“Gird your loins, gentlemen.”
“I don’t... I don’t know how to do that.”
Now that is how you do a season finale. No, none of the “Fam” died, in spite of the many subtle hints. And the explanation of the “Timeless Child” was perhaps the most likely one. But I simply have to admit yet again this season that Chibbers has produced the goods. This is a cracking season finale, and what it does to Doctor Who lore is at once brave, radical and exciting. The whole thing looks amazing too, and there are truly excellent performances from both Sacha Dhawan as a dangerously and compellingly insane Master and Jodie Whittaker as a Doctor forced to confront what she’s never been made to confront before.
Much of the episode has two parallel plots- the Doctor within the Matrix receiving a massively game-changing info-dump from the Matrix while the Fam and their friends dodge peril from Ashad and his Cyber-army. I like this juxtaposition and, much as we fans are fixated on the big revelations, the exciting scenes with the Fam are important. There are some great moments, such as Graham telling Yaz just how awesome he thinks she is, and indeed one of their friends wanting to retrieve the body of his fallen comrade because her greatest fear was always being altered by the Cybermen- it’s this kind of thing that makes the Cybermen so effective in this two parter.
But we can’t help be excited by the scenes on Gallifrey. We begin with the Doctor and Master engaging in some edgily dark repartee mixed with nostalgic references to Borusa and the Panopticon, showing us what fantastic chemistry these two actors have. But when the Doctor is attached forcibly to the Matrix the revelations keep coming.
So once the sentient race of Gallifrey was the Shabogans- nice nostalgic touch- and one of them- Tecteun- was an early space explorer, crudely heroic. But one day she came across the Boundary, and found a child there, apparently abandoned. So she adopted that child and studied it, until one day it died- and became the first person on Gallifrey to regenerate. So she studies the child even further- a creepy, Stranger Things type example of an innocent child being used and experimented on, regenerating again and again. Some childhood.
But Tecteun eventually reached the point where she was able to risk testing her theories on herself- and so she became the first native Gallifreyan to regenerate. Dialogue then tells us vaguely that history passed, that the Citadel was built and that those dwelling in it became a race apart and eventually, presumably after Rassilon and Omega, Time Lords. It’s made explicit that only these elite Gallifreyans are Time Lords and are able to regenerate- an artificial twelve times- and that the rest of the planet’s population are presumably still “Shabogans”.
Meanwhile, Ashad has in his chest a device to destroy all organic life on the planet, a somewhat obvious case of Chekhov’s Gun. And the Master, latest in a long line of Tobias Vaughns, is inviting his Cyber-Army to invade Gallifrey. This is hardly rational of him, to say the least, but then that clearly isn’t the point. And it’s hugely amusing to hear the Master say what we all think about Ashad’s plan to destroy all organic life so that everyone, himself included, can “”ascend” to being purely mechanical creatures- “Oh, you mean robots?” Indeed.
But there’s a big revelation still to come, of course- the Timeless Child is the Doctor. She had many lives before the ones we knew (so The Brain of Morbius doesn’t need retconning after all!), and the Matrix has been redacted to remove all details of those lives- but the sheer size of those redactions imply there were many. And, let’s not forget, we have absolutely no idea where the child came from.
All this is brilliant. At a stroke the mystery of the Doctor is revealed- what happened in this previous lives? Who even is she? What of the Jo Martin Doctor, who we see in a mental pep talk sequence? And, let’s note, what’s even more brilliant is that the bureaucratic, arrogant, silly old Time Lords are no longer even all that relatively important to the central mystery. I love it.
Cue a final confrontation, the awesome spectacle of regenerating Cyber-Gallifreyans complete with high collared robes, and a magnificent final confrontation between the Master and the Doctor. And a splendid performance by Jodie Whittaker as she and the Master discuss whether she will indeed sacrifice herself to stop him- fortunately, there’s a convenient character on hand to make that sacrifice instead. Meanwhile, the “Fam” and friends are sent back to contemporary Earth in a Hartnell-era TARDIS which, like the Master’s, has disguised itself as a house. Cool.
And then we get a very RTD ending, complete with “What? What? What?” As the Doctor is suddenly kidnapped by a “cold case team” of Judoon and bunged in a prison without trial. Probably for a crime she can’t remember. Wow. At least we presumably have a long time to digest this before Revolution of the Daleks...
Oh, and while we wait, here are all my Doctor Who reviews... https://llamastranglermarathon.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-index.htmlhttps://llamastranglermarathon.blogspot.com/p/doctor-who-index.html
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