“He will rise higher than ever before, but then fall so much further.”
I’m not a religious man at all but it was hard to ignore the religious references in this episode, from the headless monks, to sentient computers, to soldiers of God, and the most significant religious symbolism, the Fall. In the Bible the Fall of Man refers to the disobedience of Adam and Eve, eating the fruit from the Forbidden Tree, and in doing so losing their innocence for guilt and shame, corrupting the natural world, and causing people to be born in to original sin.
In A Good Man Goes to War, the mid-series finale of Doctor Who, we witness the Fall of the Doctor; a so called “innocent”, a hero, a champion, becomes exposed as a hypocrite, a man who brings with him death and destruction, a man who will lie to those on their death-bed (Lorna Bucket), a man so feared that his enemies will go to the most desperate lengths to kill him - this was truly the Doctor’s darkest hour.