08 – Series Eight – Peter Capaldi

Deep Breath

A dinosaur suddenly appears in the Thames, and then spits out the TARDIS. From the TARDIS, Peter Capaldi comes out as the Doctor, followed by Clara Oswald. Also in attendance are the Paternoster Gang, as this is Victorian London, and of course they would be called when there is a dinosaur in the Thames. The dinosaur is impossibly large, of course, but this is never explained. Capaldi spends the first half of the episode in a state of confusion, and Clara is having trouble accepting him as the Doctor, and gets called on it by Madame Vastra. But Clara spots an advertisement in the newspaper directed to The Impossible Girl and that leads her to a restaurant, where she is joined by the Doctor.

Then they discover that this restaurant is very odd indeed. The people in there are not eating or even breathing, though they go through the motions. And then they are trapped by a Cyborg who is more human than robot by now, because he has been gradually replacing parts with human parts, and then burning the bodies of his victims to hide what he did, leading to a rash of “spontaneous combustion” cases, which includes the dinosaur. The Doctor kills him, but he is brought back to life by a mysterious woman who suggests that the Doctor is her boyfriend. We will come to know her as Missy, and the Doctor speculates that she may have placed the ad in the paper, and may have been the “woman in the shop” who first gave Clara the phone number of the TARDIS. Missy will be the story arc going forward.

The Doctor is very fixated on his face. He knows he has seen it before, but can’t remember when. But it must be important. Was he trying to send himself a message?

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Into the Dalek

The Doctor picks up a soldier who was about to die in a ship explosion, and finds that she and her people have been fighting the Daleks. He returns her to her ship, where he is coerced into helping them investigate a Dalek that has been injured and now seems to be “good”. Meanwhile, back at the Coal Hill School, a new teacher, Danny Pink, is teaching Math, but he has a past as soldier that he has not entirely gotten over, and Clara takes a shine to him. The Doctor then shows up because he can’t work on the Dalek without her. They are shrunk down to microscopic size and put inside the Dalek in shades of Fantastic Voyage, where they encounter Dalek antibodies that are quite dangerous to them.

This Dalek says the Daleks must be destroyed because he has seen beauty in the birth of a new star, but it turns out the change was caused by damage. When the Doctor fixes the damage, the Dalek reverts to type, and now wants to exterminate all humans again. He kills a few on this ship, then contacts the Dalek mothership to tell them where he is. The soldiers want them to kill this Dalek, understandably, but the Doctor refuses. Instead, he and Clara manage to cause enough damage to the morality-suppressing circuits that the Dalek can see the beauty again. The Doctor then links his mind with the Dalek, and shows him beauty, but also shows him a deep hatred for all Daleks, which impresses the Dalek. When the Doctor says he is a good Dalek, he demurs, saying he is a bad Dalek, but that the Doctor is a good Dalek. This is reference back to the Eccleston story Dalek, where the Dalek says that the Doctor would make a good Dalek. In the end, Clara gets back in time for her first date with Danny. But a soldier who was about to be killed by a Dalek is yanked away at the last moment by Missy, who pours her a cup of tea.

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Robot of Sherwood

The Doctor offers Clara her choice of any place or time to visit, and her choice is to visit Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest. At first the Doctor resists because Robin Hood is just a myth, but Clara persists telling him that he said it was her choice. So he gives in and sets the TARDIS for Sherwood Forest in 1190, where of course they immediately meet Robin Hood. The Doctor thinks this has to be a trick, particularly when his band is introduced, and it the usual suspects: Friar Tuck, Little John, Alan a Dale, etc. The Doctor keeps testing them but they seem human. But he also notes that it unusually sunny, warm and green for autumn. Clara though gives in to it all and is having a great time. Of course the evil Sheriff of Nottingham is oppressing the peasants. And he sets up an archery contest with the prize to the best archer of a golden arrow. Clara warns Robin it is a trap, but he says of course it is a trap, and goes anyway. It comes down to the Sheriff and Robin, and after the Sheriff hits the bullseye, Robin’s arrow splits the Sheriff’s arrow, and as Robin begins to claim the prize, the Doctor splits Robin’s arrow and says it should go to him. Then Robin splits the Doctor’s arrow, and the Doctor splits Robin’s arrow, and finally the Doctor blows up the target using the sonic screwdriver. (BTW, I love that the Doctor achieved his feats of archery by cheating.) The sonic screwdriver gets the Sheriff’s attention and they are all put under arrest. So far it tracks pretty close to the original Robin Hood stories.

