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After a largely great season with relatively few missteps, one that has seen the show revitalised by a new face in the TARDIS and a more subtle approach to long-form storytelling, Doctor Who is faced with the daunting task of trying to end things on a good note. That's something the show has struggled with a lot in the past, particularly when it comes to two-part finales. The typical pattern (which could actually be applied to all two-parters) is that the first half builds to a series of reveals, and in so doing manages to be hugely fun and intriguing, then the second half has to resolve all of them, and winds up being a bit of a disappointment. Based on past form, I'm now really worried for the final episode of the run, because this first half was a blast.

Last week, I said that I thought that Danny would be drawn into an adventure this week despite saying that he just wants a quiet life. I was proved right, but not in the way I expected. Danny's death (though that should probably be in quotation marks) in the first five minutes is one of the few times that the show has genuinely shocked me. Clara is talking to Danny on the phone and is preparing to tell him that she has been traveling with The Doctor (which, again, I thought he already knew, but anyway) when the line suddenly goes quiet. After a few seconds, a woman starts talking to Clara and apologising, and a few seconds after that, Clara is running out into the street and looking at a memorial. Yes, Danny Pink was killed after being run over by a car while talking to his girlfriend on the phone. It was sudden, unexpected, and almost tragically normal. Just like any other death.

It would have been incredibly bold for the show to leave it at that, and turn the two-parter into the Doctor Who equivalent of "The Body," the heartbreaking episode of Buffy in which a supporting character dies from a brain aneurysm in the opening minute, and the rest of the episode deals with the emotional fallout in an unflinchingly realistic way. Of course, this is Doctor Who, and that doesn't happen. Clearly Steven Moffat will only take his Joss Whedon obsession so far.

What actually happens is that Clara, numbed by grief, sets in motion a plan. She takes all of the keys to the TARDIS, convinces The Doctor to take her to a volcano (over his protestations that it's "just a leaky mountain") and proceeds to go all Frodo on him. Knowing that lava is the only thing that can destroy a TARDIS key, she throws one of them in to the volcano each time The Doctor refuses to travel back in time and save Danny. Once she has destroyed them all, The Doctor reveals that he had induced a state of hypnosis in order to figure out what was wrong with her. He then offers to help her find Danny at the point where her timeline and his are next due to meet, which just so happens to be in the afterlife that we have been given glimpses of over the course of the series. So the two little Orpheuses head out on an adventure, which means that The Doctor is finally going to meet Missy.

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