Directed by: Rachel Talalay
Written by: Steven Moffat
Starring:
Peter Capaldi (The Doctor), David Bradley (The Doctor),Pearl Mackie (Bill Potts),Mark Gatiss (The Captain)
Format: DVD, Blu-Ray
Duration (Feature): 58mins
Duration (Extras): 100mins
BBFC Classification: 12
Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin
Originally Released: January 2018

It’s an irony pointed out in last month’s Doctor Who Magazine that with 7.92m viewers more people tuned in to see David Bradley’s regeneration than William Hartnell’s back in 1966. Undoubtedly that’s partly down to the First Doctor’s original swansong being an event preceded by little fanfare. Good old Dr.Who simply has another of his adventures and then, once new foes the Cybermen have been dispatched with never to return, he has a bit of a funny turn and changes face. In fact, it feels less like the climax to The Tenth Planet than one of those cases where the beginning of the next serial is brought over to the end of the previous one in order to generate a cliffhanger. There’s certainly no sense of The Tenth Planet being about the Doctor’s decline and need to change.

Of course, it’s all different these days and modern regeneration stories and long goodbyes to beloved actors and a chance to take stock and sum up what their Doctor stood for and where the show may go from here. This has probably never been more true than with Twice Upon a Time, a story which takes place entirely during the regeneration, with the Doctor having been mortally wounded two episodes previously and, from the very opening shot, locked in a dilemma about whether he wants to go on at all or to finally, finally, go gently into the night. While simultaneously retroactively giving the First Doctor the chance to consider the enormity of that first regeneration – surely the most traumatic as everything you’d ever known is stripped from you, and even your forehead will no longer be the one your mother kissed goodnight, your fingers not the ones you learned to tie your laces with, your eyes no longer the ones that looked into your father’s eyes.

Ultimately a tale about self-sacrifice and duty, with both Doctors looking at the impact they’ve had, or will have, on the universe and deciding they have a moral obligation to march ever on, it’s appropriate that it intersects with World War I and Mark Gatiss’ Captain stoically prepared to die for his country as so many others had before him. The Twelfth Doctor has certainly had his issues with soldiers during his time in the TARDIS, so compassionate view of the Captain’s situation is an important component of the capstone on his era, while the “I’ve lost the idea of dying,” speech may be one of the lyrical things Doctor Who has had to say about the true nature of heroism.  It might also be the crucial moment where the Doctor loses the idea of dying himself.

Both Doctors do fantastic work here, with Bradley perhaps having the harder job – not because of the risk of comparison to William Hartnell (does anyone ever expect a note-perfect impersonation from this kind of thing?) but because of the balancing act being truthful to his own character’s drama while not stepping on what has to be, above all Peter Capaldi’s moment. As always, Capaldi dances wonderfully between gravitas, whimsy and the explosions of raw, tortured emotion that always bubbled under his Doctor’s stony exterior. It’s largely through his skill that the somewhat unlikely, and certainly disturbing, concept of the Doctor wanting to die somehow feels a natural development on the Twelfth Doctor’s journey. Even more impressively, he manages to make this conflict work for a Christmas Day teatime slot.

It all adds up to one last chance to appreciate just how great a talent Peter Capaldi is, and how lucky we were to have him on Doctor Who for as long as we did. If his impassioned final speech may be seen as a mission statement for whom the Thirteenth Doctor will be, for whom the Doctor will always be, no matter his or her external appearance, then his successor’s first line could just as equally be seen as a summing up of the man she used to be. “Brilliant.”

Extras

If it’s disappointing that Twice Upon a Time feels doomed to fall between the cracks – not included on the Series 10 set and near certain to not be included as part of Jodie Whittaker’s premiere boxset either, then at least it’s accompanied by a relatively decent set of extras for a one episode release. Between them the two documentaries and panel interview presented here, the extras clock in at almost two hours – about twice the length of the episode itself.

Doctor Who Extra: Twice Upon a Time covers the making of the Christmas itself, with contributions from Steven Moffat, Rachel Talalay, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas and Mark Gatiss. A highlight is the tantalizing glances of the partial remounting of The Tenth Planet that was ultimately cut from the episode itself (presumably because in aiming to be true to the 1960s original, it inadvertently creates the potential appearance of mocking the wobbly sets and wobblier acting). It’s a fascinating insight into the thinking behind the episode and full of anecdotes both fun and touching, from Mark Gatiss fulfilling a lifelong dream of having a Dalek mutant suck on his face to David Bradley and Peter Capaldi both almost corpsing with emotion the first time they found themselves amid the 1914 Christmas football match.

The End of an Era covers, in fact, the end of two eras – the first half placing Twice Upon a Time in the context of Peter Capaldi’s time on the show and the journey the Twelfth Doctor has gone on from remote, amoral alien to twinklingly inspiring university lecturer, the second looking back at Steven Moffat’s epic marathon of being responsible for making more Doctor Who than perhaps anyone else ever. It’s particularly nice to get Moffat’s personal highlight and lowlights on his run (Day of the Doctor being “the most miserable experience to work on") in his own words.

Rounding it all out is the full Doctor Who panel from San Diego Comic Con 2017. Watched from a point of time after the Christmas Special has been broadcast can make it a sometimes vague, fluffy experience as nobody can actually say much about the episode except in the most general terms. However, with Peter Capaldi, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Michelle Gomez and Pearl Mackie in attendance there can rarely have been such a concentration of pure wittiness in one room before and they banter off each other and moderator Chris Chadwick delightfully. And it’s a proper lump in the throat moment to see thousands of people give Capaldi a standing ovation in thanks for his three seasons and for him, in turn, and in the manner of his typical kindness and lack of self-regard, turns into an opportunity to make a speech praising those he’s worked with and giving them full credit for what they’ve accomplished together.

