The World Enough and Time – What The Papers Say…
Well, that was Andrew Marvell-ous. The series’ penultimate instalment, poetically titled World Enough and Time, was a dizzying ride which took in a shock shooting and the return of two old foes.
Bill took a bullet before getting turned into a Cyberman
“Promise you won’t get me killed.” That was the heartfelt plea of fearful companion Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie) to the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) after reluctantly agreeing to his rash plan: testing Missy’s new-found good nature by giving her a life-saving mission aboard a colony ship sending out a distress call.
The results were initially hilarious but soon unravelled. The bullet-shaped ship (a whopper that’s 400 miles long and 100 miles wide) was caught in the event horizon of a black hole, getting slowly sucked in by its gravitational pull. And 49 of its 50-strong crew had disappeared down the bottom of the ship, replaced by thousands of unknown life-forms.
The sole survivor was janitor Jorj (Oliver Lansley), one of those blue dudes last seen six episodes ago in Oxygen. In his panic at the new arrivals attracting the attention of “them downstairs”, Jorj shot the only human: our Bill. Our voluminous-haired heroine glanced down in disbelief at the gaping hole in her chest before collapsing and being taken down for “repairs”. Was she dead? The Doctor thought not, so left a haunting message in Bill’s subconscious: “Wait for me.”
Due to the ship’s vast length and gradual absorption into the black hole, its different levels moved at different time speeds. So while mere minutes passed for the Doctor up on the control deck, years were whizzing by for Bill down on level 1056, where the floor-mopping Cinderella was trapped in an hellish hospital with only some bandaged patients and mysterious, hobbity orderly Mr Razor for company.
Eventually, Razor sold her out, tricking her into entering the “Conversion Room”. Cue that tragic final scene when a shiny new Cyberman shuffled up to the Doctor, intoning “I waited for you” – while a single tear rolled down Bill’s cheek beneath the metal mask.
Like so often this series, Bill got a big chunk of screen-time after finding herself separated from the Doctor. She duly went through the emotional wringer and Mackie’s performance shone, as it has all series. Bill’s heartbreaking fate was reminiscent of Oswin Oswald being trapped inside a Dalek. Can the two (or is it three?) Time Lords somehow rescue Bill from her tinny torment?
Did you rumble The Master’s disguise?
The Doctor’s fellow Time Lord and best frenemy has always enjoyed a game of dress-up – he’s literally a Master of disguise – and spent most of this episode under heavy goblin-esque prosthetics as hospital dogsbody Mr Razor. (His previous guise, Prime Minister Harold Saxon, was anagrammatic, of course: Mister Saxon = Master No.Six. Mister Razor only reshuffles into Master Zirro/Rizor. Thoughts welcome, crossword-lovers.)
Razor was a warmly engaging character with his folksy alien speech (“Awake, is it? Good. Settle”), disgusting tea and happiness to watch the world’s slowest TV programme (“He’s been raising that eyebrow for a week”). If the much-anticipated return of John Simm as The Master hadn’t been so heavily trailed, his unmasking might have taken us fully by surprise. As it was, I began to hear traces of Simm’s voice before the episode’s midway point.
Yet somehow, it was still a gasp-inducing moment when the villainous Time Lord removed his disguise and greeted his forthcoming incarnation with: “Hello Missy. I’m the Master. And I’m very worried about my future. Give us a kiss.”
Simm seemed a smidgen lower-key than his maniacal portrayal of old – but give him time next week to crank into full crackpot mode. He had also grown the goatee beard associated with the character’s classic Roger Delgado/Anthony Ainsley era. It suited him. Bwa-ha-ha.
Mondasian Cybermen were worth the half-century wait
The Mondasian Cybermen are the original version of one of Doctor Who’s most iconic adversaries, encountered by the First Doctor (William Hartnell) in 1966 story The Tenth Planet. Whovians have been nerdily excited about their comeback 51 years later (not least Peter Capaldi, who named them as one of his two favourite Who monsters) and they didn’t disappoint.
Named after their home world of Mondas, Earth’s twin planet, the sinister cyborgs were faithfully recreated in all their home-made, steam-punk glory, complete with ghostly cloth masks, human-looking hands and vintage voices.
This, we discovered, was the Cybermen’s origin story: Operation Genesis, which saw the hospital trying to strengthen its population via cybernetic modification, so they could rise back up to the bridge and seize control of the ship, without the ravages of time weakening their feeble flesh. Evolution wasn’t fast enough but evil was.