But the Doctor has been suspicious all along. He thought that Robin and his Merry Men might have been robots, and even at one point thinks they might be in a miniscope, as seen in the Third Doctor story Carnival of Monsters. But it turns out it is the Sheriff’s Knights who are robots. The Doctor finds the control room of a crashed spaceship, and learns that the robots were on their way to “The Promised Land”, which is the place the cyborg was looking for in Deep Breath, and is the name which Missy gives to the place where she brings that cyborg and the soldier from Into the Dalek. So the outlines of a season-long mystery arc are taking shape here, which seems to be Moffat’s specialty. In Season 5 it was the crack, in season 6 it was who killed the Doctor, and in season 7 it was The Impossible Girl. Missy makes no appearance here in this story, but when Robin asks about how he is remembered in the future he is shown pictures of book covers, movie stills, etc., and among them is a picture of Patrick Troughton, who was the second Doctor, but who played a character in a 1953 TV series about Robin Hood.

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Listen

This is, among other things, a psychological thriller of sorts. The Doctor has nothing to do, and starts speculating about possible unseen creatures that surround us. He looks into the idea that we all share certain dreams, and certain fears, and asks why that is. Maybe there really is a bogeyman, and there might actually be something under the bed. Interwoven with this is a story about the developing relationship between Clara and Danny Pink, which is clearly going somewhere. This episode seems to suggest that maybe they will get married. or at least have children, when Danny’s descendant Orson appears as a character (played by the same actor, Samuel Anderson). Finally there is the Moffat Loop whereby the Doctor as a boy is scared by Clara, who comforts him using the Doctor’s own words, and it seems like maybe this whole story was driven by the Doctor’s own fears going back to his childhood. And that is only instance of a time loop in action in this story. The wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey is strong in this one.

This is an excellent story that was nominated in 2015 for both a Bram Stoker Award, and for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). All the actors are excellent in this, and you should watch it.

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Time Heist

From the title you get the idea that this is a heist story, and it indeed appears to be so on the surface. The Doctor gets a phone call on his Police Box phone, and next thing you know he and Clara are sitting with two other people. One of them is a cyborg who has augmented his human brain with electronic attachments, and the other is a shapeshifter who can imitate anyone. All four of them hear recordings saying that they have voluntarily agreed to have their memories wiped, though clearly this is only a reference to short term memory since they all seem normal. It then transpires that they are going to break into the most secure bank in the galaxy. It is guarded by a telepathic being called the Teller that can detect guilt in a person’s mind, and then turn the person’s brain into mush. The idea of the memory wipe was to guard against this, but this makes no sense to me since they know they are breaking in and I see no reason why this Teller couldn’t read that in their minds.

They fight their way into the heart of the bank, down through various levels, being pursued by the guards and the Teller. The Doctor gives the others something that he says will kill them painlessly if they need it, to avoid having their brains turned to mush. The Shapeshifter is the first to go this way, but then her part was imitating a legitimate businessman to get them in, so she is not essential to the plot any longer. The Cyborg manages to unlock the locks (we think) before the Teller catches up with him, and he uses the instant death device. It turns out that the final lock is not unlocked, but it seems the Architect who designed this bank (and it turns out to be the Doctor) made it so the final lock would only open during a solar storm, which occurred at a different time. So this bank is some kind of time machine as well, and it goes to that time and the vault is open. This again makes no sense because the storm is destroying the bank.

In the end it turns out everything is timey-wimey and circular. The bank owner had recruited the Doctor to do the heist because he had told her that some day she would be old and full of regret, and when that happened she should call him. Her regret was that she had left without freeing the mate of Teller, which she had locked up to insure his cooperation, so the real goal of the Time Heist was a rescue mission, not a bank robbery. Well of course, the Doctor would never be involved in anything so tawdry s bank robbery. And those “instant death” devices were actually short distance teleporters, so neither the shapeshifter nor the cyborg died.

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The Caretaker

On the surface this is a fairly straightforward world in danger story. An alien robotic soldier with enough explosive power to blow up the planet has been located right nearby the Coal Hill School where Clara and Danny are teachers. So the Doctor manages to become the temporary substitute caretaker (i.e. janitor) for the school so that he can develop a plot to capture the alien robot and send it into the far future. Unfortunately, Danny, the former soldier, spots some of the devices the Doctor has stashed and thereby disrupts the plan. In the end, though, Danny manages to save the day by distracting the robot long enough for the Doctor to finish the job and the planet is saved now.