It’s an essential moment on a disc strangely missing the voice of the big man himself. The absence of a commentary really bites on this most important of stories, and he’s only a very sporadic presence in the other extras on the disc, mostly represented by old encounters with the team from earlier in his run.  Perhaps on the cusp of his departure things were too raw and intense to dwell upon on camera, but it feels like there’s an important and revealing interview waiting out there in our future to be had. It’s not, unfortunately, on the Twice Upon a Time DVD.

Packaging and Presentation

For all fans’ efforts, from making their own covers to petitioning specials to be included in boxsets, the shelves on which our physical record of the show sits have always looked pretty chaotic, a mishmash of logos, shapes and formats. Twice Upon a Time, vanishingly unlikely to find a home on The Complete Series 11, doesn’t help matters and seems doomed to sit awkwardly between the two seasons, a thin streak of white.  The cover too is pretty uninspiring, simply being the main publicity image for the episode. Despite the reasonably full listing of extras, it certainly looks pretty vanilla and rushed out when in your hand.

Written by: Steven Moffat, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Sarah Dollard, Mike Bartlett, Jamie Mathieson, Toby Whithouse, Mark Gatiss, Rona Munro, Peter Harness
Directed by: Rachel Talalay, Lawrence Gough, Bill Anderson, Charles Palmer, Daniel Nettheim, Wayne Yip, Ed Bazzalgette
Starring:
Peter Capaldi (The Doctor), Pearl Mackie (Bill Potts), Matt Lucas (Nardole), Michelle Gomez (Missy), John Simm (The Master), Stephanie Hyam (Heather), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Cybermen), Tim Bentinck (Voice of the Monks), Jennifer Hennessey (Moira), Ronke Adekoluejo (Penny), Justin Chatwin (Grant/The Ghost), David Suchet (The Landlord), Nicholas Burns (Lord Sutcliffe)
The Fan Show presented by: Christel Dee
Format: DVD, Blu-Ray
Duration: 10hrs 15mins
BBFC Classifaction: 12
Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin
Originally Released: November 2017

It’s a tribute to the flexibility of Doctor Who that though these episodes represent the end of an era both before and behind the camera, they feel as fresh, if not fresher than the show has in years. As beloved as she was to many, after three seasons of Clara it was time for a new dynamic and, importantly, a companion specifically tailored to emphasize and complement the strengths of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. In Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie), always questioning, always sincere, always learning, the Twelfth Doctor received the perfect student to his shock-haired professor.  The presence of Nardole (Matt Lucas) in the mix adds to the sense of this being something new. We’ve had TARDIS Trios before, but the previous pattern has largely been the Doctor’s own companion (Rose, Amy) gaining a companion of their own (Mickey, Rory). Nardole’s mix of a loyal manservant and nagging prison guard – hectoring the Doctor to keep to his vow – is something we haven’t seen before. The dynamic between the three is charming and funny and, nicely, the writing team avoids the obvious route of making Nardole antagonistic to new girl Bill. Instead, as much as he disapproves of the Doctor putting them all in danger to show off to Bill, he regards her as entirely blameless and is always kind and protective towards her.

Lucas and Mackie prove themselves more than equal to the challenge of the scripts. Although she was an established theatre actor, the mix of pluck, innocence and pure emotion Mackie brings to Bill is all the more remarkable considering that by the end of her first day working on Series 10 she had more than doubled her entire time on a set up until that point. Lucas, for his part, proves a clever actor, adept at judging a line of a scene and the extras make clear that a lot more goes into his approach than to simply steal every scene with ad-libs.

But without a doubt, this season belongs to Peter Capaldi. For an actor leaving the role because he fears he was running out of new ways of doing it, it's the mercurial, ever-evolving nature of his Doctor which astonishes most. Back in 2014, echoing the approach to the Sixth Doctor by making the Twelfth initially prickly and difficult so he could mellow over time was a high-risk policy. But the 2017 series entirely validates the idea, with the concept of Capaldi's Doctor as someone who only likes to think of himself as cold and aloof, but is actually an exposed nerve of love and anger giving us not only some interesting story possibilities but opportunities for some of the most compelling performances of any actor to play the Doctor.

After Series 9's barnstorming "Call this a war?!" speech, and the bravura one-man show of Heaven Sent, you wouldn't have been blamed for thinking the Doctor Who slot in Capaldi's showreel for his inevitable Lifetime Achievement Awards had been taken, yet the raw emotion of his pleading "Because it's kind" speech in The Doctor Falls gives them a run for their money. While elsewhere, he can speak entire novels without a word when asked if he can even remember how many people he's killed in Thin Ice. But most impressive is the continuity of character - there's never a sense of an actor changing gears as the Twelfth Doctor flits between passionate academic ("TARDIS... It means LIFE!") to ironic asides to towering rages.

This relationship between these three leads fits perfectly with the setup for the new series. The decision to make the Doctor a professor at Bristol University is genius. It gives the excuse for a number of the type of nerve shiveringly perfect monologues Peter Capaldi does so well, disguised as college lectures and echoes Rose’s introduction of “the War” as a mysterious event that’s scarred the Doctor since we last saw him? Why has he lived in exile on Earth for half a century? Is it self-imposed? What’s in the Vault?  This last question also provides a shakeup of modern Doctor Who’s formula for series arcs. Usually, some keyword or hint is scattered through the scripts, the significance to be revealed in the finale. Or, alternatively, the Doctor is faced with some puzzle and then sets out to… put off solving it until his Plot Alarm Clock hits “Series Finale.”  Here the mystery isn’t spun out for too long and instead replaced midway by a new one: is Missy (Michelle Gomez) really reformed? And the answer to that itself turns out to satisfyingly untidy and an opportunity to show not just how gloriously mad Gomez can be, but how great a dramatic actor she can be.

