Doctor Who Review – Series 7 – Part 2

Part of the cover artwork for the Doctor Who Series 7 Blu-ray steelbook, showing Matt Smith's Doctor standing next to Clara, while behind them stands The Great Intelligence holding a snow globe with an image of Clara inside it.

Welcome back to the second part of my review for Series 7 of Doctor Who. As explained in my previous post, I’ve split it in two to reflect how the series was divided up, because each part is very distinctive.

This part of the series properly introduces Jenna-Louise Coleman as new companion Clara Oswald, following her surprise appearance in Asylum Of The Daleks. I like her combination of cheeky humour, intelligence and bravery, and she has great chemistry with Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor, so she’s another of my favourite companions. The big story arc looks at why the Doctor has met different versions of her already, while a related subplot is about the threat of the Great Intelligence. These episodes also take us towards the 50th anniversary of the show, as they were broadcast in that milestone year (2013), so they include occasional references to the Classic era for those familiar with it.

So once again, here are my reviews of the episodes and bonus features, and there are plenty of things to watch and listen to on my Youtube playlist for this part of the series. I hope you enjoy!

Contents

Overview

Stories

The second part of the series is longer than the first, granting us another hour-long Christmas special along with 8 regular episodes of 45 minutes each. And again they’re all standalone stories, without any two-parters. Three of them are written by showrunner Steven Moffat, while Neil Cross and Mark Gatiss get two each, Neil Gaiman is back for one story, and the other episode is by Stephen Thompson.

Some of the episodes also have short prequels that were shared online originally, and there are a few bonus mini-episodes that were exclusive to the DVD & Blu-ray releases. See Part 1 for details of the Blu-ray steelbook that I own.

In addition, the amazing Murray Gold produced 2 albums featuring his score for the series – one for the main episodes with 76 tracks, and another for the Christmas specials with 32 tracks. So I’ll point out the pieces of music that I like most during the course of these reviews.

Changes

The second half of the series has a brand new title sequence, including an image of the Doctor’s face for the first time since 1989. It looks like the Tardis is flying through a busy, colourful version of space, with random clouds and stars, before the Doctor Who logo fizzles and sparks, sending it into the time vortex where we see the episode’s title. We then pass through the Tardis doors to get into the episode, which is a nice touch.

There’s a new take on the theme tune as well, focusing on the main melody and bassline, and dropping the counter-melody (nicknamed “The Chase” by some of the fans) that Murray Gold had included in all his previous versions. The new theme is first introduced in The Snowmen, and is then tweaked a bit for the remaining episodes. Sadly this iteration was never released on Murray’s soundtrack albums.

It all looks and sounds good, although I still prefer the previous title sequence and theme for the 11th Doctor’s era. Also, the new opening is only used for the second half of this series and Matt Smith’s final episode after the 50th anniversary special, so it seems rather pointless going to all that effort for such a short space of time.

The inside of the Tardis has also undergone a complete rebuild, changing it from a rather haphazard and colourful layout (in a good way), to a circular space that’s more metallic and moody. It’s very cool and has more of a modern spaceship-type feel to it, and it does get retained for later series. As for the Doctor, he wears Victorian clothing for the Christmas special, while for the rest of the series he often wears a purple cashmere coat with a selection of waistcoats and his traditional bow tie, and it suits him very well.

Episodes

Paternoster Gang Prequels

There are three prequels to the Christmas special, all of which focus on the crime-solving Paternoster Gang, who we first met in A Good Man Goes To War during the previous series. They make a great team, and I’m surprised they never got a spin-off show really, as I can imagine them doing a fun series for children. They did feature in some Big Finish audios though.

They’re led by a Silurian called Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), who was forced out of hibernation by the building of an extension to the London Underground. She was unsure about fitting in with humans, but then fell in love with Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart) in Victorian London in the 19th century, who had been ostracised by her family for her companionship preferences.

They’re joined by Strax (Dan Starkey), a former Sontaran warrior who isn’t as bright as them, regularly and keenly suggesting overly violent ways of dealing with any issue, and often getting confused between men and women. So he’s quite silly but also funny, and he does bring important skills to the group when it counts, especially as he had to work as a nurse after his race was defeated by the Doctor.

The prequels are:

  • The Battle Of Demon’s Run: Two Days Later (2:52) – This was actually released online on 25 March 2013, a few months after the Christmas special. But with the benefit of having all 3 prequels available on Blu-ray, it makes sense to watch this one first, as it shows how Vastra and Jenny rescued Strax after the events of A Good Man Goes To War, and persuaded him to join them.
  • The Great Detective (3:17) – This was shown on Children In Need on 16 November 2012, and shows the trio meeting the Doctor. He’s heartbroken after losing Amy and Rory, on top of other companions he’s had to say tough farewells to, so despite the gang’s best efforts to tempt him with intriguing tales of strange happenings, he tells them he’s retired.
  • Vastra Investigates (2:29) – This was posted online on 17 December 2012. Here the gang talk to Inspector Gregson from Scotland Yard, having solved his case for them, and explain who they are to satisfy his curiosity. Gregson is played by Paul Hickey, and he later appears again in the first episode of Series 8, Deep Breath. However, as the gang leave in a carriage, despondent about the Doctor’s decision to hide away, they see snow falling, which is odd considering there aren’t any clouds.

There was also a bonus video posted online on 21 December 2012, which isn’t in the Blu-ray set, called Songtaran Carols, lasting just 50 seconds. Strax sings his own variations of three classic Christmas songs for Vastra, Jenny, the Doctor and Clara, and while they manage to hold it together for the first two, they break down in laughter at his interpretation of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

2012 Christmas Special: The Snowmen

This hour-long Christmas special is set in Victorian London in 1892, and stars the excellent Richard E. Grant as Dr Walter Simeon. As a boy 50 years earlier, a snowman had spoken to him, agreeing with him that the adults are silly and offering to help him. And now as an adult, he’s taking samples of the falling snow to a giant glass ball, under the command of the Great Intelligence that resides within it. The Great Intelligence originally appeared in a story called The Abominable Snowmen from Season 5 of the Classic era in 1967, and then The Web Of Fear a year later.

The voice of the snowman and the Great Intelligence in this episode belongs to another legendary actor, Ian McKellen, who I love as Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit film series. And Richard, incidentally, had previously appeared as a special incarnation of the Doctor in the animated web series Scream Of The Shalka in 2003, before the show was rebooted on TV two years later. His iteration of the Doctor wasn’t deemed to be official at the time, but was effectively made canon in 2024 by being referenced in the episode Rogue from Season 1 of Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure as the Doctor.

Anyway, Vastra and Jenny also encounter Dr Simeon, who is wary of how intimate they seem to be. He confidently says that nobody can stop what he’s doing, though the two ladies know someone who can, if only they could persuade him to help them.

Meanwhile, barmaid Clara sees a snowman outside her pub that’s appeared out of nowhere, and asks a man nearby – the Doctor – about it. He has a quick look and asks her name, but then leaves, and she follows, climbing on to his carriage. She overhears part of his phonecall with Vastra, and when he mentions being called the Doctor, she pokes her head in from the roof to ask “Doctor who?”, which is another amusing inclusion of the show’s title.

