The Doctor is about to team up with a few good women to stop her favorite megalomaniac. Can’t be too hard, right? Just an ordinary Sunday.
Summary
The Doctor meets a woman (Sylvia Briggs) in the conduit forest who believes that the alien figures (who are called the Kasaavin) are guardians of some sort. They zap her back to her place in time and the Doctor hitches a ride. She learns that the woman is Ada Lovelace, and the Master somehow tracks them down. Ryan, Yaz, and Graham stay alive when Ryan discovers clues left for him by the Doctor on how to safely land the plane in the present. They wind up back in England, where Barton has arrived via the Master’s TARDIS. They intend to keep an eye on him, but he tracks them through CCTV and their phones, and puts their pictures out for the public to see, so they have to go off the grid. Back in the 19th century, the Doctor finds a sculpture called The Silver Lady in Charles Babbage’s (Mark Dexter) place, and realizes that it’s linked to the Kasaavin. She hopes to summon one by activating the sculpture, and hitch a ride to the 21st Century. But Ada hitches a ride with her, and they end up in 1942, Paris. There they meet Noor Inayat Khan (Aurora Marion), and find that the Master has tracked them again, this time in the guise of a Nazi.
In 2020, Yaz, Ryan, and Graham keep barely escaping the Kasaavin. They’re on the run, with Yaz unable to tell her family what’s happened to her. The group realize that there’s very little they know about the Doctor, and they can’t figure out why any of this is happening. Ryan and Graham took some spy tech from the kits that C gave them, and Graham figures out the laser shoes, which comes in handy as they work to track down Barton. They end up in a warehouse where Barton’s mother is being held—Barton has killed her.
The Doctor contacts the Master through the drumbeat rhythm that’s followed him his whole life. They set up a mental connection and agree to meet at the Eiffel Tower. There, the Master reveals his plans to get rid of the human race using Barton and the Kasaavin, and then take power for himself. He also tells the Doctor that Gallifrey has been destroyed. The Doctor gets the Master arrested by the Nazis as a British double agent, and uses his TARDIS to get back to the 21st century right as Barton and the Kasaavin are trying to overwrite all of humanity with alien DNA. The Master has also arrived for the party (having lived through the last 77 years the long way), but the Doctor reprogrammed The Silver Lady so that the plan cannot go through, turning the Master over to the Kasaavins after revealing his duplicity. The Master is sent to their dimension (the conduit forest) while the Doctor goes back to rig the airplane landing video for the TARDIS crew. She sends Ada and Noor back to their times, wiping their memories of her existence.
The Doctor does go to Gallifrey and finds the Master was telling the truth—their planet has been destroyed. She gets a message from him, telling her that he is responsible for the carnage; he wanted to make the Time Lords pay for a terrible lie that he’s uncovered about “The Timeless Child”. Later, Ryan, Yaz, and Graham ask the Doctor who she really is. She admits to being a Time Lord, to stealing her TARDIS, and to how she knows the Master, but refuses to take them to Gallifrey when Yaz asks.
Commentary
I have a lot of questions, but most of them center around one particular query: Is that the last we’re going to see of the people and plots from this two-parter?
If these characters and the danger raised in these episodes become part of the season arc, or the finale, then this was a great set up. If we never see these people again… that’s a problem. Because there are so many lose ends here, and some of them are downright awful.
For example, why were we introduced to Daniel Barton’s mother (played by Blanche Williams, who is deadpan perfection from the first frame) only to watch her get murdered a minute later? If it’s just to make it clear that Barton is a terrible person, then there were other ways of doing that—ways that didn’t involve killing another black woman on Doctor Who after Grace’s death last season. Barton’s story here also doesn’t seem remotely finished, given that he publicly claimed he was going to wipe out humanity, and then didn’t succeed. The story of the Kasaavin doesn’t seem finished either (I’m still not convinced that they’re not the new version of the Cybermen?)… and if you expect me to believe that the Master is just going to hang out in their weird nether dimension forever, that’s a timeshare that no one in the fandom will buy.
Parts of this episode come off a little underdone, which probably has more to do with wanting that reveal at the end of Part One. If the Master’s presence had come forward earlier, there might have been time to weave the plot threads tighter and sooner, but as is, there’s a lot of confusion around who is doing what and why. The Kasaavin are watching people through history who were involved with the invention of the computer? Barton agreed to help them… because technology or maybe threats? The spy aspect of the story now only applies to Graham and Ryan because they were the only people who cared enough to keep some spy stuff? (I do love that they use some of it, but it seems like an afterthought.) How can the current TARDIS crew continue their lives when they were all over the news, and why aren’t we learning about the repercussions of that sooner? Those are big things to just leave hanging, even if they were planning to keep traveling with the Doctor before dealing with any of it.
The one thing that does remain consistent is the Master’s motivation because it’s been consistent through over a half century of television: When the Doctor asks point blank when all his murder and mayhem will cease, the Master asks why he would stop… when this is the only thing that guarantees the Doctor’s attention.
He goes to great lengths for it in this episode, even to the point of joining up with the Nazis during WWII to seek her out. From a metatextual standpoint, seeing a person of color in a Nazi uniform is patently awful, and I’m not sure it’s justifiable regardless of the character making that choice. (Note: I am a white person, so my opinion on this is less relevant than how people of color find it.) On the other hand, from an in-universe perspective, I appreciate the realism that is levied in its use. The Master is currently a person of color, ergo he would never be accepted as a Nazi—something that both he and the Doctor are cognizant of, to the point where the Master uses a perception filter in order to make himself appear more acceptable to their ranks. The Doctor is so mortified by this that she breaks said filter and calls him in as a British spy, forcibly revoking his choice to join them. I find this interesting due to the running parallels between their characters. While it doesn’t happen too often, being a woman has occasionally put the Doctor at a disadvantage, tugging at the veil of privilege that she’s normally situated behind. In this case, we get to see the Master encounter a similar change of privilege from another perspective.
