Asecension Of The Cybermen/The Timeless Children: Rank - 311

Ascension Of The Cybermen/The Timeless Children 

(Season 12, Dr 13, Graham Ryan and Yaz, 1/3/2020, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Chris Chibnall, director: Jamie Magnus Stone)

Rank: 311

In an emoji: 👼

'Top o' the morning to ya - although morning is relative to the planet you're on. Whoops, why did I say that? Anyway I'd like some potatoes and fish fingers with custard please. Eh? What did I just say?' 

 

‘Sorry, what’s happening now?!’ A lot of the bottom of our rankings list makes for bad television: stories that are bland, or confusing, or look woefully under budget, or if they’re really unlucky, all three. That in itself is forgivable: when you have a series that’s pushing boundaries and trying to do something different every week there are going to be times when things go wrong. There’s a special pool of episodes though that are fundamentally flawed not just in how television works but in how ‘Doctor Who’ works. There’s a colossal misunderstanding at the heart of ‘The Timeless Child’ arc over what this series is all about, one that causes fans to come out into a cold sweat and engage in online wars greater than any fighting seen in the series about whether or not events in this story can possibly be true. You see, the Doctor is not like other heroes in fiction: they might come from another world but fundamentally they’re as ‘human’ and flawed as aliens get, running round saving the universe with no special powers beyond their instinct, their intelligence, a sonic screwdriver and – most of the time– some friends. To the people they save and inspire they’re brilliant of course, but fundamentally they’re flawed and make mistakes and, amongst their own kind, they’re nothing special at all (much is made of the fact that the Doctor barely scarped a pass at the Timelord academy – the second time round). For much of the audience the doctor isn’t just someone you wait to come along and save you, but someone you want to emulate, to copy, because even when everything is against them and they’re fighting foes with super strength he or she still wins, not because of who he or she is, but because of what he or she does. Very occasionally they’re seen to lose - usually through arrogance, or recklessness, or by accidentally encouraging others to act like them. This isn’t your Superman with abilities we can only dream of, or a God with powers beyond our understanding, or even a figure with impossible technology at their disposal, just a mad man (or woman) with a time-travelling box that doesn’t quite work properly.

The reason this two parter comes lowest on our list, quite beyond the fact that it’s a slow and sluggish, ineptly made and confusing bit of television, is that it overwrites what we thought we knew for no good reason. By making the Doctor out to be the ‘special’ child, the founder of Gallifrey that had their memory wiped and has lived for countless regenerations beyond when we met them, doesn’t give this show of impossible elasticity more scope – it gives it less. It sets things in stone that have been successfully juggled in ambiguity for 57 years. It makes all their battles down the years seem inevitable and easy because of who they are rather than what they did. It makes everyone who ever ran at the sound of the doctor’s name act as if they did so because of the ‘legend’ rather than what the Doctor can actually do. Making the Doctor out to be a 'gifted' child, the one who brought the power of regeneration to his home race no less, certainly explains why The Master has always been so jealous of him/her (although it’s a bit sad it changed the Master’s fifty year arc of rivalry and need for control, of good versus evil, into a simple fit of jealousy) but it doesn't explain why none of the other timelords reckoned on him much, or why nobody has thought to tell the Doctor this before now. Most of all, it changes our relationship with our favourite character: if they can be the founder of worlds and be the accidental reason timelords can regenerate, what other super power are they going to pull out their pocket the next time they’re in a scrape? Aren’t they just ‘one of them’ now not ‘one of us’? It makes the person we wanted to grow up to be some day, someone we thought we knew really well, distant and impossible to relate to. ‘Dr Who’ is no longer a show about how good people trying to do their best can save the universe, but how some people are born to greatness and the rest of us are just pigging ordinary (some of us more than others).

