Dark Water/Death In Heaven: Rank - 280

  Dark Water/Death In Heaven

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 1-8/11/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Rachel Talalay)  

Rank: 280

Yes dear, this episode does mean Granny died in horrible pain before being transformed into a cyberman. More fish fingers, chips and custard for tea?...

Other stories at the bottom of this list tend to be stories where something ran out, whether it be the budget or the energy levels of the people making it. Or sometimes a story which collapses under the weight of everything it’s trying to say – while other times it falls because it has nothing much to say at all. Occasionally you’ll get a tale that feels really mean spirited and at odds with everything else the series stands for. One or two contradict everything we thought we knew about the series for no good reason. And others feature Kylie Minogue pretending she can act or Brian Cant shouting for two hours while robots with squeaky voices constantly fall over. A few of the stories that sink to the very bottom are tales where everything seems to go wrong all at the same time. By contrast ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ is a meticulously crafted, wonderfully made, heartfelt story that features some of Steven Moffat’s best writing, a tale that has oh so much to say and which touyches on the big subjects that Dr Who is so good at. Yes it’s a bit slow in places (especially the middle of the second half), features way more talking than usual and is slightly anticlimactic as a series finale, but other season finales have committed worse crimes. So why is it so far down my list? 

 Because it’s the one Dr Who story that leaves me feeling incredibly icky. This is, you see, a story about death and grieving. No surprises there – all three of the Capaldi era finales are about the main characters coming to terms with loss and grief to some extent (I don’t know who Steven Moffat lost around the end of 20134/start of 2014 but it was something that transformed his outlook on life as surely as any cyber-conversion; the ‘Sherlock’ series written at the same time is laced with grief too). But it’s the one that arguably goes too far, one of the darkest and most cynical stories in the entire run, one that scoffs at the idea of a comforting afterlife (it turns out to be an artificial world on a Gallifreyan hard-drive that can be deleted at the click of a button), which turns our beloved lost loved ones into walking corpses who are still connected to their bodies so they feel the pain they’re going through, where those who are left to rest in peace never find it and which makes out that life is one big con because death is an end that wastes everything you were in life, not the start of a great new adventure using everything you knew. That’s not very Dr Who at all: many a story has gone for gritty realism about how tough can be, but even in those the characters can hope for a ‘nice death’ – ‘Dark Water’ robs us of even that. And if the Dr Whoniverse reflects ours, as it usually does, then it means our own loved ones die this painful agonising death too. The ones who were buried? They’re gasping for air. Those who were cremated? They burn. And, in a notorious line that led to more complaints than any other in Dr Who history up to this point, people brave and noble enough to leave their bodies to medical science scream in agony as they’re cut up. Everyone in this most brutal of stories suffers – and not just bad guys who deserve their comeuppance or the sort of necessary TV suffering heroes face occasionally that’s all cured by next week either; Danny the teacher we’ve been following goes through more torture than any regular character we’ve seen since Sara Kingdom was disintegrated by the time destructor back in 1966, UNIT scientific advisor and fan favourite Osgood dies a horrible death at the hands of Missy the mysterious baddy, even the Brigadier, who somehow survived eight years of near-constant alien invasions, isn’t safe from cyber-conversion (and it’s a moot point whether paying tribute to beloved actor Nicholas Courtney, who’d died three years earlier, by turning the character he played into a walking mechanical zombie who saves the universe one last time is the way he’d want his character to go out or the single crassest thing this series has ever done). Forget the waters being dark: this two-parter is the single bleakest Dr Who story there ever was, a cynical story with a twisted, bitter humour where life is pointless and futile but death is even worse and where, for one of the few times in the series, doing the right thing doesn’t keep you or your loved ones safe but just puts you at the mercy of a ranting maniac. And all this in a family show with children watching, on a Saturday teatime. A lot of Dr who stories run right up to the line of what’s acceptable, but this story sails well past it with cyber Doc Martins on. We’ve come a long way from the child-friendly magical fairytale of ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in three short years, to the point where this is a programme that’s now gone the other way and become too real, too steeped in how randomly cruel life can be. Forget ‘everybody lives’ – no one gets out of here alive and nobody escapes pain, even in death. So what the hell happened? 

