Doctor Who – Series 12

[Dave]

Well, that was a lot of fun, I thought. One of the good things about the show is that it can support so many different styles of story, and I thought they did a Bond-esque spy romp quite well (with a touch of X-Files thrown in).

Everyone seems a little more comfortable in their roles now and there’s a bit more meaningful character development than last series.

Plus, I liked the late reveal, which I didn’t see coming at all.

(And the ‘hiding behind the sofa’ gag made me chuckle.)

As good as anything from the last series.

Topic

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

There isn’t much I have to say about this episode. Agree with Ben that one Cyberman is better than 10,000.

More interested in what is happening in the Ireland flashbacks. But also think they should have put all that in the next episode when it (hopefully) becomes relevant. Clearly Brendon is the Cyberman but it didn’t give us any contextual information relevant to this episode.

The flying heads were pretty silly.

Of course The Master was going to appear.

Not been left excited for the final.

[Flap Jack]

Hell yeah, that was great.

I don’t think it lived up to the continuity announcer promising it would be “game-changing” – you can’t change the game just by teasing a plot twist, you actually have to tell us what the plot twist is – but I’m intrigued to see what happens next all the same.

[Pete Part Three]

They’re not going to tell you what the plot twist is, as that’s all Chibnall’s got going for him; a bunch of questions and a everlasting promise of game-changing reveals.

Without all the mysteries being dangled in front of the audience like a mouldy carrot, it would just be a lot of arsing about with the poor writing and shite characters front and centre. Like the last season. And this season, when you rewatch it.

[Lily]

Last year suffered from no real arc or strong villain for the finale, but it feels like it’s the opposite now. There’s so many mysteries and surprise twists dangling around that there’s no way they’re going to get dealt with in a satisfactory way next week.

I was so hyped after the Ruth episode, but now I’m distinctly ‘meh’ about whatever turns up. Hoping it’ll be great but not holding my breath.

[Flap Jack]

I’m not begrudging this episode for not giving out the answers. It is part 1 of a 2 part story after all. This is 100% a criticism of the overblown PR.

I agree that if the resolutions to the mysteries next week are bad/absent then it will make this episode worse retrospectively, but it’s silly to try and make that judgement in advance. We’ve only got a part 1 right now, and I’m judging it as a part 1. Fingers crossed it turns out well.

Without all the mysteries being dangled in front of the audience like a mouldy carrot, it would just be a lot of arsing about with the poor writing and shite characters front and centre.

I mean, it’s as difficult to fully refute that kind of hypothetical as it is arrogant to assert it, but still, I disagree. The only episode of this series in which the series arc/mystery box/whatever was actually a major element was Fugitive of the Judoon, so if the conclusion to it does suck then that episode is the only one that will go down (outside of this 2-parter itself, of course).

Like, The Wedding of River Song was a crap conclusion to the “The Doctor is destined to be murdered by some fucker wearing a classic NASA spacesuit” arc in Series 6, and that made The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes To War, and Let’s Kill Hitler significantly worse on rewatch, but it didn’t cause everyone to suddenly think that great episodes such as The Doctor’s Wife or The Girl Who Waited were shit just because they were in the same series.

[Ben Saunders]

The difference with particularly The Impossible Astronaut and A Good Man Goes to War (I don’t care about Let’s Kill Hitler) is that they are actually entertaining episodes in their own right. The whole ending of AGMGTW is still truly special stuff, even if it leads into… stuff I’ve mostly forgotten. I caught the end of AGMGTW on whatever digital channel they show Who reruns on now while making my lunch one day, and just from the last ten or so minutes, I was absolutely sucked into this fantastic show. I get that same feeling any time I see a clip of Moffat Who or certain parts of Classic Who on YouTube – that feeling of being sucked in, of being utterly gripped by what’s happening on screen, even though you’ve already seen it and it’s just a largely out of context clip. It’s the same feeling I get from good TNG or DS9 clips, and more rarely TOS. It’s certainly not a feeling I experience while watching anything by Chibnall. Moffat Who had the “high fantasy” stuff and the fairly tale tone and stylised dialogue, TNG has the warmth and the hopefulness, DS9 has the seriousness and the depth. What does Chibnall Who have? Boring, “realistic” dialogue, unnecessary exposition and underdeveloped characters, washed out colour grading and a general dreariness.

