The Girl Who Died - Jamie Matheson wrote two of the best episodes of series 8, including the genuinely great 'Mummy On The Orient Express', so I was excited to see what he'd do in series 9, with Maisie Williams guest starring and everything! Sadly the result is a bit disappointing...
The Doctor and Clara are captured by vikings (who instantly just grab and snap the sonic sunglasses, which kind of shows the fatal flaw with sonic sunglasses.) They're really generic vikings, but Maisie Williams is one of them and the Doctor gets a weird vibe from her. Odin appears as a big face in the sky and the actor is no Brian Blessed (they wanted Brian Blessed but he wasn't available.) And the fake Odin's warrirors look a bit like Judoon. All the viking men are quickly killed so Odin can drink their testosterone. It's a bit weird but kind of fun. Clara nearly succeeds in scaring them away but Ashildir challenges them to a fight because she's a bit like Arya.
The Doctor encourages the rest of the village to run away, which is the only sensible thing to do and could have ended the episode fifteen minutes in, but they want to fight because they're vikings. The Doctor does his talking to babies thing again which is good continuity at least. The Doctor has reasonable reaons for not helping the villagers, it's not just him being a dick, but he ends up staying because...of electric eels? I think. Actually, no, it later turns out he didn't know what "fire in the water" meant so I guess he stayed because of the baby crying.
We get some scenes of the Doctor training the incompetent villagers, which are passably amusing, I guess!
The Doctor comes up with some plan to defeat the warrior aliens (I don't know if they have a name, they're lame so I don't care) involving electric eels and puppets. I don't think electric eels really work the way this episode thinks they do? Or that vikings had them. Ashildir puts one of their helmets on and that lets her project a hologram of a giant which the aliens thinks is real even though it's using their own hologram technology. It's pretty dumb? Odin even asks "what trickery is this!" when he's been using the same technology the whole fucking episode. Clara filmed the aliens running away from the fake dragon and the Doctor threatens to upload this to the internet (with the Benny Hill music...which they actually play to kill the joke) and humiliate them.
BUT TWIST ASHILDIR RANDOMLY DIED. Apparently there was a risk that using the helmet would kill her and nobody mentioned that before. This would work better as a "the Doctor got someone killed!" moment if the Doctor had actually known there was a risk of her dying. At least we get to the good/important part of the episode as the Doctor decides to save her, even though he knows he isn't supposed to. The Doctor remembers that his face previously belonged to a Roman he wasn't supposed to save, which is pretty clever. Turns out the aliens have a "battlefield med kit" that can cause immortality. Yep, these guys, some of the worst guest aliens ever, have the key to immortality!
The Doctor warns that being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be (IS SHE THE HYBRID?) and there's a great final shot of the years passing and Ashildir looking evil.
Like I said, this is disappointing. Most of it just doens't really work for me. The vikings are too generic to care about, the aliens of the week are silly and dull. Maisie Williams is basically just playing Arya. Her death comes out of nowhere. It does have a good ending which Capaldi really sells and I liked Clara being smart and taking charge a bit (she almost got rid of the aliens herself) and it's never really painful to watch or anything. Just should ahve been a lot better!
SCORE: 6/10
Clara looks hot in a spacesuit.