One of the great ironies of Series 8 is that a lot of fans were hoping that Moffat would set aside the grand season arcs for a bit and focus on character and stand-alone adventures, and yet there are endless complaints about how much the season has focused on The Doctor’s relationship with Clara.  Or how the season is largely being seen from Clara’s point of view.  This may be the inevitable legacy of so many previous seasons being about overly ambitious universe-changing events.

 

That said, I was more than a little disappointed with how quickly Clara took her rather well-justified issues with The Doctor and tossed them aside, once she was faced with that one final adventure.  And so she’s at the point where she’s lying to the man she supposedly loves so she can continue to run about with The Doctor.  It doesn’t speak well for Clara, even as the writers continue to make us love her as a Companion.  (At least, I adore her!)

 

Jamie Mathieson wrote the previous episode as well, which is perhaps why both seem to focus on character dynamics amidst a rather unusual stand-alone hook.  In both cases, the danger was posed by a threat that couldn’t be easily denied, with a nature that was difficult to parse out.  In some ways, they were “classic” Whovian villains: built to embody a conceptual source of fear that only The Doctor’s “science” could overcome.  In that regard, it met the season’s supposed mandate to be darker than previous seasons have been.

 

There may have been practical reasons for having The Doctor somewhat sidelined, but that meant that Clara was in the driver’s seat more often than not.  And so one’s enjoyment of the episode is going to hinge dramatically on one’s enjoyment of Clara at this stage of the game.  Clara is learning a lot about what it means to be heroic, and if this is the final season for Clara as a Companion, then I have to wonder what the endgame is.  Especially with that tease at the end involving Missy and her interest in Clara.

 

But that’s entirely the weakness of the episode: if there’s a character arc for Clara, and if she’s meant to arrive at some kind of revelatory endgame, then her decision to regress back to defining herself in terms of The Doctor is the wrong way to go.  For one thing, it gives credibility to the folks that dismissed Clara’s tirade at the end of “Kill the Moon” as a momentary snit instead of a logical progression of frustration.  The Doctor may need Clara, but he doesn’t treat her with that level of respect.  Why does Clara need The Doctor, then?