In which Steven Moffat crams a blockbuster film into a an hour long episode, celebrates both Nu and Classic Who, gives us thrills, squees and chills, and moves more than a few of us to tears. He also celebrates a companion, defies rumours, makes Danny Pink into a worthwhile character (or, at least, one worth more than just being this series' red-shirt) and writes a whole host of and jaw-dropping moments. Subtle, this episode was not until, ironically, a moment of pure horror is revealed, or teased, right before the knock on the fourth wall which leads us into the closing titles.
But, to begin at the beginning: I adored the finale opening, pre and post teaser. All reservations I had from the end of Dark Water (i.e. that the episode had been all set-up, little plot) faded away, for Death in Heaven started fantastically.
All companions become the Doctor, or become like the Doctor. So it is fitting that Jenna Coleman usurped the opening titles from Peter Capaldi. I loved her eyes, her gaze, peering out at us from the time vortex. Yes, Clara is a world class liar. We've seen that all season. But the fantastic irony here, at the top of the episode, is that her bragging at the start actually foreshadows her lies at its end.
The teaser worked amazingly well, but this episode captured my heart from the moment Osgood walked into frame - snazzy bow tie, matching shirt, glasses - to supposedly take a photo of Missy and her boys. Leaving aside the obvious subverted nod to Amy (and her boys) this entire sequence is Moffat's tongue in cheek, but also a genuine dig at the selfie, tweeting, Tumblr, generation. And the Whovians who flocked to the whirlwind world tour. This scene encapsulates the way he sees fandom, people. Mind you, Osgood can also, be said to personify the way he sees fandom and her, I adore.
I loved her in The Day of the Doctor (scarf-wearing, asthma inhaler carrying) and loved her even more, here in her bow-tie and red converse ("Bow ties are cool") in her cosplay homage to Ten and Eleven. And the way she oh-so nonchalantly took the Master's device, from out of her hand, then signalled for UNIT to move in - it was quite wonderful. Especially if you think back to the confidence she didn't have when the 50th anniversary episode first introduced her to us.
Which is why Moffat actually broke my heart, the moment the Master captured and then killed by Osgood. Worse, incinerated her!
Awful to watch, even if she hadn't impressed the Doctor moments earlier, hadn't been invited aboard as a companion - oh so subtly: "All of time and space. Something for your bucket list". Of course, given that line I should have seen Osgood's death coming. This is Moffat after all. But, I didn't. I really thought that with Clara almost persuading a Cyberman she was of strategic importance Osgood would go one better and remain a hostage, once again.
The companion is meant to be the every-person who gets a chance to travel in the TARDIS. Admittedly, Osgood is many things, but ordinary isn't one of them. Mind you, she is fandom in it's geeky glory and, with that in mind, I do wish a spin aboard the TARDIS for a series would have fit into the actresses' schedule. Plus, it's not as if it would be the first time a member of the UNIT task force travelled with the Doctor. Yes, I a thinking of Harry Sullivann.
Oh Osgood, you will be missed!
Worse, it's implied she could have one day stepped out of her red converse, into Kate Lethbridge-Stewart's red high-heels. All of that is denied her. Instead, pain is Moffat's gift. And it's the gift which keeps on giving.
Here, the gift is in the acting.
It's in the phenomenal performance Peter Capaldi gives from the moment the Doctor crouches in the detritus of Osgood's dust and ash, cradling her broken glasses with slow careful movements, the rage on the Doctor's/Capaldi's face incandescent. A fantastic moment, made more so because of the earlier one when the Doctor had seen Osgood, really seen her and her potential. His whole face lit up. His eyes sparkled. This, as she mused no one was looking up at the clouds because they were too busy keeping an eye on the graveyards. How fabulous it was to see someone catch the Doctor's attention with their intelligence and acumen, rather than for being simply feisty, daring, or outspoken. And then the opportunity, and Osgood herself, are both lost to us.
Pain, the Doctor tells a deceased but conscious Danny, is a gift (like fear) enabling us to know we are human. Moffat obviously believes this because in this episode pain is the gift he keeps on giving, Danny Clara the Doctor the viewer. And, even Missy.
Michelle Gomez is superb and gives a phenomenal performance. It's one that is part straight acting, part pantomime, and which has more than a pinch of Jack Nicholson's Joker about it. And, no, that's not just the eyeshadow. From the moment Missy is captured (or allows herself to be captured) Gomez is sublime and brilliantly macabre as a twisted reflection of the world's favourite nanny - complete with her own, slightly diminutive umbrella. More so, what Moffat does, amazingly, is to imply that she has tailored her appearance specifically on Poppins, this when she floats down to Earth - into the graveyard - holding that umbrella aloft, remarking how good the telly is in the UK.
