The Doctor Falls – What The Papers Say… (Updated 02.07.17)
Phew. Our nerves are shredded, our heads our spinning and we’ve got something in our eye.
The hour-long series finale, dramatically titled The Doctor Falls, was a twisting, turning, corkscrewing rollercoaster, packed with explosions and emotional goodbyes. Or were they just au revoirs?
Doctor didn’t regenerate after all. But only just!
This series has been one of fake regenerations and false starts – and it continued to tease us right until the end. The Cyber army was on the rise and as the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) boasted: “There’s only ever been one way to stop that many Cybermen: me!”
He was promptly attacked by one of the metallic monsters on the roof of that sinister “conversion” hospital, only to be rescued by Cyber-Bill and carried to safety on the 507th floor’s bucolic solar farm, where he spent two weeks recuperating under the care of rifle-toting matriarch Hazran (a lovely guest turn from the ever-excellent Samantha Spiro).
Now it was time for the last battle, with the Doctor destroying as many Cybermen as he could – first by dancing around the woods, gleefully blasting them while calling out the locations of past victories: “Mondas! Telos! Voga! Planet 14! Canary Wharf! Messier 13! Every single time, you lose. Even on the Moon!” Talk about a trip down memory lane for longtime Whovians.
He then blew up the space station’s entire floor, taking many silvery suckers with him. Our hero was left spread-eagled on the scorched battlefield – scarred, burned, seemingly fatally wounded. After being laid out in the Tardis by Bill, the broken Doctor regained consciousness and started to regenerate.
With typically stubbornness, though, he refused to let the process take full effect, shouting “I don’t want to go!” (echoing David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor) as that golden energy glow licked at his hands. “Never again! I can’t keep being somebody else,” he groaned. Why so reluctant? Is the Time Lord beginning to feel cursed by his semi-immortality? Vexingly, we’ll have to wait five months to find out.
Cyber-Bill was heartbreaking!
After being shot through the chest and converted into a Mondasian Cyberman last week, Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) cut a tragic tinny figure this time. As Missy (Michelle Gomez) cruelly put it, the plucky companion was: “Dead, dismembered, fed through a grinder and doomed to spend an eternal afterlife as a biomechanical psycho-zombie.”
The Master (John Simm) joined in the gloating, telling the Doctor that he’d “been up there chatting for 10 years and missed her by two hours”. Agonising.
Having heroically rescued the Doctor (that image of Mondasian Bill carrying Capaldi in her arms is surely destined to be an iconic Who image), Cyber-Bill woke up believing she was human – albeit consigned to the barn because the children were afraid of her (shades of Frankenstein here).
Even after Bill looked in a mirror and saw her shadow, she couldn’t quite comprehend what she’d become. Flitting between regular Bill and Cyber-Bill during these scenes was clever – not only poignant but allowing Mackie to bring a more human performance.
As the Doctor explained, she’d learnt to hold onto her identity while living under the Monks and her strong mind was rebelling against the Cyber programming. Bill wept – but as the Doctor said: “Where there’s tears, there’s hope.” She even wrung some humour out of the grim situation by telling Nardole he could kick her arse “if you go down to the hospital bins and find it”. What a brilliant companion Mackie has been. But is she destined to only survive one series?
Lucky Heather to the rescue. So will Bill be back?
Well, we didn’t see that coming. Just when it looked like battered Cyber-Bill was about to kick the tin bucket, soggy student Heather (Stephanie Hyam) – “the girl with the star in her eye” from series-opener The Pilot – reappeared, rising from a puddle to save the day. “Am I dead?” asked baffled Bill, having stepped outside her metallic suit. Cue a daringly long lesbian snog for 7.20pm. “Does that feel dead to you?” said Heather with a smile.
Back in episode one, remember, “living fluid” Heather left her tears with Bill so she could find her again when she cried. Now she somehow reassembled Bill’s mushed up molecules, restoring her as human, and gave her the option of going home or going off on adventures together. Believing the Doctor was dead, Bill said a sweet goodbye to the “old man” and headed off to explore the universe – planning to return to Earth “in time for tea”.
Personally, this is where I felt the plot unravelled and slipped into eye-rollingly tenuous territory. For me, the original Bill/Heather relationship hadn’t resonated enough to make a rousing reunion. And why hadn’t Heather appeared on the previous occasions Bill cried? Two women heading off into space together was also a rehash of Clara and Ashildr’s departure in the last series finale.
All a tad creaky, then – but if it leaves the Tardis door open to Bill coming back, I won’t complain too vociferously.
Missy turned good too late!
“Where I stand is where I fall. Stand with me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” The Doctor’s pet project this series has been trying to rehabilitate best frenemy Missy and at last he succeeded. Sure, she teamed up with the dastardly Master initially but Missy also seemed “in two minds” about whose side she was on. Which of her two hearts would win out?
With his choked-up speech about kindness and decency, the Doctor appealed to Missy’s better nature and she briefly took his hand. The childhood friends are more alike than either would care to admit and the Doctor “saving” Missy was partly about him tackling his own dark side.
