"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.

The 'Sherlock is Overrated' 1500 page views special

Whoa. Look at that! 1500 page views for 'Sherlock is Overrated' and 1600 for 'The Empty Hearse'! I know in the world of the internet that isn't really that many, but by Opinions Can Be Wrong's usual standard (given the regularly esoteric content) it's completely unprecedented. 1500 people who think that Sherlock is Overrated - or want to know why people think it's overrated, I suppose. I daresay some of them are repeat views and there's probably a bit of link jacking in there, but still. Still!

Now the 'The Empty Hearse' review doesn't count because it was linked on Twitter by a TV presenter here in Australia to whom it was shared by a friend of mine (quite without my knowledge) so it garnered a lot of views that way. 'Sherlock is Overrated' has succeeded purely on its own merits, I think by being an article with a title a lot of people were thinking but hadn't written about yet.

In hindsight I think the article is pretty imperfect, largely because it never actually explains how Sherlock is 'overrated,' just what I think is wrong with it. I suppose the logical conclusion is simply 'if it has this much wrong with it, it can't be as good as people say' but I ought to have made that more explicit in the article. In any event it's purely subjective, although I do think more and more people are admitting to themselves these days that the Emperor is walking about unclad. I just wish people would recognise that of a few more of the apparently unimpeachable touchstones of popular culture.

I sort of intend to compose 'Sherlock is Overrated 2; or, Sherlock is Still Overrated' but I haven't managed to do it so far because that would mean actually having to think about the show more, as well as trawling back through the episodes for screen grabs of Benedict Cumberbatch in the middle of sentences so he looks like he's pulling a funny face, and I simply could not be arsed at this point in time. Nonetheless it's good to see that I'm getting to someone or other out there who might otherwise be thinking "Why on earth does everyone think this show is so good?"

It's the same problem with current Doctor Who, really, especially given that they're co-written by the same man. These writers/producers have got good actors and a solid concept on their hands (even if both Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who are completely irrelevant in the modern day because they're products of radically different contexts to now). But they need to start realising that having a solid, substantial plot is just as important as characterisation. The problem with both of these shows is that they're so obsessively focused on character development that they don't achieve anything. Without both plot and character, they go nowhere, because pure characterisation doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. These elements should work towards some kind of thematic goal. Character studies only function within a broader text in service of themes. Otherwise you're just exploring fictional characters, and who cares about that? They're fictional characters, not real people.

But I won't bother getting into all that here. The point is, Sherlock is overrated. Actually, maybe it isn't anymore because people are starting to realise that it's a bit arsey. But we'll see what happens at the time of the next series. In the meantime, why not read the original novels and short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? They're actually good. Well, most of them are.

"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."

"Flatline"

"It's caught in the latch!"

We open with a scared beardy fellow gabbling on the phone to the police about certain disappearances which have been taking place, but of course he's mostly speaking in pure TV-boilerplate "cryptic" bullshit: "They are everywhere, we've been so blind." I wonder if people really have a propensity for speaking in cliché when they're in fear of their lives. Anyway, he gets merged with the wall like that painting 'The Ambassadors' by Hans Holbein the Younger with the skull-feather visual illusion, although since this is New Who it's less Flemish portraiture and more 'Magic Eye Book.' In the TARDIS we get some deeply weird characterisation from Clara where she contrasts her lie about Danny being "territorial" to how "you think he'd object to me travelling." Not a great showing from Clara, that she's willing to pretend that she conforms to her boyfriends' made-up jealousy. Fortunately, much like my good self, the Doctor doesn't give a toss, instead setting the plot in motion. They've landed a bit off course, which Clara complains about. Back in my day, companions expected the Doctor to land in the wrong place. The front door's small and so's the TARDIS. Instead of being interested, Clara continues to whinge about the detour. "This is annoying," Capaldi remarks, pointing the finger at her. He's channelling me at the moment. Clara goes to look around, seeing a bunch of guys cleaning up graffiti, including 'Rigsy,' who is doing so as part of his community service. They're led by some crusty fellow whose name the wiki tells me is 'Fenton,' - I didn't really pick up on that in the episode - who looks like he's a pack-a-day and undead. Back in the TARDIS Capaldi makes the console wobble in what is clearly an intentional tribute to the good old days. Just thought I'd mention it. Clara checks out a shrine and a tunnel with pictures of people on the wall. One of the council guys calls out to her and Rigsy runs up to apologise. She says she's "heard worse." There's a bit of a conflicted message about men approaching random women in the street here. Rigsy is obviously helpful, but evidently Clara's been bothered by men before. It turns out people are going missing all over the estate. If this was RTD Who we'd have had fifteen mentions of chips and reality TV by now.