I’m impressed with their interactions overall, and how the director and actors played the Doctor and Master’s relationship without falling prey to lazy sexist tropes now that their gender dynamic has been reversed. The Master still has that obsession around the Doctor saying his name, but we’ve seen it before, back when they were both men. All the moments that could feel needlessly sexualized—the kneeling, the chokehold—never come off that way because Whittaker never plays it as though she’s lost the upper hand. Their power plays have changed to suit their current iterations, as they are meant to do every time the parts change hands.
What’s behind all of this timeline tracking and the potential end of humanity is something far closer to home, though. The Doctor and the Master’s home, that is. This turns out to be part of a larger issue that will no doubt power the season—the reveal that the Master has destroyed Gallifrey (funny, given that up until the 50th anniversary, the Doctor had also done that) in recompense for learning something terrible about the Time Lords. This something has to do with the “Timeless Child”, which we heard about last season in “The Ghost Monument”, said to be “outcast, abandoned, and unknown.” There were a lot of theories on who this child was at the time, ranging from the Doctor herself to her granddaughter Susan from the show’s very first seasons. But the Master talks about the Timeless Child as though they are part of Gallifreyan lore or history, suggesting a different source for his fury.
Keep in mind, whatever this is likely to be beyond your average level of terrible; the Master found out that the Time Lords were responsible for the cranial drumbeat that plagued his entire existence during “The End of Time”, and likely only killed Rassilon over it. If he’s moved on to species genocide, that means that it’s somehow worse then finding out that your own people callously and purposefully drove you to madness.
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Being upfront, I’m completely in favor of this arc. Despite how nice it might be to see the Doctor rescue Gallifrey from the Time War in a very special 50th anniversary celebration of the show, it never sat well with me that all was forgiven because the truth of the matter is—the Time Lords are horrible. We see that throughout the history of the show. And while I’m guessing that the Doctor will find some way to reverse what the Master has done before long, refusing to make Gallifrey into some sort of saintly bastion of fond memories and comfort for the Doctor just makes more sense.
She ran away from home for a reason.
Having an episode revolve around the Doctor meeting two incredible women of the past and forming a brief superteam with them is beautiful. Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan are such a delight to meet, and wonderful companions for the Doctor to adventure with… but there’s something off about the Doctor using Time Lord powers to erase their memories, something that fans cried foul over with Donna Noble over a decade ago for good reason. Not obtaining permission to do what she does isn’t suddenly okay because the Doctor is a woman now. It’s an awful thing to do—and far worse if you know that Noor Khan dies two years later in a Nazi concentration camp. At the very least, more attempts could have been made to explain why the action was necessary, to convince them both rather than ignoring their autonomy.
We end with concern from the current Team TARDIS over the Doctor’s lack of forthcoming around her person and past. We’ve seen this before, but usually in one-on-one situations that are easier for the Doctor to bypass. This time, it’s unlikely that the current crew will let her get away with it for long…
Things and asides:
- The Master’s outfit in the message that he leaves for the Doctor features plaid trousers that look an awful lot like something the Second Doctor would wear. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s borrowed style from his old school pal.
- We’ve known that Time Lords have the ability to get into each other’s heads since “The End of Time”, when the Master uses this connection to give the Doctor a glimpse of the drumbeat in his head. Said beat is what the Doctor uses to get his attention via Morse Code.
- Ada Lovelace reminding the Doctor that you never learn anything without trying it may be one of my favorite moments in all of Doctor Who ever.
- The Master telling the Doctor to kneel feels intentionally reminiscent of Loki in The Avengers. Maybe the Master watched the movie while he was hanging out in Australia and wanted to go one better? It makes sense that he’d see the parallels and go for it, being the drama boy he is.
- The Master’s Nazi uniform features a skull on his hat—used on SS uniforms.
- Where did the Master’s TARDIS end up? The Doctor had it, then never indicates what she’s going to do with it. Granted, if the chameleon circuit is still functioning, she could outwardly turn it into any number of things… maybe she’s stored his TARDIS on her own TARDIS? Just leaving it somewhere seems like a bad move.
- There’s still no answer as to when this particular Master comes from. It would be pretty great if Missy somehow regenerated in spite of what her final appearance suggested, and would make sense, since he seems to know about the Time War and the pocket where Gallifrey is being kept.
- I love that Graham asks if they’re being replaced when he sees Ada and Noor. So sweet.
- The Doctor still has the occasional hiccup remembering her gender, as she does when trying to explaining her sudden appearance in Ada’s time. It’s perfect.
Emmet Asher-Perrin wants to know what Gallifrey managed to do this time. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
I agree about the hanging threads. I think Barton HAS to come back, they just left too much up in the air with him. Even more, I want this version of The Master to come back. He’s far more controlled than Sims’s version and as much as I liked Missy, this Master is compelling. I feel hopeful about him returning because he’s not even dead, so he should find a way to make it out of his prison.
I didn’t think about what had happened to his TARDIS, but good question. I expect The Doctor locked it up tight, so no one can use it and only a Time Lord could get it open. That means The Master can get it working again, but Time Lords are pretty scarce, although they may not all be dead.
This was a good start to the season. It’s too bad that Chibnall’s first season was not as strong, because I see a lot of potential from here on out.
Definitely too many “never minds” on plot threads. Maybe being outed then cleared will help the companions in their regular lives, particularly Yaz. The light people are probably gone, they were little more than a boring special effect so good riddance, and how can Barton come back after trying to destroy humanity? No amount of money will stop that.
Gallifrey is more than the Time Lords. Most of the population aren’t so I’m not okay with it being destroyed for what ever the Time Lords did. It also looks like the perky Doctor has transitioned into a sad one.