It touched on the horrors of forced human experimentation, with the top-knotted victims – sorry, patients – tapping out their disturbing pleas of “Pain, pain” and “Die me”. We saw the purpose of those famous head-rods, which “won’t stop you feeling pain but will stop you caring about it”.
Will the super-strong silver soldiers still be vulnerable to gold and radiation? Watch this (time and) space.
When the Master met Missy, will it be murder?
“You’ve met the ex?” The Doctor has crossed his own timeline and run into his former incarnations before – but this was the first ever multiple Master episode. A timey-wimey landmark in Who history.
It began with the seemingly repentant Missy (the magnificent Michelle Gomez) leading Team TARDIS on her first training exercise, while the Doctor took a day off to eat crisps and snark from the sidelines.
Missy was on superb comic form in these scenes, introducing herself as “the awesome hero Doctor Who” (writer Steven Moffat milked this name gag for all it was worth), and Bill and Nardole (Matt Lucas) as “my plucky expendables, my pets, my snacks” – even at one point dubbing them “Exposition and Comic Relief”. How postmodern.
She dressed like Mary Poppins. She danced to the alarm klaxon. She tried her hands at human flirting, slipped in mentions of spanking and the Smurfs, and accused the Doctor of cradle-snatching. “Are you human?” asked Jorj, to which Missy replied: “Don’t be a bitch.” She even celebrated one quip by busting out the dab. How topical (as was Nardole’s insistence on taking a selfie with the Doctor).
This episode is titled in reference to the opening lines of Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical classic, To His Coy Mistress: “Had we but world enough and time/This coyness, Lady, were no crime”. So are there further clues in Marvell’s poem, with its talk of “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” and “thy marble vault”?
Eventually, Missy met her former self and it was a treat to see Simm and Gomez on-screen together – both unhinged, scenery-chewing renegade Time Lords with a wayward moral compass. But why can’t Missy remember this moment in time? Surely both incarnations can’t come out of this alive?
Easily the best episode of series
Doctor Wow, more like. This two-part finale marks showrunner Steven Moffat’s last regular episodes and he’d saved the best until second last. It was darkly thrilling, mountingly tense, genuinely scary and brimming with smart ideas – but stayed just the right side of over-clever, as Moffat is often criticised for being.
His script sang, relishing both Missy’s mischief and Mr Razor’s black humour – before nimbly changing gear for the body-horror elements and emotionally resonant depths. Plenty of carbs, too, with both crisps and chips being munched. Enough to make a Saturday teatime audience distinctly peckish.
In its macabre tone and hospital setting, it recalled Moffat’s debut episode, 2005’s Blitz-era chiller The Empty Child, with a dash of 2014’s series finale Dark Water, which also featured Missy and the Cybermen.
All gorgeously realised by director Rachel Talalay, too. Right from the opening shot, which swept along the giant colony ship’s flank like Star Wars meets Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this was handsomely filmed, creatively lit, creepily soundtracked and paced with supreme confidence – playing with viewers’ feelings from teasing start to shocking finish.
Not just the standout story of this 10th “nu-Who” series but one of the best episodes since the 2005 reboot. Bravo.
Will The Doctor regenerate next week? Into a woman?
It wasn’t all Mondasian fun aboard the mega-ship. This episode opened with a dramatic pre-credits sequence which saw the Doctor – with Peter Capaldi’s hair looking whiter and wilder than usual – staggering out of the Tardis onto a snow-covered planet and shouting “No!” as that now-familiar regeneration glow emanated from his hands and spread up to his face.
A cliffhanger foreshadowing Capaldi’s departure in the Christmas special? That might explain his longer locks. Or could the transition to the Thirteenth Doctor take us by surprise and happen during next week’s episode? Considering the shows next star hasn’t been announced or even firmly rumoured yet, that would be quite a coup.
Either way, you couldn’t help seeing that flashback to a rooftop chat between The Doctor and Bill as knowingly prescient. “So Time Lords are a bit flexible on the whole man/woman thing, yeah?” “We’re billions of years beyond your petty obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.” What better way to prove it than the first female Doctor?
Let’s overlook the whole Time Lord/Time Lady issue for now. As the Doctor said: shut up.
Sparks will fly next Saturday
Nearly there now. The series-closer, titled The Doctor Falls, finds the fearsome Mondasian Cybermen on the rise and the Doctor making a final stand to protect a tiny band of humans from destruction.
If it’s anywhere near the space-high standard of this week’s episode, we’re in for a treat. Let’s reconvene here to recover and provide mutual support.