The next thing she knows, she’s locked in the carriage while the Doctor investigates the snow outside. He intends to erase her memory of him using a memory worm, but Strax is careless and wipes his own memory instead, much to Clara’s amusement. She then inadvertently brings the snowman to life by asking the Doctor about it, because it has some telepathic connection, and it tries to attack them. So instead of thinking about the snowman, the Doctor gets her to imagine it melting, which works. But if she needs to remember how to defend herself like that, he can’t erase her memory, so he doesn’t use the worm on her after all.

Instead, the Doctor sends her off and tells her to stay away. But of course, filled with curiosity, she follows him, only to spot him pulling a ladder down from the sky, climbing up it and disappearing. She follows suit, climbing the ladder and a spiral staircase to see the Tardis up in the clouds. She knocks on the door, but then nervously hides around the side of the box when the Doctor looks outside, before dashing back down to the ground again.

The following day is Christmas Eve, and Clara heads off to her second job as a governess to two children. Their previous governess had died in a pond, and Dr Simeon seems to have an unusual interest in it. Suspicious of this, Clara tries to get the Doctor’s attention by shouting up to his box in the clouds, to the bewilderment of passers-by, but Vastra spots her.

Vastra takes Clara to meet Jenny and Strax, and they test her with a set of questions for which she can only give one-word answers. And when they ask her to choose a word that will persuade the Doctor to help, the word “pond” gets his attention when it’s passed on to him, as it reminds him of Amy and Rory. Indeed, when he puts down his book to answer Vastra’s call, the reading glasses he’s wearing are Amy’s, which she’d let him borrow in the previous episode before she left him. They appear occasionally during later episodes too.

He then sets about conducting a proper investigation, calling himself Sherlock Holmes when he visits Dr Simeon to question him, and then going to the house where Clara is working. But he, Clara and the children come under attack from an ice version of the old governess who has risen from the pond. The Paternoster Gang also turn up to help, while Dr Simeon appears with some snowmen, wanting the ice lady to be handed over to him, so that he can use it to create an ice army to take over the world.

It gets to a point where the ice lady chases the Doctor and Clara up to the roof, and our two heroes climb the ladder and staircase to the Tardis. There’s then a beautiful, continuously moving shot where the camera swings around the Tardis, approaches the Doctor and Clara, and then follows them through the doors into the console room, the first time a tracking shot has taken us from the outside to the inside in this way. Sure, it’s not difficult to see when they switch from the CGI Tardis to the real doorway, because the box goes entirely out of shot in between the panning move and the entrance. But it still feels amazing to actually walk into the Tardis in this way without a camera change, so you really get a sense of how it feels from the companion’s perspective.

I love the way the Doctor then brings the machine to life, with Murray’s triumphant theme The Majestic Tale (Of A Madman In A Box) accompanying it. And I also really like Clara’s reaction that it’s “smaller on the outside”, because it catches the Doctor completely off guard, being the opposite of what people usually say. So altogether it’s one of the best Tardis reveals they’ve done.

Another thing that catches Clara by surprise, however, is the ice lady, who has followed them up, and when it grabs her, the Doctor is unable to stop them both plummeting to the ground far below. He uses the Tardis to take Clara to the Paternoster Gang, where Strax is able to revive her, but she won’t live long because her injuries are too severe.

The Doctor then confronts Dr Simeon, telling him how the Great Intelligence took advantage of him. But when he uses the worm to erase Simeon’s memories that the Great Intelligence has been relying on, the entity transfers itself into Dr Simeon to fill the vacant space in his mind and take over his body. He still seems to die though, because all the snow turns to saltwater rain, reflecting the sadness that people back at the house are feeling about Clara’s death. It’s not the last time we’ll see the Great Intelligence portrayed by Richard E. Grant, however.

The Doctor goes back to be with Clara, and just before she passes away at the start of Christmas Day, she tells him “Run, you clever boy, and remember.” That really gets his attention, as it was exactly what Oswin Oswald said to him at the end of Asylum Of The Daleks, and both Clara and Oswin had expressed a love of soufflés. The connection is confirmed when he finds her gravestone, revealing her full name to be Clara Oswin Oswald. This sparks renewed excitement in the Doctor, and he eagerly sets off to try and find her, while we see that another version of Clara is alive in the present day.

So it’s another great Christmas episode, with huge guest stars and a welcome return for the Paternoster Gang. It also provides a nice transition for the Doctor, taking him from his grief and resignation over losing Amy and Rory to a revival of his personality when he knows there’s another exciting mystery to solve, looking for a rather clever girl he’s met twice in different forms. It sets things up very nicely for the episodes ahead.

The soundtrack album for the Christmas specials contains 13 tracks from this episode, my favourite of which is easily Clara In The Tardis, as it incorporates her theme. The combination of the melody and the underpinning piano riff works really nicely, and there’s another nice variation on her theme in Clara Lives. I also rather like Sherlock Who, as it clearly nods to the music in Steven Moffat’s brilliant Sherlock series, the dramatic pacing mixed with calmer elements in Antifreeze, and the closing track Whose Enigma?, as it starts out calmly then builds in intensity from 2 minutes in to bring the album to a big climax.

6. The Bells Of Saint John

In the 2½-minute prequel to this episode, the Doctor is sitting by himself on a swing, when a little girl (played by Sophie Downham) sits on the next swing and has a chat with him. She notices that he’s sad and appears to have lost something, and he tells her that he’s trying to find someone, but is worried that he won’t be able to. She tells him that when she loses something, she goes somewhere quiet for a bit and then she figures out where she’s put it. After she then says goodbye and leaves him alone, the Doctor doesn’t hear her mother scolding her for talking to a stranger, addressing her as Clara Oswald.

In the main episode itself, people are having their souls removed by a special wi-fi network and uploaded to the cloud, which is run by people in an office led by Miss Kizlet (played by the esteemed Celia Imrie). Images of the captives fill a bank of screens, with everyone scared because they don’t know where they are.

Clara, meanwhile, is a nanny to two children whose mother had died. One is called Angie, played by Eve De Leon Allen, who once played the lead role of Marinka in a theatre show I saw called The House With Chicken Legs in December 2023. The other is Artie, played by Kassius Carey Johnson, and in this episode he has a book called Summer Falls by an author called Amelia Williams (i.e. Amy Pond, as married to Rory Williams). And when he tells Clara he’s on Chapter 10, she tells him that 11 is the best and that he’ll cry over it. So that’s a nice little reference to the first part of this series and the 11th Doctor. The book Summer Falls was also released as a real novel to tie in with the episode, written by James Goss.

Anyway, Clara isn’t very tech-savvy and can’t seem to get on to the internet, so she calls a helpline number given to her by a woman in a shop (whose identity is later revealed in the finale of Series 8). However, she’s unaware that it’s connected to the phone on the exterior of the Tardis in the year 1207. And the ringing phone surprises the Doctor, who has taken the little girl’s advice to go somewhere quiet very literally by living in a monastery, where he’s painted a picture of Clara. The other monks call the ringing of the telephone “The Bells of St John”, because there’s also a St John’s Ambulance sticker on the outside of the Tardis, hence the title of the episode.

The Doctor is confused by this random woman ringing him to ask how to get on the internet, but he immediately recognises who it is when she uses a certain phrase to help remember her wi-fi password – “Run, you clever boy, and remember”.

