Doctor Who: Spyfall, Part Two

“By the way, I bring news from home...”

Wow. Ok, this blog post is going to be one of the longer ones.

Obviously, that was brilliant, and Chibnall has far outdone anything he did last season- and this two parter is not only superb but a statement of intent, giving us a new big story arc behind the spy stuff and giving us a story that, structurally, feels very much like a Virgin New Adventure novel in not only its use of cyberspace (or social media, as we call it these days) but the sheer number of elements in the story- alien Cold War type spies from another dimension using multiple time zones and figures from the history of computing, anyone? I don’t care if the plot doesn’t make sense; the sleight of hand works and that’s enough. The random timey-wimeyness and use of Ada Lovelace, Noor Inayat Khan and Charles Babbage.

In fact, the sheer number of elements in the plot felt very Steven Moffat. So did the way the second episode of a two-parter veered into very different territory from the first part, very reminiscent of Silence in the Library. All this shows Chibnall learning from his predecessor, and is a good thing. But I especially liked that it was about something- how we are all happily surrendering our privacy and intimate lives to unaccountable and unregulated tycoons very much like Daniel Barton (and Lenny Henry is utterly, utterly superb)- I’m looking at you, Zuckerberg.

But, of course, there’s the interplay between the Doctor and the Master at the heart of everything- and the chemistry between these incarnations is electric. It seems, pleasingly, that Chibnall is trying to recreate the Pertwee/Delgado dynamic where the Master doesn’t so much want to kill the Doctor as play games with her. We get a shoutout to the sound of drums. And Sacha Dhawan is absolutely a worthy Master, getting to do so many of  the Master’s signature tricks here, with a Wizard of Oz TARDIS to boot.

Incidentally, isn’t this the Master’s first explicit TARDIS of his own since Mark of the Rani?

And yet... there’s something behind this. All throughout the Master is dropping hints about both a massive retcon and what’s happened to Gallifrey- and so, once the Master is defeated in a satisfying and credible way- albeit one that owes a LOT to The Curse of the Fatal Death- we get a coda, as the Doctor visits Gallifrey and finds the Citadel empty and devastated. At first it looks as though Chibnall is doing another RTD, another “Last of the Time Lords”, but he quickly undercuts this with something deeper as the Master appears as a hologram in the TARDIS, just as the Doctor did to Rose in The Parting of the Ways, to admit that it was all his doing- and it was all an act of fury after discovering a massive lie in Gallifreyan history: “They lied to us, the founding fathers of Gallifrey”. And this is the “lie of the Timeless Child”, as mentioned in The Ghost Monument.

It’s also a very nice touch that Yasmin, Graham and Ryan get their own cool little James Bond adventure while all this is happening, complete with cool gadgets, but this is also the episode where they finally resolve to get the Doctor to tell them who she is... and she does. Up to a point. She has so much more to tell them and I’m sure we all have so much more to discover about Gallifrey’s last. I love me a good, epic arc.

A magnificent start to the season, then. Let’s hope Chibnall can keep it up.