I truly hated what was done with Donna Noble at the end of her tenure. It was a far bigger violation than they seemed to realize. And to see the same type of erasure used so casually here… very disheartening. If these writers don’t get how serious it is to mess with the integrity of someone’s mind in the real world, then someone should hand them a pop culture reference like Identity Crisis, so they can see Batman’s righteous fury when the same is done to him. Something he values more than anything, his intellect, becomes unreliable after the tampering. And no, the MiB series casual use of same isn’t a good reference.
Barton’s speech was a good one, summing up the huge amounts of biographical data we give up freely (and not so freely when companies lie) to the new surveillance capitalism. He’s dead wrong about human brains being perfect hard drives. That’s pure nonsense and would kill his company immediately. Brains are more unreliable than silicate or crystal storage mediums, though they can both be constantly subject to being rewritten/overwritten. (Yes, I know this contrasts with what I said about the integrity of minds). Not sure what he thinks his function will be once the human race turns into wetware zombies. Maybe once the Doctor finds out what all Time Lords were forced to forget, she’ll be less casual about screwing with memory.
The laser shoes… sheesh. We went from attempting James Bond and landed on Maxwell Smart. Graham would’ve done better taking them off for more accurate aim. Just too goofy, ignoring the danger they posed to his own companions.
I’m starting to hate the score. It’s too hectic, loud, excessive, just a wall of noise. Even the opening credits theme seems like a formless rumble. Which is a shame after the distinctive themes, notes, and tunes we’ve heard for other incarnations. It fits some of the over the top reaching for action moments in these two episodes, I guess. I don’t really want to watch Who as an action movie, though.
It seems to me that the set up enough loose threads to keep us busy for the whole rest of the season, hinting that this one will be less episodic than 13’s first season.
I very much love Graham, as his attitude toward all this chaos helps keep the show grounded. I especially loved the sheer delight on his face while using his laser shoes.
I was kind of disappointed the episode couldn’t have gone on longer, as the Doctor was assembling quite a League of Extraordinary Ladies. I would love to see them come back to pitch in during future episodes.
There was one moment where Babbage was going on about women, and how they needed to be decorative. And the Doctor and Ada gave each other a look that was priceless.
@3 It was the DNA, not the brain.
@5. You’re right. He says humans are the most efficient hard drives. Then he refers to DNA. Guess I assumed a hard drive to brain mapping. In any case, he’s still wrong. There’s nothing about a chemical code that’s “hard”, even though he serves as “proof of concept” in the story.
@5 and 6…
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610071/storing-data-in-dna-is-a-lot-easier-than-getting-it-back-out/
All in all I am not sure I am completely happy with this season so far, but it does have some real potential.
As far as all the negative about wiping Donna (I wasn’t happy either) there was one option wipe or she died. Also there were several references to the event and that The Dr didn’t like doing it. And we all seem to forget about the impossible girl and the Dr when it was the Dr getting his mind wiped.
As far as the second episode is concerned something is bugging me about some of the story line and I can’t put my finger on it. Something about the timeless child is reminding me of the Baker years but I have no clue why.
The real kicker about the light aliens’ plan is they want to store important data in rotting organic matter/dead humans. For beings who have been around so long watching humans they are remarkably stupid.
I loved the sisterhood of women that the Doctor gathered to help her. It reminded me that we occasionally have seen the great men of history, but other than Cleopatra, few women (feel free to correct).
This episode made the first one acceptable. I found a threat to the spy community not much of a threat—after all, one was about to assassinate someone. The threat was finally widened to humanity. The frank conversation between the Doctor and the Master made him less of clown figure with no depth. That helped. I will still miss Missy with her conflicted reaction to the Doctor.
and we get a new mystery as a theme for the season! Even though, I thought The Timeless Child had come up as a tease in earlier seasons. I am thinking of the list of things that the Doctor lists when going through the horrors of the Time War….
This was an ambitious episode with lots of interesting ideas. And it was mess. Cramming an episode with one season worth of content cannot work. It’s a shame, because for once that people talk about Noor Inayat Khan, they don’t have the time to do anything but name-check her. What’s the point of bringing those two brilliant women if it’s just to watch the Doctor and act confused?
The situation of Gallifrey is also becoming very confusing. It was lock outside of the time stream, then the Doctor(s) freezed it in its own pocket universe (yet the Time Lords were still able to send him enough artron energy to grant him a new cycle of regenerations). The past of Gallifrey was still accessible, since the Doctor is able to travel ot his own childhood. At no point doe the Doctor restore Gallifrey. Karn was apparently unaffected by the Moment, but Ohila from the Sisterhood of Karn had apparently no trouble travelling to Gallifrey. In 2014 (or whenever), The Doctor has no idea where Gallifrey is, even believing Missy when she tells him it’s again in its proper place. Somehow the Doctor later got a confession dial that let him reached Gallifrey, discovering where it is 4.5 billion years into the future (but not how it arrived there). Going even further, he finds a Gallifrey destroyed (but then again, this was the end of the universe). The Doctor apparently never made an attempt to go back to Gallifrey since then until last night’s episode, in which we learn that the Doctor perfectly knows how to reach it, and that it’s been destroyed. What’s the point of having Gallifrey being restored and accessible, if it’s to tell us it has been destroyed?
@3: I found Barton’s speech awful, especially since everyone just listens to him without even reacting, even as he tells them he’s about to kill them. They don’t even look afraid! It’s one thing for the villain to tell the hero his master plan, it’s another to tell the entire world, before the plan is even executed. He didn’t say the human brains were perfect hard drives though, but rather human DNA. Which is also stupid: although DNA is a good way to store lots of information (it’s small and robust, since the cells can divide, making sure copies will always be available, although there might be some errors due to mutation. As for retrieval, we can assume that the Kasaavin have better technology than we do), there’s no point in using humanity for data storage, when any other species would do.
