Fixing Missy

I've been thinking about Missy for a little while now. The big reveal that she was The Master was all well and good, and I'm happy to roll with it now that it's happened. However, it's not exactly an ideal situation from my point of view. I will probably get jumped on for this, but I'm still not fully on board for gender-swapping regenerations. For good or ill, they have been part of the canon since Neil Gaiman's otherwise great The Doctor's Wife. But it's not just the gender swap that disappoints me about the Missy reveal. It is the missed opportunity that came with it.

Yes, I'm talking about The Rani. Radio Times reported on how Steven Moffat tried to trick people into thinking Missy was actually The Rani, and I must admit, she was actually my first thought when we met Missy. Moffat clearly had Rani front of mind at the time, so why default to The Master? He had already featured prominently in a season arc in season 3, and as the main protagonist in the Christmas / New Year special The End of Time in 2009-10.

The casting would have been perfect too.
(image from Following the Nerd)

With such a huge existing Rogue's Gallery and nearly infinite possibilities for new villains, there really is no need to recycle enemies at this rate. Also, it's rather questionable as to why you would gender swap a male villain when there is already a perfectly serviceable female one ready to use. Rani would arguable have fit in with the Death In Heaven season arc better than The Master does too. Her cold, calculating nature would easily see her team up with the Cybermen if it meant she could somehow further her research. The Master's motivation seems to be purely to taunt The Doctor and prove him to be a bad man.

That said, it's actually not too late to turn this whole thing around. Allow me to explain:

The last time we saw The Master he was burning up his life force to attack Rassilon and company at the climax of The End of Time. We all assume he is then either time-locked with the rest of Gallifrey, or his unstable body disintegrates. Either way, he is never to be seen again. But The Master has survived without a body before. He's also a big fan of possessing other people's bodies. It's not unreasonable for his disembodied essence to somehow escape the time-lock and wander the galaxy stealing bodies.

Those bodies, however, aren't good enough. Much like the 1996 Movie, they quickly degrade. He needs a Time Lord body. He searches the galaxy for The Doctor, but is always a step behind. He eventually decides to lie in wait on Earth, The Doctor's favourite backwater. He just misses The Doctor on several occasions, such as turning up at Craig and Sophie's place just after their Lodger left, or the time all those cubes showed up.

By chance The Master stumbles across The Rani, who has also somehow managed to escape the time locked Gallifrey, and is working to perfect a way of storing the essence of sentient creatures indefinitely, using the same basic technology as the Chameleon Arch. Perhaps she plans to use this technology to transfer the Time Lords minds off of Gallifrey, if not their bodies. Perhaps she has other plans for it. Either way, she is now using the resources of the Cybermen to further this research.

The Cybermen have had issues with strong personalities overriding the emotional suppression of the upgrade process. This is their attempt to make a better Cyberman by testing the personalities within the Nethersphere and placing only the most desirable ones into the strongest bodies. While the personalities can survive in an artificial neural network, which is essentially what The Nethersphere is, they can't bond with a purely robotic vessel, and require a bio-organic link.

The Rani is able to develop the basis for an upgraded Cyber chassis that can use a relatively small amount of organic material from the same species to create the required neural link, but her plan is always to dump the entire contents of the Nethersphere into these new bodies, even those strong enough to overcome the emotional suppression. She wants to use the tech for her own ends, not create an unstoppable Cyber Army. Just let them fight amongst themselves while she makes good her escape.

Unfortunately for Rani, The Master manages to use her own tech against her, pushing her out of her body and storing her in her own personal version of The Nethersphere. The Master is then able to possess her body, again getting the Time Lord (or Lady) form he desired. Naturally The Master (now Missy) uses the existing partnership and technology to her own ends, but being unaware that Rani had bypassed the selection protocols in the Nethersphere, she dumps the strong personalities as well. These include Danny and The Brigadier, and things play out as we have already seen.