Missy kept us guessing by fleeing with The Master, before stabbing him with a dagger hidden up her Mary Poppins sleeve (“That was really very nicely done,” he snarled, with grudging admiration) and turning back to stand with the Doctor after all.
The Master couldn’t let the Doctor win, though, so shot Missy with a full blast so she wouldn’t regenerate. Even though he’s about to regenerate into her anyway. Confusing, huh?
As she died alone in the woods, Ophelia-like, it made for an affecting final appearance from Michelle Gomez, who has been a revelation in the role: mischievous yet crackling with malevolence. She’ll be missed. As she once sang: “Hey Missy, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Missy.”
The Master was on funny form until he shot himself in the foot. Or back!
John Simm spent most of last week under heavy prosthetics as hospital hobbit Mr Razor, so it terrific to see him share serious screen time with his next incarnation Missy and nemesis The Doctor.
Goatee-bearded with a “stupid round face”, he was calculated and cruelly sarcastic as ever: referring to Cyber-Bill as “RoboMop”, asking her for “old bras” and shrugging that he “might as well rile a fridge”.
The Doctor handily filled in the backstory of how his foe washed up on the space station: his Tardis got stuck there, so The Master took over the city by force, before the people rebelled against his tyrannical rule – hence him hiding out in disguise as Mr Razor.
Typically narcissistic, he flirted with Missy via some screwball-style back-and-forth banter (“Hold me.” “Kiss me.” “Make me.”) He called her “lady version” and experimented with her eyeliner. In the end, though, he was so horrified at Missy’s display of empathy and the prospect of turning good that he knowingly ended his own timeline because he couldn’t stand the idea of working with the Doctor.
“Shooting each other in back is perfect,” he decided, before descending down into hell, cackling demonically in the lift. His final frame echoed Missy and the Doctor’s – all three Time Lords (well, two really) ended up lying on the ground, filmed from above. However, something tells us that he/she/a whole new incarnation will find a way back. The Master invariably does.
Stone the crows, it’s the Cybermen!
Amid all the other action, the stomping metallic soldiers were the least interesting part of this finale – showing up for a few skirmishes as little more than cannon fodder.
However, it was ingenious how the Mondasian Cybermen were introduced to the rural setting: as white-bandaged, top-knotted scarecrows that came creepily to life and started lurching towards the farmhouse, echoing 2007 episode Human Nature. When the homesteaders shot them, then tied them back to their stakes, it was almost like an origin story for scarecrows.
Peter Capaldi had long called for the return of the Mondasians, his favourite Who monsters in childhood. It was a sweet touch for showrunner Steven Moffat to grant his leading man’s wish for his final episodes.
Cute kids added some heart to the drama!
The Doctor made his final stand to protect a tiny band of humans from destruction – and fittingly for this family-friendly show, they were a bunch of pint-sized ragamuffins with a few token adults. “The Waltons”, Missy called them.
Star of the show here was Alit (played by 11-year-old Briana Shann, who recently appeared in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake). Was it just me or did you think she was going to be a young Bill in flashback? It was the hair wot dun it.
It was reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven, with Cybermen invading the settlement instead of bandits, while our plucky heroes fended them off. Alit got to blow up a Cyber-squadron by throwing “humanity’s first weapon”, AKA an apple. An exploding one, which Nardole termed “the ultimate apple upgrade”. See what he did there?
A bittersweet farewell to “Nardy”
Bumbling, bobble-hatted sidekick Nardole (Matt Lucas) started this series as a gooseberry in the Doctor/Bill relationship, reduced to the odd one-liner in between nagging them about guarding The Vault. Yet he’s slowly but surely grown in stature and stepped up to take an heroic role here.
Doctor Who | Who is Nardole?
Home planet: Unknown
Species: Human
First appearance: The Husbands of River Song
Played by: Matt Lucas
In the 2015 Christmas special, Nardole was an employee of the Doctor’s wife, River Song
Nardole is a serial maker of mistakes. By the end of his last appearance he was little more than a severed head
After being decapitated, Nardole became one of two heads living in the torso of an enormous robot, while working as the “head waiter” at a swanky restaurant.
He escaped from the Master and Missy, hot-wired a space shuttle from the hospital loading bay and flew up to rescue the Doctor from the rooftop – before bashing the ship up through 500-odd floors to the solar farm level.
Nardole then helped organise the homesteaders’ resistance to the Cybermen – anyone else reminded of The Walking Dead here? – thanks to his “insane computer skills” and “a bit of theatre to fool the monkey brains”. His bold leadership didn’t go unnoticed by Hazran, who developed a crush. “She’s only human,” he shrugged.
Ultimately, the Doctor convinced him to “babysit the smelly humans” by appealing to Nardole’s ego. He was last seen evacuating the children, leading them up five levels up to another solar farm – where hopefully he’ll live happily ever after with Hazran. See ya, secret badass.
The script blended wit with emotion – and a dig at Donald J Trump.
“Like sewage, smartphones and Donald Trump, some things are just inevitable.” So said the Doctor early in this episode – the show’s second pop at the US President in five weeks, after Bill’s line: “How would I know the President? I wouldn’t have even voted for him. He’s… orange.”
