Timestamp #309: Eve of the Daleks

June 12, 2024July 19, 2024 Michael Falkner2 Comments

A fun holiday murder romp!

It’s New Year’s Eve 2021 and Sarah is angry. She’s the owner of ELF Storage and her business partner Jeff has failed to show up once again. She’s also perplexed because regular customer Nick arrives and asks for a list of items that cannot be stored in his storage unit. Luckily, his Monopoly game does not fit this category.

Nick is kind of adorable if a little lovesick.

The Doctor and her team arrive in ELF’s basement, but they were aiming for the sentient beaches of San Munrohvar. They don’t get another shot because the TARDIS is rebooting to clear the Flux debris. In place of a party, they find a temporal disturbance.

That disturbance includes Daleks, which promptly exterminate poor Nick. The Doctor and her friends find his body while Sarah takes a call from her mother. The Dalek emerges behind her and opens fire. The travelers try to confront it but the Dalek exterminates them as well.

Press reset – Let’s do the time loop again!

Nick and Sarah do the routine but recognize that something is odd. The TARDIS crew do the same and try to stop Nick’s death but find nothing there because Nick has returned to the lobby to save Sarah. Sarah finds a force field surrounding the building, so she heads for Jeff’s storage unit to see if he’s hoarding any weapons.

Nick arrives in the lobby and is exterminated. Sarah finds that Jeff has stored his stuff across an entire floor rather than in one unit, but her frustration turns to fear when she is exterminated. Team TARDIS finds the forcefield and the dead bodies, and the Dalek informs them that a time malfunction has resulted in a repeat of the last few minutes. They are exterminated again.

Let’s do the time loop again! Except this time, it starts at 23:53, one minute later than the last cycle. Nick is already at his unit, Sarah sees the Dalek arrive on the CCTV, and Team TARDIS runs for Nick. Everyone collects on the first floor and seek refuge in Nick’s unit, which is full of items belonging to ex-girlfriends just in case they want it back. Unfortunately, there’s only one exit and the Dalek burns through it. The group agrees to meet on the fifth floor before they are exterminated.

Let’s do the time loop again! Starting at 23:54, Nick and Sarah decide to ignore the Doctor’s plan since they blame her for their predicament. They go the basement while Team TARDIS head for the fifth floor. After the Doctor detects a second Dalek signal, Dan splits off at the lobby as a distraction, which he does until he’s exterminated.

Nick and Sarah find the TARDIS and a second Dalek. Nick confesses that has an “embarrassing” crush on Sarah and comes in every New Year’s Eve because she’s guaranteed to be there since Jeff always lets her down. After the touching moment, Nick is exterminated, Sarah finds a door that is not shielded by the forcefield, and then Sarah is exterminated.

The Doctor and Yaz explore Jeff’s storage units and find a room full of dangerous weapons. The Dalek arrives and reveals that a squad was assigned to kill the Doctor for her role in destroying the Dalek war fleet using the Flux. They also learn that the TARDIS created the time loop. Both women are exterminated.

Let’s do the… well, you know. Starting at 23:55, Team TARDIS heads for the lobby and berates Sarah for breaking the agreement. Sarah tries to save Nick, thinking that since he dies at five minutes to midnight, he might not make it to the next loop. Nick survives by luring the Daleks into a trap where they kill each other. The Doctor finds him and they return to the lobby. The group make a plan to bounce their lifesigns around the building while they look for a way out, including asking Sarah’s mother to call ten seconds before midnight. The team is exterminated when three Daleks materialize in the lobby.

Resetting at 23:56, Sarah is immediately killed when the Daleks destroy the elevator. Nick is promptly killed when the power goes out and he is ambushed. The Doctor rushes into the darkness while Yaz and Dan discuss the former’s romantic feelings for the Doctor. The Daleks exterminate them and then hunt down the Doctor.

Resetting at 23:57, Team TARDIS finds Jeff’s stash of illegal fireworks. Yaz goes to the fifth floor while Dan tells the Doctor about Yaz’s feelings, pointing out that the Doctor pretends otherwise. Yaz retrieves Sarah and Nick and the Doctor explains that the next loop is a decoy to hide their true intentions. They are exterminated.

Resetting at 23:58, Sarah rushes to the 5th floor and calls her mother, telling her she loves her. When she emerges from the elevator, she is exterminated. Nick sets up a distraction with his stuff and is exterminated. Team TARDIS lounges in Nick’s storage unit apartment before being exterminated.

Resetting at 23:59, the team takes Nick’s hazardous materials to the basement. The Doctor sets up the trap while the humans run for the door. The Doctor joins them as Sarah’s mother calls, triggering the explosion when the Daleks shoot the phone. ELF Storage collapses in a brilliant fireworks display.

Having survived the Dalek trap, the Doctor, Yaz, and Dan find the rejuvenated TARDIS while crane operator Karl Wright films the fireworks show. Later on, Nick and Sarah embark on a trip around the world. As they start their new life together, the TARDIS arcs through the sky behind them.

All told, this was a fun story that acted like a coda to the Flux storyline. The TARDIS needs to recover and the team needs to come to terms with what they faced, and one of their enemies wants revenge.

The fact that the Dalek squad was dispatched indicates that something of the Dalek fleet survived the Sontaran strategy, and that makes sense since the Doctor’s enemies (and their Master) will be her end. It seems the destruction wrought by the Flux will be a matter of plot convenience going forward.

We get some hints of lore – Dalek assassins figured heavily into The Chase, and the use of sonic screwdrivers on concrete was a small part of The Doctor Dances – but otherwise, this one is light, quirky, adorable, and fun.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils

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 #308: Flux – The Vanquishers

June 5, 2024July 19, 2024 Michael Falkner4 Comments

The end of a story with little resolution.

Picking up immediately at the cliffhanger from Chapter Five, the Doctor dodges Swarm’s attempt to disintegrate her and rescues the Ood to find a way out. The Doctor nearly escapes from the Void, but is lured back by Swarm and Azure as they hold the Doctor’s fob watch. Swarm touches the Doctor as the Ood finds a way home for her, forcing her to materialize on Karvanista’s ship where a pitched battle is underway. Unfortunately, the Doctor is phasing.

Meanwhile, Yaz, Dan, Jericho, and Williamson are under Sontaran assault in the tunnels under Liverpool. Yaz lassos the door labeled “Death Rays” – a sort-of Chekhov’s gun hung upon the mantle in Chapter Five – and kills the invaders. The team rushes through the tunnels, trying various doors that transcend time, before entering one labeled December 5, 2021. The team finds Kate Stewart and the TARDIS as she leads a human resistance against the Sontarans.

The Doctor appears in the modern-day tunnels and meets the team (with a hug for Yaz) before bouncing back to the Division station. Swarm and Azure are pleased with their inadvertent results as the Doctor flashes to Karvanista’s ship and flies into Stenck’s command ship with Karvanista and Bel.

Sontaran Commander Stenck calls on the Cybermen and Daleks to join his assault on Earth. Stenck and the Grand Serpent defeat the Doctor’s assault as she offers Bel the chance at a covert mission. As the Doctor flashes back to Division, Azure opens the fob watch but the Doctor refuses to absorb the memories. Swarm begins shredding the memories, which inflicts pain on the Doctor.

Flashing to Liverpool, the Doctor investigates the tunnels and learns about Williamson’s and Stewart’s efforts. The group decides to send undercover operatives into the Sontaran ships, exploiting a weakness thanks to the invaders’ fascination with corner shops. It turns out that Sontarans are obsessed with sugar, and the Doctor bargains with Commander Shallo to trade chocolate for an operative. The team travels to 1967, picks up Claire, and enlists her psychic abilities for 2021.

The Doctor flashes to the Sontaran command ship in 2021 where she’s in a cage with Karvanista. She asks him about his time in Division, but he cannot talk about it due to a device in his brain that will kill him if he discloses his secrets. She flashes back to Division where Azure restores her to consciousness. Azure and Swarm plan to move the final Flux event from Earth to the planet Time, releasing the physical embodiment of Time and using it to replay the universe’s destruction in an endless loop, forcing the Doctor to witness it for eternity as revenge for their incarceration.

Flashing to the Sontaran ship, the Doctor meets Stenck and the Grand Serpent. Stenck reveals that they killed all of the Lupari, leaving Karvanista as the last of his kind. The commander takes the Doctor for interrogation as Karvanista howls in sorrow for his people.

Taking a detour to the Passenger form, Diane and Vinder search through endless landscapes and realize they are alone in their vast prison. Everyone else was used as energy but Diane was determined to be insignificant. Diane reveals she’s been busy exploring the bioform’s systems and defenses, and they use her knowledge to escape to the real world.

