Tag: Cybermen

Timestamp #301: Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children

Michael Falkner3 Comments

Doctor Who: Ascension of the Cybermen
Doctor Who: The Timeless Children
(2 episodes, s12e09-10, 2020)

Timestamp 301 Ascension Timeless Children

The story that broke so many fans.

Ascension of the Cybermen

In the depths of space, Ashad speaks of the Cybermen. The mechanical menace has finally been defeated after winning a billion battles, and after a reign of terror, the empire has fallen. But that which is dead can live again in the hands of a believer.

The adventure plays out in two stories: One follows our heroes on a refugee planet in the far future, and the other follows a mysterious man named Brendan in Ireland.

Brendan’s Tale—

In mid-twentieth century Ireland, a man named Patrick finds a baby in the middle of the road. He takes the baby home to his wife Meg, and together they report the incident to the Garda police. With no leads, they couple decides to take care of him until the parents are found. After a year, they adopt the boy and name him Brendan.

Brendan grows up, attends school, and learns to farm. He applies to join the Gardaí and is welcomed into the police force by the sergeant who met him as a baby. While on duty one day, Brendan chases a thief named Michael near a cliff. Michael pulls a revolver and forces Brendan toward the cliff. Brendan is shot and falls to his death, but by some miracle, he springs back to life.

Brendan attributes it to luck, but everyone else is confused and afraid. Nevertheless, Brendan is awarded with a commendation. Many years later, Brendan retires from the Gardaí and is faced by his father and his sergeant, both of whom have not aged. They take him to the back office where he is strapped into a chair and has his memory wiped while he screams.

The Refugees’ Tale—

The Doctor, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz follow Shelley‘s coordinates to a planet in the far future. The Doctor parks a half mile out and breaks the news of humanity’s near extinction at the hands of the Cybermen. They find the last remaining human settlement comprised of seven surviving humans. The travelers arrive just in time to help establish a defense against the arriving Cyberman fleet.

With the help of Feekat, Ravio, Ethan, Yedlarmi, Fuskle, and Bescot, Team TARDIS gets to work: Graham sets up a neural inhibitor system that can restore Cyberman emotions; Yaz builds a particle projector to attack the automatons with gold dust; and Ryan establishes a forcefield. Unfortunately, a swarm of Cyberdrone heads arrive and destroy the gadgets. They also kill Fuskle and an older woman.

The drones leave and the Doctor orders the survivors to escape in their ship. She tells her companions to join them since the TARDIS is too far away. She promises to find them after she holds off the invading force. As the humans escape, Ashad confronts the Doctor with two additional drones. The drones pursue the companions to the ship, and Ryan is left behind with Feekat and Ethan as the rickety craft takes off.

The Doctor prepares a grenade as Ethan distracts Ashad. Ashad calls Ethan’s bluff and kills Feekat, then tells Ethan to carry his message of the Cybermen’s power. The Doctor uses her grenade and runs with Ethan and Ryan to the nearby Cyberfighters. The group hotwires Ashad’s ship and rockets into space.

The refugees aboard the gravraft limp toward Ko Sharmus and a phenomenon known as the Boundary, which can teleport people to random locations in the universe. On the Cyberfighter, Ethan also sets course for Ko Sharmus. Ethan talks about his upbringing and lessons about destroying cyber tech. Ashad makes contact and threatens to destroy humanity, even if it costs him his imperfect life. He believes that he was chosen to resurrect the Cybermen, and the death of everything is harbored within him.

The gravraft’s systems fail, leaving the ship on emergency power. A series of collisions prompt Yaz to look outside and find a Cyberman graveyard. A ship sits dormant in the debris and Graham convinces the survivors to use their remaining power to board it. They succeed, but as the ship powers up around them, Ashad and his guards arrive in a Cyberfighter.

The Doctor’s craft arrives at Ko Shamus. The planet has a single temporary settlement, and Ko Shamus is the elderly man who maintains it. He is stunned to see living humans and explains that he helps survivors pass through the Boundary. He fled with a handful of others, but as the word spread, more survivors sought sanctuary.

Graham, Yaz, and the refugees explore the Cyberman war carrier. They reactivate it and decide to use the ship as a mobile settlement to rescue what’s left of humanity. Graham and Ravio explore the rest of the ship and discover millions of dormant, battle-ready drones of a new design. The pair runs from Ashad, returning to the control center as the team continues to Ko Shamus despite the threat. Meanwhile, Ashad begins the ascension with his new army.

The Doctor, Ryan, and Ethan investigate the Boundary. It manifests as a rippling sheet of purple energy. As the carrier approaches the planet, Yaz calls the Doctor and explains the situation. The awakened Cybermen rampage through the ship and the Doctor urges the humans to evacuate. Unfortunately, they are trapped.

Then the two stories come together as the Boundary clears.

Through the portal, the Doctor sees the Citadel of Gallifrey. The Master leaps through the Boundary and tells the Doctor that everything is about to change… forever.

The Timeless Children

The Master forces the Doctor to join him in Gallifrey. If she doesn’t, he will kill the humans. As she crosses the Boundary, the Cyberman carrier arrives at the planet. Once on Gallifrey, the Master gloats about burning Gallifery to the ground and then takes the Doctor on a tour of the ruins.

On the carrier, the humans hide in a storage area after Bescot is killed. Graham develops a plan to use Cyberman suits as disguises. The team sets to work removing the biological remains and disconnecting the neural nets. Meanwhile, Ko Sharmus shows Ryan and Ethan his limited weapons supply.

In the Citadel, the Master is notified that the Cybermen have reached the Boundary. He invites Ashad to join him on Gallifrey and to leave some Cybermen behind to destroy Ko Sharmus, Ethan, and Ryan.

Graham and Yaz take a moment to talk about what happens if they don’t survive. He is quite proud of her and impressed by her resolve. With a tear in her eye, she jokes that he’s not so bad either. As their team puts the plan into motion, Ashad is alerted to their presence. Ashad searches for the humans but cannot find them in their disguises, and he gives up when the ship enters the Boundary.

The Doctor questions why the Master would surrender Gallifrey to the Cybermen. He deflects, directing her to the Matrix instead. He is driven by an unbelievable truth that he discovered in Gallifrey’s history, and he traps the Doctor in a paralysis field so he can share that truth with her. He sends her deep into the Matrix with a promise that it will hurt.

The Master presents a history of Gallifrey. In the time before the Time Lords, the Shobogans were the native population of the planet. An explorer named Tecteun found a gateway on another planet, with an orphaned child at its base. Tecteun and the child explored the cosmos before returning to Gallifrey, where she ran experiments trying to determine where the child came from. One day, the child fell off a cliff, but instead of dying, the child regenerated.

This was the first time regeneration happened on Gallifrey.

On Ko Sharmus’s planet, the humans wage war on the Cybermen. Ryan takes out several with a basketball-shaped bomb, but the drones keep marching. Meanwhile, the carrier literally lands on the Citadel. Ashad meets with the Master and introduces the Death Particle, a device created by the Cyberium to wipe out all organic life. Ashad has purged the new Cybermen of organic components in preparation for his takeover of the universe, but the Master offers an alternative to fully robotic life. He accompanies Ashad while his consciousness remains with the Doctor.

The Doctor’s story continues as Tecteun experiments on the child, forcing the child to regenerate time and again. Finally, Tecteun cracks the mystery and injects herself with the solution. Tecteun regenerates. With this new technology, Time Lord civilization exploded with the Timeless Child at its core, limiting each individual to twelve regenerations.

The Doctor asks what happened to the Timeless Child. The Master tells her that she is that child.

Meanwhile, Ko Sharmus, Ethan, and Ryan continue their guerilla campaign. They take out several drones, but Ethan is eventually captured. He is almost executed, but Graham’s team destroys the execution squad. Ryan is surprised to see his friends.

Ashad and the Master arrive in the Cybermen storage bays. The Master uses his Tissue Compress Eliminator to kill Ashad and release the Cyberium. He absorbs the Cyberium and pockets Ashad to keep the Death Particle nearby.

The Doctor awakens on a vast green landscape. She struggles with the revelations but the Master promises his story is true. He continues the story with Tecteun and the child becoming part of a secret group called the Division. Despite the Time Lord philosophy of non-interference, the group intervenes in time when necessary. The vision flashes in parallel with Brendan’s story, then stops altogether because the files were redacted. It is impossible to tell how much was lost, but what remains was encoded with a perception filter that looks like Brendan’s story.

The Master wonders how many lives the Doctor has lived.

As the Doctor revives from her experience, the physical version of the Master reveals that he kept the corpses of every Time Lord he killed. He has combined the power of regeneration with the durability of the Cybermen.

He has created CyberMasters – festooned in Time Lord regalia and armed with the power of regeneration – and he leads them into a conquest of the universe. Meanwhile, the human survivors cross the Boundary and arrive on Gallifrey.

The Doctor’s mind swims in the Matrix’s redacted void when the Fugitive Doctor appears. The Thirteenth Doctor wonders about her life before their First, but the Fugitive Doctor tells her it doesn’t matter. They’ve never been limited by who they were before, and the Thirteenth Doctor has the power to stop the Master now. But first, she must harness the power of the Timeless Child to overload the Matrix. She unleashes the memories of the Doctor into the Matrix and blows out the paralysis field.

She comes to and finds her companions and the human survivors standing over her. The humans explain their plan to destroy the carrier, and the Doctor devises a plan to use the Death Particle to destroy the CyberMasters. The humans place explosive charges throughout the ship while Team TARDIS tracks down the Master. They find Ashad’s miniaturized form and the Death Particle, and the Doctor telepathically offers one last meeting with the Master in the Citadel.

Unfortunately, the bombs are activated early, so everyone has to run. The ship is destroyed as the Doctor ushers everyone into a TARDIS. She asks Ko Sharmus for a bomb – it only has a hand detonator – and explains her plan to unleash the Death Particle on Gallifrey. She sets the TARDIS for the twenty-first century and sends the humans to Earth.

The Doctor returns to the Matrix Chamber on her suicide mission. There she finds the Master and his CyberMasters. The Master goads her but the Doctor doesn’t fall for it. His revelations have strengthened her. She pulls out the bomb and mini-Ashad, but before she can pull the trigger, Ko Sharmus arrives. He sent the Cyberium into the past, and he takes the detonator as his penance for not hiding it well enough. As the Doctor runs for a TARDIS, the CyberMasters shoot Ko Sharmus and he detonates the Death Particle.

The new Cyber-Empire is dead.

The humans arrive on Earth and their TARDIS disguises itself as a house. The Doctor materializes on the refugee planet near her own TARDIS, and the TARDIS she used to get there disguises itself as a tree. Unfortunately for her, three Judoon materialize inside the TARDIS and arrest the Doctor, finally closing the cold case on the fugitive.

The Doctor is taken to a maximum security prison to serve a life sentence, and her companions have no idea if she survived.

It’s the most controversial story in modern Doctor Who history… and I like it just as much now as I did when it first aired.

I understand the complaints. Fans of most major sci-fi franchises don’t like to see things meddled with. From Star Trek to Doctor Who, the complaints remind me of the oft-memed scene from The Incredibles 2: “I don’t know that way. Why would they change math? Math is math. Math. Is. Math!”

But… here’s the reality check. Doctor Who has never been consistent with continuity, and there are several extensive parody lists on Reddit about how changes in the franchise have “ruined the show forever”. Yet, somehow, the franchise continues on even under periodic threat of cancellation (in various definitions of the word).

Of the complaints I have seen regarding the Timeless Child revelation:

  • “This change disrespects William Hartnell.” How? Show your work. Because his stories still exist (even in telesnap form) and are even being preserved in high-definition format. If anything disrespects the legacy of William Hartnell’s work on Doctor Who, it’s how “An Unearthly Child” won’t be available because of Stef Coburn’s efforts. Otherwise, Hartnell’s legacy as the First Doctor remains intact.
  • “This change removes the mystery from the Doctor.” If so, please explain the history of the pre-Hartnell incarnations. Because all I see is massive story potential for the Doctor’s time with the Division and the implications of whether or not the Time Lords deserve to come back at all. We already knew they were arrogant and self-righteous, but now we get some context behind the regeneration limit. I also look at the events of The Time of the Doctor and how the Time Lords view the Doctor with a different lens, especially after thirteen incarnations risked their lives to save Gallifrey from utter destruction. Those Time Lords either gave the Doctor another set of regenerations or unlocked the Timeless Child’s potential that they had previously tried to stifle, allowing the Doctor to be who they truly are. In the end, the mystery is still there, effectively fulfilling the so-called “Cartmel Masterplan.”
  • “The Morbius Doctors aren’t real.” To the contrary, it was Philip Hinchcliffe’s intention that they were previous incarnations. The dialogue is also pretty clear: “Back! Back to your beginning!” followed by the eight faces. What happens on the television screen is part of the official continuity unless retconned later, and showrunner intentions fall into that same category for me. Showrunners are in charge of the show’s legacy while they hold the reins. Fans don’t have that responsibility. Philip Hinchcliffe has even seemed amused that fans ignored the obvious in  Morbius but readily attached themselves to the regeneration limits a mere four stories later.
  • “The Timeless Child isn’t canon.” We’ve already covered that. Unless retconned later, what happens on the screen during the show is official continuity.

Boiling it down, fans just don’t like the change. While that’s their prerogative, it’s also a personal choice. I don’t agree with that choice, but I respect it. We all need to remember that fan opinion is not continuity.

That said, it’s not all puppy dogs and marshmallows for me. I do have issues with the revelation.

First, is it even true? The revelation is provided by the Master, the man who massacred his entire civilization and is known for lying. Even if he is telling the Doctor the truth, is it based on his own interpolation of redacted events? Even with the Doctor having lives before the First Doctor, could the Timeless Child be someone else? Say, Susan, for example?

Imagine that storytelling potential. Taking Susan away from Gallifrey to protect her and remove some leverage from the Time Lords. Especially considering that Chris Chibnall’s screenplay suggests that the Time Lords who join Tecteun at the dawn of their society could be Rassilon and Omega.

10:27:40 INT. GALLIFREYAN CORRIDOR – DAY

TECTEUN walking down a corridor — at the far end, two Gallifreyan figures (with the collars up) in silhouette. We can assume these might be Rassilon and Omega.

I’d buy that. It would be a stronger story, leave some room for future work, and make the Doctor a bit more vulnerable in the future. It also provides a dramatic reason for the Time Lords to return. Note that the script says “assume” and that these characters were not credited on screen, so we can’t verify that it’s true.

As far as what happened to the Time Lords? I don’t like it. It feels disgusting, which makes it work dramatically. The fact that I physically recoiled from seeing Cybermen that can regenerate tells me that the Master is a villain of the highest order. While Missy had a path to redemption during Series 10, I don’t think this incarnation has a path back. He’s a monster.