We also noted writer Steven Moffat’s sly revenge on online trolls: “People plus technology minus humanity. Always read the comments because one day, they’ll be an army.”
His script was packed with fan-pleasing callbacks – to this year’s Monks trilogy and opening episode, plus canonical references going back decades. The Doctor offered Alit a jelly baby – a bag of sweets that most incarnations have carried but which are particularly associated with Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor.
Amid the gags, this episode was also full of emotional goodbyes. Pearl Mackie hinted as much in the run-up to the finale, saying: “There’s quite a lot of endings.” This could be the swansong for her, Matt Lucas and Michelle Gomez, as well as the beginning of the end for Capaldi.
No wonder it lapsed into sentimentality at times. The Doctor’s voice cracked during his impassioned plea to the Master and Missy to do the right thing. There were lumps in viewers’ throats when he lay close to death, muttering: “A pity. No stars. I hoped there’d be stars.” His life seemed to flash before him, as we got glimpses of former companions calling “Doctor!” – pleasingly including the Paternoster Gang and even dear old Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen).
This was a tensely sombre affair, leavened with Moffat’s quip-smart dialogue and fireball bursts of action – all stylishly orchestrated by director Rachel Talalay, who set a powerful mood from the start and sustained it, even when things got slightly daft in the home stretch.
First Doctor compensated for fudged ending.
Just when we were scratching our heads over that Heather twist, all was forgiven. Seething with golden-glowing regeneration energy but desperately holding it back while the Cloister Bell tolled ominously, the ailing Twelfth Doctor was whisked to a snow-covered landscape by the Tardis – where he promptly ran into his original incarnation.
Veteran Harry Potter and Game of Thrones thesp David Bradley reprised his performance as First Doctor William Hartnell from Mark Gatiss’s splendid 50th anniversary making-of docudrama, An Adventure In Space And Time. In a familiar Edwardian frock coat, black furry hat and white scarf, his stern manner concealing an avuncular twinkle, the First Doctor said: “The Doctor? Dear me, no. I’m the Doctor. The original, you might say.”
What did it all mean? Apart from a double Doctor romp this Christmas? Well, it certainly harked back to 1966 serial The Tenth Planet, which was both the first story to feature the Cybermen and the first to feature a regeneration – from Hartnell into Second Doctor Patrick Troughton.
Capaldi’s Doctor also muttered about “Sontarans perverting the course of human history”, as he did earlier in 2014 in Listen – which in turn seemingly referred to Jon Pertwee-era story The Time Warrior. Another clue?
That’s it until Christmas Day!
“The Doctors will return at Christmas” (note that plural), confirmed the closing caption. We were left dangling off a huge cliffhanger which sets up a mouthwatering special on 25 December.
So it looks like Moffat and Capaldi will sign off with something nostalgic, timey-wimey and refreshingly different to the usual festive romps – as well as snow-covered and Christmassy, of course. See you in just under six months.
To regenerate or not to regenerate. That is the question.
In fact, it’s the question not just for the Twelfth Doctor here in the Season 10 finale, “The Doctor Falls,” but also in a way for Missy and for Bill as well. It makes sense that Peter Capaldi and writer/executive-producer Steven Moffat’s final regular season episode would be concerned with such matters, not just because they’re about to regenerate behind the scenes but also because the very idea of regeneration on Doctor Who has become such a point of hype for viewers whenever it rolls around.
Unfortunately, while “The Doctor Falls” does play with this concept, it doesn’t do so in a terribly successful way in at least two of the three cases cited above. Twelve, who for some reason is steadfastly against regenerating, doesn’t even get closure on his story here, which is unfortunate. Yes, it was super cool to see David Bradley (Game of Thrones) return as the William Hartnell First Doctor at the very end of the episode, and I can’t wait to get to the Christmas Special to see how this all plays out, but dramatically it doesn’t work in the context of this episode. Not only does Twelve’s refusal to regenerate seem to come out of the blue, but teasing it for two episodes and then not resolving that story in any meaningful way is a bit of a cheat. “I can’t keep on being somebody else,” Twelve laments to the TARDIS. It’s a great concept, and one that deserves to be fleshed out. Sure, the parallel between Bill’s dilemma and how it informs the Doctor’s is sketched out earlier in the episode when she says, “I don’t want to live if I can’t be me anymore.” But otherwise Twelve’s regeneration regret is more or less dumped on us in the final moments of the season.
(Which isn’t to say seeing Capaldi fight off regeneration isn’t fun, even as he repeats several first and last lines of previous incarnations. “Sontarans perverting the course of human history” was Tom Baker’s first line and also repeated by Capaldi in Season 8’s “Listen.” “I don’t want to go” were of course David Tennant’s final words. And “When the Doctor was me” is the last portion of Matt Smith’s last sentence. Tear.)
As for Bill, it looks like she’s a one-season and done kinda companion. This isn’t hugely surprising since Moffat is leaving (and he also recently said Pearl Mackie was leaving the show) and you’d figure new showrunner Chris Chibnall (Broadchurch) will want to start with a clean slate next season. But her departure disappoints me not just because I really like Mackie and the character and I feel like we barely scratched the surface with her, but also because she got such a lame send-off.
