Review of The Zygon Inversion
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.
This is the episode that made me look back and admit I hadn’t been entirely fair to Moffat.
Regular readers will know that I’ve long since tired of Moffat’s regular tricks and quirks. It was easy for me, therefore, to jump to conclusions about previous stories that I now know to have been incomplete. In particular, I was really angry after Death in Heaven when Osgood died. It felt like an attack on the fandom for whom she was a cipher.
Now, though, it’s obvious that Moffat had a larger character (and plot) arc in mind for Petronella Osgood (I kind of wish we still didn’t have a given name for her…). He has even tied up the glaringly loose end of the Zygon peace agreement with humanity, left dangling for nearly two years since The Day of the Doctor. Many of us noted how that particular plot line had been abandoned unceremoniously at the end of the anniversary special; some felt the Zygons had been underutilized as a result. It’s nice to see those threads being tied back into the ongoing narrative.
Speaking of call-backs to previous episodes, Clara’s in-pod experiences during the pre-credits sequence was extremely reminiscent of both Last Christmas (with Clara’s search for dream tells) and Asylum of the Daleks (in that Clara was physically trapped inside an enclosed space, but had made a different space in which to exist in her mind). Long-term continuity was well considered here (more on that later).