Dark Water

Dark Water is the opening half of the first two part story Doctor Who has done since the less than stellar combination of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People in May 2011. While the second part hasn’t aired yet it feels safe to say that it this story will surpass that story in every conceivable way. Judging by what we’ve seen so far it also looks like it’s going to better the last Steven Moffat penned two-parter, series six’s opening story of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon. In fact it looks like it could be the best two-part story since David Tennant’s End of Time swansong.

This is not the accomplishment it might appear. Despite turning out one of the highlights of series one in his two part story The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, Steven Moffat has a spotty past with the multiple episode offerings. The second two part story he gave us was series four’s Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, which was enjoyable enough but riddled with minor faults and a came as a significant drop in quality from his contributions to the first three series.

The problem became really apparent when his time as producer kicked in. Before The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone aired Moffat had opined that two part stories only truly worked when the first instalment ended on a cliffhanger that completely changed the way the audience viewed the situation (changed the game, if you will) so as to set up an entirely different story to be told in part two. It’s logical and easy to agree with but he didn’t get it entirely right with the Weeping Angels two part return. The cliffhanger felt laboured and the second half was different in the wrong sort of way, substituting one group of studio sets, recording locations and themes for another but keeping the story the same without providing much of a change in perspective for the audience. It was a visual change and nothing more.

The series one finale went too far in the opposite direction, so much so that The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang can practically be seen as individual stories rather than two halves of a whole. Not that there’s anything wrong with standalone episodes, but it’s not what Moffat and his team were aiming for on that occasion.

Series six saw Moffat move the two part “finale” (a term he insisted on using even though he was referring to the precise opposite of a finale) to the opening two episodes, seemingly just to be contrary. Structurally it was pretty sound, the second episode opened up several months after the closing moments of the first, thereby allowing the story to continue from a different perspective. Ultimately the need for it to start the series was questionable but as a Doctor Who two part story it worked well enough and was the best ninety minute offering Moffles had made since series one.

All of which is to say that two part stories, particularly with Moffat’s extreme approach to changing things for the second halves, are tough things to assess as individual episodes. Dark Water is not intended to be something we look at in and of itself. It’s meant to be appraised as a whole in conjunction with Death in Heaven. But at the same time it told its own story and featured enough interesting bits and pieces and Moffat-favoured tropes to comment on it, so I will.

I’ll start with the big shock. No, that’s not Missy’s identity. That seemed pretty obvious all along, although, to be fair to Moffat, it wasn’t as obvious as Mr Saxon’s identity throughout series three (I guessed that in The Runaway Bride). It also wasn’t Danny dying. The harping on about his past as a soldier and the afterlife thread that had run throughout the series seemed destined to join and oh look, they did. The framing of the last shot in which we saw Danny alive made it fairly clear that something was about to happen to him, so his death didn’t come as a surprise.

The big shock of the episode was the return of Sheila Reid as Clara’s Gran. Under Moffat the show has been pretty poor at creating supporting casts to make the home lives of companions seem believable (with the obvious exception of Danny, who was designed to do far more than provide a simple fleshing out of the home life). It was only a minor part, just as it was in Time of the Doctor, but it’s neat, simple little touches of continuity that can mean the most.

Another surprise was that the Cybermen were foreshadowed so strongly before their reveal. Within the episode itself this made perfect sense, but I can’t imagine there were more than a few people watching unaware that they were in the episode. Obviously there were all those photos taken at St Pauls of the location shoot but they were also in the trailer shown at the end of In the Forest of the Night. Their musical sting appeared several minutes before any Cybermen did. Their presence in the episode hadn’t been hushed up so it was peculiar that the episode built up to their reveal in the manner that it did.

That said it did build to their reveal very well. The teardrop circular eye motif being used on the sliding doors, the musical sting, and the set design nods to Tomb of the Cybermen were all excellent touches, as was the fact that we’d seen the Cybermen throughout the episode and not realised it (although, of course, we had realised it because of the trailer and the location shots, but you know what I mean). There were a couple of missteps; Missy reaching out to touch the glass of a tank with a skeletal hand reaching out to mirror her movement (because when have the allegedly emotionless Cybermen ever gone in for bouts of sentimentality?); the sudden love of a nice sit down on stone thrones; the lack of an explanation for why they were sitting in vats of water, dark or otherwise; and the fact that Cybersuits now apparently have an intact human skeleton inside of them, but on the whole their reintroduction was handled well. By the end of the episode the Cybermen seemed like a genuine threat, something that’s quite rare in the history of their stories. For that matter it’s something Moffat’s not always achieved with his scripts in general.

