Apologies for the lack of illustration with this piece. I did keep holding off in the hope that I’d have a piece of art to go along with it finished, but there’s only so many hours in the day (I sooo need a TARDIS).  Hopefully it’ll be the jumping off point for a few general reactions on Series 8 in in its entirety. And also thanks in advance if you manage to make it to the end of this. It’s appreciated.

Rather than focus on Death in Heaven in isolation, I’m going to take a brief whistle-stop tour to look at how we arrived there via the rest of the series. This was originally going to be a post on the Death in Heaven thread but it grew so outrageously that a separate blogpost seemed to be the way to go. And apologies for the length.

First of all, some general thoughts on Twelve (or Thirteen or even 1.2) although I guess he seems to be officially called the 12th Doc. Overall, I’ve really liked Capaldi’s Doc, though I have to admit that I’ve also been slightly surprised by some of his choices. I had expected someone a bit more mysterious, a bit more in control, perhaps in the style of the 7th, and I’ve been surprised at how error-prone he is sometimes. But at the same time, I’ve grown to like that and the surprising whimsicality he’s sometimes shown. I’ve also been slightly surprised at just how of a ‘Malcolm Tucker in space’ edge he’s had to him at times, although I suspect this might be a case of writers being unable to resist the temptation to give Capaldi those sort of lines, knowing just how good he is at delivering them.

There’s also a surprising vulnerability in there too, which is an interesting choice to make in an actor of his age, with its suggestion almost of a slightly ailing parent perhaps. As I’ve said on t’other place, I wonder now if the Afterlife/Missy arc was a whole big misdirection (and one which looks like it’s going to get its payoff a lot further down the line, rather like Trenzalore) and that the true arc of this series was a 12-episode regeneration crisis. It’s been done very subtly, very carefully — largely because we’ve already seen the damage it can do if it’s done badly a la Colin Baker but the arc of this series is the Doctor asking ‘why this face?’ (who am I, basically), followed by “am I a good man?’. Death in Heaven was primarily about answering those questions, about the Doctor reconnecting with who he was. It was a very brave move, relied on JLC to effectively carry many of the episodes and was absolutely brilliant.

Does that mean we’ll see a slightly different, slightly more confident Doctor next year. I don’t know. I wouldn’t want Capaldi’s Doctor to change too much. But I think we probably should see a Doctor who’s a little more front and centre, a little more at the heart of the stories, especially as Jenna seems to be on the verge of moving on.

Which leads to the question what kind of companion would work for Capaldi. I think he and Jenna have been great and had a chemistry that I just don’t think she had with Matt. It’s possible that Capaldi’s Doc would work with a ‘companion of the week’ format that didn’t really work for Tennant in his final ‘year’ but it might be appropriate for 12. I know many were looking forward to Osgood possibly becoming a companion but I think she was too smart already, too much of a fangirl, even. I’m not sure if she would have worked long-term. Actually, I think River Song would work as FT companion with Capaldi as she wouldn’t overpower him in a way that I think she would with Matt. But I suspect that would be considered ageing the TARDIS demographic slightly. Personally, I’d be quite happy to see Jenna carry for another series.

Which brings me onto DEEP BREATH. It’s no Eleventh Hour, that’s for sure, but I think it’s slightly better than The Christmas Invasion, if for no other reason than having a regeneration story within a Christmas special is just a bit too much of an overloaded mixture, I suspect. Although I suppose it did allow Tennant to hit the ground running in his first series proper. It was great to see The Paternoster Gang fleshed out and established on their home turf — making me want to see a spin-off even more, or at least see them more often — but the key scene for me was the Doctor and Clara in the restaurant. Capaldi and Coleman had a great dynamic, somewhere between bickering married couple, slightly resentful exes and perhaps even brother and sister. It’s a shame we didn’t see a bit more of this comic ambivalence throughout the series, although I don’t think we’ve ever seen a Doctor/companion relationship that has been quite so troubled.

INTO THE DALEK had lots of great ideas and some cracking visuals but just didn’t really spark in the end, I think. I like the idea of bringing shades of grey into the Dalek world but I think after Asylum of the Daleks, which I really liked, this fell a bit flat. I do hope that the creation of Rusty is going to have repercussions for the future.

ROBOT OF SHERWOOD — I know many hated this and I didn’t love it but I didn’t despise it either. The golden arrow denouement was the first indication that this series was going to take some interesting, and risky, narrative decisions. At the end of the day, it still was miles better than The King’s Demons, which it kinda reminded me of.

LISTEN was another tonal shift and a great story too, one of the series highpoints for me. Capaldi showed a few more hints of what kind of Doctor he was going to be — a bit professorial, with his oratory ‘question’ ‘conjecture’ style, but also nicely clueless too and also much better at relating to kids than he’d like to pretend. Much more Hartnellian than you’d expect any Doctor to be in this day and age.

TIME HEIST is kind of Doctor Who tries to do the Ariel episode of Firefly and for me it doesn’t really work. Quite fun and all that but it just didn’t feel like a Capaldi story. In the same way that Vampires in Venice felt like a Tennant story that just happened to have Smith in it, this felt like a Smith story that just happened to have Capaldi. Especially in the final scene in the vault in which all I could hear was Smith lines coming through Capaldi’s mouth. It just felt as if it should have had Smith, Amy, Rory and River in it.

