The first two-parter of Doctor Who season nine is complete, and many questions were answered: What did the Doctor say to that small boy alone on a battlefield? Whatever happened to Missy and Clara? Why does Davros want to talk to his arch-enemy anyhow?
Let’s take a look at “The Witch’s Familiar.”
Summary
We start with Missy and Clara—who are clearly not dead at all. Missy starts by giving Clara a scenario, where the Doctor is on the run from android assassins, traveling by one of their teleport devices, just like she was in the previous episode. She asks Clara how the Doctor avoids being killed by the assassins, and Clara figures he does it by using the tech from the teleport device to absorb their weapons’ fire and teleport again… and that happens to be exactly how Missy avoided being killed before, and how they’re still alive. Missy asks why the Doctor survives, and Clara says it’s because he always believes he can. Missy asks what is different now, then, with his delivering of the will and such. Clara says that it means the Doctor has given up hope, and they in turn give up hope because he has. With that lesson over, they journey back to the heart of Skaro to find the Doctor.
The Doctor steals Davros’ chair for a while, making use of its shielding. He asks the Daleks to return Clara to him, even having seen her murder. Davros has his snaky security guard stop the Doctor and bring him back, insisting that they’ll entrap him yet.
Missy and Clara head into the Dalek sewer, which turns out to be more of a Dalek graveyard, where the useless bodies of Daleks who have lived too long wither away and melt into the walls. Missy insists that they get Clara caught so they can get a Dalek to come down there. One arrives and Missy pierces it, prompting a Dalek stew in the sewer to attack and destroy it. Missy has Clara climb into the Dalek casing and control it; one of the things she finds is that whenever Clara tries to say her own name, it comes out “I am a Dalek,” and when she says I love you, it comes out “Exterminate.” They head aboveground to talk to the Daleks.
In the meantime, the Doctor has a long heart-to-heart with Davros, who is being surprisingly kind. He asks about the Doctor’s “will,” which is apparently a confession that explains why he ran from Gallifrey in the first place. He talks of their never-ending conflict; of the cables in his chamber that he draws life from, connected to every Dalek; and how it’s no longer enough to sustain him. He encourages the Doctor to murder the Daleks through those cables, pointing out how many of each other’s peoples they’re responsible for killing. The Doctor tells Davros that Gallifrey is actually out there somewhere, and Davros is glad, glad to know that the Doctor still has his people. He asks to look on the Doctor with his real eyes, and they have a moment together, joking around. He tells the Doctor that all he really wants is to see the sunrise one more time before he dies. By the time they get to that sunrise, Davros cannot open his eyes and seems near the end, so the Doctor offers up some regeneration energy…
It was a trap. Davros begins to drain the Doctor dry, using the regeneration energy to invigorate the Daleks and prolong his life. Missy rushes to the chamber and destroys the cable system before the Doctor can be killed, and the Doctor claims that he always knew Davros was going to double-cross him. And the Doctor thought of something that Davros did not: the sewers. All the basically dead Daleks start sliming up from the sewers to attack the still-live ones, and the Doctor and Missy escape. When they reach Clara—who is stuck in the Dalek casing—Missy tells the Doctor that it is the Dalek who killed Clara (because Clara cannot say her name or anything kind at all). But Clara manages to ask for mercy, which gives the Doctor pause. The Doctor tells her to think the casing open, and when Clara is revealed, the Doctor tells Missy to run. Missy is eventually caught by the Daleks, and claims that she has an idea.
The Doctor and Clara go back to where the TARDIS was and the Doctor admits that it wasn’t destroyed, only dispersed. His sunglasses call it back together—he’s into wearable tech now. Once they’re away, he ponders over a peculiarity: If Clara were able to ask for mercy, it means that Daleks have a concept of mercy, and he can’t figure out how that could be true. It clicks suddenly, and he goes back to little Davros on the battlefield, using the Dalek tech to destroy the hand mines that had him trapped. The boy asks if he’s a friend or enemy, and the Doctor tells him that he doesn’t think sides matter much, only mercy. They walk off together.
Commentary
I would like to point out that in Missy’s potential scenario at the start, the Doctor is running away from android assassins in Hogwarts. It’s definitely Hogwarts. So we now have confirmation that the Doctor has been to Hogwarts, where he thwarted a plot from evil android assassins to probably kill Harry. Or something.
