C+Q - Death in Heaven (2014)

Just like with The Big Bang, I went into Death in Heaven with a lot of expectations that went unfulfilled. 2010's The Pandorica Opens made me think that in The Big Bang I'd find out who the Silence were, who blew the TARDIS, and who the voice inside the TARDIS was, and I was incredibly disappointed when none of that actually happened until years later. Dark Water similarly left me with a lot of high hopes for the finale, namely that we were going to learn how the Master escaped Gallifrey and how she teamed up with the Cybermen, that we were going to see her TARDIS (which was actually mentioned but never shown), and that we'd learn exactly why the Master paired the Doctor up with Clara. I was once again disappointed when none of that happened. After I realised that The Big Bang wasn't going to give me all the answers I wanted, I was able to rewatch it, not through the lens of what I expected it to be, but for what it actually was, and what The Big Bang actually is is one of Steven Moffat's tightest scripts and a highlight of his career as showrunner. So after rewatching Death in Heaven for what it actually is instead of what I wanted it to be, it's a satisfactory conclusion to an overall great series, but 'satisfactory' is all I can really say about it. This is mainly because the answers to a lot of the questions you would naturally enter the episode with aren't given and instead you need to do a bit of the legwork yourself, coming up with answers that make sense to you. And when the audience is expected to make up their own headcanons to explain things that the paid writers neglected to even address, something is definitely lacking.

It's not entirely true to say that Moffat neglected to address the questions however. The Doctor at one point asks most of them, but it's just that Missy brushes them away instantly. We learn through the medium of flashback that she was the one who gave Clara the Doctor's phone number and also put the advert in the paper ("Lunch on the 'other side'" referring to the afterlife) and the Doctor does actually ask her why she did it. To this she replies, "Because she's perfect, innit?" That's not an answer. I mean, I know that Missy put them together because they're bad influences on each other and Clara turned the Doctor into a bit of a bastard so he could be willing to kill the Master and give in to the Dark Side of the Force ("You win." "I know."), but for Missy to know all of that was going to happen is a stretch. Unless, as I suspect, Missy had been messing with them and manipulating their adventures to accelerate the Doctor's bastardisation process. For example, I'm pretty sure the experiment in Mummy on the Orient Express was all engineered by Missy to make the Doctor a bastard who has to sit back and observe people as they die. Seriously, rewatch the episode with that in mind and it makes 384934000% more sense. So, again, it's not explicitly clear but I guess you could say that Missy had been messing with the Doctor and Clara for a long time to slowly mold them into bastards. Fair enough. But here's something: how did Missy know who Clara was before Clara met the Doctor?

What was significant about Clara Oswald that brought her to Missy's attention? Could it be that she has many echoes scattered throughout time and space? Could it be her involvement in saving Gallifrey or that she demanded the high council gave the Doctor more regenerations? This episode forces you to speculate and guess the answers to things when all of this could've been explained away in a simple line here or there. Oh and while we're on the subject of Clara and her slow transformation into the Doctor/a bastard, I can't decide whether or not the edited title sequence is genius or just forced. Really those two conflicting opinions cancel each other out and my opinion on the changed title sequence ends up being 'meh'. But I'll tell you what IS forced: the shot of Clara walking out of one of the Cyber-tombs, which not only makes no sense, but is ONLY in the episode for the benefit of the trailer. There's a difference between misdirection and lying. It isn't clever, it isn't smart, it's literally a shot that makes no sense in context so it could be used for marketing purposes.

There are plenty of good things about this episode. The final dilemma of the Doctor being given an army seems like the perfect, logical way for his arc this series to end and I love the amount of development he and Clara were given this series. The Doctor and Clara parting ways at the end by lying to each other to make the other person happy is beautiful and perfect. I did generally like Death in Heaven, and it succeeds where it needs to i.e. with the big character stuff. There are just so many little bits of sloppiness that frustrate me about it.

For example, the bystander outside the graveyard near the beginning of the episode who says, "That's weird. Look at that," and "How come it's only raining inside the graveyard?". That's dialogue so bad, I'd write it. Whatever happened to 'show don't tell'? In that scene, the episode shows AND tells. If that bystander hadn't opened his stupid mouth, nothing would be lost from the scene. It's a weird bit of awkwardness from an episode that generally has strong moments of visual storytelling, like the bit where the Doctor smashes the TARDIS console in frustration.

Back onto the subject of good things, Michelle Gomez is perfect for the role of the Master, with her stand-out moment being when she killed Osgood. I love Osgood and something tells me that Moffat will find a way to bring her back (the one that died is probably her Zygon duplicate from The Day of the Doctor), but there's no way to establish how evil a villain is quite like having said villain deprive you of a good character. The scene in question is very sinister and I love how calm and in-control Gomez is at all times throughout this episode, much like Roger Delgado's portrayal. You get the sense that even when Missy is """""killed""""" at the end, it all went according to her plan. Nothing is more terrifying than a confident villain.

Death in Heaven is a real mixed bag for me. The good stuff only slightly overpowers the bad, resulting in a finale that overall I found merely okay. I'm guessing quite a lot of the questions raised in this episode, along with the mystery of Orson Pink and the Twelfth Doctor's face, will be explored further in Last Christmas and throughout Series 9. Now that we've reached the end of the finale, I should probably give my thoughts on Series 8 overall; I loved it. Deep Breath, Into the Dalek, Listen, Kill the Moon, Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, and Dark Water are some of the best Doctor Who stories we've had since Series 1, and a few of them actually surpass it. In fact, there's not a single episode this series that I have a negative opinion of overall. The worst I can say about episodes like Robot of Sherwood, In the Forest of the Night, and Death in Heaven was that they were just okay. Series 8 reminded me why I love Doctor Who: because when it's good, it's the best thing on TV.