Meanwhile, though the arc may not reach the extent of serialization of something like The Walking Dead or Jessica Jones, there’s no doubt that the standard Doctor Who notion of ‘one parters’ or ‘two parters’ breaks down this season. This sense of a narrative flowing and building from one episode to the next makes Series 10 a genuinely fresh feeling and exciting ride. The building of the Doctor’s wanderlust, the recklessness that borders of death wish that comes with it, and the resulting consequences define the whole strand of episodes from Oxygen to The Lie of the Land which then segue effortlessly into the revelation of Missy and the Doctor’s deep need to believe she can change.The individual episodes soar to meet the quality of the arc, like the wit and fun of The Pilot, and the insanity and claustrophobia of Oxygen, and the meditations of how small random mistakes can so easily build to a nightmare in The Pyramid at the End of the World, while the final two-parter possibly finally gives the body horror of the Cyberman concept the treatment it deserves, Series 10 hits several highs. It’s a testament to this high bar that even the worst story of the series, Knock Knock, is merely a bit ordinary compared to the others rather than actively poor.

Extras

While sadly the days of commentaries on every episode appear to be long gone now, the three we get here are both witty and informative. Writers Steven Moffat, Mike Bartlett, and Jamie Mathieson provide insight into how their scripts reached their final form, with Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas on hand with their own tales from the sets of The Pilot and Oxygen, and balance between being engaging and funny company with showing a genuine interest in the writing process and the roads untaken in the versions of the scripts they might have performed in. Director Bill Anderson appears on the commentary for Knock, Knock and the unique challenges that shoot provided. Good as these commentaries are, the reduced number means there’s less scope for hearing from a greater variety of departments.

That slack is taken up, somewhat, by Doctor Who: The Fan Show – The Aftershow (as host Christel Dee herself admits in the first episode, a mouthful of a title) which manages to give a voice for everybody from costume designers to prosthetics artists, as well as guest stars as varied as David Suchet or man-behind-the-Monks Jamie Hill. While episodes such as Matt Lucas and Mark Gatiss’ hilarious, and slightly naughty, ramble around the houses of every question, and Steven Moffat’s in-depth interview about the final two-parter, are genuine highlights of the entire box set.

Christel makes for a charming and personable host, so adept at making you feel like you’re simply sitting with her having a lively chat about Doctor Who in her front room that fans meeting her at conventions probably take a moment to remember they’ve never actually met her. Yet with The Fan Show also freely available online (and indeed, in a longer form than presented here) giving over an entire disc to it does feel a little pointless – except, perhaps, as future proofing for generations to come in case YouTube ever goes the way of AOL Online.

Elsewhere, Becoming the Companion delves into the process of casting an excited, and slightly daunted, Pearl Mackie and follows through her early days of being announced and starting work on set. It’s bookended at the other end of the series by twin documentaries The Finale Falls and The Finale Countdown, which present a similarly excited, and also slightly fraught, Steven Moffat as he scrambles to the finish line to get The Doctor Falls finished with only days left before broadcast. But the Inside Look which accompanies each episode is eminently dispensable – not only the fluffiest of fluff but obviously created as teases to be shown to people who haven’t yet seen the related episode. And how many of those will have bought the box set, let alone watch the extras about an episode before the episode itself?

Packaging and Presentation

The most inexplicable thing about this set is the absence of any way to tell which episodes or special features are on each disc. There’s no insert sheet or booklet with a listing and, even as a cost-saving measure, it makes no sense for the usual listing printed on the disc art to have been dispensed with. Fortunately, thanks to Matthew Purchase, a fanmade insert is available and downloadable here:

The DVD box itself is a slimline sort and though some complain they find the format flimsy, it’s sturdy enough for me and sits more tidily on the shelf. The cover art is striking and takes a greater risk than simply placing a previously released promo photo on the cover. Even better, the Blu-Ray Steelbook has typically stunning art by the dependably brilliant Alice X. Zhang.

Written by Steven Moffat
Directed by Rachel Talalay

Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas
with Michelle Gomez, John Simm, Briana Shann,
Rosie Boore, Samantha Spiro, Simon Coombs,
Nicholas Briggs, Stephanie Hyam, and David Bradley

Produced by Peter Bennett
Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin

A BBC Studios Cymru Wales Production for BBC ONE
First broadcast 6.30pm, Saturday 1 July 2017

 

Last week Matt Hills described World Enough and Time as ‘the bleakest and darkest that Doctor Who has been for quite some time’. The Doctor Falls, befitting the second part of World Enough and Time’s story, maintains if not deepens this atmosphere. Nothing that is done in World Enough and Time is reversed. At times many of the lead characters seem to be competing to find which of them has the most profound death wish. The plan the Doctor comes up with can only obtain a minor respite for the embattled humans on floor 507. Indeed, when the Doctor argues that the emergence of Cybermen is inevitable in any human society, and where he also points out that in this closed and time-dilated environment their advantage is overwhelming, what point can there be to fighting on? It’s this question which The Doctor Falls seeks to explore, and in doing so say more than we have heard for some time, if ever, about both Steven Moffat’s and Peter Capaldi’s understanding of who the Doctor is. The result is oddly uplifting. My first reaction, as messaged to one of the editors of this page, was ‘Shining, brilliant, beautiful’; but I added that I think I needed more words to do the story justice. So:

Floor 507 displays a placeless but vaguely mid-Atlantic rusticity, neatly juxtaposed with the gas-choked dystopia over five hundred floors below. It’s an agricultural community where children are central and guarded against the predations of the topknots by a thin line of defenders. It recalls Russell T Davies's idea from his 2003/4 pitch document, that outer space stories should feature human pioneers so the audience have points of identification, perhaps unconsciously also recalling the western. In contrast to the masculine universalism of the Cybermen – both male in that there are no Cyberwomen, but genderless in that the Master insists Bill is now an it – the community has a matriarchal bent, with Hazran as its leader. The chief cook and chief executive are the same person, unproblematic and brought to the screen with authoritative warmth and human fear by Samantha Spiro. The character reminded me a little of Lucy Cohu's Deborah Goren in Ripper Street. There are at least nods to the New England orphanage of The Cider House Rules, and to the pioneer communities of Little House on the Prairie, but theirs are not the stories being told.

