"Hello. I'm Doctor Who."
Wow. Not sure what the Andrew Marvell quote has with anything, and I did English at uni, but this episode is extraordinary from the initial teasing (apparent) regeneration sequence, with us knowing full well that Peter Capaldi is around until Christmas, to the final, utterly wrenching body horror of our discovery that Bill has been turned fully into a Tenth Planet Cyberman.
The episode starts, though, with a few minutes of fantastic dialogue between a TARDIS crew that has never had such chemistry, and the addition of a seemingly reformed but utterly magnificent Missy is the icing on the cake. Her dialogue is witty, metatextual and glorious. But then the storytelling is equally and non-linearly magnificent as the Doctor tests out Missy's Doctoring skills with a distress call from a 400 mile long ship falling into a black hole, where time passes more slowly at one end of the ship than the other. We get alot of necessary exposition, Bill fulfilling the companion's narrative role here, as the Doctor explains his history with Missy in flashback, Bill gets shot, and... for those of us who've listened to some Big Finish, it all goes very Spare Parts, in the best way possible.
This is, of course, revealed to be a Mondasian ship, and the (ahem) genesis of the Cybermen, as it's very nicely put by John Simm's Master, superbly revealed after having played a friendly character in prosthetics all episode long without fooling me. It's all done quite brilliantly, and John Simm's Master looks positively Delgado for the first multi-Master story. The implausibility of Mondas being Earth's twin planet is nicely glossed over too. Thi is an episode to truly remind us of Steven Moffat's considerable talents.
All this and we get Venusian Aikido too. We're being spoiled. This is, and I know I keep saying it, extraordinary even by the very high standards of what we can surely start calling the best season since Season 27.
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