There are, of course, fans who like it (there are some fans who like anything). Who enjoy the fact that the Doctor has a bigger past to enjoy and who explain away the problems the ‘Timeless Child’ arc causes because her memory of who she was is wiped anyway, so what she did in the past she still did the way we saw on screen. But that sounds like a fudge to me: at her core this Doctor was different and even if her impulses were subconscious, nevertheless the thought that she’d lived that long and been ‘rescued’ is in there somewhere. This story changes other things too, of course. So, Jodie Whittaker isn't the 13th Doctor then. OK, I can live with that, it’s just a number after all and The War Doctor rather confused the numbering system  anyway, never mind David Tennant’s spare limbs. But wait, William Hartnell isn't the 1st Doctor, despite the dozens of times he referred to himself as 'the original', his 'earliest self' etc? I'm not sure I can live with that - it changes the entire way we approach those early years. It matters so fundamentally to the character arc of the Doctor that William Hartnell be the first doctor, old-yet-young, inexperienced in the way of the universe and with rotten people skills. tetchily looking down their nose at other cultures before learning that, actually, they can learn a lot from the people they travel with, that they can feel good by doing good for other people. I wouldn’t trade the first season’s growth and development for anything, not even Jo Martin or the faces seen in ‘Brian Of Morbius’ as actual canon doctors. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding too by the way: in that story from 1976 the 4^th Dr challenges Morbius to a ‘mindmelding’ contest to be sent back through their regenerations and some people we don’t know (played by members of the production team for a laugh) flash up on screen while Morbius giggles manically and the Doctor slumps to the floor: evidence to some fans that the Doctor had lives before Hartnell. Hang on though: ‘The Timeless Children’ makes a point that the Doctor doesn’t know any of this, so why doesn’t Tom Baker go ‘blimey, who are they then?’ I always took them to be Morbius’ past lives anyway – even if he’s ranting away to himself quote happily as if he’s winning that’s perfectly in character for a timelord living in denial and too stubborn to admit defeat until the inevitable (the machine they’re using explodes before we find out either way). How typical then: it feels as if this whole story was written to explain away a tiny bit of continuity, which only a few people will get, which is most probably wrong anyway. Most of all this plot arc changes how they behave going forward: from now on, for the rest of the time Dr Who is on the air, they know in their heart of hearts that they’re ‘special’ whether they believe it or not. And that’s not what Doctor Who is about at all: this is a series where everyone is special, where every character we meet can live and grow and change, even the misguided ones. 

If this arc ruins things for the series then, does it at least make for an interesting story? No. We’re  deep into the age now where you have to see stories multiple times for the ‘oh I see’ conclusion to make sense of what came before it, to pick up on the clues that were laid out but you missed through obfuscation and sleight of hand. To do that, though you need to make a story interesting and well-made enough to make you want to go back through it all a second time, to keep you going through the moments of pure confusion, the belief that you’re in safe storytelling hands that will give you a reward that makes the hard work of puzzling things through worth it. This story does none of that. For the most part ‘Ascension’ follows that old Who trope of the last survivors of a planet battling for their lives against the Cybermen, a base under siege with the twist that the base is a whole planet but there are even less humans to wipe out than normal. The humans aren’t that interesting or likeable, but a fight to the death to save humanity is at least what Dr Who is about. Interspersed with that, though we get shots of a child named Brendon in rural Ireland inserted randomly, even in the middle of some quite tense scenes in the main plot, not so much threaded into the action so much as sprinkled, so that we haven’t got a clue what on Gallifrey is going on until right near the end (spoilers: it’s the Doctor, when they were first born, in hiding, a ‘cover story’ for the truth. Eh what? Why does the Doctor need a cover story when they aren’t going to remember any of it anyway? Why are they in Ireland of all places? Why do the timelords, a race for whom Earthlings are nobodies and won’t even let them into the planet, know about Ireland? Was it picked at random or part of the Doctor’s long relationship with our planet? And if its still deep in their subconscious memory then how come we’ve had three doctors with a Scottish accent and no Irish ones?! In reality I fear Ireland was chosen due to a second misunderstanding, of a joke in ‘Human Nature’ where the 10^th Dr says he comes from Gallifrey and was asked ‘is that in Ireland?’ because it’s the only place a Brit is likely to have travelled from with a name you didn’t recognise back in 1913. It was only ever meant as a joke, not a plot point. There’s nothing to link these scenes to the Doctor for an entire episode and a half, no clue, not even a half-clue and no appearance of the lad in Ireland once we’ve worked it all out to go ‘ah, I see!’ In fact, given that he’s living happily with authoritarian parents (one of whom is a policeman and trying to become one themselves) and the Doctor doesn’t even think about looking at the stars or show curiosity in anything outside their own lives, there isn’t even the sort of common character trait the Doctor shares that wouldn’t give the game away (because lots of other people could have it too). Even the name isn’t the clue it might have been: what’s wrong with them being named ‘Tim’ for ‘Timelord’ or ‘Kaster’ for ‘Kasterberous’ (home postcode) or something? Where did the name ‘Brendon’ come from? And then they have Brendan the policeman fall off a cliff and come back to life – but not in a way we’ve ever seen the Doctor do (shouldn’t he have regenerated? He’s not indestructible. If the Doctor could do this every time he’d have survived the fall in ‘Logopolis’ from a similar height for starters and been less of a wuss in quite a few other stories. This is an annoying false clue: I had money on the lad being someone in the series who actually is indestructible, like Captain Jack Harkness). And then they let him live till retirement and wipe his memory. Why then? What’s so special they have to come back when he’s 65? We never find out. And on top of that, like many a two-parter in the modern series, we’re following one plot on one story and then get roped into a second suddenly and rather violently just because there’s a cliffhanger. Believe it or not things get worse when The master turns up and whisks The Doctor off to Gallifrey. 

