Doctor Who Season 9, Episode 12: Hell Bent

And so ends Season 9 of Doctor Who. Overall it was a pretty good season. I think the decision to go with mostly two part episodes helped, as it allowed the stories to breathe a bit and avoid the "Whoops, out of time!" hasty wrap ups that have plagued other seasons. 

There were a couple of missteps this season (cough Sleep No More cough), but for the most part this was a big improvement over last season.

A couple of weeks ago in Face The Raven we said goodbye to Clara Oswald, seemingly forever. Well, we should all know by now that nothing's ever permanent on this show, so this week we find out she's not really dead and we get to say goodbye to her all over again.

The New Series has always had a problem letting go of the Doctor's companions, making their departures needlessly complicated and convoluted. Rose Tyler was sucked into an supposedly locked parallel Earth, but returned to our world several times before permanently settling on her new home with a clone of the Tenth Doctor. Donna Noble's brain merged with Number Ten, causing her mind to overload and the Doctor to erase her memory of him to save her life. Rory Williams was wiped out of existence, reborn as an Auton and then restored as a human when the entire universe was destroyed and reset (!). Later Amy and Rory were zapped back in time by a Weeping Angel and had to live out their lives in the past.

I'm starting to miss the days of the Classic Series, in which companions simply told the Doctor they were done traveling and walked off the set. 

When the show kills off a companion and then cheats to bring them back, all it does is undermine and cheapen their exits. Especially in the case of Clara. Her death, as puzzling and nonsensical as it was, was actually quite moving. She faced her doom with quiet dignity and grace. And it only took two episodes for all that to be undone though with a cheap stunt.

Last season many fans (including me) noted that Clara was becoming more and more Doctor-like. In fact, in the episode Flatline, she actually took over for the Doctor, as she investigated strange goings-on in while he was trapped inside the shrunken TARDIS. She even wielded his sonic in that episode.

At the end of this episode they take this transformation to its ultimate conclusion. Clara has literally become the Doctor now. She's even got a TARDIS and her own companion in Ashildr, as they fly off on their own series of adventures at the end.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Plot:

The Doctor, inexplicably armed with his electric guitar, enters a diner in the middle of the Nevada desert. The diner looks suspiciously like the one were he met Amy, Rory and River several seasons ago in The Impossible Astronaut. He orders a lemonade from a waitress who looks suspiciously like Clara, and begins telling her his story.

In his story, he wakes up in a similar desert on Gallifrey, which has apparently somehow escaped the pocket of time in which it was trapped. He makes his way to the barn we saw in The Day Of The Doctor. He's summoned before the Time Lord High Council, but refuses to come out and face any underlings. He only comes out of the barn when Rassilon, Lord President of Gallifrey, appears.

Rassilon was the one who trapped the Doctor in the confession dial for four and a half billion years, to get him to confess the identity of the Hybrid, the being who's prophesied to stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. The Doctor refuses to tell him, so Rassilon orders him killed.

Fortunately for the Doctor, the soldiers of Gallifrey consider him a war hero (as he stopped the Last Great Time War) and refuse to fire. The Doctor then takes over, impeaching Rassilon and banishing him. The Doctor then becomes the new Lord President.

He then barges into the Extraction Chamber to revive Clara. It seems the Time Lords can extract a person from their time stream the second before their death, for... reasons. But they must always return them after a few minutes, or Time itself will unravel, which sounds like a bad thing. When Clara's extracted, she's concerned that she doesn't have a pulse. This is apparently normal, as she's now frozen in the moment before her final heartbeat.

The Doctor extracts Clara on the pretense that she knows who the Hybrid is, but then refuses to return her to her time stream. The Doctor  shoots the General who tries to stop him (forcing him to regenerate) and he and Clara hide in the Matrix crypt. The Matrix is an organic computer which contains the brains of every Time Lords who's died.

Inside the crypt, Clara quizzes the Doctor and finds out he endured over four billion years of torture just to save her (more on that later). His plan was to endure billions of years of torture just so he could return to Gallifrey and extract Clara, thus preventing her premature death. Clara (and the Time Lords) thinks he's nuts for doing such a thing to himself. The General enters the crypt and demands the Doctor surrender and return Clara to her time stream.

The Doctor and Clara then escape the Matrix through a secret passage. He steals a TARDIS (!) and the two of them flee. The Doctor's sure that if they get far enough away from Gallifrey, Clara's heart will start beating again. He's puzzled though when that doesn't happen. He decides to fly the TARDIS to the literal end of the Universe itself, hoping that'll be far enough from the influence of Gallifrey for Clara's heart to start up again.

They arrive at the end of time, but Clara's heart still isn't beating. Suddenly there's a knock at the door. The Doctor exits the TARDIS and finds Ashildr, the immortal girl he created in The Girl Who Died, waiting for him. As they watch the stars go out, they discuss just who the Hybrid is. The Doctor thinks it's Ashildr, because she's a combination of human and the Mire. She suggests it's the Doctor himself, since he seems so preoccupied with Earth. Then she says maybe the Hyrbid isn't one person, and it's formed by the Doctor and Clara both. Missy brought the two of them together, so maybe their meeting was just a long con to destroy Gallifrey.

