Face The Raven: Rank - 297

        Face The Raven

(Season 9, Dr 12 and Clara, 21/11/2015, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Sarah Dollard, director: Justin Molotnikov)

Rank: 297

Watch the birdie Clara...No I don't mean stop and have your picture taken I meant...Oh well, never mind. 

Poor Clara. Fans still have teary eyes over the departures of Rose (lost in a parallel world), Donna (doomed to forget) and Amy/Rory (sent back in time by giant statues that are really weeping angels while saving each other...typical love story). Clara, though, just gets a new tattoo and is then attacked by a giant bird that looks like death. Which is just a normal night out for some people. Clara’s death is the first time we’ve seen a companion die on screen since Adric in ‘Earthshock’, a full forty-three years earlier (we’ll skip over the fact that they imply it with Peri in ‘Mindwarp’ because we don’t actually see it and its part of a ‘story’ that seems to be Matrix-AI ‘fake news’ anyway). Steven Moffat, usually so averse to killing off his characters, is clearly going for a similar moment for the 21st century viewer, of pulling the rug out from under our feet that they couldn’t possibly go and do a thing like that, teasing us with all the ways Clara might get out of it and then pulling the plug anyway in much the same way, showing that anything in this series is possible. It should be the big emotional climax of his era, a colossal break with tradition given that it happens without warning in a standalone episode that’s eleven in a run of thirteen. And yet most fans’ reactions is kind of ‘meh’. 

 You see, by this point we’re used to being teased. Clara had already died, in some form, twice already in her splinter personas as Oswin in ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ (where she’s part Dalek) and ‘The Snowmen’ (when Clara the Victorian nanny falls from a cloud), both of which were a lot more moving than this story. Jenna Coleman was meant to leave at the end of series eight, after the death of Danny Pink, but Moffat wasn’t ready to see her go (and was still a little burnt out from the endless actress auditions, never his favourite part of the process). Then she got a reprieve to stay for the festive special ‘Last Christmas’ which was a sort of coda to the main story. Then she ended up staying for most of series nine. If you were enough of a fan to know about the behind-the-scenes stuff then you knew Clara’s days were numbered even before she got a quantum lock tattoo counting down to her demise. And if you didn’t you could sense it: we’d had her natural story arc long ago, the year when she was a mystery and the year when she was a ‘normal’ person trying to lead a life as a teacher while being a part-time time traveller. The scripts haven’t known what to do with Clara for a while now, she’s clearly been on borrowed time. We also suspected that Moffat was going to revert back to type and revive her again at some point, the way he always did with Rory, which (spoilers) he does two episodes later in ‘Hell Bent’, undoing every impact this story had along the way. If anything the surprise was that we get to the end of ‘Heaven sent’ with Clara still dead. After all, Clara was pitched from the beginning as the impossible girl. Surely they couldn’t have killed her of totally in such an ordinary way?

 Mostly though it’s because this death is such a perfunctory one, only set up a few minutes in advance, that you’re not so much moved as confused. It’s certainly a far less fitting or memorable way to go than either of Clara’s previous deaths, despite knowing the character that much better. And that all comes down to Moffat’s position as showrunner, a fit he finds far less natural than Russell T Davies, despite being – on average – a lot better at writing series-long arcs. You see, this story wasn’t originally meant to be Clara’s death story at all. It was a standalone episode submitted by writer Sarah Dollard that landed in his proucvtion pigeon-hole just as he was trying to wrap up series nine (and for a longest time was pencilled in for series ten). Dollard had been on the fringes of Who for so long and was such a known fan that it’s a wonder she hadn’t been offered an episode before. She’d penned some of the better episodes of both ‘Merlin’ and ‘Being Human’, the two best series the BBC had created to fill the ‘family’ Saturday teatime slot when Dr Who was off the air (although, admittedly, the gore in ‘Human’ meant it was a very late tea-time for slightly older families). Dollard’s idea, picked up by Russell T Davies for ‘The Church On Ruby Road’, was for ‘Trap Street’s, invisible places hidden away in busy town centres on earth that could be filled with alien waifs and strays out of sight of most humans. The idea was inspired by Victorian cryptographers who, back in the days before computers when mapping streets was a fulltime and exhausting job, used to catch out ‘cheaters’ who borrowed their work withput permission by adding in fake street names that only they or a few confused locals would ever know about. There were quite a few of them: there’s a whole ‘missing’ area named Argleton not far from my house in fact, which makes visiting that region in the dark after watching the creepier Dr who stories quite the experience I can tell you! Forgotten for decades, this sort of thing was back in vogue in the 2010s when ‘Google Earth’ were going round the world taking pictures using photographic contraptions that looked like alien technology anyway, with people poring over certainly peculiar anomalies thrown up by the readings. Particularly the blank areas that we weren’t allowed to see around military bases (there’s just an empty space around Area 51 for instance) and certain shapes in out-of-the-way areas like mountains and the poles that people couldn’t usually see (one of the most obvious Who stories they haven’t done yet: What is that ark-shaped object on top of Mount Arafat where Noah’s boat was meant to become stuck? Or what looks like a ufo under Antarctica?) A lot of them are, admittedly, pareidolia, the human brain’s capacity for coming up with shapes and seeing patterns in random bits of data that have no meaning (an evolutionary quirk that allows us to sense danger before we can actually see it). There were even a few companies that took aerial pictures by drone and sold to people who fancied a picture of what their roof looked like for a tenner (the rumour going round that they were taken by aliens trying to pay for new equipment for their flying saucer, mostly because nobody could believe that this was a workable business plan). It’s exactly the sort of thing Dr Who should have been doing and you can see why Steven Moffat hastily commissioned this script. 

