The Woman Who Lived: Rank - 296

        The Woman Who Lived

(Season 9, Dr 12 and Clara, 24/10/2015, producer/showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Catherine Tregana, director: Ed Bazalgette)

Rank: 296

In which Ashildr is older and angrier but not really any wiser...

The second half of Ashildr's adventures in time (not space) is better than the 1st,a very DW opportunity to rummage around timezones and show the effects that immortality would have on anyone without a time-travelling machine to numb the pain. The problem remains, though, that the whole part has been written around the publicity of as Who/Game of Thrones crossover without quite understanding why that worked. Maisie Williams convinced as a child whose seen so much she's become adult early; less so as a sort of immortal angst machine whose lived for centuries and suffered at the hands of mankind for all that time. The big emotional scenes of her anger at the DR condemning her to the sort of life he leads when he knows how hard that live of watching others die is should, on paper, be a huge emotional climax. In practice it just looks like a lot of pouting and shouting. The rest of the plot, a half-hearted search for a lost alien artefact that never really does anything, is just an excuse for a big showdown that never quite comes off. Still, marks for at least the thought of what impact eternal life would have on a Viking peasant girl.

Positives+ Highwaymen! Not seen in DW since 1983! The robbery scenes are good fun and like all things Who and historical it all looks amazing.

Negatives- Sadly much of the rest of the script and most of the supporting cast is daylight robbery this week. Unusually it's Peter Capaldi, the most variable of the lead actors, who comes into his own here and outclasses the lot, getting the balance between brooding darkness and comedy just right this week.