The fact is we’ll probably never know. Steven Moffat was never as open a book about his inspirations as Russell T Davies was (behind the scenes show ‘Dr Who Confidential’ limped on across his first series as showrunner, but it’s no surprise the behind the scenes stuff cuts down way drastically when he gets in charge to the point where its nonexistent by 2014). We don’t know who the person was that the showrunner lost that made him mourn so deeply, or whether this is even a new thing (you can still process grieving many years after losing someone close after all and writers like to store these kinds of big emotions away for later). But Moffat clearly lost someone: the Capaldi era is full of stories like this one, all three series finales centring round a similar theme. This one is the toughest watch of the trilogy though, for all that people say it’s ‘Hell Bent’ – this is the story that feels as if it was written when grief was fresh and burning a hole in Moffat’s typewriter so strongly he couldn’t focus on anything else, which makes it the bravest of his work but also the hardest to watch. While ‘Hell Bent’ is about the long journey through the grief process from despair to acceptance and ‘The World Falls’ is about the sadness of realising something bad is coming, this story is pure prime raw anger, about the panic that comes with learning that the world doesn’t spare our feelings for being kind or noble or troubled with how much we care about someone: it will hurt us anyway and snatch good people away from us, often for no good reason. There’s a casual cruelty in this story that can only come from someone whose had all their safety nets ripped away from them, whose seen firsthand how losing someone can turn your world upside down and how grieving isn’t something that happens in a single scene of television but reverberates across time and space for people long past the point of burial. Had this been a standalone drama, with characters we hadn’t become so invested in across so many episodes, I’d be the first to applaud it. As a Dr Who story though, it feels so very wrong: virtually the only thing in common with all the other 319-ish Dr who stories is that they offer hope somewhere somehow, but (aside from ‘The Doctor Falls’, its’ closest equivalent and even that gets a happy coda) there is no hope to be found here. Good people die. Bad people die. Everybody dies (it’s unclear just how many – and it can’t surely be everyone or all stories set on earth after this one would look very different - but it’s a lot). 

 And dying isn’t just linking out of existence; death hurts. The ones you love are all going to suffer hopelessly and painfully and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to save them, even when you’re a timelord elected Earth president. And every loss of life, of all that experience and knowledge and uniqueness, is a tragedy to be mourned on a grand cosmic scale, that shatters the world of the people who lost them. After watching this story you’ll never see a ‘security guard gets zapped by a monster/tipped into an acid bath’ comedy scene in Dr Who the same way ever again: death isn’t the punchline to a joke, it’s a tragedy we all have to come to terms with sooner or later. This is a story whose big moral message, highly fitting for a cyberman story, is that emotions and pain are what makes humans human, that we shouldn’t shy away from the grieving process and try to work around it, because it will make us numb mindless zombies, so Moffat doesn’t let us: every twist, every turn, every heart-renching feeling is shown on screen for what it is: an awful, unavoidable truth. All worthy aims that would work in any other series, but this a story that’s grieving so hard and so painfully its out of control and with no one else to edit his scripts Moffat doesn’t know when it’s gone too far. He even writes this in for goodness sake: if ‘Clara’ is Moffat’s occasional voice, a smart brave go-getter who wants to have both an adventurous life and a cosy home to come back to, then just look at those opening scenes where Clara is so upset she tries to blackmail the Doctor into bringing Danny back, throwing his Tardis keys into a volcano, something he calls a ‘leaky mountain’ in one of the story’s best lines, hijacking the usual Dr Who story and demanding it goes in this direction this week whether it’s a ‘betrayal’ of everything the Doctor would normally do or not. Not to be all Mary Whitehouse (I’m one of those people who think the more hard subjects are tackled in drama the easier it is to process those things when they happen to you in real life) and there’s not much that’s out of bounds in this series after all, but the potential suffering of our lost loved ones after death ought to be one of those bounds, especially with children watching. It’s one thing being haunted by a fictional creation who doesn’t exist when the telly is switched off; it’s another to be confronted by the sheer horror of your mortality and the futility of existence when you’re, say, seven. It’s one thing doing this sort of thing to bad people who brought it on themselves or even to strangers, but to do this to characters we know well randomly, just because in fiction you can do anything, feels like a betrayal of the unwritten moral code of Dr Who that everything will be put right in the end (this is, after all, a series where even if the main character ‘loses’ the worst that normally happens is he gets another face). But then this isn’t really the Doctor’s story but Clara’s and no matter how much she tries to act like the Doctor she’s not as indestructible or experienced at staying out of trouble. 