Jericho and Claire are taken to Stenck’s ship and tasked with determining the time and place of the final Flux event. The psychic work is intrusive and painful. Meanwhile, the Grand Serpent interrogates the Doctor about Kate Stewart’s location. She taunts the Grand Serpent and he tries to kill her with his serpents, but because the Doctor is split across three locations, the effort fails. The Liverpool Doctor fragment arrives in the TARDIS with Dan and Yaz, incapacitates the Grand Serpent, and rescues the Sontaran Doctor fragment. They also rescue Karvanista and Bel and make contact with the psychic agents.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor fragments witness the Sontaran message to the Daleks and Cybermen, then make telepathic contact with the third fragment and learn how the Flux is made of antimatter. Meanwhile, Claire finds the data about the final Flux event and Stenck recalls his troops. The Grand Serpent uses artron energy readings to find Kate Stewart.

The Doctors receive messages from Vinder and Kate, and they decide to split up to tackle each problem. Vinder and Diane are pulled back into the Passenger form, the tunnel doors fluctuate due to Flux effects, and Williamson returns home while he has time. The Doctor pilots the TARDIS inside the Passenger form and rescues the prisoners, resulting in a reunion between couples Vinder and Bel and Dan and Diane.

The Doctor also figures out that the Sontaran peace treaty is a trick: They plan to use the Dalek and Cyberman fleets to counteract the Flux event, leaving the universe as the Sontaran playground. The Doctor hatches a plan to save the universe as her Division fragment is taken to Time by Swarm as a sacrifice.

Claire escapes using a transmat ring, but Jericho is stuck on the Sontaran ship. The Dalek and Cyberman fleets are destroyed by the Flux, but the Sontarans are left outside the Lupari shell when Karvanista reprograms the fleet. The Doctor tries to save Jericho, but he’s unable to escape as the Sontaran fleet is consumed. Finally, Diane summons the Passenger form which traps the rest of the Flux.

Last stop is Atropos. The physical form of Time manifests as Swarm and reveals that the Flux has been defeated. Time consumes Swarm and Azure for their failure, then takes the Doctor’s form as the Time Lord retrieves her fob watch. Time teases the end of the Thirteenth Doctor at the hand of the forces that mass against her and their Master, then restores the Doctor by combining her fragments. Now in the TARDIS, the Doctor sets course to take everyone home.

In the tunnels, the Grand Serpent confronts Vinder and Kate Stewart but ends up stranded on a tiny asteroid forever. Vinder and Bel decide to travel with Karvanista, and Claire remains in 2021 with Kate as the Doctor expresses her hope of seeing both of them again.

Sometime later, Dan returns to the museum where he meets up with Diane again. Diane turns down his offer for a drink as she processes the adventure she just experienced. The Doctor and Yaz offer him a spot on the TARDIS. As Dan settles in, the Doctor finally apologizes for her secrecy. Yaz leaves to help Dan navigate the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor to hide her fob watch in the TARDIS console.

She instructs the time capsule to keep it safe and only give it back when she really asks for it.

This frantic episode shares Chapter Five‘s issue with a fast pace that doesn’t offer much room to breathe. Thankfully, it slows down near the end, offering some space leading into the disappointing ending. Why is it disappointing? I don’t like the Doctor running from knowledge.

So much of Doctor Who concerns a quest for learning and doing good in the universe, yet this epic story ends with the Doctor running away from her own history. The answers are right there, yet she hides them instead of facing them.

If I had three words to tell her, they would be “Brave heart, Doctor.”

The other disappointing part of the finale is the lack of resolution. Multi-part stories and episodic seasons should have an overall resolution, but this one leaves the universe in a state of flux (pun intended) with immeasurable destruction wrought throughout. We have no idea how much of the universe is left standing, let alone how much of the local solar system. The whole thing is just passed off as the new status quo with hardly a mention.

Say it with me, now: Chris Chibnall has a problem with endings. It’s been apparent since he started, and even though I thought it might be better with long-form narratives, this proves that it’s not. I like the Planet of the Ood and Planet of the Dead-style warnings for the Thirteenth Doctor’s impending regeneration. They’re just cryptic enough to make you wonder what’s coming, but it’s only a lonely spark in what should have been a lovely fireworks show.

Concerning the Lupari, I like the drama created by the Sontaran genocide of Karvanista’s people, but it would have been more emotionally involved had we seen it instead of being told about it. Karvanista’s mourning howls are heartbreaking but somewhat hollow. It is fitting, however, that Vinder and Bel become his new family in the end.

I had similar thoughts about the TARDIS materializing inside the Passenger form. It just happens and the story moves on. No discussion aside from a one-liner about how the TARDIS doesn’t like it, and no tie-in to the TARDIS’s currently warped and/or broken state. Is that even still a thing at this point, or did that magically get resolved?

Flux was a ride, but it could have been more.

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

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks

Timestamp #305: Flux – Once, Upon Time

May 15, 2024July 19, 2024 Michael Falkner5 Comments

A story that covers a lot of ground only to go full circle.

This chapter starts with a woman named Bel and her story in the aftermath of the Flux. On the run from Daleks, she’s trying to make sense of corruptions in time and space. As a swarm of blue particles consumes a pair of survivors she vows to find the one she loves.

Back at the Temple of Atropos, the Doctor tries to save Yaz and Vinder by pushing Dan on a pedestal as she leaps into the heart of the time storm. The others vanish as a Weeping Angel appears, then she’s swept away. A flashback follows to the Seige of Atropos where the four are commandos with the Doctor in charge.

Dan has his own vision where he gets coffee with Diane in Liverpool. Yaz has a similar vision where she’s on patrol with her police supervisor. Vinder has a vision where he receives an award and a promotion. All of them are aware of the irregularities in their scenarios as the Doctor flickers in and out.

The Doctor’s vision continues as her team infiltrates the Temple of Atropos in search of the Ravagers. She’s returned to the time storm where she stands before three giant Mouri. She’s returned to the temple where she discovers she’s reliving a moment from the Fugitive Doctor’s life. To save her friends, she needs to survive the encounter.

Dan ends up in tunnels where he encounters Joseph Williamson holding a laser weapon. After an encounter with the blue swarm, he returns to Liverpool where a vision of the Doctor tells him not to disappear while she tries to convince the Mouri to help.

Bel’s story continues after stealing a Lupari ship and flying to a new sector dominated by Cybermen. She consults a device called Tigmi before pushing onward.

Vinder’s memories continue as he serves the Grand Serpent. Yaz lives a memory of playing video games with Sonya, learns the truth of their predicament from the Doctor, and discovers that her timestream is being corrupted by the Weeping Angels.

At the Siege of Atropos, the Doctor faces the Ravagers (including Azure and an older version of Swarm). She learns about the Passengers – an endlessly large living prison with five of them holding hundreds of thousands of beings – and captures the Ravagers after they destroy two of the passengers. The Doctor reveals that one of the Passengers belongs to Division and contains the Mouri. The Doctor convinces the Mouri in the time storm to replicate the same infiltration.

Bel escapes from the planet but her ship is invaded by Cybermen. She narrowly survives by shooting all of them only to learn that all of the surviving villains are fighting for the scraps of the universe.

Vinder’s service to the Grand Serpent reveals that his commander is corrupt. When Vinder reports the Grand Serpent’s actions, he is exiled to Observation Outpost Rose. He is allowed to record only one message to his family.

The Doctor finishes her mission on Atropos, learning that one of her cohorts was Karvanista. She is swept to a station where she meets an old woman named Awsok who tells her that the Flux and Ravagers were introduced intentionally to destroy space and time. It was designed to stop the Doctor.

Yaz, Dan, Vinder, and the Doctor emerge in the modern-day temple as Mouri are restored. Swarm and Azure summon the blue Time Force particles and gloat that they have already won, taunting Dan with an image of Diane trapped in a Passenger. The villains teleport away and the team returns to the TARDIS, which Vinder easily recognizes.

Bel sits beside a campfire and listens to Vinder’s message. She promises to find Vinder and reunite him with his unborn child. Meanwhile, Vinder returns to his home planet and finds it ravaged by the Flux. He stays behind to search for Bel as the TARDIS moves on.

Peace on the TARDIS is shortlived, however, as a Weeping Angel appears on Yaz’s phone. It soon emerges and takes control of the ship.

The Angel has the TARDIS.

On the one hand, this story provides a ton of backstory for Vinder and the Doctor, particularly for the latter as a small slice of the Fugitive Doctor’s life is explained. It ties the Doctor to the temple and the Ravagers and provides a thread for the future about the Flux and its engineered impact on the universe. It also provides another plot thread as Bel searches for Vinder.

On the other hand, this chapter spins in a circle, ultimately going where Dan and Yaz went, which is nowhere. In fact, Dan and Yaz are effectively sidelined in safe pockets of time while the Doctor figures out a solution.

The story itself is the most chaotic of Flux so far, ping-ponging to and fro and ultimately resulting in a loss for our heroes. They didn’t achieve anything concerning saving the universe, though, to their credit, they did gain new information by following the path the enemy laid out.

It’s an interesting concept, but the execution felt frantic and anxious. Instead of ramping down at the end, it crashed to a halt with a cliffhanger. Thankfully, though, this intrusion into the TARDIS actually made sense since Yaz brought the Angel with her from the time storm.

