The Doctor and fam are finally back with a spin on one of Britain’s favorite genres—it’s time to gather the gadgets and infiltrate in style as Doctor Who goes all in for spy craft.
Summary
Ryan, Yaz, and Graham are getting ready for another trip with the Doctor, despite people in their lives starting to wonder where they’ve been. The trio (and then the Doctor) are nabbed by secret service types in a black car. On the way to their unknown destination, the car’s systems are hijacked, and they almost die. They find out that they were supposed to be delivered to MI6, and head there at once. There they are greeted by “C” (Stephen Fry), who tells the Doctor that spies all over the world are being killed by mysterious figures that rewrites their DNA. The Doctor agrees to help if she can call on a man who used to work for MI6—a guy who they fired because he cared too much about aliens. There’s another man named Daniel Barton (Lenny Henry) who might also be involved. He used to work with MI6 until he elected to create his own tech conglomerate (that started as a search engine) called Vos. Before they can make a full plan, C is killed, and the mysterious beings come for the Doctor and company, almost breaking into the TARDIS… which should be impossible.
Yaz and Ryan go to San Francisco to check out Barton, while the Doctor and Graham go to meet her old mystery contact. The man is living in the Australian outback and calls himself “O” (Sacha Dhawan) because that’s what people at MI6 seemed to utter whenever he entered a room. He tries to help the Doctor figure things out about the mystery figures, but they arrive to attack. O has some very special tech he’s cobbled together that manages to keep them at bay, but one breaks into his house and talks to the Doctor, telling her that they plan to take over the whole universe. Ryan and Yaz try to interview Barton, but he’s called away, so they get an invite to his birthday party. They break into his office late at night, and download everything on his computer, then see him in contact with the mysterious figures, though they can’t tell who has the power in their dynamic. Yaz gets attacked by one of the figures and vanishes. She’s transported to a place that looks a bit like a forest of conduits, then gets sent to the house in Australia somehow.
The Doctor looks through Barton’s computer and finds some alien code that shows how many of these alien entities are on Earth. She knows she’s still missing something, so she decides that they’ll all go to Barton’s birthday party, O included. Once there, the Doctor tries to confront Barton about what he’s doing, but he refuses to talk, then leaves the party in a car. The group follow on a few motorcycles, catching up to Barton at his own airfield. He gets into a plane and they make to follow, though O has some trouble keeping up. When he claims that he’s terrible at sprinting, the Doctor realizes something is wrong because his MI6 file said the opposite. They suddenly see O’s house whirling beside the plane in midair, and the missing puzzle piece slots into place—
—O is the Master.
He’s put a bomb on the plane, and it goes off. As they begin to crash and the mystery figures start coming after them again, the Master tells the Doctor that everything she thinks she knows is lie.
Commentary
You know, you can spend a whole episode watching a new character and going “he’s charming as all get out, almost too sweet, and I love it but something’s off?” And then you remember that Doctor Who has had characters like that before in Osgood and so forth, so maybe it’s nothing, and you enjoy yourself, and wonder what this guy’s deal is, and if he’ll maybe become a companion down the road, or perhaps he knows more than he’s letting on—
—and then he says “Come on, Doctor, catch up,” and your heart genuinely skips a beat because you know what you want, but that seems like a New Year’s miracle too far. 2020 can’t possibly start out that great.
I’m sure plenty of people won’t be into this reveal, either because they don’t much care for the Master, or because it hasn’t actually been that long since we’ve seen the character. But as a person who frequently refers to him (and/or her) as “my murder baby”, and who was incredibly disappointed with how the Moffat era ended the character’s tenure, this feels like a gift aimed explicitly at me, and I intend to grab it with both hands.
This episode had all the hallmarks of a classic Master reveal: a disguise (less about costumes this time, but a disguise nonetheless), a little flirting with one of the companions, a plot within the plot, and a lot of gloating and potential death once the big reveal comes about. Sacha Dhawan clearly knows what he’s jumped into, giving ample homage to Roger Delgado’s charm, Anthony Ainley’s flair for dramatics, and infusing it with Michele Gomez and John Simm’s sense of camp to create his own fabulous take. Once he makes the switch, he becomes utterly hypnotizing—and what’s more, the Thirteenth Doctor needs this. She needs someone around who can occasionally squelch her unflappability. She deserves her own perfectly paired best enemy, and you can tell in the mere moments he gets to make his introduction that Dhawan is definitely it.