She’s been set up across two series now as the trainee Romana of the 21st century, the girl whose spent so much time round the Doctor watching his decisions that she’s begun to think like him, taking big risks, always seeing the bigger picture, willing to let people to get hurt if it saves more, becoming slowly more callous and controlling (Missy might not have spent much time round this pairing but she nails their caring but often toxic relationship as ‘the control freak – and the man who refuses to be controlled’, a pair who are always trying to outsmart each other). The Doctor tries his hardest to prevent Clara from becoming like him (just as Danny has all season), refusing to let her shoot Missy even in revenge, but it’s a close run thing and of all the companions who get the chance to shoot at the baddy and don’t you feel Clara is the one who would actually do it if the Doctor wasn’t there (Amy in ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ is the only one who actually does it). There’s a moment, at the start of the second episode, when Clara gets out of trouble with a cyber army by trying to pretend she is the Doctor and she’s been pushed to such extremes and taken such liberties that for a moment we think that’s the typical Moffat twist coming up: that she is the Doctor, a future Doctor or a Jo Martin Doctor (the fact that Clara’s birthdate is given as November 23rd 1986 – Dr Who’s 23rd birthday, the week the first part of ‘The Ultimate Foe’ in ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ went out – made me wonder for a moment if she was the Valeyard, the ‘shadowy figure between the doctor’s 12th and 13th regenerations’). They even toy with this by putting her eyes on the opening credits instead of Peter Capaldi’s and switching the names around in the credits so it’s clearly not just my weird brain picking up on this too – that’s what they want us to think. The very fact that we might even consider Clara might be the Doctor as opposed to, say Susan Tegan or Rose, shows just how tough Clara has become. 

 But then not many companions have to grieve losing the love of their life (Tegan loses an aunt and Amy keeps on losing Rory before he survives again, but that’s the closest we get in sixty years). The resolution of Danny’s story arc is horrific, the opposite of what we were expecting to happen. Clara’s bottled up the courage to tell him that she’s been lying and travelling the stars with the Doctor and gets spooked when he goes quiet at the end of the phone, only for a passerby pick it up and tell Clara he’s died in a road accident, off-screen. It’s an awful way for anyone to go, just randomly, just suddenly (Missy wasn’t even driving the car) – which is kind of the point of this story, the random cruelty of it all, of someone who was so full of life and who meant everything who was there one minute and gone the next. It would be awful if it happened to third spear carrier from the left we didn’t know. But it happens to Danny, a character who since the day we met him has been trying to turn his life around and do the right thing and was only just getting his life back on track, making a new life for himself away from being a soldier and learning to embrace love and new beginnings rather than guilt and fear. To have him sacrificed like this feels all wrong – I mean, he might as well have shot himself the night he accidentally shot and killed a child during a war. And when he dies and passes over, suffering a fate worse than death by being stuck in a room with Chris Addison making polite chitchat, it’s not enough just to kill him and separate him from Clara: he’s visited by the child he accidentally killed, his heart breaking as he watches the child so like the ones in his class at Coal Hill he’s been nurturing to make amends run away from him screaming as if he’s still the biggest monster seen in the series since Davros. Danny then has to sit there while people are sarcastic and callous to him and make remarks about his temper and unsuitability, about how lightly he took a life when he’s already been to hell and back every night since. And then when he and us all think Clara’s come to save him he gets converted into a cyberman whilst retaining full knowledge of what’s happening, the pain receptors working overtime so he’s fully aware that he’s about to kill more innocent people and he knows how awfu and horrific that is. Danny is, I think, the one character on Dr Who we see visibly break down and cry as he dies and even if he finally goes in a moment of blistering sacrifice that sort-of makes up for all the mistakes in his life, nevertheless it hurts to see someone we like and were rooting for die in such an offhand way. His death haunts me in a way few others in this series do because the series arc seemed to be heading towards his redemption and maybe his acceptance by the Doctor (whose niggled at him all year), not more suffering and pain. I happened to get one of those Dr Who ‘mystery boxes’ for Christmas (they’re fun!) and the free toy I got given at random (because, like most of those themed boxes, it was the one that didn’t sell) was one of Danny Pink as a cyberman, looking as if he’s about to burst into tears. It creeped me out so much it’s the only Dr Who thing I’ve ever owned that I’ve willingly thrown away. And for the record I was 36 at the time. Goodness knows what the junior end of the Dr Who fanbase made of this story – I suspect there’ll be a lot of young Whovian adults walking around now scarred for life by this story the way my curmudgeonly millennial generation are scared by the horse in ‘Neverending Story’ or baby boomers shiver at the sight of The Singing Ringing Tree’. 

