July 14: "Dark Water"

Stuart Manning's poster for "Dark Water"
(from Doctor Who: exclusive Dark Water
poster revealed)

Exciting news for those of us who care about such things (and don't we all secretly?) -- "Dark Water" is the start of our first two-parter since 2011's "The Rebel Flesh" / "The Almost People".  "Dark Water" / "Death in Heaven" is one of those two-parters where the first half leads to a completely different second half (as opposed to, say, "The Hungry Earth" / "Cold Blood", where there's a very clear through line from start to finish); here the first half is a somber affair, with little in the way of action and lots in the way of thoughtful creepiness.

It starts with the most horrifically mundane death ever: Danny Pink talking to Clara on the phone and struck and killed by a car as he's crossing the road.  It's a surprisingly boring death for this show -- but that's the point.  He didn't die sacrificing himself, or fighting for his beliefs, or even to show that the villain really means it; he died in a traffic accident.  What it does, however, is spur Clara into desperate action; her best friend has a time machine, after all, and so all she can think of is getting Danny back, by changing the past, which leads to one of the most dramatic moments of series 8: Clara threatening the Doctor to either bring Danny back or be locked out of the TARDIS forever.  It's a powerful moment, watching Clara toss in spare key after spare key in order to make the Doctor help her, and even when you know it's a trick it's still just as impressive.  But what's best is that even after all that, after seeing how far Clara was willing to go, the Doctor is still willing to help.  "You're going to help me?" she asks.  "Well, why wouldn't I help you?" the Doctor replies.  "Because of what I just did," Clara says.  "I just—"  "You betrayed me," the Doctor replies somewhat harshly.  "Betrayed my trust, you betrayed our friendship, you betrayed everything that I've ever stood for.  You let me down!"  "Then why are you helping me?" Clara wonders.  "Why?" the Doctor asks, genuinely confused.  "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"  And just like that, we know -- we for certain know -- what kind of man this Doctor is.  He may be brusque and tactless and totally alien, but he still cares deeply.  He's still, emphatically, a good man.

A big moment, but it leads to some suspenseful scenes, as the Doctor and Clara travel to what might be the afterlife and what seems to be a mausoleum.  This is where we're finally getting a payoff for all those Missy scenes scattered throughout the previous episodes, of people being brought to the Nethersphere after they die.  And since Danny's just died, he's currently in the Nethersphere, trying to work out what happened, which is why the TARDIS has arrived at 3W in the first place.  These scenes apparently were cause for concern for some viewers, as it depicts a world where the dead are still conscious and feeling things that happen to their bodies, but it's hard to know what exactly is going on.  The sales pitch by Dr. Chang is very smooth, but the Doctor doesn't believe a word of it and it's not hard to see his point of view -- other than Danny's presence, we don't have any genuine evidence that things are as 3W says they are.  There are things to make us wonder though; the off-screen screaming could be staged, but the boy who Danny accidentally killed when he was a soldier -- the thing that clearly made him give up the soldier life -- seems too real to be a fake.  Although it could be a clever manipulation to make Danny give up his emotions so that he can become a Cyberman.

The Cybermen reveal is a good move, by the way; despite knowing that they were going to be in this episode (from both all the publicity photos from when the Cybermen were marching outside St. Paul's (again) and the "Next Time" trailer at the end of "In the Forest of the Night"), it took me an awfully long time to realize that the bodies inside the "dark water" tanks that only revealed organic matter were full of Cybermen, and that the 3W logo was in fact a Cyberman eye, with the teardrop motif and everything.  Perhaps sharper viewers than me were wishing they'd just get on with it, but it was a pleasant feeling as the pieces finally all fell into place, right when presumably the production team wanted them to.  It also sets the stage for the next episode, with Missy in control of Cybermen, populated by minds snatched up by a piece of Gallifreyan tech -- the Matrix data-slice²⁶¹ -- and all ready to do her bidding.

Missy reveals her identity. ("Dark Water") ©BBC

It's nice to finally get the Missy stuff out in the open, and Michelle Gomez is clearly having a ball in the role, pretending to be a welcome droid and then killing Dr. Chang -- but only after he says something nice, because "[t]his is going to be our last conversation, and I'm the one who's going to have to live with that."  Missy is clearly a psychopath, but she also has a sense of humor, which makes her even more frightening -- she's someone you could potentially reason with who's still going to kill you.  Her chemistry with Peter Capaldi is really good -- Missy is loving the fact that the Doctor doesn't recognize her, and she's clearly enjoying putting him on the back foot (the kissing scene being a prime example of this).  They also do a good job with the misdirection of Missy's identity -- being called a Time Lady and such (my brother in fact was convinced that this was Romana, and that the Mistress stuff was related to K-9's term of address for her); it's a shame the bit of location filming misdirection -- "I'm the Random Access Neural Integrator" -- wasn't kept.  But while Cybermen are on the march, leaving St. Paul's cathedral (that's a nice twist, by the way, putting 3W inside a London landmark like that but not telling us until we step outside), the best part is her revelation of her true identity to the slow-on-the-uptake Doctor:

DOCTOR: Who are you?
MISSY: Oh, you know who I am.  I'm Missy.
DOCTOR: Who's Missy?
MISSY: Please, try to keep up.  Short for "Mistress".  Well, I couldn't very well keep calling myself the Master, now could I?

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - Dark Water)

If "Death in Heaven" is as good as this episode has been, we're in for a smashing series 8 finale.







²⁶¹ This is a clever bit of writing, as we've known as far back as The Deadly Assassin that the Matrix can snatch dying minds and upload them to a large network (hence "Matrix"), which means that we're immediately on board with the idea of living minds being snatched up and stored -- although, intriguingly, Steven Moffat doesn't hold the viewers' hands here: either you recognize the reference and make the connection, or you simply move on.  It's not explained at length, which is, I think, a wise move.