I find myself agreeing with much of this review (aside from the continuing disturbingly racist comments about how skin colour is a factor in whether or not someone should be killed). There seem to be a heck of a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions. As the episode ends, Barton’s still at large (and could possibly write this off as a publicity stunt since no-one actually died: certainly his audience seemed to think he was joking), the Master’s down but not out, and the Kasaavi have suffered a setback but hardly a killing blow. Possibly they’re all going to turn up further down the line, but I’m left remembering that nearly every episode last season ended with a villain either sent away but with the potential to come back or not actually being defeated at all. So that may just be how Chibnall does it.
But yes, not much in the way of motivation. The Master’s is clear: Get an alien species to wipe out humanity for a laugh/to upset the Doctor and then take over is a standard MO for him, although he probably doesn’t have any idea how to do it. But it’s not clear why the Kasaavi want to turn the human race into storage banks, or why Barton thinks it’s a good idea to help them (the Master says he convinced him but it’s not clear how). Is he really so misanthropic that he’s willing to help eradicate/enslave his species so he can be one of the ruling class (as his speech suggests)?
So my second theory about how Barton got off the plane was right: Having rewatched Part One prior to it, we definitely saw Barton and the alert in the same shot, so it’s not a different plane, but he does get a phone call just before he disappears (presumably from the Master, who’s lagging behind the Doctor and the others at the time and probably out of view).
No definitive word on where this Master comes from. He could conceivably be post-Simms, pre-Gomez, but I find that unlikely, although I’d like to know how we got from the apparently redeemed Missy back to business as usual. Was the reveal of the Timeless Child enough to send him over the edge? (The Master didn’t kill Rassilon by the way, because he turned up again in “Hell Bent”. We were told in “The Doctor Falls” that the Time Lords removed the drumbeat from the Master’s head and sent him on his way.)
So yes, finito Gallifrey again. It was probably for the best as while Steven Moffat wanted a happy ending for the 50th anniversary, even he had no idea what to do with Gallifrey afterwards, culminating in the horror of “Hell Bent” where the Doctor finally makes it there, murders someone and tries to destroy the universe, which at least explains why he never went back. I disagree with the assertion that they all deserved it though (unless there’s something very very big to come in this reveal): As Steven Moffat said, none of us deserve genocide because of the actions of our leaders.
More obscure figures from history: I didn’t even know for sure that the spy in 1943 Paris (not 1942 as the review claims) was a real person until I read this. This does mean that Graham, Yasmin and Ryan are largely irrelevant, just killing time until the Doctor turns up to rescue them. And the episode really didn’t make enough of them being public enemies. Barton says they know everything about them, but Yaz’s family go through the episode unmolested.
Some people complained about the Doctor nipping back to pre-emptively sort things out. (In fact, there is a lot of “The Curse of Fatal Death” in here!) Someone I know called it a bootstrap paradox, but it’s not really because no-one tells the Doctor what to do: She comes up with the ideas to get them off the plane herself, we (and she) just see the effect before the cause. It does feel a bit convenient though that she could slip a failsafe into the silver lady and the Master, with 77 years to check, never realises: I was expecting him to reveal that at the end, especially when suddenly the Kasaavi turned up, but they just drag him off.
Maybe just a personal thing but it felt very odd to me to have the Doctor suddenly using the northern pronounciation of Master (“Mass-ter”) rather than the received pronunciation “Mar-ster”. Christopher Ecclestone would probably have said it that way but never met him, and other northern-originated actors playing the Doctor, like Tom Baker and Paul McGann, had obviously been taught received pronunciation. Then again, as I was watching I realised I had two northern friends in the room saying Mass-ter, so maybe it’s happened a lot and I’ve never noticed.
Personally, “Kneel!” always makes me think of Superman II, which is probably where Joss Whedon got it from. Or “Pyramids of Mars”.
I forgot to comment on the mind wipe but I agree about that as well. I was uncomfortable enough when the Doctor intended to do it to Bill, but at least there he thought better of it. But this seemed unnecessary and, in the case of the clearly unwilling Ava, a complete violation. It seems like the Doctor’s been exposing historical celebrities to things outside their recorded experience for regenerations without feeling the need to mentally rape them afterwards, so why the change? Maybe this will come back to bite her in future, but the aftermath of Ava’s erasure seemed to be trying to present it in a positive light.
I haven’t watched Doctor Who in a while, mostly because I don’t really watch TV all that much and the somewhat irregular release schedule.
So I have to ask, with a certain amount of incredulity: did they really have this set of companions traveling with the Doctor for month (at least) and they’re only now learning she’s a *Time Lord*?
I also can’t help but feel a bit miffed that Gallifrey is gone. Again. And in such a dismissive way (“Oh I blew it up off screen”).
The story of the Doctor, in the rebooted series, put the destruction of Gallifrey (and the war and everything) together into this really amazing background and characterization for the Doctor, and the return of Gallifrey was such a big moment. To see it just trashed off screen feels pointless, and to a degree reminds me an awful lot of the new Star Wars trilogy and how it essentially spent so much of it’s time undoing the victories of the original trilogy (and things like Vader turning back to the light side and redeeming himself) in order to give the same victories (essentially) to the new cast.
Christ, imagine if this *wasn’t* the doctor, but a bunch of Time Lords (A new enemy from an old group) that puts the Doctor at exact odds with them. The plot could even require the Doctor to lock them away (or something) because they’re really bad people, despite being her own species/family. But… nope.
@11: Nobody got killed in the stunt (if we exclude Mrs Barton, who died before that), but a great part of the world’s population got hurt, so Barton is right to expect punishment for what he did.
The Master did kill Rassilon. But I believe Rassilon has an unlimited number of regenerations (Time Lords searched for the Tomb of Rassilon to find the secret of immortality after all. And yes, the fact that this secret is in a tomb should make one question how effective that secret is…). Death is like Time Lord flu after all!