 Osgood’s death isn’t much better. I know why its there: in a story about death we had to see Missy kill at least one person directly and at least there were two Osgoods walking round the Earth so she isn’t gone entirely (I rather like the fact the script doesn’t tell us, and indeed doesn’t care, if it’s ‘Zygon’ Osgood or ‘Human’ Osgood because it doesn’t matter, a life is a life). But Missy doesn’t just kill our beloved fan icon, she taunts her, makes her beg for her life before killing her anyway and who makes sure the last things she hears are all the ways she fails as a human being, how ugly she is, how unnecessary her life was. And if ever a character in Dr Who can be said to be all good and who deserves to live a long and happy life it was Osgood – either of them. Like I say, brutally dark. The only wonder is that Kate Lethbridge Stewart gets a last minute reprieve courtesy of her cyber-dad rather than breaking her neck falling from the presidential plane. 

 The Doctor isn’t as directly affected but he’s not exactly spared either. Much of this story centres around the theme of the 12th Dr’s first season and a question he’s been asking since day one: is he a good man or not? This Doctor has by now become notorious in th universe at large, even powerful, and power and responsibility corrupts even those with the best of intentions because they come with the job. We’ve seen what being a soldier did to Danny’s heart, the sort of emotional empathetic soul who should never be sent into battle under orders and made to kill, so what on Earth (or Gallifrey) does multiple lifetimes of damage to do someone with two of them? ‘The Caretaker’ showed us that Danny recognised the Doctor as an officer, the sort of person who sent people into battle for him so he didn’t have to get his hands dirty. You see a lot of that here and every time it makes you wince. The hypocrisy of a timelord who brings trouble to his favourite planet and surrounds himself with armies that fight for him then criticises a soldier who made a mistake, the way that earth is ‘the only planet that has him on the payroll’ in the story’s smartest line. The good people who’ve died in his name that the Doctor doesn’t even recognise or know. His un-comfortableness at being made ‘President of Earth’ giving final orders over people who live and die in the world’s armies when he’s spent his life running away from the sort of power and responsibility Missy craves. The fact he can’t even be saluted without feeling queasy because this is a Doctor who hates what responsibility and being an ‘officer’ does. 

