How many lives has John Smith had, anyway?
Recap
In Bavaria 1865, the Rani arrives as the midwife to a woman who has just birthed the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. The Rani steals the child and unmakes the family entirely, saying this special infant has a job to do granting a very special wish. In the present, the Doctor (now called John Smith) and Belinda wake—they are married and Poppy is their daughter. On the television Conrad is promising nice weather and telling stories to the population. Whenever anyone expresses doubt in this reality, a cup falls to the floor and breaks. It’s called a “slip.” John Smith leaves for work and Ruby is at his door. She asks if he knows her because she knows him, and also knows that Poppy isn’t his child. Belinda calls the authorities to tell them that someone is expressing doubt and Ruby runs away, bumping into Mel, who lives next door. There are dinosaur skeletons walking the earth and John Smith can’t believe anyone would doubt this reality.
The Doctor heads into work at the UNIT building with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in charge, but the whole thing is an insurance company now. When the Doctor tells Chistofer to ask Kate out and admits he thinks the man is beautiful, it causes another major slip. Belinda welcomes her mother and auntie over, and they talk about how their duty is to be wives and mothers as Conrad says. Belinda realizes that she can’t remember giving birth to Poppy, causing another major slip. She rushes out into the woods to scream. While John Smith is at work, Conrad is telling the people a story about the Doctor and the death of the Time Lords, and how one Time Lady survived their destruction. The Rani appears on a sky scooter and the people at the insurance company marvel at her entrance. John Smith wonders who she is, which is another forbidden slip. The Rani brings mortadella to Mrs. Flood to make a sandwich for Conrad. Doubts are building up nicely, just as she wants. When Mrs. Flood brings that sandwich to Conrad, he gets a break—this world is powered by his wish and he has to focus on it endlessly to keep it going. The infant the Rani stole is powering this wish, and it gives the Giggle.
The Rani snaps the Vindicator onto her large lair clock, and preps the balcony for her plan. Mrs. Flood points out that sort of birthed the current Rani, which she finds disgusting. Ruby runs into Shirley Bingham, and tries to avoid talking to her because she knows it’s not right, but they recognize each other. She brings Ruby to the camp of unwanted people: all of them disabled, poor, queer. They all know the world is wrong and no one notices them. They think they’re suspended somehow, and one of them believes it’s a perception bias in Conrad—because he’s not disabled, he literally can’t see them, and so no one else can. They ask Ruby if she wants to join their plot to bring this all down. John Smith is at home listening to Conrad’s stories when Rogue (Jonathan Groff) pops up on his TV. He tells John that he doesn’t have much time because he’s in a hell dimension that might be subsumed, but he has time to send a warning: “Tables don’t do that.” He tells him that he loves him before vanishing. Belinda wakes and finds John at the table watching the mugs fall through to the floor. But tables don’t do that. Belinda calls the authorities over John’s doubts and Mrs. Flood appears to take him away, then takes Belinda too, leaving her mother with Poppy.
Ruby is working with Shirley and a friend to disrupt the world; Shirley has her UNIT tablet, a “relic,” from the other world that has power. They have a link to the signal where Conrad is broadcasting from the bone palace. Ruby thinks she’ll remember if she can look him in the eye. John and Belinda are brought to the bone palace and he steps over a threshold, encouraging Belinda to do the same because he has doubts but never doubts her. They meet the Rani, who is trying to trigger John’s memory—she shows him the seal of Rassilon, clone classiforms, mentioning the TARDIS. Belinda brings up Poppy, but the Rani says they don’t have a child. The Rani dances with John and asks if he can remember when they danced long ago and people said they were lovers. She says everyone called them enemies, only they weren’t; that all the Doctor’s villains wanted death, but she only wanted life. She shows him Conrad and the baby—Desidirium, the God of Wishes, the most powerful of all. The Doctor woke him with the Pantheon, and boosted him with a powered up Vindicator.