Introducing a child viewpoint character is an old familiar Moffatism, here used self-consciously. Briana Shann’s Alit recalls Caitlin Blackwood’s Amelia Pond; apparently parentless, independent, willing to confront her fears, and bearing enough of a resemblance to Pearl Mackie’s Bill (exaggerated by the hairstyling) to make one wonder if there is a direct connection between the characters. Perhaps this is Moffat once more embodying the child audience and acknowledging its link with the companion. Alit is the first person Bill sees when she arrives on floor 507, and the first person to make an empathic connection with her when she wakes up from the ‘sleep’ induced by the Doctor. Alit perhaps embodies the audience’s hopes that Bill can be restored to humanity, as well as the wish of her community and the Doctor for a non-cybernetic future. In reminding long-term viewers of lost friends, and present lookers-in on the current predicament, Alit helps to highlight the optimism underlying what could otherwise be read for much of its length as an overwhelmingly pessimistic episode.

The Doctor Falls follows the non-linear structure of World Enough and Time in its first act, containing flashbacks within flashbacks. However, opening the main narrative with a scene where the Doctor is undergoing torture and ritual humiliation is a good choice. There’s something Christ-like about suffering enabling the Doctor to restate his values, though I’d be cautious about following this parallel too far. The scene and the Doctor’s speeches also help divorce the episode from the detail of the setting: there will, the Doctor says, always be Cybermen, wherever there are human beings. The origin of the Cybermen is a tale Doctor Who has told elsewhere in other media, and it’s a legend which this episode supposes will be told again and again in different ways. Hence the nod to Doctor Who Magazine's The World Shapers with the mention of Marinus, and why it is perfectly acceptable in this context for the Cybermen to blast death rays from their headlamps in a way which they never managed before on television, but did on the back cover of  the first paperback edition of Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet. Cybermen created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis; but with embellishments by Chris Achilleos, Grant Morrison and many others. Moffat, like Russell T Davies, has never been reluctant to draw from non-television Doctor Who where it helps develop a concept. Likewise his attitude to the programme’s lore: the importance is not in the detail of where the Cybermen come from, but that the Cybermen’s conviction that turning people into Cybermen is a dead end for all the natural and moral sciences. As someone once said, they must be fought.

Bill is herself a battlefield. The Master likes to remind everybody (but particularly the Doctor) that she is a Cyberman, the result of a conversion process which stripped away anything deemed useless to Operation Exodus. From his point of view, Bill is dead. The programme shows the Master to be wrong, or at least that it disagrees with his view of the individual as nothing more than an organism. As long as Bill recognizes and believes in herself, she exists, even if the programming of a Cyberman rages like a hurricane in her head. The continuing presence of Pearl Mackie in the credits and her voiceover in the trailer tantalized exactly what role she would play, and doubtless many hoped or expected a speedy and conventional resolution. The Master’s brutal taunting is a reminder that we can obtain neither. The device of allowing the viewer to see, most of the time, Bill as she understands herself, not only avoids practical problems surrounding the uniformity and inflexibility of the Cyberman costumes, but allows Pearl Mackie’s talents to be displayed in a way they haven’t been so far. Mackie's physical awareness makes her fill the space of a Cyberman while remaining visibly Bill to us. We often see Bill as a Cyberman only when she is reminded that a Cyberman is what others see – such as when she walks in on Hazran and Nardole unannounced and Hazran blasts away with her shotgun. It’s a jarring, heartbreaking moment.

Also breaking hearts is Missy. Those hoping for an hour of multi-Master malevolence will be disappointed, but I think this episode does better with the scenario it presents than it would with the one some seem to have hoped for. Michelle Gomez plays Missy in the manner of an addict who keeps slipping from the wagon, deliberating giddily between new and old hits and guessing at some kind of peace beyond the spectre of withdrawal. It’s an irony that the Doctor never knows for certain that Missy was luring her former self into a trap which would have made her feel free to help the Doctor. In the meantime Missy and the Master flirt like bad fairy nobles making sport in the woods. Shakespeare scholars will know better, but their bickering seemed to me a sort of self-obsessed fusion of elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. Gomez and John Simm are very good at this, especially as there’s a genuinely disturbing undercurrent to their bantering. Simm in particular, with his beard, is a poisoned Pan, a violator whose lust for his next self reminds one of the brutality with which the Master treated his wife Lucy.

Despite his very real and effective threat (and history) of violence, John Simm’s Master is a hollow malevolence, harmful, damaging, self-consumed, but overall an evil with no point to it. I’ve been looking at academic Doctor Who books for another project, and remembered that in an interview with the writers of Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text, Douglas Adams complained that the Master’s plans had no meaning. The Doctor theorizes the path of the Master’s career on the ship in a way which assumes the emptiness and self-defeat in the pursuit and exercise of absolute power for its own sake. In return, later, the Master critiques the Doctor’s course of action on his way to floor 1056, arguing that if the Doctor hadn’t given his lecture on time dilation he would have arrived early enough to save Bill. This line of reasoning is possibly flawed in story terms, but anticipates (or echoes, depending on where one stands) the criticisms made by several reviewers of World Enough and Time. It’s an old fan observation that the Master often seems like a character who realizes that he is in a television series and behaves accordingly, but here his criticisms flag up his own powerlessness; he’s not willing to act in a way that helps anybody or contributes to the main narrative, so stands on the sidelines and plays critic until he can escape. It's tempting to think of this aspect of him as a departing showrunner who knows his successor is already in the office.

The Doctor Falls is a good episode for Nardole, a character whom we never really got to know and who has probably suffered from never having been the focus of an episode. A friend explained him to her enquiring mother as the Doctor’s butler, and perhaps that’s why he remained semi-visible, his full properties a secret. Here, though, Hazran makes her discovery of him one of her missions and Matt Lucas’s depiction of Nardole’s awkwardness must resound with everybody who has felt unworthy of another person’s esteem. It’s natural and credible and also very much part of Moffat’s observational writing of male self-effacement and overconfidence as a mask for doubt. How one greets it will depend on one’s patience with Moffat’s themes, but for me, here, it works unobtrusively, the Doctor and Nardole competing over their relative usefulness, or lack of it. Nardole’s departure doesn’t give him a chance to say a long goodbye; he leaves as part of an operation in much the way he might have done if he’d expected to see the Doctor again, but as he never had a conventional introduction this is appropriate.