My favorite thing about watching the Master is all the ways that the character’s need for the Doctor’s attention come through, even when he’s trying to be discrete. In “O”, the Master has created the perfect lure, but also the perfect facade by which to gain praise and focus from the Doctor. She knows him and says they “text” each other, which means that the Master has been planning this for ages, living on Earth, constructing the sort of person the Doctor would come to in an emergency. When she calls, it’s all about telling him how “right” he was and how terrible MI6 was for treating him poorly. When they meet, he has all the things needed to keep the alien incursion (however briefly) at bay. And then the Doctor actually treats him like a companion, inviting him aboard the TARDIS and outfitting him for a “trip”—which we know, from Missy, is all the Master ever really wanted. His friend back.
Well, that and the ability to terrify and upset his friend constantly. That’s also a large part of it.
We don’t know where in their collective intertwined timeline this version of the Master heralds from, but it’s possible that he predates Missy entirely (and Simm and Jacobi and Roberts and more for that matter), since we know there are a lot of incarnations we’ve never seen. The fact that he has his TARDIS makes this even more likely. The fact that said TARDIS contains a shelf of books about the Doctor is the most On Brand thing the Master has ever admitted to (even if he was admitting it under the guise of being another person).
Outside of the mega reveal, this episode is a delightful pastiche of the spy genre, and James Bond in particular. Composer Segun Akinola deserves the majority of the credit for providing that atmosphere, sending up decades worth of James Bond soundtracks with flawless panache. The comical choice to bring in Stephen Fry as the head of MI6, only to murder him minutes later is frankly too much fun. The city-hopping with the places all labeled out was also a great touch, and watching the Doctor and crew get spiffed up in tuxes and gamble (poorly) is guaranteed to be one of my season highlights, even knowing that we’re just one episode in.
Amongst the TARDIS crew, we’re seeing a little bit of the strain that traveling is putting on Ryan and Yaz’s lives. Yaz is getting close to irreparably damaging her career, though we don’t yet know if she’s soured on it after seeing the universe. Ryan’s absences are starting to get noticed by friends, his excuses getting more and more ridiculous. The dynamics between the three of them are better fleshed out now than ever. Graham’s keen on lots of it, but is more than willing to say when he’s had enough. Yaz is into the idea of pushing farther and breaking more rules than she can in her normal life—and we have to expect that this will eventually become an issue. Ryan has the relatable problem of real anxiety that he has to constantly navigate his way around as they go on adventures. It’s gratifying to see someone who doesn’t have the usual TARDIS buddy bluster still get the chance to be a companion and grow from it.
Yaz gets a real scare in this episode, believing briefly that she’s died when the alien zaps her away to that weird conduit forest. She’s an excellent spy, but it seems as though she’s learning a little about caution, while Ryan is learning more about stepped up and being a part of things. Their friendship has clearly grown, and we’ve got a little bit of family drama with Yaz’s sister asking for Ryan’s number and Yaz being fully against the whole thing. (Ryan’s right, though—he’d be a great brother-in-law.)
Who are these mysterious beings who mean to conquer the universe, and what do they want? They could be the Cybermen; the body shape looks similar, and we know they’re set for a return and a reimagining this season. It would make sense to pair the Master with them, since he’s pulled team-ups like this before (and there’s also the possibility that he’s just siding with them until the Doctor can figure out a way to stop them). This might also serve as something of a continuation of the Davies era Cybermen—RTD partly used the Cybermen as a commentary on technology’s presence in our lives, with the Cybus Industries earpods serving as they method by which people could be hijacked and converted. In the Vos company, we’ve got a more immediate and obvious analog to technology companies and how they infiltrate every single facet of our lives.
There’s clearly more going on than we understand—the Master says as much—and it’s unclear if this will all get wrapped up in part two, or if it’s ultimately going to be part of a season-long arc. Either way, the second half of this story can’t come soon enough.
Things and asides:
- “O” claims to have met the Doctor back when she was a man. WHICH DOCTOR. I need to know.
- The Doctor claims she lived in the Outback for 123 years at one point, and honestly, I think it’s time that fandom acknowledges that the Doctor has no idea how old she is, or when things took place in her life, or for how long. It’s better this way, I promise.
- We need to know what that previous motorcycle adventure was all about. I also love Ryan letting Graham drive him around on it.