"Think about it, three times the slapping!"

Back where they materialised, the TARDIS is now tiny, Clara laughing at "you and your big old face," which is a funny line. Something is "leeching the external dimensions" of the TARDIS, whatever that means. Clara sticks the ship in her bag - luckily she's carrying one of those big ones - and the Doctor remarks that the true weight of the TARDIS would fracture the earth. He then sticks his hand out of the door in a way which Clara lamely jokes is "just wrong." Why? I mean, what is she imagining it looks like? A hand coming out of something? What does that convey? Well, anyway, he hands over his New Who Travel Essentials Kit, the psychic paper and the sonic screwdriver, and we get some dodgy effects work which makes Capaldi's face look flat. Back at the buildings, Clara tells Rigsy that she's the Doctor, which is kind of funny, but then goes into typical pomo ball soup mode when she starts making self-referential remarks about how vague the Doctor is about the title and so forth. Rigsy sneaks her off to an apartment of a missing person, remarking that the police don't care about the disappearances. After a bit of stuffing around she starts scaring him off by saying the absentees might have been shrunk to tiny size before showing him the Doctor inside the TARDIS to prove she means business. There's a weird noise and we discover that something has "drained a massive amount of energy from inside the TARDIS." Of course it has.

You could have a big dipper.

The Doctor's confused because "dimensions are kind of our thing," referring to the Time Lords. Yeah, but Time moreso, right? They're not Dimension Lords. A police officer at an apartment outside the estate talks about the absent 'Mr Heath,' Clara gets a Mary Poppins moment when she pulls an entire sledgehammer out of her bag via the TARDIS, she walks up uneasily behind the police officer as if she's going to bash her skull in, and then she and Rigsy start tearing down the walls on the Doctor's advice. Speaking of walls, stuff starts running down them more quickly than any positive expression lingering on my face runs off when an episode of New Who starts, and the police officer gets merged with the floor. We already know this is going on due to the teaser; there's no mystery. There's a real 'Fear Her' vibe about all this, but slightly less shite. The Doctor figures that whoever's doing this must be from another universe and are trying to understand humans. They can flatten three-dimensional objects, thus removing the door handle and Clara and Rigsy's means of escape. Does this really make sense? Even if they're two-dimensional entities, why do they slide along defined flat surfaces? Isn't that still, really, operating in three-dimensions. Ah, who cares.

"What is on the positive y axis, my female dog?"

So Clara gets a call from Danny which the internet informs me was amusingly mis-captioned by BBC America. He says "Got our bench," but it kind of sounds a bit like he says "What up bitch?" which is what appeared on their captions. Clara and Rigsy climb onto a convenient swing chair and Danny remarks that whatever they're doing "sounds kind of active." Really? A sex joke now? Seriously though, why does Danny even need to be in this? There's a dodgy cutaway as they somehow manage to get the entire chair to fly out the window, and then Capaldi announces the existence of two-dimensional aliens: "Yes, that is a thing." Stop saying 'thing' all the time, Series 8 characters! You're not funny! The Doctor also susses out that Clara's lying about Danny, but this never really goes anywhere. Meanwhile that crusty council guy Fenton is getting his crew to paint over the murals, which Clara and the Doctor realise are actually the missing people physically merged into the walls. What a surprise. The psychic paper doesn't work on Fenton because he has "quite a lack of imagination," but fortunately, much like the guard being killed by the Mummy in front of everyone in the previous episode, community service Stan gets sucked into the wall in front of everyone. The Doctor reveals that they're "wearing the dead like camouflage." Are they? To what purpose? Everyone screams and runs off waving their hands in the air as all the murals trickle down and slide along the floor.

