The Woman Who Lived is a bit of a strange one, and for all manner of reasons. Not strictly the back end of a two-parter, more like a distended episode with a character who recurred only the week previous (and we have since learned will come back again). The Woman Who Lived was also a disjointed story in terms of tone, starting with some striking night filming and segueing into some really interesting exchanges between ‘Me’ and the Doctor which reminded us a lot of the Doctor/Wilf chats during The End of Time.
Then came the arrival of Sam Swift and things begin to go askew. Add in Leandro the leonine alien provocateur who bore a striking resemblance to Vincent from Beauty and the Beast and an all-too-long gallows stand-up routine and the casual viewer could be forgiven for feeling a little displaced.
The plot mechanics we’re completely straightforward (who didn’t know where the second ‘immortality disc’ was going to go), but overall the episode feels slightly under cooked and underruns. This is to say we didn’t like The Woman Who Lived just that we could have used more (or less).
Images and caps for The Woman Who Lived are now online.
