Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #81 – Decalog 3: Consequences edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: Decalog 3: Consequences
Edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Time for more short stories, mostly by new writers, which is exciting.  The theme here is consequences, and we’re leaning back towards the linked story format of Decalog 1: “Ten stories.  Seven Doctors.  One chain of events.” Interesting to see how the authors handle it, and whether anybody takes it literally and coughs up Revenge Of The Sensorites.

Let’s find out...

*

...And Eternity In An Hour

By Stephen Bowkett

We’re off to a dramatic start as the Third Doctor and Jo are sent on a mission by the Time Lords.  They must halt the spread of a colossal time rift which is causing (among other things) horrific deaths on Alrakis.  There are ideas aplenty, such as the TARDIS having “intuition circuits”, which explains why it always arrives at pivotal moments.  (Fair enough, but personally I like the New Who version: “I always took you where you needed to go.”)

Plot-wise this feels like a full story heavily condensed.  The Doctor and Jo are immediately separated when they arrive on Alrakis and promptly given info-dumps by the people they meet.  They then march straight to the story’s climax.  (Jo does this by convincing the TARDIS to fly itself.  Hmmmm.) It has a very busy and bleak ending which would be even harder to swallow if we spent any time with the characters.  Stepping back and letting the Alrakians sort it out / blow themselves up is novel, I guess, but it doesn’t suit these two, or quite tie off the mission they’re on.

The writing is flowery and often very evocative, particularly in describing the effects of the temporal disaster and the Doctor explaining it all to Jo with dominoes.  It’s a pleasure to read in places.  But elsewhere the Doctor witters on a bit too much even for Pertwee, and Jo has a philosophical nous that has simply come from nowhere.  (“Or was it, [Jo] wondered, just making meaning out of chaos? Could it all be simply self-delusion, the presence of prescience in a purposeful void?” And we are all together, coo-coo-cachoo...)

It’s still quite nice to read a mature and contemplative Jo, even if I don’t buy it.  Same goes for the story.

*

Moving On

By Peter Anghelides

Well this is brilliant.  I sort of wish it was a full Missing Adventure, more out of enjoyment than there being anything lacking.

Sarah Jane Smith interviews an unpleasant tech genius interested in Virtual Reality, sees him die in a traffic accident, and then has a fairly odd time afterwards.  (I know what you’re thinking, and to head off any eye-rolls: it’s not that exactly.)

The story mostly concerns Sarah’s life after the Doctor, struggling to make her career as a novelist and deal with the gulf in understanding caused by travelling in the TARDIS for a few years.  K9 seems to be breaking down with no hope of repair and no Doctor around to help him – or her.  Wisps of her past crop up in creative ways, and a sinister figure inadvertently allows her to get closure on the Doctor.

Just because Sarah is not happy with him for letting her go does not mean she can’t have a life, and following her blistering rebuke against a man that isn’t really there we jump to a Ten Years Later epilogue.  We find her stronger, happier and putting the Doctor properly behind her.  It’s bittersweet and brave, particularly the extraordinary bit of writing that closes out the story, paralleling the fate of K9 with Sarah’s old dog, Rab.

Peter Anghelides cares not for spin-offs; everything has its time and everything dies.  That sentiment, and therefore the story is probably not for everyone, but it is definitely for Sarah.

NB: The villain turns out to be a direct continuation from the first story, although the plot is self-contained.  A bit of a tightrope walk in terms of theme; I’ve no idea how everybody else will approach it.

NB(2?): In the “Ten Years Later” bit, Sarah’s new book is published by Virgin.  Aw.

*

Tarnished Image

By Guy Clapperton

This could technically be the least eventful story in Doctor Who history.  It features the First Doctor and Dodo doing some reading in the TARDIS.  The “story” has been resolved already, so they read news correspondence about it and pick apart the inaccuracies.  Buckle up!

Actually it’s not a bad approach, as we still have to find all the stuff out.  Plus it’s refreshing to come at a story from another perspective.  The earlier events concern a planet ruled by the Azmec Company and a series of ritualistic murders.  The Doctor has theories on what caused them and a possible conspiracy involving the Company.  He and Dodo have been mistaken for actors taking part in recent celebrations, but they are secretly investigating.

The Doctor and Dodo are well written, although Guy Clapperton leans a bit hard on Dodo’s accent and the Doctor’s mannerisms.  (Sort of understandable when you’re only here for 30-odd pages.) There is an enjoyable oddness in chopping between the reports of what happened and the Doctor disagreeing with or correcting them.  The main issue for me was the reporting itself, which isn’t supposed to be brilliant – the Doctor bemoans how sensationalist and vague it is – but is nonetheless so busy and full of interjection that I had difficulty following it.  I’m still not sure how the faked holovid dénouement went down or if I’m supposed to recognise the Azmec Company from something else.  I initially missed the link to the previous story, but the Disco Guide helped me out there.  (It has to do with the holovid, so no wonder I was befuddled.)

So yeah, it’s creative and it more or less works, but the writing could have been tighter.

*

Past Reckoning

By Jackie Marshall

In another understated one, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa visit Trentillys Castle so he can see how some advice he once gave has panned out.  It turns out not well, and the young man he met spent his inheritance and now the castle is open to the public.  Whoops.

This is at the same time a very accurate Fifth Doctor, revelling in the role of blandly pleasant museum guide for Nyssa, and also a rather ill-fitting one.  His determination not to visit Tegan – because she chose to leave and that’s that – goes against his usual amiability, especially when adding in Tom’s portentous line about walking in eternity.  He shows an odd lack of regret for how his advice took effect, and when said advice claims a second victim he cheerily insists that he and Nyssa leave the corpse to be found by someone else.  Pragmatic, yes, given how often he is mistaken for a murderer due to bad timing, but it’s still unusually cold.  He even gets in a bit more busy-bodying, telling the soon-to-be-victim how to live her life.  What a jerk.

It’s all very low-key as strolls around country homes tend to be, but there are some apt bits of writing describing a rather unhappy family’s day out.  The prose is generally delightful; I particularly liked the description of a lake, “as sleek and placid as a pampered cat.” There are some poignant moments, especially a woman’s furious response to the Doctor’s meddling.  (Is a lot of Decalog 3 going to be people shouting at him?) However a quick reminder of Nyssa’s tragic past just underlines how weirdly under-utilised that bit of dramatic fodder has been.  Such indifference suits the Doctor in this story: a callous interior added uncomfortably to our usually milquetoast Boy Scout.

NB: An item directly links this to the previous story.

*

UNITed We Fall

By Keith R. A. DeCandido

Let’s just hurry past the title, shall we? “You Knitted, We Fall”?