The Doctor seems to think that's a reasonable explanation, so he plans to erase himself from Clara's memory and send her to an out of the way corner of the universe. Clara overhears this, and using the sonic sunglasses, she reverses the polarity of the Doctor's memory-wiping widget (more on that later too). When the Doctor returns, she tells him what she's done. He says it doesn't matter– either way, one of them will forget the other. He presses the button, and finds he drew the short straw. The Doctor forgets Clara

So the Clara in the diner is real, and the Doctor doesn't know who she is or find her familiar at all. The Doctor leaves. Clara slips into the back room of the diner, and we find out it's all part of her TARDIS. She's for all intents and purposes a Time Lord now– she has her own TARDIS, and her own companion, Ashildr. Some day she'll return to Gallifrey so the Time Lords can put her back into her timestream to die, but until then, she and her companion tool off into adventure.

As the diner disappears, it reveals the Doctor's TARDIS waiting in the middle of the Nevada desert. He enters, puts his velvet jacket on, and the TARDIS makes him a brand new sonic screwdriver, so he can get rid of those thrice-damned sunglasses.

Thoughts:

• When the Doctor first enters the diner, Foxes slow, jazzy rendition of Don't Stop Me Now is playing on the jukebox. We first heard the song  last season in Mummy On The Orient Express.

• Clara's diner looks just like the one we saw several seasons back in The Impossible Astronaut. Clara wasn't in that episode, and as far as we know never visited it. So how does she know what it looked like? Did the Doctor ever describe it to her in excruciatingly minute detail? Or did she and Ashildr pop over to Lake Silencio, scope out the real diner and then duplicate the look in their TARDIS?

• In the diner, Clara asks the Doctor if he's been traveling. He says, "Yeah, from time to time."

OK, that was a pretty cool line. Well done, Moffat. 

• Wow, Rassilon's really aged! Last time we saw him he looked like Timothy Dalton. Now he looks just like Maester Luwin on Game Of Thrones. Maybe he regenerated a time or two since.

Rassilon is played here by actor Donald Sumpter, who's no stranger to Doctor Who. He was in the 1968 episode The Wheel In Space, as well as 1972's The Sea Devils. He also guest starred in 2009's The Eternity Trap on The Sarah Jane Adventures.

• When Clara's "extracted" from her time stream, she notes that she doesn't have a pulse. The Doctor says it's because she was snatched out of time in the instant before her last heartbeat. Obviously he did this with the intention of allowing her to live out her normal lifespan with him.

The Time Lords tell him this is impossible though, as her death is a fixed point in time and cannot be altered. The implication is that even if she's not returned to her proper time, her next heartbeat will be her last. And therein lies the problem.

The Doctor flies her away from Gallifrey, hoping once they're away from the planet, her heart will restart, but it doesn't work. Her heart still isn't beating. Several more times during the episode she checks her pulse, but is disappointed to find out she still doesn't have one.

If her death is a fixed point and her next heartbeat is her last, why is he trying to get her heart started back up again? If his plan worked, wouldn't she have immediately collapsed and died?

And how the hell is she walking and talking if her heart– and presumably all her bodily functions– are suspended?

I suspect I'm being too literal here. The whole "final heartbeat" thing is supposed to be poeti and metaphorical, not logical.

• The Doctor escapes from the Extraction Chamber by shooting the General and "killing" him. The General, who looks like a middle aged Caucasian man, regenerates into a younger black woman. I wonder if she's also gay, disabled and an atheist as well? Gotta be diverse these days after all! Can't leave any group unrepresented.

This feels less like an attempt at diversity, and more like pandering to me. Showrunner Steven Moffat knows there's a very vocal minority out there who want to see the Doctor regenerate into a black man, or a woman, or a black woman. The Master's recent transformation into Missy and the General's gender and race swap feels like Moffat paying lip service to these fans and trying to placate them. 

• When Clara finds out the Doctor spent 4.5 billion years trapped in his confession dial, she says, "Why would you even do that? I was dead and gone. Why would you even do that to yourself? The Doctor says, "I had a duty of care," and says he did it to save her. Yeah. About that...

Last week in Heaven Sent, we did indeed see the Doctor trapped inside the confession dial for billions of years (last week the figure we were given was two billion, this week it's ballooned to four). As we were shown, the Doctor lived out a cycle every two or three days inside the dial. At the end of each cycle he sacrificed himself to power a telporter, and a brand new version of him was created. A version with no memory or awareness of the dial, the castle inside it or the previous cycle. From his point of view, every time he lived through a cycle was the first for him. There's nothing vague or uncertain about this, it's all spelled out very clearly.

So when Clara thinks the Doctor endured billions of years of torture to save her, she's sadly mistaken. According to the events as we saw them, he endured a couple of days at most without her. 