Basically, the Twelfth Doctor can now be said to have gotten his main two companions killed. First Clara and now Bill, who after being consigned to life as a Cyberman “regenerates” as one of those water creature things from the first episode of this season. Frankly, this is poor storytelling, a deus ex machina that spares us the pain of Bill dying or seeing her sign off as a soulless cyborg. Certainly the set-up of this scenario early in the episode is effective, tragic and horrifying, and the idea of intercutting between Mackie and the hulking robo-Bill is interesting. But whereas the Doctor’s story doesn’t get a resolution, Bill’s end is simply not earned. (There’s also the fact that the Doctor doesn’t even know what happened to Bill in the end which I find frustrating.)
And then there’s Missy and the Master, which perhaps is the portion of this episode that works best as a self-contained arc. Michelle Gomez and John Simm are terrific playing variations of each other, which yes, we now know for sure is the case (at least, if Missy it to believed!). The way they’re sort of somewhere between brother-sister and boyfriend-girlfriend is suitably gross, and the Master’s presence and how it serves to draw Missy back to her old ways makes so much internal sense that Moffat doesn’t really even need to write it on the page (and he doesn’t). It’s interesting, however, that while so much of the latter part of the season seemed to be about the will-she-or-won’t-she-turn-good Missy storyline, that matter is ultimately given very little time here.
But we do get a resolution to that question, and one that is so, so fitting for both Missy and the Master. In the end, not only does she betray her counterpart to (try to) help the Doctor, but she actually kills him, sparking her own creation (we think, though of course you never really know). That the Master takes it all in stride and the two laugh as he then zaps her is pretty perfect, and he sums up their very nature nicely: “We shoot ourselves in the back.”
And yet! While I understand why Gomez also leaving the show is a sort of housecleaning move for the incoming new administration, man if I won’t miss her and Missy. Also, the fact that the Doctor will never know that he was right to trust in Missy’s rehabilitation feels like another miss on the part of Moffat after priming us with this question again and again.
Some notes:
Nardole winds up getting an appropriate ending as he assumes a Doctor-like role in caring for the inhabitants of the ship. He’s definitely up to the task.
David Bradley returning as the original Doctor had been rumored previously, with some theories placing him as the mysterious figure in the vault, though I had pretty much ruled that all out as fanboy speculation by the time we got to these last two episodes.
Not that I’m counting, but both of Twelve’s companions didn’t just “die” but also went off to explore space as souped-up cosmic beings in the end. Hm.
“The Doctor’s dead. He told me he always hated you.”
The Master and Missy’s dance plays like a creepy variation of the Rose/Jack scene from “The Empty Child,” also written by Steven Moffat.
Oof, another Trump reference.
Jelly Babies!
The Verdict:
In the end, “The Doctor Falls” has much going on that is of note, with the season’s better-than-average visuals propping it up, some cool Cybermen battles, more than a few creepy moments (proto-Cybermen scarecrows!), and a real “wow” of a final scene. Unfortunately, much like Season 10 itself, the episode feels more like a bunch of interesting ideas that don’t quite congeal rather than a fully formed story.
Doctor Who’s series 10 finale paid tribute to the sci-fi show’s history with appearances from some of its former stars, giving a sneak preview of the Christmas special.
The episode, entitled The Doctor Falls, was Peter Capaldi’s penultimate in the starring role and saw the beginning of the end of his incarnation as the 12th Doctor.
In last week’s episode, companion Bill (Pearl Mackie) was turned into a Cyberman.
Saturday’s instalment saw the Time Lord battle against the growing swarm of Cybermen as his enemies Missy (Michelle Gomez) and the Master (John Simm) delighted in his horror at the prospect of his own regeneration.
As the Doctor’s regeneration process began, viewers saw his flashback through previous incarnations as past sidekicks played by Billie Piper, Jenna Coleman, Catherine Tate and John Barrowman were seen calling out his name.
But the biggest clue to the plot of this year’s Christmas special came in the closing moments of the episode when Capaldi’s character struggled outside of the Tardis into a snowy wasteland and came face to face with the original Doctor.
The 12th Doctor shouted: “I don’t want to change again, never again, I can’t keep on being somebody else.
“I’m staying. I will not change. I am the Doctor.”
But he was answered by a figure who emerged through the snow saying: “No, no, no, I am the Doctor, the original.”
Played by David Bradley, the character was dressed as the late William Hartnell’s Doctor, the first ever incarnation of the Time Lord.
It harked back to a 1966 episode, The Tenth Planet, in which the Doctor travelled to the South Pole to take on the Cybermen.
Elsewhere in Saturday’s episode, Gomez bowed out as Missy was shot by the Master and Bill’s love interest from her debut episode, who disappeared as a ghost in a watery puddle, returned to invite a grieving Bill to travel through the universe by her side.
Capaldi will return for a final appearance in the Doctor Who Christmas special.
Thank you for taking the time, in the midst of the internet exploding all around you, to come and read this review. This is being written ahead of the episode’s transmission, and were I putting money on things, I’d suggest the reappearance of Heather from The Pilot is where the battlelines are mainly being drawn right about now.