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

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Flux – Village of the Angels

Timestamp #302: Revolution of the Daleks

April 17, 2024July 22, 2024 Michael Falkner5 Comments

A little bit of cloning and a little bit of open warfare.

It’s been 367 minutes since the Doctor and her team destroyed the Reconnaissance Dalek in GCHQ. An ill-fated truck driver takes the empty casing to Depository 23, but he is assassinated en route with some bad roadside tea. The woman who served the tea stashes his corpse in the truck and drives it away.

Jo Patterson, the Technology Secretary for the United Kingdom, meets with Leo Rugazzi and Jack Robertson to see the engineer’s new defense drones. The demonstration includes a mock riot which is broken up by a drone that looks like a Dalek but uses water cannons and tear gas. The drone is solar-powered and driven by artificial intelligence. Patterson buys into the idea because they will help her win the upcoming election.

Some 79 billion light years away, the Doctor wakes up in her asteroid cell and scratches another tally mark on the wall. She goes through her daily routine, including a walk with restrained Weeping Angels, Ood, Silence, and Pting, before getting ready for bed. She hears four knocks through her wall and knocks four times in reply, but there is no further answer.

Back on Earth, Ryan, Graham, and Yaz meet in the TARDIS disguised as a house. Yaz is working on a method to find the Doctor, but Ryan and Graham urge her to move on. Graham also shows her footage of the new security drone and the companions decide to investigate.

Patterson convinces Robertson to expedite a national rollout of the security drones at no cost to the taxpayers. Later, the companions confront Robertson about his drones but are forced to leave when armed security arrives.

In the prison, the Doctor finds Jack Harkness during her daily constitutional. He shows her a temporal-freezing gateway disinhibitor bubble which they use to escape by treating it like a hamster ball. Using a vortex manipulator, the pair vanishes.

Patterson wins her election as Prime Minister and party leader. Rugazzi shows Robertson the organic remnants he found in the original casing, which he has cloned and grown into a Dalek mutant. Robertson tells Leo to destroy it, but it eventually takes control of the engineer.

The vortex manipulator drops Jack and the Doctor inside the Doctor’s TARDIS. Jack likes the new interior design. They discuss the Cyberium and Ashad, as well as the Doctor’s imprisonment for being herself while she was trying to figure out who she was. She tells the TARDIS to find her fam.

That fam is discussing the Dalek threat when the TARDIS materializes in the living room. It’s been ten months since the companions and the Doctor were separated, and after she apologizes, the companions tell her about the Dalek.

The Dalek controlling Leo takes him to Osaka, Japan, where he finds a clone farm that has somehow sprung to life in the time since it was cloned. As the companions board the TARDIS, Jack gives them a crash course on his history with the Doctor. They split up, sending Yaz and Jack to find the Dalek DNA in Osaka while Ryan and Graham accompany the Doctor to Robertson’s office.

Robertson shows off his 3D printing operation, but the Doctor warns him he’s messing with something he doesn’t understand. He also denies having a facility in Osaka, which Yaz and Jack find listed as an agricultural park but containing the clone farm. Jack also warns Yaz that she should enjoy her journey with the Doctor because it will end, but is worth the pain in the end.

PM Patterson announces the defense drones in an address outside 10 Downing Street. While she promises a new secure age for the UK, the Doctor, Graham, and Ryan take Robertson to Osaka. The Doctor and Ryan have a heart-to-heart talk during which she promises to find out about herself. Meanwhile, Yaz and Jack set explosives and are besieged by the cloned Daleks. They get some relief when the TARDIS arrives.

The Doctor asks about the farm and Dalek-Leo admits that he infiltrated Earth’s networks and diverted resources to remotely direct its construction. He even fed his clones with the workers just to keep things clean. The Dalek intends to use the planet as a base to conquer this sector of the universe. Yaz and the Doctor note that the light is changing in the facility, gradually becoming ultraviolet to allow the clones to teleport into the shells that Robertson built.

With thousands of shells at their command, the Daleks begin their assault on Earth, including the assassination of PM Patterson. The Dalek controlling Leo kills the engineer and teleports away. The Doctor finally figures out who she is… she’s the one who stops the Daleks. Opting for the nuclear option, she sends the Reconnaissance Scout’s signal through the time vortex and summons the Death Squad Daleks – the SAS of Daleks – who will ignore humans in favor of exterminating the impure clones. They mustn’t realize, however, that the Doctor is on Earth.

As the cloned Daleks wreak havoc in the streets, the bronze-colored Death Squad begin exterminating Robertson’s army. As the Doctor prepares to move on, Robertson approaches the Death Squad and joins them with information about who sent the signal.

The Doctor continues her plan: Once all of the defense drones are destroyed, Jack will destroy the Death Squad ship. Graham and Ryan join him and start planting charges. Jack finds Robertson as the businessman tells the Dalek leader about the Doctor. As the final defense drone is destroyed, Jack calls the Doctor with what he learned and she enacts a backup plan with Yaz.

The Daleks detect the TARDIS hovering over the city and swarm around it. She emerges and baits them into entering the TARDIS as the explosives tear the command ship apart. The Doctor appears as a hologram and reveals that the Daleks are trapped in the “house” TARDIS. Further, she has programmed it to fold in on itself and emerge in the heart of the Void where it will self-destruct.

With the threat eliminated, Graham and Ryan watch the news as Robertson takes credit for saving everyone. Disgusted, the pair joins the Doctor and Yaz on the TARDIS where Jack sends regards from Gwen Cooper. It is then that Ryan declares that he’s done traveling with her because he knows what he wants to do with his life.

The Doctor hugs him farewell. Yaz wants to keep traveling, but Graham doesn’t want to miss his grandson growing up. The fam shares one last hug and the Doctor gives each of the men a piece of psychic paper. The Doctor and Yaz are sad, but they know that it’s okay.

Sometime later, Graham and Ryan are back on the hillside as the latter practices with a bicycle. They discuss strange occurrences like a troll invasion in Finland and gravel creatures in Korea. They decide to make plans, but first, they finish cycling practice.

And a vision of Grace watches over them as they work.

The companions really steal this show as the Doctor struggles with the Timeless Child revelation. It makes sense, given that this is the swan song for Ryan and Graham. We also get a good story where three companions seem to work well together. Unfortunately, that formula still doesn’t include Yaz as she gets very little to do with this otherwise explosive plot.

There are some hiccups along the way. No one addresses the murder that kicks off the defense drone program, and the timing’s a bit suspect when it comes to building the farm. The Dalek wasn’t in charge of Leo long enough to make that work, but the story needed a way to mass-produce Daleks.

On the plus side, the subtle references to Doctor Who history are pretty clever. The Death Squad Daleks are the bronze versions that have popped up throughout the revival era, and the defense drones are voiced similarly to the Imperial Daleks last seen during the Dalek Civil War. It makes sense that they would fight one another.

I enjoyed the crash course on Jack’s history with the new companions. It plays well with the running thread of the companions and their questions about traveling in the TARDIS. I also dug the running gag of not telling Robertson how the TARDIS works while he traveled in it.

Finally, I’m glad that the creative team is embracing the changes they made by way of the Timeless Child. The Doctor has to rediscover who they are while facing a large, looming threat. It’s good drama.

Note that this is the final appearance of Captain Jack Harkness (as of early 2024) due to allegations of sexual misconduct leading to John Barrowman’s blacklisting by the BBC.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Series Twelve Summary

Timestamp #293: Resolution

January 31, 2024July 29, 2024 Michael Falkner4 Comments

Conquest in 9376 rels. However long that is.

In the 9th century, three tribes of people came together to destroy a creature beyond their nightmares. Victorious, three Custodians split the creature into three pieces and hid them in distant places: Anuta Island, Siberia, and Yorkshire. Unfortunately, the Custodian in England was killed by thieves in Sheffield. His fragment remained unguarded for over 1000 years.

On New Year’s Day, 2019, archaeologists Lin and Mitch excavate a site in Sheffield. They discuss their kiss at a party the night before, eventually leading to a promise to make plans later. They discover a mysterious object near a skeleton’s hand and are excited that this may be the key to unlocking the mysteries behind the supposed Battle of Hope Valley.

They pair chat, and while they’re distracted the bag begins to move. Meanwhile, on Anuta Island and in Siberia, the current Custodians watch as their shrines begin to act strangely. Once uncovered, the remaining two packages teleport away.

In the TARDIS, the fam is making the rounds through time and space to different New Year’s Eve celebrations. With nineteen down and a twentieth to go, the TARDIS warns the Doctor that an extraterrestrial threat is descending on Sheffield.

Time to go to work!

The TARDIS materializes as a tentacled being escapes from the archaeological sample bags. Lin finds the creature – a Dalek mutant! – but it disappears before the newly arrived Doctor can see it. She analyzes the slime that it left behind and quarantines the site. Lin and Mitch make plans to meet up later, but Lin starts to act funny once she reaches her car.