Moffat's plots are always needlessly complex, but now they're apparently so twisted that even he doesn't properly understand them.

• Because this was a Steven Moffat episode, he had to work the goddamned Weeping Angels into the story, whether it made any sense or not. When they were first introduced, the Angels were one of the most awesome villains the show had seen in decades. But thanks to epic overuse on Moffat's part, they've effectively been neutered, more likely to generate yawns than fear.

• The overall story arc this season has been the prophecy of the Hybrid, a being comprised of two warrior races that's destined to destroy Gallifrey. The minute the show first mentioned this, I got an uneasy feeling about it.

Way back in the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, the Doctor told his companion Grace Holloway that he was "half human on his mother's side." This was certainly news to the fans who'd been watching the show from the beginning, as the Doctor had always been 100% Time Lord.

Most fans and writers chose to simply ignore this asinine bit of info and pretend it never happened.

As soon as they started talking about the Hybrid, I started wondering if Moffat was planning on dredging up the ill-advised half-human malarkey. 

I was watching this episode with a brick in my hand, ready to hurl it at my TV the minute the episode indeed established that the Doctor was half human on his mother's side. They came pretty close to actually saying it, but fortunately managed to skirt the issue. In the end, it turns out the Doctor wasn't the Hybrid after all. Well, he sort of was. He and Clara combined were the Hybrid. I think. Actually I'm honestly not sure what the hell happened. Such are Moffat's plots.

• It was cool to see a TARDIS in default mode, one that's not disguised as a police box. And the old-school control room, which resembled the interior of the First Doctor's TARDIS, was a nice touch too. I guess this control room must be the "factory setting."

This TARDIS also makes the familiar distressed "vwooorp vwooorp" noise, that sounds like someone sawing through piano strings. Both the Master and the Rani had TARDISES (TARDI?) that made the same sound.

But in The Time Of The Angels, River Song flew the TARDIS and said it makes that wheezing sound because the Doctor always leaves the parking brake on (!).

So does that mean the Doctor left this TARDIS' parking brake on as well? Did the Master and the Rani do the same? Or have all decided to ignore River and her little comment? You decide.

• Last season I (and many others) noted that Clara was becoming more and more Doctor-like. And how! In this episode she grabs the Doctor's memory wipe doohickey and reverses the polarity of it, so that it will affect whoever wields it. Then at the end of the episode she's piloting her own TARDIS like a pro!

OK, so she used the sonic sunglasses to alter the memory blocker, and Ashildr was helping her fly the TARDIS, but still... she seems to know way more about Gallifreyan technology than she should.

• Speaking of the memory blocker... Clara overhears the Doctor saying he has to erase her mind to save the universe. Clara then immediately picks up the mind-wiping gizmo and reverses its polarity.

So there just happened to be a memory erasing device lying on the console of this brand new TARDIS that the Doctor stole. Now THAT'S a coincidence!

• So I guess Clara's now a zombie with a TARDIS. A girl who's dead traveling through time and space with a girl who can't die. Let the fan fiction begin!

• If nothing else, at least this episode got rid of those motherfraking sonic sunglasses, and gave us a very cool looking new sonic screwdriver. 

Looking forward to Character Options releasing a toy of it! By the way, I have to wonder if the show periodically changes the design of the sonic and other props, just so the BBC's merchandising department will have something new to sell.

Doctor Who Season 9, Episode 10: Face The Raven

Last week's episode of Doctor Who was seemingly written by the proverbial room full of monkeys with typewriters. Untalented monkeys, with defective typewriters, mind you. Fortunately this week's episode was much better. It wasn't perfect by any means though, as it was marred by some odd narrative choices, sloppy writing and some of the most blatant plagiarism I've ever seen outside of The Asylum film studio.

It was also the swan song of actress Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald, Clara's the longest-serving companion of the modern era, appearing in thirty five episodes. She managed to just squeak by Rose Tyler, who clocked in with thirty four (I'm aware that some characters weren't actually considered companions in certain episodes. For the sake of simplicity, I'm listing the number of episodes in which they appeared, companion or not).

As character deaths go, this has to be one of the most bizarre and convoluted to date. Clara gets a magical tattoo on her neck that counts down, and when it reaches zero she'll be killed by the Smoke Monster from LOST, which takes the form of a raven. Oh, and nothing can be done to save her due to ill-conceived and vaguely-explained rules. Oy.

Clara's final episode was originally going to be last year's Christmas Special, but she changed her mind at the eleventh hour and decided to stay on. Supposedly this necessitated hurried rewrites of the ending of the Special, and I have a sneaking suspicion that's also why she hasn't had much to do this year. 

SPOILERS, INCLUDING CLARA'S DEATH! WHOOPS!

The Plot:

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor and Clara discuss their most recent (unseen) adventure. Why do their offscreen adventures always sound so much better (and with a bigger budget) than the ones we actually get to see? Anyway, suddenly the TARDIS phone rings. Clara answers it, and it's Rigsy, the graffiti "artist" from Flatline (one of the few bright spots of Season 8), who absolutely wasn't named after Banksy. He tells Clara he woke up with no memory of the previous day, and a strange tattoo on the back of his neck that seems to be... counting down.

