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The first part of season 8’s two-part finale, “Dark Water,” is a triumph of style over substance. It’s also a big, honking mess. It’s an interesting mess — it plays with some compelling concepts — but a mess nonetheless. It’s also an almost direct clone of the 1985 Sixth Doctor serial “Revelation of the Daleks,” in which the bodies kept in cryogenic stasis at a far-future mausoleum called Tranquil Repose are being turned into Daleks. But anyway, there’s a lot to talk about with “Dark Water,” so let’s get right to it.

**MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED.**

I call “Dark Water” an example of style over substance because, while there’s compelling drama on the screen for most of the episode, very little of it makes sense. Characters act out of character again. Established rules and precedents are forgotten or ignored in favor of the plot. Things happen purely to move the story along without an eye toward plausibility. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Clara threatens the Doctor with the elimination of all the existing TARDIS keys (apparently, there are seven of them) in the heart of a volcano if he doesn’t go back in time and save Danny’s life. They both react as if this is a real threat. If there are no keys, the TARDIS is lost to both of them and they’ll be stuck there forever. Except that the Doctor has been able to open the TARDIS doors with a snap of his fingers since season 4. Clara showed she could do it, too, earlier this season. So the threat involving the TARDIS keys is an empty one. It is a four-year-long precedent that is ignored solely for one scene in this one story — a scene that doesn’t make much sense anyway. Why is Clara acting this way? She leaps right to betraying the Doctor without even asking him to save Danny first. And then, just to make it even more frustrating, it’s all just a dream anyway. It didn’t happen. It was a psychic test of her resolve, which she apparently passed and now the Doctor will help her. So much for anything actually mattering. (But then we’re used to there being no consequences to anyone’s actions in the Steven Moffat era.)  Also, since when does lava destroy TARDIS keys? Has this ever been mentioned before? Clara says the Doctor mentioned it, but I have no memory of it. If it’s a conversation that happened off-screen, that makes it even lamer and, frankly, an unforgivable “sudden rule.”

Danny’s death is narratively problematic as well. Aside from being far too random — a car accident? Seriously? After everything else that he’s been through? — it is much too easy and much too plot-necessitated. Like Missy, whom we will get to shortly, his death is entirely outside of everything that’s been happening this season. Worse, it happens off-screen. For it to have any emotional impact at all, we need to A) see it happen, and B) have it be part of an actual story. Imagine if Danny had died at the end of the last episode, and then this episode started with Clara begging the Doctor to go back and change what happened. He could say no, and then she tries to blackmail him with the keys. That would work so much better than what we were given. But there has been very little story cohesiveness this season anyway. It seemed like there was going to be, what with the words “the Promised Land” showing up in two early episodes, much the way “Bad Wolf,” “Torchwood,” and “Saxon” did in previous seasons, but then…nothing. It was all “Where do you want to go today, Clara?” and “No, Danny, I’m not traveling with the Doctor again” instead. Which was terribly boring, really.

So yes, at the start of the season we had two episodes where robots from the future were looking for the Promised Land, as if it were a place that actually existed. “Dark Water” reveals it is instead a virtual reality of sorts called the Nethersphere, where the minds of the deceased (or near-deceased, I think, which would make more sense) are uploaded while their bodies are turned into Cybermen. So why are the robots looking for it? Why do they think it’s someplace they can physically find? Why are these robots from the distant future so interested in the Nethersphere when it clearly exists in contemporary London, not the future, and not somewhere in outer space? Also, where did the nice, English garden from “Deep Breath” go? Because now the Promised Land is an urban cityscape instead.

And speaking of being turned into Cybermen, what exactly is the purpose of the dark water itself? It would hardly be a draw to the mausoleum to go visit a loved one and see a fucking skeleton sitting in a water tank. The dark water seems to only exist for the big reveal. It looks cool when it drains away and we see the skeletons are actually Cybermen, but other than that it does nothing. Again, style over substance.

