a mindless disease, and are uninteresting as a result. Almost everything vaguely interesting about the Nethersphere set up in the previous episode and across the series is dropped and forgotten, UNIT is unnecessary, the Master's plan makes barely any sense, the plot makes no effort to explain itself and the emotional drama is mostly fairly thin and lacking in impact. It's an unspectacular conclusion to Peter Capaldi's first series as the Doctor, of which he himself was by far the best part, and an unimpressive resolution to Series 8's ongoing storyline, as well as to mysteries which were established previously. To give some final thoughts on Series 8 overall, I think it's fair to say that there were exactly two good things about it: Peter Capaldi, and "Mummy on the Orient Express". Everything else was either utterly mediocre or exceptionally poor, even by Moffat's rapidly plummeting standards, and you couldn't look for a better example of a show that's wasting a lead actor of the calibre that the New Series has needed for years. I'm happy to say, however, that this didn't seem to escape anyone, including, it seems, Moffat himself, and the one good-from-evil compensation for this is that it seems to have spurred a change of pace for Series 9 which, unless things go badly wrong in the last two episodes (as they may of course very well do), is, although still extremely patchy, in many respects a noteworthy improvement over this miserable series.

"Dark Water"

After the next round of budget cuts, post-its will replace episodes.

Right. If it doesn't happen now it isn't happening. I've been watching The Thick of It lately and I'm keen to compare it to Peter Capaldi in arguably a less confronting role, admittedly at the expense of The Thick of It's actually good writing. We begin with, naturally, not the Doctor, TARDIS or adventure but Clara as usual calling Danny on the phone. Thus is revealed, after all this waiting, the great expected secret about Danny: he can't cross roads safely and talk on the phone at the same time. In all honesty, we don't need to hear six "shoot oops" from Clara at the start of any screenplay after hearing this phrase done to absolute death in this series. She's embarking on some kind of post-it-note-driven confession about lying, but it's never made clear why: didn't Danny already figure out that she was still travelling with the Doctor last episode? Not sure what else there is to be done with that. She has a big self-referential ramble about saying the deadly phrase "I love you" and Danny gets hit by a car, which apparently makes no noise whatsoever on the phone. Clara nonetheless says "that's a thing" - was someone paying Moffat to insert the phrase "a thing" into every episode? - and says that he's the "last person who's ever gonna hear me say that." Why? This never gets resolved either.

Auditioning for one of the water tomb bodies.

Of course the whole point of this is that Danny dies as he lives: in a humdrum sort of way, killed offscreen by a speeding car, not aliens or something. Now I know he notionally had an exciting life in the army and what not but I mean as a character he was humdrum. Later Clara's mourning, standing in the middle of the street where it happened - clearly not learning from Danny there. She phones the Doctor, who's mucking around on what looks a bit like a gloomier version of that planet from Revenge of the Sith where Obi-Wan hunts down General Grievous. She's all dead inside, having a stilted conversation with her weird grandmother from "The Time of the Doctor," and complains about Danny's death being boring and ordinary. Much like himself, then. I'm trying to wrestle the subtext out of this but it's still drama with the blunt end of the wedge. Clara thinks she's "owed better." Then the Doctor answers the phone, Peter Capaldi giving an adrenalin shot to the episode. That being said, I realise Buffy-style the representation of death as silent and dull is something which can have a purpose, although I wonder given the Buffy precedent if really now its only purpose is to remind of shows that have done it before. Suddenly the Doctor wakes up on Lanzarote or rather some lava planet which is intercut with flashbacks of Clara nicking all the TARDIS keys, one of which is in The Time Traveller's Wife. Remember how in the TV Movie he was reading H.G. Wells' The Time Traveller? Well, pomo Who, pomo intertextuality I guess. Clara's used some kind of "sleep patch" on the Doctor and is chucking all the keys into a volcano to force him to help her prevent the death of Danny. Apparently lava is the only thing that can destroy a TARDIS key. Seems a bit ordinary for sci-fi. Why not dropping them into a blue giant star or a black hole or something? Anyway, hearing Jenna Coleman trying to fill the name "Danny Pink" with emotional gravitas is a pretty awful moment.

"I do not choose now to do what I came to do."