 Only instead of leaving Sarah to get on with it he kept coming back to it. At the time he was meant to be at work on the season finale ‘Heaven sent’ and ‘hell bent’ and the scripts were giving him great problems. He knew what he wanted to do with the stories – most of what ended up on screen – but he had too much material to fit properly and didn’t know how to park Clara before the last episode in Gallifrey. What he really needed was an extra episode, but also an extra few months to write it, but the juggernaut of a long-running series just doesn’t have that luxury. So slowly Moffat began to wonder: what if he wrote Clara out earlier? Even though her script was all but finished Moffat persuaded Dollard to go back and add the element of Clara being killed off, leaving it up to her how to do it. In keeping with the Victoriana motif Dollard came up with the idea of a raven, an old folk tale as the omen of death who’d come to prominence again after Edgar Allen Poe wrote his poem about them crowing ‘nevermore’ at times of endings, but who was not just messenger but executioner. Moffat approved: it fitted the story’s theme of a street that lived by its own rules and had its own legal system everyone agreed to abide by and they worked together to have a plot where Clara broke the rules without knowing it, paying the price with her life without knowing it. Dollard said she got quite emotional writing Clara’s death scene and Moffat too said he struggled to hold it together and not be seen crying in public when he first got the script while on a train to a BBC meeting. However, that still wasn’t working – it didn’t seem the sort of thing that Clara would do. The only thing they could come up with was that Clara would get into trouble by saving someone else, picking up on a story arc that had been flowing in and out since her first arrival (where, unknown to us, she was saving the Doctor). The only problem was who? The Doctor himself was the obvious choice, but he seemed even less likely to accidentally break an alien law and, besides, they’d nearly killed him off a few times too many for comfort lately. Clara had already lost her boyfriend Danny Pink and she was an orphan. 

 Their solution is where this story goes wrong as Moffat literally tries to make ‘Face The Raven’ kill multiple birds with one stone it wasn’t designed to do. Leafing back through old stories Moffat hit on the idea of Rigsy, the graffiti artists from ‘Flatline’ and decided to write him into the series again, figuring that Clara might have slipped him her number in case he was ever in trouble. There’s nothing wrong with Rigsy as a character in ‘Flatline’, but he was an incidental character sketched in rather than a big memorable creation were dying to see again a nd besides, we’d already had his story. He had very little screentime with Clara (even less with the Doctor) and most casual viewers of the show probably couldn’t remember him (his last appearance being over a year ago by this point): he just seems like a really odd character to bring back and set up a series finale around. The only way the two writers could make it work was with a lot of changes: rather than a straightforward sacrifice or a mistake it now became part of Clara’s story arc of trying too hard to be like the Doctor, taking the same sort of risks he did despite being mortal. Though they never fully come out and say it, we’re clearly meant to think that being splintered back in the Doctor’s timeline in ‘Name Of The Doctor’ and effectively ‘regenerating’ has given Clara ideas above her station, making her feel infallible (as it is it’s weird that this is never ever mentioned again between them on screen once we meet The War Doctor in ‘Day Of The Doctor’). 