He excitedly goes to the house where she’s working as a nanny, but of course this version of Clara doesn’t know who he is, so she’s completely bemused by this excited man in a monk’s outfit who knows her name and where to find her. And when he introduces himself as the Doctor, she utters the inevitable phrase “Doctor who?”, which he asks her to repeat a couple of times because he enjoys hearing it. The use of the phrase has become a bit of a running joke in this series in particular. He then goes back to the Tardis to pick out a better outfit, including a bow tie, so that he looks a bit more normal, before returning to the house.

In his absence, however, Clara is approached by a little girl, who turns out to be a wi-fi base station called a Spoonhead, and it uploads Clara’s soul to the cloud, leaving her dead on the floor. But the Doctor is having none of it, given that he’s lost 2 versions of her already, so he hacks into the cloud and brings her back.

As she rests and recovers, and the Doctor nibbles at one of the Jammie Dodgers he’s placed by her bed, he opens a book called 101 Places To See in which Clara has placed a large leaf, which will become very relevant as the series progresses.

The Doctor then proceeds to guard the house, as a result of which they start to get a bit better acquainted. It transpires that not only did he restore her soul, but she also brought back detailed knowledge of computers and the internet with her from the cloud too.

They are then surrounded by a group of people being manipulated by Miss Kizlet, and a plane is sent on a crash course with the house. So the Doctor and Clara use the Tardis to fly on to the plane and run down the aisle to the cockpit, where they just make it clear the rooftops in time. They then return to the Tardis, where the Doctor explains what it is, having not had a chance until then, and this time Clara does say that it’s bigger on the inside, unlike in the previous episode.

They then land on the South Bank of the River Thames, an area I’ve enjoyed walking along many a time, to the applause of a crowd who think it’s some kind of clever trick by a street performer. The Tardis is also spotted on CCTV by Miss Kizlet’s team, as she had demanded it be found after being surprised by it disappearing from Clara’s garden, evidently not knowing what it is.

There’s an amusing moment here when a man asks his colleague if they’re certain they’ve found it this time, saying that “Earl’s Court was an embarrassment”. That’s referring to the fact that there is a blue police box outside Earl’s Court station, which I’ve visited and taken a selfie in front of. You can’t go inside it in person, but you can explore the interior on Google Street View, and as it happens it’s the version of the Tardis used in this second part of Series 7 and beyond. It’s a really cool Easter egg from Google there.

Anyway, the Doctor fetches a motorbike from inside the Tardis, and he takes Clara for a ride across Westminster Bridge, providing a nice iconic shot as they pass Big Ben, before finding a café near St Paul’s Cathedral at which to have breakfast. The Doctor is struggling to locate the origin of the wi-fi kidnappings using a laptop, but with her newfound tech knowledge, Clara is able to figure it out instead. She proudly exclaims “Oswald for the win!”, which she then shortens to Oswin, the name her previous iterations had used.

While she’s doing her online searches, however, the Doctor learns that everyone inside the café is under the control of Miss Kizlet. And a duplicate of the Doctor uploads Clara to the cloud again. But as Clara had been able to give him the location before then, the Doctor gets back on his motorbike and speeds off to The Shard. He’s told there’s no way in, but he bypasses any security easily, as he’s on an anti-gravity bike, which allows him to drive up the side of the building instead and crash into the office that way. It’s a very cool action sequence.

The Doctor confronts Miss Kizlet to demand that everyone be restored. And when she refuses, it’s revealed that it’s not really the Doctor at all, but the Spoonhead duplicate of him that had uploaded Clara, now being controlled remotely by the real Doctor back at the café, and it uploads her to the cloud as well. The Doctor then forces her colleagues to download everyone back to their bodies, shutting down the cloud.

Miss Kizlet tells her client about what’s happened, who happens to be the Great Intelligence (Richard E. Grant), so evidently he survived after the events of the Christmas special. And with soldiers from UNIT now storming the building, he orders her to reset everyone to their original states from before they were taken under control. She does so using her tablet computer, which wipes their memories and makes them all think clearly again, so they haven’t a clue where they are or what they’ve been doing. Miss Kizlet has evidently been a puppet of the Great Intelligence for a long time though, as her default state of mind is that of a child, who is frightened that she’s lost her mummy.

As for Clara, she is of course restored with everyone else, and the Doctor invites her to come travelling with him. She’s clearly tempted, but asks him to come back the next day to ask her again, as she needs to think about it. After she’s gone, the Doctor gets excited to learn more about who she is, now that he’s found her at long last. Indeed, this episode has been a fun way to bring them together properly.

The soundtrack album contains 8 tracks for this episode. Clara’s track presents the full version of her theme that was introduced in the Christmas special, and it’s gorgeous. Meanwhile, A Turbulent Flight has a serene start before it gets very urgent and dramatic when they’re on the plane, and I like the action music in Up The Shard as well. Monking About and Bah Bah Biker are both short but fun pieces too.

7. The Rings Of Akhaten

At the start of this episode we learn the sentimental importance of the big leaf that Clara has in her possession – as does the Doctor, because he’s spying on her history and watching her grow up, just to make sure she’s a real person. By a chance gust of wind it had brought her parents-to-be together in the 1980s (the period being signified by the sound of Ghost Town by The Specials), and the travel book containing the leaf was then passed down to Clara by her mother Ellie (Nicola Sian). Ellie then passed away 8 years before Clara met the Doctor, on 5 March 2005, the same date on which the first episode of Series 1, Rose, is set.

In the present day, Clara boards the Tardis with her book, and the Doctor takes her to The Rings Of Akhaten, a distant part of space where seven planets orbit a huge sun, and a golden pyramid is deemed to be a holy site for those who hold certain beliefs about how life in the universe began. They then move closer and explore a market full of a variety of alien species, and the Doctor mentions that he’s been there before with his granddaughter (a nice little nod to Susan).

When they get split up in the crowd, Clara spots a scared little girl, played by a superb child actress called Emilia Jones, who runs away before Clara eventually finds her and gains her trust. The girl reveals that she’s called Merry and is the Queen Of Years, having been taken as a baby to replace the previous person who held that title. Her mind has been filled with all the songs and poems of her culture, and there’s a particular song she needs to sing at an upcoming ceremony, but she’s scared of getting it wrong. So Clara has a friendly chat with her and persuades her to go ahead with it.

In amongst all of this, it’s interesting to note that Clara cannot understand what the aliens in the market are saying, which means the Tardis isn’t translating for her like it usually does for people. And when she tries to take Merry into the Tardis to keep her safe, she finds the door is locked, which leads her to think the Tardis doesn’t like her very much. This relationship between her and the Doctor’s machine develops throughout the series.

Anyway, she and the Doctor attend the ceremony, where they watch Merry singing The Long Song while members of the crowd make offerings, and a chorister sings inside the pyramid, in order to keep the Old God (aka Grandfather) asleep. It’s sung so beautifully, with its stunning choral backing, and in 2020 an impressive cover was produced by over 300 fans coming together for a lockdown video (and an a cappella version was also posted).

Merry is then caught in a beam of energy which draws her towards the pyramid, so that her soul can be sacrificed to Akhaten, which terrifies her. In order to get there and try to rescue her, the Doctor barters with an alien for a moped, for which they want something of sentimental value, and Clara gives it a ring that her mother had given her. They then fly it through space to the pyramid, with Clara clinging on to the Doctor for dear life.