The Doctor and Clara rush to Rigsy's apartment. The Doctor scans him and discovers evidence of Retcon, an alien mind-erasing drug in Rigsy's system. They begin looking for a "trap street" in London, an area where aliens are concealed by a perception-altering field.

They manage to find Diagon Alley, er, I mean the trap street, and enter. Inside they find a secret area of London populated by a variety of aliens, all coexisting peacefully. To the Doctor's surprise, Ashildr/Me ( the Viking girl made immortal back in The Girl Who Died).appears. She's now the Mayor of this city within a city, and is determined to keep the peace. 

She tells the Doctor that Rigsy murdered a female Janus (a race of two faced aliens-- literally) and was sentenced to death. She placed a chronolock tattoo on Rigsy, as one does. At the appropriate time will summon a Quantum Shade, in the form of a raven, that will kill him. The Doctor believes Rigsy was set up, and Mayor Me (oy) allows him to investigate, but warms him he'll have to convince the populace of the city, not her.

While the Doctor's off investigating, Clara talks Rigsy, who's now a husband and father, into transferring the chronolock to her. Clara's confident she'll be safe because she has Mayor Me's personal guarantee of protection. Rigsy reluctantly agrees and transfers the chronolock. 

Meanwhile the Doctor questions Anahson, the daughter of the Janus who was murdered. She says her mother is alive but trapped in a stasis unit, and the whole thing was an elaborate setup to bring the Doctor to Mayor Me. The Doctor unlocks the stasis unit with his TARDIS key, but in the process an unremovable teleportation band is placed on his arm.

Mayor Me appears and says the teleporter is meant to send the Doctor away to keep the peace. She asks him for his Confession Dial (first seen in The Magician's Apprentice) before she teleports him. He gives it to her. Mayor Me says she'll now deactivate Rigsy's chronolock, but is horrified when she discovers it's been passed on to Clara. 

Me says she arranged the chronolock with the Quantum Shade, offering it a soul while assuring no one would die. Clara's transfer broke the terms of that contract, and now she's doomed to die. This makes absolutely no sense, but the episode's almost over, so we're stuck with it. 

The Doctor begins threatening Me, but Clara calms him down. She says her own recklessness got her into this mess, and to let her die on her own terms. She makes him promise to not seek revenge against Me or anyone else involved. She then steps out into Diagon Alley, where the Quantum Shade raven flies through her chest, killing her.

The Doctor tells Me that the universe isn't big enough for the two of them, and she activates his teleportation band, sending him... somewhere.

Thoughts:

• A lot's happened to Rigsy in the past year. Not only did he get married and father a child, but he also apparently moved from Bristol to London. Last season's Flatline took place in Bristol. Didn't think we'd catch that one, did you Moffat?

• Funny line: Clara (to Rigsy): Look, no matter how bad it is, we can NOT take you back down your timeline just to fix a tattoo."

• When the Doctor and Clara arrive at Rigsy's flat, he's apparently there alone with his baby. The Doctor says to come along with him, and the three leave. Um,.. did Rigsy just leave his newborn daughter alone in his apartment? At no time do we ever see or hear any sign of his wife.

• I liked the Doctor's fascination with Rigsy's infant daughter. And it was hilarious when Clara and Rigsy both sternly shushed the Doctor when he started cluelessly yelling, afraid he'd make the baby cry. 

Wonder why the Doctor didn't try and speak "baby" to her?

• Finally, at long last, the Doctor ditched the idiotic hoodie he's been wearing all season, replacing it with a purple jacket much like the one worn by the Third Doctor. He's still got the sonic sunglasses though. I'm going to complain about them every week until they finally disappear.

• When the Doctor scans Rigsy, he says his body's full of Retcon, an amnesia drug. Retcon was first mentioned several years ago in the Doctor Who spinoff series Torchwood.

I'm very surprised to hear a Torchwood reference on the show. Ever since Steven Moffat took over the series, he's seemingly done his best to ignore or erase everything previous showrunner Russell T Davies created.

• We see the return of the Doctor's "empathy cards" as he tries to figure out the best way to tell Rigsy he's doomed. The cards made their first appearance in Under The Lake.

We catch a brief glimpse of one of the cards in this episode, which reads, "I could be wrong. Let's try it your way."

• Rigsy and the Doctor discuss the fact that Clara seems to enjoy risking her life way too much. I'm assuming the point of this episode was to show that her recklessness finally caught up with her, but... when has all this prior risk-taking supposedly taken place? Clara spent the majority of this season separated from the Doctor, chilling inside a Zygon pod, or absent from episodes altogether. 

You can't just tell us stuff like this, guys. It's a TV series. You've got to show us.

• The Doctor says they'll find answers inside a secret alien "city within a city" in London. They find the entrance to this city in a narrow alley between two buildings.

