Doctor Who: Dark Water / Death In Heaven (2014) Review

With “Dark Water / Death In Heaven”, we’ve reached the end of another season of Doctor Who, and as usual Steven Moffat does a commendable job of wrapping up all the themes and ideas this season has been exploring about self-discovery and the nature of warfare. Since Series 8 has been focusing a lot more on character development for our leads over the traditional story arc surrounding the Promised Land, the events of this finale dive deep into the Doctor, Clara and Danny’s personality flaws and push all three of them past their breaking points as they’re forced to endure a whole lot of trauma. When it comes to how the events of this finale affect the show’s status quo as a whole, an old foe of the Doctor returns, for the first time since the RTD era, and they become a recurring character for the rest of the Twelfth Doctor’s era, playing a vital role in his character arc.

While the Twelfth Doctor’s seasons have plenty of silliness and whimsy in them to appeal to both kids and adults alike (“Robot Of Sherwood“, “The Caretaker“, “In The Forest Of The Night“), his tenure tends to be a lot more dour and brooding across the board compared to Tennant and Smith’s, and that’s reflected in his season finales. All three of his finales tend to be very bleak and tragic affairs that psychologically break the Doctor and his companions, and “Dark Water” officially starts that trend: because despite all their efforts to overcome impossible odds, no one really gets what they wanted in this story. “Dark Water” also marks the return of your traditional multi-part stories in Doctor Who. We haven’t had one since “A Good Man Goes To War / Let’s Kill Hitler“, halfway through Series 6 (unless you consider “The Name Of The Doctor“, “The Day Of The Doctor” and “The Time Of The Doctor” to be a really loose three-part serial), and it’s a welcome return in my eyes, because I’ve really missed a good two-parter over the last two seasons.

In “Dark Water”, a seemingly ordinary day for the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) takes a grim turn when Clara tries to drug him, so she can blackmail him with access to his own ship. However, her chosen method is ineffectual on him, so he promptly flips her blackmail scheme around on her like a boss. Her boyfriend Danny has just died and she’s hell bent on finding a way to save him – including forcing her time-traveling friend to try to change his fate. Clara was never really a threat to the time lord and his ship, but he’s still pretty pissed afterwards about what she was willing to do. Betrayal always stings the most when it comes from those you love, and the Doctor does love his Impossible Girl, either as a friend or something more than that. But he’s well aware that he’s betrayed her trust as well this season – if anything, this little incident makes them even.

So he decides to try to help her anyway. He can’t change Danny’s death, but he can do the next best thing and try to find him in the afterlife – if an afterlife even exists. Their reconciliation is a rather touching moment between the two. The Doctor and Clara’s relationship has been strained and rocky for a lot of this season, so it’s great to see the strength of their bond be reaffirmed here (along with Twelve showing a warmer side of his personality). They set out on a quest, using the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits from “Listen“, to bring Danny home. The Doctor repeatedly warns Clara to get her unstable, grief-driven emotions under control, because he needs her to be at the top of her game. Even before he knows there’s evil afoot, he already suspects they’re walking into a trap when they pick up Danny’s trail. He feels a lot less certain about teaching Clara his methods now after what he saw in “Flatline“, but he knows she’s really going to need them.

When they arrive at an institute that claims it can communicate with the dead, the Doctor thinks it’s total nonsense, because he isn’t remotely superstitious and he doesn’t believe in the concept of an afterlife: he’s only humoring it today to try to help Clara. As it turns out, the Doctor is right to be skeptical, because the woman in charge of the 3W institute, Missy, is converting the dead into her own army of Cybermen. The personal stakes of this finale are raised significantly for the Doctor when he realizes Missy is actually his old “friend” the Master, newly regenerated into a female form. Once he discovers that she concocted her scheme as some sort of sick, twisted attempt to get to him, he feels personally responsible for it and becomes even more driven to stop it, despite things rapidly spiraling out of his control as Missy’s legion rises.