How about we start there?
For much of The Doctor Falls, it really looked as if Bill – one of the absolute triumphs of the series – was doomed. We thought Clara was doomed last series too, but Bill especially so. After all, Bill was turned into a Mondassian Cyberman at the end of World Enough And Time, but what I wasn’t expecting was for her to spend pretty much the entire episode in that state. The point of view switching between Mackie and the Cyberman, as she gradually realised what she’d become, was really nicely handled too. Mackie, in turn, delivered her best performance to date, and that’s against some pretty stuff competition. The sense of dread and the growing appreciation of what Bill had become was superbly conveyed.
And then Heather appeared.
On the one hand, you can’t say the rules of Heather’s character weren’t established from episode one, and that things had been seeded (the Doctor and Bill even have a conversation in The Pilot about whether Bill would ever see Heather again). Heather had, beforehand, chased Bill right across the universe, so there’s form there. The tear that brought Heather back to Bill? Again, no matter what you think of it, it was clearly noted back in The Pilot.
On the other, there was an element of WTF when she popped up, and basically reset Bill, heading off around the universe with her. Whether or not it was a strict reset switch, it still felt a bit like one. I’m long past the days of expecting Doctor Who companions to die (although in the Steven Moffat era, they’ve certainly had to be braced for life-altering damage). But this seemed like a very unexpected way to get out of a very tight corner.
A key point in the midst of it all, though: Bill, crucially, believes the Doctor to be dead, and I did think it was odd that she just left his body. Whether we’ve seen the last of the reset Bill remains to be seen, but the presence of one of the magic tears suggests otherwise.
“The Doctor’s dead. He told me he always hated you. Go.”
Less contentious at the heart of all of this was Peter Capaldi. The majestic, wonderful, brilliant Peter Capaldi. If you needed a reminder of just how much he’s going to be missed when he finally departs Doctor Who at the end of the year, his outstanding work here was precisely that. When he was blasted, apparently mortally, and he kept holding off his regeneration (a power that we’ve not really seen before, even though it’s been established in Who lore – see the geeky spots article for more on that), I found myself saying out loud “I don’t want you to go”.
I really don’t, either. His final episode at Christmas will seemingly see himself – and Steven Moffat – wrapped heavily in very early Doctor Who too, with the appearance of David Bradley as the first and original Doctor (a spoiler that wasn’t announced by the BBC, but was revealed anyway, which offers a mini-audit of just what the Who press office is up against). Why has the TARDIS taken Capaldi’s Doctor to the end of the character’s first generation, and is there a precise reason he was holding off the regeneration? Good question. Was he just scared, and/or not wanting to go through it. Quite probably. The answer may be deeper, though.
Talking of regenerations, there’s the story of The Two Masters. This ended up interesting me less than I was expecting, and I thought it was the part of the story that fell just a little flat, sadly. Perhaps the episode was trying to get too much in – although it felt quite relaxed, even appreciating it was 60 minutes long – but I didn’t really get the sparks I was hoping for here. The one central area of mystery – would Missy side with the Master of the Doctor? – didn’t feel too weighty for some reason in the scheme of things.
Things have been left with both Simm’s Master and Missy seemingly on the way out, and the option to regenerate gone. But this being Doctor Who, there’s no such thing as a story dead end like that. Perhaps that’s why the episode didn’t really dwell on it any longer than necessary. What’s more, the Master/Missy narrative seemed pretty incidental to the series in the end to me, and that’s a disappointment too, given that the idea of Missy in the vault was written through the heart of this run (at least in the earlier stages). I’m not quite sure why, in hindsight. It feels like the story there was only three quarters told. There were threads teased – Missy going good, and the possibility that there was a regeneration between Simm’s Master and Missy. But The Doctor Falls resisted going too much into that, and as such, it felt as though the welcome return of John Simm was a little undercooked. I’ll happily take a spin-off episode though, if anyone at the BBC’s reading.
Surprisingly too, we got little in the way of the Mondassian Cybermen’s return. For long parts, I got the sense of a Time Of The Doctor feel from The Doctor Falls, with a weakening Doctor protecting a small community from an incoming threat. Last week, in World Enough And Time, even the build up to the Cybermen’s creation felt really sinister and creepy. Here, they stamped around a bit, but once created, there wasn’t much to do with them. A quick tap of a keyboard solved the immediate conflict, then shortly after the modern, less interesting Cybermen turned up, and were blown up. Then not much else.
I’m gratified that The Doctor Falls didn’t turn into just another blasting battle, but also, I can’t help but feel that neither the broader Cybermen (outside of Bill), nor Missy/Master, really got the narrative shrift they perhaps warranted.
“Somebody broke the barn. No biggie”
We did get a lot of good things, though. Rachel Talalay’s taut direction skillfully maintained a very sombre tone, and Steven Moffat’s resistance to whiz-bangs and fast action in his writing left lots of room for character. The pacing of series 10, in large parts, has been a little slower, and much to the benefit of the drama. There was a sense of that here, too.