I still don’t understand why the Kasaavi would focus on spies. They said that intelligence agencies all over the world were starting to notice them, but targeting spies made the Kasaavi even more obvious, so that’s not a great strategy. And what is the relevance of Barton being a former spy?
I’m French, and I had never heard of Noor Inayat Khan until last year. She deserves to be better known!
The interaction between the Doctor and the Master at the science exhibition (“say my name”) reminded me of The Sound Of Drums. I liked how the Tenth Doctor just removed the wind from the Master’s sails by insisting that it was just his name, and thus the Doctor calling him that had no specific meaning. This Doctor on the other hand does not seem to care that much about how people see her, thus doesn’t care much about how she appears if it can save lives (compare with Silence In The Library for instance: “I don’t want to see everyone in this room dead because some idiot thinks his pride is more important. RIVER: Then why don’t you sign his contract?”)
I think Ada’s mindwipe was important because she hadn’t achieved what she is famous for yet, and the Doctor had been extremely careless about revealing her future to her: not wiping her mind would have robbed her of her future successes. The scene still left a bad taste in my mouth.
@13: I believe it took a long time for Rose to learn about the basics of the Doctor. As for the earlier companions, they may never have (since those aspects of the canon hadn’t been decided upon yet)
@11: Nobody got killed in the stunt (if we exclude Mrs Barton, who died before that), but a great part of the world’s population got hurt, so Barton is right to expect punishment for what he did.
I can see Barton walking on the whole “spearheading an alien invasion” thing (“They altered his DNA, m’lud! He was an unwilling participant!”) but doing time for the murder of his mother, since the jury will CLEARLY think that killing his mother was part of the deal he made with the aliens, otherwise why kill her first, instead of, y’know, warning her to stay off the grid that day. But then, Chibnall never thinks through the legal implications of anything (see Broadchurch, Season Two.)
Some of the classic series companions knew at least some things about the Doctor. Any companion who went to Gallifrey would learn a lot. The ones witnessing his regenerations knew about that. The non-human ones, such as Nyssa, probably knew at least a bit about the existence of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. And Susan probably knew the most, being Gallifreyan herself, although we don’t know how young she was when her grandfather spirited her away with him. If she was very small her knowledge of her own world and people would rely on how much he educated her about them.
The Doctor didn’t “mind wipe” anyone. She removed the memory of her and the incident. That’s it. The whole concern-troll fuss about it is ridiculous and equating it to rape is disgusting. I don’t care who the human is, no one can be trusted to have knowledge of the future—period. If you want a metaphor, go with a medical doctor giving a child a vaccination or removing some foreign body. The child is going to scream and holler NO, but you would never say the doctor is “raping” the child by proceeding. The doctor’s knowledge and experience trumps the child’s protest for everyone’s good.
Lovely review, Emily! I wasn’t really bothered by loose threads. I have to admit I was completely enthralled by the Master. I love what Sacha Dhawan is doing with the character.
Regarding when this Master comes from: Even if Missy dies at end of season 10, doesn’t the Master, as played by John Simm, regenerates after shooting Missy? Couldn’t Dhawan!Master be the one he regenerated into? As you said in the review from part 1 (and I’ve also seen people on tumblr suggest this idea) Dhawan!Master could predate Missy – in fact, the reason for Missy’s almost execution at the start of season 10 could be about Gallifrey.
@14 Noor Inayat Khan was a brave person who died a horrible death, but I have to question the wisdom of putting an Arabic woman who could be considered Jewish looking into a situation like Nazi occupied France.
Actually Noor Inayat Khan was half Indian and half American. The book I read about her brief career as a spy pointed out the folly of putting a woman so memorably lovely in the field. Unnoticeability is what you want in a spy.
@17. Puff: Nope. You’re analogy is reductionist. We’re not dealing with children, where parental judgment overrides consent. What the Doctor does should require consent. If there’s no consent, it’s a violation of another person. And if you go the route that the Doctor is so superior to humans that she knows better, that’s again reductionist: humans are no better than children or pets to have their futures determined for them. Supposedly, the Doctor likes and respects humans more than that.
If she wants to avoid such issues, then stop mucking about with time altogether. Contain all time travelers in a cage and never let them out.
@13 and @16: None of the companions in the first six years knew the Doctor was a Time Lord (at least not until the very end in Jamie and Zoe’s case, then they were made to forget it). Or the seventh, for that matter. None knew his home planet was called Gallifrey for at least another five years. After that, it did become a bit “We know so everyone knows”, with him blurting out personal information within seconds of meeting someone, but he still never mentioned his planet’s name while Rose was around.
@13 again: Sadly, one of the problems of an ongoing series is that any victory is ultimately only partial or temporary, because the characters have to be in danger again next week. How many times have the Daleks been wiped out forever? How many times has the Master died? By the same token, long before the sequel trilogy, just about every Star Wars story set after the original films had some version of the Empire or the Sith turning up to menace the heroes a few years after their latest absolutely, definitely, final victory. Or an alien invasion.
@14: Define hurt. Yaz’s family seemed to recover immediately, the audience in the auditorium didn’t seem particularly incapacitated. It could be passed off as a simple light show, or at worst nothing more than a static shock.
@17: Since when? The Doctor takes companions from the present and earlier into the future loads of times, then lets them go with that knowledge. He leaves HG Wells with the inspiration for several novels, lets Shakespeare remember an alien invasion and a few handy lines for future works, takes Vincent Van Gogh into the future to show him how he’ll be remembered, and hangs around 1999 San Francisco on New Year’s Eve telling everyone what they’re going to be doing next year. So, why are these two particular humans subjected to a policy of “you don’t have the right to say no to me”?