>The only episode of this series in which the series arc/mystery box/whatever was actually a major element was Fugitive of the Judoon, so… etc
None of the rest of the episodes really have anywhere to GO “down”. Everything else we’ve had in Series 11+12 is middling at best, with Spyfall and (I mean this) Orphan 55 being the best we’ve had so far, and those episodes are not without their sometimes glaring and oft-discussed issues.

Our main criticism of Ascension isn’t “begrudging this episode for not giving out the answers”, it’s begrudging the first part of a two-parter for not really giving us anything to sink our teeth into, and not really giving us any questions we want answered, no reason for us to tune in next week. That was all given to us by Spyfall and Fugitive! Graham et al are being ambushed by 10,000 Cybermen… they’ll be fine, it doesn’t even take watching the Next Time trailer to realise that. And even if they aren’t fine, I don’t care about any of these characters to worry about the alternative. I’d rather they were unceremoniously killed off, especially Ryan. Is Yaz even there, or with the Doctor at that point? She’s so inconsequential to anything I honestly don’t remember.

The one thing they’ve given us that is an “oh, I wonder what that’s all about” is the portal to Gallifrey, and again I was taken out of that mystery immediately by a character I don’t like turning up.

[Dave]

Compare the great cliffhangers of previous two-parters (including Spyfall) to this one, and it’s kind of laughable. The Master turns up at the end and says “oooh, something exciting and interesting is about to happen, I promise!” And that’s it.

[Flap Jack]

As much as I appreciate your willingness to launch into lengthy explanations of why Doctor Who is terrible now, Ben, that’s really not at all relevant to what I was saying.

“Of course Series 12 episodes won’t be brought down by a bad conclusion, they were already fully bad!” is a valid take (wrong of course, but valid), but my point was that the people who liked Series 12 episodes aren’t going to suddenly change their minds due to a bad ending or a bad plot twist. They either like them already or dislike them already, but that opinion is not going to change for that reason.

So if anything, you saying “Well I still love A Good Man Goes To War despite the mysteries set up having disappointing resolutions!” supports my argument.

As for “we’re not criticising Ascension of the Cybermen for not providing answers, we’re criticising it for not pulling us in”, I never said that was your criticism, I was just clarifying that it wasn’t my own.

[Pete Part Three]

>Of course Series 12 episodes won’t be brought down by a bad conclusion, they were already fully bad!” is a valid take (wrong of course, but valid),

If despairing at the state of this series is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

[Ben Saunders]

“I agree that if the resolutions to the mysteries next week are bad/absent then it will make this episode worse retrospectively” makes it sound like you’re arguing for the exact opposite of what your most recent post clarifies you are arguing for

[Flap Jack]

Ah, OK, that’s just a simple misunderstanding.

if the resolutions to the mysteries next week are bad/absent then it will make this episode worse retrospectively

As in, if part 2 of a 2 part story is bad, then that makes part 1 worse retrospectively. Not that it’ll make the entire series of largely unrelated episodes worse retrospectively, which is what I was disagreeing with Pete about.

[Ben Kirkham]

If the rumours are true, Chibnall is about to take a massive shit on the history of ‘Doctor Who’. If he does, can somebody do a fan edit of the end of ‘Twice Upon A Time’ where Capaldi explodes mid-regeneration? I’d rather leave it like that and stick with 1963-2017 and Big Finish than see this vandalism.

If the rumours aren’t true, I’ll happily eat my words. I’ve never wanted to be proven wrong more than I do at the moment.

[Dave]

The rumours do sound utterly shit. For a show with a usually pretty bulletproof approach to continuity and lore it’s still a fairly decent stab at really upending everything in a pretty un-ignorable way.

[Flap Jack]

There’s really no call for this kind of self-imposed stress, for the following reasons:

1. Chris Chibnall is a lifelong Doctor Who fan. Discounting the possibility that he’s only been pretending to love Doctor Who for decades in order to gain the trust of the BBC and intentionally destroy the show from the inside, it seems unlikely he would do anything that would majorly rewrite or undermine its history.
2. Even if The Timeless Children does hit us with a really stupid twist that has ramifications for how you view all 38 seasons of the show, Doctor Who barely has a canon. If it’s that bad, it’ll just be ignored from next series onward, and it ultimately won’t matter. Just like it doesn’t matter that Clara was directly responsible for The Doctor’s origins as a hero in 2 different ways, or that The Doctor is half-human on his mother’s side, or that a lady called Ursula is presumably still living as an immortal, decapitated head on a paving slab.
3. Chris Chibnall does not have access to a real TARDIS and therefore cannot do any harm to history.

