Day 708: Bad Wolf

Cliffhangers, in my opinion, can be generally divided into two categories. The first is 'Peril', where a character is placed in mortal peril at the end of the episode, and the tension of the cliffhanger is built upon seeing wither they live, and more importantly, how they lived (an example of this ending are the cliffhanger to The Magician's Apprentice, where Missy, Clara and the TARDIS are seemingly destroyed). The other category is 'Development', where the ending is pivoted around a major plot development that changes the entire structure of the story (an example of this could be the ending to Under the Lake, where the 'ghost Doctor' is revealed, changing the story slightly from being about ghosts attacking a base to how the Doctor became a ghost in the first place). Bad Wolf's ending doesn't quite fit into either of those categories, and it's all the better for it.

On the surface, it's a 'Peril' ending. The episode clearly ends on the point of the Daleks stating that they are going to go and conquer the Earth, which puts everyone in danger, increasing the tension in the story. But there's also the argument that the cliffhanger didn't begin there, instead it began around 5 minutes earlier when the Daleks were first revealed, showing that they have been in command of the Game Station for all these years, as well as surviving the Time War, changing the focus of the episode from a story about homicidal game shows to a fight against the Daleks. This would put it in the 'Development' column, although there's enough 'Peril' in there to make it a hybrid of the two.

But that's all missing the entire point of the ending. The real meat of it is the Doctor's speech, where he stands up to the Daleks, ready to take them on in an instant. The notion of the speech is fantastic, as we get steadily more and more excited as he lays out his aims for the next episode. But we don't get to see his actions, which makes the next episode all the more exciting. It turns the tension present in the cliffhanger on its head, not using events that will happen and you need to see the conclusion of said events in the next episode, but instead you get told about the events happening and the conclusion of the events within the cliffhanger, making it more of a trailer than a cliffhanger ending. But it still works, and it makes for one of my favourite scenes in the history of Doctor Who.