Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Peter Capaldi, Maisie Williams, Rufus Hound, Ariyon Bakare, Struan Rodger, Jenna Coleman, Gareth Berliner, Elizabeth Hopper, John Voce, Gruffudd Glyn, Reuben Johnson, Daniel Fearn, Karen Seacombe, John Hales, Will Brown.
How would it be if you could be immortal? That every single ripple of Humanity’s suffering for ever would in some way touch your heart and then corrode it, tarnish it against the pain and eventually leave you cold and as unfeeling a rock in the baked and merciless deserts. Immortality comes at a price, life is something that no longer becomes precious and the cost to the soul can be devastating.
The Woman Who Lived takes that ever growing rust, the tarnishing of the soul and fuses it with a genre of story-telling that hasn’t been seen on screen properly for many years, not since the days of Richard O’ Sullivan’s tremendous series Dick Turpin or perhaps with strange comic effect during the third series of Blackadder, and gives the life of the adventure, the open road and the scale that a programme such as Doctor Who deserves.
Even though Maisie Williams was a huge asset to the previous episode, The Girl Who Died, in The Woman Who Lived she was able bring a performance to the screen that would leave some audience members and even long term fans adoring the feisty, almost aggressively energetic character in a way that surpassed Clara’s spirit and Tegan Jovanka’s sometimes belligerent and uncompromising force of nature. The fact that it was done with a smile, the passing moment between two friends who could end up on opposing sides at any time, was also touching and full of hard-hitting symbolism.
The series really has raised the level on which darkness can be found, gone it seems, for now at least, are the wonderfully serene and almost comic like adventures into which Matt Smith’s incarnation of The Doctor found himself within. This is a Doctor who can smile at Time but understands perhaps more than any other, save Tom Baker’s personification of the Time Lord, just how vicious the spectre of Time can be upon other races and civilisations when he places a foot or a handprint into their business. The dialogue between Lady Me, Maisie Williams, and The Doctor was one in which God’s tremble and yet at all times, it was done with style and cordial respect, something that chills the bones more so than the argument between two people who hate each other.
A stirring episode and despite being Clara-light, it still ranks very highly in the overall sphere of stories shown since the revival of the show, a truly excellent script delivered with passion by writer Catherine Tregenna. The Woman Who Lived is a lesson to all about the art of capturing a great story with honour.
Ian D. Hall