If there’s anything that this episode (and the two-parter as a whole) suffers from, it’s that there are one too many “gotcha!” double-backs, and not all of them are that smart. Sure, we know Davros is up to something, but the Doctor’s final insistence that he knew Davros would betray him this way from the start seems pretty hollow when you consider the price he’s likely to pay for that stunt. (YOU DON’T JUST GIVE AWAY REGENERATION POWER WILLY-NILLY LIKE THAT, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.) We know the Daleks aren’t going to be gone, and we know that Davros will be back sometime. If the Doctor had really thought that the regeneration of the species would lead to their final demise, you could see why he’d be willing to go along with it, but it doesn’t seem that way at all—it just seems like he knew he could use it for a good exit, and now he’s gone and made them ridiculously powerful.
Those issues are unfortunate because they dampen what is otherwise a very strong episode. Davros offering the Doctor a way to commit genocide against the Daleks, which he refuses, is a harkening back to many previous encounters between them, most specifically “Genesis of the Daleks,” where the Fourth Doctor has that same chance and also refuses. The moments we get between Davros and the Doctor are powerful by and large: Davros understands much of the Doctor, and knows exactly which buttons to push; the fact that he asks the Doctor if he is a “good man”—something that the Doctor was asking himself in the previous season—proves that well enough.
And then the Doctor essentially admits to what Davros had been calling his “greatest weakness”: He did not come to Skaro because he was ashamed of what he did to Davros as a boy, but because Davros is dying, and he asked for him. Compassion all over again, the mark of any good doctor. And while we know by the end that Davros is being tricky here, trying to forge these moments between him as a way of getting what he wants, you can’t help but suspect that there’s truth in these exchanges. That Davros maybe is glad that the Doctor has not lost the Time Lords, that he does wonder about his legacy in creating the Daleks, that there is a part of him that misses connecting with any being that is not one of his creations. That moment of laughter between them feels far from forced, and seeing Davros open his true eyes is a jarring and sincere move. (Props to Julian Bleach here, he does an incredible job.)
There are some interesting reveals here that I’m not quite sure I understand, most of them wrapped up in Clara’s time in the Dalek casing. So, when she tries to give her own answers to questions, when she says anything kind or caring, they are usurped by Dalek words of hate… but the Dalek itself isn’t in the casing. Does that mean that Daleks aren’t permitted to say that they truly think, that the technology in their casing overrides it? Or does it simply mean that, to a Dalek, even emotions like love become warped and are then channeled into violence? Because that segment was fascinating, but it wasn’t really given the explanation it deserved.
(Also, there was an extra layer of creepy here, considering that Clara-inside-a-Dalek is technically how the Doctor first met her.)
We find out that the Doctor’s will is not precisely a will, it’s a confession disc, one that presumably explains why he ran from Gallifrey all those years ago—is that this season’s long game mystery? Because… that’s actually pretty interesting question to me, resolved or not. It’s a much better question to be asking than “Doctor WHO?” any day of the week.
I’m already sorry that Missy is likely to go under the radar until the finale, as she and Clara made a hilariously fun team to watch, and it’s not quite so common to have two female companions around anymore. (We had some fun in the fourth season finale, and when Martha and Donna were both around for the Sontaran two-parter, but other than that, we haven’t had the dynamic since Nyssa and Tegan were on the TARDIS.) Plus, she’s the perfect dramatic instigator: Trying to get the Doctor to inadvertently kill Clara was a superbly evil move, and the comments she makes afterwards (about trying to get the Doctor to see the enemies in his friends, and the friends in his enemies) make it even more wrenching. Because the Doctor loves to talk about the Master as though they’re enemies—and in a way they are—but that also couldn’t be further from the truth. And this incarnation of the Master cares very much about making that distinction, about making her friend admit that he is her friend. Her parting shot proves it all over again: He tells her to run, and she tells him that he was always the one who ran, not her. So again, there are hurt feelings there, anger at being constantly left behind.
There’s the title to consider as well—”The Witch’s Familiar.” My immediate guess is that the witch is Missy, and Clara is her familiar? Since we know that the Missy considers herself the “original” companion after a fashion, and she did hand-pick Clara for the Doctor.