[Veni]

I don’t think its possible for any episode to be so bad it tanks the entire legacy of the show, I don’t think that has happened to any show. You can have an episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets raped by a panda, and I’ll still love everything before that and just pretend the show ended before it got to that point.

However, I will say that if the show keeps getting detrimental viewership ratings, that could prove to be a great threat to the show’s sustainability with how fickle audiences are, there’s no telling if you fool them once they’ll be willing to risk being fooled again.

[Ben Saunders]

I don’t think anybody is truly arguing that whatever the fuck Chibnall does will retroactively ruin 50+ years of storytelling – Episode VIII of Star Wars was fucking shite but I-VI are just as good as they ever were. It still would be utterly shitting all over everything if he dared to pull the shit everybody is expecting, and would fuel people’s already rather strong opinions that this man should not be in charge of the show.

I actually think it’s pretty funny that people are getting genuinely pre-angry over something that hasn’t happened yet, and might not. A lot of people are going to have egg on their faces if the finale turns out to be completely mundane (but if it does I and many other will just be annoyed at THAT, most likely). If it isn’t clear, I am expecting something utterly stupid to happen, and I am slightly looking forward to the shitstorm, but I’m not really pre-angry about it, and any suggestion as such is hyperbole. The height of my annoyance with Doctor Who was actually during The Witchfinders when I realised this show really was not getting any better and we really are lumped with Chibnall for three, four, possibly five seasons. I’m over being really annoyed by any of this stuff and am now just shitting on it to pass the time, really. Ridiculous hyperbole and saying I want showrunners to literally kill the show forever is just my style, I think it’s funny.

>Chris Chibnall is a lifelong Doctor Who fan
So is fucking Ian Levine and his magnum opus was all the bizarre, almost but somehow wrong in the strangest way possible continuity porn of Attack of the Cybermen. Being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t have shit ideas. For example, Moffat was a fan when he wrote Clara doing all that shit, and RTD was a fan when he came up with a blowjob slab.

[Dave]

I actually think it’s pretty funny that people are getting genuinely pre-angry over something that hasn’t happened yet, and might not. A lot of people are going to have egg on their faces if the finale turns out to be completely mundane (but if it does I and many other will just be annoyed at THAT, most likely).

Just as long as everyone can be angry about *something*.

Episode VIII of Star Wars was fucking shite

Nine in roman numerals is actually IX.

[Flap Jack]

Being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t have shit ideas. For example, Moffat was a fan when he wrote Clara doing all that shit, and RTD was a fan when he came up with a blowjob slab.

Oh, absolutely fans are not above coming up with stupid shit. Just not completely-reimagining-Doctor-Who-history stupid shit. Even the worst of Philip Segal and Steven Moffat’s major continuity additions complement Doctor Who history (albeit badly), not rewrite it.

Again though, I’m saying that Chibnall being a fan makes it unlikely he’d do something like that, not impossible. I guess we’ll see.

Also, I know you like to suggest that “there’s a plot twist so huge and so bad that it makes people want to forget this story ever happened” and “it’s so completely boring that people forget this story ever happened without trying” are the only options on the table for this final episode, but obviously there’s a massive gulf of possibility between those two outcomes.

[Pete Part Three]

Ah, Saunders law. “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of Ben bringing up The Last Jedi steadily increases”.

[Ben Saunders]

It’s my most solid go-to example of something that’s well known to be utter shite. I actually rather enjoyed Rise of Skywalker because I was so disconnected from actually caring about what was happening onscreen that I could just enjoy it at face value. It’s massively stupid, but I couldn’t bring myself to be offended by any of it.

[Ben Saunders]

Remember when RTD made it so that the reason The Master was so evil was because there was a drum beat playing constantly in his head? This show is no stranger to totally bonkers and stupid lore retcons. I was glad Moffat entirely ignored that, because fuck me. I actually got annoyed when the new Master referenced it in his morse code message, because I thought we’d managed to quietly sweep that one under the rug.

Just imagine Delgado teaming up with the Sea Devils while his head constantly does dun dun dun dun. Absurd.