The doubts are not a problem—they’re the point. Doubts will crack open this world, and a Time Lord’s doubt could break reality as they know it. The world begins to break apart, allowing the Rani to see the Underverse and find the One Who is Lost: Omega, the first Time Lord and creator of their people. The Doctor finally remembers who he is, but the Rani has locked him on the balcony and detonates it off the palace. Belinda is brought back over the threshold and disappears, the world begins to fall and dissolve. The Doctor shouts back to the Rani that Poppy is truly his daughter, and she knows what that means…
Commentary
The framing on this episode hurts something fierce.
Davies loves finales that are all about the world being wrong. (I have, shall we say, big feelings about this because I think it comes from a deep-rooted fear that lives in the mind of most marginalized folks—it’s a feeling that’s never far away.) But this might be the most direct he’s ever been with that narrative because it’s a world coming from the mind of Conrad Clark.
Davies has called Conrad, the Rani, and Desidirium the “Unholy Trinity,” for all intents and purposes here—it occurs to me that you could read that in multiple directions if you’re intending to graft them onto the holy version.
This world is perfectly constructed in its framework and its holes, both. We get overt sexism evident in the positions women are “meant” to fulfill, but less overt racism—because with everyone “in their place,” the audience is going to see less of it, and because Conrad has clearly applied his nuclear-family-suburban-hellscape to everyone. It’s unsurprising that a post-truth thinker like him has layers on layers of retro, conformist beliefs forming the bedrock of his desires, but I appreciate that the episode tells us it’s hard for Conrad to maintain. That there’s any measure of suffering attached to this devil’s bargain. Sorry, that’s where my own “oncoming storm” feelings come into play.
The sharpness of making disabled and gender-nonconforming people functionally invisible—that’s where the nasty dose of realism enters the conceit. The suggestion that Conrad makes an entire population of people “unreal” to the rest of the world because his own lack of disability (and therefore lack of empathy) means he simply edits them out. This segment of the episode, with Shirley and her cohort, seamlessly illustrates the intersection of disability and transness because they are both groups that a certain segment of humanity simply refuses to believe in. They are linked for that in this strange pocket of the world.
But then everyone in the forgotten camp talks about how they all remember a “better” world and I cringe a little because… well, they’re all being held “in stasis,” as they say. Shirley literally points out that she doesn’t have to take her meds right now because of it. No one is battling with their insurance at the moment; trying to get in to see a doctor that believes them; going into piles of medical debt. I’m not saying that being effectively homeless is the better option, but I would like to point out—for some people in that camp, this version of reality might actually be easier than their normal lives, a thing this episode is not prepared to consider.
So all of that is going on while the world stays wrong, and the Rani reigns supreme. This brings up so many questions, but they do start with the stories Conrad is being forced to tell the populace…
One story Conrad tells contains a segment that reveals the Doctor and the Rani were enemies for a long time and fought about “irrelevant” things—and that the Rani knew they could be friends if only the Doctor knew how clever she was, and I am about to eat my own tongue over this. Oh nothing, just the Doctor and his two former school buddies who both know that the Doctor would love them if only he could see how smart they are. You know, who cares if the smart things are viciously amoral and unhinged, if he knew they were clever, he definitely wouldn’t care, right?
I am incapable of not taking this personally, as a former weird kid who also thought that being smart and obsessed with stuff was how you made friends. Help me, I’m not okay about all of them.
On the other hand, if this turns into some weird “they dated once and Poppy is their illegitimate child” thing, I’ll be pissed. The Rani is commonly depicted as very Time Lord-ish about how she views organic matter—the point where Mrs. Flood says her newest iteration sprung from her loins and the Rani tells her that’s the most disgusting thing she’s ever heard is exactly in line here. I don’t believe for one second that she wants a lover of any kind. The argument that she cares about life while the Doctor’s usual antagonists only want death is hilarious, however. Yeah, subjugation is cool, so long as things live! Good one, Rani.