In theory this should feel like the sort of thing Dr Who is so gifted at, shifting perspectives in space and time because every revelation is relative to what you know about the rest of the story and all time is linked, dots on a line, with cause and effect. In practice it just looks as if your TV’s been possessed by a drunken weeping angel and started channel hopping. There was a time, halfway into ‘Ascension’ on first broadcast, when I seriously thought someone had broken into the BBC and started playing with transmitter masts again (the way a repeat of ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’ in America got interrupted by a kid in a Max Headroom mask), its that intrusive. When the revelation is half-made to the Doctor about who they are its left to us to join the dots and frankly half the picture was never sketched in. Even when we do get that revelation it isn’t a satisfying end to something we’ve been slowly working out for ourselves, but something The Master tells us, pontificating at length to the Doctor about something he knows and she doesn’t (with no reason given why he’s announcing this to her now and not in, say, any of their previous thirty odd encounters). There isn’t even enough made of the spoken plotline of The Master feeling jealous at the Doctor being ‘special’ without knowing it, because he so desperately wants to be (instead you’re asked to try to work that out based on past stories, just a bit of a rant about ‘having part of you inside me’ – something that’s particularly hard to do after this story as it changes everything we thought we knew about all past stories). What should be a huge moment in Who history, a revelation that reverberates throughout space and time and at the very least provides a huge climax to Season 12, ends up being...underwhelming, as Jodie stares with big eyes while The Master natters on and on and on (life’s too short for this: the Doctor might suddenly have unlimited lifespans but we don’t). There’s no drama made out of the revelation, no great climax, it just is: the Doctor turns up, gets told it all while looking unhappy, then escapes at the end while someone else blows up Gallifrey without doing anything herself.