I had a similar feeling toward Tecteun and her experimentation on the Timeless Child. She literally killed several incarnations of the child to unlock the secrets of regeneration for her own selfish desires. Yuck.

I also don’t like how the Timeless Child revelation was handled from a writing and production standpoint. The entire sequence with the Doctor in the Matrix was handled in a “tell don’t show” manner. I think it would have been better for the Doctor to experience Brendan’s story in A Christmas Carol format, then have the Master fill in the blanks in a much shorter manner. Having Brendan’s story in Ascension of the Cybermen was more confusing and probably made viewers more defensive from the start. A little rebalancing between the two episodes would have worked wonders.

Otherwise, I liked the balance of action and drama in this pair of episodes. The Doctor doesn’t have all the answers and has to figure things out with us. The companions get a huge chunk of the spotlight, and everyone has to use their wits and smarts to save the day. And Yaz getting some dues was a great thing to see.

In terms of franchise lore, there wasn’t much in terms of callbacks aside from what has already been mentioned. The Timeless Children does have the most extensive use of archive footage in Doctor Who at the time of airing. It’s also the first time clips from William Hartnell’s and Patrick Troughton’s eras were shown in full color.

It also features the first on-screen female-to-male regeneration.

Finally, for something to chew on, this adventure fulfills several elements of the Series Nine Hybrid prophecy: A hybrid creature (the Master and the Cyberium) stood over the ruins of Gallifrey and unraveled the Web of Time (the Master hacked into the Matrix and revealed the Timeless Child secret), and broke a billion billion hearts to heal its own (the slaughter of the Time Lords).

Probably not Chibnall’s intent, but a nice parallel nonetheless.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Revolution of the Daleks

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #281: World Enough and Time & The Doctor Falls

Michael Falkner6 Comments

Doctor Who: World Enough and Time
Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls
(2 episodes, s10e11-12, 2017)

Timestamp 281 World Enough and Time Doctor Falls

Powerful, surprising, and heartbreaking: A Doctor Who triple threat.

World Enough and Time

Upon a snowy landscape, the Doctor stumbles from the TARDIS and repeats the word “no” as he begins to regenerate. He falls to his knees as the energy overtakes him…

…and we flash back to a long cylindrical spaceship hovering at the edge of a black hole’s event horizon. The TARDIS materializes in the control room at the closest point to the phenomenon and Missy emerges. She describes herself as “Doctor Who” and introduces her companions. As alarms sound, we find out that this is a test of Missy’s resolve to be good. The Doctor watches from the TARDIS as Missy, Bill, and Nardole work through the puzzle and make contact with a blue-skinned humanoid named Jorj.

Jorj arrives at the control room with a gun and demands to know which of them is human. As three lifts race toward the control room, the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS and Bill admits to being human. Jorj declares that she is why the lifts are coming and shoots Bill, mortally wounding her. Figures with bandaged faces emerge from the lifts and take Bill, claiming they will fix her but will not return. The Doctor decides to trust them and leaves a psychic message for Bill to wait for him when she wakes.

Before the trip, Bill had disagreed with the Doctor about the rehabilitation test. The Doctor wanted Missy to be good, but Bill didn’t know if it was possible. They later had a discussion about the Doctor, the Master, and Time Lords and their flexible approaches to gender. Bill confided that Missy scared her, and the Doctor told Bill that he would do his best to not let her die.

This pressure now weighs on the Doctor. He let his companion die on his watch.

The Doctor tries to scan the lift with his sonic screwdriver, and when Jorj threatens him, he warns Jorj not to make him angry. The Doctor is borderline furious. Nardole finds thousands of life signs in the lower levels of the ship, leading the Doctor to understand that the different levels of the ship are moving at different times due to relativity.

On one of those lower levels, Bill wakes up in a medical facility with a cybernetic heart in her chest. She gets the message from the Doctor and meets a caretaker named Mr. Razor. She also hears a cybernetic voice calling out in pain. She finds the patient as screens show the time differential between Floor 0000 and Floor 1056. She can’t stop the voice from chanting “pain” over and over, and a nurse merely mutes the voice instead of tending to the pain. Bill finds that the others are also chanting about their pain but their voices are also muted.

Mr. Razor finds Bill and takes her to his room for tea. He explains that they are curing the people in the surgical  (conversion theater) suites and that she was saved from death with her new “shiny” cybernetic heart. She’s been on this level for months and passes the time watching the live feed of Level 0000. The Doctor literally takes a week to raise his eyebrow. Bill eventually recovers enough to work as a cleaner as she continues to wait. Meanwhile, the Doctor uses Venusian aikido to knock out Jorj and make his way to Bill.

Bill also cannot leave the hospital. Her heart will supposedly cease to function and the patients will raise the alarm. Mr. Razor explains that the people are being converted to survive Operation Exodus, a necessity since the human lifespan cannot survive the trip back to the top of the ship. Mr. Razor takes Bill outside one day, and sure enough, after a brief walk, her heart begins to fail.

The years pass and Bill continues to wait. She watches as the Doctor, Missy, and Nardole board a lift. They cannot take the TARDIS because the black hole with mess with navigation. Mr. Razor tricks Bill into one of the conversion theaters and condemns her to a full conversion. After all, people usually scream when they find out the real reason for surgery. They fit her for a headpiece that will inhibit emotion.

When the Doctor, Missy, and Nardole arrive on the bottom floor, Missy is left to explore the ship’s computer history. She soon meets Mr. Razor who is enamored with her and seems to know who she is. On separate paths, the travelers learn the truth: The ship’s origin was Mondas, the twin planet of Earth, and the conversions are the genesis of the Cybermen.

More shocking, Mr. Razor reveals that he is Missy’s predecessor, the Saxon Master. With that revelation in mind, Missy reverts to her cruel nature.

Even more shocking, this trip has turned upside down. The Cyberman standing before the Doctor is Bill Potts, and the former companion cries beneath the mask as she tells the Doctor that she waited for him.

The Doctor Falls

On Floor 0507, farmers and families face off against the scarecrows – the prototype Cybermen from Floor 1056 – shooting them at night and restraining them on wooden crosses by the light of day. One of those days, the relative peace is broken when a shuttle crashes through the ground near a girl named Alit. From the wreckage emerges a Cyberman carrying the unconscious form of the Doctor.

We flash back to the Doctor restrained to a wheelchair on the roof of the hospital on 1056. He was subdued by Missy and the Master, dancing and flirting as they discuss the Doctor’s deaths and how many regenerations he has left to spend. Notably, Missy cannot remember what happened that forced her regeneration. The Doctor ponders what happened in the Master’s life since he vanished while blasting Rassilon with his life energy.

Upon returning to Gallifrey, the Time Lords showed their gratitude for the Master’s help in preventing Rassilon from executing the Ultimate Sanction by restoring his body and kicking him off the planet. The Master stole a TARDIS and landed on the Mondasian colony ship where he lived like a king and killed at his leisure. When the colonist overthrew him and he attempted to run, he found that his TARDIS was burned out from being too close to the event horizon.

While they gloat, the Masters are shocked to find that the Cybermen are advancing on them. When the Masters attacked the Doctor, he was able to change the coding for humanity to read two hearts instead of one. With the Cybermen marching to convert the Time Lords, Missy knocks the Master unconscious and rescues the Doctor. She frees the Doctor and he calls for Nardole, who has successfully stolen a shuttle.

As the Masters and the Doctor try to board the shuttle, a Cyberman attacks the Doctor with an electrical shock. Bill kills the Cyberman but the Masters take over the shuttle as the Doctor falls. Bill stops the craft from taking off and ensures that the Doctor boards the shuttle.

That same shuttle has since crashed into 0507, leaving the entire group stranded. Two weeks pass as the Doctor recovers and Nardole prepares the families for war. Bill has been resigned to the barn since she frightens the children, and while she believes that she is still human, everyone else sees her as a Cyberman. Alit comes to her side with a mirror and Bill is shocked to see her true self. When the Doctor arrives, he rewards Alit for being kind to Bill. They have a brief discussion about Cybermen and what she’s become, Bill’s anger and grief boil over as she accidentally destroys the barn’s door.

The Doctor is amazed by Bill’s resiliency against the Cyberman programming. When Bill sheds a tear because everyone is afraid of her, he wipes it away and notes that she shouldn’t be able to cry. They meet with the Master, who mocks Bill and tells the Doctor about a plan that he and Missy have been working on. As they all walk across the farmland, the Doctor limps and stifles regeneration energy in his hand, revealing that his electrocution was fatal. When Bill worries about him and her future, he tells her that “where there’s tears, there’s hope.”

They reach the forest where the Master and Missy theorize that they’re out of temporal sync so they can’t retain their memories of these events. Missy reveals that the forest around them is a holographic wall disguising the lifts. Missy calls for one, not remembering that it is coming from the bottom floor and not empty. The lift reveals an evolved Cyberman, and despite killing it, the trio of Time Lords knows that the Cybermen now know where they are.

They cannot run because time is running faster on the lower levels. The Cyberman invasion would easily catch up to them. They have no choice but to fight as the Cybermen begin punching through the various floors. Nardole uses the fuel piping on Floor 0508 as weaponry and the Doctor finds a service duct that can be used to evacuate the children. Meanwhile, the Masters discuss running for their TARDIS on the bottom floor. After all, Missy once (now) threatened her former self into carrying a spare dematerialization circuit.

As night falls, the first wave of Cybermen appears. Nardole tricks them into believing that a single apple can destroy them all. When the Masters decide to leave, the Doctor delivers an emotional and passionate speech on why he helps people. It’s not easy and doesn’t always work, but it’s the right and kind thing to do. The Master ridicules the Doctor and continues on, but Missy is somewhat moved. She agrees that being the Doctor’s friend was what she always wanted, but she goes with her predecessor anyway. Within minutes, the two Masters arrive at the lift where the younger tricks the elder by fatally stabbing him and leaving just enough time to reach his TARDIS before regenerating. Unfortunately, the Master fires his laser screwdriver at Missy and mortally wounds her.

By all appearances, Missy dies. Her last intention was to return to the Doctor’s side.

The next wave of Cybermen arrives and Nardole’s tricks force them to retreat and develop a new plan. The Doctor downloads the plans for the floor into his sonic screwdriver and sends Nardole to escort the children to the service ducts. The Doctor convinces Nardole to leave despite the latter’s protests. After all, the Doctor is treating this like a suicide mission and Nardole owes him too much. The Doctor convinces Nardole that this will be penance for his crimes from before the Doctor rescued him. Bill stands beside the Doctor and Nardole admits that he’ll never be able to find the words for their sacrifice.

Now alone on Floor 0507, the Doctor and Bill prepare for a last stand by saying their farewells. They move to opposite sides of the floor and engage the Cybermen. The Doctor cites his numerous victories over them – Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus, Voga, Canary Wharf, and the Moon – before falling to several laser blasts. He nearly regenerates, but holds it back as he ignites the piping below the floor and engulfs the forest in fiery destruction. The Cybermen are destroyed.

As Nardole and his charges reach Floor 0502, he holds out hope that Bill and the Doctor will return. Alit convinces him to move on and focus on living with them instead.

Amongst the wasteland that is Floor 0507, Bill finds the wounded Doctor. She’s barely functioning, but her personality is nearly restored, and she mourns over the Time Lord’s body. She is surprised to find Heather emerging from a nearby puddle and learns that she’s real through a passionate kiss. Heather changed Bill into a being like her, and together they take the Doctor’s body back to the TARDIS. Heather sets the controls for a new location and offers Bill the choice to return to her old life or live a new one at her side as she travels the universe.

Bill chooses the latter, shedding a tear over her friend and telling him that “where there’s tears, there’s hope.” The two women depart as the TARDIS flies on and the Doctor heals, dreaming of Bill, Nardole, Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, Captain Jack, Donna Noble, Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, Sarah Jane, Amy Pond, Clara Oswald, and River Song as they each call his name. The last voice is Missy’s, one which awakens the Doctor as he mutters some words of his former lives. He yells that he can’t keep being someone else and suppresses his regeneration as the TARDIS lands.

The Doctor is defiant, telling the TARDIS that he would listen to the lesson it’s trying to teach him, and steps into an arctic landscape. He screams into the snow and stifles his regeneration, pledging not to change as he hears a voice that echoes his concerns. When he demands to know who the other person is, he’s surprised to find the Doctor in the snowstorm. The original, you might say.

He finds the First Doctor.

Before this point, the televised history of the Cybermen was pretty simple: There were the Mondasian Cybermen from this universe and the Cybus Cybermen from Pete’s World. This pair of episodes complicate the evolution by introducing various origins for the Cybermen of this universe.

After Mondas was ejected from Earth’s orbit, the Mondasians were split into two groups based on the desire to fully embrace cyber conversion. The so-called Faction left Mondas to find their destiny in The Wheel in Space,  The Invasion, and The War Games (with a cameo in Carnival of Monsters and brief nods in Dalek and Death in Heaven). The remaining Mondans would evolve into Cybermen in this episode – and in the audio drama Spare Parts and the comics The World Shapers and The Cybermen, if you count those – before proceeding to The Tenth Planet. It’s worth noting that the Cybermen in The Tenth Planet arrived with their rogue planet, so these Cybermen might not be those Cybermen.

Apparently, every other version of the Cybermen evolved independently and on parallel trajectories across time and space. At least, that’s how the story goes as of right now since Doctor Who‘s continuity is perpetually fluid.

As if that wasn’t enough, we get a quasi-confirmation that “Doctor Who” is a legitimate variation of the Doctor’s name. These days, fans will point to all sorts of sources to justify the character’s moniker of “The Doctor,” but there are several sources that also make “Doctor Who” just as legitimate: The computer WOTAN repeatedly called for “Doctor Who” in The War Machines; The Second Doctor used the alias “Doktor von Wer” – literally, “Doctor [of] Who” – in The Highlanders; The Second Doctor signed a note as “Dr W” in The Underwater Menace; Bessie’s license plate was WHO 1 and WHO 7; and Miss Hawthorne referred to him as “the great wizard Qui Quae Quod” – literally “Who Who Who” in Latin – in The Dæmons.

What about the show’s credits, you might ask. The character was credited as “Doctor Who” from An Unearthly Child all the way through Logopolis, spanning 18 seasons of stories. Starting with Castrovalva and the Fifth Doctor’s run, the character was credited as “The Doctor” through the TV movie (which also credited the Seventh Doctor as “The Old Doctor”). The name changed again to “Doctor Who” for the Ninth Doctor‘s run before returning to “The Doctor” in The Christmas Invasion. Rose also featured a website entitled “Doctor Who?”.