Also, Missy had a comment about her star alloy thingamajig, something that she claims the Doctor gave to her for her daughter… of course, she could be lying, but if she’s not, then they were both parents at some point, and now I’d be just as happy to watch a series of the Doctor and Master co-parenting Time Tots on Gallifrey. My needs are few, give me this one thing.
The overall theme of mercy being a necessity (and it being a key quality that the Doctor himself ultimately inscribed on the Daleks) only really grabbed me because we, as the audience, have seen a Dalek plead for mercy before—when the Doctor wasn’t around. That was in the season five finale, when a Dalek begged River Song. So the fact that this is something that we had experienced before as viewers when the Doctor had not made it even more interesting. It made his choice to influence young Davros there at the end feel less like a cheat. My only quibble is that it’s become something of a stock point in the show that the Doctor is totally responsible for the good in everyone, now up to and including his greatest enemies. So maybe that’s getting to be a bit much?
All in all, an emotional start to the season. Hopefully there is more of the same on offer down the road—minus a few confusing hiccups, this was a great ride.
Emmet Asher-Perrin thinks that maybe the Doctor should stop tossing around regeneration energy like it’s candy. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
It was fun to see Clara reacting to Missy like she was the Doctor, only to have Missy take advantage of it. FFS, Clara, didn’t the spontaneous murders in the square teach you anything?
As for telling Missy to run, the Doctor is still afraid of what he’ll do when he’s angry. Him being the one to run ties back to the boarding school two parter with Martha. Or Demons run…
Is the Hybrid prophecy a new thing or from Old Who somehow?
I’m starting to think hat Missy isn’t a new regeneration of the master, but a more psychotic version of The Rani
There was a moment where the Doctor and Davros were having their chuckle when I wondered what if that happens in every episode for the rest of the season. The Doctor goes shopping with the Cybermen, tea with Sontarans, volleyball with the Vashta Nerada, and they’re all just chatting and laughing and having a grand old time.
The pacing was a bit wonky in this one, but overall I liked it. I hope the Sonic Sunglasses stick around.
“Your sewers are revolting”
OK, so I was wrong assuming Missy and Clara died and some timey-wimey stuff is going to happen to fix it. Too bad, I quite liked that idea.
@1 noblehunter: Prophecy is new. And I don’t like it. I’m not a fan of stories with prophecies in general (with one single exception: WoT) and mostly I find it a cheap trope. And I really really liked the original idea of Doctor running away simply because he was bored.
@3 ScavengerMonk: now that would be a season! :)
I too think that Doctor “knowing all along it’s a trap” was too much. But maybe he lied?
Clara inside the Dalek: Doctor should’ve guessed something’s wrong sooner. Dalek hesitating to shoot? Missy telling him to kill it?
Not sure about the sunglasses. I sort of expect Doctor saying at some point: “Never trust a sunglasses. It’s just a clever way to hide your eyes…”
@2 If only. In fact if Missy had been spun off as the Rani, or Romana, or Susan, or that clone from the Doctor’s Daughter, then this would not be a wholly unobjectionable episode. Moffat’s determination to put his bad fanfic ideas on screen sank it though. I’m done defending that guy and just hope he goes quickly and his successor is smart enough to do some good retconning. There is a lot to fix.
@5, I think the Doctor lied about it being his plan all along, yes. He said in some previous episode during his eleventh incarnation that he likes to wait for something to happen and then claim it was his plan all along.
Now, I could believe Davros trying to create a Dalek metacrisis, after what he saw in Journey’s End. And I don’t know about Time Lord prophesies, but in that episode Dalek Caan went on and on about prophesies and seeing the Doctor’s soul bared at the end.
@7, Re: the Prophecy: I don’t mind that – obviously time-travelling people like Time Lords have some acces to future knowledge – I just don’t want a prophecy to be the one thing that drives main character’s journey. For example, I don’t like Harry Potter so much since the fifth book, where he stopped being “the boy who lived” and who wants to stop You-know-who just because it’s a right thing to do, and started to be “The One,” destined to be the only one who can ever defeat Voldemort. When heroes stop being heroes because of their own good will and start to be The Ones, I just don’t care anymore. I want Doctor to be this weird space-tourist who just happens from time to time to help someone; not The One – to save the universe, to destroy it, to create some sort of superwarrior… just no.
the Doctor has given up hope, and they in turn give up hope because he has
I don’t think that was what Clara meant:
“What happens next?”