UNIT gets wind of the crisis as well and turns to him for guidance. Since he has all the knowledge and experience they need to fight back against Missy, they make him their leader for the time being, with all their manpower at his disposal. The Doctor doesn’t feel comfortable with people thrusting armies onto him, even if the situation calls for it: because not only does it fly in the face of who he likes to consider himself to be as a person, but it also dredges up some bad memories of both the time war and the war on Trenzalore he fought in recently. Things only continue to grow worse as Missy starts killing his friends, Clara’s grief for Danny causes her to become borderline suicidal, and the Cybermen seem to be unstoppable. As Twelve enters his darkest hour so far, we get to see a far more fearful and desperate side of his personality than we usually do, and Peter Capaldi’s performance as a man who’s gradually becoming undone is captivating to watch.

Twelve is saddened and mortified by what became of poor Danny Pink: the two men might have had their differences, but he wouldn’t wish the horrific fate of becoming a Cyberman onto his worst enemy. Danny also calls him out on his hypocrisy one last time. He might talk a big game and make a lot of flowery speeches about what it means to be human, but at the end of the day, he’ll compromise his principles and let Clara switch off Danny’s emotional inhibitor to win the war against Missy. Missy reveals that she went to the trouble of a creating a cyber army as a gift to him, to bond with him, because she figured he couldn’t resist the temptation of having one. And she’s not entirely wrong, the Doctor doesn’t trust himself with that kind of power. He’s been tempted by his own god complex in the past, and he will be again in the future.

When she asks him to decide what kind of man he is, he reaches the same conclusion Clara and Robin Hood did. It doesn’t matter if he’s a good man or a bad man, what matters is that he always tries his best to be a force for good and set an example for others, to inspire heroism in them. He manages to do that for Danny, and after Mr. Pink dies a hero, saving the planet, the Twelfth Doctor’s soldier-hating phase is officially put to rest. “Death In Heaven” wraps up on a bittersweet note. Missy lied to him about the whereabouts of Gallifrey, to hurt him one last time, and he doesn’t take it well. The Doctor and Clara both decide to lie each other afterwards, to hide how broken they both are and to try to make each other happy, so they can part ways on good terms. They sacrifice their own peace of mind for each other’s sake, as one last example of how much the two friends have in common this season.

After promising herself she would be more honest with the man she loved in the previous episode, Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) tries to confess all of her deepest, innermost feelings to Danny at the start of “Dark Water”. She promises him her heart, and it seems she’s all set to choose building a life with him on Earth over her travels with the Doctor. However, she never gets the chance to, since her confession over the phone tragically distracts him while he’s crossing the street and he gets hit by a car as a result. Clara naturally blames herself for his death and is consumed by grief for weeks. She goes numb to the world and slips into a state of depression, until she finally snaps. She decides to blackmail the Doctor into changing Danny’s fate, by threatening to destroy all his keys to the TARDIS until he complies.

It’s very disturbing how callous and ruthless Clara is being, as she goes about executing her plan, but in a way, it also makes sense with what we know of her. Clara has always encouraged the Doctor to break his own rules and refuse to settle for a tragic outcome when she feels he can do more to help people. Here we see a really dark and twisted version of that same personality trait, as she does it for entirely selfish reasons. The whole thing turns out to be a ruse on the Doctor’s part, and Clara quite rightly feels ashamed of herself when the reality of what she almost did sinks in. She’s all set to walk away from the time lord and his big blue box forever, because she feels she doesn’t deserve to be his friend anymore. But he still decides to help her anyway, out of the kindness of his heart and his loyalty to his best friend, which blows her away (and certainly removes any remaining doubts she might have had about how much their bond means to him).

As they set out following Danny’s trail to the 3W institute, Clara tries to be logical, shrewd and skeptical, just like the Doctor advises. But even though she’s calmed down significantly, she’s still not thinking straight. She’s so desperate to get Danny back that she’ll do anything to make it happen, whatever the costs, and at times she shows signs of becoming suicidal (signs that are outright confirmed in “Last Christmas“). Clara and Danny are briefly reunited when she’s able to call him in the Nethersphere, and the conversation that follows is beautifully tragic. Whatever joy or relief they might have gotten from hearing each other’s voices again is short-lived, as suspicion and mistrust comes between them – the same things that have always doomed their relationship – and both of them walk away from this encounter feeling more upset than they already were.

