Skip to content
While Missy and the Doctor are chatting, she divulges she’s not a Time Lord, but more of a Time Lady, and someone he left behind a long time ago, and as her creations emerge from their now-drained water tanks, and since the dead outnumber the living, she shouts, “All the graves of planet Earth are about to give birth”
As the episode lumbers towards some sort of an ending, The Cybermen spring into action, Danny is so distraught about being dead and never seeing Clara agin that he’s offered the option of suicide, and then Dark Water offers up the only reason for this episode’s existence – the fact that Missy is short for Mistress. And she declares with a wry smile: “Well, I couldn’t keep calling myself *The Master* could I?”
So, yes, we’ve had 40 minutes of mostly filler, along with a treat from Gomez’s full episode appearance, while there’s some neat exchanges thrown in by Steven Moffat, below:
- As Clara declares of Dead Danny: “I love him”, The Doctor points his sonic screwdriver at her, uses it, and replies: “Yeah, you’re quite the mess of chemicals, aren’t you?”
- Then when Clara cries, he adds, “Stop it with the eyes. Don’t do that with the eyes. How do you do that, anyway? It’s like they inflate.”
- When Danny enquires: “I’m dead. How can I be dead?”, Seb coldly responds: “Our sincerest condolences”
- In the afterlife, a man is heard screaming, and Seb wryly comments: “Someone left their body to science!”
- In her pretence-robot-like state, Missy plays up with: “My heart is maintained by the Doctor”, to which The Doctor replies: “Doctor who?”
- And when Dr Chang delays in explaining what 3W stands for, Capaldi tuts and moans “Hurry up or I’ll hit you with my shoe.”
Next Week: …There was no ‘next week’ clip, obviously because it’s the finale. We know the Cybermen are going to terrorise the world, but I hope they don’t kill off Missy now they’ve only just told us the reason for her existence.
Score: 6/10
Director: Rachel Talalay
Producer: Peter Bennett
Screenplay: Steven Moffat
Music: Murray Gold
Cast:
The Doctor: Peter Capaldi
Clara Oswald: Jenna Coleman
Danny Pink: Samuel Anderson
Missy: Michelle Gomez
Woman: Joan Blackham
Gran: Sheila Reid
Seb: Chris Addison
Dr Chang: Andrew Leung
Boy: Antonio Bourouphael
Cyberman: Jeremiah Krage
Mr Armitage: Nigel Betts
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.