Half a decade into his retirement, the Brigadier is still having to justify UNIT’s expenses.  An apparent stroke of luck brings the Doctor (avec scarf) to New York where he can testify that UNIT needed the funding way back when, but he’s early so he slinks off to take in some museums.

The real reason for his summons is a man whose life took a downward turn in the last story, all because of the Doctor.  He has manipulated the UNIT hearing together, recalled the TARDIS and built a bomb with the Doctor’s own equipment, hoping to take the Time Lord out.  He’s not to know that he has an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, and wouldn’t care if he did.

Things promptly escalate to the man panicking and trying to shoot the Doctor dead.  Having survived through the usual mix of being light on his feet and knowing how to stall, the Doctor rushes back to the UN to defuse the bomb, sending the (considerable) explosion ahead in time and knowing it will have consequences there.  That’s two stories in a row that make a slightly laborious point of stressing that there are consequences; a bit clunky.

There’s not a lot to say about this one – a quick, action-driven story that directly follows Past Reckoning and leaves things open for the next story.  It’s as spirited as the Doctor haring through New York amid gunshots, and it works, but aside from the wronged villain and a few amusing insights into the Brigadier as he adjusts to retirement – his sense of humour coming more into focus – there’s no particular substance.

*

Aliens And Predators

By Colin Brake

Am I clutching at straws, or is that a highly unimaginative pseudonym?

Anyway, another not-exactly-deep story places the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe on a ship harbouring the last remains of humanity, in data and DNA form.  The Hope is under attack from the Other.  (Nothing to do with the Doctor’s shady New Adventures past.) They’re bigged up as basically the worst life form in the universe, the Doctor even saying they’ve evolved evil (!) and there’s no turning back for them, and in the scant page-count we can’t really back any of that up.  The supporting cast of tell-don’t-show bad guys and ostensibly good androids aren’t terribly interesting, nor are the space battles.  Also the links to previous / future stories are too obscure.  The humans assume the Doctor is his Seventh incarnation, and the artwork he leaves behind in a gallery is presumably for a future story.  The explanation for the TARDIS signal that brought him here – presumably the one from UNITed We Fall – is somewhat bungled and unclear.

There’s the germ of something emotional here, as the Other represent a different path for humanity and the Hope is pretty much doomed, with humanity’s custodian androids choosing oblivion to resolve the conflict.  But there’s no time to reflect on any of that in a short story, which makes it all a bit of a wasted effort.

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe acquit themselves, but the prose isn’t brilliant (spotted an apostrophe error, deary me) and it’s a bit late in the “chain” to be so wilfully vague.  It didn’t do much for me.

*

Fegovy

By Gareth Roberts

Good old Gareth Roberts.  His style of snippy comedic writing suits the Sixth Doctor very well, and this little jaunt concerning an auction of – wouldn’t you know it – thoroughly unlikeable people makes for a fun 30 pages.

Numerous alien races have come to bid for the painting the Doctor was given at the end of Aliens And Predators.  (I’m not entirely clear if he placed it in this story’s past or future; probably the former.) Fegovy, the computer intelligence hosting the auction, naturally has other plans.  The thoroughly beastly Miss Monodine will probably let her temper scupper the whole thing.

Roberts writes a note-perfect Sixth Doctor, indulgently verbose and brashly confident.  “His eyes glazed over, which [Mel] recognised as a bad sign.  ‘Did I say breakthrough? Too meek a word.  No, our work will be a positive confutation to the sceptics.  A bold charge through the flummery, a vital strike against the purist hordes!’ Mel sniffed.” (He would do it again, with Clayton Hickman, in the sublime The One Doctor.) Mel gets kidnapped, talks her way out of it and otherwise handles the Doctor’s hot air with aplomb.  She’s not as annoying as usual, thank heaven.

The supporting cast are typical Roberts, so a bunch of back-biting low lives including some Chelonians.  He does this sort of thing brilliantly, it's just that (as in the case of Zamper) it can result in diminishing returns when stretched to a novel.  He’s always good for scrumptious prose and frothy dialogue: the Doctor notes that the New Alexandrians have displayed “some leanings to learnings”, and at one point a door breaks down into “buttery gobbets”.  Yum.

The whole thing fits the short story remit very nicely, neatly using an element from a previous story (although still not explaining how it had a TARDIS signal embedded, or some such – I’m probably being thick).  It doesn’t exactly leave the door open for the next story, but it’s excellent all the same.

*

Continuity Errors

By Steven Moffat

Wow, obviously.

As a really cool Doctor Who fan who knows where it’s at, I’ve talked a lot of smack about Steven Moffat.  He’s written an awful lot of Doctor Who, including a measurable amount of awful Doctor Who, but on a good day his interpretation of the character and what he means to those around him is thought-provoking.  It puts the show in a new light, like how you feel about towels after reading Douglas Adams.  Again, that’s on a good day – these ideas have had a lot of airtime over his years as scriptwriter and showrunner for Who, so not every one’s a winner, or can be indefinitely.  Consequently some of the shine might have disappeared from this, his first (?) published Who story, now that I’ve got around to it.*

Yeah, nope.  Continuity Errors explores some of the themes he’d come back to later**, in particular the Doctor’s relative omnipotence when it comes to time and the moral ambiguity of his doing terrible things for good reasons, or wonderful things for selfish reasons.  There is a running thread of lecture notes concerning, in that fourth-wall-bothering way Moffat made seven years of telly out of, the Doctor and his various facets.  Is he our friend? Do any of his friends think it’s odd that everyone in the universe speaks English? Does he just discard them when he gets bored? But even this, the closest Continuity Errors comes to over-egging it and having me reach, with a smug grin, for the “Con” column, is ultimately not as simple as it seems and is put to smart use.

The whole thing revolves around the New Alexandrian Library (mooted in Fegovy) where the Doctor cannot get a librarian to lend him a particular book.  She is written at first very much in Bernice’s vein, all smart-alec observations (oh good GOD do I miss her smart-alec observations, and oh hi Bernice as well, welcome back, stay!), but there is a thunderous misanthropy which will be very important later.  Of course it’s also biting and hilarious.  “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I haven’t memorised the entire stock, consisting, as it does, of every word ever written by a sentient being.  I had yesterday off.” Her inner gripes do not feel like gimmicks even though they are the meat of the story’s machinations.