At the end of “Dark Water”, Clara finds herself separated from the Doctor and cornered by the Cybermen, so she decides to put the new confidence she gained from “Flatline” and the poker face she’s been honing since “Deep Breath” to good use. She pretends to be the Doctor to buy herself some time to escape (the opening titles for “Death In Heaven” even swap Jenna Coleman’s name around with Peter Capaldi’s as a fun little gag). Since the Cybermen are emotionless creatures of pure logic, she figures she has a good chance of outsmarting them if she can just keep up her bluff for long enough. However, we’ll never know how long she would have been able to keep up the charade until her luck ran out, because Cyber Danny eventually steps in and destroys the other Cybermen. He also decides to whisk an unconscious Clara away to a graveyard where they can be alone and he can reveal himself to her – a scene that would feel right at home in an old school monster movie.

Clara is devastated to discover Danny has been converted into a Cyberman – a fate worse than death in this show’s universe – and is in agony. He asks her to help him end the pain by switching off his emotional inhibitor, which would essentially kill him. The Doctor warns her that doing so could lead to Cyber Danny turning on her and killing her, but that’s a risk that she’s willing to take to make amends. Clara feels responsible for this whole mess happening, for playing a part in his death and not being a better lover to him, and she feels immensely guilty about it. Jenna Coleman really shows off her range as an actress in this finale, as she does a phenomenal job of portraying Clara’s anguish – the graveyard scenes she shares with Danny are actually quite hard to watch.

Clara loses Danny four times over the course of this story: when he’s killed in traffic, when she has to spiritually kill him by switching off his emotions, when he sacrifices himself to stop Missy’s apocalypse, and finally when he chooses to give up his last chance to return to the world of the living by restoring the boy he killed instead. Afterwards, Clara tries to bump off Missy to avenge Danny, and she makes it quite clear that if the Doctor won’t kill his bff from hell then she will. I should probably be disturbed by the return of Clara’s cold-blooded streak, but honestly, I don’t blame her in the slightest bit for demanding Missy’s execution. By the coda, both of Clara’s boys are gone (once the Doctor has flown away again in his ship) and she’s left completely alone. Everything that happened in this finale was incredibly traumatic for her, and it completely emotionally wrecks her. Even after she manages to bounce back from some of her depression, Clara is never really the same person again afterwards, which is made very apparent by her reckless behavior in Series 9.

Out of the various boyfriend characters Doctor Who has had over the years, Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson) certainly got the rawest deal. Rose and Mickey broke up and eventually went their separate ways when they realized their relationship wasn’t working. Amy and Rory worked through their differences and built an incredibly fulfilling life together over time. Danny, by comparison, straight up dies – though his death has less to do with the love triangle between himself, Clara and the Doctor, and more to do with a redemption arc for the former soldier. After he’s killed by a car accident unexpectedly, Danny wakes up in the Netherspehre. Throughout Series 8, Missy has been collecting the souls of the dead and greeting them in what she claims to be the afterlife, and now our heroes are finally becoming aware of her actions.

Danny has to come to terms with the fact that his mortal life is over, just when he was beginning to like it again. He’s lost everything he’s grown fond of over the last few years, including Clara. Missy’s assistant, Seb, talks him through it all, and he seems like a harmless, comical character at first, but his real game plan slowly becomes clear. He fishes around for any secrets or regrets Danny might have about his background, anything he can use to manipulate him into switching off his emotions. He arranges to have Danny meet the person he killed while he was deployed and relive his greatest trauma. Then he sets up a torturous phone call with Clara, to break his heart even further. Seb does a good job of never tipping his hand during it all: he’s had a lot of practice with pulling off his con with everyone else residing inside the Nethersphere. I also appreciate how the lighting during his scenes slowly grows colder and creepier, as he starts to show his true colors.