 In the olden days it used to be easy: the Doctor was the experienced time-traveller who was impossibly old and had seen everything, while the companions were his apprentices, young and hungry to see the universe, the audience identification figure who could ask all the questions we wanted to know and there so we wouldn’t feel left out. Something weird happens in the 4th Doctor era though: ‘The Deadly Assassin’ has him talking to himself, while his next three companions are a savage from our future who doesn’t understand even the science we take for granted, then a fellow timelord who knew far more than we did, then an Alzarian who didn’t even come from our universe and where the usual rules didn’t apply. After a period of things reverting back to normal we then got the 7th Doctor, who more often than not was in stories precisely because of his companion Ace. It’s a blur the modern series have continued since, having Rose learn to think like the Doctor, Donna become the Doctor and Amy know the Doctor better than he does. Clara has seen more Doctors and spent more time with him, in her different lives, than any companion so it sort of makes sense that she should think like he does. There’s a scene early on this story where they’re playing good cop bad cop, Clara reusing to let the Doctor be good cop because of ‘the thing you do you’re your face’. But that only highlights how much they’ve become like each other: time travel has hardened Clara. By now she’s seen a lot of people she’s been close to die and she’s been running out of patience, while at the same time the 12th Doctor’s story arc has been about his inner doubts as to whether he’s a ‘good man’ or not. By now they’re both in a grey area somewhere in the middle, turning into each other – notably Clara hangs from the Tardis by her feet the same way the 11th Doctor did in ‘Day Of The Doctor’ – but that was by accident, this is deliberate. Previous stories (notably ‘Deep Breath’ ‘Dark Water’ and ‘Last Christmas’) have played up her ‘controlling’ tendencies, her need to have the last word, to risk her life and put other people in danger by accident. She’d already paid for this character flaw big time with the death of Danny (not that he died directly because of her actions but the problems she creates trying to undo his death nearly skills off all humanity and means she has to witness his death again as a cyber-conversion, which is plenty close enough really); surely a bigger problem is that her travels have turned her into an adrenalin junkie who just can’t settle into ordinary life. And yet she was even working on that till now. The Clara we’d seen across series nine was a much calmer, more accepting personality who only risked all when the Doctor was in trouble. Maybe the young and impetuous Clara of series seven or eight might have done this, but not the new-look Clara. The moment she takes Rigsy’s chronolock, because she’s stalling for time’ is by now incredibly out of character: she knows the dangers of jumping into danger without looking firsthand and it really isn’t the sort of mistake you ever make again. It would have been so easy to tweak this aspect to make it a noble heroic death, to have Clara really become the Doctor and risk her life for one of the children in her care the way he would (whether it be the two children she nannies for that we barely ever see or the Coal Hill class she seems to have forgotten all about. As it is those poor kids must have trauma after their other teacher Danny dies in suspicious circumstances too). Instead she dies for Rigsy a character who most of us couldn’t even remember, in a twist that feels more like punishment for the lapse of a character flaw she’d already overcome. Even after out-staying her welcome, even after cheating death so many times, Clara deserved so much better than this. 