The Doctor is written beautifully, forgoing the obvious Oncoming Storm ominousness that, to be honest, would befit his actions in this story, for a more Season 24 portrayal.  At first.  He has “the gap-toothed smile – no, grin – of a seven-year-old delightedly showing his mother some worms he’d found in the garden.” He “seemed likely to suggest they bunk off school together and raid an orchard.” He’s friendly and unassuming, until she figures out who/what he is and says no, flat out.  Then he sneaks off and suddenly little things we’ve already taken on board about the librarian begin to shift, from her thoughts on Bernice’s earrings to the number of people she’s disliked today to her relationships and, in a passage that made my head spin in a good way, a memory that alters in real time as she’s remembering it.  I.  Still.  Have.  Goosebumps.  The librarian is impressively resilient and the Doctor is relentless.  The tug of war is earned, thrilling and deliciously creative.  The whole thing veers between dark and hilarious.

All through this we have Bernice wandering in and out, charmingly up to no good as well, and able to observe the shenanigans from the outside.  (Time traveller’s privilege, I guess.) She’s note-perfect too, from the diary post-its to the quest for a minibar to, best of all, a resigned and even affectionate understanding of what the Doctor is.  She’s done her time being mad at him.  All of which adds up to me wishing Moffat had done a full New Adventure for them both.  Let’s face it, the ideas expounded here would fit right in.  But as with an earlier very enjoyable story in Decalog 3, that’s not because this short story is missing anything.  Continuity Errors fills its space exactly, says its piece and vanishes triumphant.

It’s perfect.  Keep forever.

* A recent Big Finish story, Asking For A Friend, maybe took some of the shine away as it has a suspiciously similar premise.  But I generally like James Goss and the story – which has some important differences, namely the Doctor’s motivation – is also brilliant, so I’m going with unconscious plagiarism.

** Though not all of them.  I still think of The Curse Of Fatal Death as the Moffat era’s Rosetta Stone: the nudge-wink jokes and the show-off time travel one-upsmanship are unmistakeable.  (So I guess Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is the real Rosetta Stone?)

*

Timevault

By Ben Jeapes

This isn’t half bad, but the goalposts have moved a bit in recent pages.

The Doctor and K9 are aboard the cargo ship Collateral Security, the Doctor having bought himself passage by making some repairs and improvements.  He quite enjoys the voyage and admires his efficient hosts, the Lorq – who will store anything, for anyone, so long as it’s paid for.  But then a virulent disease breaks out, followed by something worse: a life-form the Time Lords knew long ago, which can be transmitted in the cure.

The Crialans are perhaps not the most original idea, and they’re the second Big Bad alien in this collection, but they have more going for them than the Other.  A race who only exist as bacteria, members of which are created wholesale when the bacteria is spread and take control of their hosts, they have a pretty good grievance with the Time Lords: they got Continuity Errored, so now there are only two left.  For the Doctor to get rid of any Crialans he essentially has to kill them, which he does to a newborn to save a young Lorq he’s befriended.  It’s a dark observation, but they helpfully don’t leave him a lot of options, making it clear they 1) take people over against their will and 2) will not accept anything less than the universe under their command.  It lets the air out of a moral dilemma somewhat when you stack the deck, but a truly cruel attack wouldn’t suit the Fourth Doctor anyway, especially in a story where he is otherwise his affable, jelly-baby-sharing self.  He’s well written here, and his relationship with the young boy is charming.

I mean, this is absolutely fine.  No complaints.  The story holds together and it doesn’t feel too small for what it is.  There’s just not a lot that’s remarkable about it.  The Time Lord meddling referred to here is executed far more literally and interestingly in the preceding story, and although there is an overall theme of consequences – being the Time Lord war, I guess – there’s nothing much linking it to the rest of Decalog 3.  (There is a reference to an Institute which references Continuity Errors, but I had to look that up.) It would work better in less prestigious company.

*

Zeitgeist

By Craig Hinton

We ride out Decalog 3 with a bit of technobabble.  The Fifth Doctor and Turlough arrive on Heracletus seemingly at the behest of the Time Lords, only to get separated in time; the much talked about Spline, a form of time machine that will allow the Heracletans to benefit from their own future, is surely responsible.

This works quite neatly, dividing its time (ahem) between the two versions of the planet and leaving us to guess what has happened there.  There’s an enjoyable symmetry to the Doctor and Turlough both investigating the same building in different times, but reality gets decidedly complicated towards the end.  As you’ll likely guess, it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of deal, and the “consequences” here partly rest on the Doctor turning up at all.  There is also an unhappy epilogue to the Doctor’s new friendship in Timevault, which he never actually clocks.

The Doctor is well written, but Turlough gets more opportunities to shine, bringing his patented brand of exasperation to a people that don’t appear to make sense.  He is neatly described as being a mixture of cowardice and bravery.  It all ends unsurprisingly on a bleak note, far from the collection’s first.

It’s another one that does its job well, but isn’t going to set the world alight.  Decent sci-fi fodder.

*

And that’s Decalog 3, apart from a cheeky Afterword from Steven Moffat that adds another Christmas decoration to the Continuity Errors tree.  (It comes a bit closer to over-egging it, but then he’d come a lot closer by pretending he was going to reveal the Doctor’s name decades later, so eh.)

This is ostensibly the last one, or the last in this format: there will be no more Decalogs featuring the Doctors.  I think the format went out on a high, finding a middle ground between a bunch of stories that are tied to a central one (Decalog) and just having a linking theme (Decalog 2).  That said, this is often more about continuity than consequences; some of the links are a bit obscure, and there’s really no overall domino effect at work.  I don’t mind.  The stories are generally of a good standard, and there are several real standouts.  It’s worth seeking out, with a touch of essential reading.

8/10

I Don't Want To Glow

Doctor Who
Twice Upon A Time
2017 Christmas Special

Here we are again, huh?  Another era over.  And just like last time, there doesn’t seem to be anything left to say about it or to cap off.  Steven Moffat seemed ready to follow Matt Smith out the door when he wrote The Time Of The Doctor, filling it with references and sort-of-but-not-really tying up loose ends, but the fiftieth anniversary Special went better than expected and he got a second wind hiring Peter Capaldi to follow Smith.  At that point, things seemed like they might get interesting again.

Day 1, practicing his David Bradley.

And they... sort of did?  The Twelfth Doctor (also the Thirteenth, Fourteenth or First Mk II, cheers Steven) was abrasive, rude and difficult.  He consequently spent Series Eight wondering if he really was a good man after all.  When it turned out this was in fact still Doctor Who, so duh-on-a-stick the Doctor is still a goodie (despite inexplicably being a prick now), things went sharply the other way: he got a hoodie, a guitar and (nyurgh) sonic sunglasses.  A softer, like totally rad Twelfth Doctor was born, one who could dazzle a room and change people’s minds with Youtube-worthy speeches.  It wasn’t subtle, and it made the whole Year Of The Douchebag seem curiously pointless, but Capaldi was still too good to pass up.  He waded through imperfect scripts and usually got something good out of them.  (And he finally got a hands-down classic episode, though for me it remains his only one.)

