I love Missy! She's bananas!
Spoilers!
[spoil]
I saw one review of this episode where they said they expected Missy to become the Doctor's new companion by the end...and I think that would've been fantastic. We'd have finally had a new character dynamic, and we'd have gotten Missy in every episode, which is something I'm completely OK with.
Beyond Missy, the finale was kind of a letdown for me-- almost every major element which was advertised, was actually completely misleading and had nothing to do with the plot:
1) Clara confronts the Doctor at Vesuvius ("You were the chosen one!"): Dream sequence which ultimately has no effect on the plot or the characters.
2) "Clara Oswald never existed.": Just a lie Clara tells the Cybermen, which fools them for exactly zero seconds.
3) The Doctor is now President Doctor: absolutely nothing is done with this.
And check out the huge huevos on Missy, to use the Toclafane plan again, but with Cybermen this time, because paradoxes are for nerds. I thought they were going to get around the paradox issue by Missy saying "I only cyberized people who were already dead, so there's no paradox! This is a free army and no one had to die!" which would create a morally gray decision for the Doctor to make. Instead, she has her nonsensical "Cyberzombie" plan, followed by her "screw it, I'll just kill everyone with spores" plan. I feel like she could've skipped the fake afterlife part of the plan altogether.
And the part with the kid at the end made zero sense. If the Nethersphere could create fully functional human bodies solely from people's minds, then why would they need corpses to begin with? They could've skipped that entire part of the plot, and the story would've still worked (Missy would be making an army of the dead, using copies of people's minds with the emotions removed, and using the Nethersphere to replicate cyberized bodies for them), and there wouldn't have been massive plotholes and paradoxes.
Bah, such a frustrating finale. The only parts I really liked were Missy, Nick Frost as Santa, and when Clara and the Doctor where lying to each other at the end...though I don't feel that the show earned Capaldi's reaction at not finding Gallifrey. I'm pretty sure the dude doesn't care about finding it, since he spent no time trying to search for it this season.
Statistics: Posted by Liesmith — Sun Nov 16, 2014 4:42 pm