See, Clara isn't the companion this time around. Once she learns that people all throughout Bristol (that's where they landed by the way) have been disappearing, and walks with Rigsy under s bridge where murals of all of the missing have been painted in memorial, she returns to the TARDIS and finds it too small to enter or exit. The Doctor manages to technobabble the TARDIS's mass so that Clara can carry it, and he can hand her things through the doors, which can still fit his hand, but otherwise Clara is on her own, with the Doctor communicating with her through a device in her ear, giving her advice. On a hunch that the missing people are related to the dimensional whatchamajigger that is giving the duo trouble, Clara, with Rigsy's help, begin to investigate, Clara under the guise of an MI5 agent ala the Psychic Paper.
They first investigate one of the fellow workers' places and find nothing more than a messy flat with an odd mural of a top down view of a desert on one wall. Eventually they team up with a cop, who admits that their office is stumped, who then disappears in a room with a mural of what looks like a landscape or a map of some kind on the wall. The Doctor looks at the mural and realizes that it is in fact the woman's nervous system turned to two dimensions. This leads him to figure that the desert mural wasn't a desert at all, but the missing worker's skin made 2d. He deduces that the things taking the people are from another universe parallel to ours where things exist in two dimensions rather than three. Meanwhile Clara and Rigsy escape a bunch of wavy lines on the walls and floor of the room, which turn the door knob and a sofa two dimensional before their very eyes.
And this is where the episode annoyed me a little bit. There has been some bad science in Doctor Who before, in Kill the Moon for example, but what that episode did wrong was they drew that pseudo-science from places too close to home, and it leaned heavily on the audience's suspension of disbelief. This time they kept the pseudo-science far from home, and grounded it in real theory, but quite frankly Star Trek: The Next Generation did this concept better from a scientific perspective. In an episode of that series (I'm not sure of the title) the characters encountered a group of 2d lifeforms in space. It took all of their most exotic methods just to perceive these beings, and the usual forces of gravity and energy didn't affect them, because being 3d beings, we literally cannot perceive things which have length and breadth but not depth, and science can only guess at how the forces which affect 3d things in our dimension would affect these theoretical beings. It is a theory that such creatures could exist, but we literally have no way of proving or disproving it, because we cannot see or interact with these things if they do exist.
In a way, this episode gets this right. At first the creatures are barely perceivable aside from distortions in the floors and walls, and while they seem to have developed the ability to manipulate things in our dimension to an extent, we can't do the same in reverse, and being taken into only two dimensions would instantly kill any affected human, just as fully emerging in our 3d space would almost certainly kill these odd things. At first any interaction between the two dimensions can be explained by whatever technology the 2d creatures have developed to cross over. But then we see the 2d people, and the 2d sofa and door knob. This is ridiculous. These things weren't just flattened out, they literally had a dimension removed from them. They aren't like some painting or something. We can only see "2d" painting and drawings and printings because the ink used to transcribe them has depth which we can perceive, but these new 2d versions of the formerly 3d people and objects no longer have this. 3d beings like us and the Doctor shouldn't be able to perceive them anymore. Rather than flattening out, these things should simply have disappeared as far as the observer was concerned.
Of course, if this were the case, we wouldn't have the clues for the Doctor to figure out, and we wouldn't have the unsettling imagery of this episode, from the things creeping along the walls and floors, to people being flattened into the walls and floors before our eyes, to facsimiles of 3d people shambling out of the walls with the 2d entities within them, making the transition fully into our world. In fact, this is the reason that the people were taken. In the second shocking reveal since the revelation that the missing people are literally in the walls, we learn that the murals of the missing people are not murals. The 2d beings have been abducting people and dissecting them to learn how to construct 3d forms for themselves, and those "murals" are where they are building their own 3d bodies.
So the episode, which has been doing a fantastic job of building suspense, shifts gears to a desperate situation where Clara and the survivors of the work crew have to evade the shambling, misformed monsters which encroach on the uncanny valley just enough to make your skin crawl and your stomach roll. With the Doctor still stuck on the TARDIS, which is rapidly losing power, Clara must be the Doctor, taking charge of the situation and adjusting to the new rules of the situation, including the fact that just as the Doctor completes a device which can use an energy field to turn things from 2d to 3d and back, the creatures have the same ability. What might have been an advantage if made moot.
So there is running, and lying, and the Doctor learns that Danny doesn't want Clara traveling with the Doctor anymore, and Clara, not the Doctor, figures out how to save them by turning what had once nullified their one advantage into an advantage again. She tricks the creatures into hitting the drained TARDIS with their energy fields. The TARDIS absorbs and converts the energy, overcharging to the point the she can not only return to her normal exterior dimensions, but force the creatures back to theirs, after the Doctor gives one of his big hero speeches, of course, where he names the monsters the Boneless, though this speech sounds reluctant and almost insincere. Still, everyone who survived the experience is free to return to their lives, and Clara gets a moment with the Doctor to wrap things up.
See, while their roles were reversed, the Doctor, without the weight of so many lives on his shoulders, was able to show outward signs of hope: hope that maybe the creatures weren't malevolent and that this was all some kind of misunderstanding, and hope that if they could communicate with the creatures, they could come to some sort of peaceful agreement. Hopes which were pretty soundly dashed. Meanwhile Clara plays the part of the Doctor, with the Psychic Paper, and the Sonic, and the gadgets, and she seems almost more the Doctor than the Doctor has been lately, she has fun doing it, and she does it well.
Having been all through the Doctor's time stream, Clara knows the Doctor and his ways better than anyone else, save maybe River Song. She may not have all of the Doctor's knowledge, but when it comes to being Doctor like, she is a pro. This seems to worry the Doctor, though, and when Clara asks if she did good as the Doctor, he says that she was an excellent Doctor, but that "goodness" had nothing to do with it. This continues the prevalent theme that the Doctor has lost faith in himself and begun to see himself as a negative force as much, if not more than, a positive one.
Finally we get a Missy cameo. She has been watching Clara on an iPod-like device, and remarks that she "chose well". Such a simple scene, but it says so much! Is this why Missy thinks of the Doctor as her boyfriend? Has she been stalking him for countless years using this device? Is this why she is only acting now, because she needs a particular one of the Doctor's companion's to carry out her plans, and Clara is that companion? She says that she chose Clara, and yet the other people that we have seen her choose have been already dead. Does this mean that Missy knows that Clara will die, or does Missy plan to create a situation where Clara gets killed, so that she can be "claimed" like the others? How will Danny fit into all of this? This is a Moffat plot line, so we all know that he will somehow.
After this episode, I really can't wait to see where this Missy plot thread goes next, and how it involves Clara and her developing Doctor-ness. However, despite some of the creepiest and most unsettling imagery that we have gotten from Who in a while, even more so I think that the *ugh* spider-bacteria from Kill the Moon, I really don't think that this episode was much better than average for the show. It scores a 6, bumped up to a 7 out of 10 by the cool Missy scene, which actually advanced her story, and the emerging theme of Clara beginning to resemble the Doctor. Also, unlike with Kill the Moon and its bad science, even though I knew the flaws in the science of this episode, I was able to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story, so as far as I'm concerned the bad science doesn't bring the episode down. I absolutely recommend this episode, and would even go so far as to call it a must-see.
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