Aim for the head.

In a convenient nearby disused train shed, Clara has to become the leader, leaning in to menacingly tell Fenton "I'm the one chance you've got of staying alive." Somehow she's not knocked cold by the overpowering smell of stale cigarette smoke that I am arbitrarily imagining him possessing. The Doctor gets to be all dark as usual, convincing Clara to give them possibly false hope, and reveals that the TARDIS can't translate the aliens' language so they need a more primitive form of communication. He talks about a lot of bizarre alien races that sound like they're stripped straight from drafts for Moffat's 'Curse of Fatal Death,' and then sends 'pi' to them in some fashion, to which they respond with the number '55' and then '22.' These, Rigsy deduces, correspond to the numbers on their uniforms. Hang on, so these things have only just figured out sort of how to exist in a three-dimensional universe, but they know how to read Hindu-Arabic numerals? So number 22, George, gets merged with the wall optical-illusion style, and everyone runs flailing into some tunnel below the train depot, where there are more flattened door handles preventing their escape. The Doctor builds some gizmo to reverse this, but it doesn't work. He talks about how the aliens are "leeching the TARDIS" again on a different frequency, whatever that means. Fenton complains that everything they're saying "sounds important but means absolutely nothing." It's basically a one-sentence review of almost every episode of New Who ever. Suddenly one of our remaining stiffs is grabbed by a gigantic hand that reaches down from far behind them, which is probably one of the only genuinely unsettling moments in the entire episode. The aliens then proceed to reveal themselves as lurching, flickering facsimiles of the flattened people, which is far less exciting. Maybe they should have manifested as random body parts and stuff. The Doctor thinks he knows a way to send them back but the TARDIS doesn't have enough "dimensional energy," because dimensions have "energy," much like time, life and everything else in New Who. He also says something about if they "pump it out as fast as they can steal it." It's actually an important piece of foreshadowing for the resolution, but the delivery here is totally unclear. It seems he says "Apparently these things can" pump etc but without looking up the captions just now I couldn't tell despite replaying the scene multiple times.

He watches you from your TARDIS toy while you sleep
and while you engage in acts of carnal pleasure.

Fenton knocks the TARDIS down into a pit for some reason and I think this somehow damages it. Now it's on the train lines and a train is coming. Clara tells him to "move the TARDIS like Addams family." As if Clara would reference the Addams family. Somehow the Doctor's able to simply turn his hand to flip the TARDIS up even though he himself is inside it - it would have made more sense if he'd been contracting the external surface of the floor in some way - and walks it off the tracks with his fingers. He spontaneously gets a haircut as we cut back to the interior of the ship, an obvious continuity error, and starts dancing and scat singing, something I don't think we've seen the Doctor do before. But somehow despite being well out of danger the TARDIS is now closer to the tracks than it was in a shot five seconds ago and falls back down on them with the train about to hit. The Doctor pulls some big lever just before collision, which we assume does something. Meanwhile another train's bearing down on Clara and co, but they stop it and ask the driver if they can use it to ram the aliens. "I've always wanted to ram something," the driver remarks, which is nice subtle minor-characterisation, and Rigsy bizarrely attempts to sacrifice his life but Clara uses a headband instead to hold the lever down. The aliens of course just merge the train with the wall before it can harm them. Why did they think ramming would work, anyway?