“We do. We assume we’re going to win.”
“Pity really. I was actually quite peckish!”
I may have edited the dialogue a bit, but I think Clara meant “we happen next”. They haven’t made a will yet. And so off they go.
Prophecies are supposed to be messages from an inscrutable future. Time Lords can just pop in to see how it goes. Not to mention the whole Time War thing. If there’s unfulfilled prophecies around they’re going to know this isn’t The End; the Doctor should have known it.
So I don’t like this prophecy thing. The Doctor makes prophecy, he is not subject to it.
I think the point of Daleks not being able to say unauthorised words is just Newspeak: even if a Dalek develops a flaw that would allow it to have other emotions than hate and anger, not being able to express them would kill those emotions. Of course, we may wonder why such a Dalek wouldn’t be immediately killed by the others. Also, I’m not sure how that works with episodes like ‘Evil of the Daleks’ or ‘Asylum of the Daleks’, but we can say it’s a recent upgrade of the Dalek casing.
I thought Missy was much better than in her previous episodes, here I did see the Master from the classic series. To me, the titles are about comparing Clara as a companion to the Doctor (“You’re the puppy”) and to Missy (“Every miner needs a canary”).
“The Doctor is totally responsible for the good in everyone, now up to and including his greatest enemies. So maybe that’s getting to be a bit much?”
The previous encounter with Davros gave us this:
“The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun, but this is the truth, Doctor: you take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons… behold your Children of Time, transformed into murderers. I made the Daleks, Doctor, you made this. […] Just think, how many have died in your name? The Doctor, the man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame. This is my final victory, Doctor. I have shown you yourself.”
I think it’s nice to balance it out and remind us that the Doctor is indeed a good man.
By the way, the first part of the description, the fact that the Doctor abhors violence but still makes violence happen, is why I disliked the idea that the Doctor knew it was a trap all along. If he knew he was going to kill the Daleks anyway, he could have done it directly without sacrificing regeneration energy and risking that his plan would fail. For starters, he didn’t check that the sewers were still there. It’s a different Skaro, and they rebuilt it with different sewers, without the giant clams that bit Harry Sullivan in Genesis of the Daleks; the presence of the dying Daleks was not obvious.
I’m ok with the big mystery being “why did the Doctor run away”, although I will suspect it will be another non-answer like the Doctor’s name (which was not important except that it was a key to keeping something else bad from happening). Although the mystery needs to take into account that it’s been established that the Doctor ran away when he was “old” (i.e. Hartnell) and had a granddaughter.
I’m not ok with the big mystery having to do with some suddenly contrived prophecy about Time Lord-Dalek hybrids. I’m also unclear on how a Dalek-Time Lord hybrid would be more dangerous. Daleks already have some kind of time travel, and getting some regeneration energy is not going to suddenly give them the technical specs to build a TARDIS. They can’t be killed except by blowing up their casing, so if they regenerate they would be vulnerable and easy to blast again. Plus, they can never be so powerful that the Doctor can’t beat them, so it feels like a concept that can’t really deliver.
It doesn’t make sense that the Doctor would have known Davros’ plan “all along”. Or, if he did, his actions make no sense. Deliberately giving Davros and the Daleks his regeneration energy was way too risky, and dependent on someone else to rescue him, when he thought Clara and Missy were dead. He would have realized about the sewers after it happened, and known that things were not going to go as well for Davros as he had planned, but it was a huge and stupid risk to take if he really had figured out Davros’ whole plan in advance.
I didn’t much like the Part One episode, so not surprisingly, I liked this Part Two episode quite a bit better. One of the things I didn’t like about the first episode was the moral ambiguity of it all. The Doctor was far too cozy with Missy, and even with Davros. Not to mention him leaving a child in the midst of a minefield. The Doctor was looking too dark, and his opponents were looking not quite dark enough.
But this week, the Doctor’s behavior was revealed to be him trying to see the best in people, an aspect of his mercy, and was juxtaposed with Davros shamelessly manipulating the Doctor to steal his regeneration power, and Missy trying to trick him into killing Clara while she was trapped in the Dalek body. So the Doctor is back to being the good guy, and the bad guys are back to being bad guys.
