The Doctor finds his new companion in modern London, evil Wi-Fi is uploading human souls, and the climax involves a motorcycle chase up a skyscraper. Welcome to Doctor Who: Cyberpunk Lite.
Short Synopsis
The Doctor finally reconnects with Clara in 21st-century London, discovers people are being trapped inside the internet, and proceeds to hack the Wi-Fi with a spoon and a motorbike. The Great Intelligence is back, because apparently even eldritch villains need solid broadband.
Extended Storyline
We begin with the Doctor hiding out in a monastery, still obsessing over the mystery of Clara Oswald. The monks bring him news of “the girl twice dead,” and in true Who fashion, his prayer phone rings — The Bells of Saint John. Except it’s not divine intervention. It’s Clara in 2013, trying to fix her Wi-Fi. She’s been given the TARDIS number and called tech support… which apparently now doubles as alien crisis hotlines.
Delighted but confused, the Doctor dashes off to London, finds Clara living as a nanny, and immediately declares her his “Impossible Girl.” Clara, meanwhile, reacts to a strange man turning up in her house about as you’d expect: suspicion, sarcasm, and making him prove he isn’t a creep. (Spoiler: he’s definitely a creep, but a charming one with a bow tie.)
The plot kicks in when Clara gets sucked — literally — into her laptop by malevolent Wi-Fi. Turns out a shady organization called the “Human Souls Collection Agency” (okay, fine, it’s the sinister Miss Kizlet working for the Great Intelligence) has been uploading people into the cloud. Their brains get harvested for processing power, while their bodies sit in zombie mode waiting for a software update. Basically, it’s iCloud if Apple had teamed up with Lovecraft.
The Doctor saves Clara, but she’s now carrying a “data infection” that gives her computer super-skills. Suddenly she’s hacking with the speed of a Hollywood movie hacker — typing furiously while shouting things like “I’m in!” (All she needs is some green Matrix code raining down the screen to complete the aesthetic.)
Miss Kizlet, meanwhile, is the villain-of-the-week who takes “corporate evil” to the extreme. She manipulates her employees via app — literally sliding their obedience levels up and down on a tablet like she’s adjusting Spotify volume. It’s equal parts hilarious and terrifying, and Celia Imrie plays her with just the right amount of sinister poise.
Things escalate with a creepy sequence of “Spoonheads” — humanoid robots with Wi-Fi dish heads that upload people on sight. Clara nearly gets snatched again, the Doctor whirls into action, and before you know it, he’s chasing down Miss Kizlet’s agents on a motorbike through London. The big set piece? Driving straight up the Shard skyscraper to confront her in her glassy penthouse lair.
In classic Eleventh Doctor fashion, he wins not by brute force but by a clever hack: reversing the Wi-Fi connection to download every trapped soul back into their bodies. Miss Kizlet herself gets “factory reset” by the Great Intelligence, reverting to her childhood self and forgetting all her crimes. Creepy. Effective. Very “Moffat.”
As the dust settles, the Doctor is more intrigued than ever by Clara’s Impossible Girl nature. She’s the same as Oswin from Asylum and the governess from The Snowmen, but here she is, alive and human in modern-day London. He offers her a trip in the TARDIS. She hesitates — nanny duties, normal life, you know — but curiosity (and, let’s be honest, the promise of motorbike stunts in space) wins out.