As a title, The Doctor Falls intrigued me more after World Enough and Time because in one sense the Doctor had already fallen; he’d hubristically reduced his way of living to a formula by which he thought he could test Missy, and where stock phrases had replaced psychological insight. Instead we have a heroic fall which (like much else, as Matt Hills noted last week) calls back to the series trailer. The Doctor says he is a man of peace, but walks in war, and here he accepts the fate of the warrior, picking off more Cybermen than logic would perhaps expect with his absurdly versatile screwdriver until a Cyberman blasts him down through the chest, a wound which is one of at least two ways in which Bill’s fate has anticipated his own. The devastated landscape which the Doctor’s bomb leaves behind is as much a design achievement as anything Michael Pickwoad has hitherto accomplished – a landscape we’ve got to know has become a devastation of a kind previously associated in his time on the series with Skaro or Trenzalore, and this time the Doctor is the immediate cause.

Redemption and the chance of new beginnings come in part because the Doctor was wrong. There was hope and there was a witness, perhaps even a reward. I’m sure that in earlier seasons we’d have had glimpses of Heather now and then, as the series piled arc upon arc. None of Steven Moffat’s companions have been allowed to return to anything approximating their old lives; travelling with the Doctor means incorporation into the mythic substrata of the universe, and so it proves with Bill, reunited with a Heather whose personality has now re-emerged and seems dominant in the watery spaceship. It's good to see Stephanie Hyam once more; there's still a note of wondering in her performance but the dislocation has become the confidence of the explorer. As all the interaction between Bill and Heather is seen from Bill’s narrative point of view once Bill has been remade as a Heather-like creature, perhaps what we see is all a translation convention. Whatever, the choice to become human again is open; it’s intriguing that the door is not closed entirely on Pearl Mackie’s return. However, if this is a farewell, it’s a good one. There's irony in the Doctor’s regeneration being sparked by a tear (a rearranging of the meaning of grief expressed for the third Doctor in The Monster of Peladon and Planet of the Spiders, of course) from a protected friend who has now turned twice into a creature he has previously fought against. It recalls Russell T Davies’s theme of the Doctor as agent of liberation rather than reinforcer of parental authority. However, this year the Doctor has forgotten that lesson and become guardian and tutor to both Bill and Missy, with Nardole as an unteachable voice by the wings. The Doctor's efforts to protect people have not succeeded in the way he sought. As the first Doctor realized at the conclusion of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, beneficial change can come from taking the risk of being brave enough to let go. That was the real lesson of Susan's portrait seen on the Doctor's desk in The Pilot, and he had forgotten.

The problem, of course, is that the Doctor doesn’t want to let go. Bill, as a Cyberman, wanted to die if she couldn’t be herself any more. The Doctor wants to die too. Peter Capaldi’s performance of a fragmented Doctor, repeating the words of his earlier selves while holding on to his current physical form, was dizzying, helped by a camera which located him at once from several angles and levels in the TARDIS interior. Perhaps this Doctor’s changes of persona across series reflect an ongoing uncertainty about who he is which stretches beyond the ‘Am I a good man?’ interrogations of series eight. Back in 2010 Frank Collins wrote (in a review of The End of Time) of the tenth Doctor’s life as a Bildungsroman; the Doctor’s reward for personal development and the achievement of self-knowledge, was however to be returned to adolescence to begin the process again. Perhaps this older Doctor is about to change without having reached the point his two immediate predecessors did, and worse, can’t see any prospect of doing so.

What, then, can be made of the first Doctor’s emergence from what presumed convergence of narrative (over fifty-one years) leads us to believe is an Antarctic blizzard? I’d thought earlier this series that Steven Moffat’s valedictory notes weren’t only for the period he’s been showrunner, but for the entire period he’s been involved, from the time Doctor Who returned in 2005. The Logopolis homage of companions suggests this too in content, as well as calling further back in form. If nothing else, the montage will open up arguments about who counts as a companion again, which will keep a lot of people happy and angry at the same time. The first Doctor said, if only in the script of The Tenth Planet, that he would not go through with the change to his next self, and the meeting of the two Doctors benefits from that level of fan knowledge while I hope still working as a confounding moment – a ‘suspended enigma’, it was once called – for those who don’t know. In the brief time we see him, David Bradley gives a performance which is very much the first Doctor as opposed to his William Hartnell or his Hartnell as the first Doctor from An Adventure in Space and Time, which augurs well.

I’m always conscious that I tend to emphasize what works for me in these reviews, and they are often moments which leap out rather than broader themes or more thorough analysis. This article is based on one viewing of the episode and I’m still not sure why I found it so positive an experience. Throughout I imagined that the director, rather than the Doctor, must have the hidden arms of a Venusian Aikido practitioner; Rachel Talalay conducting with at least three batons like a hexapod, but with many more eyes than Alpha Centauri. The open vistas of floor 507 come to mind; the fatally wounded Doctor’s monologue about stars, too, was uplifting despite its note of disappointment, perhaps because it acknowledged that the Doctor’s belief and perhaps hope that this was the end for him was false. Heather’s return was a reminder that hope, even if apparently lost, can never be written off. Yet throughout there are sacrifices unappreciated and only postponed, with the sense that the inevitable is only being delayed. Perhaps the episode can be read as a musing on mortality, especially given that Cybermen, Time Lords, unconverted humans and indeed puddle-spaceship-creatures are all seeking to delay the inevitable, unless they are the Master, which is in a sense to be nothing at all because he can’t adequately empathize with others’ conditions. If so, it’s also the second part of three. The twelfth Doctor’s finale is begun, but it is not over, and we have to wait almost six months to conclude our verdicts on the whole.

Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas
Guest starring Michelle Gomez and John Simm
Written by Steven Moffat
Directed by Rachel Talalay
Executive-produced by Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin

First broadcast on BBC1, Saturday June 24th, 6:45pm
 

This review is based on a BBC preview and discusses major spoilers from the very beginning

From its specially-shot 'A Time for Heroes' promo trailer onwards, Series Ten has raised the question of Bill's fate. And although Steven Moffat's writing is famed for reversing and undoing the loss of key characters, this episode has the feel of something truly irreversible. It's the bleakest and darkest that Doctor Who has been for quite some time, and hopefully it won't provoke audience complaints. But the Mondasian Cybermen are incredibly spooky and unsettling, thanks both to their authentic, old-school voices and the very visible remnants of their humanity. Moments such as a pre-Cyberman intoning "pain" over and over again seem a world away from stereotypical 'children's TV' (either that, or I need to adjust my sense of the stereotype). Bill's predicament is treated in a full-on stylized fantasy mode, though, as if to render it less shockingly 'realistic'. Of course, there was never going to be blood - Doctor Who has to make sure that it doesn't transgress BBC guidelines - but the impressively striking visual of Bill (and us, and the Doctor, and the camera) realising that there was gaping, empty space where flesh and blood should have been was a truly startling sequence. And this in an episode packed with reveals and surprises, right from the pre-titles.

Seeing the Doctor fighting his regeneration suggests that this must be the beginning of a three-parter that will only properly conclude at Christmas. Yet featuring a flash-forward (if that's what it is) to the Doctor's moment of regeneration doesn't quite seem to fit with recent publicity discussions of the regen's "complication" this time round. There must be more to it, I would have thought. And the opening's impact also felt a touch reduced thanks to the game-playing of Lie of the Land earlier this series: is this just another tease and fakeout, or is it the real deal? Hopefully the latter, but in a provisional world of stories and simulations, doubts can linger.

However, there's enough 'meta' and self-referential commentary on show to stock a supermarket shelf's worth of easter eggs; the Master seems passingly familiar with conventions of Doctor Who episode titling, for instance. He prefers 'Genesis of the Cybermen' to World Enough and Time, though is less familiar with the Big Finish story Spare Parts that this appears to supersede in canon. And Missy enjoys teasing her "disposables" (and the fan audience) with tales of the Doctor's "real name", resulting in the fourth wall at times appearing to have a ragged SFX hole punched right through it. Putting Missy and the Master together risks overloading the density of camp quippery, but sadly they share relatively little screen time during this outing.

For an episode marked by the science of time dilation, there's an odd kind of temporal distortion going on throughout. In effect, 'time' has already passed much quicker in Doctor Who's hype and marketing than it does within the story: we already know that the Cybermen will show up, and that the Master is somehow behind proceedings. Consequently, World Enough and Time frequently feels like an episode striving to catch up with itself, yet remaining focused on almost pure delay (the emphasis on arriving elevators captures this perfectly well, along with the near freeze frames of Mr Razor's TV). This must surely count as one of Who's great set-up episodes. Even the Doctor gets in on the act, settling down to watch with a packet of crisps.  

Despite much grumbling about the recent (final?) series of Sherlock, one thing I thought it did extremely well was to mislead the audience into believing that a particular actor was actually a number of different characters. Prosthetics skill aside, the device is far less successful here. Depending on your facial recognition capabiities and knowledge of past Doctor Who, it may seem fairy obvious what trick is being pulled for the sake of a Masterful cliffhanger, and this aspect struck me as the least well achieved element of the episode. But given how hard-hitting the reveal of Cyber-Bill was, the Master's ornate scheming was always going to be left slightly in the shade, and it could be argued that its "dah-dah, it's me!" daffiness offered a lighter counterpoint to the terrifying narrative of Bill's situation. (As an aside, presumably part of the BBC's strategy behind live-streaming a Pearl Mackie Q&A right after this episode must be to reassure younger audiences that Pearl is fine in real life). And as a lead-in to episode 12, this multi-cliffhanger does its job perfectly.

'New' Doctor Who (though of course, it's not-so-new now) tends to be at its strongest when it intricately melds intimate moments of characterisation and emotion with epic science-fictional conceits. World Enough and Time displays this quality of 'intimate epic' by combining the vast Colony Ship with moments such as the Doctor and Bill discussing his history with Missy. This suffers slightly from the old 'show don't tell' maxim; a lot of the emotional weight behind the Doctor's fateful decision to test Missy's redemption/'goodness' relies on what we are told rather than what we're shown, and on how invested audiences are in the Doctor-Master/Missy backstory. Yes, the Doctor's hope was sharply delineated at the very end of last week's episode, but it still feels as if more emotional scene-setting would have been valuable for the Doctor-Missy storyline. As ever, though, Missy is a joy to behold, and her introductory sequence as she steps out of the TARDIS and shares her newly adopted name is simply brilliant. Michelle Gomez makes the absolute most of Moffat's zinging dialogue, whilst Missy's companions/pets look on, suitably aggravated.  

If the Master-Third Doctor era was marked by the 'UNIT family', then this moment in the show's history also carries a strong familial sense, and not just because Missy's continued presence echoes that of the Delgado Master. Bringing Rachel Talalay back behind the camera for another finale means reassembling a crack team, whilst Bill and Nardole have gelled extremely well across this series, with Capaldi's Doctor undoubtedly benefitting from Doctor-companion relationships designed to suit his characterisation. 

