Doctor Who Recap: Death in Heaven

By Edwin Davies

November 19, 2014

Watch out for that hand, Doctor.

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Last time, I wrote about how the problem with a lot of Doctor Who two-parters is that the first halves tend to be much better than the second halves. It's not hard to see why: the first episode has the advantage of getting to escalate a crisis for The Doctor without the burden of having to resolve anything, while the second has to deal with the immediate fallout of its predecessor before leaping into its own story. In drama, raising questions is fun and easy, but providing satisfactory answers is frustrating and difficult.

That pattern aggressively asserted itself with this final episode of Peter Capaldi's first series in the blue box, as the show followed the dark, weird and unsettling "Dark Water" with the much sillier "Death in Heaven." The two episodes are so dissimilar in tone that it's hard to believe the same creative team was behind both, but they do in fact share the same writer (Steven Moffat) and director (Rachel Talalay). That's not to say that it is a terrible episode, because there were some really strong and emotional moments in it, just that it falls so flat after the previous one that it can't help but be disappointing.

"Dark Water" ended with a number of revelations and cliffhangers. The Doctor had discovered that Missy (Michelle Gomez) was a regeneration of his old friend/nemesis The Master, and that she had created an army of Cybermen from the bodies of the recently deceased, while keeping their consciousnesses (including that of the dearly departed Danny Pink) in a large spherical storage unit. Clara, meanwhile, was being menaced by one of those same Cybermen immediately after she had completely an emotionally fraught conversation with Danny's consciousness. It's the second plot strand that the episode starts with by having Clara talk her way out of being vaporised by claiming that "Clara Oswald" is a made up persona, and that she is actually The Doctor. Cue cutesy opening credits in which Jenna Coleman's eyebrows replaced Peter Capaldi's and she gets first billing.




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Rather than pulling at that thread a little more to see where it goes, we jump back to The Doctor and Missy, who are quickly taken into custody by Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) and the Agents of UNIT, but not before Missy orders her Cyberminions to fly into the sky and detonate, releasing a black cloud which then causes the dead to rise from their graves as newly-minted Cybermen. Within minutes, Missy has created a vast of army of killer robots, one which will swell its ranks with those it kills. As The Doctor says once he is (supposedly) safely aboard a UNIT plane, "How can you win a war against an enemy that can weaponise the dead?"

Right there, you have two plots that could have made for a very compelling episode. Clara, separated from The Doctor and forced to fend for herself, has to pretend to be him in order to survive, in effect taking the next logical step from her role in "Flatline." On the other hand, treating The Cybermen as essentially zombies, a connection that is reinforced by the sluggish way the disinterred Cybermen move, would allow the show to continue its habit of shifting between genres from episode to episode. Neither idea is explored, though, and gets dropped almost instantly in favour of other, even less developed ones.


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