One of the lesser but still important questions of the episode is Who placed the newspaper advert? The three most likely candidates of the Doctor, Clara, and the Half-Face Man are completely out, and the idea of the Doctor doing it retroactively as in Battlefield (1989) and The Lodger (2011) seems to have been ruled out by the final scene in the Tardis that connects the advert to another time that the Doctor and Clara were mysteriously brought together. In another case of Steven Moffat planting seeds and then not picking up on them until much later, Clara mysteriously getting the Doctors phone number in The Bells Of St John has been picked up on properly a full eighteen months after its first mention. So just like Dalek Caan in the Russell T. Davies era, somebody is deliberately trying to bind the Doctor and Clara together. And the question is who. The obvious answer would be Missy as she could easily have been the woman who gave Clara the Doctors phone number and seems to have been observing the events of Deep Breath, possibly manipulating them to gain access to the Half-Face Man. But at the same time, Missy seems like too obvious a candidate and its more like Steven Moffat to have something more complicated and unexpected up his sleeve.
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