LOL ZELDA REFERENCE

So the Doctor starts rambling about the TARDIS being in "siege mode," whatever that means, and how there's "not enough power left now to turn it off." To turn off the TARDIS, or to turn off "siege mode"? It now resembles a small silver cube. Apparently it's right there by the train and Clara notices it, carrying it off. In a nearby room Clara concocts a plan for Rigsy to draw up a fake door on a poster so that the aliens feed the "dimensional energy" back into the TARDIS. Why does the energy go through the poster, rather than simply into it? Capaldi waxes lyrical about Clara making "a mighty fine Doctor," and Clara remarks that "rule number one of being the Doctor" is to "use your enemy's power against them." I don't know if that's universally true, but it's better than "the Doctor lies." So the TARDIS gets powered back up and blasts the aliens with some big green energy wave. Then we get a questionable scene of the Doctor rationalising his plan to, probably fatally, send them back to their own universe: "You are monsters, that is the role you seem determined to play." Yeah, they have killed a lot of people, but at the same time it sounds almost xenophobic, especially when he bursts out giving a horrible 'New Who' Doctor-speech, declaring "you are not welcome here, this plane is protected." Then he declares over-dramatically "I name you the Boneless!" Seriously? This is the worst part of the episode. We have no idea how he's sent them back, and time is wasted with one of these stock, cringe inducing self-aggrandizing New Who speeches they like to have the Doctor crack out once or twice a series. It's dreadful.

"I don't give a shit if I 'have the right' or not!"

Outside, everyone pisses off, the Johnny-come-lately train driver still earning himself a big hug from Clara and Fenton's survival seeming awfully reminiscent of that guy 'Rickston Slade' from 'Voyage of the Damned,' the Doctor remarking that "maybe the wrong people survived." No one bothers to question it this time because Clara's too caught up in self-love at her competence at being the Doctor, after Rigsy gives her an eyebrow-raisingly lingering hug. Then we get a bunch of characterisation crap shoehorned in at the end about how the Doctor makes decisions "largely so other people don't have to," and that "goodness had nothing to do with it," hammering away at this "good man" shite as usual. Then we see Michelle Gomez aka Missy being herself for a few seconds. Fin. 'Flatline,' despite also being written by Jamie Mathieson, writer of 'Mummy on the Orient Express,' is not exactly very riveting material, in my view. In fact on the rewatch for this review I found it terrifically boring. The thing is, most of this series has just been a collection of mash-ups of previous New Who episodes. This one is 'Fear Her' (stuff living in the walls) crossed with 'The Girl Who Waited' (The Doctor can't leave the TARDIS). The aliens (I'm not calling them 'The Boneless' because that's dreck) are kind of interesting, but the fact that they're just kill-'em-all monsters as usual limits their appeal, especially when they turn into zombies that never seem to actually do anything. If there was more like the giant hand coming out of the roof, that would have been better. The supporting cast aren't memorable. Jenna Coleman does a decent job of carrying things on her own but I find her a bit tiresome. It's a bit weird comparing her now, where she's basically just Amy with a little Tegan thrown in, to last year where she simply had no characterisation at all. The resolution is more or less unexplained, and replaced with that abominable speech that Peter Capaldi is forced to deliver. To be honest this feels like New Who on autopilot to me, a dirt-cheap-looking location-shoot runaround with no real plot and antagonists with zero motivation. It's not one I can see myself viewing again, for fear that the episode's title would be an accurate description for what my heart monitor would display by about ten minutes in.

"Mummy on the Orient Express"

"There's no more bog roll."

