Doctor Who ‘The Woman Who Lived’ Review

While The Doctor is in search of a rare, powerful alien artifact, he stumbles across Ashildr. Now hundreds of years old, she's grown weathered and ruthless leaving The Doctor responsible for guiding her on her path of everlasting life.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Woman Who Lived opens with The Doctor landing in Victorian era London, scanning for something yet to be revealed. In his search, he manages to intercept a robbery by a masked burglar referred to as The Knightmare. With the victims of the attempted mugging managing to get away, the thief reveals themselves to be none other than Ashildr, the viking girl whose life he saved at the cost of her mortality.

Returning with her to her palatial estate, she begins regaling The Doctor of the last 800 years of her existence. She's fought, she's loved, she's survived disease and famine, but now she finds herself a respected duchess who spends her nights masquerading as a masked theif. Seeing that she's gone through more than any human being should have to go through in any lifetime, The Doctor is filled with remorse, accepting all the blame she throws at him. She does, however, offer him the chance to redeem himself by requesting he take her along. As it turns out, Ashildr ultimately just wants to run away, much in the way The Doctor has lived his whole life. She's lived on one planet for hundreds of years, living different versions of the same life over and over again. The world has grown too small for her and she needs to reach out to other worlds. Naturally, The Doctor refuses, unwilling to be responsible for her, knowing how many he himself has lost over the centuries.

With The Doctor's refusal, she's forced to continue her alignment with a humanoid alien lion creature known as Leandro, who promised her allegiance would be rewarded with a ride off planet. The artifact The Doctor has been searching for, The Eye of Hades, is the key component to Leandro's plan; a gem stone able to tear open a rift in the fabric of space and create a portal with which to pass through. Unfortunately, the only way the Eye can be activated is with a death. After a rousing race to the village gallows, Ashildr decides to use the gem on a man known as Sam Swift who has already been sentenced to death. Affixing him with the artifact, it drains him of his life almost immediately, and emits a massive beam, which opens the gateway in the sky. Leandro's plan, however, wasn't an escape, but an invasion! The sky begins raining fire from the heavens, devastating the village below until Ashildr, thinking quickly, uses the same device The Doctor had used to make her immortal on Sam Swift, reversing the effects of the gem.

The Woman Who Lived was an unfortunately executed story. It's pretty clear showrunner Steven Moffat's experimentation of the format this season is backfiring. The episode was boring and just felt like a bi-product of the previous episode, which wasn't too special to begin with. The entirety of the episode was spent with Ashildr complaining about The Doctor and the burden of her longevity, while the actual plot was generic and interchangeable; mainly some alien wants to invade using some device and its all resolved in a matter of minutes. A rare miss for Doctor Who, but the whole story wasn't something you can enjoy, but more like something you have to sit through. Clara wasn't even there to provide a moral rudder. It all felt like it would have been done better condensed into a ten minute web short. There are still three more two part episodes on the way, so let's hope there aren't anymore follies like this most recent one.