After a struggle to open the door with his sonic screwdriver, he and Clara eventually find themselves trapped inside as well. Merry tells them that the god will take their souls too if they don’t leave, but they refuse to go without her. The Doctor and Clara work together to try and calm Merry’s fears, including the Doctor telling her a story about how unique and special she is in the universe, and they also try to keep the mummy inside the glass case that it’s trying to break out of. They then also have to stop a group called the Vigil, who are summoned to assist with the sacrifice if the Queen Of Years won’t agree to it.

Once they do manage to get out safely with Merry, the Doctor realises that he’s made a mistake, as the mummy inside the pyramid wasn’t the actual god after all. The real Akhaten is a face that appears in the massive sun instead, with the mummy just being there to awaken it.

So the Doctor sends Merry and Clara back to the planet, and while Merry and the crowd sing to the god again, he faces the entity alone, inviting it to feast on the many stories from his extensive lifetime. He gives an impassioned, powerful speech that shows Matt Smith at his very best, up there with his Pandorica speech from Series 5.

But even the Doctor’s memories of his incredible life aren’t enough to calm the god, so Clara flies back over on the moped and offers it her leaf, because it represents the infinite possibilities of the life her mother never got to have. And that does prove to be enough to send it back to sleep.

Back on Earth, Clara recalls seeing the Doctor near her mother’s grave, where he tells her she reminds him of someone who died. But they both agree that Clara should be respected for who she is, and not treated like a stand-in for someone else. He also returns her mother’s ring, as the people had wanted her to have it back for saving them, which is very sweet.

The soundtrack album carries 10 pieces of music from this episode. Apart from The Long Song mentioned above, which is the obvious highlight, there is another nice song called God Of Akhaten that is heard during the episode. I also particularly like The Leaf (which is fittingly romantic and includes Clara’s theme in the melody), Merry’s theme (which includes elements of The Long Song), The Speeder (which sounds very triumphant) and Infinite Potential (reflecting the powerful emotions inherent in the offering of the leaf).

8. Cold War

This tense story finds the Doctor and Clara on a Russian nuclear submarine at the North Pole in 1983 during the Cold War. He explains to her that it’s a dangerous flashpoint in history where the smallest mistake can change the future she currently knows. And he has to calm down Captain Zhukov (Liam Cunningham) about their sudden presence on the vessel.

It’s not the nuclear missiles that are the biggest threat, however. A creature has been captured and brought on board in a large block of ice, which Professor Grisenko (David Warner) thinks is probably a mammoth. But when a crew member defrosts it to see what it is, it turns out to be an Ice Warrior called Marshal Skaldak (Nicholas Briggs). The Doctor is very fearful of him, having met the Ice Warriors before (they were last seen in The Monster Of Peladon in 1974). And even the Tardis is so alarmed that it dematerialises, thanks to the Hostile Action Displacement System (HADS) that the Doctor has turned on for the first time in ages, whereby the Tardis will disappear to somewhere nearby if it comes under attack.

One of the officers knocks out Skaldak and he’s chained up. But that makes him angry about being attacked, and he also learns that he’s been imprisoned in the ice for 5,000 years, meaning he’s lost his daughter as well as all the other members of his race, who the Doctor explains are living on other planets rather than Earth. Skaldak does send out an SOS signal in the hope that one of his race will hear it somewhere, but it doesn’t appear to get any response.

So with nothing left to lose, Skaldak sets out for revenge. He gets out of his armour and roams the ship, killing a few members of the crew, and ultimately attempts to launch one of the missiles to start a nuclear war, which is when the Doctor gets a look at what the creature beneath the armour looks like for the very first time. The armour itself hasn’t changed too much since the Classic era, on the request of writer Mark Gatiss, but the creature inside has been imagined to great effect, it does look freaky and terrifying. You can also tell how anxious the Doctor is here, as the stakes are extremely high indeed.

For Clara it’s all a frightening experience, naturally. At one point she bravely goes to speak to Skaldak directly, wearing headphones so the Doctor can encourage her and tell her what to say. And later, seeing people who have just been killed makes it feel very real for her, driving home just how dangerous travelling with the Doctor can be. But she still has trust in him to keep her safe, and unlike most companions she actually does as she’s told when he tells her to stay somewhere in this episode. It also appears that the Tardis translation circuits are now working for her, as she discovers that she’s speaking and understanding fluent Russian without realising it.

The Professor also befriends her during the adventure. Being a big fan of 80s music, he loves the track Vienna by Ultravox (can’t blame him either), and when he learns that Clara is a time traveller, his big question about the future is whether Ultravox split up. He also tries to put her at ease when he notices that she’s on edge, even suggesting that they sing Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran, and while Clara refuses to do so at first, she does nervously sing a little bit of it when she’s helping the Doctor to stop Skaldak firing one of the nukes.

In the end, a ship that heard the distress call does come to pick up Skaldak, so the crisis is averted – although his journey home is rather easier than the Doctor’s and Clara’s, as it turns out the Tardis went as far as it could to stay away from the danger, teleporting itself to the South Pole! So the Doctor jokingly asks the crew for a lift, although it’s perfectly possible that the Tardis later returns to get them, now that the danger from the Ice Warrior has passed.

Finally, there are just 2 tracks for this episode on the soundtrack album – Cold War and Skaldak – which aren’t memorable tunes but are both suitably dramatic and aptly titled, so they work very well in the story.

9. Hide

The Doctor and Clara visit a mansion in 1974, where they meet Professor Alec Palmer (Dougray Scott) and his psychic friend Emma Grayling (Jessica Raine, who later starred in the 50th anniversary spin-off drama An Adventure In Space And Time as producer Verity Lambert). Alec and Emma have been trying to contact a ghost known to haunt the property, and the Doctor, who is well aware of who they are, helps them out. They manage to open a floating portal briefly, out of which the words “Help me” appear on a nearby wall before it closes again. The Doctor and Clara explore the house to see if they can find anything, and in typical horror style there are strange noises and movements that put them on edge.

Clara has also noticed that the photos taken of the ghost over the years show it adopting the same pose every time. So she and the Doctor hop in the Tardis and make multiple stops, in order for him to take photos of the ghost throughout Earth’s history and future, right up to the planet’s final moments. Seeing Earth’s demise upsets Clara though, as it puts everything in perspective and gives her the impression that she and the Doctor’s other companions are nothing more than ghosts to him. She confronts him about it, and he tells her that she is “the only mystery worth solving”.

By putting the photographs together in sequence, the Doctor confirms that the ghost is a time traveller called Hila Tacorien (Kemi-Bo Jacobs). She’s become trapped in a pocket universe where time is running at a much slower pace to us, so while she’s moving normally from her perspective, to us her movements are so slow as to look still, unless photos are taken over thousands of years.

The Doctor uses a special crystal to strengthen Emma’s psychic abilities, which allows her to open a portal to the universe for a bit longer, and the Doctor leaps into it. He finds himself in a misty woodland, where he can hear the lady’s cries for help, but also the growls of a creature that’s been chasing her. It all makes him quite afraid, and he openly admits it, albeit with nobody around to hear it. He does find Hila eventually, and after being chased by the mysterious creature, he sends her through the portal back to our universe, only for the portal to close so that he’s now trapped there.