The real wrong-footing came with Missy. Her first interaction with the Doctor saw her rattle off an old Bruce Forsyth catchphrase, passionately kiss the Doctor, and hold his hand to her chest before claiming to be a droid. That last one jarred with the level of personality displayed in the first three and with the character in general. The android claim was clearly there to desperately keep people off the scent until the final reveal seconds before the end of the episode, as was the kiss and the hand on the chest being played for laughs and the Doctor not revealing that he’d detected a dual heartbeat. Which is fair enough. The introduction of a new Master is one of those occasions that Doctor Who should revel in. It’s a chance to swerve the audience a bit and provide a satisfactory (though also slightly lazy) cliffhanger, because of the history of the character and the show. It couldn’t be done every week but as the last time we saw it was 2007 it was a perfectly acceptable addition here.

This feels as good a point as any to talk about Michelle Gomez. I like her as an actress and feel she’s a very good casting choice for the role of the Master-and-or-Missy. She has sufficient range and looks the part. Beyond that I don’t really feel there’s much to say at this point because I imagine the bulk of Gomez’s Master moments will come next week. What we got this week was very good, but it’s hard to say at this point whether or not it was a subdued performance designed to obscure the fact that Missy was the Master.

What we can say is that Moffat will almost certainly be going into continuity overdrive next week. The nature of the modern show (and Moffat’s nature as a writer pretty keen on being popular with the bulk of fandom) means that reintroducing the Master has to come with an explanation. It’s not like The Mark of the Rani where the Master was casually shown standing in a field dressed as a scarecrow after he’d last been seen shrinking inside a flame in Planet of Fire, presumably dying the process. People will want to know how he escaped the destruction of Gallifrey and turned from John Simm into Michelle Gomez. Which is a reasonable expectation in 2014, to be honest, but Moffat also set up a bundle of other stuff he needs to pay off. Such as why Missy is in league with the Cybermen (as in what will she actually get out of it?), how she procured and set up the Time Lord tech (which could very well lead to the Doctor setting out on that quest to find Gallifrey that was first mentioned in Day of the Doctor), Clara and Danny’s relationship, and, of course, the Doctor figuring out a way to stop the Cybermen. It’s not impossible, it’s a big ask to do it all in a satisfying manner inside forty-five minutes.

From that list the Danny and Clara relationship is the clearly intended as the most important part. Moffat has spent the entire series attempting to turn Danny into a meaningful part of Clara’s everyday life. He’s mostly failed, in no small part because of Samuel Anderson’s often wooden performance, but they’ve hit the mark enough to at least let us know what the intention is. The ending to Dark Water, Danny essentially being handed the means to commit suicide while a boy he shot dead watches on, was effective, and was made even more so by the scenes in which Clara and Danny had argued. That argument saw Clara tell Danny she wanted to be with him wherever he was and Danny, believing that would involve her dying, saying he loved her even though she’d said she’d end the call if he said that again without offering up a substantial argument that he really was Danny. Right now this looks as though it’s meant to be seen as Danny making the ultimate sacrifice. We’ll have to see if that holds true next, but it would certainly fit with what’s been done with the character so far.

Clara got another big emotional scene in addition to the one with Danny. You know, the one where she tried forcing the Doctor into helping her. It was a move that fit well enough with the control freak description often attached to her as it was completely believable that someone with those tendencies would behave that way when suffering from grief over the death of a loved one. The only trouble is that there’s been precious little evidence that Clara really does have control freak tendencies. Yes, the Doctor’s joked about it and she’s been quick to take control of some (but not all) chaotic situations that have sailed her way but mostly we know she’s supposed to be a control freak because Steven Moffat, lead writer, has told us that’s what she is. The scene made sense and was well acted by both Coleman and Capaldi but it didn’t feel as natural as it should have done. And as one of the key scenes of a two part finale it definitely should have felt natural, a culmination of a season’s worth of tension and foreshadowing.

On the whole any complaints I have are minor. I enjoyed Dark Water for what it was. The trouble is that I generally enjoy Moffat episodes while he’s setting things up and stop enjoying them when he has to start paying things off. Which is a problem here because, being the first part of a two part story, this was almost exclusively set up. In other words next week’s Death in Heaven has been given the strongest build-up possible, but there’s no guarantee it will provide the satisfying conclusion Dark Water deserves and needs.