.
Although the 1964 Disney film was made for a cinema audience, time, taste and scheduling have made it a holiday television staple. At least in the UK. Children? They've only ever seen the film on telly, and most have probably never read the P.L. Travers books which inspired the film. This comment, more than the earlier one about selfies and a world tour, give us a sense that Missy has built her persona, laced herself into it as thoroughly as the corset she may be wearing, and is projecting herself in this way specifically.
Why?
Partly, it's to give nuance to a performance within a performance, ie. Gomez acting as Missy who is acting as the world's favourite nanny, with a dark twist. Nanny to an army. Also, it's an interesting nod to her jaunts through time and space and a nod back to Deep Breath implying she's been flitting back and forth across the centuries in Victorian garb. From her perspective, Missy could have given Clara the Doctor's number last week and placed the add in The Times yesterday. As an aside, it's amusing and interesting to realise that, according to Steven Moffat, it is Missy, almost single-handedly, who has created humanity's view of the afterlife. Of AN afterlife. Thus she quite literally becomes Hel and is Hel on Earth.
Following his regeneration, from the moment he starred at his reflection in a looking glass in an alley-way and from the later moment when he asked Clara if she believed him to be a good man, Twelve has been trying to realise who he really is. Missy is, of course, the dark reflection of the Doctor's own self. Black queen to his white king. It's in the dark mirror of her actions that he sees his own true face, sees and recognises himself as an idiot, with a screwdriver and a box. Helping people, passing through....
Peter Capaldi nails the line because, I believe, this is how he sees the Doctor. But all his scenes with Michelle Gomez are amazing.
If Missy is the Doctor's dark reflection, she also mirrors Clara (and no not just because it takes one control freak to recognise another) in that the Master was once the Doctor's friend and Clara has no stepped into that position. And Clara's friendship with the Doctor echoes his lifelong friendship with Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart. Clara has saved the Doctor in the past. Here, on earth's darkest day, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart (ghost in a cyberman shell, if you will) saves the Doctor by taking the kill-shot the Doctor himself cannot take - dispatching the Master - though, probably only for now. Sometime between the moment Kate Lethbridge Stewart was discovered and the moment the Doctor finally saluted The Brig, I had tears in my eyes. That saulte, and nod to old friends, really got me.
Not that this one moment in any way detracts from the poignancy and poetry of Clara and Danny's plot-arc. At the top of the episode, just as at its end, Clara is alone. Apart from the Doctor. When she is rescued, we realise she's been rescued by Danny Pink. Dead. Upgraded. Retaining a semblance of self and emotion, while clutching a pink form proclaiming his identity: Known as Danny Pink. Danny Pink, pink-slipped by life. I assume that's an allusion Moffat might not have twigged to, seeing as it's an American practice and an Americanism.
But damn, Danny is phenomenal in this episode. He, far more than the Doctor (with his TARDIS and its magic-key) is the big damn hero and Samuel Anderson turns in his best performance this series, brilliantly portraying Danny's horror and dismay at what he has become. For me though, the heart-breaking moment isn't when he asks Clara to activate the device which will kill his ability to feel. It's the earlier moment when Clara first catches sight of the Cyberman standing alone, apart form the others and he, unable to bear her looking upon him thus, turns away. It is a fantastic moment. And a brilliant acting choice, if that isn't spelled out in the script.
Danny Pink is a hero in his own right AND is symbolic of many another hero. He is theTin Man acting from his heart, which he has all along (even when it's meant to have been deactivated) Iron Man (brilliance and bravery) and there's more than one nod to Angel from the Whedonverse. The tragic impossibility of Clara's love for Danny (now dead and upgraded) does place him in the footsteps of many a vampire, for all that he rose from a morgue table and not from his own grave. And then there's the nod to the Commedia dell'arte and Pierrot the clown.
