Review of The Woman Who Lived
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
Nominally, The Woman Who Lived was the second half of a two-parter that began with The Girl Who Died. In practice, it’s a brand new story featuring the return of a previously seen character, like Craig in Closing Time, the Meddling Monk in The Daleks’ Master Plan, or the Master in anything after Terror of the Autons.
There was even a completely different writer for this episode than the previous one; last week’s episode was co-written by Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat, while this was written by Catherine Tregenna (halle-effin-lujah, finally a woman!). It’s hardly surprising, then, that it had a completely different character and feel than its predecessor.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. For me, though, the trappings of the mid-seventeenth century, the highwayman known as the Knightmare, and the fine lady in cahoots with Leandro of Delta Leonis (whom I was very disappointed to learn wasn’t actually a Tharil after all) were of little interest. They were merely the setting in which the real story took place.
Said real story, as I see it, is twofold. First, there is the fact of don’t-call-me-Ashildr’s effective immortality, stuck on “the slow path,” as Reinette put it in The Girl in the Fireplace. This exploration of what it would mean to live for centuries, outliving everyone you got to know along the way—and not being able to fly off in a blue box after—is the human side of the equation, though a modified one. We are not meant to live so long, certainly not alone. The way Ashildr’s perspective has changed, and her attitude toward the lives of others with it, is testament to the psychological effects of that isolation.
The second half of the real story is how the Doctor is being made to face up to the consequences of his actions, counter to the way he usually operates. Granted, things have come back to bite him in the metaphorical ass before (see, for example, The Face of Evil), but they’re usually not quite so… personal.
And he really can’t help himself. He wants to desperately to make the consequences ones that don’t weigh on his conscience. “Do you intend to fix me?” Ashildr Lady Me asks, when he tries to alleviate that guilt, telling her she’s approaching her life the wrong way. Although we’re meant to see things from the Doctor’s point of view, I have to admit I very much empathized with Lady Me in that moment. As a woman, I have often found men trying to “fix” me to align with their own ideas of how I was supposed to fit into the world. The way Lady Me lashed out at him and called him on his bullshit struck me as very realistic.
But the real thrust of that scene is the idea that the Doctor usually avoids responsibility for the messes he makes, simply by swanning off, and this time the affected party is having none of it. She calls him on that time and again. “Do you ever think—or care—what happens after you’ve flown away?” Her life, as he pops back into it (not to take her with him, as she initially assumes, and continues to ask for) is a direct result of his actions. For once, he has to examine that truth.
Aside from the personal and moral implications of the Doctor’s actions turning a human immortal, we have the wider questions of how Lady Me/Ashildr learned about his usual modus operandi and her broader role in the course of coming events—by which I mean the rest of the series, including the whole Hybrid thing and the eventual departure of Clara.
Regarding the former, Ashildr initially claims just to have sussed things out on her own. At the end, when asked directly, her answer is a mere “take your pick,” which is hardly satisfying. We are left to reach our own conclusions, so until I come across or devise a better one, I’m going to assume she’s not met any former Companions (most of whom got returned to the 20th C), but rather a fair number of bystanders in his various adventures (for example, this story is some two centuries past The Masque of Mandragora).
As for the rest of the series, it seems unlikely this is the last we’ve seen of Ashildr, especially given some of her final words to the Doctor: “Enemies are never a problem. It’s your friends you have to watch out for. And, my friend, I’ll be watching out for you.” She effectively echoes what Ohila told him in the prologue to the entire series about not being able to hide from your friends.
Once she appeared as a background creeper in Clara’s student’s selfie (I so did not miss Clara this episode), I figured it was a done deal that (a) she’ll be back later in the series and (b) she is indeed the Hybrid of the Gallifreyan prophecy. Although I find her interesting (at least this older, wiser version), I’m not sure I want Ashildr to be The Big Plot Point of the series. We’ve already seen how poorly that can go when the Companion fills the role; there’s really no need to repeat the experiment with a recurring non-Companion character. (Nor do I want her to be all up and down the show’s timeline like Clara.)
But what I want is irrelevant. What will be will be, and I’ll deal. The days of one-off adventures are apparently long gone, so the best I can do at this stage is amuse myself by trying to predict how Lady Big Plot Point will factor into the end of Clara’s time in the TARDIS and the latest universal crisis. That, and hope the quality of the coming episodes continues to be to my taste.