Dark Water

Dear Gary—

“It was boring,” Clara says of Poor Danny Pink’s death. “It was ordinary,” she continues. “He was alive, and then he was dead and it was nothing.”

Except it was not nothing and hence my problem with season arcs. Poor Danny Pink was set up. He was set up from the beginning of the season for this oh so ordinary death. It was his whole reason for being. And we knew from the start that he was being set up for something. He was not introduced as another companion or as a person in his own right. He was a tool; a pawn; a sacrificial lamb. And so his death is boring and ordinary and I can’t get too worked up about it and I can’t buy into Clara’s grief because I can’t buy into Clara’s love. Their romance was never anything more than a matter of convenience to the narrative.

Dark Water is the first part of Poor Danny Pink’s swan song and starts with Clara choosing to declare her love for him in a most impersonal way, in keeping with the nature of their manufactured liaison. She begins her phone declaration by repeatedly telling him to “shut up.” I think this is meant to be cute and endearing; it’s not. What it is, however, is typical of the way in which she has always treated Poor Danny Pink, and I cannot imagine why he has continually put up with her deceit and condescension. Poor Danny Pink is Clara’s door mat and it is this loss that she mourns.

It is not so much grief as anger that she feels; anger at her lack of and loss of control. Danny’s death was boring; it was ordinary; it was out of keeping with her grand illusions. At least she is honest enough to realize she doesn’t deserve any better. “But I am owed better,” she declares. And so she embarks on her selfish quest.

Clara’s confrontation with the Doctor is a compelling scene; Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi are both outstanding as usual. Clara’s threat is completely convincing as she holds the last remaining TARDIS key over the lava (although she has undoubtedly forgotten about the Doctor’s magic finger snap entry). How wonderful that the Doctor calls her bluff. Clara believes that she is holding all of the TARDIS key cards, but she has backed herself into a corner.

“Either you do as you’re told or stop threatening me,” the Doctor tells her.

“Do you know what, Doctor,” Clara replies defiantly, “when it comes to taking control you really are out of your depth.”

When the Doctor refuses her request to bring Poor Danny Pink back to her she has no choice but to destroy her lifeline in the lava. She immediately collapses in tears. She had no choice. She backed herself into a corner and had no choice. Clara the control freak lost control yet again.

The Doctor emerges victorious. I love it. Even when seemingly ceding control back to her by caving in to her wishes, he does so on his own terms and thus retains command of the situation. He doesn’t take her where she wants to go because she demands it; he takes her there because he wants to; after he has broken her.

However this is where the show loses me.

“Almost every culture in the universe has some concept of an afterlife,” the Doctor says. “I always meant to have a look around; see if I could find one.”

Now, I know that the Doctor doesn’t believe in the Devil and I’m certain he scoffs at the notion of God. So how does an afterlife fit in? Or the concept of a soul? Certainly, some atheists can maintain the existence of an afterlife and soul, but the Doctor? Hardly. He derides anything with a whiff of the supernatural. The show is careful to steer clear of the term ‘soul’ and instead throws about talk of the mind. Seb uses soul, but only in a “whatever you want to call it” way; and the Doctor talks of the “poor souls” in the tanks, but he makes it clear that “they’re just dead and they’re not coming back.”

Poor Danny Pink is dead. The Doctor knows he is dead and he is not coming back. Yet he plugs Clara into the TARDIS to find Poor Danny Pink. According to the Doctor’s logic the TARDIS should take them to the morgue. It doesn’t; and now things turn really ludicrous.

“Good point; tombs with windows. Who wants to watch their loved ones rot? Why would anyone go to so much trouble just to keep watch on the dead?” Good point. Welcome to 3W.

3W reminds me of Tranquil Repose from the Classic Who serial Revelation of the Daleks. Except Tranquil Repose has a logical reason for being. It houses the bodies of those in suspended animation awaiting a future cure. In the meantime, unbeknownst to anyone, Davros is harvesting these bodies to turn into Daleks. Fast forward to the 3W of Dark Water, which is cobbled together out of several half-baked ideas.