- The Doctor’s adding rooms and levels to the TARDIS again. I wanna see the Rainforest Floor.
- We’ve had references to and uses of the Master’s tissue compression eliminator in New Who before, but this time they played it less for scares, and showed the shrunken fellow the Master replaced in a matchbox. More of this, please.
- It looks like people called “C” simply cannot be put in charge of MI6; in addition to the death of Stephen Fry, Andrew Scott played a character dubbed “C” by James Bond in Spectre. C tried to take over the organization using surveillance and technology, and ended up taking a very long fall.
- Time Lords are supposed to be able to recognize each other on sight, but the Master has hidden that from the Doctor before, so presumably something similar was at work here.
Emmet Asher-Perrin is proud of themself for not making this review just a video of them screaming like they did at the tv. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I thought the alien trapped in the box in the hut said that they wanted to destroy the universe.
The episode was fun, but some of the scenes were too long like they were filler. Yes, we know those two guards are toast. Don’t take so long to fry them. The episode definitely had a Pertwee vibe with the gadgets, car chases, etc., but her tuxedo jacket should have had a red lining.
@@@@@! Oops. I just looked at the picture above, and you can see a slight bit of red satin in that coat.
Oh please not the Cybermen AGAIN! A sexy Master is always welcome but I’ve had enough of the Cybermen and Daleks for a while.
Oh please not the Cybermen AGAIN! A sexy Master is always welcome but I’ve had enough of the Cybermen and Daleks for a while.
Frankly, I had the opposite reaction. Not The Master … again. There are so many other Time Lords and powerful individuals it could have been. Then I saw the dedication to Terrance Dicks (who helped create The Master as script editor for his initial appearance written by Robert Holmes) and I got it.
So, okay, one more time with The Master. But then I want to see The Rani or Rassilon or The Meddling Monk or one of The Eternals or anyone else as the big bad. Maybe have The Doctor THINK it’s The Master but it turns out to be someone else with a different motivation and The Doctor realizes they’re falling into simplistic thinking?
NB: “C” is the actual nickname of every head of the British Secret Service (MI6 or SIS or whatever they call themselves these days). Calling the character “C” is accurate. I liked that part.
The company is called Vor, as in -vore (to devour).
How many incarnations of the Master have we seen on screen? Seven, eight? I like Alastair Reynolds’ idea, in his excellent 3rd Doctor adventure Harvest of Time, that the Master has had hundreds, if not thousands of lives, some very alien. No one should be surprised to see him again. And Dhawan got to make a short joke in character.
Fun enough romp. Guess it’ll hinge on how they stick the landing in part two.
Quibbles: Ryan’s pain at missing shot at the basket was so overplayed it lost meaning. What, you can’t set up a hoop on the TARDIS when you have some downtime if it matters so much?
The production also has either equipment that can’t handle a sun low in the sky or cinematographers/lighting people who can’t get clearly lit captures. Several shots were washed out at Barton’s house, weirdly intercut with sharply lit shots. This was a problem last season too (unless I’m confusing it with another show).
I’m afraid my main emotion during the final scenes, which just seemed to come out of nowhere, was utter bemusement, split between “Are they actually doing this?” and “Why are they doing it?” It didn’t help that the credits then refer to the character as O rather than The Master, which increased my feeling that this weird guy wasn’t the Doctor’s arch-enemy but some deluded fan boy who’s just pretending to be the Master. He probably isn’t but it shows how unconvincing I found him, even if he does have a miniaturised corpse in a matchbox. I’ve said in the past that when they do these episodes where they reveal an old enemy at the end of the equivalent of Part Two of a four-part story (although the extended running time means this one’s as long as an old five-parter) then the template is “Time-Flight”, where you spend two episodes following a false plot only for the intriguing original villain to turn out to be just the Master again, leaving much of what went before feeling like a waste of time and the second half struggling to squeeze in the real plot. So after 60 minutes focusing on Barton and the aliens, we get literally told that everything we know is wrong and seem to be starting the story again from scratch.
The set-up to the cliffhanger doesn’t even seem to make sense: We appear to see Barton at the controls of the plane as it takes off, but then the Master says he was never there. Was he in a different plane (that for some reason got an alert warning at the same time)? Did the Master cross his time stream and whip Barton off mid-flight, possibly via his shack/TARDIS?