This is a story that’s working on lots of different levels, with more imagery and metaphors than usual for Moffat’s writing style and in many ways his cleverest (he’s usually more straightforward than this, even if his sense of linear time isn’t – this is a rare season finale that unfolds in chronological order, incidentally). Perhaps the cleverest symbol in all of this is one I missed for the longest time: the creepy mausoleum that makes up the afterlife looks just like a Doctor’s waiting room, complete with tiny chairs, things to read, wifi and fishtanks in the corner. Only this is Doctor Who’s waiting room (literally – it’s a trap sprung by Missy as she waits for the Doctor to bumble in) – so the wifi is coming from Gallifrey, the things to read are brochures for ways to die and the fish tanks are full of skeletons of humans turned into Cybermen and awaiting orders. All of Earth is awaiting the Doctor’s orders which will inevitably lead to their death and a place in this afterlife eventually, even before UNIT turn the Doctor into the president of Earth. I rather like the idea of the afterlife being in a distant ‘cloud’ too, even if its an artificial online cloud created by a rogue timelord. In a story that’s all about how humans are born imperfect so we’re all a mixture of saints and sinners, neither deserving of a Heaven or a Hell, note that everyone thinks the threat is coming from ‘under the ground’ but it actually comes from ‘the sky’ too: it doesn’t matter how noble you are, how kind you are, however much you try to do the right thing, people will always get hurt by you doing anything even when it’s morally right. A lot of Russell T Davies stories are about consequences and repercussions when you share a planet with other people and Moffat hasn’t spent much time on that idea so far but he positively runs with it here: you can’t fight bad that many times and remain kind, because fighting is not a kind thing to do. This is the final answer to the question of whether the Doctor is a good man or not: he’s both. He’s good because he tries to do the right thing and bad because good innocent people get hurt because of that, the price paid for his morality. Being around the Doctor gets you killed, even if you’re the boyfriend of his closest companion whose been warning against exactly this sort of thing happening. Being an innocent bystander on the planet the Doctor loves gets you killed. Even being dead doesn’t save you from being killed again or being used for killing. No wonder this Doctor has been walking around as if he has ptsd since the time wars. Every decision made in battle is the wrong one, even when they’re right. 

 All worthy ideas for any Dr Who story and there’s much about this two-parter to love, with some gorgeous scenes that live long in the mind. The sight of the modern Cybermen walking down the steps of St Paul’s just like ‘The Invasion’ from 1968. The way the camera holds on Clara as the realisation that something awful has happened and Danny’s died offscreen mid-conversation slowly dawns on her. Clara snapping when her Gran tries to cheer her up about Danny’s death, with all those platitudes everyone always gives you; that it’s all going to be alright, that the funeral service was special, that she’ll feel better if she cries, that nobody deserved to die that way. It’s really powerful when she turns round and says that the death of someone you love is never going to be OK no matter how many regenerations you live through, that a funeral service trying to sum up a life in an hour by a stranger can still be ‘boring’, that crying doesn’t solve bring anyone back, that nobody deserves anything for how they die. As much as I think this story goes too far by the end, those opening moments of grief are brilliantly sharply written. Missy telling the passers by outside St Paul’s not to worry because the Doctor’s ‘just a ranting Scotsman’ when she’s secretly the mad one killing everyone is so very Mastery. The way that Danny uses up his chance to come back to life by sending the boy he killed through instead, much to Clara’s horror (as much as this series has been about the Doctor working out if he’s a good man or not, this is mirrored by Danny’s arc too and its clear he is, however much he doubts it). At the end, too, Clara’s speech to Danny that she’s saying ‘I love you’ for the last time because she’s never going to be able to find someone to say that too again really packs a powerful punch for anyone whose ever lost someone they love. Clara annoyed: it wasn’t terrible. She doesn’t need to cry. Nobody deserves anything. 

