Dark Water: Skeletons in the Tanks and a Volcano for Clara

It’s clear from the cold open of Dark Water that, apart from a wall of post-it notes, nothing much is going to tie the first episode of this two-part finale to the rest of the series, same as previous years. Clara is on the phone to Danny, finally ready to tell him she loves him, and mid-sentence he’s hit by a car and killed. It’s an abrupt, horrible way to start, and the Gran scene that follows, Clara sitting with her grief in a completely ordinary room, is the best thing in the episode. As a self-contained story it’s just about bearable. But I came out of it feeling the series had been building to something and this wasn’t it.

Only a week after In the Forest of the Night finally got Clara and Danny talking honestly to each other, he’s gone, and Clara doesn’t take it well at all. She works out where the Doctor keeps all seven of his TARDIS keys, drugs him with a sleep patch and takes him to the edge of an active volcano, threatening to throw the keys in one at a time unless he goes back and saves Danny. It’s a big, dramatic scene and for a few minutes I was right there with it. Then it turns out the Doctor switched the patch, the whole thing was happening inside her head and the TARDIS was letting her dream it, so he could see how far she’d go.

Seven keys and a volcano

Burned by the betrayal, the Doctor offers to help her anyway, which is the one moment of this Doctor being kind without any grumpiness on top. He hooks Clara’s mind into the TARDIS telepathic circuits to see if there’s any trace of Danny left anywhere in existence, and off they go. Meanwhile Danny wakes up somewhere called the Nethersphere, where a cheerful greeter called Seb tells him he’s in the afterlife, sat in a very bright, very ordinary office. The Nethersphere has been popping up at the end of episodes all series with Missy, and it doesn’t help that those appearances were tacked on to each episode like a DVD bonus, so now we’re here properly it feels like the payoff to something nobody had really been following.

In the Nethersphere Danny meets a child he accidentally killed while serving in Afghanistan. That clears up the enigma of the “bad day” we’ve been hearing about since Into the Dalek, the thing that made him who he is, and the scene with the boy is quiet and sad and one of the few in the Nethersphere I actually liked. Seb keeps nudging him to press a button and delete his emotions, which is obviously a very bad idea, and Danny keeps not doing it, which is about as much as he gets to do. I liked Danny more here than in most of the series, and it’s a bit cruel that his best material arrives after he’s dead and stuck behind a desk. The Nethersphere scenes are made almost unwatchable by Seb’s overacting, though, and that’s a shame when there’s a decent idea sitting underneath them.

3W and the dark water

The TARDIS takes the Doctor and Clara to the 3W facility, a sort of high-tech mausoleum where corpses sit upright in tanks of a substance called “dark water”, which only shows up organic matter, so all you can see are the skeletons. Then the skeleton heads start turning, very slowly, to look at you. The whole facility is macabre and the creepy moving skulls make it an effective piece of horror, easily the best part of the episode. The Doctor works out that the dead stay conscious after death, there’s a horrible bit about the dead begging not to be cremated, and it turns out the skeletons are Cybermen being uploaded with the minds of the dead. They break out at the end and walk out into London, and the building turns out to be St Paul’s Cathedral, which is a great image to finish on. The Cybermen haven’t been this creepy in years, and seeing them coming out of the water one by one, with the skeletons still sort of visible in your head, is the closest the episode gets to the horror it should have been all the way through.

But the volcano dream sequence is the worst example yet this series of the programme trying to have its dark cake and eat it. It turns Clara into a sociopath and then denies ever taking the character that far, because none of it really happened. That’s dishonest writing, and the show should know better. It also wasn’t needed. Her grief had already been perfectly well set up in that naturalistic scene with her Gran, and the threat doesn’t even hold up when the Doctor and Clara can open the TARDIS with a click of their fingers anyway. I didn’t need to see her betray him to believe she was devastated.

Missy, at last

Having waited so long for the truth about Missy, the double bluff comes off as tedious and the big reveal is underwhelming. She’s introduced as a welcome droid, the Doctor spends ages refusing to take her seriously, and then she tells him she’s a female regeneration of The Master. That raises a lot more questions than it answers, and from what I’ve seen since, very few of them get picked up. While the misogynistic, bigoted corners of the internet have been freaking out about a transgender Timelady, my real misgiving is the show’s inability lately to write interesting, powerful women.

The Doctor not knowing who Missy is relies on an incredible suspension of disbelief, and on turning a blind eye to everything the programme has already told us about Time Lords recognising each other. But the biggest problem is that nobody’s found anything worthwhile to do with Missy as a character, besides the slash-fiction friendly kiss she plants on the Doctor the moment they meet. She pouts, she skips, she’s very pleased with herself, and the performance isn’t far behind Seb for hamminess. I wanted to be unsettled by her and mostly I was just waiting for her to stop. The Master has always been at his best when he’s a genuine threat with a plan you can follow, and so far Missy is all mannerism and no plan, or none I could work out from this episode anyway.

A real mess

Danny’s death is also an unwelcome return of the “dead lover” motif that plagued so many of Amy and Rory’s storylines, and it’s used to bring about Clara’s breakdown while handing the Doctor and Clara a convenient excuse to run into Missy. After a few red herrings we find out the Nethersphere is nothing more than a simulated reality inside a global hard drive from Gallifrey. The Doctor is really just a pawn in this elaborate pile-up of storylines. Apart from piloting the TARDIS, his impact on the episode is virtually non-existent, and for the finale of his first series that’s a strange place to leave him. He spends most of the episode either asleep, being lied to or being kissed, and the big decisions all get made by Clara, Danny and Missy while he stands in the corner looking cross.

Like most of the recent series finales, Dark Water is a real mess. Unlike the previous ones, though, it isn’t the weight of all the storylines coming together that makes it so. Here it’s that the episode gives away the dramatic power of its big set-piece, the 3W facility, for a few fan-gasps. The strongest ideas and character moments get undermined by pantomime execution, not least from the supporting cast, and Clara gets the most ill-advised villainising of a Doctor Who character since the Sixth Doctor tried to throttle Peri. The twists are easy to see coming and not nearly as interesting as they first seem.

The dark water of the title could easily have been an intriguing sci-fi idea on its own, water that hides everything but bone, sitting in tanks under a cathedral. But much like the submerged Cybermen, it never gets the chance to breathe, and by the time the episode ends it’s just the stuff they were standing in.

Was Clara’s volcano betrayal a fair way to show how much she was grieving for Danny, or did it go too far for her character? Tell me in the comments.