It’s a shame because until those bewildering final minutes, the episode was rather fun, if a bit underwhelming. Similar to “Is he really the Master?”, I’m left wondering if they really cast Stephen Fry just to deliver exposition and then die, so I can’t help wondering if there’s going to be a twist there: Again, probably wrong, but it’s a thought. It is interesting seeing the impact that being part-time time-travellers is having on the Doctor’s new crew. It might be pointless trying to unravel the plot of Barton and the aliens (the credit seems to name them as Kasaavin, unless that’s an individual name) given that it doesn’t seem to be the real plot anyway but I’ll have a go: I’m guessing Barton’s 7% alien DNA is the result of it being partially rewritten like the agents that were attacked. The aliens seemed to imply that they come from a different universe altogether, possibly with that “forest” that Yaz found herself in and the Doctor was in at the end being some sort of intersection point. Barton and the aliens feel more like partners than master/agent, which leaves the question of where the Master fits in. (Maybe he doesn’t and is just making a bid to take over someone else’s plan? But then he makes that “Spymaster” gag. Unless he actually went “you have to find the spy, Master” and he’s working for them?) The Doctor having the TARDIS jacked up like a car with wires hanging out the bottom is passable as a visual gag but doesn’t make much logical sense.
I’ll admit it, while I totally saw “O is not really on their side” coming a mile away, I didn’t expect the Master like I have in most other Master reveals, didn’t think they’d go to that well quite so quickly (though I was so annoyed with the annoying ‘we killed him, for realz this time’ the last creative team did that I’m actually happy they dispensed with it right away).
And, perhaps, I was too distracted by “well they’re obviously Cybermen” for the villains based on the shape and all the tricks they used to try and hide it (glowing, mapping the textures around the bodies)… which perhaps, was the point, and well-played if so.
So I was quite pleased with it, a few off-notes aside. My only worry is “Everything you think you know is a lie…” If the Master’s talking about his particular scheme, fine, but I’m really hoping this is not leading into another “let’s make our mark by retconning major stuff about the Doctor’s history, because we don’t feel confident enough in our ability to just do it through good storytelling.” (Unless of course, that is itself going to be a lie to throw the Doctor off-balance).
I’m a bit ambivalent about this one. Great new monster, the spy stuff wasn’t terrible, but I’m less than enthused about the return of the Master. Following up Michelle Gomez’s definitive take on the character and amazing character arc with another cRaZy Master doing evil for the lulz feels like a serious step back for the character. I know status quo is god, but at least wait a few years if we’re going to have to just pretend the Master didn’t have a serious change of heart at the end of their previous regeneration.
@5 I thought Ryan’s missing the basket was a nice nod to his dyspraxia. To show that he still has coordination problems that will never quite go away, no matter how much he practices.
So long as this is a pre-Missy incarnation, I’m fine. I liked where that story left her, and I’m not ready to see that undone again so soon. But he can be between Simm and Gomez fairly easily.
It was a bit odd that there were so many sunset scenes in this episode, but it was nice to look at.
A little concerned about the arc with the “everything you know is a lie” and “timeless child” stuff. And “the entire universe is at stake!” seems a bit much for a (currently) solidly earthbound story. But I’m still going to be there for the next one.
@@.-@. The Thirteenth Doctor Comic recently did a “The Doctor thinks it’s the Master, but it’s not” story.
This episode was quite enjoyable to start with, but The Master prowling out from where he’d been hidden in plain sight really punched up the Entertainment Factor in my estimation; actually, while I would definitely love to see more Time Lord Rogues who are NOT The Master my only disappointment with this Season Premiere is the realisation that Thirteen is almost certainly NOT wearing one of Eleven’s old bow-ties (and that Ms. Whittaker is too short to wear Mr Matt Smith’s old suits).
On the other hand “Snap” was one of those simple delights that I keep tuning into DOCTOR WHO for and there were others (Mycroft Holmes III aka ‘C’ was definitely one of them).
What if “the lie” is that the Master is trying to stop this new monster from destroying our universe. He’s either a post-Missy version struggling for redemption or another timeline Master who doesn’t want someone destroying/controlling the universe that belongs to him.
I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see this one since I don’t have cable anymore, but fortunately I found it streaming for free on the BBC America website this morning. Unfortunately, it’s a crummy video player that fumbled the transitions between the show and the commercials, which was annoying. Plus it’s the first time in a while I’ve encountered streaming video that wouldn’t play in Firefox so that I had to use Chrome instead.
