https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3795856.html

As usual with this series, the book is broken down into discrete chapters each making a particular argument. The chapters deal with:
* Dark Water / Death in Heaven seen in the context of season finales - as mentioned, Purser-Hallard gives it higher marks than I do; I do agree that it pulls together the narrative strands of the series better than some other finales;
* the narrative arcs of the main characters in the story, including the Doctor, Clara, Missy, Danny Pink and also Osgood, Kate Stewart and Santa;
* the significance of the story being broadcast in the week between Halloween and Remembrance Sunday in 2014, dealing as it does with death and commemoration;
* gender-swapping and the Master - worth noting that Kronos and Eldrad in Old Who also swapped gender, and also explores how gender affects the way we read the Master's relationship with the Doctor - turns out of course to be prophetic for the central character of the show;
* death, where Purser-Hallard skips over what for me is the central problem of bad taste in the story, and looks instead at the various and contradictory treatments of death in the Whoniverse (including within this story - what happens to dead Osgood? Let alone the Belgians);
* whether or not the Cybermen are cyberpunk (on balance, not);
* an appendix on the similarities between the story and Purser-Hallard's own Faction Paradox novel Of The City of the Saved, which Purser-Hallard modestly says are probably coincidental or else flattering (having since read the entry on the City of the Saved in The Book of the War, it seems to me that they share only the most basic concept and every other detail differs).

Each of these is thoroughly footnoted and well argued, and the book succeeds in making me think a bit more about something I had not really expected to think much more about, and lifts my overall experience of the story (though I'm afraid still leaving it in the negative for me). ( )