@22. cap: agreed. Lots of people leave the TARDIS with their memories intact. As do participants in the adventures after exposure to the Doctor. It’s just seems capricious and arbitrary in this case, especially since the two women come across as potential replacement companions. I would’ve liked to see an adventure with the three women, but that’s now null and void.
Since the Doctor is supposedly the archetype of all doctors (although we don’t often see her specialize or specifically use MD abilities), she badly needs a course in medical ethics. Anyone who’s had a procedure done knows about consent forms. No matter how right a doctor feels they are, consent is still required. Otherwise we’re in Mengele territory.
@7 Yes, Donna would have died without the mind wipe. The thing is she knew that and said she would rather die than lose who she had become during her travels with the Doctor. People do get to refuse treatment to save their lives if they think the effects of the treatment aren’t worth it.
I did think about Clara mind wiping The Doctor, mostly during the “when did you last visit Gallifrey?” question because this Doctor shouldn’t remember EVER going back to Gallifrey since the only time we saw them do it was in Hell Bent/Heaven Sent and all that should have been erased when Clara erased herself from his mind. I mean, maybe The Doctor went in novels or in Big Finish productions, but I don’t think they did it on screen
Going from Missy seemingly dead to this Master alive is perfectly in keeping with the show’s history. The Anthony Ainley Master routinely got left in far worse scrapes than that (or the one at the end of this episode) and then turned up again later with nary a word of explanation.
@24: Didn’t 12 get those memories back just before he regenerated?
A couple of things:
First, regarding the memory wipes, and Ada’s in particular. There was a bit of commentary after Rosa aired that having her interact with the Doctor and the Fam diminished her own achievements, and some people claimed that having them act to make sure it all happened (filling out the seats in the bus, making sure it kept to recorded history) stripped Rosa of her agency.
I personally disagree with that, since they were only ensuring that the meddling that had already been done was fixed and it was still Rosa entirely who made the decision not to move, but they may have been trying to circumvent that criticism with Ada (people saying, “She only developed computing code because she travelled with the Doctor!”). If her memories of the events are removed, then they can still give her the agency of developing code, even if her agency of being able to remember was taken from her.
Second, adding on to the kneeling scene – while it’s a huge help that Whittaker is playing it as the Doctor still having control, there’s another factor here I found really interesting, and that’s that as soon as the ‘say my name’ bit ends, the Master also kneels so they’re level! It’s almost like he’s saying, “On the surface, I want people to see that I have control of the situation and that you’re submitting to me, but between us, I still see us as equal” (even if he’s not saying it consciously, either!). They have such an interesting dynamic and always have – the Master plays power games (Hobbit!Ten comes to mind), but at the end of the day, they balance against each other.
Last, yeah, they absolutely need to pick up the Kasaavin thread! They’re still integrated all through time and space, they’ve just had a temporary setback!
@24 and @25: The Doctor always remembered at least some of those events, since he was relating them to Clara (without knowing who she was) at the end of the episode. He remembered going to Gallifrey, he just had a hole about anything concerning Clara.
Part of me is getting a “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” vibe from the Timeless Child. That doesn’t seem like the sort of thing to push the Master to the total destruction of Gallifrey, but it might have been enough for a redeemed and regenerated Missy. The other part of me wonders if the Timeless Child and the Other are the same or connected in some way. Back during the Sylvester McCoy years, they seemed to be hinting that the Doctor might be the Other, but that obviously never came to fruition (much like the idea of the Master actually being the Doctor and the Valeyard explicitly being said to be the Doctor).
I couldn’t quite understand what the Master said at the beginning of his message, but he seemed to be using a different name for the Doctor. It sounded a little like Theta Alpha, which we learned was the Doctor’s nickname in school. I seem to have trouble understanding Sacha Dhawan at times. I thought he said “Neon” until the Doctor dropped to her knees. Might be time to get my ears checked.
Did the Doctor strip Babbage’s memories of encountering her as well? If she didn’t, there’s going to be a conversation that starts –
“Miss Gordon! You are returned! What happened?”
“Sir, I have been at home.”
– and potentially ends with Ada convinced she’s inherited her father’s madness, swearing off mathematics and totally bollixing the timeline as a result.
After what happened to Jamie and Zoe, I’d think the Doctor wouldn’t want anything to do with altering the memories of their companions. I’m another who would have agreed with the story decision to allow Donna to choose to die as the person she became in the course of her adventures.
On a side note, “O,” represented by the kanji 大, is Japanese for “great” or “big.” If you’re going for a one letter name that implies master, that’s probably as close as it gets. This also means that, when they said “Oh, God” at the sight of him, the master was smuggly translating that as “great god.”
@28: He just says “If you’re seeing this, you’ve been to Gallifrey.”
@31: No, he says something before that. The Doctor is sitting against a column and pulls out a glowy, bleeping thing (her sonic?) and the Master say something. She runs over to where his hologram is and then he says “If you’re seeing this, you’ve been to Gallifrey.”
Donna knew it was a choice between loosing her memories or dying. She is an adult, she knows what death is, to choose it or not. She chose to die. People have the right to refuse medical treatment, even life-saving medical treatment.
When the Doctor and Clara did the mind wipe, Clara told the Doctor she’d reversed the polarity on the sonic, and that either of them might get mind wiped. They both agreed that they would go ahead, as it was for the best. Each consented to their 50/50 risk.
In all the cases involved, the people being mind wiped are adults, with the right to consent to or refuse medical treatment. Not children, who lack the experience to make an informed decision.
The difference is consent. Donna was saying”no”, the Doctor and Clara both said “yes.”
@32: Oh yes. It sounds to me like a computer voice, although the subtitles insist it’s the Master’s voice. It just says “Geo activated”, presumably meaning the message was designed to play if the TARDIS was on Gallifrey.
The Doctor needs to make the final journey to Trenzalore.