 There’s another problem. Dollard’s original script had a new character in the story being the ‘mayor’ and overseeing the Trap Street, doling out the rules and being judge jury and executioner. Moffat felt that he hadn’t quite tied up Ashildr’s arc from ‘The Girl Who Died/The Woman Who Lived’) and thought it would make a good mirror to have another person the Doctor damaged (by bringing back to life and making immortal against her wishes) along with one who was facing to death because she’s been acting like him. So he wrote her in as the mayor of this town, even though it’s a massive contradiction with everything we’d seen of her character thus far. She explains half-heartedly that she took the job for ‘stability’, hers and the aliens who pass by, but that’s a nonsense given that the last time we saw her she was running away from being tried down; everyone can change of course and all the more so someone whose lived for centuries since we last saw her, but there’s never any reason given in the script for why she settled down here or how she become so harsh and unbending over enforcing petty rules (if anyone can see the need to change rules depending on circumstances, because everyone has different motives for the same crime, it’s someone whose been kicking around for thousands of years and can see the pattern). Ashildr says everyone needs to abide by these rules to feel safe, but it’s blatant they don’t: all these aliens are scared out of their wits already. A threat to kick them out and let the humans deal with them ought to be enough to kill off any serious rebellion here. And if people do rebel what does Ashildr care? By her own admission she doesn’t care much for any of these people, the extra years having turned her heart cold, while she herself is in no danger of dying at all. Once again Moffat’s had a sudden idea that wasn’t there in the original plan and forced a square peg into fitting into a round hole that was never meant to bear it. This was, apparently, a very last minute decision: so last minute that Maisie Williams had assumed all her filming was over and in between roles had bought a nose piercing that couldn’t be removed (rather killing off the idea that Ashildr couldn’t hurt herself or damage her body without it ‘repairing’). Somehow everyone seems to have missed a far more obvious way they could have brought Ashildr in: Viking legends have ravens as Odin’s messengers, the bringers of death. Ashildr is a Viking. Wouldn’t it be better to have had the raven searching for Ashildr for centuries wondering why she couldn’t die and killing Clara off not as a punishment for her but for the Doctor for thinking he had power over people’s lives when he doesn’t? After all, this story goes to great lengths to say how you can’t cheat death (even though, uh, that’s exactly what Rigsy did by passing on the chronolock to Clara when she offered to take it) – the Doctor seems to have gotten away with reversing Ashildr’s no problem. All this faffing about with Clara also means that Rigsy gets forgotten about, robbing us of the emotional pay-off we need to see: he should be so in debt to Clara that he’s delirious at having his name cleared and guilty all at the same time. Painting a mural of Clara (based on the photograph she traditionally sent out to fans) to remember her by just doesn’t cut it (a cut scene had him naming his new-born daughter after Clara, which would have been something). 

 The result is a script that’s been cobbled together out of so many odds and ends it just doesn’t fit together anymore and most of the best ones ended up on the cutting room floor to make way for lesser material that feels forced. The original script made up far greater play of how these aliens had gone into hiding because they were scared of humanity, a neat reverse of trick of what we normally see that’s very Who-like and I’m amazed hasn’t been done before. The aliens tell their children that they’re feral monsters where even the children ‘eat raw flesh with their teeth’ and ‘make great snorting noises and shoot germs out of their noses’, natural predators that kill on sight. There’s much more play about how trap streets can be everywhere , that people are forever finding themselves taking a wrong turning and ending up walking down an unfamiliar street that’s right up there with the coda of ‘Blink’ (‘statues are everywhere!’) for allowing children to keep playing the game of make-believe in between stories and spotting their own ‘monsters’ in the street. There’s a tonne more about how Me/Ashildr took the job as mayor reluctantly but grew into it, realising that caring for other people gave her a purpose she lacked when her immortality made her selfish (she’s turned into the Doctor at last). There’s even a weird cut scene where humans from the past who should have died ended up falling here buy accident and are in the alley too, with a sight of Jane Austen playing cards with Wild Bill Hickock and Jeremy Clarkson (who Dollard seems to think is dead in ‘our’ world!) All of these seem like better ideas than what we got. 

