@denvaldron
Sorry, was going to wander off until the next ep, but just saw this quoted by @ichabod :
the charge I level at Moffat. He’s taken a character with the potential for life-like depth and flexibility, for fallibility and humanity, and he’s reduced her to a plot pawn to perform a prescribed story function.
This is just about the most thoroughly and absurdly ridiculous comment that can be made about Moffat’s writing. Everything – everything – Moffat writes is about the exploration of character. From Press Gang, through Coupling to Sherlock and Who his stories are entirely character driven (his imagining of Watson in Sherlock is a masterclass made real by a fine actor who knows when to dial it down).
Once deconstructed his plots are invariably pretty simple – usually some form of closed loop built around a standard, US-style A-plot, B-plot and (if there’s room) C-plot for light relief. And sometimes they are a bit rushed, as is inevitable with modern TV production schedules when the budget is bust, or the bus has been wrecked on a dockside.
But his characters are rich, complex and when things happen to them they are changed. There are never magic “all better now” resets and even when you think there are, they will be confounded further down the road. Consider how long it took Rory to trust the Doctor – or how quickly Amy chose when faced with losing him. Consider how long the Doctor had to keep the dreadful secret from River, or his investigations from Ganger!Amy and Rory.
And when Clara – who has been utterly crushed by Missy and then continuously abused – is confronted by just about the worst fear she could imagine SHE PANICKED.
Because that is what a once-confident human (who, incidentally, has seen more trauma than most) who has lost all sense of control and had her self-worth crushed like a discarded fag butt, would do.
To suggest otherwise by dismissing Clara as a plot pawn is absurd.
And to cap it all off, this episode really delivered in spades the full and epic scale of the arrogance of the time lords in a way that would have been unacceptable coming from The Doctor. And again, that is about the character of a people who have mastery of time itself and to whom stopping a few thousand planes is flight is a mere parlour trick.