Talalay's direction makes the Mondasian Cybermen genuinely scary; the decision not to directly show Bill's partial conversion is also a sound one, as it ramps up the tension when we realise that a cyber chest-unit must have been installed, whilst the eventual 'full' Cyberman emerging from shadows is a memorably familiar sequence. Although the body horror that could have been pursued is dialled down somewhat, the partial conversions' monotone cries of anguish remain bleakly forceful. Who has rarely been this disturbing or this existentially raw. Thankfully, Talalay also has some fun with the time dilation (assuming this wasn't purely an editor's choice), as various sequences cut stylishly in and out of freeze frame. It is only the treatment of Mr. Razor that feels a little curious; he is featured so directly, even in relative close-up, that it's difficult not to discern the stunt being entertained, even though this kind of disguise has a well-established history in the programme. Presumably it was decided, directorially, that it didn't really matter when the penny dropped for audiences as they'd be waiting for the cliffhanger pay-off in any case.     

Given that the 'iconic poster image' for this episode so strongly echoes that from Day of the Doctor, next week's title seems equally likely to refer back to the "Gallifrey Falls" strand of Steven Moffat's overarching plot. Will we see more of the Doctor's regeneration... perhaps even a number of different possible new faces starting to coalesce as the twelfth Doctor progresses towards the thirteenth? This transition has been more of a tease than ever before, and no doubt the showrunner hasn't run out of tricks yet. 

Bring it, as the Doctor would say.

Written by Rona Munro
Directed by Charles Palmer

Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas

Produced by Nikki Wilson
Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin

A BBC Studios Cymru Wales production for BBC ONE

First broadcast 17 June 2017​

This review contains spoilers

CAUTION - Some Spoilers Apply

The trio of Nardole, Bill and the ever-developing (and 'reborn') 12th Doctor find themselves in the time of the Roman Empire - a period which previous selves such as the '11th' and '1st' had been in. The location is Scotland, which is long before the times of referendums and Brexit controversy. This also happens to be a land where the current incarnation of the Doctor can speak, and sound like a native).

The story follows a standard modern Doctor Who pattern in having a simple enough foe to face, but mainly showing the characters (both regular and one off), who go through a journey of personal discovery.

There are some similarities to Thin Ice, in terms of exploring the impact of invasion and subjugation of a weaker settlement. The Roman Empire left many a positive aspect over the course of time, but the means to the end were brutal and borderline-animalistic. Bill Potts does good work in pointing out the problems with the system to Kar (one of the valiant Picts).

The exploration of language translation is also pleasing, as this was often glossed over for much of the show’s history (and especially so with the 'psychic paper' device). Bill’s ability to recognise the issue without the Doctor telling her is yet another big step forward in proving how the Doctor needs his companions, just as much as they need him.

Returning female scribe Rona Munro knows how to pace her stories and bring something a little different so that they are a cut above the average in terms of being memorable. Ever since creating the final transmitted Sylvester McCoy story, she has forged a fine career as a playwright.

But something is missing in this episode. I deplored the cheesiness of ‘girl/Vikings in Series 9, and felt it was more akin to a CBBC show (in other words for mainly children under the age of 12). This episode does some good work – especially for the Doctor – but it never comes together with the gravitas of the most successful modern Who tales.

Munro’s premise is fine, but perhaps her partnering the writing team of today sees an awkward clash of storytelling styles. Doctor Who – despite being set anywhere in Space and Time – should always be forward-looking, and this entry is somewhat of a nod back to glories of long ago.

But the season arc continues to gather steam, with Missy's witty remarks being the very best sections. Michelle Gomez simply cannot do no wrong, and displays even more facets to this villainous character. Facets which were never for a moment contemplated by previous writers, when he was in ‘his normal’ form. Now we are getting to the finale and the long-awaited appearance of the (perhaps divisive) John Simm Master. I for one simply cannot wait.

Back to this episode. The production values are decent enough, with the alien being that consumes its victims being especially scary, in concept and visual execution. The guest cast never really present more than the minimum necessary for the stakes to feel relevantly high. I also found both Lucas and Mackie a little flat at times. After such good work from Oxygen onward, this seemed to be a relative come down in their ability to either be funny or conveying ‘normal reactions’ to unusual events. But Capaldi never misses a trick in his ability to translate the words on page he is given. I expect great things from this record breaker (in terms of seniority in the main role), in the ensuing conclusion to a great run of episodes.

Doctor Who is really on song once again, and makes the most of its spotlight during the Spring/Summer seasons.

Written by Mark Gatiss
Directed by Wayne Yip

Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie and Matt Lucas
with Michelle Gomez, Anthony Calf, Ferdinand Kingsley,
Richard Ashton, Adele Lynch, Glenn Speers,
Ian Beattie, Bayo Gbadamosi, Ian Hughes,
Lesley Ewen,
and the voice of Ysanne Churchman

Produced by Nikki Wilson
Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin

A BBC Studios Cymru Wales production for BBC ONE
First broadcast 7.15pm, 10 June 2017​This review contains spoilers.

This review contains spoilers.

Earlier in the week, a friend circulated one of the pictures released by the BBC to promote Empress of Mars. It depicted an Ice Warrior serving tea to the Doctor, Bill and the British officers around a cloth-covered table, with hints of reddish cave walls. He declared that we had reached ‘peak Gatiss’. Empress of Mars repeats many of the techniques used in The Crimson Horror, Mark Gatiss’s previous excursion into Victoriana for Doctor Who, but perhaps with more restraint and to more broadly entertaining effect.

There’s a great amount of detail in Empress of Mars which enhances its worldbuilding. Careful attention is paid to the Martian atmosphere. The introduction of Friday the Ice Warrior is a canny reinforcement of the idea that a menacing Ice Warrior bearing down on you is not necessarily hostile, a concentrated homage to The Curse of Peladon. From the Doctor’s poetic description of the Ice Warriors, blending or suggesting details established in Brian Hayles stories with Doctor Who Monster Book lore, the accretions of fandom and the innovations Gatiss introduced in Cold War, we move to learn about Ice Warrior hives and tombs that are not really tombs. The imagery owes something to The Tomb of the Cybermen via Dragonfire, but more widely to every film or television production featuring people or creatures preserved in ice. This is a fortress of solitude for superbeings more than it is a memorial to the dead.

