This one's tricky. Yes, it's part of the finale. Yes, it does some amazing things and has more than its share of jaw-dropping and mind-blowing moments. It's also a puzzle with half its pieces missing. We haven't had an Doctor Who episode in two parts since The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People, all the way back in May 2011. In hindsight, critical attention will look at this as a 105-minute piece that closed out Series 8. For the next few days as of writing, though, we exist in... hell, let's play with what it is, considering. We exist in a state of temporal grace. Serious questions have been raised, and serious revelations and shocking things have popped up to send every Doctor Who fan into a frenzy of speculation... but there are also many things left to be unanswered, and a world in crisis. Until the puzzle is solved, let's take stock of what we know so far. This is Dark Water.We begin with Danny and Clara, talking on the phone. Clara's got her post-it notes out, ready to tell Danny everything about her secret travels with the Doctor as he's out for a walk. Then he gets hit by a car and dies. That's it. Danny Pink. Soldier, maths teacher, love of Clara's life. Dead in a random accident. Oof. Steven Moffat just punched us all in the gut with a mortality boxing glove. For my part, I really liked Danny. He was a great supporting character in his own right, and his relationship with Clara gave both of them more depth. To see him just die is tragic. To see how Clara deals with it gives us even more insight.
Clara in these opening scenes is taking things surprisingly well. She remains calm and bubbly as she asks the Doctor to take her somewhere cool, like a volcano... but this is all ulterior motive. One of those scenes from the trailer, given context to reveal its red herring status. Clara, menacing the Doctor with all of his TARDIS keys, demanding he go back in time and save Danny. The Doctor refusing on the grounds that if Danny hadn't died, Clara would never threaten the Doctor and go back to fix it, thus creating a paradox. One by one, Clara throws the keys into the boiling lava, and when none are left she finally breaks down. Of course, the Doctor is in control. The whole thing was a dream sequence, brought on by his curiosity. What now, Clara asks? They go to hell. Even though Clara betrayed his trust and let the Doctor down, he's still willing to help his friend. As Capaldi puts it; "Do you think I care so little for you that betraying me would make a difference?". Beautiful. Hard to believe that 10 weeks ago I wasn't sure if this man was the Doctor. He is. He is, and he's here to help heal his friend's pain by finding the dead Danny Pink, wherever he moved on to.That "wherever" turns out to be the Nethersphere, the place we've seen in those little teases and sneak peeks over the past 10 weeks. Chris Addison even comes back, playing his Nethersphere office worker character who showed up at the end of The Caretaker. This time, he's assigned to Danny's case, explaining the nature of his death and the new afterlife of the Nethersphere, which is a rather visually stunning place. Not what I expected it to look like at all, but it's cool to see. While this is happening, the Doctor and Clara arrive at the 3W Institute, in search of a lead on Danny. What they do find are skeletons in submerged tanks. Hundreds of them. The dead on full display for the living. They also find Missy, who calls herself an android working for the institute and sends them off to have things explained by an institute doctor.
It's here that things take a grim turn. Moffat's great at planting little idea seeds with horrible implications, and letting the imaginations of the audience water them. In this case, the 3W Institute turns out to be founded on the basis that the dead remain conscious after they die. 3W stands for 3 Words, and presumably the three words shouted by the dead people in a panic are "Don't cremate me!". If you think on that in any detail, you're going to give yourself goosebumps. There's some talk about the water in the tanks being "dark water" that works like x-ray vision, and more than a few shots of Missy playing around with the skeletons in the tank... who are now moving. In case you haven't figured it out yet, there's a brilliant shot of a door that creates a connection in the audience's mind.
So yeah. The skeletons in the tank are actually Cybermen, and Missy has some sort of sphere that lets her upload the dead people's minds. First to the sphere, and then into the brains of the Cybermen. One could spout lots of words about the Cybermen, but we'll save that for next week. They don't play much of a role here aside from their menace being the cliffhanger. For now, just know that they're very bad news. The real secret, the one that was clutched close to Moffat's chest, is Missy's true identity. After 10 weeks of speculation and teasing on the part of the show, we at long last know who she is.And she's The Master.