One of the worst aspects of the 13^th Dr’s run is that she’s a character that things happen to without making things happen. That’s not true of every story and its not unique (the 5^th Dr did that a lot too) but it happens in this story a lot. If your whole plot revolves around the revelation that your lead character is ‘special’, now is not the best time to have her standing around while other people blow her up or natter to her about her origins. ‘This is not a discussion! says the Doctor early on in the first part, but that’s the problem: this isn’t dialogue its monologue. She never gets to do anything clever, she never gets to react to other people being clever, she’s either running or standing still and reacting, never doing. When The Master suddenly sticks The Doctor in a ‘paralysis field’ to keep her imprisoned and later sticks her in a void for good measure it doesn’t make any discernible difference as it’s not like she’s done anything other than stand there anyway. It’s a habit of Chris Chibnall as a writer to keep the doctor out of trouble until she’s needed by the plot, something no other writer ever did, but in this story there’s no point when the plot needs her to do anything other than listen, for two hours; at least when the 2^nd Dr is on the fringe of things he’s always looking on and making notes while seeing how the characters do: the 13^th Dr is always being imprisoned or trapped or got out the way. It’s not just the doctor either. So much of this story is static, people talking about the world ending and hiding but not actually doing much about it until the final act, the only action sequences coming right at the start and right at the end. Nothing much happens in this story at all, for all the lines about how ‘this is going to change everything’. A good chunk, maybe twenty minutes of the second episode, is The Master narrating a flashback at length in near-enough real  time, as if he’s reading out a Jackanory story, while what we get on screen is a load of silhouettes and shadows that don’t make for the best television. It’s the sort of thing that feels like a computer game, where exposition in small chunks is inevitable because you don’t get told much when you’re running for your life and shooting at things, but instead of small chunks it goes on and on and on and you can’t just skip it to get to some action, because there really isn’t any. When The Master says ‘this is going to hurt’ he means it as a threat to the Doctor, but it feels more like a threat to the viewer. Things lift when Jo Martin turns up for the second time (she’s a much more interesting Doctor than Jodie Whittaker, authoritarian and charismatic), but it’s annoying that the Dr we’re following ends up wimping out like Susan in those first season adventures and has to be geed up by someone else to survive. We’re meant to feel for the Doctor, how scared she is, how everything she thought she knew about herself has changed, but the dialogue isn’t up to it and Jodie Whittaker isn’t a strong enough actress to convey everything she needs to in the few lines she gets. The Doctor’s not even a character worth caring about in this story - what could potentially be her last words to her companions are her yelling at Yaz ‘get off!’

The Master’s a one-dimensional villain too, having lost all the extra characterisation and surprise offered him in ‘Spyfall’ and spends most of this story laughing at the Doctor and mocking her. Sacha Derwan is one of those actors whose as good as his script and of course this one is bad so he has nowhere to go and can’t sell some of the clunkiest bits of exposition in the series, without any moments that make him seem like ‘The Master’ rather than some other gloating enemy. This used to be one of the best characters in Dr Who, multifaceted, unpredictable, a force to be reckoned with, a cool calm exterior enabling him to mix with anyone and anything but with scary rage underneath, very much the Doctor’s equal. This one’s a nitwit who doesn’t even keep a lookout for the inevitable twist when things are going well. ‘Look how low you’ve brought me Doctor’ he says at one point. Quite.  