The Doctor's having none of it of course, refusing to be involved with a paradox, and dismissively suggesting Clara make good on her threats which she claims is him trying to seize control. His response, "I am in control," is very Malcolm Tucker. Her remark that "You will never step inside your TARDIS again" is pure trailer bait, and in any event she tosses all the keys into the Fire of Doom. Then she has a big cry while saying she'd do it again. Can't the Doctor just click his fingers? I think I heard a cut line addressed that. It is, however, very conveniently, all a dream. The Doctor turned the tables on Clara in the first place. This is exploitative writing at its finest, the Doctor claiming it was a test to see how much she meant it. Instead of telling her to "piss off" however he tells her to "go to hell." How droll, he was making a pun about how they'd go find the dead. Presumably the Doctor believes that the TARDIS might be capable of accessing the "afterlife." How does that work? Maybe if he believed living consciousnesses went to another dimension or something, but otherwise "heaven" is a pretty metaphysical concept. What are we going to get next, an episode where the TARDIS lands inside an idea or something? It's odd. Anyway, we get some overplayed drama shite about how the Doctor cares for Clara so much that betrayal wouldn't matter and pure trailer speak about "the darkest day, the blackest hour." Why do characters in New Who always saying "a thing" or spout vaguely poetic-sounding crap all the time instead of actually commenting on events like real people?

That's right, it stinks.

Anyway Clara sticks her hands back in the TARDIS's dubious "interface" from "Listen" and off they go. Meanwhile Danny is being shown the ropes by Chris Addison who's concerned about him being cremated and reveals that they're all on the inside of a Hollow Earth kind of deal. Obviously the bureaucratic office space heaven type imagery is hardly something new either. The TARDIS lands in a spooky building with teardrop logos everywhere and skeletons in tanks, which of course move when the Doctor's not looking. I'm surprised at one point they didn't go past a painting where the eyes slid away and someone peeped through. The Doctor checks out a hologram book about the place rather pointlessly and they finally, after a whole series, meet Missy. Knowing who the character is it's of course completely predictable that Moffat gets his kiss in here as the Doctor gets orally accosted. I'm so worn down by this stuff after ten years of New Who, but the thing is this: the Doctor never kissed anyone in the old show, did he? No, not like that. Why? Because he just didn't. That wasn't in the nature of the character, and no one seems to have cared. Now it seems like one is mandated once a year, and if it isn't outwardly, boringly romantic - making the Doctor seem like any other screen hero - it's like this, just pointlessly cheeky and the writers doing it because they can. I think the thing that bothers me is that, regardless of whether it's done sincerely or as a joke, it's basically the writers saying "Old Who's characterisation and tone was wrong," because it was conspicuous that in Old Who this never ever happened. The thing is, Old Who wasn't always terrific on the characterisation front, but the way they treated the Doctor, and the way they treated romance most of the time (except for weak crap like marrying off female companions), wasn't conformist to regular drama or what have you. So whenever they do stuff like this, even as a joke, I feel like it's saying "it's better that Doctor Who be more conformist to the norms of modern TV" which to me is emblematic of the way that New Who so often seems to spectacularly miss the point of the show's original premise, which was to stand out and be different. That's not to say the Old show wasn't as unashamedly populist as the New, but I feel like it more often did so on its own terms (although I'm sure tedious gasbaggers on some of the bigger, more "uber"-populated forums could lecture me on how every single Old Who episode is a worthless rip off of a pre-existing narrative and New Who is better in every way). It is of course also a problem because it's just Moffat going "Wouldn't it be funny if the Master and the Doctor kissed on screen?" and making it happen. It has nothing to do with the story really, it's just an old fan mucking around, which like so much of New Who's self-awareness, makes it virtually impossible to suspend disbelief about anything because the narrative doesn't function as if it is a representation of actual (albeit fictional and fantastical) events happening to people and instead feels more like playing with toys. But hey, it's a kid's show, right, so maybe that works in its favour (or maybe kids deserve to be taken seriously too).

"Why don't they fall off the ceiling?"

Anyway Missy pretends to be a robot, they meet someone named Doctor Chang, and Clara and the Doctor have an exchange where Clara says she's not okay and the Doctor responds "there would be something very wrong if you were." Typical Moffat "Look at me, aren't I clever" dialogue. No offence to the guy (I know no one says that in good faith) but why does he write these days so much as if he's got something to prove? If he's as good as his biggest fans claim that his winning of awards proves him to be, he shouldn't need to. In the Nethersphere Chris Addison makes a naff reference to the death of Steve Jobs explaining the proliferation of iPads in heaven, which is clearly not all it's cracked up to be, being cold, dark and apparently involving crime if the police siren is to be believed. Chris Addison makes an analogy to babies which serves in no way to explain or bear any relevance to the idea that the Nethersphere is an extension of existing consciousness rather than a "true" spiritual afterlife. Then a visitor turns up and we discover that the person Danny killed in Afghanistan (or Iraq I suppose) was a young boy upon whom he recklessly opened fire when checking a house in a battle zone.