Remember when the master ate a burger really fast, turned into Skeletor and flew away? I think those both happened in the same story. I have to say, Chibnall so far hasn’t given us anything that fucking stupid, so I guess we should count our blessings.

[Dave]

Nah, Last Jedi is alright and is comfortably the best of the new Star Wars movies. Being utterly convinced that something is awful doesn’t force everyone to feel the same way about it through sheer force of will, fortunately for both Star Wars and Doctor Who.

(If anything, I thought that The Last Jedi was best known as a very polarising film that had provoked strong reactions at both ends of the spectrum.)

[Dave]

I quite liked having the Master’s madness manifest through an obsession the Doctor Who theme tune as an idea, although I supposed it might seem odd if you couldn’t help but think lf that while you were watching old Master stories.

As a comics fan I’m used to seeing different creators do very different things with characters on different runs over the years, even though they’re technically meant to be the same character in terms of the overall continuity. I have the same approach to stuff like Doctor Who (and Star Wars) – I can appreciate different takes in their own right and not worry too much about the implications of one take reaching back and tarnishing another take. Best just to try and enjoy them on their own terms.

[Dave]

I quite liked having the Master’s madness manifest through an obsession with the Doctor Who theme tune as an idea, although I supposed it might seem odd if you couldn’t help but think of that while you were watching old Master stories.

As a comics fan I’m used to seeing different creators do very different things with characters on different runs over the years, even though they’re technically meant to be the same character in terms of the overall continuity. I have the same approach to stuff like Doctor Who (and Star Wars) – I can appreciate different takes in their own right and not worry too much about the implications of one take reaching back and tarnishing another take. Best just to try and enjoy them on their own terms.

[Flap Jack]

It’s my most solid go-to example of something that’s well known to be utter shite.

Then you really ought to find a better one, because The Last Jedi is not a solid example of that at all.

I understand the instinct to feel that your own opinion is the consensus, especially when there are a lot of people who agree with you and many of those people are extremely loud and confident about having that opinion, but TLJ is in fact an example of a film that is controversial or polarising, not a film that is widely agreed to be terrible. A simple Google search will reveal that, if you must disbelieve me every time I try to inform you that this is the case.

If you’re stuck for ideas, just have a look at IMDb’s bottom 250 list for inspiration. There are plenty of well known options that, unlike TLJ, almost definitely won’t start any arguments when you cite them as examples of “something that’s well known to be utter shite”. Epic Movie, Battlefield Earth, Dragonball Evolution, The Emoji Movie, Mac and Me, Catwoman, Jack and Jill, Superman IV, Batman & Robin. Take your pick.

[Veni]

The Last Jedi is better than two-thirds of the prequels.

[Ben Saunders]

You people honestly need to relax lmao what a response

[Hamish]

[Dave]

This thread is now worse than any Doctor Who finale could ever be, so I’m finding myself looking forward to Sunday.

[Ben Saunders]

I hope we just get lots of gratuitous shots of the new Cyb design, because I quite like it. It’s basically copying the Invasion design but that’s one of my favourite designs

[Ben Saunders]

[Dave]

I predict there will be a lot of backlash to that due to teh canons, but I actually thought it was ok. It was a nice, dramatic, eventful finale with room for a few decent character moments, and the big reveals about the Doctor’s history don’t fundamentally undermine the character as much as they could have done (and they left plenty of wiggle room to give them easy outs if they choose to take them later.) Either way, there’s clearly a longer plan with more to reveal here.

Timelords crossed with Cybermen was a bit fanfiction-y but I thought it worked quite well.

I also liked the Ruth Doctor’s appearance and again it made me feel like I could happily watch a series with her as the lead.

[Ben Saunders]

That was all a bit fanwanky and unnecessary – Cyber Lords, early Gallifrey lore, retconning the Morbius Doctors – all stuff that really shouldn’t be explored, but was, and it’s… whatever. I feel I might have enjoyed some of this stuff if it came at the end of series 9 or 10, and not after two years of almost exclusively shite that turned me into a Who sceptic rather than a believer. As it stands the episode is alright, I’m sure people are going to be very upset about it, though.

Ruth’s appearance unfortunately solidifies how much a lot of people prefer her over Jodie… not only is she more convincing in the role of The Doctor, but having her actually mentor the “real” Doctor and help her figure out how to escape just reinforces her being “better”, don’t you think. Jodie has finally been given some real material to chew on and… she’s alright. Better than Sylvester McCoy.