Sure enough, the scripts stayed largely flimflam and balls.  Did anyone think recasting the lead would fix that?  We still had a showrunner obsessed with cool-sounding, ultimately dead-end arcs, a Mary Sue companion who held ridiculous sway over the Doctor and a permanent reservation for Mark Gatiss, no questions asked.  Moffat continued to put his mucky stamp on the show’s history at every opportunity, asking silly questions where we can all guess the answers, and the stakes only seemed to get smaller.  Series 10 refreshed some of these elements, particularly with a new companion who was recognisably from Earth, but other shortcomings remained the same.  It wasn’t much of an era for Capaldi (who still seems like the new guy to me), and now he’s off, which just seems like the thing you do after three series rather than a natural progression for him.  (Not that he has been here three years; let’s not forget 2016, The Year Of One Episode.)  He’d have already gone in The Doctor Falls if we didn’t need a Christmas Special, so here we are again, putting his golden jazz hands on hold for one more hour.  As it happens, “on hold for one more hour” is a fairly accurate synopsis for Twice Upon A Time.

The Doctor doesn’t want to regenerate.  “Ah,” I hear you say, “this again.”  For the Tenth Doctor famously Didn’t Want To Go, which seemed overly dramatic at first but was actually in character for him.  (Even that time he was a different species.)  It’s a fear of death, and we can all relate.  But that kind of psychological scaffolding isn’t in place this time.  The Twelfth Doctor never seemed like he had an issue with change (ahem, hoodies), if anything he’s quite pragmatic and unsentimental, so he’s probably quite likely to just get on with the switch.  Alas, it’s not just a new Doctor he’s got a problem with, it’s continuing to live at all.  Eh?  He wants to die?!  Not so relatable.  There’s nothing wrong with him making a principled stand, but it would be nice if they’d properly set it up first.  Okay, there is a hint of no-more-regeneration ennui right back in his first episode when he confronts the Half-Face Man; also Heaven Sent memorably relates the gruelling process of regenerating ad infinitum, although that was a time-loop and it’s not exactly clear whether he remembers it, since he says he’s 2,000 years old here.  These bits do hint towards not wanting to go on any more, but he doesn’t actually talk about it all that much apart from there, and seems pretty zesty in general.  Transparently the only reason he’s stamping his foot now is that we need to squeeze another episode out of him first.

Speaking of transparent: the Testimony.
Delivering the best pain relief on New Earth!

To help said foot-stamping along we have a juicy parallel: the First Doctor himself, sort of, pottering around the South Pole and also refusing to regenerate.  This doesn’t fit what we know about him – our Doctor even points that out! – but I can see how having another Doctor suffer the same crisis might give it some credence.  It’s cheating, but what else is he going to do?  It’s also somewhat redundant as we know both of them are going to regenerate, but it could be compelling to watch them come to terms with it.  However, there’s bonus redundancy: the First Doctor is played by David Bradley, who dramatized William Hartnell’s exit from the show in An Adventure In Space And Time.  Hartnell, too, didn’t want to go.  (Thanks to Mark Gatiss’s mawkish and revisionist script, he even said David Tennant’s final line to ram it home.)  In other words, you’ve seen David Bradley go through these motions – and more affectingly so, as the stakes made more sense for the actor than they do for the character.  (The Doctor’s a Time Lord, and while regeneration must be scary as hell, especially the first time, a figurative gun to his head is not obviously more appealing.  And that’s what not going through with it means.)

If peculiar characterisation of the First Doctor is going to be an issue for you, locate your nearest exit.  Twice Upon A Time has some odd ideas about William Hartnell’s time on the show, knotting together his real life irritability with certain red flag moments like threatening Susan with a “jolly good smacked bottom” to create an embarrassing, frequently non-PC stereotype.  This Doctor is so out of time – chuckling at remarks about women being “made of glass”, casually explaining that Polly is there to clean the TARDIS – that Capaldi-Doc keeps having to apologise for him.  As with his shared refusal to regenerate giving us a convenient “this totally makes sense you guys” comparison, it’s a lazy straw man to show how far we’ve come, and it’s astonishingly unearned.

In the first place, Hartnell wasn’t like this: he could be equal-opportunities blunt with people, but some of that was the actor rather than the character, and any of this sexist rubbish would have rightly earned him a black eye from Barbara or an intervention from Verity Lambert.  More importantly, if any era of the show has given us sexism and a juvenile obsession with stereotypes, it’s Steven Moffat’s.  We’ve had the Eleventh Doctor lusting after Clara’s arse, Amy wanting to shag her duplicate, River Song highlighting The Differences Between Men And Women – Am I Right, Girls? and a general sitcom-esque objectification of females.  (No, making them magically better-than-men is not a compliment.)  It’s the reason I’m very grateful Moffat isn’t the guy writing the first female Doctor, as it would likely be about as empowering as Roy Chubby Brown.  Considering Bradley-Doc is largely here for the fan-service, it’s an utterly bizarre move to then insult him, especially for things either misunderstood or taken out of context.  (The “smacked bottom” remark came right before his granddaughter left the show; infantilising her probably came out of desperation to keep her.)

If you want to be charitable (again), Bradley-Doc’s behaviour can be interpreted as a finger-wagging response to those outraged by a female Doctor, showing the worst knee-jerk response for the silliness it is.  However, they do this by misrepresenting the show’s own past (and annoying people who like Hartnell), risk irritating people who are concerned about Jodie Whittaker but aren’t raging misogynists, and it all sounds completely insincere coming from the Coupling guy anyway.  So I’m not on board this particular train of thought.

"You'll not mind me saying this, since lots of my friends are black..."

As for Bradley, his obvious talents and accolades notwithstanding, I wasn’t convinced by him as Hartnell in the docudrama and I’m still not.  His cadence is quite different, he’s breathless and vaguely amiable, the loveable waspishness is absent; he holds onto his lapels as if his life depended on it, which ends up looking a bit desperate, like Churchill always having a cigar in his gob.  Between him being mischaracterised and Capaldi having his unearned end-of-life crisis, the whole thing has roughly as much depth as Time Crash.  We get the same level of gags with a Classic Doctor mocking new Who tropes, such as the screwdriver, the sunglasses and Capaldi’s rock star grandstanding; Bradley is right to mock them, but it’s no good just serving up your own shortcomings if you’re not able to rise above them.  All it does is make Capaldi look like a collection of stupid habits.