Influences are mixed and matched. The rhetoric surrounding the discovery of Iraxxa draws from late-nineteenth century imperialist fiction; I can spot H. Rider Haggard’s She but Gatiss doubtless knows his way around many more. However, the presentation of her tomb owes more to the European Middle Ages than Haggard’s sub-ancient Egyptian fantasies. Bill’s fourth-wall breaking recognition that the Ice Warriors are modelled on Vikings is in some way honoured, though Iraxxa on her bier looks more like a mediaeval knight, gilded like the armour of the Black Prince. Her awakening helps justify the awkward idea that reptilian Ice Warriors have hives like bees, the gold leaf fragmenting and disappearing like the pupal skins of some social insects. Dialogue throughout presents the Ice Warriors as guardians of military honour, but their military honour proves a concept over which there can be debate without integrity being compromised, in contrast with the non-negotiable values of devotion to Queen and Country and of bravery and cowardice proclaimed by the British soldiers.

As this last point indicates, worldbuilding isn’t just a matter of sketching in Ice Warrior culture. One of this story’s observations is that the imperial culture of the Victorians is alien to their modern British descendants. By locating the soldiers as veterans of the Anglo-Zulu War – the battle of Isandlwana, 22 January 1879, is mentioned as the site of Colonel Godsacre’s desertion – the soldiers are associated both with both imperial conquest and with one of the British Empire’s most substantial defeats in southern Africa, where a European army equipped with technologically-superior weaponry was no match for a force armed with assegais which they held in contempt. There’s more than an echo of this in Captain Catchlove’s dismissal of the Ice Warriors as ‘upright crocodiles’; and the demonstration of the ‘thin red line’ formation in the episode only shows, as it did at Isandlwana, how soldiers could easily be picked off. Just as there are parallels between Iraxxa and Ayesha of She, then Catchlove has something of H. Rider Haggard’s imperialism about him. He’s far more the ideologue of empire than Godsacre is, and that he is also a practitioner of blackmail and unapologetically avaricious is not just a good character sketch for a forty-five minute drama, but a sharply unsubtle commentary on the reality of the supposedly civilizing mission inspiring British rule as presented by Haggard and others in the late nineteenth century.

The most sympathetic of the soldiers is Vincey, the one who has a girl back home, and with deliberate irony this black character he’s given a name which is, in She, the family name of the British descendants of the forgotten white rulers of Kôr in central Africa. Gatiss enjoys the irony of depicting the reality that Victorian Britain was not monolithically white ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with a character name borrowed from a figure intended to represent white superiority. Likewise, his inclusion of Catchpole’s evident attraction at their first encounter towards Bill, whom Haggardian imperialism would regard as inferior to a white person. Bill’s stunned, appalled face at the casual way in which the British officers have named their Ice Warrior ally Friday, and by extension why they think he should to wait on them, helps pay off her earlier string of cultural references. It’s juxtaposed with the way the script is already establishing Friday as a courteous warrior, a mind rather than a shell. Arguably it also points towards Godsacre’s journey from servant of colonialism, whose demeanour is that of a dead man walking (as his grave name suggests) to a more self-aware person serving the colonized, much as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, rescuer-captor of the original Friday, passes through several states of consciousness of his own actions during Robinson Crusoe the novel.  

The regulars have quirks here which might not be found welcoming. Neither Bill’s tendency to spout film anecdotes nor the Doctor’s apparent ignorance of so much pop culture (which surely his tenth self knew about) rang as true as the production hoped or expected. Nevertheless, Peter Capaldi’s fiercely deliberate portrayal of the Doctor’s observation of Martian ritual helps bring home how crucial for all those on Mars negotiation is, and though I found Bill’s characterization early in the episode to be at odds with how she has been portrayed earlier in the series, Pearl Mackie restores her to alert and intelligent Everywoman by the second half of the story.

Empress of Mars feels much more cohesively whole somehow than several other episodes have this series. It also feels more welcoming. Perhaps the assembling of recognizable old-fashioned ‘types’ among the characters helps; but so do the warmth of the red Martian soil, the fire, the gold and the green-hued Ice Warriors themselves. In recent years Doctor Who has often seemed grainy and blue, and so much of The Lie of the Land seemed to take place in a dystopian grey haze which reminded me of the post-nuclear Yorkshire of the BBC’s 1984 film Threads. Faced with a warm colourscheme it’s up to Murray Gold’s music to suggest cold and the thin atmosphere ‘topside’, and his thin, reedy notes manage just that.

She featured a mysterious African queen who beguiled white men to do her will. Iraxxa, here, does not perform that part of Ayesha's role. Instead, it’s another queen behind a veil who is acting as seductress. It’s never explained why the TARDIS returned itself to the Doctor’s study at St Luke’s with only Nardole on board, but we are invited to guess who is its secret remote operator. The final scene of Missy as contrite woman-child facing the Doctor, backlit, as Murray Gold’s score slithers across the speakers, sets up how compromised the Doctor might just be by Missy, and also how the end of this Doctor’s era, now so close, might be brought about by his belief in an old friend's better nature.

On a lighter note, perhaps… Who else of a certain vintage grinned or even punched the air when that high-pitched voice turned out to belong to a certain hermaphrodite hexapod? Who else exclaimed ‘It was Ysanne Churchman’? As the Ice Warriors are welcomed to the universe and give up isolation, those who regretted that this episode wouldn’t be set on Peladon learned that one doesn’t have to go there to use the Ice Warriors to make comments about Britain and its relationship with its neighbours in Europe. By invoking one of Doctor Who's own imperial phases, that of velvet jackets, Venusian aikido and broad political allegory, to warn about British imperial nostalgia (the brief visit to NASA is a concession to contemporary expectations, but feels like a stand-in for a Pertwee-era British Space Control), Empress of Mars recalls strong storytelling values whose appeal rightly stretches beyond the fan audience these references court, and help Doctor Who feel more anchored on Saturday nights than it has sometimes felt this year.