I hope that Colony Scharf, the snake guy, is just mostly dead, as he was too good a villain to just use once. It looked like a lot of regeneration energy was being drawn from the Doctor, but I doubt there will be any long term impact to that. They certainly won’t want to take away any of his future regenerations. The slithering dead Daleks oozing up from the sewers were cool and creepy at the same time, a fitting petard for Davros and the Daleks to be hoisted upon. The whole thing with Clara being trapped in a Dalek was a nice twist, evoking the horror of her previous incarnation when she had been trapped as a Dalek. And I was happy when the Doctor went back to the minefield to at least try to share some mercy with young Davros. I mean, you have to ‘hand’ it to him for at least trying.
I am looking forward to next week, a good old fashioned claustrophobic sea base infested by scary ghosts. Looks fun!
Something I just remembered, that I read on another review site (so not my idea).
The Doctor rescues Davros with a gun that Davros previously described as “ancient technology.” We know the Doctor left his screwdriver behind even after going back to save the boy, what if he also accidentally left the gun behind?
One thing I haven’t seen discussed, it that the idea that the Doctor was going into a situation with no hope and planning to die doesn’t hold up to close inspection. If he had no hope because he was planning to visit Davros alone and knew it was a trap, then why did he set the sunglasses up as a TARDIS remote control? But then Missy and Clara go along, and he has hope then he doesn’t, except he keeps asking for her so he does.
I briefly wondered if Clara wasn’t going to end up stuck in that Dalek (being, of course, the Dalek form in which we first met her), and this would then be Jenna Louise Coleman’s last episode. It would have been brave and kind of cool, but ultimately, too cruel for the current incarnation.
“A little bit of regeneration energy. Probably cost me an arm or a leg somewhere down the line”
I really hope that’s not the reason they’re going to use when they finally let the Doctor regenerate as a woman, the implications would be really unpleasant.
but the Doctor’s final insistence that he knew Davros would betray him this way from the start seems pretty hollow when you consider the price he’s likely to pay for that stunt. (YOU DON’T JUST GIVE AWAY REGENERATION POWER WILLY-NILLY LIKE THAT, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.)
Yes thank you! I felt the exact same way. I also rather prefer it when the Doctor is wrong; it proves he isn’t always the cleverest being in the room, and that he is fallible and not perfect. And this regeneration of the Doctor seems like he would be wrong out of pure arrogance.
Clara’s time in the Dalek casing
Meh. Yeah, I see what you’re saying about the casing not being the Dalek and why does that matter, and that’s a good point, But I didn’t even find this interesting because I knew what it was setting up, exactly what kind of scene would happen later, and I was just bored. I’ve seen a science fiction show, thanks.
That was in the season five finale, when a Dalek begged River Song. So the fact that this is something that we had experienced before as viewers when the Doctor had not made it even more interesting.
I remembered that moment, too, and I just chalked it up to Moffat not giving a crap about continuity. As a friend of a friend observed: the Doctor’s non-explanation of how he got the teacup is Moffat telling the audience “I’m Moffat. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
I will say I adore Missy. She’s delightful.
I don’t know where the teacup came from, but I immediately saw it as a shout-out to Granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum.
@18: and we’re talking about the guy who made it a plot point that “soufflé girl” had no way to get the milk in Asylum of the Daleks. Sometimes the lack of continuity makes it hard to care.
I thought it was awful. One of the big problems with New Who is that it seems to be built on Good Moments rather than Good Story.
Good Story requires attention to what has come before and thinking ahead about what comes next from what you do. It requires caring that the story makes sense, it requires characters acting in reasonable ways not being idiots or super-geniuses as the plot demands. It requires an awareness of the maxim “If literally anything can happen then why should we care exactly WHAT happens?”
Good Moments are easy. The Doctor sharing a laugh with, showing mercy to his greatest enemy. A revelation that Daleks might be saying “I love you” when what comes out it “Exterminate.” The Doctor seeming to be defeated but turning the tables. The Doctor riding into a medieval exhibition battle on a modern tank, in part 1. All good moments.