Also, Moffat’s hard science-fiction idea, of a spaceship where time varies – to the point where even going up more than five floors would give the Cybermen years to build an army – remained terrific. Simple visual effects realised it well, too. The numbers in the sky were straightforward, but very effective. I said in the spoiler-free review, and I say it again: the idea of a full series run based on a ship like this would be a tantalizing one.
I do wonder if we’ve seen the last of Nardole. He was at his best here when the episode cut to the countryside, as we saw him orchestrating forces outside a besieged solar farm, with the fervor of Zulu or The Magnificent Seven. Matt Lucas’ knack for quiet, measured, surgically precise comedy delivery has been a real asset to the series, and I’ve enjoyed spending what time we’ve been allowed with Nardole. I do wonder, again in hindsight, how far the character has actually developed, though. Some weeks, he seemed to be comedy relief, some weeks more integral. But I do wonder if his importance to the overall story arc suffered as the vault mystery fell away. Not that I’m grumbling: I hope there’s room for Matt Lucas in the TARDIS at some point again in the future.
But still, inevitably, I come back to Peter Capaldi.
Over his time in the TARDIS, Capaldi has made me laugh, he’s chilled me to the bone with exquisite delivery of well-written monologues, and he’s also sold explanations to stories that sometimes needed a little bit of extra selling. Here, though, he got the tears in my eyes early, and by the end, I couldn’t help but feel inherently sad. His Doctor has felt for much of the series like he’s dying, and the very best parts of The Doctor Falls were the payoff to that. That quietly, we’ve been building to the best known spoiler of them all: that Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is leaving us. It felt like a more premature departure was being teased, but at least we’ve got another hour with him at Christmas to look forward to.
“You said you could fix this. You could get me back”
It seems somewhat appropriate that Steven Moffat’s last Doctor Who finale is set to be as heavily debated as many of the others. It has become a bit of a feature of his time on the show. The Doctor Falls comes at the end of a run of the show that shot out of the gates and gave us four or five strong stories in a row, before stumbling a little, then finding its feet again in the last week or two. It’s given us, in Pearl Mackie, both a star in the making, and a character to really root for. And it’s left the show ready for its inevitable mini-reboot, as new personnel take charge.
The Doctor Falls, for me, had some wonderful stuff, that Moffat on top form excels at giving us. It also had some interesting ideas that never quite bubbled up. I liked it, but felt it didn’t quite deliver on what had been set up. Yet the moments with Peter Capaldi – taking centre stage in an episode, something that’s not been too common throughout its run – had me utterly, utterly gripped.
The end, then, is nigh. Just an hour of the Capaldi and Moffat era to go. Roll on Christmas. Or not. Sob…
‘Because he’s right. Because it’s time to stand with him, it’s where we’ve always been going, and it’s happening now, today. It’s time to stand with the Doctor’
The end seems like a good place to start. Only that isn’t quite possible, because this doozy of a cliffhanger can’t play out until Christmas – and even then there are so many feelings to process I’m not sure any of us have the emotional energy. Yes, that was David Bradley as the First Doctor, replacing William Hartnell and the perhaps-best-forgotten portrayal by Richard Hurndall in 1983’s 20th-anniversary special The Five Doctors. In any other circumstances, recasting a deceased actor in the role would feel cheap. In these ones, Bradley was simply so good in the 50th-anniversary biopic An Adventure in Space and Time – both as a struggling Hartnell and his reimagining of Hartnell’s portrayal – that we must applaud it. I spent time with Bradley on set of that production, and his “Doctor face” is the most disarming thing in the world.
That’s all to come of course. More to the point is the final showdown between the Masters. I was overjoyed, on watching the confrontation between the three Timelords, that there was no soundtrack aside from the dialogue and some gentle birdsong. It was an example of less-is-more that I don’t think I’ve seen equalled in Doctor Who.
As for that showdown, how else was it going to end? Two Masters stabbing themselves in the back (and front) was the perfect solution to evil coming up against itself – writing both of them out, as much as is ever possible with Timelords, in a few short minutes. Did Missy’s eventual redemption ring true? Did the apparent and inherent “goodness” of this female version have bigger things to say about male and female states?
‘Does that feel dead to you? You’re like me now. It’s just a different way of living’
More of a problem is the fate of Our Pottsy. With so much to get through, even in the expanded space of an hour, her exit – if that’s what it was – felt sparse. As much as it stands as a positive piece of LGBT representation, her relationship with Puddle-Heather never felt major enough to be her final pay-off. No announcement has been made about the character’s future, and it has been reported only this week that Pearl Mackie has had meetings with incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall. But if this truly was the end for a character who was almost unanimously well received, that’s probably an accident of scheduling as much as anything else. Mackie will almost certainly be fine in her future career.
As, of course, will Matt Lucas, who never really needed a role in Doctor Who. But Nardole’s fate is left similarly vague – though we assume he’s destined to spend the rest of eternity as a foster carer to the children of the Mondasian spaceship, batting off the relentless flirting of gun-toting nanny Hazran.
Mysteries and questions:
The obvious point here is how can the First Doctor be back? Moffat would hardly let his Doctor go without something hugely epic. But will younger fans be able to follow whatever’s happening?