The Doctor takes team TARDIS to Graham and Ryan’s house. After breaking Graham’s chair, the Doctor scrounges up kitchen supplies to sequence the slime proteins. Ryan’s father arrives, but the reception is quite frosty. Ryan gives Aaron the benefit of the doubt and takes his father for coffee, but not before Graham takes him aside for some choice words about his failings.

Lin returns home and we find out that she’s been taken over by the Dalek. It gloats about being able to control her body and brain, and it forces her to access UNIT archives to learn about Earth’s capabilities and defenses. Lin tries to fight back, but the Dalek is too strong. Meanwhile, the Doctor figures out what they’re dealing with and explains the threat to Graham and Yaz.

The Dalek takes Lin for a joyride. While driving her car at over 100 miles per hour, they are pulled over by the police, but the Dalek easily dispatches the police officers. Lin steals a uniform and the police car, leaving the officers on the road.

In the café, Aaron reveals his new profession to his son as he tries to sell a microwave oven to the owner. Unfortunately, Aaron’s not good at sales and is considering oil rig work again. Ryan gets angry and explains how lonely, abandoned, and lost he has felt without Aaron’s presence in his life. Aaron realizes that he’s made a lot of bad choices but he promises not to hide from the truth anymore.

Yaz calls Mitch as she tries to track down Lin. The Doctor traces the phone call, materializes the TARDIS right next to him, and welcomes him aboard. After a brief “bigger on the inside” moment, Mitch explains the Three Custodians and the ancient battle with the Dalek. Once the Doctor makes the connection between the Dalek and Lin, she locates them in the same place. Ryan returns to the TARDIS and stows the microwave in the corner. The Doctor tries to get a read on the Dalek, but it jams the scans and shorts the system. The Doctor realizes that this is a reconnaissance scout, one of the first to leave Skaro and reach Earth.

Lin and the Dalek reach the MDZ Research security archives in Yorkshire and kill the security guard. There they find a Dalek gunstick and try to leave, but the Doctor connects with the Dalek and speaks to it, confirming that it is a recon scout. When the Dalek laughs at the Doctor’s message, she summons a hologram of Lin so they can see face-to-face. She uses Mitch as a lifeline to Lin, reboots the navigation systems, and speeds off to meet the intruder.

Of course, this leaves Aaron and Graham alone in the latter’s living room. Graham takes advantage of the situation by having a more civil discussion with Aaron. Grace was proud of him, and she kept a large box of things about him, including artifacts from his childhood.

The Dalek stymies the navigation trace, so the Doctor tries to use traffic cameras and CCTV to track it. When that doesn’t work, she tries to call Kate Stewart at UNIT, but budget cuts have resulted in UNIT being temporarily shut down.

Lin and the Dalek end up at a farm workshop where they kill the owner and start welding parts together. As Lin begins to tire, she fights back against the Dalek, opening the door for the Doctor to find her. When the TARDIS arrives, the Dalek has separated from Lin, leaving her weak but alive. The Doctor sends her companions back to the TARDIS while she confronts the Dalek, now encased in a custom mobile casing. It’s not perfect by any means, sporting a claw arm and recycled Earth metal, and this provides a chance for the Doctor to jam the gunstick signals and talk. When the Doctor identifies herself, it overrides the block and shoots at her. It misses but declares that it has everything it needs to conquer Earth before launching out of the warehouse and into the sky.

The Doctor fires up the TARDIS again, making a quick detour to pick up Aaron and Graham while Lin recovers. Aaron is beside himself, but he gets a chance to contribute when the Doctor uses his microwave oven to build a defense.

The Dalek lands in an open area and encounters the British Army. It makes short work of them with the gunstick and missiles under the casing’s domes. It then launches for GCHQ, the center of all British communications. Once there, it wreaks havoc before diverting all possible power toward Skaro, including Wi-Fi, phone signals, and internet. The Doctor arrives with the TARDIS shields on full, offering an ultimatum to the Dalek. When the Dalek refuses, the Doctor springs their plan into action, attaching the microwave pieces to the shell and explosively melting it down.

The reconnaissance signal wasn’t sent, but the Dalek isn’t done yet. It has attached itself to Aaron and forces the Doctor to take it to the Dalek fleet. Everyone boards the TARDIS and the Doctor sets course for the fleet, but she has instead taken them to a supernova. When she opens the doors, she creates a vacuum corridor and tries to send the Dalek into the star. Ryan rushes for his father, risking everything to save him while telling him that he loves him. The Dalek loses control and falls into the supernova. Everyone is now safe.

Later on, the TARDIS returns to the underground dig site in Sheffield. Lin and Mitch return to their lives, and Aaron turns down a trip in the TARDIS. Ryan promises to call him when he gets back.

The TARDIS and her crew set sail once again… destination everywhere.

This story did what the previous one did not: Provided a good season finale. It has a lot of good family details, closing the loop on Ryan and his father along with showing the healing relationship between Ryan and Graham.

The TARDIS console room is a bit brighter, even though it’s the same set that we’ve seen all season. It primes us a little bit for the slightly more fleshed-out set we’ll see next time. The Doctor also gets a new accessory with her winter scarf, a real-world design that sold out pretty quickly after this episode aired, but clever fans have interpreted it on Etsy and Ravelry. It’s a great choice for Thirteen’s bubbly personality.

This episode moves fast – too fast in some places – and wraps up far too quickly. The latter is a Chibnall trademark when it comes to episodic work. That ending also includes a statement that “The Doctor will return”. With the power of hindsight, we could say that it was setting the stage for Spyfall‘s James Bond-inspired homage, but it’s more likely that this was setting audience expectations.

After all, the next Doctor Who adventure wouldn’t arrive for a full year.

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

UP NEXT – Series Eleven Summary

Timestamp #282: Twice Upon a Time

May 31, 2023August 19, 2024 Michael Falkner11 Comments

The (other) two Doctors.

709 episodes ago, the First Doctor faced the Cybermen. After the threat was over, the Doctor walked through the snow storms of the South Pole to his TARDIS. There he found someone claiming to be the Doctor.

He found the Twelfth Doctor.

The First Doctor is obviously confused by the new Time Lord and the confusing proportions of the TARDIS. The Twelfth Doctor realizes that the First Doctor is refusing to regenerate, and as he outlines the problems with that idea, time stops around them. They are soon greeted by a British soldier from World War I.

This soldier comes from Ypres 1914 where he was engaged in a standoff with a German soldier. Both hold the other at gunpoint inside a bomb crater and the British captain is startled when time freezes. He takes in the bizarre battlefield before encountering a glass avatar that deposits him half a world away with the two Doctors. When he greets them, the glass avatar appears and the Doctors approach it. When the Twelfth Doctor declares that the planet is protected, the avatar disappears and the First Doctor invites everyone inside the TARDIS for protection.

The First Doctor is astounded because he thought that this TARDIS was his TARDIS. Meanwhile, the Twelfth Doctor mentions that the British captain is from the First World War, which shocks him since he only knows of the War to End All Wars (which it obviously did not). As the captain tries to understand the wonders around him, the two Doctors come to terms with their mutual situation. The Doctors offer the captain some brandy to calm his nerves and the Twelfth is astounded by the First’s lack of decorum toward gender roles.

The discussions all halt when the TARDIS is pulled into an overhead spacecraft that holds the Chamber of the Dead. The First Doctor exits the TARDIS to face the chamber as the captain and the Twelfth Doctor watch from the console. The First Doctor doesn’t understand being called the “Doctor of War.” Meanwhile, when Bill Potts arrives from a portal, the Twelfth Doctor rushes to meet her before realizing that this being is not the Bill that he knew. In fact, she is a duplicate and his Bill is dead.

The Doctors wonder who has been stealing the faces of the dead and investigate the chamber. They find the glass avatar who explains that they chronicle the lives of beings in the moments before their deaths, becoming a living testimony. They explain that they tried to capture the captain’s testimony but a timeline error caused him to become misplaced. The captain offers to take Bill’s place, but the Twelfth Doctor proposes taking both Bill and the captain. The First Doctor demands to know who the Twelfth thinks he is, and the First is astounded to find out just how his future will play out as the avatar reveals his legacy. It is recorded as one of battles and bloodshed.

Technically, what the Testimony shows him is accurate. It’s just missing context.

The Twelfth Doctor opens the airlock and everyone jumps, holding onto the chains restraining the TARDIS as it drops to the surface. The Testimony retrieves the Twelfth Doctor’s TARDIS and the four travelers escape Earth in the First Doctor’s ship instead. As they run, Bill figures out how the two Time Lords are related.

The Doctors realize that the glass avatar’s face is asymmetrical, and they decide that they need to find a database to figure out who she represents. The Twelfth Doctor considers the Matrix on Gallifrey, but instead decides to visit Villengard at the center of the universe. There is a database there, but it wants to kill him. Unfortunately, the area is swarming with Kaled mutants.

