Doctor Who's The Girl Who Died ships in nasty Vikings floating atop a time-bending tidal wave

Gavin says:

Actions and their consequences have become established as this season’s Doctor Who story arc.

In The Girl Who Died, the Doctor goes against his own good advice from only the episode before (Before the Flood) about reviving the dead.

Only he does so using a piece of alien medical technology instead of time travel, and – in so doing – creates a hybrid of the already otherworldly girl-woman Ashildr.

War-like race implanted in a girl with a propensity to anger and defiance, already in possession of a vivid imagination and with powerful creative powers: what could possibly go wrong?

Are we talking some kind of hard-to-kill villain with superpowers?

The lingering last scene of rising and falling suns conveyed foreboding without a word uttered: Ashildr’s face evolves in time lapse from soft-eyed innocent to something steelier, ending with raised eyebrow and determined smile against a cataclysmic shower of sparks. A poignant and beautifully crafted, breathtaking final shot.

'The joy of war. Can't you see it on my face?'

She and the Doctor will cross paths again – he thinks she looks familiar upon first meeting Ashildr – only next time she won’t be the lost and loving girl; rather a hardened and probably bitter enemy furious at her creator for having gifted her the curse of immortality.

“Imortality isn’t living for ever ... it’s everybody else dying,” the Doctor reminds Clara.

There’s a growing sense, too, that the storm that’s coming will take Clara. Again, in this episode, we have a telling reference to her fragility and the Doctor's “duty of care.”

If so, that will be a massive pay-off to the actions-and-consequences set up: the butterfly effect of a ripple in a lost corner of the long-gone Viking world descending with tidal wave effect on the Doctor and Clara millennia from now.

Think about it: she can’t stay settled on Earth – they tried that once after the death of Danny Pink, and it didn’t work.

The backdrop, of course, is a ramble through a quaintly amusing group of anachronistic Vikings.

A Dad’s Army rabble of comedy fools, with the Doctor their reluctant leader. Played for laughs, there's more than a hint of High Noon to the set up, with a bloodthirsty posse coming to pick off the simple and ill-equipped settlers and farmers.

Did you notice the slightly Sergio Leone-inspired twang to the incidental music?

In this, the Doctor looks more Outlaw Josey Wales than time traveller, bestriding this rustic setting in his long coat and using his smarts to outwit the superior enemy.

One liners are completed by visual humour: the accidental burning of the village during training, the Doctor and Clara as the only ones to raise their hands to the question of sword play, and a quick-fire discussion on religion and the Gods.

A touch, too, of Cowboys & Aliens, but we’ll forgive writers Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffatt that. In the Doctor’s past, the comedy seeing off of the alien threat to this corner of Earth, with the Doctor reigning victorious, would have served as the entire episode.

No, this story will be continued, and I relish the prospect. ®