But the heart of this story is about relationships. The Doctor takes a dislike to Danny even before his first plan is disrupted, and we know from Into the Dalek that he has a thing against soldiers in general. This of course sets Danny to distrusting the Doctor, and Clara is in the middle. She loves Danny, and says so in this episode, but she is fond of the Doctor in a different way, and we remember that she entered his timeline in The Name of the Doctor to protect him throughout time and space. Danny’s act in distracting the robot was heroic, though, and the Doctor starts to thaw. And Danny says that all he wants to do is keep Clara safe.

At the end, we see another person brought to The Promised Land, and Missy makes a brief appearance as the “God” of this place.

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Kill the Moon

The basic plot here is that the moon has put on weight, and that means it is messing with the tides, and that could cause a lot of deaths on earth. In fact, one of the characters claims it would wipe out life on Earth, though I find that questionable. The Earth has stopped launching space flights by this point (2049), but they find an old shuttle and the last few trained astronauts still around, and send them up with nuclear bombs to blow up the moon, which also doesn’t make sense. You will enjoy this episode more if you don’t actually know anything about physics, but honestly this is not the first time that has happened on Doctor Who. Sometimes you just just to go with it and not ask too many questions. The Doctor takes Clara and the student Courtney to the moon, and they land on the shuttle just before it crashes on the moon.

They find spider creatures that kill people, and then the Doctor investigates further and determines that the Moon is really a giant egg, and a creature is about to be born. The astronaut leader wants to kill it, but Clara and Courtney are against that. The Doctor declares that it is not his decision to make since he is an alien and he leaves in the TARDIS but leaves Clara and Courtney behind with the Astronaut leader to make the decision. This enrages Clara, who says she is finished with the Doctor. Frankly, I can see her point. He has been pretty unlikable for several episodes now. Clara’s decision was to not blow up the Moon, and that becomes a key turning point in Earth history so maybe the Doctor was right that this was not his decision to make.

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Mummy on the Orient Express

The Doctor and Clara land the TARDIS on the Orient Express, which in this case is a replica that travels through space. But inside it appears to be pretty authentic. But something odd is happening here. One after another people see a Mummy that only they can see, and it kills them. The Doctor investigates with the help of the train’s engineer Perkins and finds that in the surveillance videos it takes exactly 66 seconds from the time the Mummy appears to the victim until the person dies, though it is not clear to me why that particular number matters. Maybe it only matters that it is the same interval each time. They scan one of the victims and realize that the Mummy is draining its victims of all of their energy at a cellular level using phase-shifting technology.

The Doctor then puts some pieces together and notes the passengers have an unusual number PhDs in their midst, which was telegraphed earlier when the Doctor introduces himself to the Captain as “the Doctor” and the Captain responds “Doctor of what? We’ve got every kind of doctor you can imagine on this train right now”. But the Doctor realizes they have been brought together to solve the mystery, and it is train’s computer that has done this. And it has sought the Doctor specifically, as we have a throwaway line from The Big Bang where the Eleventh Doctor answers a call and says it was about “an Egyptian goddess loose on the Orient Express, in space”.

A young lady is due to be the next victim, and the Doctor tells Clara to bring her to him so he can observe, but Clara lies and says to the lady that the Doctor said he could save her. But she does it anyway, and the Doctor does actually save her. That leads to a scene in the TARDIS where the Doctor explains that sometimes there are no good choices, but you still have to choose. He did not know he could save that lady, and if she had died he would have moved on the next victim and kept trying to figure it out. Then Clara calls Danny, and tells him she has done it, meaning she has broken off her relationship with the Doctor, except she almost immediately changes her mind, and tells the Doctor that Danny is OK with her continuing with the Doctor, which the Doctor is surprised by, as he should be.

This was a good story on its own terms, but the evolving relationships between Clara, The Doctor, and Danny are clearly forming the story arc of this season. In this episode Clara lies to two people, and gets away with it in one case. What about the other?