The Twelfth Doctor insists that Bill wait in the TARDIS with the captain and the First Doctor, but Bill stands defiant as her Doctor considers her nothing more than a doppelgänger. The tension is broken when the First Doctor chastises her for bad language. With a laugh and the hope that she and the Twelfth Doctor can joke about this for years, she joins the captain while the First Doctor explores the surface with his future self.

They discuss their mutual decision not to regenerate. The First Doctor admits his fear of the future, but when he asks about the Twelfth’s rationale, the answer is pre-empted by weapons fire. The Twelfth Doctor stands in the open and demands that their assailant scan him. When the truth of the Doctor’s pending doom is revealed, the sniper allows the Time Lords to enter the tower.

In the meantime, Bill and the captain talk about his fate. The captain recognizes that he must die, but he’s no longer ready to do so. He’s shocked when Bill reveals herself as a glass avatar.

The First Doctor remains at the tower entrance for his safety as the Twelfth Doctor climbs to meet his assailant. The shooter is revealed to be the Dalek named Rusty. They come to a truce as Rusty tears off his own gunstick, and the Twelfth Doctor finds out that the glass avatars and their ship, the Testimony, were created on New Earth. This comes from the Dalek programmed to hate Daleks and his connection to the Dalek hive mind. Rusty agrees to provide the information since helping the Doctor harms the Daleks.

Bill’s glass avatar meets up with the First Doctor as he finds Dalek parts nearby. She talks to the Doctor, probing his past and his motivations, asking what he’s running toward. She declares that the Doctor is amazing and thanks him for his efforts. When he realizes that she’s a glass avatar, he comes to understand her motives as an agent of Testimony.

Bill and the First Doctor ascend the tower and time stops again. The Doctors realize that there is no evil to fight, and while Bill is an avatar, she reminds the Doctor that reality is merely a function of memories. The Twelfth Doctor tells her that he’s tired of losing people, hence the reason why he doesn’t want to regenerate. He decides to return the captain to his proper time as he considers how their decisions not to regenerate caused the timeline error that displaced the officer.

En route, he has a revelation and changes course, dropping the captain at the start of the famous Christmas Truce, ensuring that his life will be spared. The captain will not be able to remember his adventure and won’t be able to see the Doctors or Bill once his timeline restarts. He asks them to check on his family from time to time, introducing himself as Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart, an ancestor of the Brigadier. The Doctor is overjoyed at the prospect.

When time starts again, Captain Lethbridge-Stewart and the German soldier nearly pull their triggers, but they stop as both sides begin to sing Christmas carols. The truce was a miracle, a one-of-a-kind, but one that allowed everyone to stop fighting and be kind for a short time.

The First Doctor is happy to see how the “Doctor of War” solved the problem, to which the Twelfth responds that their place is to help when the universe isn’t a fairy tale. The Doctors decide that they are both ready to go on living and they part ways.

The First Doctor returns to the South Pole as the Twelfth bids farewell to Captain Lethbridge-Stewart. Ben and Polly find their Doctor on the TARDIS floor as he regenerates into the Second Doctor. Meanwhile, the Twelfth Doctor asks Bill if she’d like to take one last trip in the TARDIS. She tells him that the hardest thing about knowing him is letting him go then gives him a goodbye present as she kisses his cheek and turns into Clara.

The Doctor is overjoyed to remember her, as is the memory of his former companion. He also gets to say goodbye to Nardole, who encourages him not to die since it would mean that the universe would go cold. The Doctor refuses to offer his testimony to the avatars, stating that he must be left alone to face his fate. He thanks them for what they have offered and they agree with a hug.

The Doctor boards the TARDIS again, ready to leave the battlefield. As he engages the TARDIS, he gazes upon the universe and concedes that one more lifetime won’t kill anyone. Well, except him. He relays some advice to his future self in a powerful speech before falling to the floor. He picks himself up and utters his final words: “Doctor… I let you go.”

The regeneration process is so violent that it rips into every corner of the console room. As smoke fills the room, his ring falls from his hand and his face transforms into a younger version. As the smoke clears, the Doctor’s new face is visible in a reflection.

The Thirteenth Doctor is a woman. Oh, brilliant.

She smiles broadly for just a moment until the TARDIS suffers a catastrophic systems failure. The ship tilts to one side as the console room explodes around her. The doors fly open, and even though she holds on as tight as she can, she eventually falls out of the TARDIS as it hovers thousands of feet above Earth.

The Doctor can only watch in horror as the TARDIS is engulfed in flames and dematerializes, leaving her to plummet toward the planet below.

Starting with the good stuff, I adore this multi-Doctor special because the threat isn’t really a threat at all. Fans have been conditioned since 2005 to expect a monster of some sort each week, and this fake-out driven by that assumption is a nice change of pace. I also like how the story was carved out of a space in The Tenth Planet‘s finale, drawing a parallel between the two Doctors as they ponder their futures. The classical romanticism and vulnerability are touching.

The setup also ties off a narrative thread started in The Pilot, which showed us a Doctor fresh off losing two people close to him. The thread has run across this series and comes to a beautiful conclusion here as the Doctor faces the loss of three people in The Doctor Falls. In a sense, both Doctors share a fear of the future.

It doesn’t hurt that I have a soft spot for the Christmas Truce. The truce was not unique in general – World War I had quite a few “live and let live” moments like this where soldiers would stop hostilities and fraternize – but this was one of the largest and most memorable.

The biggest failing of this adventure was the writing for the First Doctor. This story treats the character as a sexist dinosaur, but it seems like Steven Moffat’s target was the 1960s in general and he used the First Doctor as an avatar for his grievances. Certainly, the era didn’t treat women fairly, but Doctor Who stood apart with more well-rounded characters in comparison to some of the portrayals and dialogue found in later decades. Yes, the First Doctor was the character who let a caveman die until Ian stepped in, threatened a “jolly good smacked bottom” for Susan after her clumsiness inconvenienced him, was generally irascible and cranky, and even said a few things in The Five Doctors that made his successors squeamish, but this representation betrays the progressive heart that this show has had since birth.

Don’t get me wrong: David Bradley’s performance is amazing. It’s Steven Moffat and his meta-commentary that failed here because his research into the character seems to have stopped at the First Doctor’s first adventure, which is a far cry from the character’s nature in his final adventure.

That huge downside is unfortunate because there’s so much to love here, from the regeneration being a good narrative cover for the change in actors, the First Doctor’s treatment of sonic technology, the transitions from 1966 archive footage to modern imagery and back, and the fantastic rebuild of the First Doctor’s TARDIS. I also didn’t notice that Bill’s wardrobe constantly changes throughout the episode, perhaps as a tip of the hand to her true nature.

Not bad at all for an episode that was supposed to be Jodie Whittaker’s first adventure. That would have been a sight to see.

Finally, the regeneration is probably one of my favorites of the modern era. I was visiting family on the other side of the country when this episode first aired and I stayed up late at my brother-in-law’s house after everyone else had gone to bed. Peter Capaldi’s final speech was perfect and brought me to tears then, as it still does today.

Even with the imperfect writing, this story still does it for me.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Series Ten Summary

Timestamp #273: The Pilot

March 15, 2023August 19, 2024 Michael Falkner3 Comments

A new companion gets an education.

An empty university office soon welcomes Nardole and a woman we will come to know as Bill. The TARDIS stands darkly in the corner of the office, apparently out of order, and photos of River Song and Susan decorate the desk alongside a small jar of sonic screwdrivers. The Doctor makes his entrance with an electric guitar before questioning Bill as to why she’d attend his lectures if she wasn’t a student. Bill tells a story about a girl and fries before asking about the TARDIS.

The Doctor deflects and redirects Bill to the question at hand. He notes that she tends to smile when she doesn’t understand something. She wonders what he actually lectures about. The Doctor offers to tutor her so long as she performs well.

The Doctor lectures about time as Bill works her job in the canteen, and she arrives at his tutoring sessions on time while scoring top marks. Bill’s foster mother Moira wonders about her relationship with the Doctor, but Bill replies under her breath that she’s not interested in men. To wit, she sparks a relationship with a woman in a bar who has a star pattern in her eyes.

One day, Bill follows the Doctor and Nardole to a secret underground chamber. She overhears the pair talking as they work on a large door, but after she knocks over some debris on the floor, she rushes back outside. She soon runs into Heather, the woman from the bar. Heather explains that the star is a defect in her iris but offers to show Bill something that’s bothering her. They sneak into a construction area where Heather shows Bill a puddle that hasn’t evaporated since the rain last week. When Bill looks into it, she notes that the reflection is somehow wrong. Heather walks away without much explanation as a voice inside the puddle proclaims that the pilot has been located.

Christmas eventually rolls around and the Doctor and Bill celebrate with a small gathering. She talks about her mother and wonders about photographs helping ease the pain of loss. Later on, she returns home and looks at some photographs of her mother. She spots the Doctor in one of them and is intrigued.

She sees some other strange things when the new term starts, including evidence that the TARDIS has moved. She finds Heather staring into the puddle but the woman disappears when Bill approaches. Sadly, Heather is trapped in the puddle and identified as the pilot.