Let’s talk about Missy and all the inherent problems with the revelation that she is in fact a new incarnation of the Master. Time Lords are mildly telepathic with each other. It’s been mentioned a zillion times in the classic series, and hinted at in the revamp. This means the Doctor should immediately know that Missy is a Time Lord, and more than that, he should instantly recognize that she’s the Master, too. Remember, in the season 3 episode “Utopia,” the Doctor is able to recognize the Master’s presence through the walls of the TARDIS. But here, he only starts to piece things together when he feels that Missy has two hearts, and then recognizes that the Nethersphere utilizes Gallifreyan technology, and then finally he has to pester her to tell him her name. When you change established rules solely to fit the plot, it never works. Imagine one issue of The X-Men where Cyclops can suddenly control his eye beams without explanation, and in the next he can’t anymore and it’s never addressed.

Part two is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to rescue this storyline. Why, for example, is the Master making Cybermen? The Master has no love for them, and the one time they tried to work together, in the 1983 20th anniversary special “The Five Doctors,” the Cybermen attempted to kill him pretty much right away. So why is she making more now? What’s the connection? Also, how did the Master escape from Gallifrey after the events of “The End of Time, Part Two”? Why did he regenerate? And why the fuck is she going around calling the Doctor her boyfriend, as she did in “Deep Breath,” and planting a big kiss on him in this episode? (I’m asking why in terms of plot reasons. I already know why in terms of Moffat reasons: he has trouble imagining any female characters who don’t want to kiss the Doctor.)

And by the way, the Master would totally go on calling himself the Master, no matter what the sex of his new body is. You know that. She would never call herself the Mistress!

I could go on indefinitely, but I won’t, except for this one last thing. Moffat continues to write the Doctor as someone who yells “Do as I say!” at his companions instead of saying “Please trust me.” (The Eleventh Doctor did this, too.) Maybe I’m being silly, but that’s not the Doctor to me. It’s off-putting and makes me not like someone I’ve considered a hero since I was a child. Frankly, I don’t get why Moffat keeps doing it.

If I were ten years old, I would think “In the Forest of the Night” is the greatest episode ever. As it is, it feels like a very good episode…but of some other program entirely. Because its focus is on the school children and their teachers, Clara and Danny, and because the Doctor’s presence once again feels more like a cameo than anything else, the whole thing has the feel of being some other program, like an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures without Sarah Jane. It’s a good story, despite all its plot holes, but “In the Forest of the Night” is missing something.

In fact, the same could be said of the entirety of Season 8 so far. For the most part, the scripts and acting are decent, but something’s just not there. If I were to put my finger on it, I’d say what’s missing is the Doctor himself. We’re almost at the end of his first full season, and we still don’t have a handle on who the Twelfth Doctor is. There’s very little consistency in the way the character is being written (the Doctor in “Deep Breath” and “Into the Dalek” seems quite different from the Doctor in “The Caretaker” and “Kill the Moon”) and half the time he feels like a sidekick in a sitcom about Clara’s romantic complications. The Clara Show, with special guest star the Doctor.

**MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**

“In the Forest of the Night” has a lot of missed opportunities. Courtney should have been part of the school outing, for example. Her presence could have helped the other children not be so scared of the Doctor, and could also have shown that the Doctor is having a positive effect on the people around him. The story of Maebh’s sister’s disappearance is glossed over so quickly that the sister’s return at the end doesn’t pack the emotional punch it ought to. It’s also difficult to understand what’s happening because of the way her return is presented. Did the sister run away and return home after hearing Maebh’s cell phone call? Did the sparkly forest fairies, or whatever they were, bring her back home somehow? Were they responsible for her disappearance in the first place? The sister seems happy to be back, but gives no indication of why she left, nor signs of trauma that she was taken against her will. She’s just there and we’re supposed to feel happy about it, cue end credits. On the other hand, Maebh herself is a very interesting character and I felt the episode came alive whenever she was on screen.

It’s impossible to understand Clara’s reasoning for telling the Doctor not to rescue the children from the solar flare that will destroy Earth. So they would miss their parents, at least they would survive and the human race would go on! It was incredibly selfish — and damn near murderous — of Clara to make that decision for them without even asking, and to make it for Danny, too. It’s not presented that way, of course. We’re supposed to side with her, but how can we when it’s such a bad idea? I did like the Doctor repeating Clara’s words from “Kill the Moon” back to her (“It’s my world, too. I walk your earth. I breathe your air.”), and Clara’s assertion that she doesn’t want to be the last of her kind the way the Doctor is (a moment that could have been explored a little more, in my opinion, even if it was just by Clara adding, “I’ve seen what it did to you, and I don’t think I could handle it”).