Apparently the entrance to this alley wasn't a set, but an actual location in Cardiff, where Doctor Who is filmed. You can see a glimpse of the alley in the image above (sorry about the stupid light pole in the way-- this is the best image Google Maps had).

• Once they pass through the alley, the Doctor, Clara and Rigsy find themselves in a secret city, complete with twisting, angled streets and Dickensian-looking buildings. Holy plagiarism! I defy anyone to watch this and not think of Diagon Alley from the Harry Potter films.

One of the aliens even taps on a particular brick to activate a forcefield that traps the Doctor & Co.! And then there are the Janus aliens, beings with a second face on the back of their heads. This is of course nothing like when Voldemort's face was sticking out of the back of Professor Quirrell's noggin.

All these elements go way past "homage" and firmly into "outright theft" territory. About the only thing missing from this episode was a hairy giant growling, "You're a wizard, Doctor!"

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is known for being overly litigious. She's definitely got a case here, and would easily win if she decided to sue.

• Mayor Me sentenced Rigsy to death, but to show she's not heartless, she gave him the countdown tattoo so he could go home and say goodbye to his wife and child. But before he could do so, she erased his memory, because no human can ever leave Diagon Alley with knowledge of its existence.

Um... what the hell? So he's dying, but his mind was wiped so he doesn't know he's doomed. Got it.

Also, if you gave someone a tattoo that counts down to their death, don't you think you might want to put it someplace where they could actually see it, so they'd know how much time they had left? Like maybe on their forearm or hand, instead of the back of their neck? But no, out of sight is good too.

Lucky break that Rigsy apparently likes using two mirrors to gaze at the back of his own neck, or he'd have been really surprised when a raven flew through his chest a few hours later.

Did anyone proofread this script before they filmed it?

• Diagon Alley is populated by dozens of alien refugees, secretly living in London. I get that there's a fragile truce between all the various extraterrestrials there and they'll be punished if they violate the treaty. That said, I find it very hard to believe that a Cyberman would be able to peacefully coexist with all these other species. You know, the Cybermen, whose sole purpose is to "upgrade" all other life forms into Cyberkind?

• Once again the BBC cleans out its storage unit when it needs a crowd of aliens. Diagon Alley was populated with many familiar faces. 

There was the aforementioned Cyberman, along with an Ood.

An uncharacteristically tall Sontaran.

A Silurian.

A helmet-less Ice Warrior (don't they need to stay inside their armor to survive?).

And of course a couple of ever popular Judoon security guards.

There were a couple of new alien designs, but for the most part they were all recycled.

• I didn't understand why there was a chameleon circuit (or whatever they called it) in DIagon Alley that disguised all the aliens as humans. It's supposed to be a refugee camp, right? A refuge for displaced aliens? So wouldn't it follow they'd all be in their normal forms? Why the disguises? Was it so they weren't reminded they're all from enemy races? Or do the disguises only kick in when intruders are present?

• I really, really don't understand why the chronolock curse couldn't be stopped after being transferred to Clara. It seemed like a totally arbitrary rule, and no one ever explained it satisfactorily. Every time there was an opportunity to adequately spell it out, Mayor Me would just say, "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."

According to the vague explanation we got, Me arranged a contract with the Quantum Shade, promising it a soul but reserving the right to break the agreement (I think). When Clara took the chronolock from RIgsy, that violated the contract, and Me couldn't stop the Shade from claiming her soul.

I've gone over it twenty times and it still doesn't make any sense. If there's any logic to that explanation, it's very subtle or I'm just too dense to understand it. How hard would it have been to write some clear, logical rules and spell them out precisely for the audience?

• Clara's death might have been more shocking and had more emotional weight if it hadn't been telegraphed all over ever corner of the bloody internet for the past three or four months. 

I remember way back in Season 2, how gobsmacked I was when Rose was sucked into a vortex and into another, unreachable dimension, forever (heh). Back then everyone and their dog wasn't reporting every tiny morsel of Doctor Who news, so Rose's fate came as a complete and total surprise to me. Sometimes I miss those days.

And before someone says, "Well, if you don't like spoilers, why do you read spoiler sites," I don't. But it's hard to avoid them when a headline screaming "JENNA COLEMAN LEAVING DOCTOR WHO!" pops up on Yahoo or Google News, before I have a chance to avert my eyes.

• After Clara's death, the Doctor is teleported to an unknown destination. This is another one of those times when it would come in really handy for the Doctor to have a way to remotely summon the TARDIS.

• In the after credits scene, we see Rigsy painting flowers and a portrait of Clara on the now-abandoned TARDIS. He stands back to admire his work, a can of spray paint in his hand. It's strongly implied that he spray painted all this, which is patently ridiculous. I don't care how good an artist he is, there's no way in hell he painted all those fiddly little details with a can of spray paint.

His memorial also implies that his mind wasn't wiped after leaving Diagon Alley this time. A parting gift from Mayor Me?

