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Read Part One here.
Clara, Francesca and Digby back away as the Ice Governess advances on them. But where’s the Doctor?
“Doctor? Doctor?! Doctor who…?”
They turn to their Punch and Judy Show in the corner of the room to find Punch sporting a sonic screwdriver. The puppet aims it at the Ice Governess, activates it – and she shatters. New setting: anti-freeze. “That’s the way to do it!” the Doctor says, popping up from behind the puppet show.
Outside, Dr. Simeon’s carriage draws up and activates a device covering the house and its gardens in snarling snow crystals.
The Doctor checks himself in the mirror and notices that he’s wearing a bow tie. “It’s cooler,” Clara says, and the Doctor agrees. “Bow ties are cool.” But Clara’s not talking about the tie. The room gets colder as the Ice Governess reforms and chases the Doctor, Clara and the children downstairs.
Captain Latimer confronts them, and the Doctor offers a brief explanation: “It’s okay. I’m your governess’ gentleman friend and we’ve just been upstairs… kissing.” The maid rushes in, yelling about snowmen growing out of nowhere, surrounding the house. She rushes to the door – to find Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax. “Good evening. I’m a lizard woman from the dawn of time,” Vastra explains, “and this is my wife.”
Suddenly, the Ice Governess emerges at the top of the stairs: “That’s the way to do it!”
“Your current governess is in reality a former barmaid called Clara,” the Doctor says to Captain Latimer. “Meanwhile, your previous governess is now a living ice sculpture who’s impersonating Mr. Punch.”
Jenny traps her behind an invisible forcefield, and the Doctor elucidates: “she’s a perfect duplication of human DNA in ice-crystal form: the ultimate fusion of snow and humanity. To live here, the snow needs to evolve, and she’s the blueprint. She’s what they need to become… Living ice. It will never melt. If the snow gets a hold of that creature on the stairs, it will learn to make more of them; it will build an army of ice… and it will be the last day of humanity on this planet.”
The Doctor rushes back to the Ice Governess, grabbing an umbrella as he does, and followed by Clara. He takes down the forcefield and the two (pursued by the frosty creature) head to the roof. Clara takes the umbrella from him, reaches it into the air – and pulls down a ladder.
They head up, up the ladder, up the staircase and into blue box. “It’s…” Clara stares at the vast expanse: Gallifreyan symbols, shiny metallic panels, stairs leading to everywhere. “Go on,” the Doctor urges. “Say it. Most people do.” Clara runs around the box, and exclaims, “It’s smaller on the outside!”
Clara’s full of questions: is it magic? Is it a machine? A ship? Is there a kitchen? “Dunno why I asked that. It’s just, I like making soufflés.” She holds up the umbrella and says, “You’re nearly a foot taller than I am. You could’ve reached the ladder without this. You took it. For me… Why?”
The Doctor reaches into his pocket and produces a key to the TARDIS, placing it in her hand. “I never know why,” he smiles. “I only know who.”
But the Ice Governess bursts in, and grabs Clara, dragging her back, back, back –and off the edge of the cloudbase!
The Ice Governess shatters, and Clara is critically injured as she lands in Latimer’s garden. The Doctor, for the first time in so long, materialises the TARDIS around her and takes her inside. But it’s too late; she’s dying. The Doctor decides to make a bargain with the universe: if he stops Simeon and his army of snowmen, Clara agrees to travel with him.
The Doctor marches out, and confronts Simeon. “I have in my hand a piece of the ice lady. Everything you need to know about how to make ice people… See you at the office!” He rushes to his TARDIS.
The Institute. Accompanied by Vastra, the Doctor sits at Simeon’s desk, looking at the snow globe. Simeon arrives. The snow globe’s been very quiet while he’s been gone. It’s only to be expected, considering who he really is. The Doctor holds a tin up, adorned with a map of the London Underground 1967 – “a key strategic weakness in metropolitan living if you ask me. But then, I have never liked a tunnel” – and within…
The Doctor explains that the snow globe – the Intelligence – is just a parasite, feeding on the loneliness of a child and the sickness of an old man. Because the snow can’t talk; it just mirrors and feeds on all the darkness in Walter Simeon.
Dr. Simeon grabs the tin, opens it – and the Memory Worm bites him.
He falls to the floor, his mind slowly stripping away, and the Intelligence dying with it. Or not. “Now the dream outlives the dreamer and can never die. Once, I was the puppet…” the Intelligence says, and Simeon, icy and dead, rises. “Now I pull the strings! I tried so long to take on human form. By erasing Simeon, you made space for me. I fill him now.”
Simeon bats Vastra away and strangles the Doctor, his breath freezing the Time Lord’s face.
Back at the Latimer household, the family gather around the dying Clara, Francesca and Digby crying. A flash of lightning outside – -
And Simeon tumbles off the Doctor. The Intelligence melts away, and the Doctor and Vastra run to the window. It’s not snowing anymore. The sky is crying too.
“There was a critical mass of snow at the house. If something happened there…”
The Doctor rushes back to Clara’s side, just as she passes away. But before she does, she tells him to run. “Run, you clever boy. And remember.” Suddenly, he realises. He remembers Oswin Oswald, stuck in the Dalek Asylum.
And then it’s Christmas Day.
The Doctor, Vastra and Jenny gather around the grave of Clara Oswin Oswald. “And what about the Intelligence?” Vastra asks. “It learned to survive beyond physical form,” the Doctor replies, and takes out Simeon’s business card. “The Great Intelligence. Rings a bell…”
Looking at the gravestone, and remembering her in the Asylum, the Doctor rushes off to the TARDIS, running to find the impossible girl who’s already died twice.
Now. Clara and a friend walk through the cemetery, past the now-old gravestone that the three stood by in 1842. “Don’t you think it’s creepy?” her friend asks. “Nah,” Clara smiles. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
The Doctor runs around the TARDIS console, pulling levers and yelling out for her. Clara Oswin Oswald.
“Watch me run.”
COMING SOON: “I’M THE DOCTOR. I’M AN ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE; I’M A THOUSAND YEARS OLD; I’VE GOT TWO HEARTS – AND I CAN’T FLY A PLANE!”
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