And, oh yes – where is Planet 14?
Continuity corner:
The Master and Missy clearly don’t know their best frenemy as well as they thought they did. As far as we know, the Doctor has never drowned or “felt the blade”. But he has expired from old age; been exiled to Earth by the Time Lords; poisoned by Metebelis crystals; fallen from Jodrell Bank observatory; poisoned by Spectrox toxaemia; banged his head against the Tardis console; been shot by the mafia; sacrificed himself to fight the Time War; expired again at the end of the Time War; absorbed the energy of the time vortex to save Billie Piper; absorbed a cubicle of radiation to save Bernard Cribbins; lived to die of old age and now – presumably – is facing a reluctant regeneration at the hands of the Cybermen’s death ray.
Deeper into the vortex:
As we reach the end, there is a fair amount of housekeeping to get through in the wider Whoniverse …
In an era of two Masters, we’re actually getting a third. Sir Derek Jacobi is confirmed to return as the pre-Simm Master (from 2007’s Utopia) in a new series of audio plays for Big Finish. The War Master series is available for pre-order from bigfinish.com.
And along with him, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor and Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler are set to reunite in a new series of audio-adventures, coming to Big Finish in November.
In sadder news, BBC Worldwide have announced that the BBC Store, which has allowed viewers to stream and download from Auntie’s extensive archive (including Doctor Who and Torchwood) will close in November. Users have been offered a full refund.
Similarly, the excellent Doctor Who Experience exhibit in Cardiff will shutter its doors in November. But it’ll be going out in a blaze of events. Details available at doctorwhoexperience.com.
Next time!
We’ll be back at Christmas. But after that, Capaldi and Moffat will be gone for good …
Fans of Doctor Who were left with their heads spinning after the dramatic series finale, when veteran actor David Bradley appeared as William Hartnell’s First Doctor.
Other huge shocks saw The Master and Missy apparently destroying each other in an epic showdown, while companion Bill jumped out of the TARDIS with Heather, the girl she’d fallen for in her first intergalactic adventure, but who is now The Pilot, able to take Bill anywhere they want to go together in time or space.
What an episode it was for The Doctor himself, with the Time Lord beginning his regeneration after seemingly being killed, then doing everything to try and prevent it. He stumbled from the TARDIS into a snowy wasteland to be greeted by the First Doctor, the grumpy old granddad first played by William Hartnell when the sci-fi series began in 1963. Doctor Who writers had delivered a huge shock and a brilliant twist!
Back in 2013, Harry Potter star David Bradley portrayed veteran actor William Hartnell in BBC2’s drama An Adventure in Space and Time. This emotional special on the show’s 50th Anniversary showed how Hartnell was cast as the Doctor in a groundbreaking ‘children’s sci-fi show’ and what happened when filming began under producer Verity Lambert (Jessica Raine)
The First Doctor is central to the upcoming Christmas special, which will see Peter Capaldi’s Doctor at last regenerate into the latest incarnation of the Time Lord. But who exactly that is remains a closely guarded secret…
★★★★★ Yes, I know, another five stars… but you can tell a Doctor Who episode is a winner when you watch a very rough-cut version and it still hooks you. The first preview let out of the blocks had many fx missing and needed final edits and polish, as the production team strove to hit a tight deadline just a few days before transmission. Phew!
The end is in sight for Messrs Moffat and Minchin, outgoing executive producers, and their remarkable cast (Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas, Michelle Gomez and John Simm) all signing off here, or soon… But what is perhaps most surprising about this concluding episode of Series Ten is how inconclusive it is.
The Mondas colony ship remains stuck on the threshold of a black hole. Its inhabitants are still under threat from incipient Cybermen. No one cause is specified for the Doctor’s regeneration, although he can evidently now hold the process at bay. And what is subtly needling is that the main characters remain unaware of each other’s fate. Nobody knows whether any of their friends or enemies have survived.
Nardole lives but is stranded on the spaceship. Will he or his party ever escape? The Doctor has no idea that Bill was restored/transformed by Heather nor that they returned him to the Tardis. Bill leaves without knowing that the Doctor will survive or even that he can regenerate. What, for me, is most poignant is that the Doctor does not know he succeeded in turning Missy from the dark side, that his best friend was returning to support him and may have died in the attempt.
The Doctor Falls is an uneven but utterly engrossing “final” episode. Our hero thwarts, or at least tampers with, the Master’s fiendish plan remarkably early so that the First Act is wrapped up before the 15min mark. The Time Lords find themselves on the run from the Cybermen, and the action shifts from dystopian Floor 1056 to bucolic Floor 507. Suddenly the Doctor has a children’s refuge to protect. This change in pace and environment may be unexpected but it gives the characters pause to think and have difficult conversations. It gives the cast chance to shine.
Capaldi, Simm and Gomez are of course divine together. Peter Capaldi is magnificent as ever. This is truly his episode. His Doctor may fall but he stands tall among stiff competition. John Simm’s Master is an implacable bastard to the end but not the loon of seven years ago. Michelle Gomez is simply superb at the duplicity and the soul-searching and laughing at her own tragedy. Their dancing, flirting and backstabbing is to die for.