All that to say that either name is legitimate, really. Sure, Missy lies… a lot… but her lies always have a kernel of truth within. In recent years, the title has referred more to an ethos and mission statement rather than an actual name.

Considering the stories at hand, the horror film feeling of these episodes is amazing. The first half is edge-of-your-seat tension mixed with copious amounts of body horror, and the second half blunts the body horror for more battlefield tension. The tension follows the lighting, leading to more empathic storytelling in daylight and ratcheting tension during the night. The Doctor’s impassioned speech is truly a last-stand Hail Mary pass, and it serves up more tension before the final battle. The moment that truly sent shivers down my spine was “pain, pain, pain,” cueing the audience to just how monstrous the Mondasians were.

Another shocker was the identity of Mr. Razor, but this is only because I didn’t the “coming soon” teaser at the end of The Eaters of Light when this series was in first-run. If I had known that John Simm was returning, I probably would have seen right through the Mr. Razor disguise. Since I didn’t know at the time, it blew me away back in 2017.

As someone who earned a degree in physics, I love when science fiction shows play around with the subject and can explain it to the home audience. Gravitational time dilation is a real phenomenon related to special relativity that has been observed on Earth. Scientists placed identical atomic clocks at different altitudes (which relates to the pull of gravity) and noted significant differences in time between them. In this case, “significant” is on the order of nanoseconds, but imagine scaling that up beyond the fragile envelope of our atmosphere to a really long spaceship parked longitudinally on the event horizon of a black hole. That difference in gravity is pretty big.

I did have a question about fridging the black woman in this story – a terrible trio of tropes! – but Bill doesn’t really die and she’s not put in peril by the villain simply as a means to motivate the hero, so I dismissed the idea.

The video of Level 0000 looks like a paused classic black-and-white episode of the show. It added to the feeling of tension and was a nice callback to the era that this story and its cliffhanger were meant to evoke.

The two Masters working side-by-side in this story was pure joy. Notably, this is the first televised story to feature multiple Masters. It was also the third finale of the three in Capaldi’s run to feature the Cybermen.

In the end, I’m left in awe of the Twelfth Doctor’s resolve and strength. He survived all of that and still had the fortitude to hold back one of the character’s most primal forces, setting the stage for Peter Capaldi’s swan song in the next adventure.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #270: Heaven Sent & Hell Bent

Michael Falkner10 Comments

Doctor Who: Heaven Sent
Doctor Who: Hell Bent
(2 episodes, s09e11-12, 2015)

Timestamp 270 Heaven Sent Hell Bent

The conflict runs strong with this pair.

Heaven Sent

Gears turn as a figure walks through a chamber. This figure flips a switch with bloody hands and collapses into dust as the Doctor materializes inside a teleporter chamber. He leaves the chamber with the weight of Clara’s death on his mind and analyzes the dusty remains. He vows to find those responsible and he won’t stop until he does.

He moves into a circular corridor and peers out of a window, realizing that he’s trapped in a castle tower. He’s only about a light-year from the trap street alley in London and he muses aloud about how he’ll determine his location by the stars. Further on, he finds a shovel and dirt. His anger continues to boil until he spots a couple of monitors with his image on them. From that, he determines that a hooded figure on the other side of the tower is watching him.

More than that, it is stalking him.

The Doctor runs but is trapped in a dead-end corridor by a locked door. He thinks that he’s met the creature before and uses a bit of telepathy to open the door. Unfortunately, a wall lies beyond and the creature reaches for the Doctor’s head. As the Doctor admits that he’s actually scared of dying, time stops and the castle shifts all around him. He slips past the creature and ends up in a bedroom where an aged portrait of Clara rests on the wall. The Doctor analyzes it with a loupe as the creature shambles into the room.

The Doctor finally recognizes the creature as a nightmare that he had about a dead, old woman he once met. She was covered in veils and flies swarmed around her body. He was haunted for years. Regardless, the Doctor deduces that this tower is a torture chamber tailor-made to his psyche, and he escapes the nightmare by diving out of a window. As he plunges into the mists, he admits again that he is scared of dying…

…and emerges into the TARDIS.

Okay, not exactly. It’s really a manifestation of his subconscious that he created to give himself more time to think. He’s also manifested an avatar of Clara that stands before the chalkboard with her back to him. The Doctor deduces that the tower is standing in the sea. He previously dropped his loupe to test the local gravity and broke the window to determine how far he would fall. He needed to know if he could survive. After all, “Rule One about being interrogated: you are the only irreplaceable person in the room. If they threaten you with death, show ’em who’s boss. Die faster.”

The Doctor plunges into the waters below. As he regains consciousness, the manifestation of the TARDIS comes back to life and the Clara avatar writes on the chalkboard:

  • “Question 1 – What is this place?”
  • “Question 2 – What did you say that made the creature stop?”
  • “Question 3 – How are you going to WIN?”

The Doctor peers into the water below him and spots a field of skulls on the seabed. He returns to the surface and enters the colossal tower, eventually finding a room with a lit fireplace. It even has a set of his own clothes ready for him. He dresses and leaves the room. Next is a small room with hand-drawn arrows pointing inward to an octagonal shape. He muses with his mental Clara and ponders the creature’s movements and purpose before heading to an outside garden. There he finds a rectangular mound of dirt and a shovel, so he decides to dig.

An hour later, he has a hole but not much else. He turns at the sound of flies and finds a monitor. It shows the creature staring at a smooth surface. In reality, it is right behind the door to the garden. The Doctor wrestles with the creature and the door before wedging the shovel beneath the doorknob. The creature shuffles into the octagon room so the Doctor continues to dig.

Night falls as the Doctor finally hits something. He notes that the stars are wrong before looking at his prize. It is the missing octagonal floor tile and it contains the words “I AM IN 12”. The Doctor’s analysis is interrupted as the creature emerges from the dirt, having dug into the garden from the octagon room.

The Doctor takes refuge in his mental TARDIS again, this time realizing that he must tell truths – perhaps, confessions? – to escape the creature. The problem is that there are truths that the Doctor can never tell.

In the real world, the Doctor confesses that he didn’t leave Gallifrey because he was bored. Instead, it was because he was scared. The creature backs off and the tower shifts again, this time revealing that the castle is standing alone in the midst of an endless sea.

As time marches on, the Doctor begins to measure the creature’s pace. From one end of the castle to the other, he has 82 minutes of solitude to eat, sleep, and work. He tries to find Room 12, which is a task in itself since the castle jumbles its internal geography. The castle tidies up after itself and resets rooms to the condition they were in before the Doctor arrived.

The Doctor muses about the nature of heaven and hell – “Hell is just Heaven for bad people” – and eventually returns to the teleporter room. There he finds the word “BIRD” scrawled on the sand of the fallen figure before the castle sweeps it away. He wonders what he’s missing as he wanders the halls, eventually finding Room 12. He decides that it is both a trap and a lure, also putting together that the stars are all wrong for the time zone. If he didn’t know better, he would say that he’s moved 7000 years into the future.

To stave off the creature, the Doctor talks about the Hybrid. Long before the Time War, the Time Lords knew the cataclysmic war was coming. There were many prophecies and stories concerning it, including one that mentioned a creature called the Hybrid, who was half Dalek and half Time Lord, the ultimate warrior. The Doctor confesses that he knows that the Hybrid is real, that he knows where it is, and what it is. He confesses that he is afraid of it.

The creature backs off as the castle moves again, opening the way through Room 12. At the far end lies a semi-transparent wall with the word “HOME” written on it. It is the final obstacle, one which the Doctor presumes will take him to the TARDIS if he can get through twenty feet of Azbantium. Of course, the mineral is four hundred times tougher than diamond.

The Doctor’s internal Clara asks the three questions again and the Doctor wonders why he can’t just lose. It would be easy to simply confess the secret details of the Hybrid. The Clara avatar responds with one handwritten word: “NO!”

The Doctor replies that he remembers everything, and no matter what he does she’ll still be gone. The Clara avatar responds by talking to him, explaining that he is not the only person to lose someone. It’s the story of everybody, and to get over it and beat it, he has to move on. It’s time to get up and win.

The Doctor faces the creature, apologizing for his lack of further confessions. He offers the truth as he punches the wall: The Hybrid is a very dangerous secret that cannot be let free, so the Doctor will break out of this prison and confront his captors. He offers a story from the Brothers Grimm until the creature grabs his head. The creature vanishes and a severely burned Doctor takes refuge in his safe space again.

Time Lords always take forever to die, even when they are too injured to regenerate and every cell in the body tries to use every last reserve to save them. He muses that it will take about a day and a half to reach the top of the tower. There he reveals everything that he remembered, including that the castle was created specifically for him. He’s been here for a very, very long time.

The teleporter chamber is a hard drive that contains the Doctor’s image from 7000 years before. The dying Doctor is the power source, burning the old Doctor to make a new one. The Doctor’s body fades into oblivion, leaving only a skull behind as a new copy emerges from the chamber and vows vengeance for Clara’s death.

The cycle continues for centuries. Each time, the Doctor gets a little further into the Azbantium chamber as he continues to tell the tale of The Shepherd Boy. Over four billion years later, the Doctor lands the final punch in the wall. A bright light floods around him as the creature falls apart into a pile of gears. The Doctor steps into the light and lands on a desert world. The Azbantium tunnel collapses into an image of the castle and sea on the face of the Doctor’s confession dial.

A boy runs up to the Doctor and the Time Lord tells him to find someone important in the city beyond and deliver a message: He’s back, he knows what they did, and he’s on his way. He came the long way around.

The desert world is Gallifrey, and the Doctor finally reveals the secret of the prophecy. A Dalek would never allow a half-Dalek being to exist, and the Hybrid – the being destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins – is the Doctor himself.

Hell Bent

In the Nevada desert, the Doctor walks into a diner with a guitar and is greeted by a waitress who looks remarkably like Clara Oswald. Oddly, the Doctor doesn’t recognize her. He has no money but offers to play for a drink. He also notes that the waitress is English and wonders how she got to the middle of nowhere Nevada. She tells him that it was magic.

The Doctor strums out a tune named Clara – itself the character’s theme by Murray Gold – and tells her the story of the woman behind the song.

On Gallifrey, the Doctor wanders the desert until he arrives at the barn where he nearly set off the Moment and discovered how to save his home. The same barn where he slept as a child. When he arrives, the Cloister bells sound in the Citadel. Rassilon advises a guard named Gastron to not approach the Cloister Wraiths contained within before speaking with Ohila of the Sisterhood of Karn. She has heard that the Doctor has returned home and she came to see the fireworks.

The Doctor enters the barn and encounters a woman who recognizes him. Despite her warning that Rassilon will kill him, he settles in for a bowl of soup with the locals as a military craft arrives. Gastron, the ship’s pilot, demands that the Doctor accompany him to the Citadel. Instead, the Doctor walks up to the ship and draws a line in the sand, standing in defiance of the Rassilon’s order. The civilians applaud.

The General decides to talk to the Doctor – Words are the Doctor’s weapons, the General muses, but when did they stop being theirs? – and the Doctor rebuffs him. The same happens when the High Council bows before the Doctor. It isn’t until Rassilon himself comes before him that the Doctor acts. After all, the Doctor doesn’t blame the Time Lords for the horrors of the Last Great Time War. He only blames Rassilon.

The Doctor walks up to Rassilon and ignores an offered handshake. Instead, he drops the confession dial at Rassilon’s feet and demands that the president gets off his planet. Rassilon tries to defend his actions, both those of the Time War and the Doctor’s incarceration, but finally orders the Doctor’s execution.

The Doctor stops his story to ask the waitress for a drink. When he picks up again, every shot from the firing squad has gone wide. Each soldier drops his weapon as they express their respect for the war hero who saved Gallifrey. Rassilon raises his gauntlet and asks just how many regenerations they granted him back on Trenzalore. After all, he has all night to work through them. His vengeance is cut short as reinforcements arrive and the General joins his soldiers at the Doctor’s side.

Later, in the Citadel, the General explains to the Doctor that Gallifrey was returned to the universe at the extreme end of the time continuum. It was a safety measure for the Time Lords since the Doctor never confirmed that it was safe for Gallifrey to return to the moment in which it disappeared. Since the end of time is so near, anyone who is banished doesn’t have far to go before reaching the edge of the universe. Nevertheless, the Doctor exiles the entire High Council.

The Doctor visits the Cloister Chambers and chats with Ohila about the confession dial. It was meant to purify a dying Time Lord’s soul so that they could be uploaded to the Matrix without regrets. Instead, Rassilon configured the Doctor’s as a torture chamber. Returning to the High Council chambers, the Doctor discusses the prophecy of the Hybrid with Ohila and the General, exposing the information that Rassilon feared.

The Doctor asks for the use of an extraction chamber so he can visit an old friend. He uses it to remove Clara from the moment of her death. The Doctor and the General explain where they are and coach Clara through the last moment of her life. Her functions are a reflex but her heart no longer beats, a phenomenon that scares her. Despite the need to return her to her death, the Doctor punches the General and takes his sidearm. Clara is shocked but the Doctor asks how many regenerations the General has left.

The Doctor shoots the General and then asks for a human-compatible neural block before he and Clara run. The General, meanwhile, regenerates into a dark-skinned woman. Ohila arrives and presumes that the Doctor has run straight into the most dangerous place he could think of.

They end up in the Cloisters, and Clara is introduced to the Cloister Wraiths. The Wraiths are the firewall to keep foreign entities out of the Matrix by trapping them in the Cloisters, preventing them from ever leaving. The room is full of Cybermen, Daleks, and Weeping Angels, but the Doctor knows of a secret way out. He knows this path through a maintenance hatch because he heard of a boy who was lost there and told a secret by the Wraiths. The last anyone heard of the boy, he stole the moon and the president’s wife.

That boy, of course, was the Doctor.

As the General and Ohila search for the Doctor and Clara, the Doctor explains that Clara’s death was engineered by the Time Lords. The coup he staged on Gallifrey was in the service of finding the technology to resurrect her. He pretended to know about the Hybrid just for that. The General and Ohila arrive and demand that the Doctor and Clara surrender. Clara asks how long the Doctor was trapped in the confession dial, and while it was 4.5 billion years, the General reveals that the truth could have released him sooner.

The General and Ohila were part of the deception.

Clara demands to know why the Doctor would put himself through hell for her, then takes the time to say all the things that need to be said. She calls Ohila and the General monsters and refuses to divulge what she told the Doctor. While she engages them, the Doctor escapes and steals a TARDIS before materializing it around Clara. They run away, but the Doctor is stunned to realize that Clara hasn’t been freed of the quantum shade‘s chronolock or her death state. Ohila’s warning that saving Clara echoes in the console room, but the Doctor is sure that the damage to the universe will be minimal. The Doctor decides to take Clara to the very end of the universe, declaring that he’s answerable to no one.