And now we come to the re-introduction of Omega, who has only been showcased in a couple of classic Doctor Who serials, the first being the 10th anniversary special that featured the first three Doctors (helpfully called “The Three Doctors”). The Time Lords basically had to recruit the Doctor to fight Omega, the first of their kind who discovered time travel—making them Time Lords—because they’d banished him to an antimatter universe and he wanted out. So the Rani trying to pull the guy back from the Underverse is, uh, exactly right. I’m guessing she thinks he can restore Time Lord society, which doesn’t sound like a terrible idea at all.
Which brings me back to Rogue in all this because I’m calling it right now: This guy is either Jack Harkness (who has somehow figured out how to regenerate), or the Master acting like Jack in order to mess with the Doctor. Fine, maybe it’s a whole new character, but as I said in his introduction last season—that doesn’t make any sense. He’s written exactly like Jack, but more importantly, there are so many clues that tell the audience he’s hiding something and knows the Doctor from well before that “first” meeting.
(A red manicured hand took the ring holding the Master from the scene of the Toymaker’s demise during the 60th anniversary special: It easily could have been the Rani. Rogue’s message to the Doctor actually plays directly into the Rani’s plan, suggesting that he could be deliberately working with her, or been forced to work with her. Either way, it’s a fun premise.)
And then Murray Gold sails in with a soundtrack cue that made me throw a napkin at my television: When the Doctor is telling Belinda that the man in the TV said “tables don’t work like that,” the soundtrack literally hits us with the Master’s “drums” double-heartbeat rhythm. If that wasn’t intentional, it’s wildly sloppy, and Gold is usually precise about this stuff. Just… ugh, let me be right. This once? Please?
But now we’ve got to take bets on what it means that Poppy is the Doctor’s actual daughter somehow… particularly when Susan is popping up left and right.
Time and Space and Sundry
- Okay, but John Smith’s work fit with the bowler hat looks an awful lot like the “Inspector Spacetime” uniform, right? The Community Doctor Who knock-off?
- They really need to stop creating realities where Carla betrays Ruby because I both hate it and don’t buy it for a second. (There’s something in here about Davies offering very few examples of decent parenting as a rule—and also constantly pointing out that being a good parent is less about personal virtue than it is about luck and stars aligning just right, but even so. We don’t need this many alternate realities where Ruby gets dumped by the mother who was there for her.)
- The echo of Omega comes from one of the Big Finish audio plays, which actually makes it the first time any bit of media from those plays has been used in canon. (Former companions from the audio plays have been canonized on the show before, however.)
- “This isn’t just exposition, Doctor.” …I love her so much.
Next week we’ve got an explosive finale coming. Hang on tight.
This episode got on my bad side from the start by having the Rani pursue a magical child whose power came from an old superstition made real. I mean, come on — the one overriding thing that defines the Rani is that she’s a scientist. She’s not out for power or conquest or destruction like the Master; she just wants to do science to things, but she happens to have as little regard for the well-being of her human subjects as a cosmetics company has for rabbits. So building her return around this annoying “magic is real” kick that RTD has been on ever since his return is an injustice to the character. It’s missing the point.
Also, RTD can’t resist once again tacking sexual tension onto the Doctor’s reunion with an old acquaintance, as he did with Sarah Jane and the Master. Granted, it was left ambiguous — the Rani just said that people rumored they were lovers and asked the Doctor if he remembered whether or not it was true. But it still feels like he’s repeating himself, failing to come up with any fresh angle.
The whole rewritten-reality plot isn’t working for me either. What the hell is the deal with the orange cups falling through tables when people have doubts? Where did that image come from? It’s like he’s trying to do a bit of Steven Moffat-y weirdness, but Moffat’s weirdnesses rely on something familiar being twisted, like, what if statues are only immobile when we’re looking at them? Cups falling through tables is just random. And what’s with the dinosaur skeletons? Is that some kind of oblique nod to the dinosaur that attacked the Rani and the Master at the end of “The Mark of the Rani?” If so, that’s pretty arbitrary.
Also, I barely remembered who Rogue was. That bit of him showing up on the TV was out of left field, given that he’s been completely forgotten about until now.