The entire episode can’t just be a refusal to regenerate followed by a shrug and an “Oh well, I guess I’ll regenerate then”, particularly as it’s instantly obvious to Capaldi that Bradley snuffing it would erase him anyway.  Sure enough, there’s no real discussion to be had on the subject: they admit they’re a bit scared, cheer up and then it’s time to go.  So time goes a bit wonky, and Mark Gatiss arrives as an unintentionally Hitler-esque First World War soldier, who is also about to die.  He’s been taken out of time, or rather some aliens are trying to put him back in his proper time because of the Doctors not dying, possibly – it’s not very clear what he’s doing in the South Pole, but the Testimony are keen to get things moving deathwards.  They are a futuristic database who come to all of us when we die, for reasons the Doctor immediately assumes to be sinister.  He is keen to keep the Captain alive, which provides a sort of parallel to his own situation.  I’m not sure it’s needed with Bradley having literally the same crisis right next to him, and the character’s happy ending scuppers any parallel about accepting your own death, but let’s face it, it’s a gig for Gatiss.  He’s rather good here, although the repeated “I’m not really following all this” gag doesn’t appreciate in value.  The notably nameless character does end up in fanwank territory, inevitably, retconning the Doctor’s relationship with one old friend as something he always intended; like all of Moffat’s retcons, it doesn’t actually fit and you’ll instantly file it under “Nope”, but hey, it’s his last episode!

Also here: Bill.  Sort of.  Because this is Moffat Who and nobody ever dies, Bill already survived her own demise in The Doctor Falls, flying into space with Heather.  This isn’t the same Bill – it’s a collection of memories created by the Testimony, which she argues is exactly the same as Bill anyway.  (There’s a bigger discussion to be had there, which we of course skip.)  Much like Clara hanging around with Smith before he regenerated, Bill is a latecomer and doesn’t have that strong a bond with the Doctor, and there’s not much left to say besides her telling him to regenerate, and also having some awkward downtime with Bradley-Doc.  In some of Pearl Mackie’s most forced dialogue, she quizzes the First Doctor on why he left Gallifrey and what he was running to, which Bradley/Moffat promptly points out is a brilliant question and not just a nothingy way to ask the same thing again.  Yes, we get another examination of the Doctor’s history, followed by another summary of how wonderful and cuddly and gumdrops he really is.  (Provided you ignore all the sexist comments.)  It made me realise just how much time Moffat has spent revising and repeating the basic tenets of the show and obsessively trying to own them, and not for the first time, it made me clock-watch.

"I left Gallifrey, of course, to get a bit of peace and quiet!  Women, you see.

Also they can't drive."

Bill also restores the Doctor’s memory of Clara, i.e. gets Jenna Coleman in for a cameo, which is also a bit like Smith’s exit – sorry Clara, Amy’s calling!  This chucks away whatever lingering relevance Hell Bent might have had, with its confused amnesia resolution, but it’s not the first time Moffat’s made a big stink about something, got bored with it and then binned it altogether.  For example, he seems to have forgotten that Clara erased the Doctor’s memory, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for her to complain about it here.

As the episode draws to a close, it’s awkwardly clear there’s been almost no plot.  The Testimony are apparently a nice enough bunch, so there’s exactly no danger here: they want to store memories so we don’t truly lose people, i.e. they do exactly what Gallifreyans already do with the Matrix, which the Doctor has no problem with.  (It also recalls the “Heaven” stuff from Series Eight, probably unintentionally.)  The Doctor needs to look them up first on “the biggest database in the universe” for some reason, which shockingly-not-shockingly involves the Daleks, and gives him a weird excuse to go and see Rusty from Into The Dalek.  Then it’s back to the war, somehow skipping forward in time to the Christmas Armistice in order to save the Captain’s life, although time was frozen when they left so how does that work?  Both Doctors agree it’s time to cark it, and the First Doctor successfully pilots his TARDIS for the second time this episode, after reminding us it’s something he can’t do.  Because Christmas.  Capaldi-Doc talks to not-Bill and not-Nardole who implore him to regenerate, so he does.  While this whole journey could be seen as a fourth-wall bothering look at a TV show that must go on and on like no other, in that arena it’s scuppered by Heaven Sent, which said all of that already.

But you can hardly blame Moffat for having nothing left to say.  This episode, after all, is stalling.  With no great threat to kill the Doctor (it happened in The Doctor Falls, and frankly it was disappointing), this is the over-extended farewell tour from The End Of Time, stretched to a whole episode.  You’re here for the regeneration scene.  Finally, it comes, and it’s just as noticeably out of puff as the rest of it, not helped by treating regeneration as something you can virtually ignore, save for one scene where Capaldi gets a slight cramp.  When it comes to the famous last words, Moffat already wrote a beautiful speech about regeneration in Matt’s (otherwise pretty wretched) send-off: all about looking at your past and accepting that was all you, but it isn’t you now, it was poignant and apt, and troubled the fourth wall only a little.  What else is there to say, especially with no one to say it to?  So Capaldi, a Doctor now known mostly for speeches and grandly pointing at things, reels off an overcooked confection of Terrance Dicks, Bertrand Russell and Capaldi’s own remarks at a convention, which merrily puts a fist through the fourth wall.  (Granted, “only children can hear my name” probably sounded great in front of adoring fans, but it’s doolally coming from the Doctor, who is not prone to self-mythologizing.  It also sidesteps that River knows his name, although if we can now go forward and pretend she didn’t happen, I’m all for it.)

First drafts included: "Fandabbydozy!"

"Eh bah gum, I got new eyebrows I 'ave!"

"They're pickin' us off, one by one!"

Push finally comes to shove and we’re reminded how far Peter Capaldi has come from the unpleasant guy of Series Eight.  Or possibly we’re just ignoring it; they didn’t have to write him that way in the first place, and they just twisted him 180 degrees afterwards.  His era was consequently all over the place.  But he’s a ferociously good actor, and while the mean stuff was a bad fit for the Doctor, those pricklier moments were always interesting to watch.  (Look at Dark Water when he coldly ignores Clara’s threats, or Face The Raven when he brutally snaps at Ashildr, or any time he smiles, looking like a dinosaur on the hunt.)  Capaldi has always been better than the material, sometimes sailing above it (“I am the Doctor and this is my spoon”), but Twice Upon A Time doesn’t give him enough to deliver anything heart-rending.  A vague moral wobble complete with standard issue terrible jokes (“You’re the very first Dalek to get naked for me”) and a handful of good ones (“I assumed I’d get… younger.”  “I am younger!”), it’s as empty and twee as its title.  So long, Angry Eyebrows.  We’ll always have Heaven Sent.  And toodle-oo, Moffat.  Cheers for the good episodes.