Four knocks sound at the TARDIS door. The Doctor exits alone to find Me, the last being in existence in a small universe. She’s been staying alive by using a reality bubble on the Cloisters, watching the universe die around her. She explains that Clara’s death was her own doing, not the Doctor’s and not Me’s. She also asks to learn the secret of the Hybrid, which the Wraith told the Doctor as a boy. He speculates that she is the Hybrid, born of humanity and the Mire. She speculates that the Doctor could be half-human, but he laughs at her.

Me presents another theory: The Hybrid is not one person, but rather two true companions who will go to extremes for the sake of each other. A powerful and compassionate Time Lord and a human who serves as a guiding conscience. As Clara watches on the TARDIS monitor, the Doctor explains that he will wipe Clara’s memory of him to prevent the Time Lords from tracking her before dropping her off somewhere to live her life.

Clara throws a wrinkle in the plan by reversing the polarity of the neural blocker and taking charge of her own future. The Doctor wonders if she could do that as he realizes that their adventure has to end. They choose to activate the neural blocker together and let fate decide.

In the end, Clara succeeded. The Doctor’s memories of her are erased, and as he falls asleep he says that she needs to run like hell. She should never be cruel and never be cowardly, and if she ever is, she should always make amends. He asks for one last smile as he tells her that everything is okay – he broke every rule he had and became the Hybrid – before he finally loses consciousness.

The Doctor wakes up in Nevada where a man has been told by Clara to look after him. The story brings him to the diner where he admits that he remembers adventures with Clara and talking with her in the Cloisters, but he can’t remember what she looks like or what the very important message was. The Doctor does remember visiting the diner with Amy and Rory, however, he doesn’t know where his TARDIS is.

Clara suggests that lost memories become stories and songs when they’re forgotten, then walks into the back room as the Doctor continues playing his song. The diner is revealed to be the stolen TARDIS as it dematerializes around the Doctor. As Clara and Me travel the universe as a pair of adventuring immortals, returning to Gallifrey the long way around, the Doctor finds his TARDIS parked in the desert with Rigsy’s memorial painted upon it.

The Doctor admires the artwork and steps into the TARDIS. The ship welcomes him home. As he puts his guitar away, he sees a message from Clara on the blackboard – “Run you clever boy, and be a Doctor” – and receives a new sonic screwdriver from the TARDIS.

He dons his coat and sets a course. The memorial burns away, leaving no trace of Clara except a diner flying through space and time.

This pair, while designed as one cohesive story, is an exercise in the love it/hate it dichotomy. Let me explain.

First, I find Heaven Sent to be an amazing tour de force for Peter Capaldi. He explores this hour-long mystery on his own and carries the whole episode with aplomb. This is the prime example of his craft as an actor and artist. The story itself is also well-crafted, orbiting around the rather short tale that is featured as the Doctor punches through the crystal wall. The Shepherd Boy contains the key elements of inspiration for Steven Moffat’s script, from the drops in the sea and the stars in the sky to the little bird who sharpens his beak on the diamond mountain until the first second of eternity is over. It does so well to remind us of the story threads from this series of episodes and lay the path toward resolution.

But then we come to Hell Bent. The great parts are the return to Gallifrey, the circumstances of its return to our universe, and the sheer hubris of the Time Lords (and their associates) placed square in the spotlight. I love seeing the resolution of The Day of the Doctor and The Time of the Doctor, I love the Doctor’s realization in the face of Gallifreyan ignobility that he can never truly go home again, and I love stories where the Doctor realizes that he can go too far on his own, but I absolutely despise this ending for Clara’s journey.

This is Steven Moffat’s inability to simply let characters go on full display. It was exercised before when Amy and Rory couldn’t just leave the show but instead had to be written into a semi-nonsensical temporal paradox. It was exercised again in Last Christmas where Clara’s story threads were tied off in a beautiful tearjerker of a farewell that ended in a terrible coda. And here we are again, after a series where Clara’s pride and arrogance play out in a classic action-reaction arc, presented with a series ender that completely neuters the finale by reversing the consequences. It leaves the resolution dangling by shunting a fan-favorite companion into a state where they (presumably) can never be seen again outside of quick cameos. It’s Donna Noble all over, like Steven Moffat learned the wrong lesson from Russell T Davies.

It’s a hard calculation because the stories this time around have been fun adventures with powerful messages, but the resolution feels hollow.

Or, in the case of the whole Hybrid thread, incomplete and half-hearted. I get the impression that Steven Moffat had no idea what to do with it outside of a clever spark of inspiration. It ends up here are a muddled mess with no solid resolution.

Some other interesting notes that I made include the newfound ability for the Doctor to telepathically commune with inanimate objects, the ability for Time Lords to change gender (previously noted in The Curse of Fatal Death, The Doctor’s Wife, The Night of the Doctor, and Dark Water) and skin color during regeneration, and the relative ease with which other Time Lords recover from regenerations (like Romana in Destiny of the Daleks), marking the Doctor’s traumatic regenerations as fairly unique in comparison. I was happy to see the return of the classic TARDIS console room and over the moon about Clara’s beautiful theme becoming actual in-universe diegetic music.

Also, Jackson, Nevada doesn’t exist. The closest this episode’s wide spot in the road comes to reality is the Jackson Mountain range in the state’s northwest region. I grew up in the western United States, so I had no choice but to look into that one.

Heaven Sent alone is an easy top score while Hell Bent falls well below average due to Clara’s departure. Together, they balance somewhere above the average. As is tradition around these parts, I round up for optimism’s sake, but it’s almost a stretch this time.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Husbands of River Song

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #262: Dark Water & Death in Heaven

Michael Falkner9 Comments

Doctor Who: Dark Water
Doctor Who: Death in Heaven
(2 episodes, s08e11-12, 2014)

Timestamp 262 Dark Water Death in Heaven

A long-lost friend returns.

Dark Water

Clara is ready to confess her travels with the Doctor to Danny. She’s left Post-It notes around to remind her of everything she wants to say, but she starts with “I love you.” She continues with how he’s the last person she’ll ever say that to, but the line goes silent.

A woman picks up the line and tearfully apologizes.

Danny Pink was hit by a car. He died in the accident.

Clara mourns. She’s numb from the experience. She’s visited by her grandmother, but consolation does nothing. She claims that Danny was ordinary and boring, though she obviously doesn’t believe it. She claims that the universe owes her better. So she calls the Doctor.

The Doctor picks her up and she asks him to take her to an active volcano. While she asks, she gathers all seven of the TARDIS keys and hits the Doctor with a sleep patch before navigating the TARDIS to a volcano. She remembered when the Doctor explained what could destroy a TARDIS key and systematically throws them in the lava while demanding that the Doctor fixes Danny’s death.

The Doctor refuses to create the paradox, and after Clara throws the final key into the lava, the enormity of what she has done hits her. The Doctor asks her to look at her hand, revealing that he reversed the patch in order to see how far she would go. The pair are still in the console room. The Doctor gathers the keys as Clara asks about the state of their friendship. He suggests that she should go to Hell, and when she takes that as the end of their relationship, he clarifies that he meant it literally. He’s going to take them to the afterlife to find Danny and bring him home. Almost every culture in the universe has a concept of the afterlife. The Doctor sees the extremity of her desire to see Danny and, despite his fury at her betrayal, he agrees to do everything he can. The generosity of forgiveness is overwhelming.

He wires Clara into the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits and she pilots the craft to Danny. Meanwhile, Danny wakes up in the Nethersphere. Seb offers him a cup of coffee as Danny realizes that he is dead.

The TARDIS takes Clara and the Doctor to the 3W Institute. The place is dark and filled with tanks of water. Each tank contains a skeleton seated in a chair, placed in tombs after death. They are eventually greeted by Missy who pretends to be a Mobile Intelligence Systems Interface as she kisses the Doctor. The Doctor is displeased. The Doctor is also mildly surprised when Missy takes his hand and presses it to her chest to feel her heart.

The subtext in this meeting is amazing. It’s also foreshadowing that is easy to miss if the viewer isn’t paying attention.

Missy calls for Doctor Chang. Chang continues the tour as Missy smirks and the skeletons look on. Meanwhile, in the Nethersphere, Seb introduces the afterlife to Danny while asking if he has ever killed anyone. This is due to Danny’s time in the army which forces him to relive the “bad day” when he killed a child. This child has apparently requested to meet Danny and appears before him. The kid runs away when Danny tries to reach out.

Chang takes the Doctor and Clara to learn about Dark Water. Only organic matter can be seen through the substance, and each skeleton is encased in a protective shell. (More foreshadowing!) The Doctor poses as a government inspector and interrogates Chang.

Together in separate places, Danny, the Doctor, and Clara learn that 3W’s founder, Dr. Skarosa, found telepathic communications from the dead in white radio noise. The dead are conscious and aware of everything happening to their bodies. Danny feels cold because his body is being stored in a cold place while his soul is in the Nethersphere.

While the Doctor mocks this idea, Chang establishes a connection between Danny and Clara. The Doctor tells her to ask questions to which only Danny would know the answer.

Meanwhile, Missy activates the tanks. The skeletons all stand.

Chang takes the Doctor to investigate the skeletons. Missy reveals that she was pretending to be an android and then kills Chang. The Doctor is shocked as the tanks drain to reveal an army of Cybermen, and he’s more shocked to see the Nethersphere floating in the air near him and Missy.

The Nethersphere is a Matrix data slice, a Gallifreyan hard drive, and it holds the minds of the dead while they are transferred into upgraded bodies. Missy reveals that she is a Time Lord – Time Lady, please – who the Doctor left for dead. The Doctor runs out of the building, which is really St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Clara is unconvinced that she’s talking to Danny, and he tells her that she needs to move on. That she cannot find him where he is now. He forces her to disconnect the call, and Seb offers him a chance to delete himself to avoid feeling the immense sorrow of leaving Clara behind.

In 3W, Clara looks behind her to see a Cyberman in a tank. She tries to run, but the door is locked. Outside, the tanks all open and the Cybermen march. The Doctor tries to scare the onlookers away, but Missy only mocks him. The Doctor demands to know who she is, and she tells him that she’s Missy. Short for Mistress.

She couldn’t keep calling herself the Master, after all.

In the Nethersphere, Danny almost presses the delete button. Then he sees the kid he killed in the screen’s reflection.

Death in Heaven

Clara takes refuge behind a desk until a Cyberman finds her. To save her own life, she poses as the Doctor. Outside the cathedral, the Doctor is astounded to see the people of London posing with the Cyberman as if they were a carnival attraction. When Kate Stewart and Osgood show up, the bystanders are revealed as UNIT operatives. They take Missy into custody, but the Cybermen open up the cathedral dome and the cyborg army lifts off into the sky.

The same repeats around the world, leaving one Cyberman per major metropolitan area. Each of those Cybermen explodes and pollinates the air. Inside the Nethersphere, Danny and the kid look on as the lights start going out and the dead are transplanted into new bodies. The Doctor is unable to get the answers he needs when both he and Missy are shot with tranquilizer darts and taken away. Before the Doctor succumbs, he tells Osgood to focus on the graveyards.

Sure enough, that is where the new cyber-storms empty their rain, eventually flooding cemeteries and funeral homes with the contaminated water. In no time at all, the dead rise in upgraded Cyberman bodies. One of them is Danny Pink, who was previously laying in rest at the Chaplet Funeral Home.

The Doctor is awakened as the TARDIS is loaded into a UNIT plane. Kate has yet to find Clara, and explains that his cooperation is to be ensured since UNIT assumes that he won’t automatically do so. The Doctor has also been elected as the President of Earth, much to his chagrin.

Clara is still within St. John’s Cathedral and trying to negotiate with three Cybermen. They don’t buy her ruse, but it doesn’t need to last long since a single Cyberman approaches from behind. That unit concurs that Clara is an incredible liar, knocks her out, then destroys the three Cybermen holding her hostage.

Missy wakes up to see the Doctor hovering over her, asking why she’s still alive. Her presence is due to the Doctor saving Gallifrey, and Missy seems to know where Gallifrey is located. She refuses to tell the Doctor, and their discussion leads Osgood to deduce that Missy is the Master. As the Doctor is summoned to the conference room, Osgood tells him that the storm clouds have expanded to cover the landmasses. The Doctor offers her a spot as his companion, which pretty much seals her fate.

All around the world, the dead have risen as the new Cyberman army. Clara awakens in a graveyard as more start to rise, but these models wander aimlessly. On the UNIT plane, the Doctor realizes that the Cyber-pollen contains the data to convert the dead. The Cybermen are newborns, unable to attack since they haven’t yet linked to the Cyberiad.

Kate tells the Doctor that they were previously investigating 3W before getting a call from a Scottish woman. He presumes that the caller was Missy because the Master loves to show off his/her diabolical plans. Down in the cargo hold, Missy goads Osgood, revealing that she will kill the scientist soon. Missy distracts her with a countdown before displaying that she is free and vaporizing Osgood. Soon after, she summons the Cybermen to attack the plane. The Doctor returns to the cargo hold to find Missy.

In the graveyard, Clara confronts the Cyberman who saved her. After she refuses to admit where the Doctor is, the Cyberman removes its faceplate to reveal Danny Pink’s face. Danny asks for help, begging to have his emotion inhibitor turned on to eliminate his grief.

Missy admits that she’s been traveling up and down his timeline, salvaging the people who died saving him. When the TARDIS phone rings, she further reveals that she was the woman who gave the Doctor’s phone number to Clara. She was also the person who placed the newspaper ad in Deep Breath. When he picks up the phone, he hears Clara on the other end. She tells him about Danny’s fate and tells him to home in on her phone. He’ll either show up or he won’t, but Clara is set on helping Danny.

When Kate comes below, Missy blows out the hull before transmatting back to the Nethersphere, sending Kate into free fall. The Doctor plummets after Kate, falling into the TARDIS on the way. When Seb celebrates, Missy vaporizes him.

The TARDIS materializes in the graveyard and the Doctor warns Clara that if she removes Danny’s emotions, Danny will kill her. Danny denies it, but the Doctor tells him that pain is a gift. Without the capacity for pain, we can’t feel the hurt we inflict. The catch is that Danny cannot tell the Doctor what the plan is unless the emotions are removed.

The Doctor is left in a quandary. Clara relieves him of that by taking the sonic screwdriver and activating the inhibitor. Before she does, she says goodbye and apologizes to Danny for not being better. Danny reveals the plan to kill off humanity and resurrect the dead as Cybermen, thus eliminating the human race.

