Day 812: Death in Heaven

When the early reviews for Deep Breath first came in, every single one seemed to focus on the restaurant scene. It's a surprisingly long scene where the two characters are just allowed to talk about their situation and figure out what is happening. It was frequently called out as a representation of how this new Capaldi era of Doctor Who would look like a collection of longer scenes, giving the stories more time to breathe instead of giving them more bells and whistles to gawp at. And whilst these longer scenes may not be seen in every single episode of the Capaldi era, there is one particular one that pops up in Death in Heaven that is definitely worth talking about.

The graveyard scene is absolutely fantastic. It happens towards the end of the episode, after the Doctor has escaped death by falling into the TARDIS and unlocking it, where his first port of call is to find Clara, who's dealing with the fact that Danny Pink has suddenly become a Cyberman, but still has his emotions. And what the scene does is, instead of just allowing the Doctor to fix the situation and be done with it, it gives the characters an ethical dilemma to consider. Because all three characters, at some point in the scene, have some desire to remove Danny's emotions, whether it's to take away his pain, or for a tactical advantage against the Cybermen. But none of them want to be the one to do it, so they spend time standing around and considering their options as they attempt to stall the inevitable. And this is what makes the scene so memorable: it allows the characters to talk and develop over the course of the situation. It also helps that the ending to that particular strand is that Danny loses his emotions and becomes a Cyberman, adding a heartbreaking inevitability to the event.

But that's still only half of the scene. The other half concerns Missy, who enters the scene with a desire to make it go in a completely unexpected direction. She reveals that she created the army of the Cybermen specifically for the Doctor, not as creatures for him to beat, but as creatures for him to use. She wants him to use them to fight evil throughout the Universe, as the world's most good General. And she specifically does this because she wants him to consider that offer, so that he can realise that he is not a particularly good man and that he would clearly use that force for some sort of evil. It's a wonderful road for the story to go along; it reveals that the entire plot has not been conceived out of some simple desire to take over the world, but the far more complex and interesting want to change a character's mind. As Missy says to the Doctor, she just wanted him to realise that they're not so different.

And of course, order is restored by the end of the scene. The Doctor realises that, whilst he isn't a good man, he is happy with being an idiot who just helps out from time to time wherever he is needed. Danny takes control of the Cybermen and uses them to solve the bigger issues that Missy had set up to take over the Earth. And so the story comes to an end, but a bitter-sweet ending as Clara deals with the loss of Danny, but hides it from the Doctor. Perhaps we'll see how all of this plays out tomorrow, as we continue our look at Peter Capaldi's time as the Doctor.