No skeletons in his water closet.

In the real world, such as it is, the Cyberman imagery is extremely obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Doctor Chang reveals that the dead bodies have a "support exoskeleton" which Clara immediately deduces must be invisible. Why is Doctor Chang so accepting of all this? Is he from the future? I think it's kind of implied that he is, but it's really not clear. I guess "Into the Dalek" showed people from the future being uploaded so I suppose it's possible. Chang shows off "Dark Water" in which only "organic material" is visible. Pedantry time! Why does his suit disappear? Even if he was being a dreadful cad and wearing a polyester suit, that's still organic. He also makes a pervy joke about swimming pools 'cause obviously as a scientist he's a big old nerd and of course for Moffat that means he wants to trick people into exposing themselves as his only way of seeing anything arousing. Anyway, the only purpose of the Dark Water is to hide the presence of the Cybermen. Its invisibility qualities serve no other purpose whatsoever. There's a possible Malcolm Tucker reference when the psychic paper is alleged to show swearing. Back in the Nethersphere, Danny tries to be nice to the kid he shot. Does he expect that to work? Why does the kid want to see him anyway? Chris Addison dodges the question, so Moffat does too. Outside, Chang reveals that the company's founder discovered that TV white noise is actually a psychic message from the dead. Capaldi has to deliver the atrocious line "Can you just hurry up please or I'll hit you with my shoe." Chang reveals that the dead remain conscious in their bodies (somehow - New Who implying souls as usual), saying that this "never occurred" to anyone before. What? People have imagined that forever. I know I have. Moffat trying to seem clever again.

Says it all.

So it turns out everyone's begging not to be cremated to spare their bodies, which still have feeling. If they're dead, wouldn't the nervous system have stopped working? How can an uploaded mind, even if somehow still connected to a body, feel anything from the body if the body's dead? So dead people have more physical sensation than, say, paralysed people? It's bizarre. The Doctor appropriately enough declares it all a sham, arguing that "the dead are dead," that they're "just gone." Suddenly Danny's getting a call from Clara, but Clara's getting a call from Danny. How did that happen? "We've been scanning you telepathically since you came in." That's convenient. The skeletons all start standing up and the Doctor and Chang piss off leaving Clara alone. The Doctor's wondering what he's missing, asking "who would harvest dead bodies?" It's the Cybermen, as we see when the doors close, but it's still a valid question, or at least: why would the Cybermen need dead bodies? They're just old bones and stuff, what use would they be to the Cybermen? Isn't the point that they combine cybernetics with living organics? Surely an empty skeleton with no muscles or organs or brain would have no use whatsoever to them. Well, that wouldn't fit the spooky idea of the Cybermen turning skeletons into more Cybermen would it, so the issue is avoided. Missy stands around gloating and Chang reveals she's not a robot. He accepts the existence of robots then, so is he from the future? Missy says she'll not kill him until he says something nice, so in fear for his life he says something nice and she kills him. So long, Doctor Chang. What an odd character. I wonder what she would have done if he'd slagged her off.

"Can I have something to eat?"

Missy's claim that she's "feeling a bit emotional" is of course jutaxposed against the Cybermen, I suppose suggesting that cold reason is most dangerous in the hands of irrational people. The Doctor exclaims "Cybermen!" possibly surprised at their presence given that they would have no use for a bunch of old dead parts. Meanwhile Danny can't prove to Clara who he is, while Missy reveals that people in the Nethersphere only think they've gone to heaven. It's actually a "matrix data slice" which is a "Gallifreyan hard drive," evoking the weird dimensional computer storage of the Time Lords as seen in "The Deadly Assassin," "The Ultimate Foe" and so forth. Supposedly the dying minds are uploaded, edited and put back into their "upgraded" bodies. Again, wouldn't the Cybermen need living people? In fact why do they need minds? I guess that's the problem with the Cybermen, really: if they're so advanced and don't want emotions, why don't they just go full robot? The Doctor wonders "which Time Lady" she is and Missy says she's "the one you abandoned," presumably a last minute effort by Moffat to get people thinking it's going to be Romana or Susan or something. People had already been saying the Rani for months, as if Moffat would bring back an unpopular and little known character from the Eighties. It's like people who every year seem convinced Omega is going to come back. The Doctor heads through a tiny door and discovers himself bursting out of St Paul's Cathedral, Missy wondering if he didn't realise where he was. He shouldn't be too surprised, most of the time they can't escape from the middle of London.