But they have to be earned, otherwise they’re cheap and almost meaningless (particularly if we’ve seen them before, which, I’m just saying, “Doctor acts differently because he thinks he’s going into a hopeless situation”), or occasionally do outright harm. And they way you earn them with good story. If we’ve heard plenty of Daleks before say more complex thoughts than “exterminate,” it just doesn’t WORK unless you’ve found a good way to explain it. “New model” doesn’t cut it (particularly in a time travel show when the exact same Daleks that kidnap the TARDIS from Earth in the 12th century also are active on modern day Earth), but at least saying it out loud would have showed they put the minimum of thought into it. Which is more than I can say for other things. Why exactly do these sewers-full of Dalek-goo do nothing at all to the two humans in the sewers (who they are hardwired to hate) and yet just pierce a Dalek shell (at Missy’s arm height) and they flood over, seek out one of those tiny holes, and kill the Dalek inside? It might have been a good moment, but it made zero sense. And who cares if the Daleks have regeneration energy if a) they’re already immortal as their sewers indicate, and b) you have a history of “game changing moments” and then not doing anything with them. Remember how all Daleks everywhere forgot who the Doctor was? Just a couple seasons ago, and the first time we saw Jenna. It’s easy to forget, considering it’s had almost no impact on the storyline since, even though it was the first interesting thing they’d done with the Daleks in a long time. I would not be surprised that the far-less-interesting hybrid concept went the same way.
Good story can lead to good moments, it can turn them in to great moments.
I’m sick of the new Who being nothing but good moments. I want better. I want a good story.
And Moffat seems unwilling or unable to bring that anymore, so he needs to go.
I don’t think that Moffat was ignoring continuity with the cup of tea, or in general.
One of the comments I saw him make in the promo videos was how the Master always used to end a story being Really Truly Dead This Time, and then would return in a latter story with no explanation of how he survived. He was playing with that concept by bringing Missy back so deliberately.
He also was very much playing with the Doctor and Missy/the Master being mirrors of each other. They’re both renegades from Gallifrey, the last of their kind. Even more, I think they’re both a bit like pets that have run away to play, and who are looking for a friend to play with. The Doctor is a puppy looking for a friend to play with. Missy is a kitten looking for buggy friends to play with and torture and squash.
And they both do impossible impossible things. Starting with Missy/The Master always surviving. What’s one cup of tea, compared to that? Compared to getting past who knows how many Daleks, unnoticed, sitting in Davros’s chair?
@21 You put that very well, ghostly1. We are getting good moments strung together, which is entertaining in the short run, but which is a sad substitute for a good story over the long run. Moffat has done a lot of good things, but I also think it is time for a fresh viewpoint from a new show runner. Maybe next year.
Put me in the camp of those who thought this was a great episode.
As for Clara in the Dalek casing – I took the fact that she could say nothing but “I am a Dalek” (hey, what prize did BBCA end up giving for using that hashtag, anyway?) and “Exterminate” to be Missy’s fault. We’ve seen Daleks say non-exterminatey things before (the Stone Dalek in “The Big Bang,” for one, as several have mentioned above). I think Missy somehow messed with the interface, making her plan to have the Doctor kill Clara that much more likely to suceed (or so she thought). In which case, Clara’s ability to overcome it and say, “I show mercy” is a nice echo of Craig’s ability to defeat his Cyberman programming in “Closing Time” by focusing on his love for his baby.
Lots of folks (not necessarily anyone here; just thinking as I type) say Moffat goes to the themes of love and mercy too quickly but, you know, given the world we have, I’m ok with a show where love and mercy are put front and center on a regular basis.
I seriously just mute the TV and put on subtitles during Dalek episodes. I would be happy if I never heard their voices again, and with their all too frequent appearances, they’re really losing what little narrative appeal they have left. Interesting to see Clara inside a Dalek, again (Asylum of The Daleks). Finally, this started as a potentially cool twist on Davros, but, just like The Doctor, we all knew Davros wouldn’t actually change (and that Missy hadn’t actually died, twice, no – three times). Done to death. @ghostly1 – Amen. As I’ve said before, and I’ll likely say again – Moffat and Co are focused on writing “cool” ideas, not well written characters or scripts.
So Missy duplicated what she’d seen the Doctor do before; she materialized elsewhere instead of being zapped/ disintegrated. But that doesn’t explain how it worked for Clara, who wasn’t aware of the plan. Or how it worked for the TARDIS, who cannot wear or operate a bracelet. We all knew they didn’t really die, but was that explained away a little too quickly?
Speaking of “not really dying,” I have a suspicion the end-game will involve Danny being somehow rescued. Missy somehow survived that CyberFinale, and someone reminded us above about Craig rising above his programming.