Although not condoning it, I think the cups thing is a reference to “there’s many a slip betwixt cup and lip” which I don’t know how widespread it is as an adage but probably needed to be mentioned if it were the case. I also assumed it was partially a reference to how often in dramas (at least in the UK) an emotional outburst is accompanied by broken crockery. But why they were all orange, apart from to cause doubt, I don’t know.
I was wondering if there was anything in Conrad’s previous episode that associated him with the color orange. If not, it may have just been something that was done to indicate the mass-produced artificiality of this reality, with orange being a standout color.
Although I also dislike the fact that there seems to be too much fantasy in this sci-fi show lately, it actually makes sense. Seventh Doctor once said about the famous quote “advanced science is undistinguishable from magic” (which I’m paraphrasing,) that it is the other way around: advanced magic is undistinguishable from science. So, in this universe, it makes sense that for Rani magic is part of science.
I should say I dislike the fantasy element here; one of my favourite episodes of the whole show is Battlefield… (one of the final episodes of classic Who, where Doctor is basically Merlin.)
As I said to David, it’s not about whether it can be rationalized in-universe. I just wanted to see the Rani’s return story feature her as a scientist doing mad science, not as an evil witch out of a Grimm fairy tale. She just doesn’t feel like she’s being written as the Rani, although I have zero trouble accepting Archie Panjabi as the character.
EVIL QUEEN out of fairy tale, my dear Mr Bennett!😉
Same difference. Neither is a scientist.
I looked at it as the Rani simply shifting her modus operandi to function in this new reality. She’s running the biggest experiment in the universe using the tools at her disposal. If magic IS real, she’s not going to ignore it.
It’s not about whether it can be explained in-story, it’s about whether it was a good choice of story to use for the Rani’s return. I wanted her return story to be one that highlighted the thing that defines her as a character, her amoral approach to science. Instead, she gets subsumed within RTD’s fantasy narrative, and comes off more as a generic Evil Queen than any version of the Rani I recognize. I dislike the entire turn toward magic and gods and fairy-tale nonsense, which is a fundamental change from past Doctor Who, which, even at its most fanciful, always (except in a couple of Torchwood episodes) insisted that gods and demons and magic were just aliens and exotic science. But it feels like an affront to bring the Rani back within that context. It doesn’t do justice to the character.
Well, out-of-universe, she’s only part of the story because Ncuti Gatwa wanted to face her, since, apart from being an amoral scientist, she’s also incredibly camp. That’s the part of her personality the script leans into. I totally relate to not liking the turn the show has taken toward unapologetic fantasy, but that ship has sailed. I’m just trying to roll with it.
Speaking as someone who is disabled and has been homeless, it’s definitely not the better option. Not having stable housing makes every aspect of life harder. I’ll take the hassles of the medical industrial complex over it any day of the week.
I sincerely doubt we’re supposed to believe the Doctor and the Rani were once lovers. Of all the revival’s showrunners, Davies has been the most reluctant to say anything about the Doctor’s past. I don’t think he’s about to start writing fanfic.
I do hope there’s more to Rogue’s appearance than meets the eye, because that felt like the clumsiest bit of the episode to me. I’d rather the Doctor figured out that mugs falling through tables so often that people have a separate bin for them isn’t right in a more organic way than having to be clued in via a green-screened cameo. I certainly don’t mind the idea of recasting Jack Harkness (for reasons that I don’t need to go into here) but if he’s anybody other than himself, I’d prefer it if he were the Master. The Rogue even sounds like a Time Lord name…
Just an idle thought, but before we see the Rogue, we see Susan pop up on the screen. Which could be read as an implication that it takes the powers of a Time Lord (or Gallifreyan? Is Susan a Time Lord?) to interfere. This could lend credence to the theory that the Rogue is a Time Lord, and possibly the Master.
Time Lords/Ladies are the nobility of Gallifreyans, and nobility tends to be hereditary, so it stands to reason that a Time Lord’s granddaughter would be a Time Lady by birth. I think anyone adopted by a noble would also inherit their noble status.