Over to you, Chris and Jodie, for the one bit of the episode people will be talking about for the next year.  What of the new guy?  (Gal.  Person.  The new Doctor, right, there we are.)  Jodie Whittaker makes a likeably goony face on seeing her reflection, which some have taken to point us in a David Tennant direction, but her first words are about as inspiring as Capaldi’s last: “Oh, brilliant!”  (Hey, at least we’re spared the “I’ve-got-new-[blank]” gag, but this is still barely above a pleased grunt.)  The scene itself is such a repeat you could call it a parody: the TARDIS crashes again, this time with the Doctor falling out of it.  So that’s every New Who regeneration, plus the opening of The Eleventh Hour, with less grip?  Would it be possible, once in a while, for something else to happen during a regeneration?  But let’s leave the fears of unoriginality to Series 11, with the appropriate ducking and covering that entails.

The Spoilers Of War

Doctor Who
World Enough And Time and The Doctor Falls
Series Ten, Episodes Eleven and Twelve


How do you feel about spoilers?

If you’re Steven Moffat – let’s face it, statistically unlikely! – you’re on record as not being a fan of them.  He did his nut when someone leaked the Doctor’s “regeneration” at the start of Series Six, and urged said fan to go and be a fan of something else; more recently, when the Series Ten trailer came along he suggested journalists close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears at the end.  Much of his era has been defined by surprises, regardless of whether they’re worth the wait, and not parading them around in advance is sort of the main ingredient of that.

So it can’t have been his idea to tell everybody that the Mondas (aka original) Cybermen were coming back, as well as John Simm as the Master.  Sure, ratings are down this year (taking a year off probably didn’t help), and a juicy morsel such as that might get a few more bums on seats.  Ye Olde Cybermen?  Cool.  The old Master?  Double cool, provided he isn’t still acting like a cartoon character.  All of this would be fine (sort of) if knowing about them had been the plan from the start, but when you watch World Enough And Time it clearly wasn’t.  These things are twists, and the BBC has meticulously removed any shock value from them.

Sur...prise?

Whatever could be going on in this creepy hospital?  Cybermen, innit.  Who is that mysterious man that for some reason has a prosthetic nose and is forcing an accent?  Well, John Simm is back this week, and he’s a bit like John Simm now that you mention it, so… that’ll be the Master then.  Tada?  Simm has already lamented this in Doctor Who Magazine: nobody recognised him on set, and it would have been a huge, exciting moment for the show when he pulled off his mask at the end.  Instead it isn’t.  (Okay, some papers were already leaking the news, but so what?  It’s inconvenient, but it’s not as inyerface as the BBC sounding the spoiler horn in the press, then in the launch trailer, and then in the sodding Next Time trailer the week before.  If you remained unspoiled, it was despite their efforts.)

As for whether we would have guessed all this beforehand, with a few blissfully lucky exceptions we’ll simply never know: through the magic of spoilers, the BBC has transported you directly to your second viewing of the episode.  Did they get more bums on seats?  If so, said bums were rewarded with a lethargic 45 minute wait to catch up with the Next Time trailer.  Well done, geniuses.

The question now becomes what else there is to enjoy besides the twists.  World Enough And Time begins intriguingly enough, with Missy and her plucky companions (Bill and Nardole) arriving on a 400 mile long spaceship next to a black hole.  It’s a trial run for Missy, learning to do what the Doctor would do.  Although back up, I’ve missed a spot: it really begins with a flash-forward to the Doctor regenerating.  O RLY?  Only a couple of episodes after faking this for a laugh, a whole week before the end of the series, they’ve got to know only the amoeba-brained among us will think they’re going to see a full regeneration.  So what’s the point teasing it?  If they’ve cried wolf once, what’s to stop them doing it again and hanging on until Christmas?  If there was any chance of a new Doctor a.s.a.p., do you think the BBC would have any hesitation in telling us exactly what to expect?

Best just stick it in the bin and get back to Missy.  This bit, with the Doctor listening in and offering annoyed commentary, is quite fun, with a pretty big caveat.  Missy calls herself “Doctor Who” instead of “the Doctor”.  Ho ho and everything, moving on – but it doesn’t end there.  Bill questions it.  Tee hee, that’s enough now – nope, Missy defends it, says it’s his real name, i.e. he made it up to sound mysterious and dropped the “Who” later as it’s too on the nose.  Ha… ha?  And the Doctor says she’s kidding.  Phew, we’re done.  And then he later adopts it anyway.  Jesus.  All caught up?  That’s not a joke, it’s a relay race.  Making Doctor Who characters say “Doctor who?” is one of the campest gags in the show, and it’s bad enough when it’s just a one-two punch.  I’m pretty sure this took years.

And speaking of time dilation, parking next to a black hole has the unfortunate side effect of making time at the top go a lot slower than time at the bottom.  Fortunately the ship is pulling away very slowly, but the Doctor and co. don’t have time to offer assistance, as the moment Bill’s lifesigns are detected a mysterious something comes up in a very fast lift.  (They must be fast enough to liquefy you to get up there in good time.  Ouch!)   The non-human ship’s custodian shoots her in a panic, evidently fed up with the Doctor’s “you will wonder who I am and why I came here” grandstanding – fair enough, that stuff makes me want to shoot someone.  Shooting Bill is a bit useless now the lift is already here, but that’s panic for you.  Bill is taken away to be “repaired”.  I wonder how that’ll go?

He needed a disguise, he enjoys The Hobbit dwarf cosplay.  What of it?

Around here we’re treated to some zingy back-and-forth flashbacks, as the Doctor plans this little jaunt with Bill beforehand and admits how badly he wants Missy to be good.  This sort of zig-zagging is in Steven Moffat’s fossil record by now, but it’s well done, offering a bit of breathing room in a rather cramped and short-on-plot episode, and highlighting the friendship of the Doctor and the Master and what it means.  Unfortunately Moffat can’t resist showing off, so he does add the phrase “man crush”.  (Gosh, how incredibly hip and down with da kids he is!)  In the present, the Doctor’s job is to distract the panicky blue dude long enough to get into a lift and reach Bill.  Bill’s job is to wait for him, which she does for ten years.  Did someone mention Moffat’s fossil record?  Yeah, Companions Who Wait is in there too, along with ticking off years in seconds.  Kind of loses its shock value when you keep doing it – rather like faking a regeneration – so we’ll have to make Bill’s situation worse.  She ends up working in a creepy hospital with a mysterious bearded gentleman; say, he looks a bit odd, I wonder if that’s important?  It turns out the people here aren’t just living quicker, they’re dying; of what, I didn’t entirely catch, but they’re being “converted” so they can survive.  Survive what, exactly?  Ah, who cares, are they Cybermen yet?