"Simm? Bit rich for our blood now."

Back inside Danny keeps telling Clara that he loovs her, and she gets pissed off. Now the point here right is that Clara said those words were super special and unique from him right, at the beginning of the episode, right? Danny's trying to show how it's him that way? But it never pays off, Clara never acknowledges what he's doing, and we're left to assume that she's either too distraught or too dense to see it. Maybe Moffat's just playing with our expectations again or maybe he didn't even realise what he'd done. Either way she claims she wants to be with him, having to unleash the dreadful line "I have to be with Danny Pink." Unfortunately, no sentence involving the name "Danny Pink" is ever going to sound profound or genuinely emotional. Chris Addison encourages Danny to delete his emotions and the Cybermen emerge as Murray Gold bombast crashes in the background. The Doctor runs around yelling, Missy says it's too late and the human race is basically buggered with a bargepole because the dead outnumber the living. What use do the Cybermen have for dead bodies??? Then of course she reveals she's the Master. Holy shit! We only predicted that in the first episode! Much like River Song being Amy's daughter, I initially thought this would be too obvious to be true, but lo and behold here we are. The Master's back.

"But I thought all Time Lords were now
to be Seventies fan club members!"

I seem to remember finding "Dark Water" pretty intriguing at first broadcast but the plot's got more holes than the Seventh Doctor after he landed in San Francisco in 1999. We never find out what use the Cybermen actually have for dead bodies, there's no explanation for how or why the mind is somehow still connected to the dead body in the Nethersphere (apart from it being an elaborate trick to encourage people not to cremate anyone so they Cybermen can use their bodies for whatever reason) and we don't discover why Danny's accidental victim visited him. By this I mean that we don't find out in the next episode either. Danny just isn't interesting enough for me to care much about Clara's plight - I'm not a monster, they're fictional characters: if one dies, I have to be pretty bloody fond of the character to mind. The problem is, not enough happens: Danny dies and then talks to Chris Addison on the set of Blade Runner, the Doctor and Clara visit an imaginary volcano, and then they stand around in a building being fed plot exposition that isn't even true. Obviously as part one of two "Dark Water" has to set things up, but it's all either set up or pointless time wasting. The "drama" side of things is okay as they go, but its delight in constantly spelling itself out is tedious. The Master's reveal is incredibly obvious and the Doctor doesn't have nearly enough to do. I think the main thing that needed to be ditched here is the presence of the Cybermen, and they needed to spend less time over-emphasising the Doctor's, Clara's and Danny's feelings and more time establishing rules for the plot. It was interesting at first broadcast, but looking back what I can see are very murky waters indeed.

"In the Forest of the Night"

With what desp'rate pleas or lies
Was this role put 'fore his eyes?

If you want a piece of speculative fiction that effectively references William Blake's The Tyger, read Watchmen, with particular reference to its fifth chapter, 'Fearful Symmetry.' But hey, New Who can do intertextuality as well, right? Its primogenitor, Doctor Who, did it all the time with regards to classical literature, the golden age of science-fiction and the infinite variety of the English canon. We even got to see some clumsy references to Eliot back in 2007's 'The Lazarus Experiment,' which despite being seven years and two Doctors ago as of my writing this hardly seems old because of how enthusiastically the show has been repeating itself, navel-gazing and treading water for the majority of the time since. So how does a New Who episode reference a pre-Romantic poem which ponders theodicy, the question of evil? Well apparently it doesn't. We begin with a red riding hood girl called Maebh (pronounced "Mave") hurtling through the woods looking for the Doctor. Appropriately enough, Capaldi's not having any of it, but she talks her way into the TARDIS anyway where she more or less reveals that she had some kind of vision or dream where Clara told her to find him. The Doctor drops some crap about being the last of his species which we know from 'The Day of the Doctor' isn't even true anymore, and then when he doubts that the TARDIS is actually in London it plays a satnav voice, which of course caused me to violently evacuate my contents with the hilarity of it all. Shut up, New Who. You suck.