 Missy, too, is a great invention (spoilers for who she really is if you need them but you surely all know by now) – a female Master, the first time a long-running timelord character had been seen to switch genders. Now we’ve had a female Doctor the impact of this has been dulled a little but it’s a great little twist the first time round: speculation on who this mystery figure was had been rife in fandom. Realising this and that there would probably be a leak somewhere Moffat even muddied the (dark) waters by filming a fake scene, so that instead of Missy revealing herself as a ’Mobile Intelligent Systems Interface’ (MISI) she revealed herself to be a ‘Random Access Neural Interface’ (RANI), convincing many a fan, including me I must admit, that she was actually Kate O’Mara Mark II. Steven Moffat had planned for years to make The Master ‘The Mistress’ but struggled to work out what her ‘voice’ might be and how to make her separate enough to the male Masters while still clearly the same character. It was while auditioning roles for ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ that he bumped into Michelle Gomez in the corridor who said how enthusiastic she was to go for the similarly bonkers part of ‘Auntie’. She got the part too, but had a last minute production clash that meant she had to drop out – she wrote a sweet email to Moffat apologising profusely and saying how much she’d been looking forward to working on one of her favourite programmes and hoped she might get the chance to again one day. It was this that message which made Moffat think of what he might cast her in and he realised how right she’d be for the part of Missy; Gomez, who’d loved Delgado’s version back in the Pertwee days, was enthusiastic. She remains the only actor Moffat wrote for directly, aside from his two Doctors and she steals the show of pretty much all the stories she’s in, combining elements of all her predecessors: she’s as suave as Delgado, as desperate as Pratt, as much of a showman as Ainley, as cruel as Roberts and as insane as Simm. There are no concessions made for the fact she’s a girl now too, bar the fact that she’s dressed up as Mary Poppins: at least at first this incarnation of The Master takes more delight in killing and finds it easier than any of her predecessors (to quote a tie-in Big Finish story ‘The Bekdel Test’ ‘I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a homicidal maniac’). In a story that’s all about whether the Doctor is a ‘good man’ or not Missy’s pure undiluted evil (she’ll get her own ‘is she just a homicidal psychopath or is there some good in her too?’ plotline in another couple of years’ time) and pushes the Doctor to extremes like never before. Incidentally you have to feel for Michelle – her mum died during making of this story but production was so tight she still had to come to work and read lines in this of all stories, about how the dead suffer horribly. Maybe it’s that which gives her performance such a gleeful unhinged feel even for her (she’s notably softened by the time of her next appearance in ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’). 

 Alas this is also a story where the worst aspects of the era come to the fore. There’s way too much talking going on and not enough action. We spend a full half an hour standing round corpses in fishtanks in the mausoleum in ‘Dark Water’ and then a full half hour standing round a graveyard in ‘Death In Heaven’. In common with most Moffat two-parters all the good in the first half is booted out the way without being tied up properly in the second, as if the writer’s forgotten about it all (Moffat isa writer who does tend to get, shall we say, easily distracted?) We’re teased with half-ideas that would be better than anything we get that are then thrown away: the thought that the Doctor might abandon Clara with a rage not seen unleashed against any companion since Adam sort-of was one, the idea that Clara is more than just pretending when she impersonates the Doctor is daring and audacious and everything Moffat is at his best, but then he chickens out of it and just has Clara parked to the side in a very boring, un-dramatic way because the plot needs her to be next to Danny. It really is very un-characteristically stupid of Missy not to notice Clara pick up the device that can kill her – not least because it’s exactly the sort of thing The Master’s done in her shoes in past regenerations. Sanjeev Baskhar barely gets to say five words: of all the underused actors, certainly in the modern series, he’s one of the biggest wastes (and after his wife Meera Syal got such a cushy part as a Silurian in ‘The Hungry Earth’ too – and Baskhar’s the keen Whovian in that household!) I still struggle to see any sign of Nicholas Courtney’s complexity as a Lethbridge Stewart who manages to stay loyal as both a soldier and to the Doctor’s principles in Jemma Redgrave’s decidedly bland portrayal as his daughter Kate. We’ve said it a few times here already but Peter Capaldi is the most variable of all the actors to play the Doctor: on his good days he’s a great as anyone in the role and on his bad days he’s just on autopilot. Alas he’s at his worst here, just speaking lines. Jenna Coleman, too, is at her limpest: of all scripts this is the one that’s most nuanced, that most needs her to fill in the gaps of what’s going on with her eyes and she struggles like never before. The opening scenes of Danny’s death and her ‘betrayal’ of the Doctor ought to be some of the most blisteringly powerful ever seen in the series, but their mutual delivery falls really flat (just imagine this scene played out between Christopher Eccleston and Billie Pier, David Tennant and Catherine Tate or Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, it would have been electric!) A lot of this story has nothing much happening at all and the second part really doesn’t need to be an hour – it could have been trimmed to normal length or even shorter quite easily. 