From the moment I realised that the porthole doors in the Nethersphere were modelled on the eyes of Cybermen, I also realised each had a tear in the corner of their eye. That of course reminds one of Pierrot. Pierrot being the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. And how perfect an allusion to Danny Pink, given that (and I admit I am gakking from Wiki)
- "His physical insularity; his poignant lapses into mutism, the legacy of the great mime Deburau; his white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the dead; his often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be vanquished unworldly naïveté—all conspired to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the Commedia dell'Arte and into the larger realm of myth"
& Harlequin [..." later develops into a prototype of the romantic hero. Harlequin inherits his physical agility and his trickster qualities, as well as his name, from a mischievous "devil" character in medieval passion plays...][...
The Harlequin also carried a sword of magic wand. Sonic screwdriver anyone?
Above all Danny is a fallen soldier. In this centenary year commemorating the First World War, as rows upon rows of graves give rise to Cyberman soldiers who literally climb out of trenches, I couldn't help but draw allusions between these once-fallen and those who fell on the battlefields a century ago. This newly formed Cyber-army follows Danny (thanks to the bracelet on his wrist and a poetic speech he himself derided the Doctor for almost giving) up the line, as it were, to death. The dead saving the living on earth's darkest day.
For a brief moment there is a happy ending. There's a bright possible future - and then Moffat and Missy snatch that away from the Doctor and from us all...
The Doctor's fury, anger and despair as he punches his rage out on the TARDIS console can only be read as his having opened the TARDIS double doors and seen a world destroyed, his home-world conquered by a Cyber army. He beat and foiled the Dalek's but an interloper (Missy) still destroyed everything he holds dear. And his loss as palpable as Clara's. Both have lost a future imagined and possibly longed for. And what of Clara's future now? As Danny teleports the young boy who died as collateral damage in a war he never wanted to fight, through a portal of light, into Clara's flat we're reminded of Sarah Jane Smith, single mother of Luke Smith. Saving the earth with her sonic lipstick and young assistants. That is a possible future for Clara, but probably not one which will come to pass.
At the tail-end of the episode two friends, divided by time and space, united by experience and adversity, lie to each other out of love. The Doctor assumes he knows what Clara is going to say (and, it would seem all of fandom and various journalists also assume her revelation is to be that she's pregnant) and so makes an ass out of himself and Clara - to paraphrase a witticism. And Clara? She does exactly the same proving, rather wonderfully, that the companion is always the true reflection of the Doctor in this series.
I loved the fact that she thanked the Doctor for her travels in the TARDIS, thanked him overtly, because in doing so she stands for every companion he's ever had since 1963. And, yes it's a nice touch that he thanks her right back. Plus, I loved the shot of her walking away, alone, down a high-street very similar to the one she'd first walked down with the Doctor after she saw him and they went off to get coffee. It's a gorgeous, quiet, closing scene that would work well to round off the series.
Only it doesn't.
There's a knock on the TARDIS door/Fourth wall and Santa's voice booms out to remind us Christmas is just round the corner. And then, six days after the finale, we get a teaser trailer on ciN.
There are so many wonderful moments in this episode, from the dark to the comedic. From a manic cackle (Missy's) to a look and splutter over a cup of tea (Twelve when Kate first refers to him as Mr. President.) There are fantastic turns of phrase and puns on popular culture:
- (Hey Missy for Hey Mickey and of course the fact that it's literally Raining Men, Missy singing Happy Birthday Mr. President - a nod to Marilyn Monroe, who married Eleven in the whoniverse, but who also may have had a fling with another president and his brother)
...but above all this episode succeds as well as it does because it has a plot-arc.
Clara's journey in the TARDIS, with Twelve, appears to have come full circle. The Doctor appears to have found himself and his home. And the little boy who grew up to become "Dan the soldier" man saves the world and the life of the woman he loves, living up to the name he chose for himself.
There is plot, there is break-neck speed pacing, solid characterisation, some caricaturing (in the best of ways) brilliant lines of dialogue and love, from the writer to his characters and from the characters one to the other. It is a mad, whirlwind ride of an episode but it works very, very, well and is well deserving of Chris Addison/SEB's Squee. Death in Heaven rounds the series off well, in my opinion. And it ends with a great hook for the Christmas special. Series 8 as a whole?
For me, the series was more successful than not (Deep Breath, Into the Dalek, Listen, Kill the Moon, Flatline, Mummy on the Orient Express, Dark Water, Death in Heaven) I adore Capaldi for the performance he's giving and am truly, deeply curious to see how it changes now that the Doctor has rediscovered his sense of self and self-confidence. And, I like Clara more than I used to, which is a plus.
What's on my Santa list for Who? More consistency in tone across episodes. Tighter scripts. Some semblance of continuity plot-point wise. Fingers crossed.