Doctor Who Season 8, Episode 12: Death In Heaven

Now that's how you close out a season! 

After a very, very uneven batch of episodes, showrunner Steven Moffat pulled out all the stops and managed to prevent Season 8 from being a total wash with this reasonably decent wrap up.

I have to admit it's taken me longer to warm up to this Doctor than the previous ones. I liked Christopher Eccleston's portrayal and was sorry to see him go after just one season. David Tennant was amazing from the moment he started, and he quickly became my all time favorite Doctor. When he announced he was leaving, I was sure no one would ever be able to replace him, but Matt Smith won me over by the end of his first episode.

Peter Capaldi though... his Doctor is colder, more distant and more alien than previous incarnations. He's a fine actor, but his portrayal is making it harder for me to actually like this version of the Doctor. It's also probably not helping that he's taken a back seat to Clara all season. Definitely a bold move, but not necessarily a good one.

Speaking of Clara, Jenna Coleman really hit it out of the park this season, as the writers, freed from all the Impossible Girl bushwah, finally figured out what to do with the character. Too bad it took them so long, and even too badder that she's probably going to be leaving the show soon, if the rumors are true.

Samuel Anderson also turned in a fine performance as Danny Pink throughout the season. It's just too bad the character was so criminally underused. Even when he did appear, he was abused by the characters as well as the writers. He was definitely much too good for Clara, who was always too busy jetting off with the Doctor to spend any time with him.

This season gave us some standout episodes, such as Mummy On The Orient Express and Flatline. But it also gave us what may go down in history as the show's worst– Kill The Moon. That episode featured a plot straight out of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, featuring jaw dropping "science" that would make Ed Wood cringe. The idea that Earth's moon is an enormous egg that hatches a giant space dragon is beyond preposterous and a definite low point for the series.

There are currently around 97 missing episodes of Doctor Who. Pity Kill The Moon isn't one of them. Unfortunately every preposterous second of it will be with us forever in glorious 1080p high definition.

I'm hopeful Capaldi will grow on me, and I'm really pulling for Clara to stay on another season or two. We'll find out at Christmas, I suppose.

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Plot:
Picking up right where last week's episode left off, Clara is threatened inside the 3W corp by a Cyberman, while the Mistress (sorry, I'm having trouble calling her the Master) reveals her plan to the Doctor. She releases 91 Cybermen from St. Paul's Cathedral, who fly– yep, the Cybermen can now fly– to strategic points around the globe and detonate into clouds of "cyber spores." These spores infiltrate cemeteries and morgues and transform the dead into new Cybermen.

Meanwhile, the Nethersphere begins shutting down, and Danny's soul is transferred into his now Cyberman body. He saves Clara from a group of other Cybermen, then takes her to a nearby cemetery. Danny removes his face plate and reveals his identity to Clara, begging her to activate his emotional inhibitor chip, which will remove all his human feelings and end his pain.

Kate Stewart, daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the head of UNIT, captures the Mistress as well as the Doctor (and his TARDIS) and takes them aboard a UNIT aircraft. Once there, she informs the Doctor that due to the current crisis, he's been made President Of Earth (!). The Mistress escapes as a horde of Cybermen attack. Kate is sucked out of the plane seconds before it's destroyed. The Doctor plummets to Earth but manages to catch up with the falling TARDIS. 

He materializes in the same cemetery where Clara and Cyber Danny just happen to be (thanks to the TARDIS' plot relevancy circuit). The Mistress joins them and reveals her incredibly convoluted plan to the Doctor, and gives him full control of the entire Cyber Army. Clara activates Danny's emotional inhibitor, but his love for her is so strong it overrides his programming and he refuses to harm her. The Doctor tosses Danny the control bracelet, which gives him command of the Cyber Army. Danny and the Army fly into the sky and detonate themselves, which destroys the clouds that would have transformed the entire world into Cybermen.

The Doctor is then about to destroy the Mistress. Before he can, she's vaporized by a lone Cyberman, who turns out to be the Doctor's old friend the Brigadier. He also saved his daughter Kate as she fell from the UNIT plane. The Cyber Brigadier then flies off into the sky, his fate unknown.

A few days later, the Doctor and Clara meet in a cafe and lie to one another before going their separate ways.

Thoughts:
• In the pre-credits scene, Clara orders an advancing Cyberman to stand down by telling it that she's the Doctor.

For a minute I actually half believed her. I wouldn't put it past Moffat to pull something like that out of his ass. It's got that "insane idea that can't possibly work but sounds really cool and shocking" aura about it that's endemic of most of his concepts. Remember, this is the man who turned Amy and Rory's daughter into River Song, so the idea of Clara somehow being a future version of the Doctor wouldn't be all that farfetched. And it would have neatly explained the whole "Doctor Clara" motif that's been going on all season.

In fact, right after her outlandish statement, they even listed Jenna Coleman's name before Peter Capaldi's in the opening credits, just to mess with us! They also flashed a brief image of her eyes instead of Capaldi's in the credits as well!

