daibhidc | Flatline

This was by the same guy as "Mummy"? Can we keep him?

Because that was brilliant. Well, I thought so anyway. I accept that if the brief of the episode had been "Write something that will really piss off the Clara-haters", it would have been unchanged, but as someone who has no strong feelings about Clara either way, I liked it. (My resident Clara-hater has stopped watching, so I can't tell you what she thought.)

The Boneless were very creepy and very well realised. (And is the fact they don't get any motivation, which is normally something that would annoy me, intentional; they're "flat" characters?) The crunching sound when people get flattened really set my teeth on edge.

And I liked the occasional perspective gag, like the doorknob that we only realise is flat when someone tries to use it, but these were rightly used sparingly. (Otherwise I would probably have realised "But if it looks normal from the camera's POV, it must be obvious to the characters the perspective is wrong?" earlier than just now as I was writing.)

The gimmick of the TARDIS exterior shrinking leaving the Doctor trapped was a neat way of using the Doctor-Lite format, and was used in some clever ways, my favourite being the Hammerspace gag involving an actual sledgehammer. And for a Clara-ambivalent person the Clara-as-the-Doctor gag was okay, and gave an interesting perspective on the "This Doctor makes hard decisions" theme.

(And the fact the exterior dimensions can shrink leaving the doors tiny on an expanse of blank wall indirectly answers one question I've had since New Who started; if the police box doors are directly attached to the TARDIS interior, what would happen if the chameleon circuit worked? Evidently, they'd turn into whatever kind of door the new shape had.)

I also liked Rigsy as Clara's companion. I would complain that the stereotyped obnoxious jobsworth was a stereotype but, well, there are council workers like that.

And at the end, it turns out Missy has "chosen" Clara? Hmm. The theme of the previous season, as neatly explained by Phil Sandifer, was that the Doctor (and the audience) thinks of Clara as a puzzle, and then at the end it turns out she wasn't a puzzle, she was a person. I'm not sure about suddenly making her a puzzle again.