The companions don’t fare any better, mind. Graham and Yaz are an interesting pairing we’ve never really seen before. Unfortunately they spend most of the story stuck in a cave with the humans, gee-ing each other up in a ‘yeeha’ way, even though for all their talk of courage and facing implacable foes head on they get scared and run when the script has delayed long enough to need them to do something. ‘That’s not luck sunshine, you never give up!’ says Graham in one of the more cringe-worthy lines, a moment that’s meant to make you celebrate human resourcefulness but is so out of touch with what these survivors have seen and lived through already that just makes you want to see the Cybermen win and convert them quick. Yaz and Graham choose some mighty weird moments to have their heart to heart talks too. Graham barely knows Yaz and anyone else in his situation would be worrying about their son, but in one of the single worst scenes in Dr Who history Graham pours out to Yaz how ‘special’ he thinks she is because she’s ‘an impressive young woman never thrown by anything, always fighting – I know you think the Doctor is the most impressive woman you’ve ever met but no, you are!’ Quite apart from being sugary enough to bring on diabetes its so out of character: Graham’s a cynic and even though he has emotions deep down in there somewhere,  fright would be a more natural reaction, even reassurance, not lovey dovey treacle like this. Yaz has shown absolutely no bravery in the story whatsoever and not much across her two series. And how does she receive this outpouring of affection? By smugly accepting it, without saying thankyou or passing the compliment on (‘You’re not such a bad human yourself either’ is the closest she comes – and no ‘I’m from Yorkshire, that’s practically a love letter’ doesn’t cut it. Yaz is, believe it or not, the most emotional one out the trio and the most likely to say this gushy stuff, not ignore it). Yaz isn’t the substitute hero Chris Chibnall thinks we need now we don’t think of the Doctor the same way, she’s a pain in the neck like few other companions before her. The Tardis team have been through bigger scrapes than this, so why have this chat now anyway? Except that it’s the end of their last full series together and we need an ‘end of term report’ and Chibnall might not get another chance to say it – but like many of the worst scripts of the 13^th Dr era we’re told it, this isn’t something earned or learnt through emotional responses to big events, it just happens. Ryan, though, amazingly is worse, the lesser aspects of Mel Turlough and Adric stuck together. He’s absolutely useless, even more than normal, but not endearingly so like Harry or Jo, but arrogantly, expecting other people to give their life up for him even though he keeps getting in the way. He spends the first episode getting separated and not being able to keep up with the others and the second skulking around on his own. Here’s no way he’d survive a Cybermen attack. I’m amazed he can tie  his own shoelaces. What’s that he can? Well, that’s  surprise because most dyspraxics can’t. One of the character traits that really bugs me is how his dyspraxia comes and goes, depending on whether Chibnall needs it or not: its treated like a mental condition, based around confidence and effort, but it isn’t, its physical. The synapses in Ryan’s brain don’t connect properly, which mean he lacks co-ordination and doesn’t know where his limbs are to the pinpoint accuracy of ‘normal’ people, which means for instance he’s too slow at running at the start so gets caught, but he should be hopeless at fine motor skills too. There’s no way he’d be able to magically lob a cyber-grenade with supreme precision and accuracy simply because he ‘wanted’ to hard enough. As a fellow sufferer, take it from me, you can’t turn dyspraxia off and on and if you could that would be a super-power I’d take over regeneration or time-travel: that frustration at being trapped in a body that doesn’t work  is in itself calling out for dramatic purposes but no, we just get Ryan being a pest then a hero (trust me, there’s nothing that says you can be both). Chibnall wrote Ryan in this character trait after seeing an undisclosed family member struggle with dyspraxia. Stories like this one suggest it isn’t a family member he knows well.
Maddeningly, there is a good story in there somewhere. The idea of humanity coming down to its last seven stragglers is such an old-Who concept that it’s great to see it in the new series (even if, worryingly, the way its realised on screen – in a quarry –makes it look as cheap as the show ever did).  In all 57 years up to this point we’ve had endless invasions of Gallifrey by Daleks and even a couple by the Vardans and Sontarons, but never the show’s second most prolific baddies. They look rather good skulking around the smoking ruins of the Dr’s home planet in a way the Daleks never could and while they’ve not been used well at all since the series revival this story comes closest in many ways: they’re early battle-scarred cybermen who still have some emotions left and know the value of fear, closer to human. They look amazing in Gallifreyan ruffs too when they’re converted, a very striking image that’s very memorable. The cliffhanger, of armies of Cybermen marching, is goose-pimply good (and to be fair to him does show that Chris Chibnall has some understanding of how Dr Who works). Had this been a straight up Cybermen story, with no Master or timeless anybody, it might have been quite strong in fact. but even that’s undercut by The Master materialising out of nowhere and leaving The Cybemen to skulk around at the back of shot not doing much (as odd as it is to see The Doctor not doing anything, its even odder for them to be so subservient). Even beyond the Timeless Child fiasco, though, there’s a lot this story gets wrong. The plot of turning dead people, even timelords, into cybermen against their will is still icky, though this episode is admittedly not the first or the worst to do that  (see ‘Death In Heaven’). The finale too is deeply, woefully poor as characters we haven’t seen in a long while end up saving the day and solving everything (sort of) by blowing things up, something they could have done hour earlier. Hardly the first Dr Who story to do this and it's not the Dr doing it after all, but it comes so soon after a speech that blowing things up isn't the right way to go about things it does seem a bit odd when that turns out to be the 'right' thing to do after all. Even then, though, it would have been a lesser story simply because the dialogue is so awful: nobody learns anything in this story the way they do in good drama, there are no chains of events with consequences and ripples, nobody grows, there’s no characterisation that makes you like these people and care for them, nobody even re-acts normally and the lines all feel wrong in these character’s mouths, while worst of all we’re told things, over and over, not shown them. You would have thought that this was a first time writer who didn’t understand the series, writing for characters they didn’t know, not a showrunner at the end of his second year. 

