Zygon and done it again

It's all gone a bit dark again chez Doctor Who, although fortunately nowhere near as dark as the David Tennant Specials a few years back.

"The Zygon Invasion" / "The Zygon Inversion" by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat, directed by Daniel Nettheim. Spoilers after the cut.

So this two-parter gives us another of the characters teased as a possible new companion - Ingrid Oliver's Osgood - and once again ends with a good reason why she shouldn't join the TARDIS crew. And not just that replacing Oswald with Osgood makes it look like Doctor Who's been on air so long they've run out of character names. Actually watching the first part I would have been happiest for Jaye Griffiths' Jac to join the show permanently, not just because an older companion worked well with Donna, but mainly because someone quite nervous who doesn't really want to be there would be a nice change. After all this "I'll just drop you off home and pick you up again next week for more wacky adventures" gubbins with the last two companions, I think it's time for a Tegan-style "look I'm trying to take you to Southend on Tuesday morning but I somehow keep ending up in 14th century Ajerbaijan" companion. Anyway, that was what I thought, so obviously she was going to get killed off before we even got to the cliffhanger.

The shape-changing is the only decent thing about the Zygons, isn't it? It's not hard to see why they were one of the last classic series monsters to get revived, when even the modern costumes look like that pile of questionable squid they bought on The Apprentice a few weeks ago. Not my favourite serial of Series 9, although the second part was better than the first (still a bit of a re-tread of the last Zygon story though.)