Danny has always been pretty forgiving when it comes to Clara’s various lies and indiscretions, and “Dark Water” explains why that’s the case. After all, Mr. Pink has not been entirely truthful himself when it comes to his past. Ever since “Into The Dalek“, the show has been hinting that he did something terrible while he was deployed, something that scarred him for life and led him to quit the army. As it turns out, that shameful secret was shooting an innocent child civilian in the line of fire, before he realized who or what he was. Danny never forgave himself for that, and to this day, the guilt is soul-crushing. When he’s confronted with the terrified boy he slaughtered in the Nethesphere, he has to face up to the pain he caused all over again.

During his phone call with Clara, Danny is alarmed to discover how desperate she is to reunite with him. He doesn’t want her doing anything reckless or stupid, and he doesn’t want her to throw her life away for him, because it isn’t her time yet. So he puts the woman he loves before himself and decides to sacrifice his chance to see her again, by convincing her to shun him. After having his heart crushed like that one more time, he’s incredibly tempted to accept Seb’s offer to switch off his emotions and numb himself to the pain. But the boy from his past saves him from that fate, which is an unexpected turn of events and more than a bit touching. Danny’s decision not to complete his conversion comes at a steep cost, when he’s subjected to the horror of discovering he’s been stripped of his humanity and turned into a cyborg against his will – a traumatic experience that’s been shown to drive people insane in previous episodes. Underneath his armor, he’s now a reanimated, decomposing corpse who’s a pale imitation of the man he used to be in life.

When he seeks out Clara, he gets yet another knife to his gut when she seems to confirm that her bond with the Doctor will always be much stronger and more meaningful than with anyone else in her life. Eventually, he decides to go through with his decision to switch off his emotional inhibitor. He asks Clara to help him end the pain, because he’s basically hit rock bottom and he’s got nothing left to lose anymore. But he’s wrong about that. He still has his attachment to Clara. As the Doctor points out to him, Danny’s love for Clara helps him to stay grounded, even beyond death. It helps him to stay sane and gives him the freedom to make his own decisions instead of just being another one of Missy’s mindless weapons. In that regard, it’s definitely better to have a broken heart than no heart at all.

Ultimately, it’s Danny who helps to tip the scales in our heroes’ favor, when no one else can. After he’s been inspired by the Doctor, Danny takes control of the Cyberman army and decides to save the world (and Clara) at the cost of his life. In the aftermath, he’s given one last chance to return to the world of the living, with Missy’s time lord technology. But he chooses to send the kid from Afghanistan back in his place, because he knows he deserves it far more than he does. Danny fades away and he’s cut off from Clara again, permenately this time. But unlike before, he can die in peace this time. He’s got his affairs in order, he’s made amends, and he’s redeemed himself to the best of his abilities. It’s a tragic end to Clara and Danny’s time together (Steven Moffat likes to have every major relationship in this show end in some form of tragedy), but it’s a fitting and dignified conclusion to Danny’s storyline that helped to give him some more dimensions beyond being Clara’s love interest.

When we last saw the Master in “The End Of Time“, he was on his way back to Gallifrey, attacking Rassilon with his new Sith lord lightning. Now she’s back, newly regenerated into a female body, with a brand new scheme up her sleeves. I’m really happy to see Missy (Michelle Gomez) make her comeback in this finale, because the Master is pure gleeful chaos personified, and he’s always been one of my favorite members of the Doctor’s rogues gallery. Missy, being the shameless troll that she is, pretends to be an android for a while, so she can keep an eye on the Doctor and mess with his head. But she also can’t resist tipping him off early on that she’s more than what she seems, because she wants him to notice her, and she’s ready to play a game with her old friend.