Now that was a lot of back-story to get through, but it tidies up a couple of issues I have with that story, namely the fact that Cybermen can suddenly use corpses to create new Cybermen. Previously they have always been upgraded living beings, so justifying this new evolution would be nice. From here, you can see it sets up a situation where The Doctor can find out about this, and be forced to choose between leaving Rani in a lonely limbo state, or essentially killing his friend. Obviously we'd find a way to save both, but then we've got two antagonists out in the field ready to clash with The Doctor again in the future.

Oh, man! Can you imagine The Master in a Cyberman body?

Review - Listen

The Doctor deals with some of his own personal monsters and we learn a bit more about Danny Pink in Listen.

Season 8, Episode 4 - Listen 

We begin with The Doctor proposing a theory that just as nature has produced perfect hunters there may also exist a creature which has evolved to be the perfect hider. He suggests these creatures are the cause of a dream shared by all people where a hand grabs you from under the bed.

Using a telepathic link with Clara to direct the TARDIS, The Doctor hopes to find a point in her life when she had the dream, and therefore discover the creature. Unfortunately, Clara gets distracted by the embarrassing aftermath of her fairly disastrous first date with Danny Pink, and things don't go according to plan.

This was an interesting concept for a story and I think overall it was executed quite well. Initially I felt a bit short-changed after there was no confirmed monster, but it is actually quite a refreshing change. There were several hints that indicate there was no creature at all, with each bit of evidence for it being paired with a rational explanation, but at the same time we just can't be sure.

I think it's a testament to the concept and the writing that there is already heated debated raging online about whether there was or wasn't a creature. I've said it before and I'll likely say it again, Steven Moffat can write. Where he falls down is his insistence on pushing these grand, overarching stories and tying everything together. Which leads into my one real issue with this episode. The connection to Day of the Doctor. It just seemed a bit gratuitous to me.

The only way I could not be excited about seeing The War Doctor again

On a similar note, is Gallifrey not time locked any more? How was the TARDIS able to get to that point in The Doctor's timeline? Perhaps it was just a special quirk of Clara's because she has been spliced throughout The Doctor's timeline, but it feels like they are forgetting some important canon there.

In the end, this whole episode felt like a bit of a nothingness. We got some interesting insights into both The Doctor and Danny Pink, and it was yet again Clara's knack with kids that won the day, but overall it was a much slower pace than we've seen recently with not a great deal of excitement. Not that that's inherently a bad thing, but we maybe need a bit more to hook the audience. And with no definite resolution, we are left without so much a story as a collection of things that happened and some unanswered questions. As I said, not everything needs to be answered, but this kind of felt unfinished.

6/10

Can we fix it?

I'm not really sure we can, at least not without completely altering the whole thing. As I said, there is a good concept here, but I don't think it's actually a story. There's a bit of value around discussing this episode and it's implications on the wider Whoniverse, but it's just not that entertaining in and of itself.

Getting rid of the in-your-face reference to Day of The Doctor could have helped. I'm pretty sure some clever people would have made the connection with the barn at some point. If not, I'm certain that Moffat would have taken the opportunity to tell people that was his intention in some interview or another.

What this episode really needs is a solid ending. A good story needs to be structured in such a way that we have Introduction, Investigation, Escalation and Resolution (More info on what I mean here). This episode shows the first three to varying degrees, but there is no real Resolution phase, at least not from The Doctor's perspective. I can't fathom The Doctor abandoning his theory without knowing for sure.

This episode is blissfully free of my other major issues, but without a definite story, it will always just feel like filler.

Just an afterthought...

I know everyone is debating whether there was a monster or not, but to me there is another more interesting question; was the kid really The Doctor? I like to think it was actually The Master. The boy appears to have similar dark hair and could be crying due to his experience looking into the Untempered Schism. That all depends on at what point in the initiation into the Academy the youngsters are made to face the Schism though.

Crying is the first sign of hyper-insanity

Either way, I hope my theory that Missy is actually The Master regenerated and gender-swapped is true and she whips out Dan The Soldier Man at some point. That'd be ace.