Dark Water - The Reviews

Not surprisingly, some superb reviews for last night's episode. A few question whether some of the content was appropriate for family viewing (mostly the comments about cremation) but over all very solid critical acclaim.

The Telegraph: Dark Water, the penultimate episode of Doctor Who, was suitably spooky, says Michael Hogan (five stars out of five).
For the night after Halloween, this was bone-rattling and suitably spooky fare. Will it all turn out to be a trick or a treat? We’ll find out next Saturday.

The Independent: Doctor Who has outdone itself this time thanks to Moffat’s excellent script, it just blows every other episode in this series out of the water - well, maybe apart from next week’s concluding instalment.

SFX: four and a half stars out of five
“Dark Water” is frequently very funny, one of those Moffat episodes where the dialogue sizzles to the point where it’s difficult to pick your favourite lines. Indeed, in many ways this is maximum Moffat, with ideas hurtling at you thick and fast and requiring maximum concentration – in a good way. There are some amazing ideas here: the dark water itself, a compound that makes all but organic tissue invisible is an ingenious narrative device, that allows the Cybermen to keep hidden until a very creepy reveal, while the skeletons themselves are incredibly spooky and appropriate for Halloween.

Radio Times: Four stars
Not content with restoring one archenemy, Moffat gives us two. The much-heralded return of the Cybermen is tantalisingly delayed until well towards the end of the episode, although many will have spotted the Cyber-eye motif in the set design and guessed the identity of the skeletons in the “dark water”. It’s a delicious revelation, stirringly directed by Rachel Talalay, and it proves, as did Asylum of the Daleks, that when at last Moffat gets to tackle a timeworn classic foe in his own script, he can find a sly and novel angle.

The Mirror: Four stars out of five
An episode about an afterlife which isn't actually an afterlife and a 'Promised Land' which is actually in St Paul's Cathedral could quite easily have been the latter.
But against the odds it was fast-paced and fast moving, although now with four central characters, there seemed to be three or four intertwined storylines and two offshoot storylines.