I see no way Rogue could be a Time Lord, let alone the Master, because he didn’t know who the Doctor was when the Doctor introduced himself, and he interpreted his scan results of the Doctor’s biology as “shapeshifter,” proving that he didn’t know a Time Lord when he saw one. He also had no familiarity with TARDISes. Unless you’re proposing he had his memory wiped and his biology changed, but we’ve been to that well way back with Professor Yana. And it would be annoying if it turned out everything Rogue said and did in his namesake episode was a lie.
Strictly speaking, there may still be the question of whether ‘Time Lord/Lady’ is a hereditary honour – it depends on whether we consider it a title like the classical ‘Dux’ or ‘Comes’ (Which were appointments, not hereditary honourifics) or, indeed, more like the hereditary peerages into which they evolved.
In this context ‘Time Lord’ strikes me as most comparable to ‘Marcher Lord’ – with the idea that Time, like the old border marches, is something rather more dangerous than a hereditary estate and requires more than simple descent to qualify one to hold the honour.
We know from the classic series that the Time Lords are the elite class of Gallifreyan society, in contrast to the Outsiders and/or Shobogans who live in the wilderness outside the Citadel. When the Twelfth Doctor first identified himself as a Time Lord to Danny Pink, Danny interpreted it as a title of nobility, and the Doctor didn’t refute it. Also, the very fact that female Gallifreyans call themselves Time Ladies suggests that it does work like the English title.
I read an interesting theory, or half theory, about Poppy: I’ts the same kid from episode Space babies. There, when Doctor and Ruby show up, babies think they’re their mum and dad, and Doctor says to Poppy: “I wish I was your dad.”
How exactly is this linked with events in this episode – I have no idea. But back then Doctor made a wish…
I hope that Rogue is a new character; I’m tired of everybody being an old enemy or frenemy from classic Who and suddenly unmasking as a cackling villain. Rogue seems nice and if he turns out to be Master, it’ll break my heart. And I’m usually not this dramatic about a character from just one episode!
Please, let the Master stay dead for more than 5 minutes. I dislike the character. The Master is murderous, crazy, and mean because he had no regenerations left and was desperate to stay alive by any means necessary. He was brought back during the Time War and given new regenerations, but driven mad by Rasilon using him as an anchor and the sound of drums. A random regeneration discovers he is not as special as the Doctor, and decides to destroy all of the Time Lords on Gallifrey. Making the Doctor the last of the Time Lords again. Please stop killing them all and bringing them back. The Time Lords are isolationist ass hats. They don’t need to be completely wiped out, let the Doctor and Gallifrey go back to happily ignoring each other. I am looking forward to Susan hopefully coming back and not dead. I Do not know what it means that Poppy is really the Doctor’s daughter. I want explanations.
The Master is all of that, but I did like the Missy version of him, especially since she was actually starting to gain some morality.
The thing about RTDII Who for me is troublesome in three ways:
1} Eight episodes and a special a year are far too few (putting aside budget reasons) as you don’t have enough time to immerse yourself in a season.
2) The scripts seem rushed, almost second draft-like, and what is there seems more concerned with being meta/modern than actually telling a story that fits into the Doctor Who Mythos.
3) It doesn’t leave me with the desire to watch the episodes again, even The Well, and that was the most classic Who story in years. This is not helped by the continued use of past Doctor clips in the episodes (3 episodes in Ncuti Gatwa’s 18 use this device), which just makes me want to watch their episodes rather than the current series.
This may seem random in concerning this episode, yet all of the above are contained in this episode to the detriment of the actors. It’s as if all the elements for a classic new era are there (a TARDIS being unreliable, UNIT being prevalent, companions that compliment The Doctor without overshadowing him, and a Doctor who is pure joy, excitement, and adventure) and yet they’re not being considered as important.
Sermon ends.
I tend to agree with the above: it’s as if the show never has the time to settle into any kind of groove (As in “get down on it, get down on it if you really want it”) leaving it in question whether the show can continue to go the distance.
I’m not saying that being effectively homeless is the better option, but I would like to point out—for some people in that camp, this version of reality might actually be easier than their normal lives, a thing this episode is not prepared to consider.