There are other more boring stories in the Dr Who catalogue: ‘Monsters Of Peladon’ or ‘The Mutants’ for instance, though considering this is a plot about a’timeless child’ you don’t half find yourself staring at the clock. There are other equally confusing stories: a lot of the Steven Moffat series closers do something similar that only make senses after lots of repeated viewings, although this one doesn’t make a lot of sense even after you go back and re-atch it lots. There are others that take great liberties with Dr Who folklore: ‘The War Games’ and ‘The Deadly Assassin’, though this plot really takes the biscuit. There are other episodes every bit as misguided about what this series is meant to be: ‘The Dominators’ or ‘Kerblam!’ for example, where war and capitalism is good. No other story messes up on all four scores as much as this two-parter does, though. I could have put up with the ‘Timeless Child’ revelation and all its contradictions  if it had led to a good story but it doesn’t. I could have put up with a bad story if it led to a new and clever way the series was going to work in the future. It doesn’t do that either. It’s a story arc that’s not even that inventive or original (the 7^th Dr era hinted at this sort of thing, but the clue is in the word: hinted) but it doesn’t go anywhere or make for good drama and just got longterm fans’ backs up. What was it all for then? I doubt any future showrunner will return to it somehow (despite Russell T making a point of saying he won’t undo it) - this is one of those moments in Who history fans just pretend never really happened, like the Doctor being half human on his mother's side or having a grand-daughter as early as his first generation (or not, as it turns out I guess) ‘I wish it wasn’t true but it is’ says The Master as he tells the Doctor. I know the feeling. A huge disappointment  as a story, a series arc (the hints we had coming into this story made it seem a lot more interesting than it turned out to be), as television drama and most especially as Dr Who, this is the nadir of the series, a story that re-wrote the rules for no good reason and didn’t even do that properly. Okay, after watching that I know I’m broken, but it’s all over now: there is so so much better to come.

POSITIVES + There’s one thing the Chibnall era gets right compared to the Russell T and Moffat uyears: the music. You get so used to Murray Gold telling you how to feel, with a choir pointing the way with every slight revelation, that composer Segun Akiola’s underplaying of everything is a massive relief. This is incidental music that really is incidental, an extra not the main player. His scores are almost all good, but this is one of his trickiest to get right, with so many spaces to fill, and it does a good job of creating an atmosphere that otherwise just isn’t there.    

NEGATIVES – That whole plot in Ireland: what? I’m all for scripts that leave us to join the gaps and we’re clearly meant to think this is one of the Doctor’s lives before they had their mind wiped and forgot it. But why there? Why not just stick her in a glass ase or keep her in the Matrix for safe keeping? To timelords Earth is an insignificant planet in the backwaters of nowhere. And it’s a place where the Doctor could either get hurt or (as happens) do something alieny and weird that draws attention to themselves. Why risk it? And what happened to  them after ‘Brendon’ retired and had his mind wiped? Did he just live the same role over and over again or did they put him somewhere else? We’re used in this show to having more questions than answers but honestly, what was the point of all that then eh?

BEST QUOTE: Best Quote: Graham - ‘I’ve got an idea, bit of a mad one, very dangerous and it might not work. We’ve got form with those sort of plans haven’t we, Yaz?’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In case you ever wondered how Yaz and Dan learned about the Timeless Child arc it’s a short story in the 2022 Dr Who Annual named, fittingly enough, ‘The Timeless Child’. Most notable for the Doctor’s joke that ‘the seven dwarfs have nothing on my history!’  

Previous ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diodati’ next ‘Revolution Of The Daleks’