Missy transmats into the graveyard and offers to take away Clara’s pain by killing her. The Doctor swats the device away and Clara picks it up before returning to Danny. Missy activates the army with her bracelet, then offers command of the forces to the Doctor. With this army, the Doctor would have the final say in every great battle in the history of the universe. He can even save the people suffering in the Dalek camps. The universe would be at peace forever.

The Doctor rejects the notion, but Missy tells him that she needs her friend back. The Doctor ponders again if he is a good man but then has an epiphany. He declares that he is not a good man, nor a bad man, nor a hero, nor a president, nor an officer, as Danny had described him. He is an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning. He has companions and knows that love is a promise, not an emotion.

This is why Danny won’t hurt Clara.

The Doctor passes the bracelet to Danny. The new commander of the Cyberman army orders all of the drones to lift off worldwide, destroying themselves in the clouds to burn away the threat.

Missy – the Master – is defeated. She recites the galactic coordinates of Gallifrey, claiming that the planet returned to its normal place. Clara considers killing Missy but relents at the Doctor’s bequest. The Doctor then tells Missy that she won before turning the device on her, but a blue blast comes from behind, seemingly disintegrating her.

The Doctor looks behind to see a single Cyberman. It gestures to Kate’s prone but alive form on the ground nearby. She was saved by this Cyberman, who in the Earth’s darkest hour still served the side of right. The Doctor offers the Brigadier a salute before he flies away.

Two weeks later, Clara is awakened by Danny’s voice. The bracelet that Missy used offers the chance to bring one person from the Nethersphere to the living world. Danny uses it to restore the kid he killed, asking Clara to find his parents and send him home. Later on, the Doctor finds Clara in a coffee shop and spots the bracelet. He wrongly assumes that Danny returned home, and further assumes that Clara will no longer be traveling with him. He also tells her that he found Gallifrey…

…except he didn’t. Space at those coordinates was empty. Missy lied, and the Doctor wept in rage and sorrow.

The Doctor tells Clara that he plans to go home, eager to reform Gallifrey into a good place. Clara continues the lie about Danny’s return and offers to say goodbye with a hug. The Doctor agrees, remarking that he doesn’t trust hugs because they are a way to hide your face.

The Doctor departs with a thank you from Clara. Traveling with him made her feel special, and he returns the thanks for the same reason. Clara walks away and doesn’t look back.

Later, the Doctor is brooding alone in his TARDIS when he hears someone knocking at the door. From behind the door, presumably in deep space, a voice says that the story cannot end like this because neither Clara nor the Doctor is okay. The voice belongs to Santa Claus, and in a swirl of snowflakes, he asks a puzzled Doctor what the Time Lord wants for Christmas.

Let’s take care of the elephant in the room. The first sin of this story is a typical sci-fi trope: They killed the only black main character.

The second sin: They fridged him.

Danny Pink’s death was an effort by Missy to engage Clara and the Doctor in her master plot. I cannot praise this story without first acknowledging how it played into two major tropes that exploit minorities, both of which Steven Moffat should have avoided in this story’s development. It also highlights the rather unhealthy relationship between the Doctor and Clara, particularly in the need for sneaking around and manipulating each other to get something done. Clara’s relationship with the Eleventh Doctor was far more healthy, and that one was based on his obsession with her.

A big mythological step from this story is the Missy revelation. While the show has previously acknowledged the concept of Time Lords changing genders – the examples are all from the revival era, specifically The End of Time, The Doctor’s Wife, and The Night of the Doctor – this firmly establishes it with the regeneration of the Master (who we haven’t seen since The End of Time, which aired four years prior to this set). Notably, the term “Time Lady” has not been used in a revival-era televised story before this point. It was previously used in City of Death in reference to Romana.

The same holds for the term Prydonian, one of the most powerful chapters (think colleges or houses) on Gallifrey. It was introduced in The Deadly Assassin and explored in the novels.

Not counting the big gaps between Survival, the TV movie, and the 2005 revival, this hiatus for the Master is on par with the breaks between Frontier in Space, The Deadly Assassin, and The Keeper of Traken. The Master’s plan is diabolical – the planet Earth has no shortage of corpses given a worldwide death rate of 1.8 people per second – but also really, really squicky. It’s no wonder that the BBC had to release a statement defending the story’s points after receiving complaints from viewers.

Part of that unease comes from the “cameo” by the Brigadier at the end. I’ll defend the Master’s plan and I get what Steven Moffat was going for, but personally, the Cyber-Master was a step too far. Sure, Missy could travel through time and space to secure the Brig’s consciousness at the moment of his death, but why would she open that weakness in her own plan? It doesn’t make sense.

It’s also notable that this is not the first time that the Cybermen have converted the dead. We saw the practice before in The Pandorica Opens. (Spoilers: We’ll also see it again in a few years within the franchise.)

The return of the Cybermen marks another point in the Steven Moffat trend of ending a series with the menace. To this point, every penultimate episode of every series under his reign as executive producer – The Pandorica Opens, Closing Time, and Nightmare in Silver – has featured the Cybermen. This was one of the best features in that list, especially with the visual callback to The Invasion and the iconic march near St. Paul’s Cathedral. This story also calls back to a similar awakening from The Tomb of the Cybermen.

The return of UNIT in the second half really throws a wrinkle in the story. It’s nice to see Kate and Osgood again, though Osgood’s death was meaningless. The story pretty much threw her away for shock value, continuing a revival-era tradition of killing potential companions after being invited to travel. You know, like Lynda Moss, Madame de Pompadour, Astrid Peth, Jenny, Rita, and Clara Oswin Oswald.

The plot point of making the Doctor into the President of Earth – some sort of UNIT contingency plan for a worldwide catastrophe – seemingly comes from thin air and really drags on the story’s tempo. It only serves to set the stage for a less than exciting dive-into-the-free-falling-TARDIS moment as the presidential jetliner is torn apart. It further boggles the mind that the Doctor did not even try to save Kate, leaving her fate (ahem) up in the air until the deus ex machina Cyber-Brig revelation.

Otherwise, the Cyber-Danny elements provide a good exercise in exploring the meaning of Doctor Who, and close the loop on the good man/bad man theme that has served as the backbone for this series. It’s evident that this was the moment that Steve Moffat wanted in this story, leaving the rest of the spectacle to meander to this point.

The story continues to meander right up to the credits, providing a meaningful moment as the Doctor fails to find Gallifrey but another exercise in toxic relationships as the Doctor and Clara say their prevaricating farewells.

But, hey, at least we got Missy playing Mary Poppins. Because Mary Poppins is a Time Lord, y’all.

Rating: 3/5 – “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Last Christmas

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #251: The Time of the Doctor

Michael Falkner11 Comments

Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor
(1 episode, Christmas Special, 2013)

Timestamp 251 Time of the Doctor

Death and birth in Christmas.

A fleet of ships respond to a tri-tone signal echoing in the cosmos from a seemingly unimportant planet. The Doctor is among the respondents and transports aboard a Dalek ship. When they start shooting, he transports back and scolds a disembodied Cyberman head named Handles.

His rant is interrupted by a ringing telephone. Unfortunately, it is routed to the handset on the outside of the TARDIS, but fortunately, the caller is Clara. She invented an imaginary boyfriend and needs the Doctor to pose as him at Christmas dinner. He materializes the TARDIS on a newly arrived ship, this time a Cyberman ship, and then scampers off as Clara calls again.

Clara’s trying her best to host Christmas dinner, but she’s having difficulty with the turkey and her family. When the TARDIS arrives, she runs down to meet the Doctor but finds him naked. It seems that he’s going to church. He puts on some holographic clothes and runs up to meet the family, but failed to extend the holographic projection to the family. Clara explains her issues with the turkey and the Doctor takes her to the TARDIS to cook it in the temporal engine.

Meanwhile, Handles has calculated the planet’s identity: Gallifrey. The Doctor refuses to believe the analysis even though he has recently saved his homeworld. His thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of Mother Superious Tasha Lem and the Papal Mainframe. Clara dons holographic clothing – nudity is the order of the day at church – and the pair board the new ship.

Tasha is pleased with the Doctor’s new body and offers a private consultation while Clara waits outside the chapel. While Tasha and the Doctor confer, Clara encounters the Silence, repeatedly forgetting the confessors once she looks away from them. She interrupts Tasha and the Doctor in a panic, forgetting why she did, and then joins the Doctor as he teleports to the planet surface. Tasha demands the TARDIS key so he can’t summon the time capsule and requests that he return in one hour.

Once the travelers arrive on the surface, they find a group of Weeping Angels buried in the snow. The Doctor summons the TARDIS by removing a surprise wig and revealing a key hidden beneath. The TARDIS materializes in a nearby village where the freshly re-dressed travelers meet the residents and a field that forces people to tell the truth.

The town, by the way, is called Christmas.

As the Doctor and Clara explore, they find a glowing crack in the wall, something he hasn’t seen for some time. The Doctor detects evidence that someone is trying to break through this weak point, and Handles suggests that it is Gallifreyan in nature. The truth field and the signal are coming from the Time Lords, and the signal is a question being transmitted through time and space.

It is the oldest question. You know, that inside joke about the show’s title. If he answers the question with his name, the Time Lords will know that it will be safe to return. Unfortunately, that means that everyone in orbit will open fire to destroy their enemy. The Time War will begin again.

The Doctor sends Clara to the TARDIS as Tasha reveals the true name of the planet. Turns out that Christmas is on Trenzalore. As the Doctor negotiates the problem with Tasha, the TARDIS returns Clara home. The Doctor places the planet under his protection, forcing Tasha to begin the Siege of Trenzalore and order the Doctor’s silence to fall.

The Doctor defends against Sontarans, Weeping Angels, and even wooden Cybermen as the years march onward and begin to show on the Time Lord’s body. The town celebrates every victory and comes to love the man who stayed for Christmas.

Eventually, the TARDIS returns to Trenzalore. It has been gone for 300 years, but it has returned Clara as she clung to the outer shell through the temporal vortex. They yell at each other and then embrace. Clara learns about the Doctor’s exploits and joins him for sunrise. Sadly, it is the last sunrise for Handles as the Cyberman head has developed a fault over time and succumbs to inevitability. The Doctor and Clara discuss the nature of his work on Trenzalore. Everyone gets stuck somewhere eventually. Everything ends.

The Doctor also reveals that he’s out of regenerations. Eleven Doctors, the War Doctor, and the Tenth Doctor’s vanity regeneration mean that this regeneration is the end of the line, but every life saved is a victory for him. His musings are interrupted by a request for a parley from Tasha. The Doctor and Clara take the TARDIS to Papal Mainframe. As Tasha and the Doctor negotiate, she reveals that everyone aboard has been replaced by Dalek puppets in order to snare their greatest enemy. The Daleks also know who the Doctor is thanks to information downloaded from the mainframe.

The Daleks try to use Clara as a bargaining chip, but he’s able to restore Tasha’s memories so she can fight back. The Doctor and Clara take the transmat back to the TARDIS. The turkey is finally done and Clara forces the Doctor to promise that he’ll never send her away again. Of course, the Doctor lies – rule number one, right? – and he tricks Clara into returning home while he stays on Trenzalore.

The years continue on as the fleets above continue the siege and the Doctor continues the fight. On Earth, Clara’s family consoles her as they celebrate Christmas. She hears the TARDIS returning and rushes to meet it. Inside, she finds Tasha, who then returns her to Trenzalore so the Doctor doesn’t die alone.

Clara returns to the room with the crack, marveling at the Doctor’s exploits and advanced age. They share a Christmas cracker and find a poignant message inside. The moment is broken by the arrival of the Daleks, and the Doctor ascends the belltower to make his last stand. This is how it ends.

Clara promises to remain behind as the Doctor bids her farewell. She turns to the crack and begs the Time Lords for assistance, offering the Doctor’s reputation as proof of who they seek. They respond by sealing the crack.

The Doctor faces the Dalek ship from the belltower. He admits that he has nothing left to offer, but the Dalek assault is disrupted by the crack opening in the sky. A burst of regeneration energy floats down to the Doctor and he begins to glow in a familiar golden light.

A bit of advice: Never ever tell the Doctor the rules. Regeneration number thirteen begins as the Time Lord uses the power rushing through his body to tear through the Dalek forces and Clara shepherds the villagers to safety.

After the battle, Clara returns to the TARDIS as she searches for the Doctor. She hangs up the phone and enters the time capsule to find the Doctor’s clothes on the floor and a bowl of fish custard on the console. He appears to her with his restored face, claiming that this is the reset. He sets the TARDIS in motion as he prepares to regenerate.

He talks to Clara as he begins to glow, seeing visions of Amelia Pond running around the TARDIS. He promises never to forget when the Doctor was him, then says farewell to a vision of Amy Pond.

He drops his bow tie, which he donned on his first day, then regenerates in a snap. As the new Doctor – an older Scottish man with familiar attack eyebrows – muses about the color of his kidneys, the TARDIS begins to spin out of control. Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember how to fly it.

This story bounces all over the map, and that is truly unfortunate. It was an attempt to tie everything off for Matt Smith’s era, including the Silence, the cracks in time, Trenzalore, and the fate of Gallifrey, but it was just too much and the sheer volume of concurrent story elements made for a muddled send-off for the Eleventh Doctor.

The mystery of the time crack was pretty well wrapped up back in Series 5, and the Silence arc came to a suitable end in Series 6. Bringing both of these elements back for this story seemed more of vain conceits than meaningful plot threads, particularly trying to redeem the Silence as religious confessors when they previously served as murderous foot soldiers.

The fate of Gallifrey was handled quite well in The Day of the Doctor, and while their minor influence here was welcome, I feel like the ending wasn’t quite earned. It’s Clara who begs the Time Lords for help, and historically the Time Lords have looked down on the Doctor’s interference in universal affairs. They even forced him to regenerate as punishment at one point, remember?

Sure, he saved them from utter annihilation, but is that enough to look the other way? I don’t know. The stakes seem awfully high since they’re perfectly safe in the pocket dimension… unless the goal is to ensure that the Doctor is indebted to them and obligated to free them.

The final element – the Doctor’s regeneration limit – takes a few turns here. This story firmly establishes that the limit is purely arbitrary, dictated at a whim by a higher power. Similar to the Master’s offer in The Five Doctors and the brand new set of regenerations gifted to him before The Sound of Drums, the Doctor’s potential is unleashed by the Time Lords with a snap.

The regeneration limit itself was mentioned three times before this point – The Deadly Assassin, Mawdryn Undead, and the TV movie – and given how regenerations are treated by other Time Lords like Runcible (The Deadly Assassin), the Council (The War Games, wherein the Time Lords didn’t even bat an eye at what was effectively capital punishment), and Romana (Destiny of the Daleks), I have long considered the limit to be very flexible if not completely artificial. The Doctor and the Master may believe it (at this point in the series progression), but others have shown us that the limits of regeneration are capricious at best. They are a way for the Council to keep the lesser Time Lords in line.