Clara is determined to help though and rushes to the Tardis, which once again refuses to let her in, leading her to call it a “grumpy old cow”. It does, however, project an image of herself as the voice interface, which she takes a bit of offence to, and after a bit of an argument it relents and opens the doors. The Tardis is reluctant to break into the pocket universe because it will drain all its power if it’s there for too long, but thanks to Clara’s persuasion it takes the risk anyway, and the Doctor jumps on board as it makes a quick flyby, so he’s returned to our universe safely.

As they prepare to leave the next day, the Doctor takes Emma aside, and asks her what she detects about Clara with her psychic abilities. This was the real reason the Doctor had travelled to the mansion, because if anyone can pick up something unusual, it’s her. But as far as Emma is concerned, Clara’s just a normal person. Instead, Emma gets a revelation of her own, as the Doctor has figured out that Hila is a descendant of her and Alec, from several generations in the future, with the blood relationship enabling contact to be made. Emma and Alec are clearly in love, but it just needed a push from the Doctor to get them to admit and take the next steps from there.

It also dawns on the Doctor that there’s a second love story at play, as the creature in the pocket universe is also trapped there, and is trying to get back to our universe to be with a similar creature at the mansion. So he uses the Tardis to break into the pocket universe one more time to rescue it.

So it’s a pretty good episode, which feels like a traditional horror story at first, with all the unease and tension you’d expect, and then there’s the sci-fi twist to make it even more interesting. This was also the first episode that Jenna filmed as Clara, but you wouldn’t know it, as she’s great considering the pressure that she must have felt at the time.

I like the reference that she makes to Ghostbusters when she and the Doctor introduce themselves to Alec and Emma too. It’s an obvious joke, but still fun to hear it mentioned in Doctor Who again (the Doctor had previously sung the theme with Rose in Army Of Ghosts). The Doctor also quotes lyrics from the song Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love at one point, which is written by Cole Porter.

There’s only a single piece of music on the soundtrack album though, called I Am A Ghost, lasting less than 2 minutes. It’s nothing special, but it sets the tone nicely.

10. Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS

The Doctor is upset that Clara and the Tardis aren’t seeing eye to eye, so he offers her the chance to have a go at flying it, by switching it into Basic Mode. Unfortunately, that includes putting the shields down, just as they come into range of a salvage vessel, which picks it up using a magnetic beam (while the song Fire Woman by The Cult plays on the ship). A grenade-shaped device rolls in and Clara picks it up, burning her hand, before the engine of the Tardis explodes and it crashes on the deck of the salvage ship.

The Doctor gets out and meets the crew, played by Ashley Walters, Mark Oliver and Jahvel Hall. But when he realises Clara is still trapped inside, he has to persuade them to help him find her. And once they’re through the doors, he locks them in and sets a self-destruct timer, to keep them focused on the task at hand.

They’re more interested in stealing what they can from the Tardis though, and despite the Doctor’s warnings one of them takes a glowing component, as a result of which the Tardis stops them from getting out by rearranging the layout. Another of the men tries to break into the central console of the main room and hears voices of several former Doctors and companions.

There are also mysterious creatures chasing them too, and another is after Clara, who has got lost while exploring the seemingly infinite maze. Some areas are very dangerous, and she has to run from a huge fireball that bursts out of one of the doors she opens. But she does also find some very interesting rooms with mementos the Doctor has collected, and even a book about the Time War in which she learns his name (but we don’t see or hear it of course).

She does eventually find the main console room again, but the doors out of the Tardis have disappeared, because it’s just an echo of the space. But the Doctor is able to sense her from the actual location, and after pinpointing her exact position he’s able to pull her into the proper room.

With the group reunited, the Doctor realises they have to go to the heart of the ship, so he takes them on an alternative route. Along the way, however, a pole bursts through a wall into the arm of Tricky, one of the salvage crew, pinning him to the opposite wall of the corridor. He’s happy that he’ll survive though, as he’s an android, so he can just get new parts. So all he needs is for his colleague Gregor to cut his arm off. But Gregor won’t do it because, as the Doctor discovers, Tricky is actually human. Gregor had convinced him he was an android after an accident had given him amnesia, for entertainment and so he could be captain instead. But in reality the only non-human parts of him are bionic eyes and a throat implant, to help him see and speak following the accident. It’s a strange way to treat a brother, and indeed the subplot involving this crew isn’t very interesting compared to the central story, as it’s hard to form a connection with them, so you don’t really care what happens to them.

A short while later, when they all reach the room containing the Eye of Harmony, Clara is horrified to learn that the deformed creature that has been on her tail is her from the future after she’s been burned to death, and likewise the Doctor and the salvage crew are being pursued by their zombified selves. The Tardis has been bleeding time as a result of the damage, so future events as well as past visions are coming through.

The Doctor, distraught at the idea of losing Clara for a third time, is able to save her, but not Tricky and Gregor, who are caught by their conjoined creature, just like their crew mate Bram had been killed earlier in the story.

The Doctor and Clara escape to a canyon that appears to be outside, but is actually still in the Tardis. And given the dire straits they seem to be in, the Doctor questions her as to who she is, explaining how he’s met her before. But he’s relieved to find that she really has no clue what he’s talking about, and they take a leap of faith into the Tardis engine room, discovering that the engine has already exploded, but the Tardis has temporarily frozen it in time.

The Doctor has no clue how to fix it, but the burn marks on Clara’s hand have formed a message to provide the answer, enabling him to contact his earlier self and reverse time to the moments before the explosion, thereby saving everybody. It means that Clara forgets everything she’s seen and done, but still feels tired after what she’s unknowingly been through, and the Doctor checks that she still feels safe with him before they travel on again.

So altogether it’s another fun episode, because it’s fascinating to see so much more of the Tardis and get a feel for how it works. And as for the soundtrack, just like the previous episode there’s only one track for this story on the album, called A Machine That Makes Machines.

11. The Crimson Horror

  • Writer – Mark Gatiss
  • First Broadcast – 4 May 2013
  • Links – BBC / Wikipedia / Tardis Wiki
  • Mark also wrote a Target novel of this story, for which the audiobook was narrated by Dan Starkey & Catrin Stewart, who play Strax & Jenny on screen.
  • This is the 100th episode in the modern era of the show.

The Paternoster Gang (Vastra, Jenny & Strax) are back, this time in Yorkshire in 1893. They’ve been asked to investigate a strange phenomenon where murder victims have been turned bright red, and one particular corpse that is brought to them has an image of the Doctor imprinted in their eyes, representing the last thing they saw.

So Jenny is sent undercover to a community called Sweetville run by Mrs Gillyflower. She’s played by the wonderful Diana Rigg, whose first big TV role as Emma Peel in The Avengers was one of many parts in her extensive stage and screen career that she was highly regarded for, and there are nods to that role during this story. Away from Doctor Who, she and Mark Gatiss both appeared in Game Of Thrones, Jenna Louise-Coleman later starred with her in Series 2 of Victoria, and Matt Smith acted alongside her in Last Night In Soho, her final film before she died.

Mrs Gillyflower has been enticing local people to join her by promising that they will be saved from an apocalypse. However, they’ve then been put through a preservation process by dunking them in some red slime, with people that die simply being dumped as rejects. And she’s running the operation with a strangely elusive Mr Sweet that nobody’s seen.