Anyway, nice to see the Doctor and the “fam” again, but I didn’t love the story, since I’m not a fan of James Bond. I mean, really, why were they so impressed by those suitcases full of spy gadgets when their best mate has a sonic screwdriver that does all that and more? And what’s the deal with MI-6 officially denying the existence of aliens even while acknowledging that UNIT and Torchwood have been dealing with them for decades? I don’t understand this franchise’s insistence on constantly resetting humanity’s knowledge of aliens to zero despite regularly doing stories about alien invasions on Earth. (And whatever happened to the peace treaty with the Zygons living among us?)
The threat is also too unfocused. Are the enemy attacking through technology or rewriting spies’ DNA or coming directly through the walls or what? Pick a tactic and stick with it.
And why did Graham act surprised when “O” said the Doctor had been a man when he’d just been mistaken for the Doctor by “C,” who explicitly said all previous records said the Doctor was a man?
Like others, I’m a bit underwhelmed by the return of the Master, since it hasn’t been that long since the last one, and it’d be nice to see some other Time Lords return now that Gallifrey is back in play. Still, Sacha Dhawan is an interesting choice — though a bit of an ironic one, since he played Doctor Who‘s pilot director Waris Hussein in the docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time.
With the hints about alternate universes, I wonder if the Barton that Yaz and Ryan saw talking to the aliens is a doppelganger and the one that the Doctor spoke to was the real one who knew nothing of the plot. And maybe Barton was “never there” in the cockpit because the Barton we saw flying the plane was a parallel one, or something. (He did seem to react to the cargo door being open, but that could be a red herring, like that annoying trope where we cut between scenes of a villain or captive inside a room and scenes of the cops about to storm into the room to arrest or rescue them, and then they storm in and it’s empty because it’s actually two completely different rooms.)
@5/Sunspear: “The company is called Vor, as in -vore (to devour).”
Yup. Which made me laugh, because “vore” is also the name of a weird sexual fetish, so I have a hard time believing any online company’s marketing people would’ve ever okayed that name as a good idea.
“How many incarnations of the Master have we seen on screen? Seven, eight?”
Let’s see…
William Hughes (as a child in “The Sound of Drums” and “The End of Time”)
Roger Delgado
Peter Pratt/Geoffrey Beevers (the decayed Master from “The Deadly Assassin” and “The Keeper of Traken,” presumably a single incarnation)
Anthony Ainley
Gordon Tipple (at the start of the ’96 movie, just long enough to be executed)
Eric Roberts
Derek Jacobi
John Simm
Michelle Gomez
Sacha Dhawan
So this would be technically the tenth Master incarnation we’ve seen, though only the eighth with significant screen time. That’s not counting the robot Master from the non-canonical animated webcast The Scream of the Shalka (which was also played by Jacobi). There have also been Big Finish audio-exclusive Masters played by Alex Macqueen and James Dreyfus.
“Quibbles: Ryan’s pain at missing shot at the basket was so overplayed it lost meaning. What, you can’t set up a hoop on the TARDIS when you have some downtime if it matters so much?”
I think it was the other way around — he missed the shot because he was barely paying attention to the game, since he was distracted/haunted by thoughts of faraway places and times.
I suspect we have not seen the last of Stephen Fry. The voices of the mystery aliens sound a lot like him with some pitch changes and what not. The cadence is very much him.
After we saw Yaz in the weird forest, am I the only one who thought “It’s the Upside Down”? That might not have been the best script choice.
One thing I enjoyed was looking back at O’s reaction to the TARDIS as “Ridiculous”.
At the time, you’re reading it as that is his reaction to it being bigger on the inside, but when you realize it’s the Master, he could have actually been saying that he doesn’t like the look of her new TARDIS.
@14/DemetriosX: The credited “Voice of Kasaavin” (which seems to mean the alien/s) is Struan Rodger, who previously voiced the Face of Boe and played Clayton in “The Woman Who Lived.”
@5/Sunspear: “The company is called Vor, as in -vore (to devour).”
“‘Vor’ means ‘thief’!” (obBujold)
I loved the Master reveal! Completely unexpected and delightful.
I’m wondering, though: Is he physically human this time around? He made a comment about keeping “Mini-O” around for a template, and if I recall correctly, he made a reference a minute later to his “heart,” i.e., singular. That could be an additional reason the Doctor didn’t recognize him, similar to how the Tenth Doctor didn’t recognize the timewatch-altered-to-human Jacobi Master.