Much like in “The Sound Of Drums“, Missy has been setting up her trap for the Doctor behind the scenes for a long time now, and it’s actually kind of scary just how efficient she is – she’s seemingly thought of everything he might do to counteract her, and she’s always one step ahead of everyone else. As always, she’s portrayed as a rather sadistic predator. She likes to toy with her prey and enjoys making them beg and plead for their lives, before she kills them anyway. She has a very dry and deadpan sense of humor. She’ll stab you in the back in an instant, but this incarnation of the Master is a bit more restrained and a bit less manic than John Simm’s version, since she’s meant to be a mirror to Peter Capaldi’s Doctor instead of David Tennant’s. She has little patience for fools or people who she thinks are just plain thick and boring. Her attitude is still just as haughty and superior as ever, and the only person she even remotely takes seriously in this two-parter is the Doctor, the only other time lord around.

I like my villainesses to be confident, cunning and ambitious, so I really enjoy Missy’s style: she’s a total diva about everything while also being sly as a fox (and Michelle Gomez is clearly having a blast chewing every last inch of scenery). After she gets captured by UNIT, Missy plays along for a while and lets them think they’re in control while she bides her time to escape. She decides to kill Osgood, purely to spite the Doctor, and she makes sure to play plenty of cruel mind games with her before her demise. Steven Moffat felt this was an important moment for him to include: to make it clear that just because the Master is played by a woman now doesn’t mean she’s any less evil or any less of a threat.

Eventually, Missy reveals that the reason why she did all of this was because she wanted to reconnect with the Doctor again. Missy is one of the more sentimental Masters in the line-up, so she wants the old bond she used to have with her friend back. She figured dragging him down to her level and convincing him they were the same would be the best way to do it. She also arranged for him to meet Clara, his Impossible Girl, in Series 7, as part of her long game. She gives him an army of Cybermen so they can rule the universe together, but he rejects her offer. When Clara tries to execute her and the Doctor insists on taking on that burden himself, Missy (being the twisted time lady she is) is willing to play along, because she gets to claim some sort of victory over him after all – robbing him of the moral high ground he so desperately clings to. However, she’s denied even that, thanks to an unexpected interloper. By the end of this story, we have a much clearer understanding of Missy’s motivations, and she plays a really vital role throughout the entire Capaldi era, as she keeps trying to reconcile with the Doctor in her own twisted way.

Throughout Series 8, Missy has been experimenting on the dead by uploading their souls to a Gallifreyan matrix, the same technology the time lords use to give their recently deceased a peaceful afterlife, now corrupted for nefarious purposes. This is the kind of clever sci-fi idea I like to see in Doctor Who, and it’s gradually used to give us some classic Steven Moffat nightmare fuel. The souls of these people are still connected to their old bodies, even if they no longer inhabit them, so if someone decides to cremate them, they’re subjected to unimaginable agony. We can only hope that this gruesome fate is the end result of Missy meddling with the natural order of things, and not the usual outcome of what happens whenever someone dies in the Doctor Who universe (though we’re never given confirmation one way or another).

With her own breed of Cybermen, Missy takes the already nightmarish fusion of flesh and technology and makes it even more obscene. The Cybermen are always at their best when the show leans into the body horror that lies at the heart of their core concept – that these poor souls used to be ordinary people who had their humanity stripped away from them against their will – and “Death In Heaven” certainly does that as Missy weaponizes the dead. Now more than ever, the Cybermen are essentially metallic zombies, as they emerge from morgues and rise from their graves to join Missy’s ranks. Every time they kill someone, they only bring in new recruits for their army, which provides a terrifying reason as to why they need to be stopped as soon as possible. They can also fly now, which is probably the least effective new addition to their designs, because the CGI shots of the flying Cybermen can look quite goofy half the time.

About halfway through this two-parter, Kate Stewart and Petronella Osgood show up to help the Doctor, two other characters who we haven’t seen in a while. As you would expect from the head of a military organization, Kate isn’t afraid to make decisions that are morally questionable from time to time. She’s completely dedicated to UNIT’s cause, and she’ll do whatever she has to to protect Britain, even if that puts her at odds with the Doctor sometimes. Osgood, meanwhile, continues to be sharp as a tack and super resourceful. She’s the living embodiment of every Doctor Who fangirl out there, and she’s unapologetically nerdy. The Doctor has retained his fondness for her from his last life, and after she manages to impress him once again, he offers her a spot in the TARDIS if she’s ever interested in flying away with him.