One thing that did work for me, surprisingly, was Clara and Danny, finally. I liked them at the start of their relationship, but then, once Clara started lying to him about her continued travels with the Doctor, it felt forced and stupid. Now that they’ve talked it out in a remarkably mature manner that I found very welcome indeed after all the relationship-drama histrionics, I like them again. Here’s hoping they don’t add any more forced and unrealistic roadblocks to their relationship. (Believable roadblocks are fine, of course, and the essence of all good drama.) But then, this is Steven Moffat we’re talking about and he’s writing the two-part finale that’s coming up next, so something ridiculous is more likely to happen to one or both of them than not.

Speaking of the finale, I can’t believe we’re there already! This season has gone by remarkably quickly, something I credit to the stronger scripts. With so much less to roll my eyes over than in the last couple of seasons, I’ve been pulled along for the ride. But alas, we’ve come to the finale, which means more of Missy, who is without a doubt the weakest part of the season. She and her “Promised Land” are supposed to be the season-long arc, maybe even the Big Bad, but Missy has been kept separate from everything else that’s happened this season, relegated only to brief cameos at the end of a few episodes. As a result, she feels more like an intrusion than a threat. She doesn’t feel important, and if she’s the key to this season’s arc, she needs to. We’ll see what happens, obviously, but with Moffat’s track record of confusing, nonsensical, and all around dreadful finales, I’m bracing myself for stupid. (From the trailer, it also looks like Missy is controlling Clara somehow as a trap for the Doctor, just like Madame Kovarian was controlling the Flesh duplicate of Amy, so I’m bracing myself for another of Moffat’s repeated plot lines, too.)

I’m not going to lie to you. When I first saw the pre-publicity photos of the shrunken-down TARDIS with the full-size Doctor struggling to get out of its doors or the even smaller TARDIS in Clara’s hands, I thought for sure “Flatline” was going to be beyond stupid. I was wrong. (I thought much the same thing about “Mummy on the Orient Express” before I saw it and was wrong then, too. This season seems to be doing well when it comes to exceeding my expectations. But then, after the last few seasons, my expectations have admittedly been quite low.)

“Flatline” isn’t a bad episode at all, even if the shrinking TARDIS itself was kind of silly. Once again we get a classic Doctor Who setup with weird aliens to fight and a mystery to solve. With the Doctor trapped in the TARDIS and basically sidelined, it’s up to Clara to do the lion’s share of the work convincing people they’re in danger and getting them to safety. As a result, it’s Clara’s best episode to date. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: freeing her from all that Impossible Girl nonsense has really allowed her to shine. Imagine that: when her life no longer revolves entirely around the Doctor as someone who was “born to save him,” she gets to be far more interesting. Why, it’s almost as if Steven Moffat is learning that the trick to successful female characters is to make them something more than their relationship to a man!)

With the exception of the handful of scenes involving the Doctor’s full-size face peeking out through the shrunken TARDIS’s doors, the special effects in this episode were pretty great, especially once the aliens materialize. They look really freaky. Over all, it was a well done, creepy episode with good bits of humor.

However, the drama around Clara lying to Danny now feels completely intrusive. It’s forced, adds nothing to the story, and diminishes everything around it. In an episode filled to the brim with far-fetched ideas, the telephone scene between Clara and Danny was the only one that actually pulled me out of the story and had me rolling my eyes. Resolve this baloney already! Danny and Clara were actually a far more interesting couple when she was being honest with him about her time with the Doctor.

**MINOR SPOLIERS FOLLOW**

I have a couple of minor quibbles, which should surprise no one.

