Death in Heaven: Cybermen Rise From London’s Graveyards

OK, where to start with Death in Heaven? There was goodness a-plenty here but at the same time some jarring elements that just didn’t fit. Overall, however, this was a fitting if somewhat depressing end to the season. While the future of Clara is somewhat up in the air, Peter Capaldi’s Doctor has definitely cemented himself into the annals of Who lore as one of the good ones.

Where were we?

In the last episode, Dark Water, Danny got run over by a car while crossing the road, and Clara in her grief managed to persuade the Doctor to take her to him. There they met Missy. Missy, who we’ve seen throughout this series, turns out to actually be the Master (by the way, read this post by another fan to get the full history of the Doctor and the Master. It’s extremely detailed and gives an excellent insight into the character, his motivations and his history). We also found out that the dark water has been converting humanity’s dead into Cybermen.

Episode Recap

Clara has been detected inside the facility and is now being interrogated by the Cybermen before being “upgraded”. Thinking fast, though (similar in some ways to how she acted in the 1st episode of Series 8, Deep Breath), Clara gets them to stall by telling them Clara Oswald isn’t real, it’s all a lie, and she’s really the Doctor! After she spent half of Flatline calling herself Doctor Oswald, it’s not that much of a stretch for her.

Meanwhile, Missy and the Doctor are outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where hordes of tourists surround the Cybermen thinking they’re just an attraction. One of the “tourists” offers to take a picture of Missy and the Doctor, but she’s really Osgood, the UNIT scientist we first met in The Day of the Doctor, undercover. After she seizes Missy’s weapon, more UNIT officers surround her, and the Cybermen use their rocket boots to escape, one of them detonating above the Cathedral.

In the Nethersphere the lights start to go out, and Seb (Chris Addison) tells Danny they’re going to go home and their bodies are being “upgraded”. (Note: this was one of the silly bits for me that just didn’t jibe with the whole story. While Seb was played really well, the whole campy, over-the-top persona just didn’t work considering the end-of-the-world scenario in progress.)

Back at St Paul’s, both Missy and the Doctor are sedated, and the Doctor just manages to whisper to Osgood, “Guard the graveyards,” before passing out. As the dust from the Cyberman explosion starts to settle, it starts to rain, but the rain only seems to be falling over graveyards.

This water seeps into the gutters and sewers and eventually finds its way to a morgue where Danny’s recently deceased body lies. Reanimating his corpse, Danny stalks off in search of Clara, whom he finds talking to the Cybermen. When he approaches her, Clara, not realising it’s Danny, makes things worse by carrying on pretending Clara isn’t real. He knocks her unconscious and then destroys the Cyberman she was talking to. Picking her up, Danny flies off with her to one of the graveyards, where Clara wakes up. Confronting her again, Danny reveals himself and tells her she needs to help him turn off his emotional inhibitor so the pain can go away.

While all this is going on, the Doctor wakes up on “Boat One”, where he’s unceremoniously informed that he’s now the President of the Earth and all of its military forces are under his command. The Doctor goes down to speak to Missy and, in a really well done scene, she reminds him of all the times she’s wanted to take over the Earth and says it’s a piece of cake! Missy also reveals she was the one who arranged for Clara to call the Doctor and for the advertisement in the newspaper (two of this season’s mysteries answered).

When Osgood impresses him, the Doctor offers her a place on the TARDIS, but unfortunately it’s not to be, as the Master quickly escapes, killing her guards and Osgood in the process. As Missy calls in her Cyberman troops, Boat One starts to plummet from the sky and Kate is sucked out into the air. The Doctor makes it onto the TARDIS, materialises in the graveyard and warns Clara that if she deletes Danny’s emotions, he will kill her. Clara, disregarding the Doctor’s warning, takes his screwdriver and switches off Danny’s emotional inhibitor.

[Note: another quibble for me is the constant ranting Danny, alive or dead, has at the Doctor and at officers in general. You could say his deep-seated hatred came from an officer forcing him to kill the child we were introduced to last episode, but we’ve learned that’s actually not the case and it was a simple accident. I realise authority figures in certain positions can definitely be overbearing and obnoxious, but I don’t know if it needed to be said and pushed as much as it was.]

A soldier, not an army

Missy then appears and gives the Doctor a bracelet that’ll let him control all of the Cybermen, saying this is what he really wants, a way to right the wrongs of the universe without sacrificing the lives of those he loves. The Doctor, horrified, tries to think of a way out of this, then realises that Danny, despite having his inhibitor off, hasn’t attacked Clara, and comes to the conclusion that what he needs here is a soldier and not an army. He throws the bracelet to Danny, who puts it on and takes control of all the Cybermen. He promises Clara she’ll “sleep safe tonight” before flying up into the cloud with the rest of the Cybermen and destroying it, himself and them.

Clara, about to kill Missy, is stopped by the Doctor, who doesn’t want her to have to carry that. Before he can shoot, though, a blast from behind seems to disintegrate her. Turning around, the Doctor realises the one remaining Cyberman is Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. The Brigadier hasn’t only saved his daughter Kate, but, as the Doctor says:

“The Earth’s darkest hour. Where else would you be?”

He’s also, it seems, destroyed Missy. The Doctor gives the Brigadier a salute before he too flies off into the sky, where he also detonates.

Several weeks later Clara wakes up in the middle of the night to Danny’s voice. He says the Nethersphere has enough power for one one-way trip, but instead of coming through himself, he sends through the young boy he’d killed. He says he’s sorry and the portal closes, leaving the boy in the hallway along with the broken bracelet.

The Doctor and Clara meet in a café, and the Doctor, seeing the bracelet on Clara’s wrist, wrongly assumes Danny has come back. Thinking this, he tells her he’s finally found Gallifrey and will now be going home. They hug, and you can see the lies they’ve both told to protect each other are making them deeply sad, before the Doctor leaves in the TARDIS.

As the episode ends, there’s a knock at the door of the TARDIS and in walks Santa Claus! Telling the Doctor that “it can’t end like this” and that neither Clara nor the Doctor are “okay”, the episode ends, getting us all ready for the upcoming Christmas episode.

Final Thoughts

Overall a really good season, with some good, scary villains and stories. While we’ve seen some of the Doctor’s favourite foes, the Daleks, they’ve been presented in a new light, and the Doctor himself has changed. The Christmas special will hopefully answer the question of what happens to Clara, and hopefully we’ll also get a chance to see what’s going to happen in the next series.

It is a depressing finale, though, which is what I meant right at the start. Both of them walk away lying to each other to protect the other one, the Doctor claiming he’s found Gallifrey and Clara letting him think Danny came back, and the episode just lets that sit there. The Missy scene on Boat One is the one I’d single out as really well done, with her reminding him of all the times she’s tried to take over the Earth, and it was good to finally get answers on the phone call and the newspaper advert. The bits that didn’t fit for me are the ones I’ve already moaned about, Seb’s campiness in the middle of an end-of-the-world story and Danny going on and on at officers, and I still don’t know if either needed pushing as much as it was. None of that changes my take on this Doctor, though, he’s one of the good ones.

Did Danny make the right call sending the boy back through instead of himself, and did the Doctor and Clara do the right thing lying to each other at the end? Tell me in the comments.