Jenny therefore explores the building, and finds the Doctor chained up. He’s also bright red in colour, but is still alive, being a reject who survived because he’s not human. He just can’t speak and can only move very stiffly. He was secretly kept in a cell by Mrs Gillyflower’s blind daughter Ada, who referred to the Doctor as her “special monster”. So when another reject walked into the cell and saw the Doctor, he died in front of him, hence the vision of him remaining in his eyes.

Ada is played by Rachael Stirling, who is actually Diana Rigg’s daughter in real life, and this episode marks the first time they’ve acted together on screen. Mark Gatiss had been in a stage play with Rachael called The Recruiting Officer, and already knew Diana, so had suggested the idea to them both, and he wrote the episode for them.

Jenny takes the Doctor to a special chamber where he’s able to restore himself to normal. He then gleefully thanks her by giving her a kiss, in response to which she slaps him! She’s then confused when he says he needs to find Clara, as the only version Jenny is aware of is the Clara that died in the Christmas special. The Doctor explains how he and Clara had also gone undercover to investigate, by posing as a married couple, with the recap shown to us in the style of an old film, which is a nice touch.

They do then find Clara, who fortunately survived the preservation process, and they’re able to restore her to normal too. While they’re waiting for that to happen, however, the Doctor and Jenny are approached by a group of security personnel, some armed with bats. He’s about to try and use the sonic screwdriver to defend him and Jenny, but she deals with it by ripping off her outer layer of clothes to reveal a leather catsuit (a direct reference to Emma Peel in the Avengers) and impressively kicks the living daylights out of a few of them, before Strax bursts in and shoots the rest. So it’s great that Jenny gets a big moment like that.

A particularly funny detail here is that when the Doctor first sees Jenny in her sexy outfit, he subconsciously holds the sonic screwdriver in an erect position, before he realises the symbolism and lowers it! A little joke for the adults there that the youngest members of the audience won’t understand.

Clara is as confused by the sight of the Paternoster trio as they are with her, but with no time for explanations they move on. Vastra has worked out that Mrs Gillyflower is using the poison of a red leech, which the Silurians had seen as a threat millions of years ago. So the Doctor and Clara confront Mrs Gillyflower about it, who reveals that Mr Sweet is a big red leech attached to her chest, and she’s about to launch a rocket that will explode in the atmosphere and spread the poison all over the world.

The Doctor also gets her to admit that she had experimented with the poison on her daughter Ada – who overhears this, because the Doctor had got her to stand outside the door to learn the truth. Clara uses a chair to smash the controls for the rocket, but Mrs Gillyflower holds her daughter at gunpoint and retreats to the rocket launch area, where she activates another launch control, and it does actually take off and explode in the sky. Vastra and Jenny had already broken in and taken the poison out though, so it will have no effect. Strax then shoots Mrs Gillyflower, and the leech abandons her now that she’s of no use to it, before Ada squashes it to death with her white cane.

So everything is put right in the end. The Paternoster Gang lock the venom away, Ada is free to live her life as she chooses, and Carla is returned to her present day home. However, Angie and Artie – the children that Carla is a nanny for – have discovered her image in some historical photos. Carla is alarmed to recognise herself on the nuclear submarine and at the haunted mansion, but is baffled by the sight of herself in Victorian London, as she’s never been there. So the children threaten to tell their dad that she’s a time traveller unless they take her on a journey with them.

The soundtrack album carried 3 pieces of music for this episode, entitled Crimson Horror, Sweetville & Thomas Thomas (a reference to modern TomTom sat-nav devices). They’re nothing outstanding, but they’re nice and serve their purpose just fine in the episode.

12. Nightmare In Silver

With the kids Angie and Artie in tow after the conclusion to the previous episode, the Doctor and Clara take them to the biggest and best theme park in the universe, only to find that it’s been closed down.

It transpires that the Cybermen were defeated in a war a thousand years ago, and the Emperor has disappeared, leaving behind a punishment platoon, the captain of which is played by Tamzin Outhwaite. They challenge the Doctor when he arrives, but he uses his psychic paper to convince them that he’s a high ranking official called the Imperial Consul.

The owner of one of the park’s attractions, Impresario Webley (Jason Watkins), is also still on site, and shows the children what he has to offer. The highlight of his space is a deactivated Cyberman that anyone can play chess against, and Artie loses when he has a go. Webley challenges them to figure out how it’s done, as if it’s a clever trick, but the Doctor realises that there’s someone inside the Cyberman suit, and opens it up to reveal a guy who calls himself Porridge. He’s played by the wonderful Warwick Davis, well known for his roles in the Star Wars and Harry Potter films, among many other things, and I once saw him deliver an inspirational speech at the Naidex event in 2019.

Webley also shows them some of his other Cybermen and a large wax figure of the Emperor, before the kids go outside and have fun on an anti-gravity ride. Clara is then ready to take them back home, but the Doctor isn’t in such a rush. He’s seen lots of metal insects scurrying around and wants to investigate further.

So they get the kids settled on a couple of sofas in Webley’s house to have a nap, with a warning not to wander off, before he and Clara go exploring. It feels very irresponsible and dangerous for them to leave the kids alone on an alien world though, especially given the Doctor’s concerns. The Tardis would surely have been safer, as it would have kept an eye on them, prevented them from doing anything they shouldn’t, and could have taken them home if necessary. Maybe the Doctor and Clara assumed that Webley would look after them, but they had never met him before that day. And besides, unbeknownst to all of them, Webley is then captured and upgraded by the chess-playing Cyberman that has now come back to life.

Angie then ignores the warning that was given to them and goes for a look around, finding the barracks. The Doctor sees this and alerts Clara, and they both follow her, only to see her get captured by a Cyberman. There’s a nice bullet-time style sequence here, where the Cyberman moves at super speed while the platoon try to fire their guns at it. That and other developments throughout the story show that not only have the Cybermen improved their abilities and agility since we last saw them, but they’re also able to upgrade very quickly to overcome any new hindrances. So they’re a bigger threat than ever before.

The Doctor promises he’ll get Angie back, and uses his authority to transfer the captain’s role as leader to Clara, entrusting her to keep everyone and the planet safe. And while all of that is going on, Artie is also caught by a Cyberman back at Webley’s house.

The Doctor is able to track the children down, finding them under the control of Webley, and learns that their brains are being used to build a new Cyber-Planner, because of their huge potential. But the Doctor’s Time Lord brain has far more space and power that can be harnessed, so the metal Cybermites install some implants in him instead.

From that point onwards, Matt Smith keeps switching between two very different personas – the clever, friendly Doctor and the ruthless, evil Cyber-Planner. It’s a spectacular performance. We see inside the Doctor’s mind as the two of them mentally face off against each other, including photos of all the former Doctors, while his dialogue and physicality also illustrates the conflict at play. They do a deal to play a game of chess, where the winner will take control of the Doctor’s brain, and it becomes a big intellectual battle between them.

Clara, meanwhile, confidently asserts her new position as commander, and takes the platoon to a castle where they have a better chance of defending themselves, even though their weaponry is very limited. She rejects a suggestion from the captain that they should follow the protocols to blow up the planet if they’re outnumbered by the Cybermen, and takes the remote control for the explosive device, but the captain says it can also be voice-activated by her voice only.