By extension, this also adds more credence to the Morbius faces being those of the Doctor before the First Doctor, but we’ll get there soon enough. (Breaking the Timestamps Project timeline, this story is exactly why I didn’t have an issue with the Timeless Child revelation during the Thirteenth Doctor’s run.)

It seems that this regeneration was the first in a whole new set of twelve, provided that the Eleventh Doctor didn’t burn all of them off with that over-the-top light show. It also offers a reset, so in that way, it was suitable for Steven Moffat to tie everything off in a sloppy bow. I have already talked about how this whole regeneration limit discussion could have been pushed into the next era by replacing the War Doctor with the Eighth Doctor, but again, Moffat and vanity conceits.

Taking a look at other elements of series mythology, we saw a nice list of “guest” aliens in orbit of Trenzalore, including the Judoon, the Silurians, the Terileptils, and the Raxacoricofallapatorians. In the Doctor’s hall of fame, there is also evidence that the Sycorax, the Monoids, the Racnoss, the Pyrovile, the Ood, and the Adipose also came to play.

It’s one hell of a finale for this era of Doctor Who. I only wish it was better. The ending was emotional, but the rest of the story was uneven. It definitely needs to take advantage of the Timestamps Project’s +1 handicap for regeneration episodes.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Series Seven, Specials, and Eleventh Doctor Summary

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #230: Closing Time

Michael Falkner8 Comments

Doctor Who: Closing Time
(1 episode, s06e12, 2011)

Timestamp 230 Closing Time

Here to help!

At the Sanderson & Grainger store in Colchester, Kelly and Shona prepare to close up for the night. Kelly is late for a date, so Shona offers to take her duties. Shona is perturbed that a customer is still in the changing rooms and is not amused at the flickering lights throughout the store.

Elsewhere, Craig Owens escorts his wife out the door for a weekend getaway, intent on showing her (and everyone else) that he can handle things on his own while she’s gone. Sophie has called a few people to check in on Craig, but he calls them back and tells them not to worry. He hears a knock at the door and, believing that Sophie has come back, answers it. To his dismay, his guest is none other than the Doctor.

His guest doesn’t like the new decor. Or the inexplicable power surges.

When he investigates, he finds a baby. Sophie and Craig’s baby.

Shona, on the other hand, finds a Cyberman. Surprise!

Craig tells the Doctor that he really can’t handle the baby. Alas, there are no off switches, but the Doctor has a secret weapon: He speaks baby.

It turns out that Alfie, the baby boy, prefers to be called Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All. Sophie is “Mum”, Craig is “Not-Mum”, the Doctor is “also-not-Mum”, and everyone else is merely “peasant”.

The Doctor says that Craig’s place is one more stop on his great farewell tour, of which he has spent a considerable amount of time waving at the Ponds through history. He sets out to visit the Alignment of Exodor, trying desperately to not notice the oddities around him. His curiosity gets the best of him, however, and he ends up as a toy salesman at Sanderson & Grainger. Nametag and all.

Craig is surprised to see the Doctor demonstrating a remote control helicopter. The Doctor explains that he’s living in the moment, even introducing Craig to Yappy the robot dog (which is nowhere near as fun as other robot dogs he knows). His attention is drawn to a silver blur, and when Craig asks, the Doctor alludes to several missing people and the ongoing power fluctuations. The Doctor ushers Craig out, but is convinced by Stormie to explain the teleporter. The teleporter in the elevator which soon whisks them away to wherever the Cybermen are hiding. The Doctor reverses it and starts searching, begging Craig to take Alfie and go, but Craig refuses. He believes in the Doctor.

The Doctor, Craig, and Stormie return to the store and investigate. The Doctor gets word of a “silver rat thing” from Val, the perfume saleswoman who thinks that he and Craig are a couple. Craig stalks the women’s department, completely missing the silver blur and getting in trouble with security. Craig gets bailed out by the Doctor (who is absolutely adored by the staff) and they both end up in the changing rooms where Shona was last seen.

Oh, and the silver rat is a Cybermat. Which makes these Mondasian Cybermen, not Cybus Cybermen.

Craig wanders off to change Alfie. In the meantime, the Doctor spots Amy and Rory. Amy has become a bit of a celebrity thanks to her perfume ads, and is surprised that a little girl wants her autograph. The Doctor beams with pride as he avoids being seen.

After closing, the Doctor, Craig, and Stormie go hunting for Cybermats. They find one, teeth and all, then follow screams to security guard George. A Cyberman knocks the Doctor out with an electrical charge and takes George’s body away. The Doctor is confused as to how the Cybermen repaired the teleport so fast.

The team regroups at Craig’s house. The Doctor whips up a science experiment and gives Alfie a pep talk, realizing that it is his old age talking. In the meantime, the Cybermat reactivates and attacks the adorable duo. Unfortunately, the Doctor locks himself and Alfie outside without the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor tries to warn Craig, but the Cybermat wreaks havoc. One broken back door and a recalibration of the sonic later, the Cybermat is disabled.

While dissecting the Cybermat with a normal screwdriver and a loupe, the Doctor laments his position. Tomorrow is the day that the prophecy – “Silence will fall when the question is asked”, even though he has no idea what the question is – descends upon him. Craig falls asleep and the Doctor goes back to the store to hunt with his new friend Bitey the Cybermat.

The Doctor finds what he’s looking for behind a mirror in the changing room, descending down a tunnel into the foundation of the store. Craig follows the Doctor, leaving Alfie with Val, as the Time Lord explores the cyber ship and is captured. The Cybermen don’t find the Doctor to be compatible, but start conversion of Craig into the new Cyber Controller. The Doctor pleads with Craig to think of Alfie as the helmet seals around his face.

Alfie’s cries across an open CCTV channel reawaken Craig’s emotions, breaking him free of the conversion and starting an emotional feedback loop in the Cybermen. Their heads literally explode and the ship blows up as Craig and the Doctor use the teleport to return to the elevator.

Oh, and Bitey? He didn’t make it.

The day saved and the “companion” miscommunication nearly resolved, the Doctor spirits away. He uses the TARDIS to help tidy up Craig’s house. He also reveals that Stormie prefers the name Alfie now, and also refers to Craig as “Dad”. The Doctor borrows some blue stationery and Craig offers him a Stetson.

Sophie returns, Alfie has a first word, and the Doctor moves on. He says hello to some kids, an event that is somehow chronicled in the records at Luna University in the 52nd century. There, River Song encounters Madame Kovarian while doing research. Kovarian and her Silence companions reveal that they have locked out part of her memories, relating the story of an impossible astronaut.

River is sedated against her will and dressed in a spacesuit. She awakens under Lake Silencio.

She’s destined to kill the Doctor.

On the one hand, this is a good dramatic break from the tension developed over the last four episodes. It does a decent job of connecting the dots leading into the finale, making it less of a filler story than its predecessor. On the other hand, the downsides here are pretty big.

First, James Corden isn’t particularly funny here, which acts as an anchor around this story’s neck. Second, and perhaps more damning, is how this story defangs the Cybermen. The Cybermen haven’t been a central figure in a story since the David Tennant era. The last time was The Next Doctor, but the last truly impactful stories were all the way back in Series Two with Army of Ghosts & Doomsday and Rise of the Cybermen & The Age of Steel.

The Cybermen here are, frankly, on the same level as The Next Doctor without the humor, the heart, or even the absurdity. They only serve to assimilate random victims and get blown to kingdom come as a function of the formula. They aren’t menacing, and they certainly don’t march anywhere. They’re nothing more than a prop.

I do appreciate several moments in this story.

  • The Doctor’s telepathy makes a comeback as he quiets people with a simple command.
  • The “I don’t like it” review of redecoration is a fun running gag from The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, and Time Crash.
  • The concept of another farewell tour, this one spanning 200 years or so.
  • The acknowledgement that the Doctor always offers a choice to his enemies. In fact, some of the best stories present the enemy failure as their own undoing.

We also see how what Pond life is like without the Doctor. It seems they’re doing well enough. The use of petrichor was a nice touch.

But in the effort to set this series up for a home-stretch sprint, this light-hearted episode stumbles while rounding the curve.

Rating: 3/5 – “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Death is the Only Answer

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #225: A Good Man Goes to War

Michael Falkner12 Comments

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War
(1 episode, s06e07, 2011)

Timestamp 225 A Good Man Goes to War

Demons run when a good man goes to war.

Prequel: Brain Trafficking

Dorium Maldovar meets with three cloaked figures. He tells them that his agents have procured the exact security software they have requested, extracted from memory – the literal brain – of a Judoon trooper. He exchanges it for a bag of sentient money.

Dorium doesn’t understand why they are doing all this to imprison one child, and he’s astonished at the child’s identity and relationship to the Doctor. He warns them: “God help us if you’ve made him angry”.

A Good Man Goes to Wars

On the Demons Run base, Amy consoles her new daughter, Melody Pond. She promises that help is on the way and is distraught that she has been unable to care for Melody since she was born.

Elsewhere in the cosmos, Rory and the Doctor have been hunting for Amy. They lay waste to an entire Cyberman fleet, news of which reaches the troops on Demons Run. Soldiers “The Fat One” and “The Thin One” – together, the Thin-Fat Gay-Married Anglican Marines – converse briefly with Cleric Lorna Bucket, a woman who has once met the Doctor in the Gamma Forests. Lorna sews to pass the time and was the only Cleric to show empathy for Amy’s plight. While The Thin One and Lorna discuss the Doctor, The Fat One is led away by the Headless Monks, the cloaked figures who met with Maldovar, and asked to make a donation into an appropriately head-sized box.

In London, circa 1888 AD, a Silurian named Vastra returns home after dispatching Jack the Ripper by her blade. Her maid Jenny informs her that the TARDIS has appeared in the drawing room, and Vastra knows that it is time to repay an old debt.

At the Battle of Zaruthstra in 4037 AD, Command Harcourt and Madame President Eleanor are ready to leave an infirm child as they retreat, but the child is saved by an unlikely nurse. A Sontaran named Strax tends to the child, then leaves as the TARDIS arrives.

At Stormcage, as River is breaking back into her cell, she meets Rory in his Centurion garb. She’s just returned from a birthday celebration with the Doctor in 1814 and Rory is summoning her to Demons Run. River explains that the Battle of Demons Run is when the Doctor will finally know who she is and that she cannot be there until the very end. During this event, the Doctor will rise higher than ever before, but will fall so much further.

At the Maldovarium, the Eyepatch Lady confronts Maldovar. She is known as Madame Kovarian, and Maldovar explains that the Doctor is raising an army. He also explains the origin of her base’s name: “Demons run when a good man goes to war.” When Kovarian leaves, the TARDIS arrives for Maldovar.

Back on Demons Run, while Colonel Manton rallies his troops, Lorna tries to present Amy with a prayer leaf. It’s a fabric token embroidered with Melody’s name in Lorna’s native language. They discuss the Doctor’s status as a legend and how each of them met the Time Lord. Amy accepts the gift and the apology.

Lorna returns to the colonel’s rally just in time for Manton to reveal the true face of the Headless Monks. Of course, the Doctor is masquerading as one of the monks, and as everyone in the crowd draws arms against him, the lights go out and the Doctor vanishes. The Clerics and the monks start shooting each other until Manton reestablishes control over the assembly by having all of the Clerics disarm themselves. Meanwhile, Vastra and Jenny have taken the control room in order to monitor the situation.

The assembled troops are suddenly surrounded as an army of Silurians and Judoon materialize. Commander Strax holds Manton at gunpoint. Manton claims that his fleet will come to help if Demons Run falls, but the Doctor counters: The fleet won’t know to come if Demons Run can’t call for help. The Doctor uses the Dalek-upgraded Spitfires, courtesy of Winston Churchill, to disable the communications tower.

Madame Kovarian readies her ship with young Melody in tow, but she’s thwarted by Rory with help from Henry and Toby Avery. Kovarian and Manton are brought before a barely restrained Doctor. He wants Manton to order his troops to “run away” so that he’ll be remembered by it for all time. Kovarian eventually yields and orders Manton to give the word.

Rory, with help from a sonic screwdriver, frees Amy from her cell. They both weep over their baby and the reunion. The Doctor soon joins them and their reunion is complete with a bout of humor. The Doctor speaks baby after all, and Melody has a lot to say.

Madame Vastra reports that the Clerics are leaving without any bloodshed. When she gloats that the Doctor has never risen higher, Rory remembers River’s warning.

The group gathers in the hangar. The Doctor doesn’t want to leave until he figures out why the base was used in the first place. The Doctor also produces his baby cot so Melody can settle down for a nap. Vastra calls the Doctor away, but before he goes he explains how Amy was split between the Ganger avatar and Demons Run. As the Doctor leaves, Strax brings in Lorna as a prisoner.

In the control room, the Doctor finds out that Melody has a mixture of human and Time Lord DNA. Presumably, it happened as a result of conception while exposed to the Untempered Schism, just like how the Time Lords began. Vastra is concerned that their victory was too easy.

In the hangar, Lorna claims that she’s a friend who only wanted to meet the Doctor. She also claims that he’s a great warrior, hence his name. Unfortunately, they soon fall under siege from the Headless Monks. While Vastra and Maldovar return to the hangar, Kovarian contacts the Doctor as he thinks back to the child in the astronaut suit from 1969. Kovarian explains that the child represents hope in their endless, bitter war against the Doctor.

A force field snaps into existence around the TARDIS and the hangar is sealed. The Headless Monks advance with their attack prayer and Amy retreats to safety while everyone else prepares for battle. Maldovar tries to reason with the monks, but he is cut down.

As the battle is met, the Doctor connects the dots. Kovarian has replaced Melody with a Ganger. The child is still lost. The Doctor arrives moments too late. The monks have been defeated, but Lorna and Strax have paid the price. The Doctor and Jenny try to comfort Amy. He also speaks briefly with Lorna before she dies, promising that he remembers her just like he remembers everyone he meets.

The Doctor is ready to give up on his quest against the Silence, but channels his anger toward the newly-arrived River Song. He wants to know where she was, but River says that she could not have turned the tide of the battle. She warns him that his name, which means healer across the universe, could become just like the people of the Gamma Forests know him: Mighty Warrior.

Demons run when a good man goes to war
Night will fall and drown the sun
When a good man goes to war

Friendship dies and true love lies
Night will fall and the dark will rise
When a good man goes to war

Demons run, but count the cost
The battle’s won, but the child is lost

The Doctor demands to know who she is and she leads him to the baby cot. The answer is inscribed on the cot in Gallifreyan and the Doctor’s mood shifts dramatically. He rushes to the TARDIS, asking River to get everyone home safely, before flying away to find Melody.