The hospital stuff is suitably eerie, with faceless patients only able to croak words like “pain” electronically, and the “nurses” doing nothing more than turn down the volume.  It doesn’t really mean anything that the staff here are absolutely evil since we don’t get to know anyone, just as it’s a bit of a shrug that people from Mondas automatically start converting into Cybermen when the going gets tough.  (Old habits?)  It’s also a big ask that Bill does nothing of note for ten years, and as far as we know her beardy chum Mr Razor doesn’t do anything either... but it’s suitably sad that she has to wait all that time, and sadder how it all turns out.  Eventually the Doctor and co. secure a lift, so Razor ushers her into medical theatre.  Surprise, he was planning to turn her into a Cyberman all along!  What a… masterful rotter he is.

Okay, so the Master is unveiled and meets Missy, who apparently switches sides.  (Hmm.)  Bill is now a Cyberman.  Behold, the sum total of the episode: a mixture of stuff you already knew and stuff you could put together like Duplo blocks, and we got here via the Moffat trope of a story that progresses years and hardly at all in the same go.  With three big reveals it really ought to pack a punch.  Instead it musters a pretty good pat.  Kudos to John Simm for investing Mr Razor with an eccentric air of the sinister; I like that the Master has gone back to wearing disguises, although ten years is a long con even for him.  When it comes to mask-off time he relishes the opportunity to be properly nasty, even if it’s not the surprise it should be; there are no more scenes of him laughing his head off, thank god.  Rubbing in how this is “the genesis of the Cybermen” is a bit on the nose, but hey, at least it’s not the “Doctor Who” joke again.  And we’re off to the next episode.

There aren't even any snarks to make.
Michelle Gomez has great material.  At last.  And it's glorious.

The Doctor Falls starts off with a sudden change of scenery, which you won’t expect if you’ve never seen a Moffat two-parter before; ditto back-filling the information to get us to that point, since it’s slightly more interesting than doing everything in order.  (It just isn’t a new way of doing Doctor Who.)  Simm and Gomez are a delight together, the former toning it down (at last) in a black suit and goatee, the latter, well… come back, Missy, all is forgiven.  There are moments here when Missy says she’s on the Doctor’s side and seems to be in actual pain trying to figure out if she means it.  Missy’s soul has been the real arc of Series Ten, and that could be a very cheesy development, besides which Moffat’s past form suggests it won’t go anywhere anyway.  Well, we’ve got Michelle Gomez.  Watching her imprint out of habit on Simm and then evil it up, only to wobble back uncertainly when she’s with the Doctor, is (ahem) a masterclass.  She underplays and steals every scene, which is all the more impressive considering who this Doctor is.  (Conversely he’s doing more of that tiresome grandstanding that you’ll either love or hate: “You know the stories.  There’s only ever been one way to stop that many Cybermen.  ME.”  Oh, sign an autograph to yourself and be done with it.  I’m sick of this particular record.)

Battle lines are drawn soon after: having turned the Cybermen against the Master(s) and ensured their begrudging co-operation, and then escaped to floor 507 of the spaceship, they know the Cybermen are coming and must stop them.  They can’t get to the bridge (and the TARDIS) because by the time they do, the Cybermen will have had “thousands of years to figure out how to stop them”.  That’s sort of bollocks really – if you all get in lifts right now, which are designed to get you up there really quick, the Cybermen will still need to go even faster than them to catch you up, and it’ll be harder for them to catch up the closer they get.  If anything, it’s impossible for them to get you, not for you to escape!  But you probably knew the whole “slow/quick time” thing would be a strictly “good idea on paper” affair, so save yourself the bother of thinking about it.  The rest of the episode is, like a lot of Moffat finales, mostly talking.  And those are the best bits.

Bill is a Cyberman now.  She still sees herself as she was – the Doctor pegs this on her ability to keep her mind during the Monk occupation, but let’s face it, it’s probably just habit after Cyber-Danny and Dalek-Oswin.  Pearl Mackie is fantastic though, keeping just enough mechanical body language to suggest something isn’t right, and otherwise only just keeping it together.  Yes, it’s a bit of an eyeroll that as soon as we’ve brought the Mondasian Cybermen back we’ve got a “nice” one, but it’s an excuse for some very compelling scenes with her and the Doctor.  And whoever the guy is in the baggy robot suit; it sounds like a snark, but there’s something quite affecting about a Cyberman impassively holding a rescue ship in place so the Doctor can get on.

The Doctor is doing his best under impossible circumstances, as is Peter Capaldi in some ways.  There’s no real “win” here as he can’t get back to the TARDIS (hush, we’ve decided he can’t, shut up, shut up I said), so there’s many an impassioned moment as he rallies the (totally interchangeable) people of Floor 507, not to mention the Masters.  And yeah, pause the rant: much like the people on floor 1056, you won’t give a rat’s arse about anyone here.  Which is a bit of an issue, if you can be bothered to focus on it.

For all his self-aggrandisement, the Doctor relies on Nardole to repel the Cybermen, mostly using some very vaguely explained explosions (something about fooling their monkey brains – or is it the thing Nardole said about fuel lines?), before relying on him to take care of the survivors on a different floor.  And that’s a series wrap for Nardole.  Plenty of people find him scintillating; I think he’s harmless, but I’ve never seen a third dimension there.  He occasionally grows new traits when they’re useful, like his apparent license to arse-kick, and the bit where he laments that if there’s more than three people in a room he’d start a black market.  And that’s based on...?  What about the bit where one of the locals haphazardly comes onto him, setting up a suggested romance later: “I’ll try anything once” will have to do for explanation, I guess.  Matt Lucas has done sterling work this year, but really, K9 had a more solid personality.

All the while, the Doctor’s got a regeneration on the go, and he’s keeping it down like a bad burp.  Not enough is made of this; annoyingly, when Bill sees him do the glow-hands, she doesn’t remember seeing it in The Lie Of The Land, which might actually have put that bloody stupid moment to some use.  By the end of the episode he’s alone in the TARDIS, regenerating-and-talking-to-himself-a-go-go, whereupon he decides he never wants to change again.  Which is... fair enough, I suppose, but it isn’t really seeded in the episode as a theme.  He just seems fairly sure he’s going to die.  Is he depressed because in the end, Missy didn’t stick around?  Is he just knackered?  Does he know that the last time someone he knows refused to regenerate, they died?  Perhaps he’s bored of trying on new trousers.  On the available evidence, it just seems like a random-ish repeat of David Tennant’s last days, crammed into a slightly awkward scene at the end.  I imagine the Christmas Special will shape it up, but thus far there’s a slightly forced bit of emoting going on where there probably ought to be a full blown regeneration.

