This season of Doctor Who has been, for the most part, quite excellent. After the mediocre Series Eight, the bar was admittedly set low, but Series Nine has shattered expectations. The change to the two part episode dynamic, as well as the improved understanding of what they have in Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, have helped fuel a dramatic change between this season and last year.
Even though these two part episodes have been excellent, not every episode should have that format. In The Girl Who Died/The Woman Who Lived, that two part setup actually felt like a hindrance, forcing the story of Ashildr to progress faster than it needed to.
While these episodes were excellent, and Maisie Williams’ character is certainly going to be intriguing as a potential recurring character on the program, the timing between the two episodes just felt off. While some 800 years had passed between the Doctor saving Ashildr and making her immortal, putting the second episode directly after The Girl Who Died did not have the right feeling to it.
Perhaps this is due to the amount of time that passed between their meetings, and the drastic hardening of Williams’ character in that time frame. They were quite obviously not the same person when the Doctor met her once again, but would that dramatic of a shift have been better served coming later in the season?
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This is not to say that the episode had to take place next season, or even towards the end of this year. Even putting another two part episode between the events from The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived would have felt like enough of a gap to make those 800 years easier to handle. While time may be wibbly-wobbly in the Whoniverse, it still passes in the same normal way here in our dull lives, making a week a week.
Even if two weeks is, in the grand scheme of the universe, not that much longer, just having another couple of episodes between seeing Ashildr once again may have given the episode a different feel. While Ashildr will return once again, spacing her appearances out a bit more may have made what was an excellent episode that much better.
Series Nine has the potential to be one of the best of the new Doctor Who, and The Woman Who Lived was an excellent episode. One just has to wonder if it would be even better if the timing of the episode was a bit different.