Amy demands to know where he’s gone and who she is. River shows her the prayer leaf and explains that Melody Pond in the language of the Gamma Forests translates to River Song. “The only water in the forest is the river.”

River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter.

The Battle of Demons Run: Two Days Later

Strax awakens two days after the Battle of Demons Run, having been healed by alien technology. Vastra and Jenny tell him that they are the last to leave and invite him to join them in London. After all, Jenny has been ostracized from her family for her sexual orientation, Vastra is presumably the last of her kind, and Strax is all alone. There could be a future for them all together.

Strax refuses at first, but once he learns that London will involve crime-solving and plenty of adventure, he agrees to accompany them.

This story serves multiple purposes and it serves them well. Primarily, it ties off the thread of Amy’s abduction and opens the story of a war against the Doctor with Melody at its core. Second, it presents a cliffhanger to close out the first half of the season and tease the direction of the second half. Third, it offers a springboard for the team of Vastra, Jenny, and Strax.

That team is an intriguing combination of a Silurian, a human servant, and the unlikely Sontaran nurse. All three are outcasts of some sort, and that characteristic provides the glue to bind them. Strax provides a wonderful parallel to Rory through their mutual professions and Vastra offers a connection to the Doctor, the man who saved her at some point in his on-again-off-again guardianship of her species.

We get a beautiful inadvertent tie back to The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang with the Cybermen. In that Timestamp, I mused about the status of the Cybus and Mondasian Cybermen at this point in the franchise. The Cybermen in that story were Cybus models, survivors of the Battle of Canary Wharf, and had either built or assimilated into a fleet. The Mondasian Cybermen, last seen in Silver Nemesis, still had to exist but I had wondered if the two could co-exist.

Obviously, they can to some degree, as the Cybermen seen in this story were obviously Mondasian – they didn’t have the Cybus C on their chests – but have evolved (or assimilated into) the more bulky Cybus body time. I’m excited to see their return.

The other blink-and-you’ll-miss-it note surrounds River Song. On the surface, it seems like the River that Rory visits in Stormcage is the same River that arrives after the Battle of Demons Run, but the context clues point in a different direction. River at Stormcage had to consult her diary, which means that Demons Run has already happened for her. The River at Stormcage was from a later point in her timeline and she knows what happens to the Doctor. A minor addition is a reminder that River once remarked how the Doctor could make whole armies turn and run.

In a smaller callback, we see the Church again, previously met in The Time of Angels.

All told, this was a great story, a wonderful springboard, and a terrific cliffhanger.

Since the Timestamps Project is proceeding (for the most part) in airdate order, the next stop on this journey is a return to Torchwood. At some point, the streams will cross for a brief period as Doctor Who continues Series Six.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Torchwood: The New World

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The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #219: The Pandorica Opens & The Big Bang

Michael Falkner18 Comments

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens
Doctor Who: The Big Bang
(2 episodes, s05e12-e13, 2010)

Timestamp 219 The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang

A roller coaster ride that closes the narrative circle. Mostly.

The Pandorica Opens

France, 1890: Vincent van Gogh finishes a painting and lapses into a screaming fit. Doctor Gachet and Madame Vernet attempt to calm him, but Vernet takes a moment to criticize the painting as one of the artist’s worst.

London, 1941: In the Cabinet War Rooms, Professor Bracewell delivers a rolled up canvas to Winston Churchill. It is the painting, found behind the wall in a French attic. Bracewell tells Churchill to deliver the message.

Stormcage Containment Facility, 5145: A guard answers the phone and hands it to River Song. After speaking to Churchill, River whammies the guard with her hallucinogenic lipstick and escapes from the prison. She breaks into the Royal Collection and swipes the painting. Liz 10 catches her, but after she looks at the artwork, River is free to go.

The Maldovarium, 5145: River meets with black marketeer Dorium Maldovar and exchanges a Callisto Pulse in exchange for a vortex manipulator, fresh from the wrist of a Time Agent.

The TARDIS, in the temporal vortex: Amy looks at the wedding ring as the Doctor lands on Planet One. There they find the first words in recorded history carved into the diamond cliffs: “Hello, Sweetie.” The accompanying coordinates take them to Roman Britain in the 2nd century where they are met by a soldier whose face is smeared with lipstick. They are escorted to Cleopatra, who is really River in disguise. She presents the travelers with the painting.

It is a mixture of Starry Night and the destruction of the TARDIS. It is titled The Pandorica Opens.

River, Amy, and the Doctor discuss the painting, which the Doctor considers a fairy tale, but they all ride to Stonehenge where it is presumed to reside. Amy notes that River warned them about this on the Byzantium, but River responds that she will. That hasn’t happened for her yet. River finds evidence of energy weapons at the site. They open a tomb beneath Stonehenge, missing the active Cyberman head nearby, in search of the mightiest warrior of all time contained within the Pandorica.

Behind a giant door they find a giant box. It is the Pandorica. Amy notes that the story of the Pandorica is similar to her favorite story, that of Pandora’s Box, and the Doctor draws attention to the coincidence. As River and the Doctor examine the box, Amy keeps an eye on the crypt.

Amy wonders how Vincent could know of this and the Doctor notes that the pillars of the crypt are transmitters. They’ve been broadcasting into all of time and space, and River traces the signals to Earth’s orbit. There are at least ten thousand starships in orbit, and every one of them belongs to the Doctor’s enemies.

It’s a veritable Who’s Who of Doctor Who universe villains, including the Daleks, the Drahvins, the Cybermen, the Autons and the Nestene Consciousness, the Silurians, the Draconians, the Sontarans, the Zygons, the Terileptils, the Chelonians (an enemy from the Virgin novels), the Slitheen, the Roboforms, the Sycorax, the Hoix, the Weevils and the Blowfish (crossing over from Torchwood), the Judoon, the Uvodni, the Atraxi, and the Haemogoths (from the novel The Forgotten Army).

Everything that ever hated the Doctor is coming to Earth on this night. River begs him to run but the Doctor has other plans. He enlists the help of the Roman army with River and her futuristic technology. She is greeted by a single mysterious volunteer.

The Doctor continues his work at the Pandorica. After extending the force fields of the box to buy them thirty minutes, he and Amy discuss the engagement ring. The Doctor explains that it belongs to a friend, and hopes that the traces it left behind can spark memories within that friend. He asks if Amy is bothered that her life doesn’t make a lot of sense, but before she can respond they are interrupted by laser blasts from a dismembered Cyberman arm. They nearly escape from the arm, but it shocks the Doctor as Amy grapples with the Cyberman head. She nearly gets the upper hand but it shoots her with a dart and threatens her with assimilation. On cue, the headless body (a Cybus Industries model) marches into view, reattaches the head, and chases the drugged companion.

Amy ends up in a side chamber. The door opens as a sword impales the Cyberman. The sword belongs to none other than Rory. He’s dressed as a Roman soldier and she still doesn’t remember him. The Doctor considers the Cyberman and the Pandorica, eventually coming around to the fact that Rory is alive again and unerased from time.

Rory is fuzzy on how he got to this point, but he still cares for Amy. They’re distracted by the ships descending from orbit and the sudden awakening of the Pandorica. The site and the Roman army are surrounded. The Doctor ascends to the surface, stands on a rock, and addresses his enemies over a communicator. His enemies face him as he threatens them with his rage. He has possession of the Pandorica and it’s opening, and though they have plenty of weapons, he has nothing to lose. He reminds them of all the times he has defeated them in the past and encourages them to do the smart thing and let someone else try first.

The fleet withdraws, granting the Doctor an additional hour. Meanwhile, River tries to pilot the TARDIS to the crypt but it won’t play nice. It takes her to Earth, specifically Amy’s house, on June 26, 2010. A crack appears on the scanner as River heads outside and a voice echoes in the console room: “Silence will fall.”

Amy wakes up but still doesn’t remember Rory. The Doctor cannot explain his presence, but listens while Rory talks about his memories while the Doctor ponders the explosion of the TARDIS. He returns Rory’s ring and dismisses Rory’s return (for now, anyway) as a miracle.

Landing patterns from alien ships have scarred the yard at Amy’s house. Inside the house, River finds a book on Roman Britain and a copy of The Legend of Pandora’s Box. She also finds a picture of Rory and Amy, but Rory is dressed like a centurion in the photograph. River contacts the Doctor and tells him that the Roman army is made of duplicates. The duplicates believe that they are alive, and River says it must be a trap.

On the surface, Amy starts to remember Rory. At Amy’s house, the TARDIS begins to shake and will not respond to River’s commands. The console room echoes with the warning again: “Silence will fall.”

The Pandorica starts transmitting a signal as it cracks open. The soldiers all stop moving and converge on the crypt, their hands raised like Auton hand-blasters. Rory fights his transformation and warns Amy to run, but she remembers him. The Autons seize the Doctor and declare that the Pandorica is ready. The Doctor’s enemies materialize in the room and force the Time Lord into the box.

All of reality is threatened by the cracks in time. The enemies of the Doctor have banded together to save the universe from destruction by his hand. They used Amy’s memories to trap him.

Unable to control himself, Rory fatally shoots Amy. As she dies, he grieves as he fights for control.

River opens the doors of the TARDIS to find a stone wall. She’s trapped as the TARDIS explodes.

The universe dies as every star goes supernova at once. The Earth is left alone in a black void.

Silence falls.

The Big Bang

Leadworth, 1996: It’s the night that Amelia Pond prays to Santa Claus on Easter to fix the crack in her wall. She hears a noise, but her garden is empty. She notes the moon in the sky and later paints the sky for her psychiatrist. She remembers stars in the sky, but no one else can. In fact, the sky is empty except for the moon.

That night, Amy sees a man in a fez slip a pamphlet through the mail slot. It advertises that Pandorica exhibit at the National Museum with a note: “Come along, Pond.” She visits the museum with her aunt, passing exhibits of antique Daleks and penguins in the Arctic. A note on the Pandorica tells her to stick around, so she hides from her aunt until the museum closes. She returns to the Pandorica and it opens to reveal Amy Pond.

Things just got complicated.

Stonehenge, 102 AD: The Auton duplicate of Rory Williams cradles Amy’s corpse. He cracks a joke and wishes that she’d laugh, but his mourning is interrupted by the vortex manipulated arrival of the Doctor. He’s wearing a fez and brandishing a mop, and he leaves instructions for Rory to open the Pandorica with his sonic screwdriver. He vanishes again.

The present-version Doctor emerges from the Pandorica. Deducing that he will set up the chain of events that have led to his release, he and Rory note the stone remains of the allied aliens. They are echoes in time of entire species that have been erased from existence. The Doctor and Rory find Amy and load her into the Pandorica. A punch to the jaw tells the Doctor that Rory has moved beyond his programming, and the Time Lord leaves a telepathic message in Amy’s head. The Pandorica will restore her to life in order to keep her imprisoned.

The Doctor picks up River’s vortex manipulator and offers Rory the opportunity to travel back to the future. Instead, Rory decides to stand watch over the Pandorica for the next 2,000 years. When Amy awakens in 1996, she sees the video presentation about the Pandorica and the lone centurion who stood guard no matter where the box went. The centurion was presumed dead in 1941.

As the Doctor appears in the museum, one of the Daleks awakens and threatens the Amys. As the Doctor finds a fez and looks for a way to stop the Dalek, a security guard appears and stops the threat with an Auton cannon. That security guard is none other than Rory the Centurion.

While Amy and Rory catch up with a whole lot of smooching, the Doctor analyzes the Dalek and realizes that it came to life when the Pandorica’s light touched it. As it revives again, the Doctor ushers everyone out and starts his chain reaction of events. His bouncing around in time comes to a halt as an older version of himself appears, leaves him a message, and dies without regeneration.

The younger version of Amy also vanishes. Time is still collapsing.

As the travelers rush to the roof, the Dalek opens the Pandorica and casts its light on the statues in the museum. On the roof, our heroes note that the sun has risen. Unfortunately, the sun is really the explosion of the TARDIS. Fortunately, the signal it is generating includes River’s last words, which tells the Doctor that the TARDIS placed her in a time loop to keep her alive. The Doctor jumps to the TARDIS and pulls her to safety in 1996.

River questions the Doctor’s fashion sense. Amy pulls the fez off his head and throws it. River shoots it, blasting it into atoms. Then the Dalek arrives and drives the team back into the museum. The Doctor questions how the Dalek could exist, then develops a plan to cast the Pandorica’s light across all of time and existence by using the TARDIS explosion as an infinite power source.

His plotting is cut short as the Dalek shoots the Doctor. The Doctor falls and teleports away. In her anger, River makes the Dalek beg for mercy (three times over) before killing it in a single shot. When the team heads back to the Pandorica, the Doctor has crawled inside and wired the vortex manipulator to transport the box to the heart of the exploding TARDIS. Rory and Amy thought he was dead, but River tells them about Rule Number One: The Doctor lies.

The downside to the Doctor’s plan is that he’ll be trapped on the wrong side of Big Bang #2. While the rest of existence will be reset, he will never have existed. He asks to talk to Amy one last time before he leaves. He explains that her parents didn’t die but rather were consumed by the crack in time. It has been eating away at her life for a long time, making her the girl whose life didn’t make sense. If she can remember them when the Big Bang happens, they stand a chance of being restored.

With that, the Doctor seals the Pandorica and launches it into the heart of the TARDIS with a transmitted “Geronimo”.

As the universe heals, the Doctor wakes up on the floor of the TARDIS console room. He watches as his timestream unravels and stumbles on the fact that Amy can still hear him. He returns to the Byzantium and has that mysterious conversation with Amy that seemed out of place. He asks her to remember what he told her when she was seven.

He rewinds back to Amy’s house on the night that she waited for him as a girl. He finds her asleep in the garden and takes her up to her bed. He tells her the story of a daft old man who “borrowed” a magic box that was ancient and new and the bluest blue ever. He realizes that the crack in her wall cannot close properly until he’s on the other side. He steps through, avoiding the rest of the rewind of his lives, and the crack seals. Amelia wakes up briefly, then goes back to sleep. The stars are back in the sky.

In 2010, Amy wakes up on her wedding day. Her gaze drifts across the dolls she made of the Doctor to her wedding dress. She’s startled by her mother and breakfast, rushes downstairs to hug her father, then calls Rory to ask him if he remembers something big.

At the wedding reception, Amy spots River outside just before her father’s speech. Rory notes that Amy is crying, then hands her a gift that someone left for them. It’s River’s TARDIS journal, but it is blank. She looks around the room, spotting things that remind her of the Doctor, and has a revelation as a single tear splashes onto the journal.