It’s irritating that the characters were explaining their absences. It’s a TIME machine. Why doesn’t the doctor simply return them to the moment after they left the way that 11 and 12 would do?
@18/Ken: The Doctor has never been very good at recognizing other Time Lords with changed faces, especially the Master, who’s successfully disguised himself from the Doctor on many occasions. The Doctor doesn’t even recognize his own future selves when he meets them; Doctor #1 didn’t recognize 5 in “The Five Doctors” or 12 in “Twice Upon a Time,” and 5 in turn failed to recognize 10 in “Time Crash,” while 10 was fooled into thinking that Jackson Lake was his future self in “The Next Doctor.”
@19/Kav: I actually got a little tired of the Moffat-era tendency to give the Doctor such perfect control over the TARDIS that he could always return a companion the second after they left. I miss the days when the TARDIS’s navigation was unreliable and it was a crapshoot whether he could get the companions home at all, so that they were full-time travelers rather than the part-time commuter-style companions of the Moffat era. Given that the TARDIS was practically destroyed and rebuilt when Thirteen came along, I wouldn’t mind if we were back to the days when the TARDIS’s steering was iffy at best.
Isn’t Her Majesty’s agent zero zero seven himself a time lord?
I mean, look at all those incarnations…!
I brought up Vor because the article calls it “Vos” several times. Maybe it’s a reference to DeVos, a kind of human vampire squid that devours resources needed by schoolchildren.
Also, forgot to mention that @roxanna has actually performed an act of time travel in this very thread: timestamp is after posts 2 and 3, yet she ended up at no. 1.
Yeah, how the heck did that happen? Have I developed temporal superpowers? Please no! I want force fields!
@roxanna: If you could time/space travel, when and where would you go?
I majored in history so it would be a list, a long list, and it’s hard to know what to choose first. And as a woman it wouldn’t be safe for me to tour most periods alone so I’d need the ability to take an escort with me. I might start with the Indus civilization.we know so little about it.
If you could combine time/space travel with stealth technology, you’d be the perfect observer. Go back to supposed key events in history and come back with accurate reports (or at least less incomplete and biased) of what did or didn’t happen.
Sounds like fun!
@13/CLB: Are the Gordon Tipple and Anthony Ainley Masters definitely separate incarnations? We only see Tipple briefly in long shot, but judging by behind the scenes photos, he seems to have been made up to look like the previous version. The tie-in fiction covering the gap between Survival and the TV Movie is notoriously contradictory: The New Adventures introduce a new post-Ainley Master (who could be the Tipple version), but The Eight Doctors seems to implying it’s the same one.
The DWM comic strip featured a post-TV Movie Master who seems to be different from the Big Finish one. Mark Gatiss has played an alternate timeline Master for Big Finish.
The weird no man’s land looked like either an exceedingly large carpet/rug [with Yaz/The Doctor amongst the threads] (Of course it could be a regular carpet and they’ve been super minaturised). Or the Wood between the Worlds gone dystopian.
Since the aliens seem to be claiming not to be of our universe, I’m leaning more in the direction of the second.
@29/Philippa: My first thought was “miniaturized in a carpet” too, but the “trees” were way too tall in proportion to their thickness.
Ugh, it looks like BBC America only offered the first episode for free online. I’d have to sign in with my cable provider to watch episode 2, and if I had a cable provider, I wouldn’t need to watch online. So I guess I won’t be able to see the rest of the season after all, at least not until I’m a bit less broke and can pay for the episodes on YouTube or Amazon or something.
If they were going to offer only one episode for free, I wish it hadn’t been the first half of a 2-parter.
Mods! Looks like the comment numbering has gone a bit timey-wimey in this thread. There’s two number 1’s.
Re: comment numbering–we’re looking into it, thanks!
It is already better written than the entirety of last season. I hope Chibnall doesn’t screw it up. A lot of good actors were let down by a lot of bad writing last season.
Also:
Look, either every Doctor only lives three years or you have to admit that you haven’t seen a whole awful lot of the Doctor’s life. S/he can perfectly well know their age. It is just that you’ve missed it all.
@34. pjcamp: Twelve alone is billions of years old. (Yes, I know there’s a technicality.)
I did find myself wondering if the chase on motorcycles was a call-back to “Delta and the Bannerman”.