This is set in Britain, where insurance issues are far less than in the US. Plus being homeless isn’t easy in any way.
I did notice that Mel’s bin was full to the brim with broken cups, indicating that she is having lots and LOTS of doubts. However, since she lives alone and has no close relatives there is no one to turn her in.
As an episode, I thought it was okay. The point being the doubt was a nice use of the artificial world trope (although I’m sure it’s been done before). I did find the ways in which the world was imposed to be very interesting and on point, such as the pairing of Bel and the Doctor. There were some bits that just made me go nope. The same mistake is potentially being made with Omega as Sutekh, by changing him from the antagonist in the story to an end of level boss. I really hope that isn’t what will happen, and that this will actually be a finale with ramifications of a new nastier Time Lord society arising, or at least Omega as a recurring threat, but there has not been a new Doctor Who finale with anything like that (with the possible exception of the Timeless Children). A large part of the point of Omega is his tragedy and there isn’t going to be time to dig into that, whereas Sutekh was pretty cardboard to begin with and it still felt shortchanged.
It’s also a shame that this feels like another remake of one of RTD’s earlier stories. The basic conflict is much the same as the Master’s reintroduction – evil Time Lord takes over the world, companion having to wander around to save the day, resolution will likely be a complete reset as if it never happened. At least in this one they aren’t having to hide the height difference between the actors, like they did with Tennant and Simm. We’ve seen this with quite a few episodes now and I aren’t sure if it’s RTD just going for safe bets to get the show going or if RTD is short of ideas. He clearly wanted to jettison the pretence of having to give some vaguely scientific reasoning to plot elements.
I did like that the skeletal monsters and base do actually point towards Omega, or at least the designs from Arc of Infinity – I’m assuming that was a conscious design decision.
The idea that Poppy is the Doctor’s daughter is odd and rushed. The “I haven’t got a daughter yet” was set up last year but I’m surprised that they actually followed up on it. If Poppy is Susan’s mother that’s likely to be rushed to get across on screen too.
I thought the same thing about Carla once again disowning Ruby, it was in this case, at least, mirrored by Belinda’s mother also disowning her, but it would be nice for it to not keep happening.
And like percysowner, I just wanted to point out insurance isn’t an issue in the UK, everyone is entitled to healthcare here (for now anyway), so that isn’t the same pressure as it might be elsewhere – although “benefits” are a hot topic right now.
“A Wish called Wanda”, anyone? This one gave me strong Scarlet Witch vibes…down to the Rani doing magic (?!) in a red outfit…and of course creating a fictional world that everyone around is forced to experience as reality…
Not that I hated it or anything, but the deja vu was strong and I hope the final episode goes somewhere strong and makes it worth this. Omega is as scary a classic villain as Sutekh (few others have made the doctor blanch at just the mention of the name), so I hope they don’t trivialise him as well!
I prefer not to give any final rating on this episode – which I must admit to not liking very much – because it’s so very obviously operating purely as set-up for the season finale: it is therefore only fair to grade these episodes as one story on two parts, rather than anything more self-contained.
Credit where it’s due, I did enjoy seeing Archie Panjabi just kill it with those ‘Wicked Queen’ vibes as The Rani (Her apparently genuine regret at being obliged to wipe out humanity as part of her Evil plan was also an interesting glimpse into how she differs from The Master); Mrs Flood (A Rani) continues to be a national treasure and the combination of the two is THE find of DOCTOR WHO 2025, so far as I’m concerned; it was nice to see The Doctor and the show remember Rogue as a person who exists and could use a rescue (I remain deeply weirded out by The Doctor insisting it would be totes impossible to reel in his hook-up after the latter was hauled off into Hell, as though doing the impossible were not The Doctor’s Thing); and that Castle of Bones was just impeccable in terms of Evil Lair design.
Oh, and one would like to point out to the reviewer that ‘easier’ need not mean ‘better’ – it’s easier for the disabled to be ignored, but that only means they’re going to be neglected and lost to obscurity, not living high on life (Especially in a world where the rest of the population is obliged to ignore them, then obliged to suffer the consequences should they fail to do so).