 Due to the way its been re-written, too, ‘Raven’ is riddled with holes big enough to get an Abzorbaloff through. How did Rigsy ever get Clara’s number? It’s so out of character for her to be keeping in touch with anyone, never mind someone she barely knew. The only way they can cover the whacking coincidence that Rigsy ended up becoming involved in two alien incursions in a couple of years is to have it all set up as a plot by the timelords to blackmail Ashildr into getting the Doctor to teleport into (spoilers) his own confession dial. But how did they ever think that Rigsy would come to the Doctor for help? He doesn’t do help, it’s the 12th Doctor. And they need this particular Doctor for their plan to work – what would they have done if a different younger Doctor had answered the call that couldn’t confess what they needed to know about Gallifrey? What’s more they wipe Rigsy’s memory using the ‘retcon’ device so often seen in ‘Torchwood’ (where it was meant to be an in-joke; retcon is a sort of retrospective way of making different stories by different writers written as if everyone was working to the same goal, with the benefit of hindsight to paper over the cracks of facts earlier writers didn’t yet know when they were writing their bits; needless to say Whovians use this term a lot) then hide his tattoo at the back of his neck so he doesn’t see it for ages. Why bother hiding it when they need the Doctor to come looking for him? Why doesn’t the Doctor simply use his memory banks to reveal the missing location, the way he does in ‘The Ark In Space’ amongst many other stories that need people to learn plots quickly? As it is Clara just stumbling upon the alley when it could have been anywhere in a few mile radius of London seems insane. We get told about luckworms, a budget-saving way aliens look like humans, but they have no reason to and it seems an incredibly unlikely evolutionary tick for a species to evolve, something that benefits other people on a planet its never been to. The timelords have no way of knowing about ‘Flatline’ and Rigsy to begin with, never mind that Clara passed him her number and is still travelling with the Doctor. One of his companions taking on the chronolock is out of character for Clara never mind any of his earlier ones (you can imagine Jo killing herself out of accident by being nice and Dodo being gullible enough to agree, but Tegan? Steven? Even Adric would have been bolshie and arrogant enough to say no) and yet this appears to be part of their plan too. For some reason Ashildr has forgotten her original name but does remember Clara’s from her diaries from several thousand years ago (what, does she not use her own name in her diaries?!) Why would any justice system ever allow you to pass your sentence on to someone else: chances are Dollard and Moffat were thinking of Victorian public schools, where rich masters could have their slaves whipped instead of them if they did something wrong, but there’s no reason for it to be here in an alien alley in the 21st century. As much as this story allowed Moffat to finally sit down and write ‘Heaven Sent’ (turning It into an episode about the grieving process, that a lot of fans consider the high point of the 12th Doctor era; spoilers – I’m not one of them) this story would only work if we had all the answers of what’s really going on but that episode kicks it all into the long grass and then ‘Hell Bent’ undoes it all again anyway. It feels like a cheat having this many people act out of character for a trap that makes even one of The Master’s look workable by comparison. 

 To do something as bold and brave as this unexpectedly you need your story to sizzle on screen…and it doesn’t. It doesn’t help that the budget is so low by this point of the year that Dollard’s original idea, of having a busy epic street filled with aliens (and little details such as being powered by a team of Adipose on bicycles, a sight which would have made this story one of my top fifty for that alone!), ends up as one dingy street shot in the dark (again!) filled by aliens who can magically filter themselves back into being humans (for no reason at all, if they’re living in a ‘magic’ place hidden from human view) filled with a mere Ood ‘n’ Cybermen team. Once we’ve left the Tardis and Rigsy’s house we’re here for the rest of the episode – and there’s nothing whatsoever to see. The acting, too, is poor – some of the worst in sixty years. Maisie Williams hasn’t got any better during her time off and is completely the wrong casting for an old woman trapped in a young girl’s body, still treating the character as a teenager hanging round the shops. Joivan Wade fall a bit flat as Rigsy in ‘Flatline’, but understandably so: he’s kind of a cipher to begin with, a street urchin in a situation way above his head no one expects much of but who beats everyone by acting calmly as if the events around him are all a game, but the actor struggles with the extra emotion he’s given to act here because he’s not that sort of an actor he’s best known for his role as Jordan Johnson in ‘Eastenders’, to give you some idea of his acting level, a series that in the ‘Dimensions In Time’ crossover even a robot dog prop acted the cast off the screen). Peter Capaldi is a variable actor who rises or falls depending on the people he’s opposite and, without much going on this story effectively goes to sleep. His dismissal of humans and the idiot boards he needs to ‘be nice’ is growing old by now, as his response to Rigsy’s dilemma by caling him ‘local knowledge’ (of all he times to go back into being the git of series eight it shouldn’t be in a story about how much he and Clara have turned into the other). That leaves Jenna Coleman, who tries her hardest to make everyone care about her death but even she struggles with the sheer speed of this story which goes from her thinking she’d done something terribly clever to something terribly stupid without enough time to properly reflect on it. 