Bill tells the Doctor about Heather and he rushes off like a “penguin with his ass on fire” to investigate it. The Doctor soon understands that the problem with their reflections is that they’re being shown the wrong way. Whatever is in the water is mimicking the observer. The Doctor also takes note of the scorch marks around the puddle and then sends Bill home. The puddle pursues, claiming to have found its passenger.

When Bill returns home, she assumes that Moira is in the shower, but a phone call proves that assumption wrong. When Bill investigates the running shower, she finds Heather’s starry eye staring back at her from the drain. Bill rushes back to the university to find the Doctor, but is confronted in the darkness by a sopping wet Heather. Heather is a bit freaky and Bill rushes to the Doctor’s office where he is analyzing a sample of the puddle. The puddle pursues and takes Heather’s shape once again.

The pair takes shelter in the TARDIS where the Doctor is pleased to show off his time capsule. Bill is astounded as most companions are, but she does proclaim that it resembles a kitchen. Nardole appears as the puddle attacks, forcing the Doctor to relocate the TARDIS to the underground vault. As the Doctor and Nardole analyze the vault for any breaches, Bill finally has her “bigger on the inside” moment.

The puddle eventually catches up to them so the trio takes flight to Sydney, Australia. The gravity of what’s happening finally catches up to Bill, and she starts asking the Doctor questions about his life and history. They’re interrupted when Heather catches up to them, so the Doctor takes the TARDIS off the planet and twenty-three million years into the future.

Bill is amazed as Nardole and the Doctor muse about the puddle. They presume that the puddle is a remnant from an alien craft that can take the shape of what it needs. It found Heather, someone who wanted to leave the world around her, and took her on board to leave the planet. The puddle catches up to them and nearly abducts Bill, and the Doctor takes his team to the most dangerous place in time and space. When they arrive, the Doctor tosses a classic sonic screwdriver to Nardole before rushing into a war zone in the past. Nardole tries to distract the Daleks, who are fighting the Movellans, as the Doctor and Bill try to escape the puddle.

Taking a slight detour to the Friend from the Future promo teaser, the Doctor and Bill run from the Daleks. Taking refuge behind a wall, Bill repeatedly questions the Doctor about the Daleks.

The Doctor finds a Dalek and has it scan his sonic screwdriver. It fires on the Doctor, but he dodges so the blast hits Heather. As the travelers run, Heather morphs into a Dalek but the Doctor is not tricked. He does wonder, however, why she didn’t shoot when she had a gun.

Bill realizes that Heather’s last conscious thought was to not leave without her. The pilot has been trying to fulfill that promise since Heather was killed. Bill releases Heather from the promise after briefly bonding with the pilot. The puddle retreats and the traveling trio returns to the TARDIS, though Bill notes that she is now partially connected with Heather.

Back in the university office, Bill regrets leaving Heather and the Doctor decides to wipe her memory in order to protect his undercover disguise while he guards the vault. Bill asks him to imagine what it would feel like if someone did the same to him and the memory of Clara forces him to send Bill away. The TARDIS and the pictures of River and Susan chide him, and he decides to meet Bill downstairs with the time capsule.

It’s a big universe, but maybe one day they’ll find Heather again. Until then it’s time for an adventure in time and space.

This episode’s title does double duty. The obvious meaning is in reference to Heather’s fate, but the other one is this story’s status as a perfect entry point for newcomers. The story tells the viewer everything they need to know about Doctor Who while easing them into the universe and a season-long story arc. Steven Moffat has compared this story (in that regard) to both An Unearthly Child and Rose. To a lesser degree, I’d also include The Eleventh Hour, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, and Remembrance of the Daleks.

Bill debuts here as a not-the-usual companion. Most companions are enraptured by the magic and fantasy of everything Time Lord, but Bill’s worldview pushes all of that to the backseat as she parses the new world around her. It’s quite refreshing.

We also get the mystery of the vault beneath the university. The Doctor and Nardole have apparently been guarding it for approximately 50 years. Since St. Luke’s University is in Bristol, the Doctor runs the risk of crossing his own timeline since Flatline also took place in Bristol. It’s also across the Bristol Channel – about an hour’s drive or so – from Cardiff, which means possible interactions with the Ninth Doctor, the Tenth Doctor, and Torchwood Three. I mean, none of those things will occur, but I’m honestly surprised that more inadvertent timeline interactions don’t happen given how much time the Doctor spends on the British Isles.

This episode marks the return of the Movellans to Doctor Who, which results in a neat timeline check with the Daleks. They don’t know that the Twelfth Doctor is their nemesis until they scan the sonic screwdriver because they only know about the current incarnation (the Fourth Doctor) who was involved in the Dalek-Movellan war shown in Destiny of the Daleks.

Overall, The Pilot fulfills its mission of serving both newbies and veterans with plenty of explanation and nods to the past interwoven with an engaging story and enjoyable actors. It serves well as a welcome back to the Twelfth Doctor after the complicated drama dance with Clara.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Smile

Timestamp #270: Heaven Sent & Hell Bent

November 30, 2022October 12, 2024 Michael Falkner10 Comments

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

Timestamp #264: The Magician’s Apprentice & The Witch’s Familiar

October 5, 2022October 12, 2024 Michael Falkner6 Comments

Courting death with Daleks.

Prologue

The Doctor arrives at Karn and discusses the nature of friends and enemies with Ohila, the leader of the Sisterhood. The Doctor has an invitation to meet with an unnamed individual, an adversary who he has known for a long time.

He eventually gives Ohila a confession dial with the vague instruction that she knows who to give it to. He then suggests that he’ll go meditate somewhere.

The Doctor’s Meditation

The Doctor’s next stop is a castle in Essex, 1138. There he meditates, periodically interrupted by a man named Bors who has pledged his life to the Time Lord for removing a splinter. The Doctor muses about his future task with Bors but first decides that the denizens of the castle need a well for proper water.

The Doctor ends up burning time by engineering a well and various extensions to the castle. Bors eventually calls him on his procrastination. The Doctor concedes that Bors is not the idiot he originally thought him to be.

Four days later, the Doctor enters his final meditation but stalls because he can’t face the man he’s destined to face. Bors stands his ground, demanding an answer or he will not leave the room, intending to force the Doctor to tell him his story. The Time Lord states that he recently let someone down. He found a battlefield, and although he had come across many before, this one would be his last.

Speaking of that battlefield, the sound of gunfire and shouts of soldiers penetrate the mist of a world far away.

The Magician’s Apprentice

On that misty battlefield, soldiers with bows and arrows run from laser-wielding airplanes. A single child runs into the mist as soldiers give chase. The boy admits that he is lost but has no idea that he ran into a minefield. In particular, the ground is littered with handmines, one of which has grabbed a soldier and pulled him beneath the ground. As more hands – each sporting an eye – pop up, the boy yells for help.

His request is answered by a man who tosses a sonic screwdriver onto the ground at the boy’s feet. The boy picks it up and spots the Doctor. The sonic screwdriver has opened an acoustic corridor between the two and the Doctor tells the boy that he has one chance in a thousand to survive. When asked his name, the Doctor is shocked to hear it.

The boy’s name is Davros.

Elsewhen, an envoy of Davros arrives at the Maldovarium. His name is Colony Sarff and he is looking for the Doctor, but no one will tell him. He next travels to the Shadow Proclamation, but the Shadow Architect also refuses to reveal the location. Finally, Sarff travels to Karn and tells Ohila that Davros is dying and is anticipating his final meeting with the Time Lord. He leaves a message with Ohila for the Doctor, unaware that his target is hiding in the rocks behind him.

Colony Sarff returns to Davros. The creator of the Daleks is weakened but cradles the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. He suggests that if Sarff cannot find the Doctor, then he must target the Doctor’s friends.

At Coal Hill School, Clara Oswald is teaching a lesson on Jane Austen when she notices that an airplane is frozen in the sky above. It appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, and UNIT reaches out to Clara, forcing the woman to leave school and rendezvous with Kate Stewart at headquarters. Clara deduces that the thousands of planes suspended in mid-air are not an invasion because they are a spectacle. At that moment, a message is sent to UNIT via the dedicated channel for the Doctor.

The messenger is Missy, she’s responsible for the planes, and she requests a meeting with Clara. The meeting goes forward, complete with UNIT snipers, and Missy demonstrates her ability to suspend the planes through a simple Time Lord trick. She reveals the confession dial – the last will and testament of a Time Lord – and explains that she cannot find the Doctor either. Since it was given to Missy, Clara literally cannot touch it.

Clara wonders if Missy has turned good, and the Time Lady responds by vaporizing UNIT agents. She only cares about her best friend being in danger, and Clara demands that Missy make her believe it. Missy releases the planes, then muses about where the Doctor would go while facing his demise. Clara knows that his chosen place is Earth, and based on the amount of noise he likes to make, she narrows it down to a party. Missy uses a vortex manipulator to travel with Clara to the Doctor’s location…

…where the Doctor enters a one-on-one battle riding a tank and shredding an electric guitar.

