Matthew's Journal

Due to the wonders of iplayer, I caught up with this when I got home yesterday. The spoiler-free summary is that I thought this was a decent bit of drama, but I worry about what it says about the series' direction: Moffat does like to set up impossible problems and then have the resolution feel like a cheat.

Of course, as soon as you hear the boy's name, you know there are going to be daleks. Which is fine, but I do think we have definitely-no-really-finally destroyed the daleks rather too often recently. Similarly, having Missy just pop up back from the dead felt a bit like cheating. And the downside of that is that when we see her and Clara killed by daleks, it feels fake somehow - we know the Doctor is going to save both of them, and we know there's going to be an ontological paradox involved. The nod to a Tom Baker speech presumably worked better for people who remember the original, but it was a neat touch anyway.

It was, though, a lot of fun - pacy, with some great moments (the misunderstood axe duel, Clara's very Doctor-esque aside about Jane Austen, Missy's repartee with Clara). But I worry both that we're in danger of losing any sense of peril, and that Moffat is setting up some series-length puzzle where the payoff will feel hollow...