The Doctor offering someone a gig as a companion when they’re not a series regular has proven to practically be a death sentence in this show for a guest character (as we’ve seen with Lynda, Astrid, Jenny, Rita and Victorian Clara) and that fatal tradition holds true for poor Osgood. Osgood lets her guard down at the worst possible time, and Missy takes advantage of her desire to prove herself to peers to lure her into a trap. Missy doesn’t waste any time killing her off, and she also tries to kill Kate by making her fall out of a plane. But thankfully Kate is saved by her late father, the Brigadier, who was drafted into Missy’s undead Cyberman army. Before he departs, the former military man gives Missy the Old Yeller treatment in the climax, so the Doctor won’t have to. And since this is the last time either of them will be seeing each other, the Doctor finally has an opportunity to give his old friend a proper goodbye, the way he couldn’t do back in “The Wedding Of River Song” – paying him his respects with a salute.

“Dark Water” is helmed by Rachel Talalay, who ranks alongside Toby Haynes, Nick Hurran and Saul Metzstein as one of the best directors from the Moffat era. In every season, she was given the task of bringing the Twelfth Doctor’s finales to life, because she always did an impeccable job of giving these episodes a stylish cinematic flair – from the Doctor and Clara’s tense stand-off by the volcano, to the scenes of the Cybermen emerging from their watery tombs, revealing their true forms to the audience, to the entire climax in the graveyard. The final shots for the cliffhanger of the Cybermen emerging from St. Paul’s Cathedral, all set to attack London, were meant to be a deliberate callback to the 1968 serial, “The Invasion”, which featured shots of the Cybermen that were nearly identical.

For the season finale, Murray Gold naturally ties together a lot of the main themes of this season. The Twelfth Doctor’s leitmotif, “A Good Man“, receives a lot of new variations in this story, including the funky electronic piece “Throw Away The Key“, the menacing “They Walk Among Us“, the underplayed “A Good Man, An Incredible Liar“, the bold and brassy “Freefall“, the heartwrenching strings of “I Need To Know“, and the strident beat of “(The Majestic Tale Of) An Idiot In A Box“, a triumphant mash-up of the Eleventh and the Twelfth Doctor’s themes. The Cybermen’s iconic, sinister motif is reprised a few times in “They Walk Among Us” and “There Is No Clara Oswald“, while the music devoted to Missy traverses a pretty wild variety of moods and styles in “Browsing“, “Missy And Her Boys“, “Missy’s Theme“, “Missy’s Theme Extended“, and “Missy’s Gift“. Reused music from previous episodes includes “Cyber Army“, “Upgrade In Progress“, “I Won’t Change My Mind“, “Beginning Of The End“, “Pain Everlasting“, “Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart” and “Fear“.

“Dark Water / Death In Heaven” does a stellar job of sending off Series 8 with a bang, while also ending the year on a bittersweet note for the Doctor and Clara. And since it has the benefit of being a two-parter, it’s also probably the most fleshed out season finale we’ve had since “The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang” in Series 5.

Rating: 10/10.

Side-Notes:

* “Dark Water” kicks off a really strange trend for Doctor Who, where the Master frequently teams up with the Cybermen in season finales. In addition to this story, it also happens in “World Enough And Time” and “The Timeless Children”.

* “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I need to talk to you” Like I said before, Moffat really likes having his characters tell each other to shut up.

* The circumstances of Danny’s death are rather suspicious. Quite a few people have wondered if Missy arranged to have him killed, to lure Clara and the Doctor into her trap, and I really wouldn’t put it past her. She planned for everything else in this two-parter, after all.

* “Save Danny. Bring him back or I swear you will never step inside your TARDIS again” Top ten anime betrayals.

* “Doctor, what happens now?” “Go to hell” “Fair enough. Absolutely fair enough”.

* “Why? Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?” Awww.

* “I don’t deserve a friend like you” “Clara, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m exactly what you deserve” Oof, there are a lot of different ways to interpret that line, and some of them are more savage than others.

