Doctor Who: Dark Waters Part I

Is it possible to watch an episode of something that feels totally unexpected and yet utterly predictable at the same time? Because that best describes my reaction to Dark Water.

As it happens, Death (as a concept, a place or an Anthropomorphic Personification) is something that the Doctor has never challenged, let alone defeated – at least as far as I know. So after Danny's unexpected yet oddly not-particularly-shocking death in what must have been the quietest car crash of all time (seriously, why did Clara not hear any screaming or squealing tires?) the Doctor decides to try his hand at playing Orpheus.

It's a fairly audacious idea in itself, and not one that's been tackled so explicitly on this show before. Even in other ghost, fantasy, sci-fi or fantasy stories, Death is usually left as the great unknown (after all, even Orpheus failed).

But before this, we have Clara struggling to cope with her boyfriend's death. It was a stupid, random accident that took him (a shoe-in for the Dropped a Bridge on Him trope) and Clara is stunned at how "boring" and "ordinary" it was (someone's been listening to Joss Whedon's commentary of The Body). She demands that the Doctor help her reverse time and bring him back, something he refuses to do – at least not without testing her first.

The sequence with Clara threatening to throw all the spare Tardis keys into the fires of a volcano mostly felt like Moffat trying to be clever (How would Clara know where they all are? Can't the Doctor open the door by clicking his fingers? And shouldn't the concept of a sleep patch have been established a bit earlier?) but at least it led to the Doctor telling Clara quite calmly : "do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?"

To be honest, Clara and Danny's love story has always felt a bit undercooked. I believe they love each other, but I haven't seen a second of the falling in love process – though at least there's a nice bit of continuity following on from Listen when the Doctor tells Clara to concentrate on Danny so the Tardis can take them to the afterlife.

Or at least Exposition Central.

It's at this point the episode slows way down in order to sift through a variety of vague clues and half explanations. I knew while watching that Missy's amorous advances toward the Doctor, the repeating symbol of the two circles, the skeletons in the water tanks and the 3W motif – no matter how bizarre it all was –would end up meaning something; that there was some major revelation regarding the Nethersphere on its way. We just had to absorb all the random clues that were being fired at us first.

See it? See it?

Finally the big reveal comes and it's... it's... it's the Master and Cybermen! Okay.

I couldn't really muster up much more than that. I mean, the Master and the Cybermen. They're villains that exist, I guess.

Luckily I had forgotten about the promotional pictures that totally give the game away, so it was still something of a surprise when the waters sank to reveal the robotic heads. Suddenly the double circles made sense, and I'm glad the show neither a) had a character explicitly reference them; instead leaving them as just part of the backdrop, or b) had someone overtly explain them after the reveal. They were prolific enough to be obvious, but subtle enough that it didn't feel I was getting beaten over the head with how clever the show was being.

Moffat clearly meant the Master's Gender Flip (is that the right term?) to reflect the momentum that was built up around the "make the Doctor a woman" campaign, but before you ask, no I'm not going to go into how the Master's attraction to the Doctor finally manifests as a kiss once he's in a female body or how he changed his moniker to the Mistress even though it makes no real difference beyond hiding her identity (surely she's free to go back to the Master now, right?)  Others are tackling all that, and it's late over on this side of the world.

 

So we finally get a proper look at Missy's plan and just what's been going on over the course of the season. People die. She uploads their minds to a piece of Gallifrey technology that looks like a miniature Death Star, but in such a way that they retain a mental connection with their bodies. This is bad news if you're cremated or have donated your bodies to science (imagine the hysterical kids who have recently helped scatter their grand-daddy's ashes), which probably helps them in their decision to "delete" their consciousness and thus be reloaded back into Cybermen bodies.

Okay...sure. If nothing else, at least it leads to the great line: "You know the key strategic weakness of the human race? The dead outnumber the living."

***

This whole season has felt like a very strange and twisted sci-fi fairy tale, though here it took a sharp right into Greek mythology: the white marble and classical construction of the mausoleum (eventually revealed as St. Paul's Cathedral in what was – for me at least – the only genuine surprise of the episode) as well as the Doctor's role as an Orpheus figure.

I chose to believe this landmark was chosen as part of the atmosphere.

Clara trying to determine the veracity of Danny's identity through information only he would know is another old trope, though the scene dragged on a little as Clara fumbled for a decent question and Danny couldn't think of anything to say but "I love you." And yes, I realize that's all going to culminate in Clara realizing that it IS Danny because she told him not to say "I love you" because she was determined to come and rescue him if she did become convinced of his genuineness, and only Danny would ever say it in order to protect her from doing so... I just don’t know if that was her plan or not.

Miscellaneous Observations:

There were plenty of Shout Outs in this one: Audrey Niffenegger 's The Time-Traveller's Wife (which Moffat credits as the inspiration behind River/The Doctor's relationship), throwing small shiny objects into lava to destroy them (The Lord of the Rings), the dead talking through the white noise on the television (Poltergeist), downloading people's consciousness into a great machine (The Matrix) and of course, Missy's Mary Poppin's get-up.

Of course, there's plenty of Moffat word-play, some clever (Clara mistaking the Doctor's "go to hell" comment as figurative rather than literal), some not-so-clever (3W standing for "three words" which end up being "don't cremate me").

My biggest stumbling block with this season continues to be that nothing ever feels like natural conversation; always scripted dialogue.

Though it was a powerful image, what was the boy that Danny killed doing in the Nethersphere? What good is his tiny skeleton if the Mistress is making Cybermen? And if she's concentrating on harvesting human bodies, why did the cyborg from Deep Breath end up there?

Who was the old lady comforting Clara? Her gran?

I try not to guess plot-points too far ahead, and I don't interact with Doctor Who fandom (who probably had it all figured out) so I didn't twig that Missy was the Master until she said it. In hindsight, it's all in Michelle Gomez's delightfully deranged performance, specifically all those gloriously shifty expressions. Because of COURSE the Master would style herself as a creepy Mary Poppins.