Things got a little more 2D than usual on Doctor Who‘s latest episode, “Flatline.”

2D Monsters

The episode starts with a man speaking to emergency services on the phone, saying he knows who did the crime. What crime? We don’t know, but then he gets sucked into what seems like oblivion. The camera turns to reveal that he is now a part of the wall decor – literally, he is now an image on the wall. From human to wallpaper in less then 10 seconds!

Toy TARDIS

Danny still doesn’t know Clara is traveling with the Doctor, so she starts making sure she doesn’t leave her things there. She lies and tells the Doctor how Danny doesn’t like her leaving things in the TARDIS and is about to leave when they realize the door to the TARDIS got insanely small; like a third of the size, small. They get out and the entire TARDIS is smaller. The Doctor wants Clara to figure out what caused this, so he gets back in the TARDIS and Clara goes off to check things out.

But when Clara returns, the TARDIS is tiny. Or, at least, the exterior is. He gives her the psychic paper and sonic screwdriver so she can explore with his tools since he’s trapped inside a toy-sized TARDIS.

Suspicious Phone Calls

While out searching for the cause, Clara meets a kid, Rigsy, doing community service, and he explains that a lot of people have lost someone lately. He takes her to a couple of apartments that belonged to a the latest missing people.

The police officer at the second apartment lets them in and then takes a phone call in another room, but while she’s in the room the monster that got our first victim sucks her into the floor and then her nervous system appears on the wall.

Clara and Rigsy then get stuck in the same room where the monster took the policewoman. Danny calls and Clara she tries to pretend nothing is happening but doesn’t really succeed. It basically sounds like she’s having an affair. Which, technically, she almost is with the Doctor since he doesn’t know. The Doctor then figures out that the monster is from a universe that’s just 2D, that’s why he didn’t know anything about it.

Communication Issues

The community workers are about to paint over the murals of the missing people when Clara tries to stop them. But then the murals start coming off the walls and onto the floor after the community group. In a conversation with the Doctor, he says that maybe the monsters are just confused and they don’t know what they’re doing. So the Doctor tries to communicate with them to see if they’re friendly.

However, that doesn’t work, and the aliens are definitely not friendly as they decide to take one of the community workers. As they try to escape, the monsters managed to make the door handle to the exit 2D, so they’re trapped. But the Doctor creates his own device that can restore previously 3D items converted to 2D back into their original 3D state. But they’re not the only ones attempting to make things 3D: the monsters have now begun to become 3D themselves. But the Doctor thinks he knows how to send them back to their dimension!

In the commotion one of the community workers, who’s a complete arse by the way, tries to take the TARDIS from Clara and it ends up falling down a tunnel and lands on a train line. Because of the worker’s action, the Doctor can’t the TARDIS out of the way in time and puts it in siege mode: No way in, no way out. And apparently siege mode means it turns into a gigantic (or in this case, tiny) cube.

Clara finds the cube and comes up with the plan. She manages to get Rigsy to draw up a fake door on a poster. The goal? Get the monsters to try to make that door real: But they can’t because that door never existed! The monsters use their energy on the fake door and it goes through the wall and to the TARDIS, which turns back into normal size. The monsters were using energy from the TARDIS to turn things two dimensional, but now they’ve given that energy back and the Doctor gets out.

The Doctor gets all Doctor-y and monologues about how he is the man who saves people from monsters like them, and he sends them back to their universe.

My Clara

In Heaven, Missy is using an iPad to stalk Clara, and says, “Clara. My Clara. I have chosen well.” Many seem to think this means Missy is a future reincarnation of the Doctor, but it’s probably a lot more complicated than that.