 Mostly though it’s that central motif that makes this story dead in the water. The Whoniverse isn’t always the kindest or prettiest or safest place to be, but it’s never been this dark before. And nothing about the plot is really resolved in the way it ought to be. Our loved ones remain Cybermen at the end, even the Brigadier. The afterlife still exists, people’s minds tied to what’s happening to their bodies in the most gruesome of ways and the Doctor doesn’t even hang around long enough to warn people. Missy is dead (for now) but has an easy death that’s over in an instant; she doesn’t come to understand any of the suffering and misery she’s inflicted here (it would make a lot more sense of her arc across the next two series if she’d come to understand a little of how much other people hurt because of her). There’s a curiously clumsy final scene where the Doctor and Clara, who’ve learnt so much about trust and doing the ‘right’ thing, forget it all again and lie to each other for no apparent reason; he that Gallifrey has returned and she that Danny is still alive (a hangover from the thought that this was going to be Cara’s last story, before she was brought back for the Christmas special and then most of the following series, even though in many ways this is a far more natural end for her character than being made killed by a raven for acting like the Doctor and then ending up immortal). If this is an episode about loss it needs to give us closure, to have Clara pouring her heart out to someone and being allowed to grieve; as much as that theme continues on into following story ‘Last Christmas’ after that it’s never really mentioned again and Clara seems to come to terms with this big emotional wrench mostly off-screen. This isn’t a bad story by any means then; indeed I’d put some individual scenes up there as some of Moffat’s greatest writing, full of powerful emotional lines and concepts that haunt you long after the episodes have finished playing, reaching deep guttural places inside you in a way another big battle showdown finale never could. If they ever do a novelisation of this two-parter in the target collection the way they have with a handful of other modern Who episodes I’m first in the queue, as I reckon it would work well in that format far better than it does on telly as part ofa long running series. But a lot goes wrong too and all the brilliant individual moments in the universe won’t save the fact that the basic story is just wrong for being a Dr Who story in a way that few other plots are. As much as I admire it, as much as I love parts of it, there’s a cold dark heart in the centre of ‘Dark water/Death In Heaven’ that makes it uncomfortable to watch in all the worst as well as all the best ways. The problem with travelling in deep, dark waters is that you don’t always know what you’re getting into and I fear that’s what happened for Moffat here: he didn’t realise quite how many sharks he’d unleashed. Whatever shook him and changed his writing so drastically, he needed another year to put this concept to paper and soften it just enough to tell a story without scaring everyone existentially; this is all just a bit too raw for public consumption in front of a family audience at a Saturday teatime and while the best drama is meant to move and shock it really shouldn’t ever go as far as this. 

 POSITIVES + The ‘cybermen from cyberspace’ gag. This story is so dark and that line so unexpected that this sudden bit of humour hits even harder than usual. 

 NEGATIVES – This story correctly guessed my definition of hell: being stuck in a room with Chris Addison trying to be funny with no escape. Bung in The Spice Girls on the soundtrack as well (there’s a reason The Toymaker has them as his soundtrack, folks!) and I’d be a gibbering wreck. I try to be fair on this site as much as any reviewer can without softening their opinions or telling lies – series never rise or fall because of just one person and even if I write about someone having an off day in one review I’ll find myself writing about their good days in another so it all balances out. Most of the supporting cast in any episode are just passing through so don’t have enough time to make much of an impact. But Chris Addison is one of those actors I will always change the channel to avoid, so false and ingratiating and unlikeable in every part he plays including this one. Even if his supercilious smugness makes him ideal casting for a sort of nethersphere timeshare salesman and he dies a death right at the end when he gets on even Missy’s nerves, I still find his scenes toe-curlingly unwatchable. Weirdly, they appear to have cast him here because of his ‘Thick Of It’ co-star Peter Capaldi and yet the two never share any scenes together (perhaps the production team thought it would smack a little too much of that show?) Incidentally Thick’s co-creator Armando Iannucci came to visit his two friends on set, the first time he’d dropped in on Capaldi – maybe that influenced this story’s dark and bleak tone more than we realised? 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Are you ok?’ ‘No’ ‘Good. Because there would be something wrong with you if you were’.