The leaks that involved the Time Lords torturing the Timeless Child to either find out how they regenerate, or forcing them to perpetually regenerate in order to fuel their own powers, were a little more interesting.

1) Was the stuff in Ireland all allegorical/didn’t literally happen?
2) Why the fuck would Chibnall not call The Division, The Celestial Intervention Agency, if he was going to do all this fanwank bullshit? Why not go whole hog?

Some research for people who don’t know what I’m talking about:
Morbius:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51a1hoSn4uY
The CIA: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Celestial_Intervention_Agency

[Ben Saunders]

12 regenerations being an imposed limit has been canon since the 70s, as is regeneration not being a natural process… a lot of the reveals in this episode are honestly just unnecessary “filling in the blanks” type writing, which I find to be rather unnecessary. Stuff we don’t really need to have explained to us, since we can make up our own minds on that shit if we want to. Leave it to books and comics that people can argue over the canonicity of for the next forty years.

[Dave]

Yes, the Ireland stuff was all meant to be allegorical for the Timeless child/Doctor up to the point of mindwipe.

[Ben Saunders]

That’s what Quinn said, but me and Lily couldn’t recall them actually stating that. Bit weird. But I’ll take it.

It’s always been a long-accepted idea that The Master actually respects The Doctor a lot… that’s why they were so chummy in the Pertwee years, and this is eventually canonised with Missy… having the Master be THAT upset by the reveal of the Timeless Child’s identity… it just doesn’t quite gel, for me. I could have bought the “the Time Lords have been torturing a little girl for eternity” thing as a reason for him being so angry, especially post-Missy. In the episode as it stands, we don’t really see anything from The Timeless Child’s perspective, and we get nothing of their feelings on the matter. They just… go along with the experiments, because… that’s what happens. Could have given us something, there.

Do the Judoon not remember the whole Pandorica fiasco? Do they really think they can just put the Doctor in jail? Evidently she’ll have escaped by next episode, but come on. Of course, these could be Judoon from a younger timeline, I guess.

[Dave]

It was a bit quick, but it was during the section with the Division. It explained that the memories had been disguised as the Ireland stuff from last week, and intercut some of that with the Timeless child stuff from earlier on to draw the parallels explicitly (eg. the fall off the cliff.)

[Veni]

How was series 12 overall

[Dave]

Okay

[Veni]

So the tally is:

Series 11 – Trash
Series 12 – Okay

[Ben Saunders]

I’m genuinely annoyed at Chibnall for not calling it the Celestial Intervention Agency. Come on, man.

Series 11 – Bottom of the barrel trash
Series 12 – closer to the top of the barrel but still ultimately trash, but you accidentally threw out a couple of things you quite like, and eventually go back into the bin to get them back out again, but you have to touch a load of old mashed potato to get there

[Pete Part Three]

Just fucking bad.

[Veni]

So the new tally is:

Series 11 – Trash
Series 12 – Just fucking bad

[srmcd1]

On the plus side, BabelColour over on YouTube is going to be absolutely thrilled “The Ten Doctors” can still work.

[Dave]

I do wonder whether the story might actually have been more interesting had the Doctor not been the Timeless Child – and instead had to grapple with the fact that Timelord society (and her own regenerative powers) were built on exploitation of this other being. Making it less of an “everything you knew about yourself is wrong!” story and instead focusing more on the aspects of class and privilege and abuse might have been a more interesting way to take it.

Of course, with the big gap in the timeline that they left and the ambiguity around the Doctor’s weird implanted memories of Ireland, they’ve still left themselves an easy get-out if they want to later reveal thay she’s not the Timeless Child after all.

[Flap Jack]

Yeah, I definitely have mixed feelings about this Timeless Child reveal. On the one hand it was certainly major enough to justify the hype and Chibnall didn’t just replace the answer with a bigger mystery for the next series as Moffat would have, on the other hand it ultimately doesn’t change a lot but does manage to undermine the idea that The Doctor is extraordinary by choice, not by birthright. That’s kind of a shame.

But, as I predicted, it didn’t burn Doctor Who canon to the ground, so hopefully people can calm down a smidge.

Other thoughts:

– The episode is called “The Timeless Children”, so who were the other ones then?