I don’t think the population is “obliged” to ignore people with disabilities, because a conscious obligation is the opposite of ignoring. The point is that Conrad doesn’t think about disabled people, so he didn’t bother to account for them in his enforced reality, so they just fall through the cracks. It’s not that Conrad is forcing everyone else to avoid them, it’s that it simply didn’t occur to him that they’d be there, so his reality just isn’t built to acknowledge or allow for them — yet by the same token, it isn’t specifically built to prohibit them either, which gives them freedom to operate in the shadows.
There’s a degree of truth in that, though the way Ruby talks about not being supposed to have dealings with the poor soul to whom she makes a charitable donation muddies the waters a bit – I do think there’s some sort of social pressure obliging the natives of ‘wish world’ to ignore if not outright shun the disabled.
But that could be an extension of the same way they’re not supposed to express any doubts about the state of the world, or acknowledge anything that doesn’t fit the accepted version of reality.
Up to this point and despite all the annoying gods stuff, I had thought that this season was a marked improvement over the previous one… until now. Now we have a Rani that is not a scientist, aside from her syringe sonic; an oddly submissive Mrs Flood with no explanation for her previous fourth-wall breaking; Conrad going from being a grifter to actually believing all his propaganda and forcing it onto the world; the Doctor not being the Doctor for most of this episode and, unlike previous John Smiths, needing to be force-fed the truth instead of figuring things out himself; Belinda being brainwashed and doing nothing again, which means she’s being basically sidelined for half of her season; Ruby and Shirley only existing to provide exposition, make awkward “ableist!” jokes, and truly be the worst spy team ever (wheelchair users or GB confirmed they had no chance of hiding themselves by bowing down on those chairs)…
In general, nothing actually happens in this story. It’s all setup. We don’t even know why the Rani wants to bring back Omega, nor is Omega introduced in any meaningful way to a viewer who is not familiar with the classic series. I know it’s part 1 of 2, but I think that every episode of a multi-parter story should be able to stand on its own somehow, and not just be a big, empty prologue.
And even aside from all the god-magic nonsense and the power of doubt, there’s a huge gaping plot hole in the Rani’s plan: if she has a TARDIS of her own, why did she need the Doctor to charge up the Vindicator instead of doing it herself? And if she didn’t, how did she hop all over time and space including Bavaria to steal the child? And if the Doctor’s TARDIS blew up on May 24th at the end of the previous episode, how come the Doctor is now trapped in this reality where it’s not May 24th yet?
–
I have very, very little faith that RTD will be able to give (or is even interested in giving) all this, plus Susan, plus Poppy, plus Belinda, any sort of satisfactory story, explanation and/or ending in the finale.
My biggest concern, after watching this episode, is that the Rani (Mrs. Flood) will do a face turn and team up with the Doctor to stop the Rani. They seemed to set this up with her interaction with Conrad and the baby. Let the Rani (Mrs. Flood) be as selfish and casual about the horrible sideffects of her experiments. The current Rani doesn’t seem to have any doubts or moral concerns, why would her previous incaration suddenly be?
I wasn’t a much of a fan of the Master’s face turn, but at least Moffatt gave us several episodes to see her being infulenced by the Doctor.
Maybe it’s just me, but Doctor Who seems to have a problem with letting female villains just be villains. It seems like they always have to be redeemed in some way.
The Fugitive Doctor popping up after the 13th as we cycle through the Doctor’s incarnations makes no sense — most especially because we see the War Doctor between 8 and 9 rather than after 11, so there’s an inconsistency in showing one when he existed, post-retcon, and the other when 13 learned about her.