• When Clara's trying to convince the Cybermen that she's really the Doctor, she gives them a pretty impressive and detailed rundown of his history. They're still not quite convinced, so she says, "How about my name?"

I get that she was bluffing here, but what if they'd said, "OK, fine. What's yer name then?" What would she have told them? She doesn't know his real name. Or does she? I'm really foggy as to whether Clara's "Impossible Girl" history and all the stuff from The Name Of The Doctor really happened or not.

And if she somehow did know the Doctor's name, isn't the universe supposed to explode or something if anyone ever says it aloud? Or was that retconned out of existence last season as well?

• When UNIT first shows up, the Cybermen scoff, saying they're invulnerable to Earthly weapons. Kate Stewart says don't be too sure, because UNIT's upgraded their weaponry. As proof, she throws down an old school Cyberman head and says, "You left this behind on one of your previous attempts." 

The head is the same model and design of the Cybermen who invaded Earth way back in the 1969 episode The Invasion. That was also the first time we saw Kate's father in the rank of Brigadier.

• Kate Stewart tells the Doctor that he's now the President Of Earth. Apparently in the event of an alien incursion an Earth president is inducted with complete authority over every nation state, an idea that was we're supposed to believe was agreed upon unanimously by the leader of every country. 

Yeah, that's never gonna happen. Can you imagine North Korea or Iran agreeing to something like that? Or the U.S. for that matter? No leader would ever agree to such a thing.

• The last time we saw UNIT scientist Osgood, she was sporting a long, striped scarf. She continues the Doctor groupie thing in this episode, as she's now wearing shoes similar to the Tenth Doctor's, and a bow tie, because "bow ties are cool."

Pity the Mistress killed her off. She'd have made a good companion for the Doctor. I was looking forward to the next time we saw her, when she'd no doubt have been wearing a red-lined Crombie coat.

On the other hand, she pretty much asked for her death. You can't blame a shark for eating you when you stick your head in its mouth.

• So the Cybermen can fly now. That's new, and pretty darned cool. I can't believe no one ever thought of before.

• Inside the Nethersphere, Danny watches from a balcony as it slowly shuts down. He's standing next to the Afghan kid that he accidentally killed when he was a soldier.

So I guess kid must have finally warmed up to him. In the previous episode he was terrified of Danny and ran from him (and rightly so).

By the way, what happened to Danny potentially "deleting" himself from the Nethersphere? Last episode ended on a cliffhanger with him about to push the delete button on his iPad, and this episode the entire thing appears to have been completely forgotten.

• Danny's soul find its way back to his body, which has now been transformed into a Cyberman. His body was being housed in the Chaplet Funeral Home. I'm assuming that's a reference to Dodo Chaplet, one of the First Doctor's companions?

• So let me see if I understand the Mistress' plan. She's been manipulating events for quite some time now to guarantee that the Doctor and Clara end up together. She was the "shop girl" who gave Clara the Doctor's number last season in The Bells Of Saint John, and she also put the advert in the newspaper a few weeks ago in Deep Breath. 

So why's the Mistress so hot for Clara and not Rose, Martha, Donna or Amy? Good question. 

Anyway, once the Doctor and Clara are together and have become good friends, the Mistress orchestrates this whole incredibly complicated Nethersphere plan to trap the souls of the dead so she can download them into Cyberman bodies. She does this in order to rule the world, right? Wrong. 

No, the sole point of this entire exercise was to make Clara so angry that she'd be willing to commit murder and kill her. And for the Doctor to then "save" Clara by killing the Mistress himself. Which will prove that the Doctor's no better than she is, and that they're both cut from the same cloth.

That's one hell of a long way to go for such a small reward. Couldn't she just short-sheet his bed, or ring his doorbell and run instead?

I would also not be surprised to find out that Missy was the driver of the truck that killed Danny, as she knew his death would cause the Doctor and Clara to come a'running to 3W.

• The mechanics of the Cybermen part of the plot are still a bit vague. The Mistress has been collecting souls inside the Nethersphere for years, and possibly decades (because time travel, I guess?), so they can be downloaded into Cybermen bodies. 

The 91 Cybermen housed inside St. Paul's Cathedral fly into the sky and explode, releasing clouds of "spores," which I assume must have been some kind of nanotechnology. These spores then fall to the ground in the rain and soak into the Earth, where they somehow contact dead human tissue (through airtight coffins, yet) and transform the corpses into fresh Cybermen. That part I understand. Sort of.

What I don't get is how are all the souls ending up in the proper bodies? Danny Pink's soul correctly finds and inhabits his. Same with the Brigadier. So does every soul go to the right body? Are the souls naturally drawn to their old shells?

What about the souls of people whose bodies were cremated, which was a big deal last week? Do they not get a new body? Do they have to stay in the Nethersphere or do they just dissipate and are lost forever? 

Or better yet, what about the bodies we see rising from the cemetery? Some of them have got to be little more than dust by now. What exactly are the Cyber spores reacting with there?