So it’s both exciting and tense as the Doctor fights and argues with the Cyber-Planner (which calls itself Mr Clever) and the platoon struggle to defend the castle against countless Cybermen, who have been repairing and rebuilding themselves since the last war ended. And when the Doctor summons Clara, she is very careful to ensure that she’s talking directly to the Doctor rather than the invader trying to possess his mind.

The Doctor is eventually able to push the Cyber-Planner out of his head by tricking it, and then tells Clara that they do have to blow up the planet. And Angie has worked out that Porridge can set off the voice-activated bomb, because he’s actually the Emperor, so it’s nice that one of the children plays a key part in the story’s resolution.

As part of the bomb’s activation, the Imperial Flagship is summoned, so everyone is teleported on to it, along with the Tardis at the Doctor’s request. The planet is then blown up, killing the Cybermen (although a surviving Cybermite is seen to be floating in space at the end). Porridge proposes to Clara, promising that she could be Queen of the universe alongside him as the Emperor, but she politely turns him down, though Angie thinks she’s crazy. So the Doctor and Clara return the children home safely, and we see that he’s still keenly wondering who Clara is.

While the previous 4 episodes have had very few tracks on the soundtrack album, this story is represented by 12 different music cues, although they only last 15 minutes in total, with 8 of them being less than a minute long. My favourite pieces are the scene-setting Hedgewick’s World, the action-packed Upgrade In Progress, and the triumphant ending moments with The Emperor’s Wife and Some Wednesday.

Later in 2013, Neil Gaiman, who wrote this episode, released a short story to mark the 50th anniversary, called Nothing O’Clock, featuring the 11th Doctor and Amy Pond. As with other Doctor Who books, I’ve never read it, but it sounds interesting, with the Doctor attempting to stop the Kin, an entity that has escaped the prison it was put into by the Time Lords, and is replicating itself across time to cause chaos.

13. The Name Of The Doctor

There are a few prequels to this episode, the first 2 of which are on the Blu-ray, although they’re not positioned together in the special features menu, so their purpose isn’t obvious until you watch them:

  • She Said, He Said (3:31) – This is a teaser for the finale, because it clearly happens after the events of the episode. First, Clara reflects on her experience of being with the Doctor, recalling what a thrill it has been but also how much of a mystery he is, and then says that she found out all about him on the day they went to Trenzalore. The Doctor then delivers a monologue about her in a similar fashion.
  • Clarence and the Whispermen (2:11) – This is an additional scene to begin the story. A serial killer called Clarence (Michael Jenn) is being held in a cell, where he’s tormented by eerie-looking men dressed in black with bright white faces and wide-open mouths. They are called the Whisper Men because of how they speak (voiced by Paul Kasey), and they implant some co-ordinates made of Gallifreyan symbols in Clarence’s head, telling him to take them to the “reptile detective” (i.e. Vastra). They also explain to him that they aren’t human, but are the Intelligence, with knowledge of everything. If he does as they ask, then he will be pardoned instead of hung, but he will always have trouble sleeping.

The main episode itself then concludes the series and launches the show’s 50th anniversary in epic style (so it’s also included in the next box set). For a start, it opens with Clara meeting several of the Doctor’s earlier incarnations, including the First Doctor when he’s about to steal a faulty Tardis from Gallifrey’s repair shop, as the engineers watch on CCTV. It’s wonderful to get a glimpse of that planet again, and it’s very cool how they’ve incorporated Clara into old footage, especially with the 60s film being colourised for this purpose.

We then jump to Victorian London, where Vastra meets prisoner Clarence from the prequel and gets the information from him. He tells her that the Doctor has one particular secret that “he will take to the grave – and it is discovered”. She and Jenny then set up a conference call across time and space, connecting them in a trance-like state with Strax (who is interrupted from a fight in Glasgow), Clara (who was trying to make a soufflé) and River Song (the replicated data version of herself from the library, as she knows about her own death). Vastra tells them that Clarence gave her one particular word with the co-ordinates – the name of Trenzalore.

River knows what this means, but before she can explain, the group come under attack from the Whisper Men. Jenny is murdered and fades away, before Vastra and Strax are forced to leave the trance and find themselves surrounded. Clara and River are then visited in the dream state by the Whisper Men, threatening that the Doctor’s friends will be lost unless he goes to Trenzalore.

When Clara awakes, she finds the Doctor in her house already, having been tricked by the children into playing blind man’s buff so they can sneak off. His enjoyment of the game turns to frustration when he realises he’s been had, and then deep distress when Clara passes on the message about Trenzalore. He goes off to the Tardis to be alone for a few moments, then when Clara approaches him about it, he explains that it’s not his secret that has been discovered, but his own grave. Trenzalore is where he’s buried, at the location of his final battle.

He must therefore never go there, and yet now he has no choice if he wants to save his friends. The Tardis knows it’s a bad idea too and fights back against his attempts to fly there, with explosions sending the Doctor and Clara flying, and it shuts down when they get above the planet. The Doctor then has to disable the anti-gravity system so it falls to the planet’s surface.

They soon come across his final resting place, in his Tardis that has ballooned in size now that it can’t contain its huge interior as well as it used to. But as they explore, Clara is contacted psychically by River Song, who has kept the link open from their conference call, and she accompanies them without the Doctor knowing. Then, as they walk through the catacombs, Clara starts to recall memories that had originally been suppressed from the time they went to the centre of the Tardis, including the Doctor confronting her about the previous versions of her.

By the time they reach the entrance to the tomb, the Whisper Men and the Great Intelligence are already there, along with the Paternoster Gang, with Jenny having been revived by Strax. The Great Intelligence speaks with high and mighty confidence about the Doctor having blood on his hands, and implores him to say his name to open the tomb, asking the question “Doctor who?” repeatedly. The Doctor refuses to say it, but the door opens anyway, with River Song having uttered it instead, with only Clara hearing her as River’s still in her head.

Inside is a swirling tower of light representing the Doctor’s entire timestream, and the Great Intelligence walks into it. The wounds of time split him into many different versions, enabling him to turn the Doctor’s victories into defeats and erase his friends from existence, with Jenny and Strax soon disappearing from the Tardis to prove it’s working, while the Doctor lies in agony on the floor.

Everything falls into place for Clara, and she knows what to do, despite the Doctor and River Song telling her not to. Telling him to “Run, you clever boy, and remember me” – mirroring the phrase we’ve heard her say a couple of times before, with the addition of “me” on the end – she enters his timestream, which replicates her across his life, and we see more of the imagery from the start.

This time, she actually tells the First Doctor which Tardis to choose, saying that although the navigation system is a bit “knackered”, he’ll have a lot more fun. I don’t know if Classic era fans like the fact that a modern companion has become part of the Doctor’s origin story, but I like it, I think it’s a fun little twist. There was never actually a scene where the First Doctor was stealing a Tardis – instead, a scene from The Aztecs was used to make it look like it. But with this interpretation, it marks the first time we see the Doctor on screen before he’s taken the Tardis, and it’s also the first time we see the Tardis in its default grey cylinder form before the chameleon circuit changes its appearance.

Back in the tomb, the Doctor reveals that he does know River Song is there by grabbing her hand, having a conversation with her and even kissing her, which he realises must look odd to everybody else who can’t see her! And River Song hints that there’s more to learn, because she had been mentally linked to Clara, yet is still present despite Clara having been scattered across time.

