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Clara goes to the dark side, with dark secrets revealed in Dark Water

Surprises and Cybermen, but Doctor Who still has a lot to pack into part two

Gavin says:

The story arc has been revealed: the backdrop to Doctor Who season 8 is a vast Cyberman-take-over plan. The author? Missy – only Missy isn’t Missy, she is the Master.

Dark Water is part one to two that starts to pull together the threads from preceding episodes.

Missy and Seb have been welcoming the deceased to their nethersphere to have them sign away their consciousnesses to a super high density, Time Lord hard drive while harvesting the bodies as Cybermen – like galactic Burke and Hares or future Doctor Frankensteins.

The Doctor and Missy in Dark Water

“Cybermen from cyberspace,” Missy muses.

What good is an angry soul trapped in a Cybersuit? Break them first or get them to go willingly, into what they believe is a beautiful but fake afterlife.

Danny Pink illustrates this: lost and alone, damaged by his manipulated encounter with a boy he killed while serving in the army, rejected by Clara. Go on, Danny boy, make it easy on you and on everybody else, lad: press the Delete Danny Pink button. Go on ...

It was one of the series’ more powerful moments, if hurriedly introduced.

Suddenly, Mr Pink – until now a narrow dimensional character defined by his love of Clara and the fact he teaches maths — has a dark and emotionally crippling secret.

Now we’re supposed to understand why he’s so down going on adventures with the Doctor – adventure is a path that can lead you down dead ends, like killing. The reveal suggests Pink’s not been as open in his relationship with Clara as we, or he, thinks.

As to the story arc, the visual clues to the Cybermen have been there all along. That big-circle-little-circle motif that’s been popping up – it’s the Cybermen’s eye. You saw it last in Mummy on the Orient Express, on the train’s computer screens, and you saw it in Seb’s office and in close up on the Cybermen’s face. Now we know why somebody was trying to understand the secret to eternal regeneration of mummy killer – to make their automated army immortal.

As for the return of the Master, The Doctor’s periodic references to being the last of his species in past episodes – looking back, they were heavy hints.

Dark Water continued the 1930s adventure feel we experienced in Mummy. This time, an eerie mausoleum full of skeletons and our two leads, the Doctor and Clara, treading deeper into a mystery closing around them, deeper into danger.

Danny Pink in Dark Water

The Doctor is skeptical but unable to provide any actual answers, Clara is left alone in a gloomy office with a materialising Cyberman over her shoulder looking – in this context – more like the Machine Man from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis than ever before.

Every 1930s’ adventurer needs a worthy nemesis and this is why we have the Master back in strutting, manic, madness mode, his flamboyance the opposite of the buttoned-down Doctor. Planting a smacker on Who, impersonating a droid, clapping his/her hands and clicking his/her fingers to raise the Cybermen. One of the Master’s signatures under Moffatt has been his false identities, now he’s added cross-dressing to his list of stunts.

Or has he regenerated as woman?

The Master, under Moffat, has become a villain you can believe in in Doctor Who – dark, calculating, firebrand, unpredictable and angry at the universe. He’s an admirable adversary – let’s see how he does in part two.

Keeping the adventure theme, there was comedy in Dark Water. Seb the sinister pen pusher, sympathising with Danny and rolling his eyes like a John Cleese bowler-hatted bureaucrat while gently shepherding the uncomprehending Pink to his fate.

We were left hanging, naturally, and that’s acceptable, but some aspects will need to be resolved in part two.

Who exactly IS Clara Oswald and what IS her role in season eight? An emotional wreck and pseudo suicidal, she’s willing to destroy her relationship with the Doctor in a fiery volcano to get Danny back. Will the Doctor remind her of that at the end of part two and say why he loves her, he can’t have her with him?

Clara digs deep to stand up to Danny’s emotional appeals and snaps into action at the sight of the Cyberman in a tank in the office where the Doctor had left her.

But why was Missy cooing over Clara in Flatline, hinting at some higher, sinister purpose? Was that moment in the volcano an emotional aberration or the tip of a dark iceberg?

What happens to Danny Pink — is he dead and is he coming back? The rules of this plot line suggest “no” as he’s been uploaded to the Time Lord hard drive.

How did the Master escape where we left him last time, locked in an inescapable moment of the Time War on Gallifrey? How and why did he regenerate as a woman? Can the Who writers stick to this or will they pull some hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye explanation as to how he can come back?

And, how was it that the Doctor pushes open the doors to the mausoleum to walk down the steps of St Pauls’ in Central London? More “Time Lord” technology? ®

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