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Flatline

The monster of the week is group of two-dimensional creatures called the Boneless. They have been draining energy from the TARDIS, and as a result the exterior dimensions have shrunk so that the TARDIS is barely 5 feet tall. Clara and the Doctor squeeze out to take a look around, and then the Doctor squeezes back in, telling Clara to take a look around. She does, meeting a young man who is a graffiti artist, which the local council does not appreciate so he is on a community service sentence to paint over the graffiti. He tells Clara that people have been mysteriously disappearing, and they go to an apartment to take a look around. A police constable is taken by these creatures. which cannot be seen except as a shimmering on the surface, which is because they are two-dimensional. Clara and the young man escape, but Danny calls while Clara is escaping. When Clara gets back she does not see the TARDIS at first, because now is has shrunk so small it can go in her handbag, and so it does.

From here on in Clara has to be the Doctor to get people out of this situation. And she can’t save everyone. The theme that is becoming clear in this series, or at least one of them, is that Clara is becoming more like the Doctor. At the end, she asks the Doctor “I was the Doctor, and wasn’t I good?” To which the Doctor replies “You were a wonderful Doctor, and goodness had nothing to do with it.” Some people were saved, some were not, and one of the people who was saved is despicable. But sometimes you have only bad choices, but you still have to choose. And now the Doctor knows that she lied to him about Danny being OK with her continuing to travel with the Doctor, but as he says in this episode “Lying is a survival skill.” And the very last scene shows Missy looking in on Clara while she is talking with the Doctor and saying “Clara! I chose well.” I think this goes back to the Bells of St. John when “some woman” gave her the telephone number of the TARDIS police phone, and that woman was Missy

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In the Forest of the Night

This is a fun and atmospheric episode that is more of a fairy tale than the usual episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor is in the TARDIS when a little girl named Maebh knocks on the door, asking “Are you the Doctor?” They are in a forest, and Maebh is afraid. The Doctor is meanwhile yelling at the TARDIS because it was supposed to take him to London, not to a forest, when Maebh says “We are in London. Come look.” Sure enough, they are in the general vicinity of Trafalgar Square with the lion statues and the Column. It appears that overnight the whole planet has been covered by trees. And Maebh claims to have done this somehow. Meanwhile, Danny and Clara have taken a class from Coal Hill School on an overnight trip to a museum, and when they leave in the morning they are in the forest.

The Doctor realizes that Maebh is in touch with the trees, and helps her to give them a voice. But around the world a lot of people are very distraught and confused by the sudden appearance of dense forest everywhere (even in the Sahara), and are trying the cut down or burn the trees. But the Doctor finds a notebook of Maebh’s in the TARDIS, and sees picture after picture of the Sun exploding in the direction of Earth, and he realizes that there is a coronal mass ejection headed for the Earth, and it will destroy the planet. Clara initially suggests the Doctor takes everyone in the TARDIS, but the children only want their parents, and Danny will never leave them, and then Clara decides she won’t leave either because she doesn’t want to be the last of her kind. That probably cut deep for the Doctor. Then the Doctor realizes that the trees knew this was going to happen, and grew to create a planet-wide air bag that would protect the Earth.

in our two ongoing arcs, Danny now is fully aware that Clara is still traveling with the Doctor, and wants her to just tell him the truth. And Missy looks on at the mass ejection and the trees and says that she was surprised, but likes surprises.

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Dark Water

The cold open has Clara and Danny talking on the phone. Danny is headed to meet Clara, but for reasons not entirely clear to me, she can’t wait for that. Then Danny is killed by an automobile while talking on the phone. Clara then goes very cold, and calls the Doctor, where she says nothing much has happened and wants to see a volcano. Meanwhile, she is going all over TARDIS grabbing things before clapping the Doctor on the neck. The next scene is at the volcano, Clara demands that the Doctor rescue Danny or she will destroy all of the keys to the TARDIS. I’m not sure why that is such a big deal since back with the 10th Doctor we learned he can open and close the TARDIS just by snapping his fingers. In any case, the Doctor refuses to cross the timelines, and Clara destroys the keys, then breaks down. At this point the Doctor says to here “Look at your hand.” There is a patch there. Clara though it would knock out the Doctor, but it actually put Clara into a dream state, and they have both both been in the TARDIS the whole time, and the keys are scattered on the floor. Then Clara says “Where to we go now?”, and the Doctor replies “To hell.” Clara slinks away toward the door saying “I deserved that.” Then the Doctor says “Where are you going?”, and she responds that he told her to go to hell, and says “No, I meant we are going to hell. Or wherever it is dead people go. We have to find your boyfriend Danny.” Then he says “Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?”