She interrupts her father’s speech to tell the assembled crowd about her raggedy man imaginary friend. Her belief in him rises as the wind swirls through the ballroom and the TARDIS materializes. She vaults over the table and knocks on the door. The Doctor emerges, congratulates Mr. and Mrs. Pond, promises to leave the kissing to Rory, and moves the TARDIS off the dance floor.

After a night of dancing and celebration, the Doctor heads outside and meets River Song. He returns her journal and the vortex manipulator, then questions her identity as they muse about marriage. River vanishes into time and the Doctor enters the TARDIS. Before he can leave, Amy and Rory barge in and demand to know why he’s taking off so soon. He tells them that the mystery of the exploding TARDIS still remains before taking a phone call about an Egyptian goddess loose on the Orient Express in space.

As he signs off with the member of royalty on the line, Amy and Rory bid farewell to their wedding guests. The Doctor fires up the TARDIS and the trio vanishes into the temporal vortex.

This finale brings a whole lot of guns to the fight. From wrapping up the season-long story arc to laying the foundations for the next big adventure while handing the audience nods to the entire history of Doctor Who, including the prose side of the house. The Doctor is in fine form as he unravels this mystery with Amy as she reclaims her life. River (doing her best Han Solo and Indiana Jones) and Rory carry the action while adding heart through their relationships with our other heroes.

The climax of the story plays the typical franchise trope of a universe reset where the protagonists remember everything, but the twist here is that Amy and Rory have to work for it. What’s even more interesting is that the Doctor is ready to make the ultimate sacrifice (without the prospect of regeneration) to save the universe. It’s times like these when we see just how much of a hero the Doctor truly is.

I loved seeing the references to the enemies of the Who-niverse, but one that really stood out was the Cyberman. Given the big C on its chest, the one in this story was obviously a Cybus Industries model from Pete’s World. We last saw them in The Next Doctor, survivors of the Battle of Canary Wharf, and it can be inferred that at least one of them was transported to 102 A.D. to face the Doctor. But the Mondasian Cybermen still exist, right? We haven’t seen them since Silver Nemesis but it stands to reason that they still exist in this universe. That means that they should be the majority of the Cyberman fleet in orbit, right? Would this universe’s Cybermen accept the Pete’s World Cybermen into their ranks without issue?

I think I miss the normal universe Cybermen. Just a little.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Series Five Summarycc-break

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #205: The Next Doctor

Michael Falkner5 Comments

Doctor Who: The Next Doctor
(Christmas Special, 2008)

 

The Doctor who wasn’t really the Doctor.

The TARDIS materializes under an archway in a snowstorm. The Doctor strides out with a smile on his face, happy to be in London for Christmas in 1851. His joy is interrupted by someone screaming “Doctor!”, and he finds a growling creature behind a door wearing a copper Cyberman mask, a frantic woman, and a man claiming to be the Doctor.

This other Doctor, armed with his own “sonic” screwdriver, tries to lasso the primitive assimilation as it runs up a wall. The Tenth Doctor grabs on and the pair finds themselves dragged along until companion Rosita cuts the rope with a hatchet. The Doctors laugh about their adventure while Rosita chides them. While she goes to check the traps, the Doctor rambles along, mistakenly believing that the other Doctor is a future regeneration. He soon figures out that the other Doctor has memory loss, something that happened just before the Cybermen arrived.

The Tenth Doctor adopts the John Smith alias as the other Doctor rushes off to a funeral.

The Cybermen, led by a new Cyber Leader and a human ally named Mercy Hartigan, review the Cybershade’s surveillance footage while they prepare for the rise of the Cyber King. These Cybermen are the Pete’s World variety, somehow left behind when the worlds merged.

The other Doctor and Rosita observe the funeral procession of Reverend Aubrey Fairchild before springing into action. Rosita heads to the “TARDIS” while the other Doctor investigates the house of the deceased. He’s joined by Mr. Smith, and he explains that the Cybermen presence is linked to a number of murders and child abductions across the city. The rash of crimes started with the death of a man named Jackson Lake and have led to the reverend’s demise by some advanced form of electrocution.

The pair find a pair of infostamps, one of which contains the history of London from 1066 to 1851. The other Doctor has a flashback to his “regeneration” and memory of another infostamp. They also uncover a Cyberman home invasion and have to run. While they flee, John Smith reveals himself as the real Doctor and the other Doctor bypasses the safeties on the infostamp to overload the pursuing Cybermen.

The other Doctor is troubled by the happenings. The Doctor promises to help him.

At the reverend’s graveside service, Miss Hartigan crashes the proceedings with an admission: The reverend had to die in order to get the mourners in one place. She dispatches the Cybermen to attack them, sparing only a few as the rest are deleted.

The Doctors return to Rosita’s side at their home base. Jackson Lake’s belongings are stacked by the wall, kept as evidence of his disappearance, and the Tenth Doctor finds another infostamp in the luggage. The other Doctor shows off his TARDIS – a gas balloon, fueled by the local gasworks for a substantial fee, long-form called Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style – and dreams of flying it one day.

The Doctor now knows that this man is not him. He shares the story of the Battle of Canary Wharf, presuming that some of the survivors fell through time and landed in London, 1851. He draws the parallels between Jackson Lake and the man’s memories, even showing him the JL inscription on his fob watch. The man, truly Jackson Lake, was flashed with an infostamp that contained all of the Cybermen’s information the Doctor, thus side-booting his brain with an alternate identity.

There’s still one missing piece that Jackson can’t remember, but the Doctor helps him remember based on the amount of luggage on hand: Jackson remembers how the Cybermen invaded his home and killed his wife Caroline. His fugue state ends as he breaks down in tears.

While Jackson Lake mourns and is consoled by Rosita, the infostamps start to chime. The Doctor finds a whole cache of them and realizes that the Cybermen are on the move. The Doctor rushes out, and Jackson sends Rosita after him.

Miss Hartigan fits her survivors with Cyberman EarPods and uses them to fulfill tasks for her. The Doctor and Rosita find the survivors marching children from their workhouses and orphanages to the River Thames. The procession is guarded by Cybershades and Cybermen, and it ends at the court of the Cyber King.

The Doctor and Rosita are ambushed by Miss Hartigan and the Cybermen. The Cybermen don’t recognize the Doctor because of the corrupted data on the infostamp, but they repair it. The Cybermen march on the Doctor and Rosita, but are stopped by Jackson Lake and his cache of infostamps. The trio run (after Rosita sucker punches Miss Hartigan!) and Jackson reveals that his cellar may be a gateway into their operations.

Miss Hartigan, in it for her own social liberation from this patriarchal society, takes control of the child workforce after killing the EarPod-clad men. Meanwhile, the Doctor’s trio finds a Dimension Vault in Jackson’s cellar. The Cybermen used the Dalek technology to travel through time and escape the Void. They follow the tunnels to the enemy base as the Cybermen attempt to convert Miss Hartigan and provide her liberation (from her anger and rage) as their Cyber King.

Unfortunately for them, she’s too strongwilled for conversion. Her mind is too powerful to control, and she uses her new powers to obliterate the Cyber Leader when it tries to intervene.

The conversion has also moved up the CyberKing’s timetable. Since they’re no longer needed, the Cybermen try to delete the children, but the Doctor and Rosita free them instead. While the children run, Jackson remembers that the Cybermen had also abducted his son, and he finds the boy among the workforce. Unfortunately, Frederic is trapped on a ledge, so the Doctor swashbuckles his way up and rescues him.

As the base ignites around them, the Doctor, Jackson, and Frederic run. Outside, a giant mechanical CyberKing rises from the Thames with Miss Hartigan on the throne, ready to convert millions into Cybermen as it rampages through London. Jackson, Frederic, and Rosita rush to safety.

The Doctor grabs the Dimension Vault and uses the “TARDIS” balloon to look the CyberKing in the eye. He offers Miss Hartigan one last chance at mercy, extending the opportunity for the Cybermen to travel using the Dimension Vault to a place where they can live in peace. She rejects him, so he uses the cache of infostamps against her. The assault breaks the cyber connection and leaves her mind open to see what she’s become. The shock and terror of her reasserted humanity destroys all of the Cybermen, leaving the giant automaton to stumble about until the Doctor uses the Dimension Vault to transport it into the time vortex where it will be disintegrated.

Jackson Lake addresses the onlookers and rallies them to cheer for the Doctor as he drifts above the city. Later on, they discuss the Lake family’s future, including Rosita as Frederic’s new nursemaid. The Doctor offers Jackson a look inside the real TARDIS. Jackson is amazed by the sight, but Jackson has had quite enough adventure. He asks the Doctor about his companions, to which the Doctor turns maudlin.

Jackson offers the Doctor a Christmas dinner in honor of all those that they’ve lost. The Doctor accepts.

 

I’m of two minds about this story. The Jackson Lake mystery is simultaneously amusing and tragic, adding a compelling throughline to the Cyberman invasion plot. The flip side is that the climax of the Cyberman story – the Pacific Rim-style CyberKing – is utterly ridiculous.

It’s a shame, really, because this story balloon really flies along until the cyber-mech lets the air right out.

There are some good but minor things that help tie things off:

The infostamp memory files of the Doctor’s lives come from The Time Meddler, The Ice Warriors, Terror of the Autons, City of Death, Arc of Infinity, The Mysterious Planet, Time and the Rani, Doctor Who (The Movie), The Parting of the Ways, and The Family of Blood, none of which are actuallyCyberman stories. The War Doctor does not appear in the library files, which makes sense from a production standpoint, but doesn’t quite jive from an internal chronological standpoint.

Finally, I also love the character development as the Tenth Doctor considers that his time may be coming to an end. He’s excited to think that he won’t be the last of his regenerations, and his joy is infectious.

I just wish that the cyber jaeger hadn’t been a thing.

 

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

 

 

Keeping in mind that the Timestamps Project is following the franchise chronologically at this point…

UP NEXT – Sarah Jane Adventures: From Raxacoricofallapatorius with Love

 

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

 

 

Timestamp #TW4: Cyberwoman

Michael Falkner6 Comments

Torchwood: Cyberwoman
(1 episode, s01e04, 2006)

 

The fallout of Canary Wharf.

It’s another normal day at Torchwood Three, and that means multi-level basketball with the pterodactyl and drinks after work. Ianto is left behind, and he orders pizza before welcoming Doctor Tanizaki to the Hub. They head down to a holding cell where Ianto reveals his secret: A partially-converted Cyberman – Lisa, his girlfriend from Torchwood One – and a deep desire to save her from her metallic purgatory.

Doctor Tanizaki is a cybernetics expert from Japan, and he is over the moon about the opportunity to work with Cyberman technology. They take Lisa up to the autopsy lab and let her breathe on her own, but the team returns with news of a UFO sighting. Ianto leaves the doctor to take Lisa back to her cell while Ianto prepares for the team’s arrival. Unfortunately, the Cyberman programming takes hold and the good doctor is queued up for conversion. The power drain is noticed by the team – Ianto covers in a less than convincing manner – and the upgrade procedure fails. Ianto finds the mutilated body, but after he leaves to hide the corpse, Lisa begins to drain more power.

The team identifies the UFO as an Arcan leisure crawler, but the power drain redirects them to the holding cell with guns in hand. Owen and Gwen approach the cell while Jack and Tosh discover the video evidence that Ianto tried to delete.  Owen recognizes the Cyberman conversion unit from Torchwood One and alerts Jack. The Cyberman ambushes Owen and attempts to convert Gwen while Jack runs to the rescue. Jack tries to shoot the Cyberman but Ianto stops him. The conversion circuits have been transferred to a secure circuit, so Jack orders Tosh to cut all power to the base, resulting in a lockdown.

The team works their way back to the control hub, finding the Cyberman along the way. Once they get to safety, Jack orders Gwen and Tosh to find a way into the weapons locker while he deals with Ianto. Ianto explains that Jack doesn’t care about his life, and since Torchwood exists to end alien threats, he couldn’t trust Jack not to kill Lisa instead of curing her. Jack retorts that there is no cure and that the Cybermen are not to be taken lightly. Ianto refuses to give up on Lisa and asks to reason with her before Jack attacks again.

The Cyberman arrives in the Hub and Ianto fails to reach the human within. The Cyberman attacks the team and they run to the conference room. Jack orders Tosh to go to reception so they can open the weapons locker while Gwen and Owen look for alternative weapons in the base. The Cyberman confronts Jack, who is deleted twice much to the astonishment of Gwen and Owen, before chasing Tosh. When Tosh escapes, it targets Gwen and Owen, who hide in a morgue locker.

Jack revives and pulls Ianto out of the water. Meanwhile, Owen and Gwen share a quick kiss before her mobile rings and gives them away. Owen stabs the Cyberman with a scalpel – he also shares a few words with Gwen about his feelings for her – but the automaton doesn’t die. Jack douses it in a lure for the pterodactyl, and the dinosaur attacks while the team escapes via the water tower lift. As Tosh catches up with the team, Ianto confronts Jack. The power is restored within moments, but the pizza delivery arrives and the Cyberman feasts on the delivery girl. Ianto tries to stop the team and Jack tries to negotiate with him at gunpoint. He gives Ianto ten minutes to make the situation right before they come in guns blazing.

Ianto finds the delivery girl with a large cut across her forehead. The Cyberman is dead in the holding cell, but Lisa’s brain is in the delivery girl, and that woman tries to appeal to Ianto as she claims to be human once again. Heartbroken, Ianto holds his love one last time before pulling his gun on her. She isn’t human anymore as she offers to upgrade them together. Ianto turns away as the Torchwood team opens fire, ending the Cyberman threat in their house. Ianto mourns over both bodies.

The next day, Ianto returns for work. Jack and Gwen talk about how Ianto couldn’t bear to live without Lisa. Jack evades the question about whether or not he would actually shoot Ianto and whether or not he’s ever loved anyone to that degree. Together, they watch Ianto silently pick up the Hub.

 

As a Cyberman story, this is not a good one. As a character development story, it is fantastic. While the Captain Jack Harkness mystery remains at its status quo, we get an uneasy yet lustful admission from Owen… and Gwen didn’t seem to protest much at all. But most of all, we got to finally see who Ianto Jones is, and it is both tragic and well done. While quietly picking up empty soda cans and discarded pizza boxes, he was frantically trying to save the woman he loved even though it meant bringing an enemy to Torchwood’s gates. Had he been straightforward and placed all of his cards on the table, maybe the team would have been willing to work with him, but he believed that the team was unworthy of his trust. He’s nothing more than Torchwood waitstaff, and this incident told Jack in no uncertain terms that he had more to offer.

I’m very eager to see how Ianto evolves over the rest of the season.

 

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

 

 

UP NEXT – Torchwood: Small Worlds

 

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.