Right. Let's do this. We begin with Capaldi's voice, even though he isn't there, while over the course of 66 surprisingly long seconds Mrs Bale from As Time Goes By gets menaced by a mummy that no one else can see. The word 'thing' rears its loathsome head here again when she refers to it as a 'mummy monster thing' because in Moffat land everyone shares identical verbal tics. The mummy places its hands on her head and she carks it, her distressed relative claiming rather clinically that "she just stopped." Outside we get our 'holy shit' special effects budget down the toilet moment when we discover that we're on a train going through space. After the titles, we find the Doctor and Clara arriving on the train taking a final trip together following Clara's explosion in 'Kill the Moon.' In the carriage we have some pop singer I'd never heard of prior to the show's promotional campaign on Facebook singing a swing version of classic overplayed Queen track 'Don't Stop Me Know,' although as an Old Who purist I was of course appalled to hear the phrase 'sex machine' being uttered in Doctor Who, when it should of course only ever be used in a scientific sense, or perhaps when a Victorian gentleman refers to 'the fair sex.' We've got the mummy, we've got the Orient Express, we've got the Doctor: now we need the last bit of the episode that isn't established in the title, which is to say our obligatory boring "emotional" crap, "emotional" in massive scare quotes where "emotional" means melodrama and tired dialogue clichés. The Doctor acts as if he's all confused about Clara having a sad smile, which gets to completely overplay this ludicrous 'the Twelfth Doctor doesn't get emotions' garbage.

Don't get too excited, she doesn't actually leave.

While I thought Capaldi should have started necking the complimentary champagne like a seasoned campaigner, he and Clara instead settle down to some idle sips while the posh train voice provided by an unrecognisable (to me, at least) John Sessions points out a fancy black hole, about which the Doctor reminisces while Clara waffles about how she doesn't hate the Doctor despite not wanting to travel with him anymore. The Doctor tries to steer the conversation away towards interesting things in space - Clara is on an interbellum-themed space train but can't stop gasbagging about her feelings - but he's rudely interrupted by Miss Pitt whose elderly relative kicked the bucket in the opening. As she's ushered away to her padded cell we're introduced to train captain Quell, who asks what he's a Doctor of. An opportunity to respond with "practically everything" is missed and then despite having just arrived the Doctor and Clara decide to take to their respective beds. The Doctor busts out this episode's obligatory ageist comment, stating that old ladies dying is "practically their job description" and asks if Clara wants the death to be a "thing," of course. It's dreadful. Clara claims that she'll see the Doctor again, which he queries. Ugh, we're back on this again?

"Can you stop wiggling your middle finger against my palm?"

In their rooms - how do they have rooms on the train if they just showed up? we find out later they're not on the guest list - Clara and Danny bore each other to death on the phone while Peter Capaldi seemingly impersonates Tom Baker, presumably due to both Doctors' experience with mummies. He pisses off to investigate without his silk-pyjama-clad companion and runs into Perkins the chief engineer, played by comedian Frank Skinner. He's not much of an actor but he gets the job done in this one, and in playing a dry, sarcastic character he has a good rapport with Capaldi himself. Meanwhile Clara follows crazy Maisie, Miss Pitt, who smashes a locked door panel with a high heeled shoe. Back in the carriage everyone's still up, which makes it look even more odd than Clara and the Doctor retired, and the Doctor accosts a 'Professor Moorhouse' about a legendary alien mummy called The Foretold which takes sixty-six seconds to kill its victims. He also gives him a jelly baby as this episode's next piece of feeble lip service to real Doctor Who. Meanwhile said mummy kills a chef in the kitchen, proving that there's no escape and that he doesn't discriminate based on class. In the locked room crazy Maisie reveals that Mrs Bale was her grandmother and that she feels guilty because she used to picture her dying. But was she picturing her dying because she disliked her, or to soften the blow for when it actually happened? It's not clear. Clara makes it about her of course, before noticing a big sarcophagus in the room.

"How dare you impugn my moustache sir."

