Reaktion Round-Up: What You Thought of The Woman Who Lived

David Power is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Whoops, I got lost in the K-Towers dungeon for a bit (imagine the castle from Heaven Sent, except every monitor played In the Forest of the Night on a loop) but it’s okay now, I’m back! Where did I leave off? Oh yes, The Woman Who Lived!

(Oh, also, as I was sprinting for my life I may have tripped over a wire and broken the comments again. I believe I could be forgiven though, given what I was running from.)

Best of Series 9 so far 10.98%  (38 votes) 

Fantastic stuff! 45.95%  (159 votes)

Average Who 24.28%  (84 votes) 

Robbed of a decent episode 9.54%  (33 votes) 

Booooooring 9.25%  (32 votes)

You guys seemed to have a very similar reaction to The Girl Who Died, which is interesting because in contrast to the first part of this story, I loved this episode! Once Catherine Tregenna was announced to be writing for Series 9 I was already excited. Out of Time, Captain Jack Harkness, Meat, and Adam are some of Torchwood‘s best episodes, so I was fascinated to see what viewpoint someone who’d written the Doctor Who universe, but not for the show itself would bring to the table.

This episode felt quite different to your average episode of Who. It was more of a character piece with small bits of plots every now and again rather than an plot focused episode. Immortality is a concept already touched upon in New Who, yet Catherine manages to make it thought provoking yet again when we see the effects of the Twelfth Doctor’s “to hell with you” moment on Ashildr.

Sure, Leandro was a throwaway villain, but we wisely used his time to instead have fun with Sam Swift. More of him please. On a serious note, how stellar was that conversation between the Doctor and Ashildr, or I guess we should say Lady Me now? Anyway, her view on immortality haunted by too many memories for one brain, gave real depth to her character and the horrifying truth about the “gift” of immortality. You can never really imagine Captain Jack and the Doctor discussing it in such a way can you? I hope we get Catherine back for another episode someday.

Ratings weren’t too kind to this tale. The overnight ratings went down after the previous week, dropping from 4.85m to 4.34m. Overalls decreased from 6.56m for The Girl Who Died to 6.11m for The Woman Who Lived. The Appreciation Index score also dropped one from the preceding week, from 82 to 81.

Critically though, people seemed to love the episode!

The Daily Telegraph‘s Catherine Gee gave a flawless 5 star score, claiming:

“It was, at times, a beautifully written episode – and less clunky than some of Steven Moffat’s offerings. With an aged, well-read, worldly wise pair to play with, scriptwriter Catherine Tregenna was able to give the dialogue a literary feel.”

Alasdair Wilkins of The A.V. Club, praised the episode, saying:

“[Maisie’s] work in last week’s The Girl Who Died was very good, bringing nuance and humanity to what in lesser hands might just feel like just another random historical character with hints of deeper mystery. But her work in The Woman Who Lived is an order of magnitude better, if only because she is asked to do so much more here than she was last week.”

The Radio Time‘s Patrick Mulkern awarded the episode four out of five stars, calling it:

“A dark and beautiful study of immortality and short lives. The first 19 minutes takes place in the dead of night, the only available light coming from candles or the Moon. It all looks fabulous and is a triumph for the director Ed Bazalgette and director of photography Richard Stoddard. The philosophical interludes between the Time Lord and Ashildr are what make this sing”.

Well alrighty folks, I promise to have the rest of this season covered before this year’s Christmas special. Maybe. Also, to address the malicious rumours of me being a Zygon clone of myself, with the real me still in the K-Towers dungeon, how about we grow up just let Zygons be Zygons?

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