3W appears to be a mausoleum housing skeletons seated in some mysterious liquid, the dark water of our title. To what purpose? Who is the customer base for this apparent business venture? The rich and powerful presumably. But why? How is having your remains sitting in a tank of water any better than lying down in a soft coffin? What gullible suckers are falling for this? But hold on, this isn’t really a mausoleum; this is merely a front put on for the Doctor’s benefit.

So who the heck is Dr. Chang?

Dr. Chang sincerely believes in the product he is selling. I can only assume he is a stooge that Missy has somehow duped into believing this malarkey. It is through Dr. Chang that we learn the meaning of 3W. 3W stands for “the three words.” OK, that explains everything. (“Oh, I’ve got a lot of internalized anger.”) It is an excruciating exchange to pad the episode and provide cheap shock effect; dredging up the “white noise” theory (“so what”); and playing on the “most fundamental fear in the universe” of dying (“just answer our question”); and laying out a fabricated history of scientific discovery by one Doctor Skarosa (“so, an idiot then”); to finally come to those three words (none of which, much to my surprise, start with ‘W’): “Don’t cremate me!”

“The dead remain conscious. The dead are fully aware of everything that is happening to them,” Dr. Chang proclaims. If that is the case, I would think the swift end of cremation is preferable to slowly rotting in the ground while worms and insects eat away my flesh. Maybe when I think of it, being pickled and preserved in water is a reasonable alternative, except those are skeletons we see sitting there so the flesh is still eaten away. Doesn’t matter, though; because as the Doctor rightly sees: “Fakery. All of it. It’s a con; it’s a racket.” They aren’t really skeletons at all. They’re Cybermen!

So please tell me what the whole 3W nonsense is about? Why the front? Why the need for Dr. Chang? This elaborate pretense took time and effort and money and loads of luck to pull off and keep secret. If it was done solely for the Doctor, how did Missy know the Doctor would end up there? How did she know Poor Danny Pink was going to die? Was she the one driving the car? Even so, how did she know the Doctor would indulge Clara’s selfish demands? Missy had some serious precognition

Let’s turn our attention to the Nethersphere.  Here we have a retread of the Great Intelligence’s plan. Upload minds to a hard drive. We also have some shoddy confirmation of the ridiculous claims being made at 3W. Poor Danny Pink is cold. Why is he cold? He’s dead. He exists as a mind only. Oh, I get it . . . the three words; “don’t cremate me;” a shivering Poor Danny Pink . . . “You’re still connected to your old body in the old world. You’re still going to feel what it feels.” How does that work exactly? Because Doctor Who says so. Rubbish.

This is where the show has painted itself into a corner. Doctor Who doesn’t believe in God. Doctor Who doesn’t believe in Heaven. Doctor Who doesn’t believe in the soul (in any religious sense of the word). But Doctor Who apparently believes that the mind can live on after death independent of the body, although telepathically connected to it somehow. Missy has taken advantage of this fact and has uploaded all of these minds to her Nethersphere. This is where I want to ask Doctor Who, if Missy had not happened along, where would all of these minds end up? (I guess in the telly making white noise.)

This is a fundamental difference between Classic and New Who. Classic Who has its share of unanswered questions, but it adamantly sticks to scientific principles underlying all of its remarkable and outlandish theories. I look to The Daemons as an example. The Doctor confronts superstition and magic and the devil head on. And while the explanation boils down to aliens and alien technology, it exists on a reasonable and logical plane within the context of a sci fi world.

New Who, on the other hand and as represented in our present story, shrouds its extraordinary and bizarre claims in a nebulous tissue of emotional bombshells.

The thing is, Gary, they have the means by which they could frame their arguments on a solid foundation: “That’s a matrix data-slice. A Gallifreyan hard drive. Time Lord Technology.” But it is thrown out as fragments of info and the only purpose is to elicit the fact that Missy is the Master. No attempt is made to ground the Nethersphere or 3W in the intriguing complexity of that idea. Instead the sham crypt and weird waiting room in limbo are only tenuously tethered to the notion while they are allowed to float freely about from one irrational assertion to another.