"WE ARE OFF TO SEE THE WIZ-ARD.
THE WON-DERFUL WIZ-ARD OF OZ."

Fair’s fair: the Doctor is often enriched by the quality of his enemies, and he’s up against the Cybermen in all their boring glory.  For all his impassioned speeches (Twelve’s trademark at this point), he defeats them with explosions.  Kind of sells his apparent all-encompassing “kindness” short, doesn’t it?  He spends all this time with Bill, a Cyberman, only to happily kaboom the rest of them.  (She’s off doing something in the middle of all that.  Deleted scene?)  It’s not just incredibly dull to make all the nasty things go bang in place of a clever solution – and no, having the Doctor admit he has no plan doesn’t put a plaster on it – it’s also continuing that very odd Series Ten trope of the Doctor answering threats with explosions.  There’s even a bit where he helps blow up a Cyberman by zapping it with the sonic.  Oh, so it’s a straight up laser gun now?

And speaking of Cybermen.  Oy.  I’ve often moaned that they’re basically less interesting, standy-uppy Daleks, and here – despite the goldmine opportunity of bringing back proper creepy Cybermen and going back to their roots – Moffat and co. simply default to that again.  Worse: the Mondas Cybermen, with their almost daringly clumsy costumes and odd sing-song voices, do exactly the same “You will be upgraded”, stomping, zapping, flying shite as their daft New Who counterparts.  Thanks to Bill, you can add crying-human-tears to the list.  (Not to be outdone, the Cybusmen are still clenching their fists and going hilariously OTT on the stomping.  Boing!  Boing!  One of them looks like he’s skipping off to market.)  After Bill, no one is converted on screen; all the Cybermen are is a stomping menace that needs to be exploded.  Despite all the effort of bringing them back and that laborious reference to the “genesis of the Cybermen”, this still isn’t in the same league as Spare Parts.  (Which you can hear for £2.99 here.  Go on, it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.)  I hope the next era of the show figures out what to do with them.  Or failing that, puts them away.

For now, we can at least put something away.  Could this be the end of the Master?  Amid all the waiting (and later, exploding) there are two Masters on the periphery: they don’t do much, which might be a tad disappointing if (for some reason!) you’ve been aware of this team-up for months.  But there’s plenty of interesting stuff going on here, as Missy tussles with her conscience and the Master becomes more affronted at what he might become.  Gomez does amazing work with just half-seen glances, or a frustrated grimace, or a phonier-than-usual smile, and manages to humanise an at times ridiculous character without breaking it.  When it comes time to escape with Simm to their TARDIS, she makes her choice, stabbing him and sending him on his way to become someone else.  She will stay with the Doctor.  Incensed and unable to change, Simm kills her.  She dies a better person; he disappears laughing that his final end is to shoot himself in the back.  And really, this is how it should be.

You probably can’t fully redeem the Master, all heroics and quips, without it seeming too easy after all these years, not to mention naff.  Having Simm on hand accentuates that.  But it is still, as Missy says, where this has been going forever.  (Roger Delgado’s Master would have gone out this way if real life tragedy hadn’t intervened.)  The Master gets his/her perfect ending without over-egging it, and the door is left open for more Simm, or even more Masters filling the gap.  Gomez gets the material she always deserved and a stagnant character grows; Simm gets to go in a direction other than random, and revels in the Master’s worst excesses, also getting a brilliant exit that works far better than The End Of Time.  In a somewhat laboured story, this is the bit they get most perfectly right.  And the Doctor goes on his way knowing nothing about it.  It’s perfect and dark.

Savour it, because there’s bollocks incoming.  Emerging from the chaos, Cyber-Bill finds the dead-ish Doctor and weeps.  And – here it comes, stomping its bollocksy stomp! – Heather the puddle girl returns, summoned by Bill’s tears.  (Yes, the tears thing was set up previously, but I doubt it’s the first time Bill’s cried since then, and also, urgh.)  Heather was a shadow of herself in The Pilot, a screaming mechanical husk that dimly remembered a fascination with Bill, all of which leant their brief romance a bit of tragedy; she’s (somehow) a full person again now, complete with the power to make Bill human again (of course) and, I suspect, do whatever a script might throw at her.  Bill and Heather promptly zoom around the cosmos, which ought to sound familiar since it’s how Clara left the show.  And this is only moments after she gives the Doctor a restorative (magic) tear that will shortly wake him up.  Now, I like Bill, Pearl Mackie’s great, and I’m not enough of a bastard to long for an unhappy ending here, but yeesh.  The degree of magic wand make-it-all-nice-again contained in these final minutes borders on parody.  One last jab in the fanbase’s ribs?  I guess it depends on whether you’ve built up a tolerance by now.  Here’s a test: isn’t there something just a wee bit hilarious about Bill and Heather having life-changing conversations over the Doctor’s splayed out corpse?

The original, you might say.

And… we’re done.  Almost.  Because we’ve got to revisit that totally-gonna-happen regeneration from last week, haven’t we?  Cut to the South Pole, where he switches his regen off again (oh) and a spoiler the BBC didn’t foghorn rears its head at last: David Bradley is the First Doctor, for real this time.  (I still heard about this one in advance, despite the Beeb’s restraint.  Ah well, it’s still a “WHAT?” moment.)  Bradley still doesn’t strike me as Hartnellesque in any particular way, but we’ll see how it goes.  It’s not as if he’s the first Hartnell stand-in, and they’ll never be him.

Another Moffat finale down – his last one ever.  Huh.  It’s certainly not his worst, eschewing tedious arc-answering questions that tend to result in disappointment with, I’ll be damned, a satisfying one for a change.  I guess it helps if your giant questions aren’t about the one character who never changes – and he, naggingly enough, doesn’t quite sell his big development, though Capaldi is could-do-this-in-his-sleep brilliant throughout.  The story doesn’t do much else that you haven’t seen before: the Doctor’s vigil on Floor 507 is a lot like him looking after the town of Christmas; Bill’s fate is quite a bit like Clara’s, with added fairydust; the Cybermen are as exciting as placeholders, as usual; and there are still the requisite “Wait, what?” holes, like whether the ship is going to escape the black hole after all (since it was a distress call that started all this), whether the Cybermen are going to get Nardole and co., whether the Doctor will go back to save them, and why Super Heather can’t just rescue everybody and fix the Doctor.  You can hope these bits will be tied up at Christmas, just as you can hope the Monks are coming back to justify their naff ending.  (No, seriously, was that it?)  Personally, after the miracle of Missy, ditching all her goofy comedy bullshit and rounding off the Master’s often disastrous story with something like elegance, I suspect one impossible thing is all we’re getting.  This late in the game, that’s a win.