To what goal did they aspire?
When did they editors fire?

We zoom out to discover that London is covered in forest, giving us an intriguing shot of the overgrown metropolis, but if you're expecting a properly post-apocalyptic 'Life After People' type scenario you're going to be disappointed. The Day of the Triffids did apocalyptic London. Why not Who? Well, maybe too many literary references would make their heads explode. Meanwhile, who knows why, Danny and Clara are supervising a very small class of school children at the "Zoological Museum," a place in London that doesn't really exist. Danny's a maths teacher and Clara's an English teacher. Why are they supervising what is surely a science excursion? What's more, why do they need two teachers for this tiny class? Well as we find out later these kids are supposedly what I believe tends to be euphemistically termed the "special class" in education systems throughout the world, although beyond Maebh I'm not sure how "special needs" any of them really are, unless at Coal Hill in 2014 "special" means "a bit annoying." Well, Bradley's first scene is annoying, and Ruby is pretty annoying, but I thought Samson was okay, mainly because he takes the piss out of Mr. Pink. As they're leaving Ruby points out a rather thick tree ring in some fairly clunky exposition. Okay, I'm sure you could justify it, but why would a tree cutting be a front-centre display at a "zoological museum," which one assumes ostensibly deals largely with animals, rather than plants?

And what meaning, and what art
Could hope to thrive in this show's heart?

There's some time wasting as an old caretaker struggles to open a door, with Danny going "No, no, no, no it moved!" in a very stagey way. Then we inexplicably cut to news reports about how the trees are appearing not just in London but all over the world. Who's watching this? Clara and Danny aren't. The Doctor isn't. Maybe Maebh's condition picks up satellite. Clara phones up the Doctor, who slags off Les Misérables. The novel? The musical? One of the many film adaptations? In any event it's of course always encouraging to see the Doctor, a man who notionally uses his brain to solve problems, anti-intellectually slagging off art. Knowing New Who's imperialist nostalgia it's probably because it's French. He does get a decent line here: "I'm a Time Lord, not a child minder," which I'm going to assume is a Star Trek reference. Clara pretends to Danny that she called the school but he swiftly susses that it was the Doctor. I know we're meant to see how irresponsible and self-centred Clara is over the course of this series so I guess this is a good thing in terms of characterisation? It kind of makes you wonder why on Earth we're meant to sympathise with her though. We also find out Maebh's on medication. Danny takes the kids on a wilderness ramble to try to get them home. Unlike Clara he doesn't give a shit about where the trees are coming from because a Taliban soldier shot his imagination during the war and they had to amputate it. The government announces their intention to use "carefully controlled fires" to clear the trees. I don't want to defend the British government in any way - I don't know a terribly large amount about them, but one assumes that like all major political parties of all Western democracies they're lazy, narrow-minded, self-righteous crony capitalist plutocrats who are only better than authoritarian states according to the lesser of two evils principle and who care more about tribalistic "us-and-them-ism" than actually governing, with a blistering contempt and disregard for the very people who elect them - but one assumes that even they would understand that cutting trees down with bulldozers or chainsaws is going to be an infinitely more efficient solution than waiting for them to burn down. So unless this was an active attempt to mock the government's incompetence, it seems like it wasn't terribly well thought through at the writing stage. They also recommend stocking up on fresh water. Are they worried the trees are going to crack the pipes or something? Maybe Frank Cottrell Boyce read Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide and assumed that it applied to all apocalyptic scenarios. There's probably a deleted scene where they recommend destroying any staircases so that the trees can't follow you to high ground.

And when that heart began to beat,
What dread jokes! And what plot cheat!