‘I am that mysterious adventurer through all of time and space, known only as Doctor Who, and these are my disposables – exposition and comic relief’
The time has come. But the moment has been prepared for. That’s to paraphrase the Fourth Doctor as he faced his own impending demise. It’s a shame that we know so far in advance that a Doctor is leaving, because it always means that the sense of foreboding overrides everything else. Add to that the fact that it is Steven Moffat’s final run, and perfectly good episodes like Knock Knock and The Eaters of Light, even the ambitious Monks Trilogy, run the risk of feeling a bit whatever. It is a human curse to wish your life away, and a fan curse to wish away a quality series so that we might just get to the end.
The good news? After a series I’ve managed to find little fault in, World Enough and Time is the finest penultimate episode we’ve seen in quite some time (and yes, that includes Heaven Sent). It needed to be, after weeks of conjecture around the redemption of Missy. But it also offered both claustrophobia and scale, scientific intrigue (more below), returning monsters from the 60s (even more below) and, most shockingly of all, the apparent offing of the companion in a graphic and brutal manner so early on. Maybe it was the speed with which it happened, and the timey-wimeyness of the colony ship, but the Doctor’s reaction to Bill’s “death”, and the surety with which he seemed to assume she would eventually be fine, spoke to a long-building recklessness. And all of that before we even get to the matter of the other returning frenemy …
‘Give us a kiss!’
Is it worth wishing even for a moment that they had managed to keep John Simm’s return a secret? A sure impossibility, but how much more delicious could that reveal have been if we hadn’t known what was coming? As it was, and despite a hugely effective prosthetic, I called from his first appearance that Mr Razor was the Simm Master in disguise because, given how far along we were into the story, who else was it going to be? We still don’t know how and if this Master knew he would be coming up against Team Tardis and his future self, but we presume he needed to disguise himself as Mr Razor since Bill would have recognised him as former Prime Minister Harold Saxon. But it was a nice line in fan service for him to ask Missy: “Do you still like disguises?”
Here, Simm’s Master is significantly dialled down, more malevolent menace than the ADHD version that battled David Tennant back in the day – and far less annoying for it. Details of the Master’s timeline and regeneration history are among the questions you’re not meant to ask in Doctor Who – but if we’re to assume this happens to him after the events of The End of Time, there are further mindbending continuity implications. I don’t really mind, though, because in his best tradition, Moffat explains things away in one line: “I’m the Master, and I’m worried about my future.” The prospect of turning “good” is apparently too severe a threat not to echo across his timeline.
Which makes me even more convinced that, in the beginning at least, Missy’s intentions are indeed pure. Yes, she treats Team Tardis’s conventions with delightful disdain, and after weeks of (welcome) understated sobriety, Michelle Gomez is back to her campest, most ridiculous best (“Congratulations on your relative symmetry!”).
Rassilon knows where we go from here, but with this pair now teamed up, I predict much hijinks and foul play.
Fear factor
I’ve said it before, but my main bugbear about modern Doctor Who is that it has never got the Cybermen right. For the second most iconic monster in these worlds, their stories have either not quite landed, or they’ve been upstaged by the Daleks or Missy or whoever. In fact, I’m not even sure the Cybermen have properly worked since the black-and-white days of the 60s. So it is little surprise that this week, at the spookiest, most menacing and damn effective the Cybermen have ever been, it’s in the form of the original 1960s, cloth-faced Mondasian Cybermen. There’s a body-horror chill to seeing the upgraded people at their most immediately post-human – made all the worse because that’s the fate that befalls Our Pottsy. It’s become the stuff of Doctor Who legend that Peter Capaldi has long been calling for their return. So it’s a great touch for Moffat to grant his actor’s wish at the final furlong.
Mysteries and questions
First thing to notice: regeneration has previously been treated as a largely heroic process. Russell T Davies’ innovation was to establish the standing-up regeneration, the beams of light cascading from the Timelord’s arms and neck signalling a glorious rebirth rather than a tragic death. None of that for Capaldi’s Twelfth. Standing alone in snowy nowheresville (because it will be Christmas when he finally goes), a sombre Doctor is not happy to be changing. He looks broken, devastated even. His hair has lost something of its sass. And perhaps crucially, he’s alone.
The powers that be were keen to talk up this regeneration. Steven Moffat explained during an appearance at the Hay Festival: “You all know the mighty Peter Capaldi will be bowing out, but we’re gonna do it slightly different this time, and I’ve been working with Chris [Chibnall] about how we do the changeover in a new way.