When they get there, they meet Missy, and while that is going on, Danny is getting “onboarded” to his new situation. He is told that he has died, and is in the Nethersphere, or the Promised Land. It is a difficult adjustment. And Missy is demonstrating what looks like skeletons seated inside tanks of liquid. The liquid is revealed to be something called Dark Water, which shows anything organic but blocks things that are artificial. And we finally learn who Missy is.

This is the first part of a two-art season finale, so it consists of the setup. The resolution will come the following week in Death in Heaven.

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Death in Heaven

Missy’s plan starts out as resurrecting the dead into an army of Cybermen. Many of them come marching out of St. Paul’s, in an homage to the 1968 Second Doctor story The Invasion. There we find the Doctor and Missy, along with members of the public who think this is hilarious, and they are taking selfies with the “robots”. Meanwhile, Clara is still inside, and tells the Cybermen that she is The Doctor. This is actually telegraphed in the opening credits where we see Clara’s eyes instead of the Doctor’s, and the name Jenna Coleman comes first, before Peter Capaldi. She is ultimately rescued by Danny, who is now a Cyberman, but who still has his emotions. This was set up in the previous episode, Dark Water, when he is given a choice to remove his emotions, but hesitates. Outside St. Paul’s, UNIT shows up, and they capture both the Doctor and Missy, and take them aboard an airplane, where we learn that the Doctor is now the President of Earth.

The initial batch of Cybermen (but not Danny) shoot into the sky, where they explode, creating clouds that rain down “Cyberpollen” that will turn all of the dead into more Cybermen. On the plane, Missy kills Osgood, the UNIT Science Advisor, then throws Kate Stewart out of the plane, followed by the Doctor. But the Doctor is able to call has TARDIS while falling, and thus land safely. Clara wakes up in a graveyard, where we start to see Cybermen coming up out of the graves. Danny is there, and begs Clara to turn on his emotional inhibitor because he can’t stand it. The Doctor arrives and tells her not to do it, but Danny begs and she does it. Then Missy arrives and says that she created the Cyber army as birthday present for the Doctor. She wants to prove that they are really the same. She gives the Doctor the bracelet to control the Cybermen. He then thanks her, and says that now he knows he is not a good man, nor a bad man, but an idiot with a screwdriver and a box, while slipping the bracelet to Danny. Danny then orders the Cybermen to all shoot up into the clouds and explode, thus ending all of the cyberpollen. Then Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who is also a Cyberman, appears. He kills Missy, then indicates where Kate Stewart is lying on the ground after he saved her. The final scene shows the doctor and Clara lying to each other about how they will go forward.

This finale has plot holes you could drive a truck through, such as both Danny and the Brigadier retaining their emotions and relationships, but the strength of the episode is in the emotional beats that bring a tear to your eye, such as the appearance of the Brigadier.

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Last Christmas

Christmas specials on Doctor Who are sometimes a bit more whimsical, and this one is to some degree, but it also has some serious Sci-fi horror to it. Clara wakes up to find Santa Claus on her roof, because he has had a slight accident with his sleigh. Then the Doctor appears and tells Clara to not say anything, just get in the TARDIS. Suddenly the focus is a scientific research station on the North Pole, where one member of the team is entering a room where there are bodies on beds that are covered with sheets, and she is supposed to not think about them, so she closes her eyes and dances across the room, when suddenly the Doctor and Clara burst in. This causes the creatures on the beds to wake up, and they are monstrous. then Santa Claus appears, tells the creatures to go back to bed, and says he doesn’t want any trouble on the North Pole.

It appears the creatures are actually team members who have been taken over by face huggers similar to Alien. They take over a person, create soporific dreams to keep them quiet, while they are slowly digesting their victims. But if you can somehow wake up from the dream they fall off and die. But then the question becomes whether you are still dreaming. So this starts to pick up ideas from Inception. Clara gets captured, and then the Doctor allows himself to be captured so he can enter the dream and free her, and this seems to work. But then the Doctor realizes that there are four seemingly alive and kicking team members, four other team members in the beds, and only four manuals. so it turns out the four members in the beds are all there are, and that they are dreaming they are alive and well. finally Santa comes to save everyone. So this is a total fantasy, but, so is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In the end you just relax and enjoy the ride. There is a nice scene at the end where the Doctor helps a very elderly Clara open a Christmas Cracker, which is an echo of the scene in The Time of the Doctor when Clara helps the elderly Doctor to do the same.

Note: The man in the 4-person crew is played by Michael Troughton, son of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton. Previously we saw another son, David Troughton, in Midnight.

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