Enough of my complaining. We get some indications that Maebh is psychic, and then cut to her mother freaking out about her absence. We also discover a few snippets about the student supporting cast with, needless to say, side-splitting cutaways to them being daft and poorly behaved at school which is pure sitcom, like something out of Family Guy. We learn that the trees grew overnight given that they have no rings, and the Doctor, joining the others, considers that it must be a natural event like an ice age, the Earth's history involving a "series of catastrophes." This one, however, seemingly involves messing with time, a fact the Doctor reveals after Clara muses on the way that "he pretends he's not interested," in this episode's serving of self-congratulatory self-referential pseudo-postmodern shite. Why don't they just have a bit where Moffat walks in, breaks the fourth wall and says straight to camera, "This is brilliant television and if you don't think so you must be a shithead," gives you the finger and then walks off again? Capaldi gets another amusing line, however, about an "arboreal coincidence," evocative of the "boyfriend error" of a few episodes previous. In the TARDIS, Danny finds Maebh's homework book, which is full of those stereotypical child's drawings that children never actually do, here depicting the sun and trees. Isn't she meant to be in year eight? Why does she draw like she's five years old? Anyway Capaldi starts running around like a fruit loop trying to figure out which one of the kids is Maebh who, much like Mario in 1992, is missing. We find out that Maebh hears voices, and has been taking psychiatric medication since her sister disappeared. The Doctor deduces from her drawings that a solar flare is heading for Earth. Clara complains that the sonic screwdriver isn't a magic wand, which is presumably the writers listening to criticism and ridiculing it. As the Doctor and Clara go looking for the missing small child-type person, Nelson's column collapses for no particular reason, which might actually, now that I think about it, be a reference to Shelley's Ozymandias, or even Horace Smith's Ozymandias, written in contest with Shelley, which specifically contemplates London becoming one day like Ancient Egypt.

What the pacing? How explain?
In what furnace was thy brain?

For reasons I didn't feel were entirely clear Danny hustles the kids back out of the TARDIS again, with smoke everywhere. Why did the collapsing column affect the TARDIS? Maebh's mother starts cycling through the forest yelling randomly for her. London's a pretty big place. What does she expect to happen? Unless somehow their suburban terrace is on a prime piece of real estate only a few blocks from Trafalgar Square, I can't help but feel that she might be being a bit optimistic. The Doctor and Clara find Maebh's phone, following a breadcrumb of clues, but instead of following it they veer off in an arbitrary direction. The Doctor claims that "the forest is mankind's nightmare." Is it, though? Or is that, actually, Mr. Cottrell Boyce, faux-poetic bullshit that doesn't really mean anything and is just meant to sound impressive? What about human societies that didn't develop in forested areas? Clearly New Who being Eurocentric. That's intended as sarcasm on my part, but it's actually worth thinking about in terms of New Who's tunnel-vision. I really can't help but feel that this would work more successfully as some kind of fairytale if the forest was better realised, rather than mostly looking like Peter Capaldi stumping around in a copse. The lighting doesn't help. It's just too bright and airy. I just looked up the place where the location shooting was done, the satisfyingly Welsh-sounding "Fforest Fawr Woods," and there are way more interesting looking bits than these, although I suppose they're meant to convey still being in the middle of London. Not sure where all the buildings went. The Doctor and Clara somehow find Maebh's stuff despite the fact that she's not moving in a straight line or leaving the clues in a straight line either, and they encounter some hazmat guys trying to burn the forest. This doesn't work, of course, their very "controlled" looking flamethrower failing to ignite the wood. Capaldi argues that "the whole natural order's turning against this planet." Is it? How? Against human infrastructure, maybe. He also tells off Clara for worrying about her relationship. The Doctor reveals that Maebh predicted the future in her homework book and Clara tells him that the "gifted and talented group" are actually the special kids. I think we would have been better off with Form K from Bad Education. Then some wolves start howling because the zoo's been broken open. Maebh gets menaced by the wolves but escapes through an unexpected gate, and the Doctor tells them to look big. From what I've read this would probably achieve jack shit. The wolves piss off nonetheless and he gets another good line: "Told you there were rubbish." Then the poetic references come to a head when what scared the wolves is revealed: a big stripy cereal-loving cat otherwise known as a tiger shows up looking surly, but Danny flickers a torch in its eyes and it too says "Blow this noise," and trots off, having no further relevance to the episode, not unlike the late war German heavy tank which took its name.

What the plotting? What sad cast
Dare its deadly script read past? 