– Sacha Dhawan is still great. I especially felt like he was predicting what the audience response would be when he said “So you’re plan is just to become robots? Wow, that’s pretty boring”.

– Cyber Time Lords? Hell yes. Every aspect of that was superb.

– So we get the implication (if not confirmation) that the Jo Martin incarnation is pre-Hartnell, but if that’s the case, why did she already call herself The Doctor and have a police box TARDIS?

– Does The Doctor have infinite regenerations now, or did she just used to? Did the Time Lords just pretend to give him an extra regeneration cycle in Time of the Doctor to cover themselves? Or did they genuinely give him an extra regeneration cycle because they didn’t realise they didn’t need to?

– Not sure I quite buy the Time Lords deciding that the Timeless Child was at odds with their political glorification of Gallifreyan supremacy to the extent they needed to cover it up. Everyone knows that regeneration doesn’t occur naturally and that scientists had to invent a way to give people that ability, so what difference does it make if it comes from an alien or not?

– However, I do buy that this incarnation of The Master would be petty enough to destroy Gallifrey over this.

– So… how much of this Cyber War did the Master personally plan? Maybe he just set up the boundary portal to Gallifrey on the assumption that The Doctor/the Cybermen would get there? Seems like that depended on a huge amount of luck. Also did the previous human survivors of the Cyber War go to Gallifrey or somewhere else?

– The Timeless Child was neither Susan nor The Rani. And so the cycle continues.

– People are understandably focusing on the pre-Hartnell Doctors aspect of this Timeless Child twist, but the revelation that The Doctor is not a native Gallifreyan and not even native to this universe is surely just as massive. I guess the ability to regenerate naturally is the only difference between The Doctor’s species and Shabogans? Otherwise it absolutely would have been discovered.

– So all Time Lords are effectively half-Gallifreyan and half-alien? LIKE A HYBRID, CLARA.

– This episode gives us a reference to Rassilon’s “For Gallifrey! For the Time Lords! For the end of time itself!” speech and a triple “What?!” cliffhanger. The David Tennant era is back, baby.

– Dear Chris Chibnall, please make up your mind about whether multi-parters get individual titles or not.

– Despite the major Doctor backstory embellishment this episode contains, I was still more irked by the ones in Name of the Doctor and Listen.

– Being casually shrunk down by The Master is an extreme anti-climax for the lone cyberman.

– Are we meant to think that Ko Sharmus is a Time Lord? Maybe that’s just me.

– I liked how elated Ryan was about successfully blowing up those Cybermen.

– Not sure why it’s “The Division” and not the Celestial Intervention Agency. Maybe they wanted this organisation to be unknown even to The Doctor and not contradict her knowledge of the CIA from other things. Or maybe it’s intended as a precursor, like the OSS.

– Bit weird to tease a Dalek episode with a Judoon incident (and a shame as I’m sure the Judoon are worthy of having their own episode dedicated to them without needing Daleks or Time Lords or Captain Jack or Anne Reid in there as well). Also notice they’re being cagey in calling it a “festive special” again rather than “Christmas” or “New Year’s”.

On the whole, despite there still being plenty to grumble about, I did really enjoy this series. I’d probably put it in the middle third of New Who series, which ain’t too shabby.

[Dave]

I took The Timeless Children to be a reference to the Timelords.

[Flap Jack]

I mean… sure, OK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I think the Timeless children are all the different regenerated versions of the The Timeless Child/Doctor that get experimented on?

My main conclusion to this is that it was a complete an utter waste of time.

Completely agree with Flap Jack that it makes The Doctor so aggrandised and important to the history of Gallifrey and the Timelords that it spoils the history of the character that has been built up over the last 50-60 years. However it adds to much yet ultimately changes nothing for the Doctor, the characters around her, or us – Chibnall knows this and that’s why he put in the scene with The Doctor saying as much.

There’s so many questions and things that don’t quite make sense.

Are there two boundaries? Or is it just the one? Where does the Timeless Child actually come from? And who is this race of infinately regenerating people and why would they abandon a kid on a planet in a different dimension/universe?

How does shoving a Timelord in a Cyberman actually help anything? The Lone Cyberman’s plan was to rid it of all organic components and the Master is all, hang on, stick a Timelord in there and they’ll never die. Except, we know and it is confirmed in this episode that Timelords have a regeneration limit imposed, so at most they can survive 12 deaths, probably less. They can presumably still succumb to the technical aspects of the Cyberman being damanged/destroyed, regeneration can’t solve fix that.