“I’m not going to tell you what that is, but I’m excited by it. I think it’s gonna work well. Every regeneration is different, but we are playing it slightly different this time. I think we’ve got a good idea.”
Continuity corner
The Mondasian Cybermen were, of course, the first Cybermen to appear in Doctor Who, in William Hartnell’s final adventure The Tenth Planet. One stop out from Pluto, Mondas was a sort of twin planet to Earth, and when faced with mortality, the humanoid citizens were subjected to mechanical upgrades until, eventually, even basic human emotions were compromised. [REDACTED but this may tie in with certain REDACTED rumours regarding this year’s Christmas special]. But Cyberman continuity is all over the place – The Tomb of the Cybermen later established that they originated on Telos, while the parallel Earth in 2006’s Rise of the Cybermen saw them created by John Lumic’s Cybus Industries. But I would say this: if all of these scenarios involved human-ish species attempt to increase their longevity through cybernetic upgrades, it stands to reason that they might follow parallel logic, however misguided. The scariest thing being that the outcome is the same. And for the truly geeky, Marc Platt’s 2002 audio play Spare Parts (on which Rise of the Cybermen was loosely based) and Grant Morrison’s 1987 comic strip The World Shapers (itself linking back to 1964’s The Keys of Marinus!) offer up theories on how all this might fit together within the geek hive mind. Credit to my pal Nick Gorton for offering up these brain-frying notes.
Deeper into the vortex
That title, of course, is taken from the opening of Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical poem To His Coy Mistress, published in 1681. With ominous echoes of the Doctor’s impending demise and Bill’s (apparently) tragically accelerated lifespan, it’s also worth noting that this Mistress in particular is anything but coy.
Obviously, the Guardian should always be your first port of call after an episode goes out, but you might also check out a live Q&A with Steven Moffat and Pearl Mackie on Doctor Who’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. They’ll be speaking after a special screening of the episode at Cardiff’s Millennium Centre, along with Murray Gold’s score performed by the National Orchestra of Wales. Which sounds like a treat.
Here comes the science bit: the mechanic by which time passes at different speeds at opposite ends of the 400-mile spaceship as it pulls away from the black hole is based entirely in fact. It’s a theoretical process known as “time dilation”, explained to Moffat by his teenage son Joshua, who knows all about physics. It’s to do with why two clocks will measure different times after different accelerations. Or something.
Are we to assume a species link between the blue-faced Jurj here and the blue-faced Dahh-Ren from Oxygen?
Is anyone else wondering why they bothered introducing Bill’s foster mum Moira, considering so little has been done with her?
“If I’m in the shower, just bring me some beans on toast. That’s pretty much human flirting, right?”
Did you enjoy the “Doctor Who” gags?
Next week!
Is Bill as we know her really gone? How far will the two Masters go? How does the Doctor’s hair lose its sass? It’s all to play for as we reach the series finale, in The Doctor Falls.
If you’re reading this just after watching this week’s Doctor Who, chances are you haven’t picked up your jaw from the carpet yet.
After weeks of build-up, the Master is back – and he’s brought friends. John Simm made a triumphant return to the show this evening, alongside Michelle Gomez, who plays the current version of the character.
But as ever, things weren’t that simple – and his return seemingly cost the life of Bill, who appears to have been converted into one of the Cybermen.
Oh, and did we mention that the Doctor started to regenerate?
Here’s all the important stuff from this week’s episode, World Enough And Time.
‘I feel it in my fingers…’
They’ve been stringing us along for months, but this looks like it might be it – the Doctor really is regenerating.
Stumbling out of the TARDIS onto a snowy landscape – Antarctica? Mondas? Somewhere else? – the Doctor collapsed to his knees and found himself bathed in the familiar Ready Brek glow of regeneration energy. And what’s more, he really didn’t seem too happy about it.
This cold open (literally) was obviously a flash forward, and we’re still not quite sure when we’ll actually reach it in the narrative – but it’s worth noting that the Doctor’s outfit appeared to be the one he wore this week.
The question is, will it be a scene that concludes, revealing the next Doctor? Or are we going to be left with a colossal cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until Christmas?
Master of disguise
So who else was watching this week and saying ‘Yes, but when’s John Simm gonna turn up?’
He was there all along, of course – in the form of a bearded, heavily accented janitor named Mr Razor, befriended by a captive Bill.
Long-time Doctor Who fans will recognise this as the sort of thing the Master used to do all the time – particularly in the 80s, when he would frequently hide behind a mask.
