Skip to content
Dark Water was prefaced with the irony of one of the BBC’s continuity announcers, from Red Bee Media, stating that everyone should shut up(!)
It also filled me with dread when the director was revealed as Rachel Talalay, director of the worst of the Freddy Krueger films, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.
Anyhoo, then the episode it went into a scene with Clara talking to Danny on the phone, declaring her love for him, only to find that he’s been run over and killed. Oh, no more from the most tedious man in the world? Shame!
A bit of to-ing and fro-ing followed with Clara and The Doctor chatting in the TARDIS with a seemingly later scene, as they’re both inside a volcano and Clara wants to destroy all seven of his TARDIS keys.
And, she wants The Doctor to bring Danny back from the dead, or she’ll melt down every last of his keys, and he’ll have to take a trip to Timpsons to get another one cut. Then again, if David Tennant’s Doctor could do it with the click of a finger, why can’t he?
Anyway, this Doctor still thinks it’s an issue with the keys, and also if he goes back in time to change the events of saving Danny, he’ll cause a paradox which will never have brought Clara to him in the first place… something like that anyway. I didn’t quite buy it. Oh, but never mind that because he had actually put her into a dream-like state to see how she would play out the scenario in full, so it was rather like Star Trek’s holodeck. Hence, the whole ‘evil Clara’-ness in last week’s “Next Time” piece was just a ruse. And that’s another example of what’s rather disappointing with this series.
Clara asked, “What do we do?” and The Doctor replied, “Go to hell”. She thinks he’s telling her to go, but he’s actually suggesting they *GO* to hell, in an attempt to revive the tedious prat.
The Doctor: “And?”
And this brings us back to the afterlife, aka the Nethersphere, aka the Promised Land, and a full episode appearance for Seb (Chris Addison, comedian and Capaldi’s The Thick Of It co-star), helping Danny get acclimatised to bringing dead, having arrived at 3W where they do this sort of thing, and where they promise: “Death is not an end. But we can help with that.”
And in this place, there are water tanks for the dead, skeletons that move inside them and Missy snogging the Doctor is effectively the full greetings package to the 3W institute, ‘3W’ referring to three words, which were heard through the white noise in a TV by a Dr Skarosa – “Don’t cremate me”. It turns out that the dead remain fully conscious, so despite being in their new body in their new world, they’re still connected to their old one, so if they’re going to be cremated, they’ll certainly feel it!
At first, we learn that Missy stands for “Mobile Intelligent Systems Interface”, a droid to help people get used to being dead… well, that’s *her* ruse as Michelle Gomez hams up her role nicely.
So where does the “Dark Water” fit into all this? Well, it’s the name they give to their new type of water which is capable of performing x-rays, and that it only highlights organic matter, so there’s something else inside those tanks, which is initially being hidden. Yes, the evil plan is to bring people to this futuristic looking place, upload dying minds to a hard drive, edit them, get rid of the emotions, and reinstall them into… Cybermen bodies.
Go to page 2 for more thoughts on this episode.
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.
| 1 | 2 |