* “At 3W, afterlife means aftercare” How kinky.

* “You also have not received the official welcome package” “Oh, I’m good, thanks. No worries”.

* “Please indicate if you’d like me to adjust my intimacy setting” “Oh, yes, please. Please do that. Do that now right now”.

* “You have iPads in the afterlife?” “iPads? We have Steve Jobs”.

* “Why is there all this swearing?” “Oh, I’ve got a lot of internalized anger”.

* When an extremely guilt-ridden Danny is talking to the boy from his past, trying to find a way to break the ice, he actually asks him “Are you okay?”. My dude, he’s dead and in the “afterlife” right now because you shot him full of holes. Of course he’s not okay.

* “He believed it was a telepathic communication from the dead” “Why? Was he an idiot?”

* “You know, I might have been guilty of a just teensy little fibette”.

* “Now, come on. Let’s not dwell on horrid things. This is going to be our last conversation, and I’m the one who’s going to have to live with that”.

* “Oh, Clara, Clara, Clara! You know I should shoot you in a jealous rage. Now, wouldn’t that be sexy?”

* “I presume you have stairs?” “Well, I’m not a Dalek”.

* “You know the key strategic weakness of the human race? The dead outnumber the living”

* “I’m Missy, short for Mistress. Well, I couldn’t very well keep calling myself the Master, now could I?”

* “New York, Paris, Rome, Marrakesh, Brisbane, Glasgow. Everywhere, anywhere! Me and my boys, we’re going viral!”

* “Welcome to the only planet in the universe where we get to say this: he’s on the payroll”.

* “Oh, don’t do that. You look like you’re self-concussing, which would explain all of military history, now I think about it”.

* “Hang on a second. The President? We don’t want Americans bobbing around the place. They’ll only start praying”.

* It’s a nice touch Clara brings up Jenny from “The Doctor’s Daughter” when she’s listing off facts about the Doctor’s life. The fact that he told her about that rather sad story (from his perspective) shows how much Twelve and Clara have grown closer over time.

* “There’s always collateral damage with you and me, Doctor. It’s our Paris”.

* “We do have files on all our ex-prime ministers. She wasn’t even the worst one” Savage. I imagine Missy had extra incentive to kill Osgood after that comment.

* “I’m going to kill you in a minute. I’m not even kidding. You’re going to be as dead as a fish on a slab any second now, all floppy and making smells. But don’t tell the boys. This is our secret girl plan”.

* “Oh, silly. Why does one pop a balloon? Because you’re pretty, and you should have a bit more confidence in yourself”.

* That flashback to “The Bells Of Saint John” is really surreal. Clara’s introductory episode was only just last season, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

* “The phone’s ringing, Doctor. Can you hear that? Now that is the sound of your chain being yanked. Heel, Doctor!”

* “Why did you do that?! You didn’t have to do that!” “Oh, don’t be so selfish! I’m going to miss her, too!”

* “Boys, blow up this plane and, I don’t know, Belgium, yeah? Kill some Belgians! Might as well, they’re not even French! Byeeee!” I love her so much.

* “Oh! Permission to squeeeee!” Please no.

* “I am an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver. Just passing through, helping out, learning. I don’t need an army. I never have, because I’ve got them. Always them. Because love, it’s not an emotion. Love is a promise. And he will never hurt her”.

* “This is not the order of a general, nor the whim of a lunatic-” “Excuse me?”

* “Old friend, is she? If you have ever let this creature live, everything that happened today, is on you. All of it, on you. And you’re not going to let her live again” Clara is out for blood, man.

* “Why don’t you like hugging, Doctor?” “Never trust a hug. It’s just a way to hide your face”.

* “Doctor? Travelling with you made me feel really special. Thank you for that. Thank you for making me feel special” Oh Clara, you have no idea how many haters you have for precisely that reason.

Further Reading:

• Gallifreyan Ramblings; The M0vie Blog I & II; Tapetrade; Junkyard Blog; Lyratek; Random Whoness; Doctor Who Reviews I & II; Who In Review.