But it was to Missy that the renegade Time Lord eventually revealed himself.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’, he said, peeling off his disguise – and confirming, as we suspected, that Missy is a future regeneration of the Master, rather than a past one.
The Master’s motives – as well as the circumstances under which he found himself on the colony ship – remain unclear. But by heck, isn’t it great to see him again?
(And how many of you have gone back through the episode and said ‘How could I not have seen that coming?’)
Kill Bill
Poor Bill. Despite her misgivings, she played along with the Doctor’s outlandish scheme to reform Missy – and all she got was a hole in her chest.
But that wasn’t the end – she was revived in a creepy hospital at the other end of the ship, with an implanted heart, like something out of Iron Man.
Forced to endure a seemingly endless wait for the Doctor (how many years was she down there, anyway?), Bill adjusted to her new life as best as she could – before she was promptly whisked away for conversion.
And it was this newly Cyberised version of Bill that the Doctor and Nardole eventually encountered when they reached the bottom of the ship.
‘I waited for you’, she said, implying that the real Bill is still in there somewhere.
But are they going to be able to get her out?
Genesis of the Cybermen
The Cybermen we’ve seen in contemporary Doctor Who have usually been converting in order to swell their ranks and eventually dominate the universe – but that wasn’t how they started out.
The origins of the metal monsters take their roots in a simple story of survival: where cybernetic implants, culminating in full conversion, were the only way to survive a hostile and dangerous environment.
The cloth heads made an early appearance in the hospital, although we didn’t get to see the full upgrade until near the end of the episode.
This was to all intents and purposes the origin story we’ve never seen on TV – it overwrites the events of Big Finish audio Spare Parts, but the basic idea remains the same.
And how wonderful that the original, Speak & Spell-type voices were back.
The Doctor Falls
After a creepy, atmospheric buildup, it looks like it’s action all the way next week in the explosive finale.
Running at an hour, The Doctor Falls will see the Doctor take on an army of Cybermen classic and modern – he’ll probably emerge the victor, but will he pay with his life?
And what’s going on with Missy and the Master – are they working with him, or against him?
We also got to see that glowing hand again, on a shirt that almost definitely belonged to the Doctor. One way or the other, it seems we’re finally at the end of the road.
★★★★★ Did I like this episode? That’s what I was asked by someone in BBC Cardiff, someone at the top of the Doctor-Who-making tree. Haha, no, I did not like it. I couldn’t like an episode that apparently kills off two beloved characters. I feel like howling “No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!” just as Peter Capaldi does at the beginning as he stumbles out of the Tardis in the snow. But in this case, not “liking” an episode is a peculiarly positive thing. It’s good to be challenged by a predictable old friend once in a while.
World Enough and Time is riveting (mostly), macabre (deliciously) and it quite coldly metes out death – or a fate worse than death for someone we’ve grown to love.
Let’s deal first with that shock Scene One. The Death of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. The pre-titles Big Moment which was so top secret it was withheld from the earliest previews. In fact, it had to be, because it hadn’t actually been filmed! Most of this two-part finale was shot months ago, but the Doctor Who team returned to the studio less than two weeks ago to film this crucial scene. As exec producer Brian Minchin told me: “We’re going very close to the wire on this!”
We’ve long known this regeneration was coming. Steven Moffat has gone on record saying it would happen differently this time, but few anticipated seeing it at the start of episode 11. Six months prior to the Christmas special! I’ve relished Peter Capaldi’s take on the Time Lord so I’m far from pleased that he’s going. I do not like this. That is Shock One.
Shock Two. In April, Steven Moffat warned Radio Times readers in his Series Ten Episode Guide that the Doctor “witnesses the death of someone he is pledged to protect”. Step forward the candidates: companions Nardole and Bill and their fellow traveller, Missy. Very early in World Enough and Time we see Bill shot. A trigger-happy blue alien blows a hole clean through her middle. I stress “clean” not quite in complaint. I don’t need Quentin Tarantino levels of gore in this Kill Bill. I don’t wish to see blood and organs spewing forth; but even if Bill’s innards have been cauterised by the blast, the wound does seem a tad unrealistic. Tame, necessarily, for the family audience.
Poor Bill! Still a newcomer. Such a popular character. Such a horrible, protracted, lingering demise. Stuck in a hospital from hell. Kept alive by a cybernetic chest unit she can’t bear to look at. Only those creepy patients, a Mengele-like surgeon, a tubby Nurse Ratched and the feral Mr Razor for company. “How much longer, Doctor? How many more years?” (We learn how many in Episode 12.) And then she’s forced into full Cyber-conversion.