I kind of liked THE CARETAKER. It’s the closest Who has ever sailed to doing an out-and-out Buffy episode, I think. With Coal Hill standing in for Sunnydale High and the Skovox Blitzer standing in for vampire threat of the week. And actually in many ways I think you could look at Capaldi’s doc as a Giles figure this year, with the much more central Clara figure almost being a Buffy analogue. No wonder the Ming-Mongs hated it.

And then it’s KILL THE MOON. Now there’s an episode that fandom is going to be talking about for years to come. It looked great. The most convincing portrayal of an alien landscape (or moonscape) in Who ever, I’d say. And my jaw dropped at THAT reveal as much as anyone but by a second viewing I’d decided I loved it. Moffatt’s take on the show has always been Who as Fairytale rather than Who as Science and never has it been more nakedly stated than here. It was worth it for nothing else than to imagine Christopher Bidmead spluttering over his Cocoa Pops.

The other big star of Series 8, aside from Capaldi himself, was Jamie Mathieson. I’d never really got into Being Human, so this was my first real introduction to him and his two episodes were, frankly, belters. He showed an ability to do the challenging Doctor-lite story and do it well and inventively, as well as being able to do the big showpiece, spectacular episodes. Almost as if he were being groomed for more of the big episodes, one might think. Both FLATLINE and MUMMY ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS were absolute belters, I thought.

And by now we’re starting to see some of the other big themes of the series emerge. Danny Pink. Clara’s lies. Missy. I think it’s a shame that some of the popular theories on here about TARDIS-as-addiction never ultimately came to fruition as I think it would have been interesting to take the show in that direction but I guess that would have been just a bit too much for the younger demographic, so it’s probably a wise move.

This series doesn’t really have an out-and-out stinker of Fear Her proportions but IN THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT came dangerously close I thought. Which is surprising, when you see who wrote it. And it’s not the Gaia-stylee ending that’s the problem, I think. Or the kids, who largely worked better here than the ones in Nightmare in Silver. I think it should have taken a leaf (arf!) from Kill The Moon’s book and taken a giant leap into fairytale. I’d have loved to have seen it become Who does Where the Wild Things Are (a really underrated movie in my opinion, with a stonking soundtrack to boot). It just lacked the courage of its convictions.

DARK WATER was a cracking penultimate episode I thought. The only reservations I had are that the death of Danny Pink was a bit too sudden. There was too much to process in the first 10 minutes for us to be truly invested in Clara’s loss. If Forest had ended with Danny’s death then that would have given us a week to be processing the idea of Clara’s grief and be more on board with her desperation. It was all just done too fast, no matter how well. But apart from that, great. Michelle Gomez an awesome Master, cementing her place in Who lore almost immediately. And the faux-offence that attended the ‘don’t cremate me’ line still invokes an involuntary eyeroll in me, I’m afraid.

However, DEATH IN HEAVEN didn’t really deliver, I’m afraid and would say it’s been Moffatt’s weakest series finale so far. Admittedly the likes of The Big Bang are kind of hard to top but this was just too much of an RTD-style everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink-never-mind-the-logic-feel-the-spectacle kind of way. For the first time over on the Graun I had to admit that some of the Ming-Mongs were actually coming up with valid points. This just didn’t feel like Moffatt. I suspect that this was because this series had taken some series risks — ramping up the fairytale, an aloof, withdrawn Doc in regeneration crisis, a female Master and I can’t help but feel at some executive level it was felt the series had to end on a more familiar, ramp-up-the-epic feel. However, it got the job done in terms of the arc and had some great moments — the Doc’s frustration at not finding Gallifrey was great and, again, Capaldi and Coleman were great in their ‘mutual lies’ scene. And as others have said, it’s essentially the middle part of the three-parter, so I may completely change my mind after Chrimbo.

What it did emphasise to me though is just how the new series hasn’t got Cybermen right yet. The problem, I think, is that they’re still taking their cue from Earthshock (a great story but one which has done more damage to the Cybermen than all the gold and nail varnish in the universe could ever manage). We get more stomping around en masse in a way that’s almost entirely un-scary. The iconography of Cybermen rising from the grave was quite nice but didn’t really cut it. I still think we need to get away from the idea that Cybermen are soldiers. They’re not. They’re scientists. I’d say Moffatt and co have to go off and rewatch Tenth Planet and Moonbase rather than The Invasion and Earthshock. They also might want to check out Spare Parts and Sword of Orion. I want to see Cybermen lurking in the shadows, a hidden and implacable threat. Actually I want to see Junkyard Demon on TV.

(And again with the Buffy maybe? Plucky lone girl surrounded by gravestones as creatures rise from the grave. Not to mention tear-jerking goodbyes with her now-undead boyfriend.)

All in all, a cracking series and on the whole better than Matt’s final year, which ended on a high, but which had a few ropey early episodes to it. Roll on Christmas (and I’d be willing to place a conservative wager on Santa possibly being The Meddling Monk, although that might be unlikely after we’ve just had the Master back.)