12.19: The Woman Who Lived

In which immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be.

By this point in my odyssey, I had fallen into a pattern of only tidying up my garbled notes to send to my nerd mailing list once I wanted to watch some more Who, to make sure I didn’t get too far behind. This was, considering I was meant to be writing a book about something else entirely, totally sane and healthy. Anyway:

Broadcast: October 2015

Watched: March 2022

“While you’re busy protecting this world, I’ll get busy protecting it from you.” Hilarious retro Who takes: Ashildr/Me is the TV show’s take on Sabbath. [Recurring antagonist in the eighth Doctor novels, 2001-4. If you understood this you are a long way down the rabbit hole and I feel nothing but pity.] 

Better. Terrific script, genuinely messy and complex idea morally, plus it’s not a story we’ve seen a dozen times before, which is always nice. It’s funny, too: the opening is literally a scene nicked from Blackadder III, right up to the female highwayman using a male voice. And there’s some lovely pathos in the bit with Rufus Hound at the gallows, keeping the crowd entertained to save his life – which, it turns out, is a neat thematic point, too.

The problem is Williams. She delivers, “Yes! It is me!” like she’s in a school play. I don’t really understand how she can be so good in Thrones and so crap here. There’s loads of great material – all the things she’s forgotten, the idea she’s cut herself off to spare herself pain, the flashbacks to the death of her children – but she can’t quite sell it, she is very clearly a teenager not an immortal in the form of one. (Honourable exception: her delivery of, “You mean... you haven’t come back for me?” is genuinely a bit heartbreaking.]

The Doctor’s reason for not rescuing her is unconvincing, too. Surely he could deposit her on a planet with longer life spans or something? But his only answer is, “Because it wouldn’t be good” – as in The Lazarus Experiment, which is also about immortality, there’s an unexamined hypocrisy here. 

Mind you, Me is willing to kill, and says in her diaries she hasn’t died because she’s too cowardly, so perhaps he just thinks she’s a moral vacuum who doesn’t deserve saving..

Some questions:

• Why are these two episodes back to back? They don't need to be.

• Why is this a Clara light episode when she's only in one scene of Heaven Sent?

• “10,000 hours is all it takes to master a skill” – how on earth has Me read Malcolm Gladwell?

• Most importantly, why is this set in 1651? Okay, there were highwaymen then but it still feels a bit weird to set it in the middle of the commonwealth and not even mention it.

Other thoughts:

• Oh fuck, the glasses are back.

• Hound kisses Williams, who is basically a child. Ew.

• There's some extremely odd editing when Sam Swift dies... a couple of lines (“Purple... colour of death”) are clearly dubbed on as Doctor is frequently in shot but we don't see him say them. 

• Yet more increasingly unsubtle foreshadowing that Clara's gonna die. Ashildr reminding the Doctor it’s a risk, Clara’s “Don't worry, daft old man. I'm not going anywhere.”