There was fevered speculation over Sam Spiro’s casting. All sorts of daft notions. In the event, Hazran has no dark secret, other than she’s a love interest for Nardole. She’s a mother figure for the children under threat on Floor 507, toting a rifle at her homestead, putting me in mind of Lillian Gish in the 1950s movie classic The Night of the Hunter.
I’m pleased that Bill earns a reprieve. Let’s not whinge that yet another regular character is seen to die or suffer a fate worse than death and then becomes undead. It would be horrible to leave her trussed up in those Cyber bandages. It has to be said Bill’s departure is remarkably similar to Clara’s at the end of series nine. Clara’s death was “paused”, her heartbeat frozen, and then she zoomed off into time and space in the company of another eternal woman (Ashildr/Me), leaving the Doctor none the wiser. Almost identical.
I never foresaw Heather’s return and I tingle at the rapprochement of her romance with Bill. “I’m the Pilot. I can fly anything. Even you,” says Heather. “You’re like me now. It’s just a different kind of living.” You’d have to have a cold heart not to be persuaded and moved. “I left you my tears, remember,” is such a strange but beautiful notion. Bill deserves this ending. And Pearl Mackie plays it to perfection.
Talking of talented women… Rachel Talalay isn’t simply a director, she’s an artist working in the medium of television. From the furnace of Floor 1056 to the Cotswold-y homestead to the snowy South Pole, she weaves varying tones and textures and tableaux, Quiet Moments and Big Moments, into one coherent, impressive tapestry.
In her hands, any potential awkwardness of the “Bill doesn’t see herself as a Cyberman” scenes is ironed over. There’s the storyboard precision of Missy turning to camera as she’s shot and irradiated by the Master. The overhead angle of Missy breathing her last, looking like Ophelia, in that twilit blue-green woodland is one of many weirdly beautiful images. And there are lots of little touches. The way that Nardole in his final shot walks towards and beyond the camera and into his future, which cuts to a high-up drone shot of CyberBill staggering through a battle-scarred wasteland.
Steven Moffat said this finale would not be a nostalgia fest. I don’t know whose leg he was pulling. It may not be a fest but it’s definitely a running buffet, with lots of savoury morsels to set off your nostalgic taste-buds. Capaldi’s Doctor is so like Jon Pertwee’s here, in looks and deeds, interacting with the Master, detonating explosions with his sonic screwdriver, heroically vanquishing the Cybermen while listing their past defeats.
One notable touch is that the original Cybermen never used their headlamps as a weapon, although they seemed to in an illustration on the back of the 1970s novel of The Tenth Planet(right). Were The Doctor Falls a book, there’d be copious footnotes – especially those pointing out allusions to the past.
The Doctor remarks that the Cybermen “happen everywhere there’s people – Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14, Marinus.” The first two were their home planets in the 1960s episodes. A parallel Earth gave rise to Cybermen during Russell T Davies’s tenure. Planet 14 is a fabulously obscure reference to a few lines of dialogue in The Invasion(1968). And Marinus? Well, that’s a nod to the 1964 serial The Keys of Marinus. (Perhaps Steven is suggesting that the rubbery Voord and semi-robotic Ice Soldiers encountered by William Hartnell’s companions were a form of Cybermen…)
As the Doctor fights to stem his regeneration, there’s a St Vitus dance of nods to earlier regen episodes. His babble about Sontarans perverting the course of human history was Tom Baker’s first line in 1974. He revisits David Tennant’s excruciating bleat, “I don’t want to go,” and Matt Smith’s “[I will always remember] when the Doctor was me.” Bill’s line as she sobs over the Doctor, “While there’s tears, there’s hope,” echoes the Pertwee Doctor’s last words as Sarah sobbed over him: “A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don’t cry. While there’s life there’s…” The overhead shot of Bill and the Doctor, sprawled on the Tardis floor, cloaked splayed, echoes William Hartnell’s final moments in The Tenth Planet (below).
And finally that ending. Nostalgia Central! Doctor 12 meeting Doctor One in the snowy wastes of Antarctica. “Où sont les neiges d’antan? / Where are the snows of yesteryear?” If you have un peu de French poetry or studied Rossetti or Tennessee Williams, you’ll know this scene uses one of literature’s key nostalgic motifs.
We’re right back to the setting of The Tenth Planet 51 years ago. And a familiar figure, an old man in cloak, astrakhan hat and white scarf emerges from the blizzard. “You may be a Doctor but I am the Doctor,” he says, clutching his lapels. “The original you might say.” (This is a glorious mash-up of one of Tom Baker’s first lines in 1974 and Richard Hurndall’s as the first Doctor replacement in The Five Doctors in 1983.)
How magical to see David Bradley again, not just playing William Hartnell (or even playing Hartnell as the first Doctor) as he did in An Adventure in Space and Time. Now he’s giving us his first Doctor. I knew full well this special moment was coming but it still touches the fanboy in me deeply.
Usually I approach the Christmas specials with trepidation. Not this time. I can’t wait to see Peter Capaldi and David Bradley performing side by side.