Apparently actress Aurora Marion who played Noor said she filmed a death scene for the episode:
“My first time as a period character, my first time on a show of this scale, my first death by guns on set (Noor got shot by the nazis, not in the final cut though)… ” cut-death-scene
That sounds like it would’ve been too dark for Who and they made the right decision.
The notion that only white characters can die is bizarre and disturbing. If you think Chibnall is a racist, come out and say it.
As far as loose ends go, do you remember last season? Stories that are abandoned in mid arc is Chibnall living down to his low writing standards. At least he’s made the sonic screwdriver less of a magic wand. That’s been getting irritating.
@37. pjcamp: ” If you think Chibnall is a racist, come out and say it.”
Not sure who the “you” being addressed is there. If it’s me, my feeling about Noor dying in Paris isn’t about race. One, it would be ahistorical. It wouldn’t have lined up/worked with the Doctor’s insistence on the mindwipe. Two, it would have been needlessly cruel (on top of losing the knowledge that the fascists lose), given that she died anyway a year later in a camp.
The staging of that scene was weird anyway. They had the Nazis shooting up the floor where Ada and the Doc were hiding, yet they didn’t get a scratch.
No new Who review this week?
No–due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to skip this week’s review, but we should be back on track for next week’s episode.
Ok, thank you. I would have been tempted to be hyperbolic and give the episode an F for how messy it is. It’s not quite that bad, more like a C, but it has some serious issues.
Well, if you can’t say anything nice… Anyway, after last week’s episode, Dinosaurs On A Spaceship is not any more “episode most likely to have been written by Mad Libs”. More precisely, it sounded like the result of a game of Once Upon A Time (or a sci-fi expansion thereof): you could tell when the writer drew the card “I am your father”, “It was Earth all along”; or “Heroic sacrifice”. In these conditions, it’s hard to care about these characters at all. Also, any story about rescuing a character that ends up with more than one character being dead because of risks that should have been anticipated just makes everyone appear stupid. Especially since there was no reason for all of them to come. For Kane and Vorm, sure, it’s their job. They really should have prevented Vilma from coming, especially since contrary to the others, they knew the risks; but at least she had a reason for going out there. As for the TARDIS’ crew, that’s what they do. But Hyph3n? Bella? Nevi and Sylas? Why aren’t they kept safe inside the linen cupboard? Especially when there’s a teleporter to fix, which would have been a better use of their time.
The planet was utterly unconvincing. Why would the trees be so green in the background, when there’s not one blade of grass around? And really, when there’s less than 1% of O2, there really shouldn’t be any fire. As for the dregs, passing on the fact that they breathe CO2 exclusively rather than being autotrophs, which would have made far more sense, how can they be so strong and aggressive when there doesn’t appear to be any other animal around? To be an apex predator, you really need to have preys. I’m also wondering how the resort was built on a limited budget under constant attacks.
Finally, the characters are on an alien planet, they see the names “Novosibirsk” and “China” and their first thought is “we’re on Earth”? I guess that if they were to see a sign that said “Memphis”, they would be wondering how they moved from Tennessee to Egypt so fast.
@42. Athreen: you cover some of the bases well. I try not to do overuse TVtropes, but this one was full of idiot balls.
If I had to pick one of the most absurd: daughter feels neglected by mom (doesn’t mom fail to recognize daughter initially?); solution? bomb her place of work. Think about such a story on the news. Bella is a complete psychopath, a criminal and a terrorist. She gets a pass from the script and Ryan because one of the bombs comes in handy. Also, he’s horny. Then they suck their thumbs at each other as a goodbye. AAArrgh! Does this writer (Ed Who?) even understand human nature?
Then we get a stern, super-serious lecture at the end where the Doctor chides her companions, as if they carry the weight of the world. She even had Graham looking sheepish. Also, these days climate change is the preferred terminology. If you use “global warming” you get dumb Senators bringing in a snowball to the chamber floor to prove there’s no such thing.
Also also, the music continues to bug me. Who has always featured lots of running, but now we have jangling, frantic, frenetic music played LOUDLY so we know they need to PANIC! and RUN! This is some of the the least subtle, least distinctive, most ham-handed musical production in Who history. (That’s only partly hyperbole.)
I’ve made my peace with dumb science in Doctor Who, and this really isn’t any worse in that area than most episodes. But it’s very unfortunate to combine dumb science with an urgent warning about a real-world environmental problem.
Glad I wasn’t the only one less than impressed. I didn’t realise until after it was over that it was the same writer as “It Takes You Away” but makes sense because it had the same problems: Decent set-up and mystery that falls apart when it has to provide explanations and an ending. Above posts have provided most of the problems. The Doctor gets nearly everyone killed by dragging them all out on a rescue mission that doesn’t even succeed: The TARDIS crew save no-one apart from themselves and the two comedy-green haired people. Character arcs are all over the place, to the point that Bella is presented as a sympathetic character when she causes the deaths of all the guests not in the opening titles and over half the staff just because mummy didn’t pay her any attention. The episode acts as if “Nightmarish planet full of horrible monsters is really what Earth will become if humans don’t mend their ways” is a twist no-one’s ever done before, when it’s such a cliché that Gareth Roberts used it as a gag ending to a spoof “Doctor Who as written by someone who’s never seen it” story fifteen years ago. Heck, it’s such a cliché that Terry Nation used it. Twice. Not to mention that “Earth is uninhabitable in the far future but it’s not a big deal because a lot of people have left anyway” is a standard Doctor Who plot.