Oh, and once that's all done, there's also a second cloud that'll rain down and turn the living into Cybermen as well. 

I think that's what all's happening here, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. Such are Steven Moffat's plots.

• I have mixed feelings about Michelle Gomez as the Mistress. She's a fine actress and she dives right into the part, but I thought she was a bit too over the top here. She didn't just chew the scenery, she devoured it. The director really needed to tell her to dial it down a notch or twelve.

I still feel like she's the Master in name only. But then I felt the same way about John Simm's potrayal a few seasons back as well. I'm not a fan of the modern "insane" Master. It's like they're trying to make this new psychotic, cackling version of the character the Joker to the Doctor's Batman.

I much prefer the old school "Bond villain" Master, who was cold and calculating but mannered and polite. A Master who's simply the moral opposite of the Doctor. A Master who sits quietly scheming while incarcerated seems much more dangerous and chilling than one who sticks her tongue out at a security camera. 

Roger Delgado set the bar for the character and in my opinion, no one else has ever come close. Anyone playing the Master should really be looking to him for inspiration.

• The scenes with the Cybermen attacking and destroying the UNIT plane were very well done. Same with the scenes of the Doctor falling to Earth and desperately trying to catch up to the plummeting TARDIS. 

The Doctor really needs to come up with some kind of remote control for the TARDIS, so he can call it to him or have it materialize around him or something. Of course if he did so, most episodes would last about ten minutes.

• Clara was born November 24, 1986. November 23rd is of course the day Doctor Who premiered back in 1963. There's a crap ton of shout outs and homages to this date peppered throughout the series.

• At one point the Mistress exclaims, "Oh my giddy aunt." That was a favorite saying of the Second Doctor. The Mistress must have studied the Doctor's timeline, because as far as I know she/he never met Doctor #2.

• Ever since Missy first appeared she reminded me of someone, but I couldn't quite put my finger on who. It all clicked when I saw this scene. The Mistress is Mary Poppins! 

So I guess we're supposed to believe that she gently floated down from 35,000 feet, with nothing but a small umbrella to slow her descent? Oy.

Was this an homage to the fan theory that Mary Poppins was secretly a Time Lord?

• The Doctor really needs to add a space between P and E when he dogs Danny. Every time he'd call him "P.E." it sounded more like he was saying "Pee."

• Danny, now a Cyberman, begs Clara to activate his emotion inhibitor, which will render him an unfeeling machine and end his pain. Clara agrees and takes the sonic from the Doctor, aiming it at Danny's chest. She asks the Doctor, "Just think and point, yeah?"

This actually makes sense. The sonic has so many functions (the Doctor once even used it to tint his glasses!) that a thought interface would be much more logical than having to fiddle with hundreds of settings.

Of course this contradicts numerous earlier episodes, in which the sonic is shown to have specific settings. Just a few episodes ago in The Caretaker, the Doctor tossed the sonic to Clara and told her to use setting 41 to send out random bursts of helicon energy to distract the Skovox Blitzer.

• I was really pissed when the Mistress seemingly killed Kate Stewart, so I was happy to see her alive at the end of the episode– saved by a Cyberman who turns out to be her late father, the Brigadier.

I'm not sure whether I should be touched or appalled by the idea of the Brig becoming a Cyberman.

• Before the season began, wasn't Moffat squawking about showing us why the Doctor has the same face as Caecilius,  the guy from Fires Of Pompeii? It's a question that didn't need to be asked, much less answered. The series has used actors in more than one role many, many times in the past. All shows do it. It's just a fact of television production. 

So despite the fact that I don't care and don't need to know why the Doctor has the face of a man from ancient Rome, what happened to the explanation? Did Moffat forget about this? Was it filmed and then ended up on the cutting room floor? Or was this explanation simply another of his numerous lies?

• Before she's killed (don't worry, I'm sure she'll get better), the Mistress tells the Doctor that she knows where to find their lost planet Gallifrey. She says it's right back where it used to be, at coordinates 10-0-11-00. 

These coordinates have been mentioned before, way back in 1975's Pyramids Of Mars.

The scene in which the Doctor, hoping against hope, flies the TARDIS to those coordinates, only to find nothing, were very well filmed and acted.

• For some reason, the bracelet that controlled the Cyber Army could also bring one, and only one person back to life. Danny uses it to restore the young boy he accidentally killed when he was a solider.

How the hell did that work? That kid's probably been dead for a couple of years. So the bracelet was able to completely rejuvenate and restore his body to factory settings?

• At the end of the episode, the Doctor and Clara meet in a cafe. Clara lies and tells him that she and Danny are together and she'll no longer be able travel with him. The Doctor lies back, saying he's found Gallifrey and he'll most likely be chilling there for a while.

So do you suppose the Doctor and Clara both knew the other was lying?

• Nick Frost appears in the rather jarring mid-credits scene as Santa. Frost is at least the fourth actor from Shaun Of The Dead to appear on the series, which confirms my belief that there are only about thirty actors in all of Great Britain.