Loved it. Loved that the Doctor bungled his effort to force Clara into making a Doctor-type decision ("welcome to my world") in what he judged to be a safe situation even though it looked dangerous; his impatience and aloofness were meant to convince her that she really was on her own here, but were also in character for him. He's been seeing her develop independence and confidence, and he's ready for her to step up and acknowledge that she really is someone who can "play the Doctor" very well. Remember too that she's been taking the role of his "teacher", often quite explicitly, in these stories, so this is his attempt to "teach" her something about herself this time (both returning the favor, and giving her some of her own medicine -- remember that roundhouse slap in "Into the Dalek"?) that should be good news to her -- that she can handle something like this. He also may be tired of her persistent miss-trust of the new Doctor, which he probably thinks he settled quite firmly as far back as "Deep Breath", where he "left" her to face Half-Face alone, only he was exactly where she doubted he would be when she needed him -- he'd been present all along, and had her back as always.

But -- he's an alien, and he's often arrogant, clumsy, and massively insensitive, so the whole thing backfires. As for Clara, he's just thrown her into a very deep end of the pool indeed, and she does manage to swim, but she's also furious at being deceived by him (although she's been busy deceiving both him and Danny in an effort to hang onto two divergent life-paths) because it makes her feel like a fool -- for being deceived, and for assuming he would never toss her into the deep end of the pool but always protect her. I think she's also a little frightened of him at the end, because he could do that and she didn't see it coming: I mean, the guy is an alien. I say this because her anger is so strong that there has to be a lot of fear at the root of it, beyond the fear of something that's now in the past, over and done (the choice). But what if he pulls something like this in future? And, knowing that he's still somewhat unstable, suppose he finds out too late that he was wrong, and can't fix it or rescue her when it goes haywire. She's recently come off a close and warm relationship with Matt Smith's Doctor, and maybe she's been wondering whether that was a fraud and a fake and a deception too? I would, in her place. And she's furious that he's just demonstrated so clearly that he's not "her" Doctor, Smith, who would never throw her into the deep end (she thinks -- or did he, ever?).

I also like it that Clara is left in the company of two other female humans to make this decision: the "maiden" (Courtney, the girl-child), and the astronaut, who isn't a "crone", but does represent the "wisdom" of human experience accumulated over more years than either of the others. So they're a rough match to the Maiden-Mother-Crone that was analogized by earlier peoples to the phases of the Moon (the female mate to the male Sun). Very imperfectly, of course, because Clara is only "Mother" in potential, not in fact. I'm reminded that George Ballanchine, the great choreographery for the NYC Ballet, used to say that he preferred putting many female dancers on the stage rather than many men because he thought that women represented humanity in an all embracing way that men did not (and no, Mr. B was not gay -- far from it). The Doctor leaves the fate of the world to those dancers; one of them does not thank him for it. If you put the silly "science" of this ep aside (it's just a prop), there's an awful lot to think about here; but re-watching has shown me that all of Season 8 is packed with layers of meaning well below the surface.