At one point, the Doctor engages a TARDIS failsafe he calls Siege Mode. Essentially, it locks the TARDIS so nothing can get in or out. Leaving aside how useful this Siege Mode would have been in other adventures had it ever existed before this episode (among the things it could have prevented: the Titanic colliding with the TARDIS in the 2007 Christmas Special “Voyage of the Damned”; the Sontarans getting inside the TARDIS in the 1978 serial “The Invasion of Time”; and the Cybermen getting inside the TARDIS in the 1982 serial “Earthshock”), there is the rather quibble-worthy addition that Siege Mode also turns the TARDIS into an impenetrable metal cube, complete with Gallifreyan writing or designs on it. This would seem to imply that the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit works after all, at least in this capacity. But how the Doctor got it to work for Siege Mode but not for, um, Normal Mode is never explained, which is frustrating. After all, it’s fifty-year-old canon that the Doctor can’t get the damn chameleon circuit to work right.

Unfortunately, “Flatline” ends with another brief and wholly unwelcome scene involving Missy. This time she’s watching Clara on what is essentially an iPad they didn’t bother disguising as anything else, and ruminating on how she has chosen well in selecting Clara for…what exactly? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Missy and the “Promised Land” are this season’s weakest link.

And now for a bit of speculation. I’m wondering if the aliens from the other dimension might actually be the Time Lords trying to get back to ours. They seem able to drain off the TARDIS’s energy easily enough, which perhaps speaks to a familiarity with TARDISes, and human physiognomy seems to be close enough to Gallifreyan that the aliens’ attempt to take over human bodies might fit this theory. (Also, wasn’t the Doctor going to spend this season looking for Gallifrey? Or has that idea already been Moffated out of existence?) Missy could conceivably play into this theory, too. Perhaps her realm is the gateway between the two dimensions? But then, why work so hard to put Clara and the Doctor together? And why did Missy so creepily refer to the Doctor as her boyfriend back in the first episode this season? Those don’t necessarily fit, at least not in ways I can see yet. Okay, so my theory isn’t a solid one, but this episode did make me wonder.

I don’t have much to say about this week’s Doctor Who episode, “Mummy on the Orient Express.” Shocking, I know! Especially given the lengthy screeds I’ve been writing about episodes for a while now. “Mummy” is the closest to a classic-era Doctor Who episode we’ve gotten so far this season: outer space, a monster, a mystery to solve, and an enclosed setting. No timey-wimey crap, no “secret origins” for the Doctor or Clara, just a welcome, straightforward adventure. It’s a good one, too. One of the better episodes this season.

The train in space conceit is stupid, and basically only exists because they needed something that sounded exotic when the setup was first mention at the end of the 2010, Eleventh Doctor episode “The Big Bang,” but it’s not so stupid as to be distracting. (Except maybe for the occasional train-snaking-through-space establishing shots, which put me in mind of the Soul Train animation more than anything else.)

I’m still having trouble getting a handle on Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. I liked who he was in the first four episodes of this season, but then suddenly they started writing him as manic and kooky, which doesn’t work for this Doctor. He needs to be more grounded, and he needs to stay grounded. In “Mummy,” he’s a little bit of both, and it’s no surprise to me that the scenes where he’s grounded and in control are the better ones.

**Very minor spoilers follow**

I also don’t quite understand Clara’s actions at the end of the episode when she decides to continue traveling with the Doctor. There’s no reason for her to lie to Danny about it except to force more narrative tension into the plot. Why not have her own her decision and then let Danny decide for himself how he feels and if he still wants to be a part of her life? Imagine how much better and more mature that scene would be than whatever inflated “confrontation” that waits for us down the line. Also, why lie to the Doctor about Danny being okay with it? The Doctor obviously wants her to stick around and doesn’t necessarily care if Danny is okay with it or not. It all feels very forced.

The TARDIS Data Core mentions there were a couple of deleted scenes for this episode, including one that “revealed that Maisie was present near the campfire on the beach in the end, explaining that when the Doctor implanted Maisie’s pain and trauma into himself, he took them away from her for good.” I think they should have kept that scene in. It would have gone a long way toward explaining how Clara found it in herself to forgive the Doctor for the way he acted in “Kill the Moon.”

No real neepery this time around, except that the Doctor offers somebody some jelly babies and says at one point, “Are you my mummy?” Sadly, the lack of a reference to the classic 1975, Fourth Doctor serial “Pyramids of Mars” is a missed opportunity.