I might also mention the ghosting that is touched on in Silence in the Library, but since this isn’t even hinted at here I’ll pass over it and return to ghost PDP in the Nethersphere with Seb. PDP is dead and cold and Seb is ushering him through the red tape of the afterlife. There is no rational reason for Seb in Missy’s data-slice matrix other than to give exposition to the audience. And there is no sense to the Wi-Fi or iPads other than the humor they afford. (“IPads? We have Steve Jobs.”) Inside Time Lord technology and they need Steve Jobs to provide them with Wi-Fi; spotty Wi-Fi at that. Nor is there any possible reason for any of the trapped minds to interact, much less for Seb to facilitate a meeting between PDP and the young boy he killed years ago during his soldiering days. That is, no reason other than the emotional impact on the audience. (At this point we are supposed to applaud Steven Moffat’s cleverness for tying in that tear on PDP’s cheek way back at the beginning of the season when his class inexplicably questioned him on it.)

The real payoff for the PDP arc, however, is in the PDP/Clara relationship.  And so, through the magic of Steve Job’s spotty Wi-Fi, ghost PDP is able to communicate with Clara. Except Control Freak Clara won’t trust that PDP is who he says he is. CFC insists that PDP prove who he is. CFC will accept nothing he says as true unless he says something she can accept as true. The two talk in circles for a bit until CFC backs herself into a corner yet again.  “Stop saying that,” she commands when all PDP can think to say is, “I love you.” “Don’t say that,” she reiterates. “If you say that again, I swear I will switch this thing off.” She has laid down another ultimatum and for once PDP stops being CFC’s doormat.

PDP: “Clara?”

CFC: “Yes?”

PDP: “I love you.”

CFC has no other choice than to switch PDP off. PDP wins.

Now Seb gives Danny the choice to turn off his emotions; and again this is purely for the effect it elicits. Neither Missy nor the Cybermen have any motivation for allowing their victims to make that choice.

Missy and the Cybermen—we’re finally at our cliffhanger of an ending for this first of the two part season finale. The Cybermen emerge from their tanks. The Doctor runs outside only to discover that 3W has been secretly hidden inside of Saint Paul’s Cathedral of all places. The Doctor warns the milling citizenry to run but they remain remarkably calm even though Cybermen are marching through their midst. Missy gives some insight into her grand scheme. “All the graves of planet Earth are about to give birth,” she says. “You know the key strategic weakness of the human race? The dead outnumber the living.”

I should hold off until Part II right about now, but I have to at least mention this. What? The dead outnumber the living? So what? The majority of these dead are nothing but bones and dust. Now, if she were planning on reanimating those corpses that were still relatively intact I’d understand. But her allies are Cybermen. They make their own cyber bodies. They don’t need the dead bodies; only the minds, which Missy already has loaded in her matrix, and maybe some brains. And now I wonder where all the cyber bodies are going to come from. Is there some magic going on under the ground in all of those graves that is turning the bones and dust and rotting flesh into metal? I’ll reserve any further ranting for the nonce. I still have Part II to contend with after all.

Finally we get the big reveal. “Oh, you know who I am.” The Time Lady the Doctor abandoned. Missy. “I couldn’t very well keep calling myself the Master, now could I?” An effective cliffhanger. Yet this could have been so much more climatic if it had not been marred by the forced and manufactured arc. Scenes of Missy that were scattered about through the season are even more absurd in hindsight; scenes such as Missy welcoming an android into ‘Paradise’ (Deep Breath).  What need is there for Missy to personally welcome each and every victim? And OK, let’s say she only welcomes those that know the Doctor. Why? The droid never shows his half-face during the entirety of the finale. How did she even know Half-Face was going to die? Not to mention the fact that Half-Face is an android and not a human so what use is he to her matrix of minds? Or are we to believe that all intelligence, both human and artificial, is welcome in an open door policy of non-discrimination? And all of the hints that Missy has been engineering the relationship between Clara and the Doctor, that Missy hand-picked Clara as the Doctor’s companion and kept throwing them together—what crystal ball was telling her that this would all lead the two to 3W at just the right time?

The answer, Gary, is that Missy is not so much the Master (shock) but none other than Steven Moffat.