The Doctor insists that they not give Maebh her medication - make of that what you will - Danny cracks out some "funny racism" when he claims that she's been "abducted by a Scotsman," and then she runs off with everyone else in pursit. "You won't find your sister out there!" Shut up Ruby. They come upon a poky-looking ring of saplings and the forest starts communicating with Maebh, although the Doctor reassures her that she wasn't responsible for it. Bradley has to shoosh at one point in this as well. The problem with the kids isn't so much that they themselves are bad as that the writing and editing is clunky and lacks timing. Somehow the Doctor "turns up" the gravity or whatever with the sonic screwdriver, and this in turn somehow causes some firefly-looking things to appear which represent the consciousness of nature or something to that effect, which claims that it's answering a call from the sun. Clara wonders why the trees want to kill them. What gave her that impression? Isn't the solar flare the thing that's going to kill them? The Doctor's toothless response is "you've been chopping them down for furniture for centuries." Were they scared of upsetting climate change deniers or something? He believes that Earth's future is going to be erased. They go back to the TARDIS, Clara tricking the Doctor into thinking that he's going to save them when actually she wants him to just save himself. She doesn't want to be the last of her species and thinks the kids will never be able to cope with the loss of everything. He declares, however, that "this is my world too," in a resolution of the issue from 'Kill the Moon.' I still don't fully understand why they assume everyone's going to die. The Doctor, however, realises that in fact the forest is filling the atmosphere with extra oxygen which will be burnt off by the solar flare. Uh... okay. Right. Well, no, it makes no sense whatsoever, but what do we expect from New Who, really? Capaldi has a few chances where he could have completely hammed it up here and he doesn't, which is all we can be grateful for these days. He compares the situation to the Tunguska event, which was a meteor strike and therefore almost totally irrelevant to the matter of oxygen and solar flares.

When these trees ate solar spears
And Moffat drank the fanboy tears

There's a minor panic when they realise that the government is planning to start defoliating. Surely, given that they know the solar flare is very soon to hit, it's unlikely that they'll be able to do enough to make a difference? Nonetheless Murray Gold's comedy music starts playing as the kids write and recite a lovely message to the world about courage and trust. The Doctor offers a trip to check out the flare in all its glory, but the kids don't give a shit about going to space and just want their parents. Danny doesn't care either, outright stating "I don't want to see more things," and arguing that "one person is more amazing than universes." So are we, as Doctor Who viewers, meant to agree with that sentiment? It's a typical false dichotomy where notionally you can't both experience new things and simultaneously appreciate them with depth. Lao Tzu said that the farther one travels, the less one knows. Then again, Sarah Jane said that travel broadened the mind. Anyway, let's not give Danny any further unnecessary airtime and join the Doctor and Clara in space where a big fire gushes harmlessly all over the Earth. Missy is watching this too for no particular reason. Back at Clara's apartment our dashing protagonists observe the trees vanishing in clouds of typical New Who all-purpose golden fairy dust, the hallmark of quality plotting. The Doctor argues that humanity's super power, among the many we've heard about this series, is forgetfulness, and that they'll put the event into "fairy stories." Spare me. He also cracks out the inexplicable remark "if you remembered how things felt you'd have stopped having wars and stopped having babies." Not even going to touch that one. Maebh and her mother go home and, clumsily, we end on a shot of a random extra playing Maebh's missing sister who appears out of a bush. Not only is the shot of this young woman whom we've never seen before totally devoid of meaning or profundity, but the music and Maebh's mother's reaction makes this one of the most embarrassing and cringeworthy moments in all of Series 8.

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who wrote 'Blink' showrun thee?

I'm afraid to say that at least in my books "In the Forest of the Night" is probably going to go down as one of the weaker episodes of Series 8. It's lacking in structure, poorly paced for the first half and simply insubstantial. On the other hand it has some nice moments for the Doctor, some decent imagery and it's a good indicator of the fact that the show doesn't need an identifiable monster, or even the idea of one, as in 'Listen,' to at least be in some respect functional, but 'functional' is probably the highest compliment I can give it. The kids are a bit pointless but nothing worth worrying about, and the dilemma doesn't seem to be terribly well thought through, but if you like your New Who with loads of arseing about then this is the episode for you. It may seem a bit rich for me, Old Who devotee that I am, to criticise arseing about, but at least Old Who's arseing about generally involved some kind of plot. This just has lots of meandering back and forth. As an experiment it's okay, but I think if you're going to do this kind of thing it needs to have a good deal more atmosphere, which ironically this episode rather lacks, the brightly-lit forest and humdrum supporting cast making the whole thing feel like nothing more than a traipse in the woods. Maybe this is what they were going for, and maybe some people like it, but for me this didn't even function as a "fairy tale" because it was all too vague. Being the second in a hat-trick of three present day Earth stories doesn't endear it a great deal either. I took a break for about a week or more in between watching halves of this episode and I found that very telling. It's not offensive particularly in dramatic terms, although you can take your pick when it comes to matters like mental illness, but it's not exactly compelling either. Maybe you could torture parallels to Blake's poem out of it, but in my view this is less "problem of evil" and more "problem of budget."