Clara, meanwhile, falls into a desolate landscape, now that her mission to save the Doctor is complete. Alone, she cries because she doesn’t know where she is. But the Doctor, having taken an enormous risk by also jumping into his own timestream, calls out to her and she sees some of his previous incarnations running by, giving her renewed hope. He then sends her the leaf that was responsible for her existence in the first place, before he appears in front of her and they embrace with relief.

But then another man appears with his back to them, to the Doctor’s alarm. He tries to pull Clara away from the stranger, but she presses him as to who it is, having not seen him before. He explains that it’s him, but it’s the one who broke the promise inherent in the title of Doctor that he had given himself. As Clara faints, overwhelmed by it all, the Doctor confirms that the man is his secret. The man asserts that he did what was necessary to preserve peace and sanity, without any choice. And while the Doctor agrees, he angrily says that the mystery man’s actions were “not in the name of the Doctor”.

As the Doctor carries Clara away, the man is revealed to be played by John Hurt, arguably the biggest of all the acting legends this series has attracted to date. Obviously he was a replacement for Christopher Eccleston, who sadly didn’t want to be involved with the 50th anniversary, as it would have been cool to see the 9th Doctor again. But as stand-ins go, you don’t get much bigger than this.

It was a huge surprise and an exciting cliffhanger when originally broadcast, because John’s appearance had been kept almost completely secret, to the extent that the scripts for the episode had the actor’s name redacted. It’s even more impressive considering that 210 American fans were accidentally sent the box set for Series 7 Part 2 early, and all of them refrained from sharing any spoilers online at the production team’s request, for which the BBC awarded them by sending them a cast interview. One newspaper did apparently leak spoilers, including the appearance of John Hurt, but it wasn’t widely reported elsewhere luckily.

So it’s a very strong end to an excellent episode, in which Matt Smith in particular is absolutely top of his game, going through quite the emotional rollercoaster. And it’s an effective way to tie up Clara’s storyline as the Impossible Girl, which has built through the series very nicely.

The soundtrack album finishes with 10 pieces of music from the finale, 2 of which (Glasgow and Whisper Men) are bonus tracks exclusive to the iTunes release. While there are fewer tracks than the previous episode, the total time of 19 minutes is longer altogether here. It’s a suitably atmospheric and emotional selection of pieces to finish the series, with the best ones for me being To Save The Doctor, A Letter To Clara (because I can never get enough of her theme), A Secret He Will Take To His Grave (a beautiful piece which has melodic elements from This Is Gallifrey) and Remember Me (which starts off nice and sweet then builds to a big crescendo).

Weirdly and frustratingly, however, the album doesn’t include the music from the final scene where John Hurt is revealed, which is the most significant part of the entire episode. It’s a really glaring omission.

Mini-Episodes

As if all the above wasn’t enough, three short bonus scenes were also added exclusively to the DVD & Blu-ray releases, which are quite fun:

  • Rain Gods (1:38) – This was written by Neil Gaiman, who adapted an unused opening scene from The Doctor’s Wife, but it’s incorrectly credited to Steven Moffat on screen. It features The Doctor and River Song being marched through woodland in preparation for being sacrificed to the Rain Gods. River is irritated with the Doctor because he doesn’t have a plan, but he’s able to get them out of it with the aid of some lightning. The interplay between the two of them is amusing.
  • Clara And The Tardis (2:06) – Written by Steven Moffat, this is a very funny scene, as Clara gets frustrated with the Tardis about where it’s hidden her bedroom. When she asks the machine if it’s the first time the Doctor’s brought a girl back, it shows her images of his previous female companions, and she’s taken aback by Amy’s legs in particular. There are also jokes about a holographic leopard and the Doctor’s screwdriver. Clara then taunts the Tardis as she goes off to try and find her bedroom again, only for it to generate multiple versions of her, who are still looking for her room or are sharing a bed, just to mess with her. It goes to show that the Tardis has a great sense of humour. This storyline is also notable for being the first to be filmed with only one person (and Jenna pulls it off brilliantly), the first to involve the companion but not the Doctor since the 1960s, and the first to be set in the Tardis without the Doctor.
  • The Inforarium (1:54) – Also written by Steven Moffat, this is the least interesting of the 3 bonus scenes, but still nice to have. It sees the Doctor projecting a hologram of himself on to the Inforarium, which is the greatest source of illicit information in history, that gets sold to a lot of the Doctor’s enemies. The Doctor has been trying to erase himself from history so he’ll be left alone, and while he can’t delete the details they hold on him, he is able to put a safeguard in place, so that anyone who learns anything about him will forget it all a few seconds later. And he proves it to the doubtful guard, who unknowingly finds himself in a repeating loop as the Doctor, who seems new to him every time, reappears to deliver the same message again, and again, and again…

Blu-ray Extras

Audio Commentaries

Since Series 5 there’s been a steady decline in the number of audio commentaries, sadly. So we only get 4 on the Blu-ray set, all of which are from the second part of the series, and it’s a very random selection. But it’s great to hear from Matt Smith, the Paternoster Gang and Mark Gatiss in particular.

Additional Scenes

  • Prequels (17:57) – As with the first part of the series, there are nice little prequels for a few episodes to expand the stories a bit, which I’ve mentioned in the reviews above, lasting from 2-3½ minutes each.
  • Mini-Episodes (5:38) – As discussed earlier, there are 3 mini-episodes relating to part 2 – Rain Gods, Clara And The Tardis & The Inforarium.

Documentaries

  • Behind The Scenes (33:42) – Every episode in Part 2 gets an all-too-brief behind the scenes feature, running 3-4 minutes each. and apart from the Christmas special they all have voiceover narration by Richard Bacon. They do have nice little insights, it’s just a shame they’re so short.
  • Creating Clara (9:39) – An interesting behind the scenes look at Clara’s introduction to the series, talking about the different versions of her character, her costumes and her courage as the companion, while Jenna-Louise Coleman reflects on her experience so far.
  • The Companions (43:37) – This is a nice documentary from BBC America in 2013, marking the arrival of Clara and honouring those who came before her, looking at what it takes to be a great companion. It includes interviews with showrunner Steven Moffat, Doctors Matt Smith & David Tennant, and companion actors Jenna-Louise Coleman (Clara Oswald), Karen Gillan (Amy Pond), Arthur Darvill (Rory Williams), John Barrowman (Captain Jack), Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones) & Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith).

Altogether, for Part 2 of the series there’s around 1 hour 50 minutes of bonus features and documentaries, plus 3 hours 15 minutes of commentaries. Coupled with the 2½ hours of extras for Part 1, that makes a total of approximately 7½ hours of bonus material across the entire Series 7 box set. So in total that’s not bad, but without the BBC America documentaries they could have had room to include much more behind the scenes material from the filming of the series.

Conclusion

And that’s it, I hope you enjoyed my review of the series. It’s been another fun one to watch, and again there are all sorts of things you can look at in relation to it on my playlist too.

It also sets things up very nicely for the 50th anniversary specials, so I’m going to rewatch and review those very soon, before I then move on to Peter Capaldi’s era. But in the meantime, run you clever reader, and remember me.

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Author: Glen

Love London, love a laugh, love life. Visually impaired blogger, culture vulture & accessibility advocate, with aniridia & nystagmus, posting about my experiences & adventures.

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