Doctor Who Series 8 Reviews - Dark Water (E11)

WARNING THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

I really don’t want to write this review. The thought of this episode makes me feel physically ill. The thought of what Steven Moffat has done to great characters written by great writers in the past and the present, what he’s done to reshape those characters in his image and degrade them for the sake of ‘entertainment’ is appalling. His previous solo stories from this series (Deep Breath and Listen) had already disappointed, but his latest turnout really takes the biscuit market. It’s an episode which doesn’t deserve a spot in the legacy of the Twelfth Doctor or the Cybermen, but especially ‘Missy’.

As the first episode to be split into two episodes since 2011’s The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, Dark Water does succeed in returning to the old roots of ‘questions first, action later’, but the questioning part limps across the episode as though it was shot. The episode’s pace is slow and incoherent. One minute you have a character in sadness, the next they’re completely cheerful, the next sad again. It’s disjointed to the point that it makes the characters like they suffer a disorder, while the story can’t make its mind up whether it wants to go for emotional or shock value, and unfortunately that’s only one ingredient in this recipe for disaster.

Death has previously been a staple in Doctor Who, with characters dying continuously from the third ever episode onwards. These past few years, death has become minimal and a part of the “Everybody lives!” tagline first muttered by the Ninth Doctor in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, but this year marked a change as death became a bit prominent. But only for this one story to exist, as it focuses on the afterlife following the sudden death of Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson). Why? Because the plot needed him dead, as the editing for the scene of his ‘demise’ was poorly executed due to the fact that all he does is stand still for a good second before his casualty. It leads to a sequence with Clara (Jenna Coleman) blackmailing the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) into saving him a la Pete Tyler in Father’s Day through throwing away all his TARDIS keys into a volcano. Again, huge plot hole through the fact that the Doctor has the capacity to open the TARDIS doors with a finger click, but within the actual circumstances of the situation it does make logical sense for the Doctor to not do so.

Something which is well done in the episode is the plan for the Cybermen, in which they turn out to be using the dead as a means of invading. A smart enough plan if it wasn’t poorly executed with the usage of skeletons – an unnecessary requirement for these renditions of Cybermen, seeing as they have the capacity to remove limbs or make a hole in their wooden chests when fired through. Starting to sense a pattern going on here. If it weren’t for the ridiculous clues across the Nethersphere a la Deep Breath and the SS Madame de Pompadour, the Cybermen could be a great aspect for the episode, but sadly they get pushed aside by the mysterious Missy, a character we’ve been forced to follow over the course of 10 episodes before her reveal.

Ahh, Missy (Michelle Gomez), a character who’s had a number of viewers puzzled and others uninterested. Over the past week, and indeed this episode, it’s been promoted that we’ll find out who Missy is, and the waiting has also been a drag due to there being no actual mystery aside from her fleeting appearances over the series. Her quips have been more of the same from previous mysteries Tasha Lem and River Song, and it was discouraging to hear her say she was his boyfriend. But the reveal was perhaps the worst thing which could happen. Turns out she is the Master in a new incarnation. A character who’s been male for the last 40 years is now a woman. Now, whilst I’m all for a female Time Lord and maybe even a female Doctor, I don’t feel like this is how he/she should handled as a character. It’s almost an insult to his creators’ initial viewing as being “The Doctor’s Moriarty” as now she’s instead become the Irene Adler to his Sherlock...his third Irene Adler in the space of 4 years. It’s an insult to fans of the Doctor/Master dynamic, and what’s worse is that there is a perfectly good villainess Time Lord in the form of The Rani (portrayed by the late Kate O’Mara) just waiting to be used, and now she has no need to because of this decision. It’s an alteration to a character fans love to hate and it complete ruins what’s left of the episode.

The only saving grace that can be commented on is the performance of Capaldi and Coleman in their roles, but by this point it’s an easy task and the writing is so subpar that they need to use their abilities to push the episode up. Danny’s subplot about his time in the army was poorly handled and very rushed in order to get the relationship stuff in thus losing any impact it had intended on having, and he has so little screen time that it’s barely noticeable or rememberable.

Dark Water is a mess. An absolute mess. It’s predictable from the get-go, it tries to reincorporate elements from the past and one-up them in a terrible manner, the twist is insulting and a great enemy has been reduced to simple bodyguards. Dark Water is an episode which makes me say no to a future series like this. It has warranted me to tell potential viewers to not watch the current series because of how poorly done it’s been, and this episode is the cherry on the top. This episode is perhaps the worst I have ever seen; surpassing a story I can barely come to say by its proper title. I really hope Death in Heaven can improve this travesty, but at the rate the series has been I cannot say my expectations are high, as Dark Water deserves a terribly low score of 2/10.