Capaldi does his part here, of course, looking shocked and horrified at the revelation. The Master should be locked on Gallifrey with the Time Lords, following the climax of The End Of Time Part 2! Yet here she is, having not just changed bodies but gender! So it's now canon that Time Lords can become Time Ladies upon regeneration, I guess. The Master being behind it all should be shocking, and it should be a game-changing reveal that calls to question what she's planning with the Cybermen. For many, I'm sure that's the case. For me? I read Doctor Who discussion threads, I write about the episodes here, I talk about them on video in quasi-podcast form. I'm privy to speculation. Missy being the Master was one of the earliest guesses, simply by leaps of language. Missy, short for Mistress. Mistress, feminine form of Master. It was the obvious horse to bet on for the big reveal, and it's the one Moffat went with. I find myself a bit disappointed that 10 weeks of yet another big mystery plot and teasing the audience just led to the most obvious guess. Then again... it's about the journey, not the destination. We're not even halfway done. Like it or not, Missy was the Master and she's planning something terrible with the Cybermen. Clara's in danger of being attacked, and Danny's mind is inside the Nethersphere, in danger of being wiped by emotion and uploaded into a mindless automaton body. Will the Doctor be able to stop her evil plot and save Earth yet again?
We'll find out next week. Next time: The finale.
AND NOW WHAT I THINK... NOW
(Spoiler warning; there are spoilers)
Yeah, the finale sticks the landing. No surprise there. Unlike the week when I wrote the above piece, we're in the future now. Dark Water and Death In Heaven are out. You can watch one right after the other, and because of that stuff I said I had to do this weekend, I am going to go and watch Death In Heaven immediately after this goes live. It's here I get to play with mirror symbolism again. The final shot, sure, is that little kid Danny shot being reflected on the Ipad screen. There's also the fact that the titular Dark Water deals with refraction. That's not the same thing as reflection, to be sure, but it deals with light being intercepted from a surface. No, more to the point, this episode has the Cybermen. Having turned Clara into a dark mirror of the Doctor (which she embraces full-on in this episode, but more on that in a second), the show now holds the dark mirror up to humanity. We are the Cybermen, and the Cybermen are us. I'd talk about the Qlippoth or whatever that is, but I ain't Phil Sandifer. What I do know is that the Cybermen are a bunch of emotionless stomping zombies, and we also know that the mirror symbolism is rampant. So the dark mirror of the emotionless Cybermen is reflected, and we get Clara and Danny. The light mirror, the emotional core of the whole thing. Clara's grief over Danny's sudden, ordinary, out of nowhere death causes her to falter, and she darkens. It is she who looms over the blighted volcano, attempting to threaten the very man she reflects into doing as she demands. Clara Oswald, in her anguish, has become her very own Oncoming Storm, and in her grief she exiles them both to a lava landscape, weeping while professing that she would do it again. Of course, a mirror cannot be as powerful as the original. This alchemy is diluted. The Doctor was in charge all along. He wanted to see how far she would go, and he has. Now he's going to help his friend, because that's what you do. That goddamn line about her betraying him not making a difference. That is Doctor Who, and it is wonderful and beautiful and a sweeping statement about the man the Doctor is. Say what you will about Stevie Moffat and his plot holes or slip-ups, but sometimes he just gets it, y'know?
He also gets how to scare people. The entire concept of being sentient when you're dead, and being able to feel what happens to your body? That's absolutely pants-shittingly horrifying. There's enough ambiguity here that you're not sure how much of this entire 3W stuff is all a ruse that Missy just made up. Certainly her magic hard drive is able to pull people's minds from their bodies when they're dead, and there has to be some liminal connection between those minds and their original bodies. Then those bodies get turned into Cybermen, or they like... shove the minds into other spare bodies? Like, if Missy is running around stealing people like the Half-Faced Man or Gretchen, she has to have spares. I went through this song and dance before. The plan is kinda gonzo, but Missy is kinda gonzo too so... there you go.
Let's talk about her and close out for now because you can't talk much about this one without also talking about Death In Heaven. I was upset when the reveal happened. 10 weeks of teasing and poking at us, all but begging us to go onto Something Awful/Twitter/Tumblr/GallifreyBase and theorize left and right, only for it to be the easiest and most obvious answer? Wow. How dare you not surprise me and shock me intellectually, Steven Moff Hat. :V
Of course, as I'll go into later, I ate my goddamn words when it turned out that Michelle Gomez was actually phenomenal and knocked it out the park. Hey, here's something to talk about. The old writeup had mention of being in a state of temporal grace. Here's another briefer one I was in while watching. Between the time Missy admits she's a Time Lady, and her outright saying she couldn't keep calling herself the Master... I thought it was Romana. Maybe shit went wrong in the CVE and she resented him for it. Then again, in the audios Romana did get out and become President of Gallifrey during the 8th Doctor era so... I shoulda realized that. Oops. Still, that woulda been a shocker, huh? Romana gone bad.
Alright, that's all I got. Next time: Everyone dies but comes back as a Cyberman.
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