Elsewhere, it's time for a joke so the much-loathed psychic paper informs Captain Quell that the Doctor is a 'mystery shopper.' In his office he offers the Doctor a snifter of the neat stuff but, despite what happened in 'Deep Breath,' he turns him down. The Doctor gets fed up with him, however, and leaves when he refuses to take action. Fortunately trusty Perkins has been gathering info for a while and provides this to the Doctor. The two of them and Moorhouse discuss 'the Foretold' and its alleged invincibility but before we can go any further we cut back to Clara and crazy Maisie still waffling about Clara leaving the Doctor. Remember kids, men talk business while women sit around chatting about their feelings. Clara regurgitates the sentiment Danny Pink gave her, that "you can't end on a slammed door," which Maisie immediately contradicts. The award for nonsensical shoehorned Moffat-style bullshit line of the week, however, goes to Maisie's "life would be so much simpler if you liked the right people, the people you're supposed to like, but then I guess there'd be no fairy tales" What on earth is that supposed to mean? The premise has absolutely no relation whatsoever to the conclusion. It's contemptible pseudo-intellectual nonsense that sounds like it was precisely engineered to be quoted on tumblr.

"Good lord, we're on a train."

The windows become bright which I assume is meant to convey day on the train, the Doctor turns some communicator thing from the wall into a phone to call Clara, fails to get her out of the locked room, is caught by Quell and arrested. The sarcophagus opens on Clara and crazy Maisie but it's just full of, to quote Clara's intonation, "booble wrap." We get an old school moment when the Captain suggests that the Doctor's behind the killings, but changes his mind when one of the guards snuffs it in front of him. Why does he let the Doctor go as a result of that? It's not like the Doctor was there any of the other times, how does he know he's not a bit of an Eddie Mars - a killer by remote control? It's nice to see that everyone's changed out of evening dress for the 'morning' on the train. The Doctor susses that someone's gathered numerous experts to the train on purpose and Gus the computer reveals that everything's actually a lab, the other passengers and some of the crew being 'hard light holograms,' in another instance of this show owing a worrying large amount not to itself but to Red Dwarf, which despite being a sitcom is an infinitely better science fiction programme than New Who will ever be. Frank Skinner gets to deliver the line "the engines, they've stopped," in a way that shows off that he's not an actor, and Gus announces that "around the room you will find a variety of scientific equipment" although I believe going by the flasks and test tubes he forgot the words 'generic' and 'stereotypical' in there. The scientists are meant to figure out how to capture the Foretold mummy, which has been brought on board via an ancient scroll around which it typically manifests.

Let me play among the stars.

The mummy arrives to kill Moorhouse, who basically describes it as being a mummy to the Doctor before he panics and carks it. This establishes our new 'drama' of the Doctor spending people's lives in order to try to stop the mummy. He calls Clara for some info near the sarcophagus but Gus voids a bunch of the crew into space to try to keep him on task. Couldn't Gus recognise that he's actually getting information? They figure out that the Foretold picks off the weakest first: the old lady, the sick chef, the cyborg guard and the psychologically troubled Moorhouse. The part about psychological issues being an illness or weakness could be construed as a dicey claim, but my bigger issue is that it doesn't make sense. By the law of averages, the mummy is actually making its enemies collectively stronger by going for the weakest first. It should be picking off the strongest. Quell, being a sufferer of PTSD, is next, seeing the Mummy's hand pass through the Doctor's head. It struck me at this point that this episode would have been more effective if we, not being the mummy's victims, could also not see it. After Quell's death the Doctor begs the other scientists for assistance in figuring out how it works, but they're all extras and haven't been paid to speak, which borders on the utterly ridiculous as they stand there silently while being picked off one by one.

Don't get glue on your fingers.