It’s a sickening reveal when the Cyber“man” emerges at the end and bleats in that singsong voice last heard in 1966: “Accessing Bill Potts. Locating Bill Potts. I am Bill Potts. I waited. I waited for you.” It packs even more punch than Jackie Tyler’s Cyber-conversion 11 years ago, or when Oswin Oswald realised she’d mutated into a Dalek in Asylum of the Daleks. It puts the body horror back into the Cybermen. Which is just as it should be. Is there any coming back for Bill…? Again, you’ll have to wait till next week to find out.
The sinister surgeon, the soulless hospital, and the tormented souls crying out “Pain… Pain… Pain…” – a howl that can be dialled down… I sense this milieu may be more disturbing for grown-ups than for little ones. What horror, what disfigurement lurks beneath the knotted bandages of these proto-Cybermen? It really is clever how Steven Moffat embraces the perceived weaknesses of the original 1966 cloth-and-plastic design – scorned and abandoned after their only screen outing in The Tenth Planet – and makes them sting.
The head “handles” are explained by the surgeon thus: “This won’t stop you feeling pain but it will stop you caring about it.” Even the “tear ducts” that featured in some Cyber masks are made sense of in that beautiful final shot, zooming into and out of CyberBill’s eye. We feel her anguish. We may shed a tear too.
“Had we but world enough and time” is the first line of Andrew Marvell’s 17th-century poem To His Coy Mistress. Ah, Missy! “She’s my oldest friend in the universe.” The Doctor’s grand folly is that he’s put his faith in his old sparring partner. “She was my first friend. So fast, so funny. She was my man crush.” Foolhardily, he’s given Missy free rein in the desperate hope of rehabilitating her. Even by the end we cannot be sure if it’s succeeded.
Michelle Gomez is a riot waltzing around the spaceship, announcing herself as “Doctor Whhooo!” and cheesing off a legion of fans who abhor the idea of the lead character being referred to by the programme title. It doesn’t bother me. At the end of days Steven Moffat is saying the unsayable. Bully for him. Through Missy, he states that Doctor Who was indeed once the Doctor’s chosen name and he sends the series up with a much-needed moment of levity, dubbing her “plucky assistants” Bill as “Exposition” and Nardole as “Comic Relief”. I wish she hadn’t used the word “disposables”.
I’m waiting to see where I stand on John Simm’s Master. Of course, his return is exciting. A coup. During David Tennant’s time, his Master had immense charm despite careering off the scale into lunacy. I look forward to sparks flying between him, Gomez and Capaldi in episode 12. Yet I remain bemused and unconvinced by the Master’s penchant for disguises.
OK, it’s a handy way to surprise the uninformed viewer, who might possibly recall him from seven years ago. OK, he’s decided to keep hidden from Bill who’d recognise her former prime minister. But Mr Razor’s heavy costume, latex mask, wonky teeth and dodgy accent are presumably in use for months, years even. It’s inherently ridiculous, a reminder of the silly disguises worn in 1980s Who by Anthony Ainley’s Master and Kate O’Mara as the Rani. The whole shtick is easily shed like a Scooby-Doo villain in one theatrical flourish, but it’s directed and performed with such bravura that it doesn’t actually detract from the final moments.
The close of World Enough and Time is sublime. Steven Moffat’s script deftly cuts between two scenes of revelation, expertly shot by director Rachel Talalay. I love Peter Capaldi’s appalled reactions. Registering that, for the first time in half a century, he’s dealing with the cloth-faced Cybermen from Mondas. That this particular one is – or was – Bill. That he has very badly let her down. And that a deranged former incarnation of the Master has just walked into the room behind him.
Multiple Doctor stories are old hat. I’ve longed for a multiple Master adventure. Here it is. With two superb actors. And great writing from Steven Moffat. Events take a biblical turn as Operation Exodus is eschewed for the Genesis of the Cybermen. John Simm’s Master revels in his Davros Moment as the creator of a monster.
And yet Old Testament aside, this is actually a mash-up of Mary Shelley, of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. You’ve got Simm as Henry Frankenstein… Nardole lurking on the sidelines as the manservant… Combine Missy and bandaged CyberBill and there’s Elsa Lanchester’s Bride… And Capaldi couldn’t look more like Dr Pretorius if he tried. D’you know what? I am liking World Enough and Time.