After all, Bors wanted an axe fight.

The Doctor’s jokes fall flat, but his rendition of Pretty Woman when he spots Missy and Clara makes the crowd cheer. The Doctor celebrates the good he’s done and the anachronisms he has introduced before admitting that he has to leave tonight. He introduces Clara and uncharacteristically hugs her. Missy joins the party as Bors falls to the ground. A snake slithers back to Colony Sarff, who has followed Clara and Missy to the Doctor’s side. Sarff reveals his serpentine form but the Doctor forces him to back down. No one will die this night.

The Doctor demands to know what his archenemy wants – much to Missy’s chagrin – and Sarff replies that Davros remembers with a toss of the sonic screwdriver at the Doctor’s feet. Missy is amused at the Doctor’s shame and Clara wonders what he did.

It turns out that the Doctor abandoned Davros in the handmine field.

The Doctor attempts to say goodbye and travel with Sarff, but Clara and Missy compel Sarff to take them as well (against the Doctor’s wishes). After they leave, Bors locates the TARDIS and reveals himself as a Dalek spy, signaling his find to Dalek High Command.

En route, the Doctor tells Clara about Davros’s history. They arrive at a space hospital and are escorted to a cell. Sarff eventually retrieves the Doctor, but Clara confronts him about knowing that Missy was alive and able to receive the confession dial. Missy reveals that she and the Doctor knew about the local gravity, particularly how it is natural rather than artificially generated. Missy decides to open the airlock to test the theory.

The Doctor is escorted to Davros’s side. They talk about their conflicts and how they were fueled by a single disagreement: Was Davros right to create the Daleks or was his lack of compassion wrong? He plays recordings of their previous meetings and the Doctor’s struggles with morality.

Missy and Clara step through the airlock only to find that they are on a planet. The planet is initially hidden but is soon revealed to be Skaro, the planet of the Daleks, and the women are taken before the Supreme Dalek. A large weapon is pointed at the TARDIS, which the Daleks procured, and Missy tries to reason with them. She tells them that they can use it to go anywhere and kill anyone, and she offers to pilot it for them. The Supreme Dalek is unimpressed and orders her extermination. Missy is seemingly vaporized in the blast.

The Doctor pleads with Davros to spare Clara but Davros reveals that he doesn’t control the Daleks. The Daleks wait for Clara to run, and when she does, they exterminate her in the same way that they did Missy. Davros demands that the Doctor declare compassion wrong as the Daleks open fire on the TARDIS, supposedly destroying it.

Back on the battlefield, a young Davros pleads with the Doctor to help him. The Doctor appears behind him, claiming to be from the future, and proclaims that he’s come from the future to save his friend in the only way he can. He raises a severed Dalek gunstick and points it at Davros with a word: “Exterminate!”

The Witch’s Familiar

Clara awakens upside down dangling from a rope. She and Missy are on the outskirts of the Dalek city and Missy is musing about the time when the Doctor faced 40 assassin robots without his TARDIS. Clara determines how the Doctor escaped from the assassins and links it to Missy’s survival.

Missy frees Clara as they discuss the Doctor’s current predicament. Together, they decide to help him.

Inside the city, the Doctor searches the infirmary and comes up with a Dalek gunstick. He threatens Davros with it and then demands that he leave the chair. The Daleks respond as Davros calls for help, and as the chair approaches the room where the Daleks have been congregating, the Doctor is revealed in the chair. When the Daleks attempt to exterminate the Doctor, they fail due to the chair’s shielding which was installed due to Davros’s paranoia.

As Missy and Clara try to enter the city through the sewers, the Doctor continues his standoff with the Daleks. The relationship between the women is contentious, and Clara is disgusted to learn that the sewer is actually a Dalek graveyard, constructed from decaying members of their race. Daleks, after all, are too stubborn to die of old age so they just waste away. They listen as the Doctor rants about Clara, demanding to know if she is truly dead. The Doctor is soon overcome by Sarff’s serpents.

Missy uses Clara to trip an intruder alert, then uses her as bait to trap and kill a Dalek. Missy uses a brooch made from dark star alloy to breach the Dalek’s shell, after which the dying Daleks flood the shell and destroy the Dalek from within. Missy then tells Clara to climb into the dalekanium shell.

The Doctor awakens in the infirmary with Davros back in his chair. The Doctor finds out that Davros is playing vampire, leeching life force from the Daleks to stay alive. This is because Davros is taking advantage of the Daleks’ respect for the one who gave them life. The cables making all of this possible also contain Colony Sarff.

Davros offers the same power to the Doctor but the Time Lord refuses. He explains that he came back to Davros not because of shame but rather compassion. Davros scoffs at this notion before asking about Gallifrey. He also returns the confession dial and the Doctor’s sunglasses, the latter of which the Doctor seems to prize more.

Missy connects Clara to the Dalek shell’s telepathic circuits and then seals her inside. Clara finds out the hard way that Daleks have no sense of individuality, fire their guns through emotion, and translate positive emotions into negative ones. They then return to the upper levels with Missy as Clara’s prisoner.

The Doctor pushes Davros’s buttons by revealing that Gallifrey has been saved. He and Davros also discuss the return of Skaro, which was made so by both Davros and the Daleks longing for a home. Davros claims that he is happy for the Doctor and the restoration of Gallifrey, asking to see the Doctor up close with his own eyes to advise the protection of the Time Lords. After all, he failed to save the Kaleds and questions if he is a good man.

Since the Doctor doubted the fact that Davros was dying, they both share a laugh about the Time Lord being a terrible doctor. Davros expresses a desire to see the sun once more with his own eyes.

As Missy and Clara return to the Supreme Dalek, Missy declares that she wants to see Davros and offers Clara in exchange for a means to control the Doctor. Meanwhile, the Doctor expresses sympathy for Davros by channeling part of his own regeneration energy into the life support system. Davros laughs as he begins to siphon more and more of it, regaining his strength and feeding it to the Daleks.

The regeneration energy forces the shutdown of the Supreme Dalek and its associates, forcing Missy to panic and go in search of the Doctor. Meanwhile, Davros asks if the Doctor truly fled Gallifrey because of a prophecy about a “hybrid creature” built from two great warrior races that overshadowed both. Davros assumes that this hybrid is part Dalek and part Time Lord.

The energy transfer is interrupted as Missy enters the room and blasts the cabling with a gunstick. Sarff is destroyed but the Daleks are awakened. The Doctor retrieves his confession dial and begins a countdown that ends with the city quaking around them. He knew what Davros wanted, understanding that the regeneration energy would be transmitted to every Dalek on Skaro, including the ones in the sewers.

As the Doctor runs he is confronted by Clara in the Dalek shell. Missy attempts to convince the Doctor that the Dalek before them killed Clara, pushing him to shoot this one in retaliation. He stops when the Dalek asks for mercy, then instructs Clara on how to open the casing. The Doctor tells Missy to run for her life as he frees Clara.

The Doctor and Clara end up before the Supreme Dalek as the city collapses. They stand on the spot where the TARDIS was destroyed, and the Doctor declares that the Hostile Action Displacement System only needs a buzz from the sonic to reassemble the time capsule. When Clara points out that the Doctor no longer has a sonic screwdriver, he reveals that his sunglasses are now wearable technology. The TARDIS reassembles and the duo escapes.

Missy is cornered by the Daleks but her fate is left for another day as the Doctor and Clara watch the city collapse from a safe distance. The Doctor wonders how the concept of mercy got into the Dalek DNA, then rushes off with his gunstick. He travels back to the moment where he left child Davros and uses the gunstick to eliminate the handmines. Davros asks if he is an enemy Thal but the Doctor tells him that it doesn’t matter so long as they have mercy. The Doctor then returns the boy home.

This was a rocking adventure full of intrigue and suspense that played with so many elements of the Daleks, from the opening moments with the handmines – a beautiful extension of the body horror that has accompanied the Daleks in the revival era – to the continuation of what happens to the hateful pepperpots as they enter their twilight years.

The Dalek congregation on Skaro included a wide swath of models from the show’s history, including the original silver and blues (seen from The Daleks to The Space Museum), the second version of the silver and blues (seen from The Space Museum to The War Games), the Emperor Dalek’s personal guard from The Evil of the Daleks, the grey and blacks (seen from Day of the Daleks to Remembrance of the Daleks), the Special Weapons Dalek from Remembrance of the Daleks, a Dalek Sec model (seen from Army of Ghosts to Evolution of the Daleks), the Supreme Dalek version from The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End, and (finally) the bronze standard that we’ve seen since Dalek.

Of course, Davros plays a long game with his latest gambit, introducing the concept of mixing Time Lord biology with one of the Doctor’s enemies. This was apparently first introduced in the comics, particularly a spoof strip called Regeneration of a Dalek. Davros also gives us glances back at his history in Doctor Who with footage from Genesis of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks, and The Stolen Earth. Davros also had a flashback of his own with a gun to his head, à la Resurrection of the Daleks. (Missy also gave us a few glances at previous faces with the First and Fourth Doctors in her flashback story.)