Some scanner Perkins whips out from hammerspace reveals that Quell's body has no "energy" at a cellular level. They could have at least said something scientifically meaningful, like electrical charge. The Doctor and Perkins figure that the mummy moves its victims 'out of phase' which is why only they can see it. So how come everyone else can still see the victim? I guess they're in a half way house between normal phase and the mummy's phase, but it's not my job to explain this shit. The Doctor figures that crazy Maisie is next because of what happened to her grandmother, so he bluntly instructs Clara to lie to her to bring her along. Clara has no choice as the TARDIS is behind a force field, the Doctor revealing that Gus has tried to entice him there before. Clara starts complaining about the Doctor lying to her: now I see where we were going with all the 'egomaniac' stuff in 'Deep Breath.' The mummy appears to crazy Maisie but the Doctor somehow uses the scanner to suck all her negative energy or whatever out of her head and stick it in himself, which causes the mummy to come after him instead. "Are you my mummy," gets its obligatory appearance, but it's still lame. The Doctor notices a similar design to that on the scroll under the mummy's bandages, realises the scroll is a flag and that the mummy must be a soldier, and then stops it in its tracks by saying "We surrender." The mummy comes out of phase. Why is it accepting the Doctor's surrender? He tells it it's relieved, so it salutes him and then crumbles into dust. It looks kind of cool, but why is the mummy suddenly taking orders from and saluting the guy who just surrendered to it? It's also very similar to how they stopped that robot in 'The Caretaker.'

"I saved everyone and dropped them
off in the nearest inhabited Wales."

Gus tries to kill everyone on board because he's a dick, Frank Skinner immediately doing a turn with some horrendous 'choking' acting even though Gus only just started venting the air. The train blows up and Clara wakes up on a stony beach in Wales somewhere, which is to say an alien planet on which the Doctor has dropped off everyone from the train after teleporting them into the TARDIS. He tells Clara that it was his plan to steal all of Maisie's bad juju all along, but he "couldn't risk Gus finding out my plan." What would Gus have cared? What would it have mattered to him how he figured out how to stop the mummy? Maybe we're meant to figure that the Doctor's lying, although he gets to utter the trite remark "sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones, but you still have to choose." Pretty groundbreaking stuff. Perkins pisses off even though he probably could have worked as a companion back in the Eighties or something and Clara asks the Doctor if he "loovs" being "the man making the impossible choice." I think Moffat and Jamie Mathieson have been reading my forum posts. She asks "is it like an addiction?" For a moment I thought she was going to ask if it was like being god. Then Danny Pink calls her up and Clara decides to lie, blame Danny for her previous desire to leave, and in fact keep travelling. The Doctor swallows this hook, line, sinker, rod and copy of Angling Times, sir, and thus the episode ends.

They're coming to get you, Clara.

'Mummy on the Orient Express' should be an average episode of New Who. I should have watched it and thought "that was okay." Actually, although the review may not convey this, I thought it was the best episode of the series, and two episodes later I still do. I've mostly been negative here for a laugh, but I actually felt like this episode did one of the things that Doctor Who does best: a mystery in space. The Doctor's in good form, he solves the problem with the help of competent guest characters, of which Frank Skinner's Perkins, despite some questionable acting, is a particular highlight, it's reasonably atmospheric, the mummy looks pretty decent and it moves along at a decent clip. This is actually an episode of New Who that I would consider to be somewhat comparable to the real stuff. The fact that this was written by newcomer Jamie Mathieson shows how desperate this show is for some fresh blood in the writing department. Where it's let down, however, are with some typical New Who complaints. For a start, the rushed and convenient resolution is disappointing and doesn't make a terrific amount of sense. That's par for the course in New Who, but doesn't justify it. The lack of a real sub plot is as usual also a problem. The story could have easily been fleshed out to a greater degree and functioned as a two-parter. The episode's other biggest weakness, of course, is that it's still bogged down with boring, heavy-handed 'drama' which here is channelled almost exclusively through the companion in a way that borders on outright sexism. I don't care about how Clara feels about the Doctor or whatever. She's not a real person. Unless her conflict with him has something to say which isn't typical, routine mainstream-entertainment 'human interest' crap then I don't care. It's interesting to observe that many people considered this episode to be a real success by New Who's standards, while others have been more apathetic for the exact same reasons. Personally, however, I would not by any means object to more like this, or better and more developed. I think the people who are uninterested in this and prefer the 'drama' and the reverie-episodes which are basically just pure flights of fancy are after a very different Doctor Who than what I am. But bugger them, say I, and let's have more of this.