 That’s a shame because this isn’t one of those Who stories that’s un-rescuable. Had they saved it for series ten and made it a standalone episode about a hidden street properly filled with monsters ‘Face The Raven’ could have been a winner: after all, the idea of something extraordinary hidden just out of sight is so very Dr Who. The script description of the alleyway sounds fabulous, like the hidden streets in Harry Potter but more so because it’s filled with aliens (about time we nicked from their franchise after they nicked from ous for so long!) There’s one really funny joke when Me/Ashildr says she’s been in Trap Street ‘since waterloo’ and the Doctor assumes she mean the battle, when she really means getting off at the train station. Unlike a lot of fans I like Clara and do feel sad when she dies for trying to do the right thing; it’s certainly an idea worth trying have the companion get into trouble by bein the Doctor (something they half tried with Romana, then steered away from, making her a second hero instead). While everything else in this story ‘rooks’ suspect the raven is actually pretty good CGI and like many a Moffat monster the thrill comes from the fact that it’s counting down to when it’s about to get you, so that you’re poised at the point of death just like The Weeping Angels and the Mummy from ‘Orient Express’ (indeed this story is very similar to that one, with the idea of a constant ticking countdown to your doom, but in a plot that makes more sense in purely that regard: a tattoo giving you time to say goodbye to your loved ones before you die so you can prepare is both merciful and cruel all at once). Clara uses that time well too, with a brilliant speech about how the Doctor shouldn’t use her death as an excuse to revert back to being a monster seeking revenge and become the war Doctor she saw in the 50th special, because it needs him to stay a Doctor and that he would stop being cross ‘at the sight of one crying child’ because deep down she knows who he is, he’s kind. He agrees before admitting, post Clara’s death, that this was a mercy for the people around him, not for him given the extra anger he now feels. Finally, some forty minutes in, the fizzling sparks turn into a roaring blaze of emotion. Even that’s a little botched and overwrought, though, with time repeated o a loop so that we see the moment Clara dies over and oeer again from different angles which is just bizarre (the first time I saw it I thought the set-top box had gone wrong, it was that distracting). Murray Gold’s music, too, is horrible, demanding we feel g heavy emotions that just aren’t there on screen. This is a story that should have stayed small-scale all the way trough and it would have had a much bigger impact than trying to make it a colossal tragedy. 

 Ultimately, though, it’s too little too late. ‘Face The Raven’ should be a powerful story about courage, about facing death in the eye without running from it, of accepting your time is up at the time that fate decides and making peace with the fact everyone has a ticking clock, even if most of us aren’t lucky enough to know when it rings. Instead we get a muddled story with returning characters we were glad to see the back of and the people we know really well acting out of character, before Clara dies from a simple mistake suddenly, in a story that doesn’t give us the space to take it all in. They could and indeed should have done this with a modern companion, just to prove that they could – that there were no fast or hard rules in this series and that the unexpected can happen. ‘Earthshock’ worked on that principle, punishing Adric for thinking he could solve something the Doctor couldn’t and straying in harm’s way just a smidgeon too long. However ‘Earthshock’ went out of its way to show there was nowhere else for him to go: he was adrift from E-space and had no interest in settling down on other planets, while he’d fallen out with the Doctor long ago. He was clearly not long for this world. Clara, though, has cheated death so many times that this just feels like another game she’s playing with the Doctor and she doesn’t quite believe it when he can’t dave her (why can’t he save her? He could go back in time and destroy her phone so Rigsy never calls her for a kickoff). Killing her almost as an afterthought seems so very wrong. Especially when they try to do that with a small scale story that was trying to tell a far more optimistic tale about salvation away from human monsters and then wonder why the ending seems tiny instead of a big hoo-hah and then undoes even that impact by reviving Clara again two weeks later. This isn’t a raven we’re facing, it’s a turkey. In ‘Alice In Wonderland’ Lewis Carroll once asked ‘why is a raven like a writing desk?’ The answer is that they can only produce a few notes at a time, that are very flat. Sadly that’s all true here too with a story whose worst crime isn’t a lack of ideas but the fac that what should have been such a big and important episode falls so flat. 

 POSITIVES + Having a whole invisible street in London full of desperados and criminals just out of everyday sight is a neat, Dickensian idea that suddenly makes sense of why Earth keeps being invaded. The chance to see so many of the aliens still kept in stock is lovely; sadly not enough of them I don't think but you do see a Sontaron, Judoon, an Ood, a Cyberman and an Ice Warrior. The script additionally had Habridan, a blue skinned woman and a dog-being, who sounds like a first version of Kornovista, plus a man whose head bloomed into flowers getting a haircut and a garagae mechanic doing repairs to Cybermen and ran to several pages of notes, practically of which were ignored. 

 NEGATIVES - Ashildr's back and Maisie Williams still doesn't have the gravitas to pull off a woman whose lived through several centuries of mankind at its worst. Even more than the 2 episodes 'about' her this episode really needs her character to come to live and it...just doesn't. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘My God. A whole London street just up and disappeared and you lot assume it's a copyright infringement’. 

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