They also did nothing! If you’re going to dangle the idea of Cyberlords or whatever in front of us, use them to do something interesting.

Some of the question Flap Jack has asked. Why was Ruth Doctor, pre Hartnell, calling herself The Doctor and swanning around in a Police Box? There’s potential answers to this, all of them problematic. Either she was given the code name The Doctor, and a TARDIS in the shape of a Police Box, and then she had her memories wiped at a later date. Then Hartnell runs away, picks the name The Doctor because it’s deeply buried in his subconcious, visits Earth, his TARDIS gets coincidentally stuck as a police box … it doesn’t work! Or Ruth comes at a time after Hartnell that we don’t know about (series 6b?) and that is yet to be explained.

Does the Doctor have infinate regenerations? I’d have to say categorically yes. The extra regen cycle in Time of the Doctor would have to be explained as the Timelords (some of them) know who the Doctor is (in which case why let him/her swan around the universe the way they do – you’d think you’d want to keep your god basically close to home and out of harms way etc) and they put on a show of bestowing regenerations to keep the secret but ultimately Matt would have regenerated into Capaldi without them.

Or, they don’t know who he is and the Doctor just absorbed some regeneration energy which then kick started his regeneration which eh was destined for anyway.

Are we to also understand now that basically all Timelords except the Master and the Doctor are dead / Cyberified (and presumably blown up)?? Which, effectively, undoes everything Moffat spent the 50th year undoing from RTDs run. RTD introduced the idea the Timelords are dead, Moffat undoes that and brings them back, then Chibnall goes and kills them all again?

Speaking of which, I was questioning earlier why The Doctor would so readily allow a random old guy to blow himself up in her place, but it makes sense as she has already lived with the experience of having genocided Gallifrey herself (even if that didn’t happen, the Doctor spent hundreds of years believing it did) so maybe, as soon as she saw a way out she took it and ran.

Ryan, Yaz and Graham have their own TARDIS now! Presumably will be used in some capacity to get them into the action of the special as they are, as always, separated from the Doctor.

How is River able to regenerate? If regeneration comes from splicing in the DNA for the Timeless Child, how is being concieved in the time vortex able to allow River that ability? Surely after millenia for pissing about in time and space and doing experiments on this kid and everything else, the Timelords themselves would have figured out they could get regeneration abilities another way. Something there doesn’t add up.

It would have been much more interesting had The Master been the Timeless Child. And I’d have actually bought him being so angry at that revelation that’d he’d destroy Gallifrey over it. Not sure I buy him being angry its The Doctor because he has always had a respect for them.

Urgh, that’s all I have for now I think. I’d have been more interested in a single story explain the whole of the Ruth thing, rather than expanding on the Doctor’s history and importance and leaving Ruth dangling to be further explained (presumably) at a later date.

[Flap Jack]

Gallifrey being destroyed again is pretty darn bleak. With what was revealed in Spyfall alone, the door was still open for the Time Lords to still be alive, and just the buildings and political leaders had been destroyed/killed, but in this episode they decisively wipe out all organic life on the entire planet. Whelp. Maybe there was a massive evacuation effort during The Master’s attack we don’t know about.

About the Cyber-Masters, I read the invincibility claim as hyperbole. Obviously they wouldn’t be immune to harm (regeneration doesn’t protect against all fatal events; that bomb Ryan used to blow up that group of Cybermen totally would have killed Cyber-Lords as well), buy they’d still be much more formidable than the Cybermen ever were or would be as robots.

Regarding regeneration and River Song, it’s definitely a contradiction but I can’t say it’s especially egregious by the standards of Doctor Who history. Originally the TARDIS was what gave The Doctor the ability to regenerate, but that hasn’t been true for ages.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in this episode don’t they establish that their discovery of regeneration pre-dated their discovery of time travel? So maybe the Timeless Child and the time vortex are just 2 different ways to get the same power, like how Superman and Wonder Woman can both fly. Or maybe The Doctor’s species got their regenerative powers by living in or heavily exposed to the time vortex themselves, so the Gallifreyans discovering time travel was them switching from getting the power from a secondary source to a primary one. Maybe this is why they decided to switch The Doctor from being a guinea pig to being a secret agent.

[Author]

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