I’ve enjoyed seeing past faces of the Doctor appear in the modern era but have to agree that lately the show’s maybe leaning a bit too hard on that at the risk of making it less special. When it does happen, though, particularly since the revelation to 13 that there were apparently rather definitively incarnations before what we and the Doctor themselves have long known as the 1st — not counting tantalizing hints or vagueness early on in the serialized version of the show and tie-in novels, from what I’ve read bopping around the Fandom wiki — I prefer seeing the old faces out of order and ideally with some unknown ones thrown in there, at least if the Fugitive Doctor is already going to be among them and if the source is more empirical than the Doctor’s own incomplete memories, like the surprise of Richard E. Grant appearing in “Rogue” last season as a nod to his portrayal of non- or pseudo-canonical incarnations. [continued]
The difference is that the Doctor never forgot about his experiences as the War Doctor, just didn’t talk about them. But the Doctor only recently learned of the existence of the Fugitive, and hasn’t recovered their memories from that era aside from a couple of flashes. So it’s in order of the Doctor’s memory of the incarnations.
Huh. I somehow misremembered the War Doctor revelation as him having suppressed his memory of ever being that incarnation until 11 found out but apparently he only suppressed the memory of saving Gallifrey. No inconsistency, then.
Yes, because he saved Gallifrey during a multi-Doctor crossover, and Moffat handwaved that the earlier Doctors lose their memories of the crossovers, to explain why the later Doctor doesn’t already know what’s going to happen. Which was something that had bugged me for decades about “The Three/Five/Two Doctors,” and Moffat not only explained it, but made it an important plot point, which is the best way to handle exposition or continuity fixes.
How fun would it be to have an entirely unexpected but reasonably well-known actor thrown into such a mix as a past life, even if it means potentially burning them for possible use as a new Doctor in the future? Not that it would necessarily mean that, since we’ve gotten the wink of the Curator in “The Day of the Doctor” and now, of course, 14 revisiting the form of 10. [continued]
Meanwhile, I’m confused about bigeneration. When it happened with 14 and 15, I considered the whole deal with 14 getting to relax with friends/found-family so charming and vaguely got the idea that whenever he died a natural death he’d just physically disappear and get psychically shunted into the mind of 15 bigenerating from him. [continued]
I’ve read that RTD has said that he considered all Doctors to have retroactively bigenerated, maybe accounting for some of them showing up in those anniversary Tales of the TARDIS shorts, but I assumed that alternate timelines must have branched out from those bigenerations to preserve the integrity of the stories we’ve seen as we’ve seen them. So the Rani bigeneration — and Mrs. Flood’s immediate subservience to her new incarnation — has thrown me.
And I really hope that Mrs. Flood talking directly to viewers gets addressed next episode. Perhaps the fans watching Doctor Who in “Lux” figure into it all.
I think what’s supposed to happen is that when 14 regenerates into 15, he vanishes from his present and loops back in time to “The Giggle” to merge with his past self.
I still don’t see why Mrs. Flood’s fourth-wall breaks need any more explanation than the First Doctor wishing the viewers at home a happy Christmas in “The Feast of Steven,” or the multiple times the Fourth Doctor spoke or mugged at the camera, or the Dalek monologuing to the camera at the end of “Genesis of the Daleks,” or Morgus in “The Caves of Androzani” soliloquizing into the camera, or the newly regenerated Sixth Doctor in the same serial directing his debut line at the camera, or the Twelfth Doctor’s extended monologues to the audience in “Listen” and “Under the Lake”/”Before the Flood,” or the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna narrating a recap to the audience at the start of “The Star Beast.” It’s just something characters in Doctor Who do sometimes.
You mean like an old face popping up at the end of an episode, looking out at the viewers, and saying “Oh, HELLO”…? :^)
This is the first time “clone classiforms” have been mentioned, right? It’s not a reference to something from the classic series or the books or audio plays?
It is not a reference to something older. I don’t even remember what it was referring to in the episode.
The automata in black latex in the Rani’s lair. You can see two of them in the screenshot right above the recap.
Oh. The Borg typists.
To keep Doctor Who going, Doctor Who should come to the US for a few years.
Maybe film in New York, Chicago, Hollywood, Vegas and maybe even Florida.
There could be a lot more to the story of the Doctor that could be told over here.
Please give it a try.
Given that the Disney partnership didn’t help the show as much as was hoped, I don’t think strengthening the American connection further would help much. Doctor Who has never been as big in the US as it is in the UK.