53 years ago, Doctor Who told us that the unchecked effects of industrialisation on the environment will cause a new ice age. This is now considered scientifically iffy. I wonder if this one will be just as laughable in 53 years’ time. (I also wonder if I’ll be here in 53 years given that I’m already middle-aged… Oh what the heck, I’ve got good genes. If anyone’s going to be here with the cockroaches after the nuclear winter…)
@43: It’s not uncommon for the Doctor to treat the companions as representatives of humanity as a whole (“stupid apes”, “Nobody human has anything to say to me today!”), but this one was really uncalled for, as she seemed to expect the three of them to come up with a solution to climate change on the spot (it is indeed a better term than global warming, as it is true everywhere, whereas some areas might get colder. It also highlights the dramatic increase in extreme weather phenomena, which are scarier than what might come to mind when we hear that the weather might get 4°C warmer).
@45: Well, Orphan 55 was not the direct consequence of climate change, but the result of a world war that was triggered by the climate. Use of fictional weapons can lead to a wild variety of consequences (but monsters that can survive on CO2 alone shouldn’t be among them)
I just saw the reason for the absence of this week’s article on Em’s twitter. I hope everything went well, and I wish them a prompt and full recovery!
So this week’s episode is better. Although a marked improvement, it’s not great. It continues the Who tradition of educating about historical events, although it’s not convincing that the Doc’s present day companions don’t recognize the name Tesla. The Doc maybe should start with educating them more.
The score continues to be laughably bad: cut to glowing green ball… BIG LOUD SCARY JANGLING notes. OH NO! Wait why am I scared? This composer needs to go back to music school to learn some subtlety. So cheesy.
The aliens? Why of course the scorpions would be able to shapeshift in order to make this story about humans work. And of course they have a humanoid female shaped queen. Why not? They have advanced tech and a spaceship, but they need a human inventor from early 1900s to be their chief engineer. Why not?
Here’s the rub though: is the showrunner really putting thought into creating a cohesive season or even maintaining proper continuity of ideas between episodes? Two episodes ago the Doc insisted on mindwiping two women without their consent, because… integrity of time and history and stuff. She even tells Ada (condescendingly) that she has to find her own way. No shortcuts. “You’ll get there.”
This week: two men, Edison and Tesla, see aliens, alien tech and weapons, and board the TARDIS. They are in actual positions to replicate what they see. It’s a huge jump start for them. What happens? No mindwipes. It’s a large inconsistency between episodes only a couple weeks apart. And its hard not to see it as sexist.
So how about this as a proposal: we not only need a female Doctor. We should get a female showrunner. Chibnall has not impressed so far.
I’d never heard of Tesla either. Neither had my dad (who needed confirming that he existed). It seems that this season, instead of doing the theme park version of history that Russell T Davies presented us with, they’re focusing on historical figures who made a significant contribution but have lapsed into obscurity. True education!
I don’t know about a showrunner, and I’m not completely convinced we need a “season arc” just because it’s what every show does, but it badly needs the equivalent of an old-style script editor because the scripts all seem to fall to pieces if you poke at them. What was the deal with the potential investor that appeared to shoot at Tesla before being shot by an alien? Was he the man Edison mentioned who’d gone missing? Did they misinterpret it? And blowing up the alien ship just have resulted in a fiery conflagration taking out a chunk of New York, but instead the effect insists that for some reason it just shot off into space.
So…not the Racnoss then. I’m still slightly weirded out that that was Anjil Mohindra, formerly Rani in The Sarah Jane Adventures (not to be confused with the Rani, although she was at first), under the make-up. Robert Glenister makes his second Who appearance 36 years after the first.
@cap: a script editor who vets an entire season’s worth for consistency would work as well. I said showrunner because the show also requires a consistent sensibility. In this case, Chibnall seems tone deaf on some issues. So not necessarily a woman at the helm, but with a female Doctor it should be at least a feminist.
As far as educating, it’s not true history, just pseudohistory. On another site, someone commented how badly they got the geography around New York. There’s a shot across the river when they mention Tesla’s second lab. In actuality it is about 60 miles away.
There are Tesla cars around. No one wonders about the name? Maybe it’s just in the US that he’s a legendary figure. He was played by David Bowie in The Prestige. Released last year in the US was The Current War (which I haven’t seen), about the war between Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and DC on one side and Westinghouse and Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) and AC on the other.
@50/Sunspear: I found several books about Tesla on Amazon where he’s called a “forgotten genius” in the title. I myself was only vaguely aware of him in the days before the Tesla cars. So probably it’s just in the US.
@Jana: yeah, I guess he’s more of a cult figure than I thought. It’s ironic that he’s not more acknowledged, since alternating current is standard worldwide. Edison remains famous despite promoting a discontinued direct current system.
@50: Just to seem as ignorant as possible, I haven’t even heard of Tesla cars. (If I did, I’d probably just assume they were made by a company called Tesla…)
Oh my word–I am overcome to hear that SF folk don’t know who Tesla is. As mentioned, there’s the movie Prestige and the battle over DC versus AC current was a feature in the book “The Devil in the White City”. I used to wonder that the Tesla cars–famous for running on battery power–is named after the guy who was famous for AC power. But we all have blind spots, I guess.
Earlier, I was on the team that excused the Doctor for clearing Ada Lovelace’s memory. But then she goes and leaves Edison’s and Tesla’s memory intact. What kind of misogynistic mess is that? A woman can’t be trusted with her memory while a man can? Neither of them are like Vincent van Gogh and will be dead within the year of meeting the doctor. The Writers Room needs to do better.
I’m still trying to understand that this is NOT the same race of scorpion people that the Doctor met with Donna. Now I want a side-by-side comparison.
With all of time and space at their disposal it’s truly disappointing how tired this series feels. The previous season was pretty solid and refreshing, but Spyfall was convoluted even by the lowest of Who standards. That one story could repeat so many of the last decade’s worth of Who plot threads while providing nothing of interest is quite the feat. Abysmally uninspired dialogue. Needlessly overpopulated in every respect. Graham with laser shoes is the new Fonz on waterskis. Shark jumped. Shoes fired.