The use of regeneration energy here brings up some questions – the Doctor previously offered it to River Song in The Angels Take Manhattan, an act that may have either returned what she gave him in Let’s Kill Hitler or expended what little he had left in the tank before The Time of the Doctor – but we have no idea how many regenerations the Twelfth Doctor is starting with (or if he even has a limit at this point). We don’t know how many lives he may have lost in this story.

The regeneration plot is where this story stumbles for me. Once again, we get the Steven Moffat trope of the Doctor holding a magic piece of information to play, and I find it implausible that he would know that Davros would try to steal regeneration energy or that he would know that someone would break Davros’s grasp on him.

Another interesting point to consider in light of future events in the series is Missy’s statement about her friendship with the Doctor. She refers to the Cloister Wars, the Doctor stealing the moon and the President’s wife, and the Doctor being a little girl, but adds the caveat that one of those was a lie. That caveat (as well as regeneration energy for enemies) will be fun to look upon in a few seasons.

This story again puts that Doctor on the precipice of destroying all the Daleks, an opportunity he has held and rejected multiple times (Genesis of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks, The Parting of the Ways, and The Day of the Doctor). We also get some connective tissue linking the Doctor’s famous moment in Genesis of the Daleks with the start of the Last Great Time War.

Perhaps one of the greatest elements in this story answers the question of what happens to Daleks in old age. The Fourth Doctor came across Dalek mutants that had been liquified (Destiny of the Daleks) and the Cult of Skaro had abandoned their non-viable mutant embryos to die in the New York City sewers (Daleks in Manhattan), but I don’t think that I have ever considered Daleks in their twilight years. It makes sense that they are too stubborn and too angry to die, allowing themselves to decay away instead of surrendering to death.

A few last Dalek notes: The design of the Dalek city and the sliding doors pays homage to the set The Daleks; Missy’s offer to teach the Daleks how to fly the TARDIS harkens back to the First Doctor bargaining for Susan’s life in The Daleks; Davros’s views on compassion echo the Daleks in Victory of the Daleks; and heroes inside Dalek casings played parts in both The Daleks and The Space Museum.

The tension surrounding Clara in the Dalek casing, especially with Missy’s mean trick at the end, was fantastic.

Missy’s mysterious resurrection calls back to the classic series, specifically, the “Tremas” Master (introduced in The Keeper of Traken) who escaped certain death with no explanation for his return (Castrovalva, Planet of Fire, and Survival). It’s almost like Skaro’s new lease on life in light of its destruction in Remembrance of the Daleks and the return in the TV movie and Asylum of the Daleks.

This story credits the creators of the Kahler, Skullions, Hath, Blowfish, Ood, and Sycorax. These aliens were all present when Colony Sarff was searching for the Doctor, and all of them have previously appeared in Doctor Who proper except for the Skullions, who originated in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

UNIT provides a fun travelogue of the Doctor’s adventures, including San Martino, Troy, multiple visits to New York City, and three possible versions of Atlantis.

Finally, this is the first purely historical story since 1982’s Black Orchid.

It’s a welcome return featuring two of the Doctor’s greatest enemies, a lot of wealth from deep mythology, and a ton of fun adventure. It’s also a great start to the new series.

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

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Under the Lake and Doctor Who: Before the Flood

Timestamp #253: Into the Dalek

June 29, 2022June 4, 2025 Michael Falkner5 Comments

A fantastic innerspace voyage.

A pilot and her wounded co-pilot desperately fly away from an attacking Dalek ship. The pilot, Journey Blue, calls for help but her ship explodes around her. She awakens in the TARDIS console room and pulls a gun on the Doctor. He tries to explain that he saved her life by materializing the TARDIS around her at the moment of her death, and he waits for her to ask nicely before taking her back to her command ship.

The vessel was once a hospital ship, but the Doctor does not receive a warm welcome when he emerges on the hangar deck. Journey Blue saves his life when she tells her shipmates that the visitor is a doctor. The crew takes the Doctor to his new patient. Unfortunately, it is a Dalek.

Back on Earth, Danny Pink trains the Coal Hill Cadet Squad before returning to his duties as a mathematics instructor. He’s quite the bit of eye-candy for the women at the school and an object of intrigue for the students since he served as a soldier in the army. The kids are curious if he’s ever killed anyone and if he’s ever killed someone who was not a soldier.

Danny eventually meets Clara, but he turns down an opportunity to join her for a drink. When he later verbally berates himself (supposedly in private), Clara offers again and he accepts. Clara leaves Danny and enters a supply closet to find the Doctor and the TARDIS. The Doctor offers some coffee, which he was supposed to fetch three weeks ago, and asks her for advice.

The Doctor wants to know if he is a good man.

Since Clara isn’t familiar with this Doctor, she replies that she doesn’t know the answer. Sadly, neither does he, and he sets a course for Aristotle. It turns out that the Dalek has asked for help and has offered to destroy its own kind, and the Doctor cannot quite wrap his head around the concept. Once they return to the command ship, they realize that they have to get into the Dalek’s head. Luckily, Aristotle has a gizmo that will shrink people.

The Doctor, Clara, Journey, and soldiers Ross and Gretchen are miniaturized and injected into the Dalek’s eyestalk. The soldiers are there to kill the travelers if they turn out to be Dalek spies. The team encounters the Dalek’s artificial memory drive which filters out good memories and reinforces bad ones, essentially refining evil. They are also attacked by antibodies when the soldiers attach grappling hooks to the Dalek’s internals. Ross is killed, but the Doctor is able to track his remains to a place of relevant safety. Unfortunately, that’s a pool of protein that feeds the Dalek, which the Doctor has named Rusty.

The team escapes through a hot tunnel to an irradiated battery room. The radiation is affecting Rusty’s memory core and allowing his morality to leak through. The damage is related to Rusty watching a star being born, an event that spoke of beauty and divine perfection. It also reinforced that life prevails and resistance to that is futile.

The Doctor fixes the battery leak, but that causes Rusty to revert to his murderous ways. He then breaks free of his restraints and begins exterminating the ship’s crew. Rusty opens a communication channel to the Dalek ship and reveals Aristotle‘s secret location.

The Doctor uses this as evidence that there is no such thing as a good Dalek, but Clara is not satisfied with the result and slaps him back into sense. Following Clara’s inspiration, the Doctor instructs her, Gretchen, and Journey to make their way back to the memory drive and try to restore Rusty’s memories of the star while he reasons with Rusty.

Gretchen sacrifices herself to get Clara and Journey to the memory core. When the antibodies kill Gretchen, she ends up meeting Missy in the garden called Heaven. Meanwhile, Rusty continues his rampage as the Daleks reach Aristotle.

The Doctor meets Rusty eye to eye, facing off against the organic creature at the heart of the Dalekanium shell. As the Doctor forms a psychic link with the Dalek, Clara crawls through its core and restores the hidden memories. The plan is mostly successful but falters when Rusty finds the Doctor’s intense hatred of the Daleks. Despite the Doctor pleading with Rusty to look beyond that hatred, the Dalek uses it to fuel a mission of destruction against his own kind.

Rusty destroys the rest of the Daleks on the ship and the team is restored to their proper size. Rusty leaves to join his own kind, promising to work against them from within. He also shakes the Doctor to his core by proclaiming that the Time Lord is the good Dalek that he was searching for. As the travelers prepare to leave, Journey asks to travel with the Doctor but he refuses because she was a soldier.

Clara changes clothes for her date as he takes her home. She tells him that she doesn’t know if he is a good man, but she does give him credit for trying to be one. She then leaves for her date with Danny, trying not to adopt the Time Lord’s policy against soldiers.

Welcome to the origin of the “Don’t be lasagna” meme. It’s such a funny example of this Doctor’s quest to find his bearings, reflecting the whimsy of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. His ruthlessness also reflects the Ninth and Tenth Doctors – note that he’s not bloodthirsty, but he is direct – and his views on the military reach back to the Third and Fourth Doctor eras.

Importantly, the military stereotypes get subverted with the reinforcement that people can evolve beyond their roles and/or training.

The Doctor’s hatred of the Daleks is generally universal, but it is amplified by the events of The Day of the Doctor. This level of hatred reminds me of the Ninth Doctor in Dalek – another time when the Doctor would make a good Dalek – though I do appreciate the attempt at defusing the hatred while persuading Rusty. The imagery used in that persuasion comes from The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End.

There are obviously elements of the classic “go inside the body” films Innerspace and Fantastic Voyage. We also have a callback to another shrunken Doctor adventure in Planet of Giants. I also love the breaking out of a morgue callback to the TV movie.

But it is the exploration of the Doctor at this point after his regeneration in the face of his greatest enemy that intrigues me, followed closely by Clara using the Doctor’s lessons learned in her own life outside the TARDIS. It’s a good journey into his personality during an otherwise straightforward narrative.

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

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood

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